He came away, fuming. Something troubled him. But he said nothing, sat down opposite Denning again, and cut a cigar with great attention.
“Yes?” he said at last to Denning, after he had lit his cigar. “And so the woman Eva came into the Café Henzi. She didn’t know Meyer at first—you’re sure?”
“She learned his identity only by recognising the pattern formed by the cigarettes and matches. That drew her attention, I noticed.”
“And how did she know that? Who told her?”
“It could have been Charlie-for-Short—they could have questioned him before they killed him.”
“They…” Keppler said. “Well, it won’t be long before we see their faces clearly. They’ve hidden themselves well, but not everything went right for them tonight. They may be forced to act too quickly, to reveal themselves… Sorry. Go on.”
Denning went on with his story. Keppler remained silent. Even after the story was ended, he remained silent. He studied the ash forming on his cigar. He seemed completely relaxed, almost too casual, sitting there with his head resting easily against the back of his chair. Then his blue eyes, blank of expression, turned toward Denning. “And what are your plans, now?”
“Plans?”
“You aren’t here under any military orders?”
“No.”
“Then you are free to go on with your holiday in Switzerland?”
Denning looked at him in amazement. “Just what do you take me for?” he asked.
Keppler ignored that. He continued, evenly, “Meyer’s death will be investigated, of course. Other Americans will come to Bern. They may not care to have—well—” Keppler hesitated in sudden embarrassment. Or was this his way of being tactful?
“An amateur complicating their investigations?” Denning suggested. “They needn’t worry. Nor need you. I’ll keep as far away from them as you will keep from me.”
“But what do you intend to do? That’s the question.”
Indeed it was. “I—I don’t know.” Wasn’t Keppler going to suggest something?
“That is what worries me. I can understand why you want to stay here. But I—” Keppler shrugged his shoulders.
“But you don’t approve of it?” What was this anyway, Denning wondered angrily—a cool dismissal?
“As a human being, yes. As a security officer, no. That’s being frank.”
“You sound like Le Brun.”
Keppler shrugged his shoulders.
“Where is he, anyway? Still talking about a hoax?” Denning asked, his bitterness no longer disguised.
“Meyer’s death ended all arguments about that,” Keppler said quietly.
“That’s just fine,” Denning said savagely. “A man has to die in order to be heard.”
“I, too, didn’t altogether believe Meyer’s story,” Keppler said. “Not at first, not until it was too late. In that sense, I—” He paused, his voice sharpened. “I didn’t do enough to protect him.” Denning thought, and if I hadn’t been a friend of Max Meyer, would I have trusted his story completely? Would I have gone over to the Café Henzi, or waited in the Square, or noticed that pack of cigarettes? “I suppose Le Brun was only acting according to his book of rules,” he conceded at last.
“We all have our rules,” Keppler said. “And in addition, Le Brun suffers from an acute case of a nagging superior officer. Results, results! That explains much. Including the fact that Le Brun has left for Genoa.”
“Genoa?”
“His theory is that this outburst of violence is only to distract our attention from the diamonds. He believes they must already be out of Switzerland. He may be right.”
Denning rose. He looked at Keppler. Then he turned away. “How far is it to my hotel on foot?” he asked. “Twenty minutes?”
“So you’ve stopped trusting me.” Keppler shook his head sadly.
Denning said, “I trust, when I am trusted. No more, no less.”
“You think I don’t trust you? Because I won’t tell you the latest reports I got over that telephone?”
“Why don’t you?”
Keppler said, “And if you were I, how would you act?”
“Warily, I suppose. I can see your point of view too, you know.”
“Can you?”
“I was only Max Meyer’s friend. Isn’t that your problem?”
