“It was mailed from Salzburg airport this morning. By the way, you can add a postscript about that. The two men who watched Bryant’s house had come from Prague, but they were leaving for Warsaw. They were speaking Czech.”
O’Donnell took a pen out of his pocket and actually noted the postscript in the margin. “All this goes farther than we are allowed to reach, but someone should certainly look into it. This Nazi angle, for instance—we can’t afford to neglect that.” He folded the report and replaced it slowly in its envelope. His brow was furrowed, his eyes thoughtful. “May I take this with me? I’ll have it back in your hands by tomorrow night.”
Newhart nodded.
“How many copies do you intend to make?” Mathison asked quickly.
O’Donnell looked surprised and then amused, but he answered frankly. “Two, if you have no objections. One for our classified files; one to pass along to the Agency. Europe is their business.”
“The fewer copies the better.”
“I agree.” O’Donnell was frowning. “You know, Mr. Mathison—there are certain aspects of that surveillance in Salzburg which puzzle me a little. You were followed up to the castle; and then nothing? Not until you got down into the town again?”
“That’s right. I thought about it, too. The only reason I could find was—well, I probably was under surveillance all the time, but I wasn’t paying so much attention to it when I was up at the castle.” He met O’Donnell’s quick look with a smile. “I was with a girl.”
“Oh... An old friend?”
“No. I met her up there. We wandered around together, went for a drink.”
“I’m sorry I’m so stupid,” O’Donnell apologised in his quiet, earnest way, “but I don’t quite have the picture. She was a stranger?”
“Yes,” Mathison said curtly. Then, if only to show it had been a pleasantly innocent meeting with a charming girl, he explained Elissa Lang. “Originally, Eliza-something-or-other. But she hasn’t used that in years,” he ended.
“From Chicago, you said?” O’Donnell asked mildly. “Forgive me if I ask one last question: are you meeting her in Zürich? I believe you mentioned something about her going there to visit her grandmother.”
“Well, there was a tentative arrangement. But I doubt if I’ll have time now to think of anything except Yates and his blasted files.”
“Yes,” Newhart broke in. “I’ve been wondering if he has used our name for any other bogus contract to establish confidence. That was what he was doing with Bryant, wasn’t it? Play the poor sucker along and get a first claim on his information?”
O’Donnell nodded, but his thoughts were elsewhere. “Do you mind?” he asked Mathison as he took out his pen and jotted down Elissa or Eliza-something Lang on the flap of the envelope. “Sorry to have bothered you about this. But it is necessary for us to get as complete a picture as possible.”
That was a delicate reminder that without a mention of the brief episode with Elissa, Mathison’s report could be considered incomplete. Either, thought Mathison with rising annoyance, I turn in a full record of my day in Salzburg or I shouldn’t have submitted any report at all. Which was true enough, he admitted slowly. “I didn’t think it was important,” he said gruffly.
“It possibly isn’t.” O’Donnell pocketed his pen, ending that subject. “I must congratulate you on your report. It is really very expert.”
“You’re the professional, I’m the amateur; that’s the difference in our approach,” Mathison said, recovering some of his good temper. Elissa wasn’t important, he felt sure of that. The professional had only given himself another footnote to check. This one would be a waste of time and taxpayers’ money, but that was O’Donnell’s headache. If he wanted to clutter up his records—
The telephone rang. O’Donnell was on his feet, picking up the receiver before it began its second ring. He listened without interruptions. At the end of the call, he said, “That’s fine, John. How long will it take you to get prints made? Enlarged as far as possible... Yes, the whole film, a complete job. I’ll pick them up. I have to take a late flight to Washington. See you.” He replaced the receiver slowly, his mind now several thousand miles away.
“Well?” asked Newhart impatiently.
“It is possible that Yates and Burch are the same man.”
“Yates is Burch?” Newhart’s face drained of colour.
