“Please,” Paula said. “I’ll give you all the other details tomorrow. But now—please—”
“This is all very unusual,” he told her severely. “Yes?” he added, watching her face. “The lady has forgotten something important?”
“It’s just—that if they came to force Francesca to go with them—wouldn’t they have needed a car?” She looked at Andy for help. “Near the hotel?”
“All cars are being searched tonight,” the policeman said. He didn’t explain further. But he rose at last. Frau Waysmith really believed her own story, he decided. No questioning would alter it.
“If I were you, I’d keep a firm eye on that man Rauch,” Andy said. “Just in case he knew he had friends waiting for him in a car.”
The policeman shook his head as he walked to the door. “He doesn’t have much courage in him, that one.” Anyone who ran away from a screaming girl wasn’t much of a problem.
But Andy wasn’t listening to him. He had opened the inner door. Now he could hear the sound of quiet scuffling from the corridor. He flung open the outside door, and he broke into a run. So did the two policemen.
Paula followed slowly. He’s escaped, she was thinking.
But Rauch had not escaped. Not quite. He had almost reached the flight of stairs just beyond the Englishman’s room, but Andy and the two policemen had him in a firm grip. The remains of the silent battle were strewn along the corridor. The assistant manager was picking himself slowly up from the floor. The lame porter was still sitting there, one arm over his brow. And at Rauch’s feet the house detective was stretched flat on the ground, one hand (with the handcuffs still secure about his own wrist) grasping the man’s ankle.
Now he let go, and tried to rise. As Andy bent down to help him, he held up the useless handcuffs on his wrist. “He slipped out of these,” he began in a breathless whisper. He wiped away some blood from a gash over his eye. He gained some more breath. “Ju-jitsu,” he warned the two policemen in a whisper that had strengthened to hoarseness. “He was so quiet. Wanted a cigarette. Then—” He snapped his fingers. “Like that. So quick. One, two, three. But I tackled his leg. I held on.” Pride raised his voice to normal. “He dragged me all the way.” He felt his shoulder and wiped away more blood from his brow. “He kicked.”
“Sh!” the assistant manager said, gesturing towards the closed bedroom doors. “Quiet, everyone!” he added in a whisper.
“Good man,” Andy said to the house detective in a normal voice. “Good man.”
“A most dangerous criminal,” the assistant manager told the policeman, as they started to lead a thoroughly subdued Rauch downstairs, “see that he doesn’t escape.”
“He won’t,” the older policeman said grimly. “Come on, you! Quick!” He tightened his grip on Rauch. Thank heaven for that, Paula thought. She had liked the way the policeman had meant “Quick!” too.
To Paula, the assistant manager gave a bow as he pressed a handkerchief to his swelling jaw. “My apologies, Frau Waysmith.”
“Why the hell didn’t you give a shout?” Andy asked.
“Sh! Please! The other guests, Herr Waysmith,” he murmured unhappily. “Besides, we held him, didn’t we?”
Andy gave him a look. Then he put his arm around Paula and turned back towards their room.
The Englishman’s outside door opened as they passed. “Thought I heard voices—”
“Round two,” said Andy. “All over.”
The Englishman looked astonished. “But I heard nothing alarming.”
“I wasn’t there,” Paula said. “Men don’t scream, seemingly. But I must say a scream in time saves—”
“Good night,” Andy said quickly and hurried her along the corridor. As they entered their bedroom, he said, “Come on, Paula. Tell me all about it.” He led her over to an armchair.
Paula didn’t answer. She was looking at the half-opened wardrobe door. The man in the long dark coat had touched that handle. And I forgot to tell the police, she thought now. What else did I forget?
Andy was saying, “If you can stand out in the corridor and chitchat to that ageing Sir Walter Raleigh, you can damn well sit on your husband’s knee and tell him how you happened to get into this—this mess.”
“I wasn’t chitchatting. I was only being polite. He did help when I—” Then she saw Andy’s face, worried, drawn. She sat down on his knees and slid her arm round his shoulders. She kissed him. “That’s for believing my story so quickly. No one else did, very much. Not until Rauch tried to escape.” Her lips drooped suddenly. “Oh, Andy, it is terrible to give a true warning, and have everyone look at you as if—” All the emotions she had felt in the last hour suddenly culminated in frank tears.
