Thomas Ochiltree (16 page)

Platzvogel, Platzvogel, Platzvogel,
he thought in time to the steps behind him. If doing this right were not so important for Helena’s sake, it would be good fun. In fact, it would be good fun anyway.

He remembered now. He had left his gloves behind him in the whore’s room, and had felt so proud of “being a man” at last that he had not noticed until he heard the word “Cadet!” pronounced with an unmistakable Croatian accent. Yes, the
Plazvogel
had really been a Croatian, just as army humor had it. Even in those days, life had been a parody of itself.

Von Falkenburg turned to the left, hoping the building he was looking for was really where he remember it being. Suddenly, looming through the darkness, he saw the huge
porte-cochère
with caryatids holding up an elaborate cornice over it.

As if he were doing the most normal thing in the world, von Falkenburg turned and pushed open the small door set in one of the great double doors. The latter had probably not been unlocked for half a century: a “carriage entrance,” but certainly no carriages ever went through it now.

A shabby courtyard with galleries around it. He did not have any time to waste, as he well knew. The plainclothesman would probably hesitate a moment before following him quite so obviously. But police thoroughness would always win out in the end over subtlety.

Von Falkenburg started running up the steps that led to the galleries, and had the sudden uncomfortable feeling of having never been there before.

Was this really the same building?
he wondered frantically.

First floor…second floor…all very, very
un
familiar. A woman leaning against the railing looked at him in astonishment.

Third floor… Von Falkenburg heard the door close in the darkness below. That had to be the plainclothesman.

But by God, instinct had served, here it was, he realized with relief: a very dark passageway, more like a hole in the wall…something no one would notice who was not looking for it. Von Falkenburg plunged through and found himself on one of the galleries surrounding the courtyard of another building, built back-to-back with the first one.

He hurried into a stairwell dimly lit by gas, and clattered down the steps as fast as his legs could take him. The
Platzvogel
had not found that passage in time all those years ago, and neither would the detective….

Another door, and he was out on a street that ran parallel to the first one. And here was a tiny, unlit alley. He had forgotten all about that alley. Forgotten why, as a cadet, he had so liked those two buildings during one of the reconnaissance missions cadets undertook to find places where a
Platzvogel
could be shaken off.

Von Falkenburg saw and heard no more of the plainclothesman, and it was not long afterwards that he was sitting with Helena in the pretty “Small Salon” of her mansion.

He knew he should not risk worrying her by telling her of his adventure. After all, the fact that the police were following him was sinister enough. But he quite simply could not resist doing so, so satisfied did he feel at having been able to repeat a trick he had last used when he was a seventeen-year-old boy.

He wove the story in with the account of how he had made a similar escape the time he had lost his gloves as a cadet. If Helena was worried by the fact that the police were tailing him, she managed not to show it. Instead, she laughed at the idea of some fussy half-retired major looking about in all directions after an errant cadet had vanished in a puff of smoke, so to speak.

“Highness, dinner is ready,” Alphonse the butler announced.

“Come on, Ernst,” she said, “I think you’ll like what the cook has prepared.” Then, as he took her arm to lead her to the dining room she asked, “by the way, if you’d spent all your allowance on debauchery that night, how did you manage to buy new gloves to keep out of trouble?”

“Endrödy lent me the money,” he said, and suddenly his face froze. The world was no longer an amusing place for games of hide-and-seek.

“What’s wrong Ernst? Who’s Endrödy?”

“Oh…a friend. He was a cadet with me.”

“If he’s a friend of yours, I hope I have a chance to meet him some day.”

Von Falkenburg was silent. He suddenly felt very alone. And very frightened: the loneliness and fear of the condemned to death.

“I have some interesting information to report,” Helena said quickly, sensing instinctively that she had committed a gaffe of some kind and that the topic of conversation needed to be changed.

“Forgive me, Helena,” von Falkenburg said, recovering himself, “I did not mean to be inattentive.”

