Thomas Ochiltree (22 page)

“I don’t think so,” he replied. In fact, he knew that there was a good chance that he would never be back, but he saw no point in mentioning that.

“Go to bed, Hanna. There are plenty of beds in this house, and you need your sleep to stay pretty.”

“You’re right,” she answered. But she made no move to budge from the chair.

Out in the cool of the night, von Falkenburg realized for the first time just how harebrained his scheme was. But it was the only way he could think of to rescue Helena, so there was no choice but to go through with it.

It had rained while he was talking and waiting with Hanna, and although the rain had stopped now, the pavement gleamed under the streetlights, and the cracks between the cobblestones were full of water. He strode across the Ring to the Stadtpark.

There were not even any prostitutes in the park at this hour. It seemed as if he were the only person alive in the city. Perhaps he should have brought his revolver after all, he thought. He had decided against doing so because he feared the sound of a shot might carry a long way in the dead stillness of the night, and the intervention of the police was the last thing he wanted. That was still a valid consideration, he decided, and anyway it was too late now.

He reached the embankment of the Wien and peered down at the shallow water rushing over cobblestones that formed its bed. The tiny tributary of the Danube had to be one of the more insignificant watercourses in the world. It was no more than a few inches deep, and ran through an artificial cut. For that matter, much of it had been completely decked over a few blocks upstream: the “Right and Left Wien Banks” were just two sides of a broad street.

Here it was open to the air, but sunk deep between two high stone embankments. The bed of the street was some forty feet below street level.

A lonely spot. Ideal for his purposes, von Falkenburg decided, but he knew its loneliness made it ideal for his enemies’ purposes too.

Carefully, he climbed down a long flight of stone steps to the river’s bed. The stream only occupied the center, leaving a sloping margin of a few feet on either side to walk on.

The moon was out, but the depth of the cut let little of its light penetrate, for it was not directly overhead. Von Falkenburg paused for a moment to let his eyes become accustomed to the darkness. Then he proceeded downstream towards the Danube Canal, being very careful to look as unthreatening as possible. His right hand wanted to grip the hilt of his sword, but he kept it away by an act of will.

The rushing, shallow water made a strange noise in his ears, and that, along with the slick, sloping pavement under his feet, had a very disorienting effect. He had been here before on some of the lonely, melancholy nocturnal walks that had long been a habit of his. But not for a long time.

Suddenly, a terrible doubt came to him as to just which bridge was the Stubenbrücke.

He paused and tried to recollect which steps he had come down. He had passed under one bridge. Was the next one the one he had named as the site of the “prisoner exchange,” or was it the one after that?

He was almost sure the bridge he had named in his note to von Lauderstein was the one
after
the next.
Almost
sure. He strode under the bridge, trying to act calm, prepared for anything. It was terribly dark, and the sound of the water much louder as it resounded from the bridge above. He was glad to be through to the other side.

Nothing had happened. So assuming that von Lauderstein had risen to his bait, the bridge ahead had to be the one. It would take him three minutes to walk there.

He strode forward, trying unsuccessfully to keep calm. In the darkness ahead, he could make out no one under the bridge. That could be a good sign or a bad one.

There were only about ten paces to go. He suddenly was very conscious of the sound of his shoes on the pavement.

He calculated that he would be under the bridge in eight steps. He counted the steps to see if he was right. It was best, he felt, to keep his mind occupied with something like that.

Seven…six…five…four…

No, he really could see no one under the bridge.

Three…two…. He had miscalculated. It would be at least four more steps before he was under the bridge.

Four…three….

The desire to quicken his pace, to force the issue, nearly mastered him, but he fought it down

Stroll calmly,
he told himself.
Act trusting.

And if von Lauderstein had decided to do nothing?

He strode into the darkness beneath the bridge and began to whirl around an instant before the hands he knew would be waiting could touch him.

He lashed out with his right foot where he sensed someone must be and he felt the foot connect. His sword was in his hand now, the symbol of honor on which everything depended.