“We need definite identification from the experts. But what the photograph shows is extremely interesting. Burch’s signature on his cheque to Richard Bryant is less exactly written, more fluid. Three letters show a close resemblance to the same three letters in Eric Yates’s own signature. That may not sound like much, but to the expert in handwriting it can mean a great deal.”
“He must have been hurried,” Newhart said, “or under some tension.”
“Or contemptuous?” Mathison asked. “He was signing a cheque for a man he had duped.”
O’Donnell looked at him, then nodded. “Good-bye,” he told both of them, and shook hands warmly. “Thank you for your help. It has saved weeks of searching.” Weeks? he thought. It might have taken months to uncover Yates. Perhaps never, if “Burch” decided to cut his losses and fake his own death; those boys were supersensitive to the smell of danger. All Yates would have to do then was keep quiet, sit tight, play the innocent publisher. The Swiss wouldn’t even have known that further search was necessary. He said to Mathison, “The Swiss may very well get in touch with you when you are in Zürich. You’d have no objections?”
“Would I be allowed to have any?” Mathison asked in wry amusement. But he could see O’Donnell’s point. Now that he knew about Burch, his searches through the Zürich office files might produce something he had passed over last week. Or even Yates’s elderly secretary, so tight-mouthed when it came to questions about her employer—for Yates had the power of hiring and firing his office staff—might unbend considerably once Yates was dismissed from his job.
“Switzerland is the host country,” O’Donnell reminded him with an unexpected grin. That was something he was obviously never allowed to forget. “You’ll hear from us,” he promised Newhart, and closed the door quietly.
“I hope so,” Newhart said, “but how much will we hear?” He had recovered his normal colour, but he was obviously brooding about Yates. He sat down heavily at his desk. “You know what, Bill? I think I’ll spend tomorrow in Washington, too. I just want to make sure that—”
“I’d leave it to that guy. There’s no good in getting our wires all crossed. Besides, the fewer people who know about Yates, the less chance there is of broken security.”
“My friends in Washington know when to keep their lips buttoned.”
“Sure. But even discreet enquiries can start some speculation. You don’t want publicity any more than the FBI does. Let them handle Washington.”
“Well, I’d like you to get back to Zürich right away.”
“Hey—give me a night’s sleep at least! And a day to sharpen my wits. At the moment, all I can see is a long hot shower and a comfortable bed.”
“What about dinner? We could talk—”
“I had dinner several hours ago.” And he wanted no more discussion until he had got some thinking done. There was too much at stake here, and not just for the firm of Newhart and Morris, to be blown off into a fine cloud of talk.
“Bill—how much do you trust Anna Bryant? Oh, I could see from your report that you found her sympathetic. But trust is another matter. After all, it’s only her word. And she was in a highly emotional state—must have been.”
“Are you talking about the contract?”
“No. It’s her statement about those god-damned Nazis.” Newhart had served in the European theatre in World War II, all the way from Normandy to Berlin. “You were only a kid at school but I saw the liberation of one concentration camp, and I tell you—” He checked himself. “Okay, okay, I’ll tell you another time. Better go and catch up on your sleep. I’ll call you tomorrow
. And Bill—thanks. I mean that.”
Mathison left the small room, its photographs of family and friends beaming from every wall, crossed over the yards and yards of soft grey carpet in the outer office with its hunting prints and mahogany and copper lamps, entered Linda’s preserve with its equally soft carpet (Audubon prints here, in dark-green frames), and found her knitting a thick-stitched sweater. She seemed to have worked some of her gloom away, for she looked up with her usual bright smile. But this time, it was he who was preoccupied. Tactfully, she said nothing.
“Oh, I nearly forgot,” he said, almost at the door, putting down his bag and searching in his pocket. He brought out the letter that Bryant had sent to Newhart two weeks ago, the letter that had been the start of everything. He stood looking at it, remembering Anna Bryant’s face as she had identified that letter.