“Now that’s all right, all right,” Andy kept saying as he found a handkerchief for her.
“But it isn’t—that wall of unbelief… And everyone listening is your friend, everyone is really on your side, only they just can’t believe. What makes us all so slow? So slow and stupid? Gregor said I was stupid. He was right.”
“Darling, let me get you to bed.”
“But I have so much to tell you—”
“Later, later,” Andy said worriedly. “I’ll get you to bed.” And next time, he was thinking, you’ll damned well stay beside me, and travel with me. No more of this. If Francesca had been here, if they had kidnapped Francesca, what would they have done to Paula to silence her? He bit his lip.
The telephone rang. Andy groaned. But Paula, suddenly alert, was saying, “Is that Francesca?” He watched his wife in amazement as she slipped off his knee and ran across to answer the call, all her exhaustion gone, her tears vanished. How long did you have to live with a woman to know what to expect next? He studied her as she listened; then as she spoke. It must have been Francesca on the other end of the wire, because Paula ended with “Take care…please take care.” She came away from the telephone, slowly. I’ve come to Bern, he thought, and found a different kind of Paula: or had we all these unsuspected resources which we called upon when we needed them? Were the hidden possibilities within each of us our true character, the essential core of a human being which surface manners and normal behaviour only veneered?
“Andy, I’m afraid,” Paula was saying, and her face was white and haggard. “I’m afraid, terribly afraid.” She covered her eyes with her hands. She sat down on the bed.
“I’m here,” Andy said, and he rose and crossed the room to sit down beside her. He took her cold hand and kissed its palm. “You ought to get some rest,” he added gently.
“It’s Schmid I’m afraid for,” she said. “And Francesca.”
He unbuttoned her jacket and began drawing it off her shoulders.
“Schmid is gone. He hasn’t been found. They’ve been searching all evening, all night.”
“Who?”
“The Falken Committee.”
Andy folded her jacket and placed it carefully on a chair. “What do you know about that Committee?” he asked quietly.
“You remember when I helped find a job in California for Andrássy, and had to keep it all so quiet?”
“Andrássy, the composer? Was he being helped by the Falken group?”
Paula nodded. “And while he waited to leave for America, he was called Schmid. He worked as a waiter at the Café Henzi. And now he has vanished. This afternoon. In Falken.”
“You never told me that Andrássy, had any connection with Falken.”
“I didn’t know. Until Francesca told me today—”
“She’s on this Committee?”
“Yes.” Then Paula looked at him quickly. “What do you know about Falken?”
He didn’t answer for a second or two. “Remember when I went to see Meyer in Frankfurt recently? Well, what bothered me was a story connected with Falken—”
“Maxwell Meyer? But he’s here!”
“In Bern?”
“I saw him tonight.”
“By God, that’s something. Where can I reach him?”
“Bill Denning could tell us. He’s in Bern, too. At the Aarhof.”
“By God—” Andy said again. He bent down and kissed her shoulder. “Either get into bed, or put something warm around you,” he told her as he lifted the telephone.
But there was no answer from Denning’s room at the Aarhof. “Then I’ll have to keep bothering you every fifteen minutes until I do get an answer,” Andy warned the operator. He turned to see his wife carefully pushing the wardrobe door farther open with the side of her arm.
“We must get the police back here, first thing in the morning,” she told him. “The tall man opened this door, and he didn’t wear gloves, so it’s got his fingerprints. That’s better than any description I can give of him.”
Andy stared at her. She was too busy tying the red silk sash of a lace dressing-gown around her, to notice his amazement. He suddenly smiled. “Is that your idea of something warm?” But there was a discreet knocking at the bedroom door, and Paula retreated modestly into the bathroom while a table was wheeled into the room.
“What a waste of a perfectly good supper,” Paula said, when it was safe for her to come back into the bedroom. And what a waste of a perfectly charming negligee, she thought. “I’d feel properly Edwardian if only I wasn’t so—so angry.”