Von Falkenburg felt a fist crash into his jaw and he reeled back, but his eyes were beginning to accustom themselves to the darkness. He could make out forms now, and he brought the sword slashing down.

A shock went through his arm as he felt the sword’s edge meet bone, and a fearful shriek pierced the air, but there was no time to think about that, because what light there was caught the blade of a knife as it lunged for his belly.

He twisted to one side, so that the blade just missed him, and as he did so, he smashed the hilt of his sword into what seemed like a face.

A moan of pain, and he hit again, harder. This time it must have been the skull that he struck, for the form he could dimly see had slumped at his feet.

That was two…were there anymore? Von Falkenburg looked around him, blood dripping from his sword blade. Paid thugs, as he expected. Perhaps the same ones who killed Lasky. He was sorry everything was over so fast, for the fighting lust still boiled within him.

No, there were no more. Nor was Helena there, but then he had not expected for a moment that she would be.

He heard a moan at his feet, and he could make out a man clutching his arm, from which something glistening was oozing out onto the cobblestones. Suddenly, von Falkenburg felt revulsion.

He knelt down beside the man and ripped a piece from the latter’s shirt. He wrapped it around the upper arm. The knife that had nearly gutted him was lying nearby, and von Falkenburg inserted the blade in the knot and twisted until the flow of blood was reduced to a trickle.

“My arm…my arm…oh God!…I’m crippled!…crippled!” the man groaned.

“If the use of your arm is all you lose, my friend, you will be able to count yourself lucky,” von Falkenburg said through clenched teeth. He knew he had not yet won – would not win – unless he could conceal the tide of disgust rising within him.

“Oh my God! It’s bleeding! I’m bleeding to
death!
”

Even in this grotesque moment, von Falkenburg’s powers of observation were active, and he noted with interest that the legendary cowardice of the defeated bully was really a fact.

“Shut up,” he said. “Your life depends on me.”

“Please…we didn’t mean….”

“I said shut up.”

The man gave a moan

“All I have to do is take this blade out so the tourniquet untwists, and all your blood will flow out of you in very short order,” von Falkenburg said.

“Oh God! What do you want? I need a doctor.”

Von Falkenburg loosened the tourniquet slightly to emphasize his point, and was rewarded with obedient silence.

“I’m not interested in any excuses you might feel like making,” he said. “I know who you are, and who sent you, and why. You’re hired thugs in the pay of Colonel von Lauderstein. You’ve abducted a woman. You were sent here to seize a female friend of von Lauderstein’s in case I was foolish enough to bring her with me, and to beat word of where she is out of me in case I was not.”

Von Falkenburg was tempted to add “right?” but did not. He knew that a pose of omniscience would be far more effective.

The man was literally trembling with fear as he waited to find out what von Falkenburg would say or do next. Von Falkenburg had to keep thinking about the abduction of Helena in order to force himself to go on with this revolting scene.

“If you tell me where the woman you kidnapped is being held, I’ll take you to a doctor. If you don’t, then you had better hope you’ve lived right, which you haven’t, because there won’t be time for any last rites.”

“And…and the police?” the man asked.

Fantastically, this criminal who thought he was in mortal danger – and who
was
seriously wounded – instinctively feared the police almost as much as he did death.

“If the address you give me turns out to be the right one, you will not be bothered by the police. If you are foolish enough to give me a false address…well, the doctor is my friend.”

Von Falkenburg said the word “friend” in a tone of voice which could leave little doubt that the friend was the kind of man who would not hesitate to kill someone as a favor to von Falkenburg.

“I…have a doctor of my own…he works with us…” the man said.

“Shut up. It’s my friend or nobody.”

“And Franz?”

Franz had to be the other thug.

“Hold the knife in the knot,” von Falkenburg ordered the man. “And remember, if you pull it out to use on me, you’ll bleed to death.”

Von Falkenburg knew the man was too afraid of the tourniquet coming loose to try to run. Besides, von Falkenburg could grab him if he tried to get up from the pavement.