“Now, come,” said Keppler with some annoyance. “I’m not quite so—so haphazard as all that. I did learn what I could about you before I even would write a note signed Elizabeth.” He thought of the report from Meyer, and of the files he had studied. “I know a little,” he said slowly. “September, 1941, you were a student at Princeton, specialising in French and German. By February, 1942, you were in the army. Then North Africa—as an interpreter. Then London, in OSS, under Max Meyer’s command. April, 1944, you parachuted, into northern France. In 1945, you were in Germany, transferring along with Meyer to the section that was searching for missing property. In 1946, you left the army, went back to Princeton, and studied for a Fine Arts degree. In January, 1949, you were married. June, 1949, you graduated. August, 1949, you were interviewed for a job in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. You got it,” Keppler paused. Then he said, “But you refused it, and returned to further service in Germany. Now, that service is over. You are going back to New York again. Am I right?”
There was a silence. Yes, Denning was thinking, August, 1949… The night I came back from New York with the job I had wanted—the night Peggy was coming to meet me at Princeton station, and never came. The car smashed up on the Trenton highway, and Peggy dead. And the empty little apartment with the celebration dinner all prepared: the candles on the table, waiting to be lit…
“Yes,” Denning said at last. The life and hard times of Bill Denning, he thought. He looked at Keppler. “Little enough, I grant you. I get your point of view, all right.” He moved towards the door.
“But you don’t!” Keppler said angrily. “Do you think I want to add you to my conscience? It’s bad enough to worry over Meyer, over Taylor…”
Denning halted. He looked round at Keppler.
“Yes, Taylor,” Keppler said. He threw his cigar down into the ash tray, and tightened his lips. “If I thought you’d go back to the Aarhof, pack your bag, and clear out of Bern, I’d let you walk right out of that door. But you won’t. So I won’t. Instead, I’ll break one of my rules.” He pointed to a chair. “Sit down!” he said angrily, but his anger wasn’t against himself or Denning: it was against the men who had killed Taylor.
“What happened to Taylor?”
“He was found in the Aare tonight, just below the Nydeck Bridge.”
“Accident by drowning?” Denning’s voice was sarcastic.
“A very wilful accident,” Keppler said bitterly. “Did you know Taylor?”
Denning shook his head.
“You never met him? Then that’s lucky—for you.”
“What other news?”
“I’ve given you the worst. The rest is mostly disappointments. Eva has vanished. And so has the man who pretended he was Maartens. Just before midnight, he interrupted his mild gambling at the Kursaal for a walk on the terrace. He strolled down to a private car which must have been waiting for him. When last seen, the car had taken the road to Thun and was travelling fast, too fast for my men to keep up with. The car never reached Thun. It must have branched off on one of the many side roads. In the darkness, that is easy.”
“His luggage at the Aarhof?”
“Picked up by arrangement earlier this evening. His bill was paid then, too.”
“While he was out at the Kursaal?”
Keppler nodded. “Expertly planned. But not well foreseen. He didn’t expect any murder to happen. Or why leave the place where he had been establishing an alibi so carefully, just in time to have his movements become unknown about midnight? That is when he needed his cloak of innocence most of all.”
“Then you don’t think this gang of jewel thieves were res
ponsible for Meyer’s death?”
“An interesting footnote,” Keppler said, “is the fact that Nikolaides and his syndicate always stopped short of murder. They believe that expert thieving and killing don’t mix.”
“Well, they’re mixed up in murder this time,” Denning said, with grim satisfaction. “Let them get what they’ve earned.” Then he thought for a moment or two. “I’m sorry for the real Charles Maartens, though. He was only the errand boy. Why did he have to be killed?”
“You’ve already suggested the reason for that,” Keppler said quietly. “If some men forced information about Meyer out of Maartens, then Maartens—if he stayed alive—could name the murderers of Meyer.”
“How carefully they are covering themselves,” Denning said slowly. He frowned.
“Tantalising,” Keppler agreed. “We have, perhaps, as much evidence as we can ever gather. All the pieces of information are probably now in our hands. Yet to scramble them around until they fit into a recognisable pattern—that’s what’s so tantalising… For the last hour I have only been able to think how stupid I must be.”
“I haven’t got all the pieces of information,” Denning reminded him. “Or do you think you’ve told me enough?”