“I’ll take it to Mr. Newhart at once,” Linda told him, and folded up her knitting. “Good night, Mr. Mathison.”
“Good night,” he said, still several thousand miles away.
One small letter, he was thinking as he went into the long corridor, one polite but businesslike letter packing a charge of dynamite. Finstersee... What was so important about Finstersee that a man would risk his life?
10
Wednesday was a day of waiting, and most of Thursday. Bill Mathison had to use considerable restraint not to telephone Jimmy Newhart with questions about O’Donnell: what have you heard, what’s going on, what has he run into in Washington—deaf ears, bland smiles, gentle reassurances? Newhart’s patience was certainly under similar strain. The idea of Yates, back in Zürich from his German trip, quietly at work in his office—in Newhart and Morris’s office—was enough to boil Jimmy’s temper into an explosion as high as Krakatoa.
Mathison made a protocol call to his own office down on Wall Street and had an amiable chat with Muller, one of the senior partners (Newhart and Morris business unfinished; this quick visit back to New York merely a matter of consultation). But apart from a couple of brisk walks in the crisp autumn air, and a lonely dinner at his usual steak house on Third Avenue (no good making a date with Peggy or Nan and having to break it), he spent the rest of his time in his own apartment. He had often wished for a couple of days to himself in the middle of the week; now, he had got them and he couldn’t enjoy them.
His small apartment was comfortable—it faced south, so that the sun streamed cheerfully in—and the white walls of the living room were covered with teak bookshelves in a broken-rhythm pattern at its sitting end. What was more, the shelves weren’t cluttered with bibelots and cute bottles but actually contained books, some rather battered, for he had been gathering them together ever since he was in college, yet these old friends weren’t saying much to him at the moment. He stacked pile after pile of records on to the stereo: Bach, Ravel, Haydn, Prokofiev, Mozart, Sibelius, Vivaldi, Shostakovich, Verdi, Fischer-Dieskau singing Schumann, Callas trying Norma (not her best effort; he’d have to find another recording), Schönberg, Bach again, and Bach. At least they kept him good company while his mind circled around the closely packed events in Salzburg. He had the odd, unpleasant feeling of being poised above his own life. Everything had come to a stop, and he was waiting. It was like the day after his final exams, or his induction into the army, or his interview for a job with Strong, Muller, Nicolson and Hodge. Just waiting, wondering, wishing, wanting, all wrapped up in a package of not-knowing.
The hell of it was, as he told himself several times on Thursday morning, he sensed something was going on in Washington. He even conjured up momentarily a small bare ugly room with three serious men quite oblivious to their surroundings or the war in Vietnam or the threatened bust-up of NATO, so engrossed were they in—guess what?—three pages of William Mathison’s typing. (That at least gave him a loud laugh, although that sounded damn silly, too, in the lonely apartment.)
By two o’clock on Thursday, he had finished his gourmet luncheon of slightly burned omelette, overmelted Brie, chilled Sancerre (at least that was a success) and left the cluttered mini-kitchen for Mrs. Pyokari to clean in her morning visit. He got his feet up on his favourite black-leather sofa, opened the book he was reading—a new novel about a British Intelligence network working in Berlin where the hero was his own best enemy, everyone was tired and old and cynical, all so meaningless, mess without end Amen Amen. The telephone rang. And it was Newhart.
Jimmy wasted no time. “Yates is missing.”
“Yates?”
“Just had a call from that secretary of his. Miss—”
“Freytag. What did she have to say?”
“He didn’t get back to Zürich on Tuesday night, didn’t appear at the office yesterday morning or today. His housekeeper says he hasn’t been home since a brief visit on Saturday.”
When he was supposed to be in Germany, thought Mathison. It gave him a strange feeling to realise that when he had been working late in the empty Zürich office on Saturday, Eric Yates had been prowling through the town. “What else did you learn?”
“What else? Bill, it took me ten minutes to get all that out of Miss Freytag. The woman’s practically hysterical. Scared stiff.”