Von Falkenburg ripped off another piece of the wounded man’s shirt and used it to tie the still-unconscious Franz’s hands tightly behind him. Another piece served as a crude but effective gag. It would be some time before Franz was conscious enough to make a serious effort to get loose, and even then he would probably not succeed. Someone would find him in the morning, for in the daylight he would be visible from the embankment. But he was secure enough until then, and even if by chance he did get free, it was unlikely that he was so loyal to von Lauderstein that he would rush to report his failure to him.

“Get on your feet,” von Falkenburg told the man with the wounded arm. It would have been faster and simpler to help him get up, but von Falkenburg knew he must maintain a pose of utter indifference to suffering.

When one is sitting on the ground, getting up without the use of one’s arms is not easy, and the man made heavy weather of it.

“Up, or do you want some kicking as encouragement?” von Falkenburg forced himself to say.

Finally, the man was on his feet, whimpering slightly.

“Start walking,” von Falkenburg said. The only thing he added was not a word, but the presence of his sword point pressed against the man’s back. He had not yet asked the man for the address where Helena was being held, for the kind of scene he had planned would be more likely to guarantee truthfulness.

And so they started upstream. Against all his doubts, the first part of von Falkenburg’s plan had succeeded. He had guessed that von Lauderstein’s response to his note offering an “exchange of prisoners” would be to prepare an ambush for him, and he himself had suggested the perfect site for it. From his walks along the bed of the Wien he knew that under the abutment of that particular bridge there was a substantial recess let into the embankment. As he had expected, the thugs sent to lie in wait for him had immediately recognized its potential for their purposes.

What they had not counted on was that von Falkenburg would be expecting them to be in that recess, and expecting an attack. Above all, they had not counted on the use he could make of his sword. Precisely because an officer’s sword was something one always saw hanging at its owner’s side at restaurants, the theater, the race track – and something never seen outside its scabbard except at parades – it was easy to overlook the fact that in addition to being a symbol of its wearer’s honor, it was also a weapon. For most people, the sword was simply a part of the officer’s uniform, like his tunic or his képi.

But tunic and képi were not made of the finest steel, nor did they have an edge like a razor.

Von Falkenburg had taken von Lauderstein by the flank with his simulated abduction of Hanna. And he had taken von Lauderstein’s thugs by the flank, too. That made two rounds, he decided, but he knew that battle was far from won, and time was draining away with terrible swiftness.

Ahead loomed the cavernous mouth of the tunnel through which the Wien ran for part of its length. That would offer concealment, but also too many opportunities for his prisoner to escape. Yet von Falkenburg knew that he could hardly parade a man through the streets of Vienna with a sword point at his back, even at that hour.

Von Falkenburg shoved the sword back into the scabbard. He placed his hand on the knife that held the tourniquet in place, forcing away the thug’s weakened fingers.

“Any trouble and I pull this out and sink it in your chest. Understood?” von Falkenburg said.

The thug nodded.

“And if we meet a policeman, just agree with whatever I say.”

Another nod. The man could have few illusions about which of the two of them a policeman would be more likely to believe.

Side by side, bound together by the twisted rag which provided a hired criminal with his only hope of life, and an officer of Infantry Regiment Nº 4 “Hoch- und Deutschmeister” with his only hope of saving his woman, they made their way through the dark and deserted streets of Vienna.

When he opened the door, the concierge at Prinz-Eugen-Strasse 19 already had his mouth open to deliver reproaches to whomever was ringing the bell of the apartment building at such an hour. But his words died away at the fantastic sight in front of him.

“I’m friend of Dr. Rubinstein’s,” von Falkenburg said, pushing past the concierge so quickly that he was already in the hallway before the latter realized what was happening.

Von Falkenburg started up the stairs with his prisoner while the porter followed, babbling something to which von Falkenburg paid no attention.

It was Rubinstein himself who came to the door, a dressing gown thrown over his nightshirt.

“Good God! Von Falkenburg!”