“Angry?” Andy looked down at the assistant manager’s excellent apology: chicken in aspic, asparagus, coeur de crème, wild strawberries, and a bottle of Piper Heidsieck 1947. It seemed ungrateful to say that all he had indeed wanted was a plain ham sandwich and a good Scotch and soda.
“Yes, angry,” Paula said, slipping her feet into red satin slippers. And she was angry, now. “What do these men think they are, anyway?” She lifted a roll and broke open the hard crust. “I’ll have a glass,” she added, pointing to the champagne. “Yes,” she went on, her lips tight, her eyes hard, “these men who think they can take away people’s freedom. By lifting a telephone, as Gregor said. By having a secret conference. By deciding, in cold blood, that a man like Andrássy has no choice in where he is going to live. By hunting down a girl who was only trying to help him and all the others who wanted freedom to choose. Mind you”—she watched Andy pour carefully—“if Andrássy had stayed in Hungary and actually plotted against the government, then they would have a case against him. But all he wants is to leave a country against which he had neither conspired nor fought. His only crime is that he wants to go and work in another country. But they don’t want that. They won’t allow any innocent man to have freedom of choice.” She lifted her glass of champagne. “Gregor was right, Freedom of choice! Now there’s an editorial for you, Andy!”
“Who is this Gregor?”
“If you’ll have some supper, I’ll tell you all that happened today.” Paula’s eyes softened as she looked at her husband. “When did you eat last?”
“This afternoon. Two o’clock.” He waved that away as unimportant now, but she began serving him some food.
“At least,” he agreed as he took her advice, “this will keep us awake until Bill Denning gets back to his hotel.”
But by four o’clock, they gave up even that idea.
10
KEPPLER
“No one followed us,” Keppler said reassuringly, as the car barely stopped to let them out on a quiet street, tree-shaded, near a narrow gate in a garden wall. Denning watched the car disappear round the corner into a broad avenue. They had driven quickly from Keppler’s dingy office, crossing the River Aare by the Kirchenfeld Bridge. That much he knew. But apart from the fact that this house belonged to Keppler’s sister, that Keppler stayed here when he visited Bern, he knew little else. He had the feeling, though, that the route they had followed, however quick, had been circuitous once they had crossed the bridge, that Keppler had been taking precautions, that now they were entering a house which did not lie so far from the river. Perhaps it was only his nerves, but he felt an irritation that he had been told so little. Yet Keppler must trust him enough, or he wouldn’t have been brought here. But he was uneasy.
Keppler noticed it. “No one followed us,” he repeated as he unlocked the heavy front door of the stolid house, encircled by its compact garden, shielded from neighbouring houses by small trees and flowering shrubs. He stood aside politely to let Denning enter the dark hall. “A crime reporter keeps strange hours. The neighbours pity me, but they aren’t curious. My sister only says that there must be easier ways to make an honest living.” He switched on a dim light. His manner, like his voice, was calm and matter-of-fact. Now, he led the way from the narrow hall—a gleamingly clean hall, smelling of beeswax and turpentine, of spices from the kitchen, with a woman’s gardening hat, old raincoats, a dog’s leash hanging against one pine-panelled wall, a bowl of flowers on a polished table—and they climbed a steep staircase which led up through this seemingly normal house. On the first landing they passed a room where someone snored. “My sister,” Keppler said. “But my rooms are on the top floor. She won’t disturb us.”
Denning felt a wild fit of laughter about to seize him. He gripped the railing hard, tensing all his muscles to control himself, and fought the laughter down. The joke wasn’t as funny as all that, he realised. And he gritted his teeth in anger against himself when he started nervously at the appearance of a large dog on the landing above them.
“That’s all right, that’s all right,” Keppler said reassuringly, patting the silent dog. But Denning felt the words were meant for him too. The dog, a massive German shepherd, gave a panting smile and lay down again on the landing. “He has a habit of barking at every visitor when he is kept in the garden,” Keppler explained. “At night, it is less disturbing for the neighbours to have him here.” So much that Keppler said seemed so simple, on the surface.