“Old self-contained precise Miss Freytag? I’d better leave for Zürich and take charge of his desk and papers. And when he gets back, I suppose I question him about the contract as a sort of lead-in to a telephone call with you? Or do you want to come over yourself?”
“That would emphasise everything, don’t you think? We’ll play it down. You talk with him, then keep him beside you while you call me. Right?”
“Anything in particular that you want me to say to him?”
“Use your own judgment. You’re in charge, Bill. Just get this business cleared up.” Newhart dropped his voice to a normal tone. “Our quiet friend of the other evening is worried in case Yates has left for a long vacation.”
So Frank O’Donnell was on the job. That was good news at least. “A permanent one, perhaps?”
“Could be. That Saturday night visit to his house was to collect his passport.”
Mathison restrained himself from asking which one; Newhart was in no mood for jokes at the moment. “How did our quiet friend find that out?”
“Swiss Security has been busy.”
“I’m glad to hear someone has. What about our quiet friend himself?”
“He has just left on a long trip. Sent you his best. By the way, about that trouble you’ve been having with your stereo, the two men I recommended will be over to fix it this afternoon. Sorry I took so long to get hold of them, but they’re quick. They won’t delay you.”
“I hope they know their business,” Mathison said, recovering from his surprise. “I have a couple of imperative questions.”
“They’re fully qualified. Don’t worry about that. Now two more things: I’m sending Mrs. Conway to Zürich—she’s head of our translation department and a bit of a linguist. She lost her husband some years ago, by the way. She’s a capable girl. She can manage the office there until I find a replacement for Yates. That’s going to take some doing, I tell you.”
Better luck next time, thought Mathison, and again restrained himself.
Newhart went on, “She knows something about the situation. I told her about that funny business with Bryant’s contract. If you have to expand on that, you’ll find you can trust her. She’s extremely discreet.”
That, thought Mathison gloomily, means she is past her first youth and has given up hope. “It might be simpler if you would send a man.”
“Arnold is in Houston, Bernstein’s wife is in the hospital, Johnstone is seeing an author through labour pains—complete revision of galley proofs or we’ll have a turkey on our hands—and Paradine is on jury duty. Besides, none of them knows both French and German. Like to be a publisher?”
“Hardly worth the wall-to-wall carpeting. Hey—I nearly forgot. Did you get the prints of the photographs I took?”
“You’ll have them this afternoon. I thin
k—perhaps—you might even deliver them personally in Salzburg.”
“Isn’t that stretching the expense account?” Mathison asked with some amusement.
“Yes, but it may be cheaper in the long run. At least, that’s what I am beginning to think. What’s your opinion?”
“Yates was in your employ and empowered to act for you. You’ve always stood by any commitments he made. The fact that you never imagined he would make this kind of commitment is not much of a defence in a law court.”
“Then it is possibly wise that you see Mrs. Bryant, explain personally.”
“I think that’s the least we could do. She is as much an injured party as you are. If she were less honest, you could have some kind of lawsuit faked up against you.”
“Better get some signed clearance from Mrs. Bryant, don’t you think?”
“That’s necessary. And I’d suggest a token payment on that kind of quitclaim. What about the equivalent of the original advance—three hundred dollars?”
“So you think a copy of the contract might turn up?”
“Always possible. Pity it’s such a small amount.” She would need every penny she could get, Mathison thought.
“You advise giving her more?” Newhart asked worriedly.
“No. That would look as if we were cajoling her into signing. Which we are not. By the way, if you had been publishing a book such as Bryant’s, what kind of advance would you have expected to pay?”
“Well, for a first book by an unknown author—five hundred would be considered generous. Some publishers would pay no more than four hundred, actually. Why do you ask?”
“Just curiosity, I guess.” Yates really was cheap, Mathison thought. Even a couple of hundred dollars more would have meant a good deal to the Bryants. “It’s really a hell of a thing,” he said irritably.