Despite the pain of having been reminded of Endrödy’s death, von Falkenburg found himself actually enjoying the meal. It was Helena’s smile, her laugh, the way she sometimes cocked her head to the right – but never to the left – when she asked a question, which allowed him to relax and realize how good the food and wine really were. The perfection of her body filled him with desire, and the gleam in those blue eyes of hers promised the most perfect satisfaction of that desire. Every minute he was with her he was increasingly convinced that there was no other woman in the world like her. Certainly, there was none in his extensive album of memories. She had learned some interesting things about Putzi from her friend the elderly Baroness von Stobbe. But looking at her, he had difficulty concentrating on what she was saying.

The lights made the room grow hot. They had finished their meal, and on an impulse Helena went to the window herself to open it instead of asking Alphonse to do so.

Von Falkenburg, filled with good wine, good food and good feelings, watched her admiringly as she threw back the curtains. There was a vitality, a suppleness, about her, he realized….

And suddenly, the vitality and suppleness were gone. It was as if for an instant she had turned into a photograph of herself. Just for an instant. But that was enough to tell him that something was wrong.

“Ernst,” she said slowly, “your friend with the thick soles on his shoes…did you say he wore a round hat?”

“And a vulgar suit with loud checks,” he added desperately. But she did not go on to say something like “oh, that’s all right, then, the man below is wearing a solid color suit in excellent taste.” She just strode out onto the balcony and pretended to take the air, without looking down any more. That way, the man below might think she had not noticed him. For Helena was a woman to keep her head, even in the face of catastrophe, von Falkenburg realized.

Finally, she came back in from the balcony. But she did not close the window herself.

“Alphonse, the window. And the curtains,” she said with the aloofness of an empress. Von Falkenburg knew that it was only when she was tense and unhappy that she acted like that.

“It’s being outwitted that’s so painful,” von Falkenburg said. She did not reply. So he went on, “obviously, the police are more intelligent than elderly Croatian majors.”

“But I thought you were sure you gave him the slip, Ernst.”

“I did give him the slip! I know he didn’t follow me down the passage or through the alley.”

“Then how…?”

“Luck.
And
skill.
And
intelligence,” he replied with exasperation.

“I still don’t see,” Helena said.

“It’s simple enough. The man had been following me for some time. That told him the general direction I was going in until I gave him the slip. He assumed that after I got good and clear of him, I’d head back towards my original goal. And he was right.”

“That’s luck,” she put in quietly.

“It’s also intelligence. The man had to realize that for me to bother shaking him off, I must have wanted very badly to get to where I was going.”

“Otherwise, on noticing that you were followed, you would have simply gone to a café and played tarock all evening,” she suggested.

“Exactly.”

“But I still don’t see how he picked up your trail again,” she went on. “The Inner City is like a maze.”

“Exactly. That’s just it. As with a maze, there are only a very few
right
choices. If you know which general direction someone is headed, and you assume he wants to continue in that direction, you know which streets he eventually has to get back to. Our friend in the derby hat probably took one look at that courtyard I had plunged into and figured out what I was up to. So he just continued on his way, knowing I would be going roughly parallel after getting out the back he must have assumed existed. Then he either worked his way over, or waited for me to cross his path again, and hung back farther than he had before.”

There was a long silence while they both thought what he next put into words.

“Helena, my enemies are very cunning, very determined, very dangerous.”

Her reply was to place her hand – it was deliciously cool and soothing – on top of his. Love and desire surged within him, but he knew he must master both, for her sake. And yet a lifetime of practice in the arts of self-control and self-denial, going all the way back to his boyhood at Falkenburg, did not make the words any easier to say.

“Helena, I mustn’t drag you down with me. If I hadn’t already mortgaged it, I’d give my life to spend the next three days with you. But every moment I spend with you endangers your reputation….”

“My reputation!” she interrupted in a tone that implied that there was quite literally nothing in the world less important to her.