Keppler smiled. “The rest of the news is good. We have captured the man Rauch—the clerk who gave you the false message at the Aarhof. He was arrested early this morning at the Hotel Victoria for unlawful entry, carrying weapons, and resisting arrest. It was your friend, Mrs. Waysmith, who caught him. I didn’t get all the details, but Inspector Bohren took charge and now two of my own men are interrogating Herr Rauch.” Keppler nodded with considerable satisfaction.
“Paula Waysmith?” Denning was incredulous. Paula was the girl all men thought they had to protect. “And what had Rauch to do with Paula?”
“He entered her room.”
“But he isn’t a thief.”
“Not a jewel thief,” Keppler said. “But I shouldn’t trust any valuable information near Herr Rauch’s nervous fingers.”
“But Paula—”
“She is a friend of a young woman called Francesca Vivenzio. Do you know anything about her?”
“No. I just met her today.”
“You have never heard of Falken?”
“No.”
Keppler studied the toe of his shoe. Then he said, “So we have Rauch. And we have the man who searched Meyer’s pocket.”
Falken, Denning wondered, Falken… He said politely, “What did he take?”
“Why do you think he took anything?”
“Why else did he run when he was challenged?”
Keppler smiled. “You are back to normal, my friend. You weren’t so much out of training after all. Yes, he took a wallet with money and a few scraps of paper. He threw away the wallet and money before the police car reached him, so he can’t plead he is an ordinary thief.”
“He’s denying everything?”
“He was—for the scraps of paper weren’t traceable. Only, he couldn’t wear gloves when he picked Meyer’s pocket, so we have fingerprints on the wallet. We can’t prove the wallet was Meyer’s, but we can prove the man is lying when he says he never saw it in his life. And when Inspector Bohren suggested his fingerprints might be in the murder car too, he was obviously nervous.”
“But he wasn’t the driver of that car.”
“No. But he could have travelled in it on his way to Bern.”
“From Berlin? He spoke with flat hard vowels and slurred consonants.”
“From East Berlin. That we did find out.”
“His politics?”
“He keeps saying he was a Nazi.”
“He says that?” Denning shook his head. “Then he is the first Nazi I’ve ever heard of who admitted it freely.” But this suits Le Brun’s theory, he was thinking. Had Le Brun been right, was I wrong? “Perhaps I’m wrong,” he said slowly. “Perhaps the ex-Nazis are behind all this.”
“Once he was a Nazi—and that information he volunteers; now he is a Communist, which is more evident than he realises with his limited brains. Bohren has quite an ear for their phrases. That’s the trouble about regulated ideas: the phrases are never original, the same words keep recurring. But basically he’s a thug pure and simple, a man who can be bought to do any ugly work.”
“Clever of them,” Denning said. “An ex-Nazi who’s now a Communist.” Then he looked sharply at Keppler. “And was that why you were so noncommittal before Le Brun, when we were discussing the two agents, Eva and Rauch? Did they too once work for the Nazis?”
Keppler nodded.
“And now for Soviet Russia?”
Keppler nodded again. “Not for military intelligence, however. We’ve always considered them minor agents, interesting to watch. We could have arrested them any time, under Article 272. But the small fish can pilot you to the big fish, you know.”
Denning was silent. The small fish… Charles-Auguste Maartens, a frightened little man, a very small fish…
“Well,” Keppler said, “there are all the pieces. What kind of picture do they make?”
Denning half-closed his eyes. He was beginning to see the first vague shape. First, Nikolaides needed help when he sent Charles Maartens to Max Meyer in Frankfurt. Then, in Bern, Nikolaides didn’t need help: he needed it so little that he tried to end any interest he had aroused. He discredited Max Meyer. Ah…he did not only want to discredit, he also wanted to discourage Max himself. Was that the explanation for the totally unnecessary piece of acting by the fake Maartens? Max was not only to look like a fool—that would not have discouraged him, not Max—he was to feel he had been fooled.