“I’m out of training,” Denning said, as he looked back down the staircase and saw, now, an innocent house. Keppler caught his true meaning.
“You can relax here,” he said. “I always do. This sort of place is my safeguard. For in my kind of work, the greatest danger is to become abnormal.” He shook his head. He looked at this moment like a grocer who had worked late making out his monthly bills, or a schoolteacher who had spent the evening grading exam papers.
They entered a most private apartment, small but simply arranged for work, eating, and sleeping. Plainly furnished, but comfortable. Quiet, too; secure. The strong door had an elaborate lock. And on one side wall there was another heavy door, barred. (“That leads to an outside stairway down that side of the house,” Keppler explained and smiled as he added, “with four steps which creak abominably.”) The windows were narrow and short. (“And no balcony,” Keppler said, his eyes following Denning’s glance. “Ever since an unfortunate experience in Geneva five years ago, I don’t like a balcony outside my windows.”)
Denning looked round the room again, and then chose a chair. Yes, this room was so normal in spite of its quiet precautions, that tensions were loosened, nerve ends stopped vibrating, and the mind slipped from worry into calm. Near his chair was a gramophone, a pile of records, a stack of foreign magazines. Wooden shelves fixed against the wall held some dictionaries, books on psychology, on wood carving, on folklore, a mixed stretch of poetry—Browning, Heine, Pushkin, Rilke, Spitteler— and a large box of cigars. This was Keppler’s own particular corner, but Denning was too exhausted to move. He watched Keppler, busy with a small electric cooker which stood conveniently, if inelegantly, near his desk and typewriter. “It’s quiet here,” Denning said. Quiet and secure. He began to relax.
Keppler brought over two cups of hot chocolate. “The gourmet would lift his eyebrows,” he said, “but the sad truth is that neither good food nor excellent wine ever solved any real problems, only pleasant speculations. And tonight our problems are very real, our speculations far from pleasant.”
The hot chocolate was too sweet for Denning’s taste, but the extra lump of sugar was probably part of Keppler’s cure, too. He drank it, anyway, and in spite of his doubt he felt
better. More confident, for one thing. And his brain was beginning to function properly again: it had stopped jumping from Eva to Charlie-for-Short, from the bogus Maartens to the missing Taylor, from why and what to how and when, so that nothing had been clear except an oppression of worry and urgency.
“Now,” Keppler said, laying aside his own emptied cup and leaning back in the chair opposite, “how do you feel?” His voice, like his actions; was leisurely. Don’t worry, don’t rush, he seemed to be saying.
“Better.” Denning almost smiled. “Thanks,” he added. “I’ve a lot to tell you, but it’s hard to know where to begin.”
“At the very beginning. When you arrived in Bern. Tell me about everyone you met, everything you saw and heard, suspicious and unsuspicious. Even the smallest thing can be of the greatest importance. And don’t forget Emily.”
Denning’s smile was natural, at last. He began his account of what he had seen, what he had noticed, what had puzzled him, ever since he had met the man who called himself Charles-Auguste Maartens in a corridor of the Aarhof.
There was no interruption from Keppler, except an occasional sound like “Uh-huh!” or “Mm-mm” as he registered either interest or foreboding. But, almost at three o’clock, as Denning was reaching the last phase of his story, the telephone bell rang. Keppler said, “Hold it! Don’t forget a thing!” and he hurried over to his desk.
He listened to the call with obvious excitement. “Good, good,” he said briefly. “You know the arrangements.” He put his finger on the telephone cradle, to end that conversation, but he didn’t leave the desk. He began making a call of his own. As he waited for the connection, he grinned widely at Denning. “Meyer’s message is all there, clear as a dry Sunday. Another hour or so, and we’ll have it.”
Then he began speaking into the telephone again, now using one of the numerous dialects you could find in Switzerland. To Denning’s ears it sounded like one of the impossible Romansch group; there wasn’t a word that he could begin to understand— if you were Swiss, he thought, small wonder that you weren’t afraid of languages—but he did notice that Keppler was giving instructions for the first half-minute, then he was listening for the next four minutes, and whatever he heard was, first of all, good, and then bad.