“Your life, perhaps,” he went on.

“And so you don’t think we should see each other anymore, correct?” her eyes were blazing.

“Correct.”

“You
men
…honestly!”

“It’s you I’m thinking of…” he said, abashed at her vehemence.

“For heaven’s sake, Ernst, try to understand me, although I’ve never yet met a man who could understand a woman! What on earth do you think a woman’s love is all about?”

It was an unanswerable question.

“When I say I’m in love with you, Ernst, does that mean that I’m in love with my reputation? Or with my life? It means I’m in love with
you
, that
you’re
what I want, and that I couldn’t care less about anything else in the whole world! I’d give everything…this mansion, my millions, that silly title of princess that I got by marriage…
everything
, just to be with
you!
”

Both the admission and the furious intensity with which it was made left von Falkenburg quite literally speechless.

“Ah, but you want to apply male logic and be
reasonable
! You men blow your brains out or let someone else put a bullet through your ribs for ‘honor,’ but when it comes to love, you find you can’t use too much reason, because you never, never, never understand what
love
is about!”

The fire in her eyes, the way her bosom heaved as she spoke, her anger and her passion…everything about her filled von Falkenburg with a desire that mastered him utterly. Her mouth was already open to continue the tirade, but the words were never spoken, for the next instant his lips were crushing hers, just as his body crushed her breasts. He swept her into his arms as she clutched his neck and trembled with her own desire. Von Falkenburg carried her to the double doors which Alphonse, as ridiculously impassive as he doubtless would be if the end of the world were being announced, opened silently before him.

The downstairs maid did not have quite the butler’s training, and let out a little gasp. To hell with her, von Falkenburg thought, as he carried his burden triumphantly up the stairs.

The upstairs maid was busy in Helena’s bedroom laying out her mistress’s nightgown.

“Get out,” von Falkenburg said to her, and as soon as she did so, he tossed Helena onto the bed.

“You’re heavy, Princess,” he said with a grin. “Perhaps I should have taken you on the dining room table in front of Alphonse. It would have been a good test of his impassivity.”

Helena threw back her head and laughed.

“You beast! I would have loved it!”

And when frenzy was stilled, and desire slaked, and he lay next to her kissing her fingers one by one, Helena said, “no man will ever really understand a woman. But you do better than most, Ernst.”

“I understand that a woman in love is apparently willing to be spied on by the police.”

“Mm hmm.” She had reached one hand out from the bed and picked up his sword, which had fallen nearby when he had hastily unbuckled it. She pressed the cool brass-trimmed hilt against her lips as she thought for a moment. Then she added, “if that man who followed you really
was
a policeman….”

“Ernst, don’t go, for heaven’s sake.”

“I must.”

Helena gave her most seductive pout, and shifted languorously in the perfumed bed where the two of them had been lying since he carried her up the stairs. She was very nearly irresistible, but von Falkenburg pulled on his pants anyway.

“But why?” she asked.

“Helena, I was given seven days. It is now almost one in the morning of the fifth day. Much though I’d like to spend all the remaining time in your arms, I think that it is best that I try to follow up on some of the information you gave me earlier.”

“But what on earth can you do at this time of night?”

“Helena, you would be surprised at the kind of people who can only be reached at this time of night,” he said, hooking shut his collar.

Helena got out of bed, shameless and glorious in her nakedness.

“Do you really think what the Duchess von Stobbe told me will help us?” Her use of “us” rather than “you” indicated clearly to von Falkenburg that there was no point in trying to decide what was best for her. She would stay by his side, come what might.

He took her perfect face between his hands and kissed her soft lips.

“I hope so,” he answered.

She picked up his sword and fastened it to his side, expertly enough to make him wonder if she had had practice arming other men, or if she was simply making use of her talent for doing everything well. His wondering was simply curiosity unalloyed with jealousy. He knew that she was totally his.