Denning looked at Keppler.
“No guesses, at least?” Keppler asked.
“Guesses, yes. And probably stupid.”
“Such as?” Keppler was smiling. He liked that quick look in Denning’s eyes.
Denning said, “Nikolaides wanted Bern to himself. He wanted Max Meyer to leave, completely discouraged. Why? Because the diamonds are in Bern. What’s more—they must be stealable.”
“Then they’ve been sold. They’ve been sold to a private individual—” Keppler snapped his fingers.
“—on whom Nikolaides can safely go to work in his usual way,” Denning added.
“But what about Genoa? Was that only an addition by Nikolaides to make sure that the Americans would take action?”
They looked at each other. “It could be,” Denning said slowly. “At least, Nikolaides seemed to have his own ideas about Americans and their motives. I remember Meyer told me—yes, Genoa could have been Nikolaides’ idea of a sure bait.”
“Come,” Keppler said, his excitement growing. “Keep throwing your ideas to me; I’ll throw mine to you; between us, we’ll catch some truth. Forget Genoa at the moment. Back to Bern. Nikolaides must have been very sure that the diamonds were here, easy to steal, before he cancelled Maartens’ meeting with Meyer. He must have been very sure.”
“He made a deal with them,” Denning said slowly.
“With the political agents of the power that was smuggling the diamonds?” Keppler grinned. “Don’t you admire my restraint?” He waved away his aside. “A deal…” he said thoughtfully. “Nikolaides was to end our interest in the diamonds; in return, Nikolaides was told the name of the buyer. Yes…that would be sufficient for Nikolaides. Only the diamonds, therefore, would be a big enough bribe. Who was this poor foolish buyer, anyway?”
“No interest,” Denning said. “But what is important is how his money will be used.” Max had talked in Berlin of a secret fund for political purposes. Was it already set up?
“Nikolaides won’t let that trouble his conscience.”
“But Max would have. That’s why he was killed.”
“Perhaps,” Keppler said slowly, “he had even discovered how the money was to be used.” He glanced at his watch. The message in Meyer’s pack of cigarettes should have reached them by this time. He rose. He tried to conceal his sudden worry.
“Certainly Nikolaides didn’t know he was being drawn into murder when he made the deal. That’s the trouble when you start doing business with political gangsters. Their plans always go far beyond yours.”
“My heart bleeds for him,” Denning said grimly. “No doubt he’ll start thinking he’s in danger, too. Well, I hope he sweats it out.” Then, thinking of danger, he thought of Le Brun who had made contact with Taylor today. “Le Brun—will he be all right?” he asked anxiously. He looked at Keppler, who was walking round the room restlessly. “Le Brun,” he said again, “shouldn’t you warn him?”
Keppler stared at Denning for a second, as if he were making a long journey back to cope with that question. “Yes,” he said, “yes.” He passed a hand wearily over his eyes. And Denning, watching him, wondered what further guesses Keppler had been making by himself. They had upset him.
“Of course,” Denning said, “all these guesses of ours may be wrong.”
“Guesses they may have been,” Keppler said grimly, “or suppositions, or inferences, or deductions. But there’s enough truth to—”
On a wall above his desk a bell rang, then rang three times more in short quick jabs. Keppler glanced up as Denning had. He took a deep breath. He relaxed. A smile came back to his face as he crossed the room with his light step. “I switch the front bell to ring up here at night,” he explained as he unlocked the door. “Doesn’t alarm my sister.” The dog outside had risen and was growling in a deep bass rumble. “I heard the bell, Fafner. I heard it,” he said, and the door closed.
Denning looked round the room, then at the books and records near his comfortable chair. He felt a touch of envy, a warm sympathetic envy, more a recognition of what he would like than a hunger for something he could not possess. Here I am, he thought, a stranger in another’s armchair: yet not a stranger. His friends are my friends. There is the Brahms Fourth, asking to be played. There, on the shelf above, is Rainer Maria Rilke, waiting to be read.