The Salzburg Connection

“You’ve taken up pipe smoking,” Mathison suggested with a small laugh. His sense of relief was growing by the minute. Some kind of trap had been set here for him, but he hadn’t been caught. No damage done except to Willi.

  “What’s so funny?” Nield asked curtly.

  “You and your legal niceties, the woman’s wig, all this business of disguise and subterfuge; and myself, too. The joke’s on me. I really thought she was an old woman. Well, it’s lucky we had Keller outside.”

  “You were lucky she didn’t carry a gun. And where was yours? Lesson two: never underestimate.” He glanced down at Willi. “I need to remember that myself. He was faster than he looked.” Distant footsteps caught Nield’s ear. Men were in the kitchen, about to enter the living room. “We can leave him now. He’ll soon be in good firm hands.” Nield was already climbing the stairs, three at a time.

  Mathison followed at the same pace. From below he could hear footsteps and voices now coming into the living room. Nield was paying them no attention whatsoever. He was at the top of the stairs, gesturing for speed, pointing to the central corridor that led from this barely lighted landing along the upper floor to the other side of the house. Six closed doors, noted Mathison; three on each side. Nield said quietly, “You take these rooms. I’ll try, the others.” He had drawn his revolver as he moved towards them. Okay, thought Mathison, and pulled out his automatic. Trouble to be expected? He reached his first door, braced himself.

  It was unlocked, and the room felt empty. He risked switching on the light. Anti-climax, he told himself as he looked briefly at a nondescript bathroom.

  The second door was locked, but it was flimsy enough to be forced open at the first try. He groped for the light switch and flicked it on. The dark shapes in the room became recognisable: a well-furnished bedroom, complete with armchair and a small television set. But the wardrobe door, gaping open, showed nothing but empty hooks and hangers. The bureau drawers were empty, too, and its top quite bare except for a crumpled lace mat, as if someone had been packing in haste. There were two suitcases beside the door, heavy to lift, locked and strapped. “What do you make of this?” Mathison called softly to Nield.

  Nield didn’t seem to hear. He was standing at the door of his third room, his hand on its light switch. Then slowly he turned away and came over to Mathison. He slipped the revolver back into his pocket. His light-blue eyes had become cold and hard. Briefly they took in the bedroom and the suitcases. His normally pleasant face was as taut as his voice. “Ready for evacuation, I see. Once they got you here alone, knocked you over the head, left you unconscious, they were ready to move out—no doubt calling the police as they left. They had it well staged.”

  “They’d call the police?”

  Nield nodded to the room across the passage. “Over here,” he said, leading the way. Mathison stopped abruptly at its threshold. He pocketed his automatic. Slowly he entered.

  The room was small, barely furnished. On its strip of thin rug were scattered a brown tweed coat, brown pocketbook, a felt hat, gloves, umbrella. And on the narrow bed against one flowered wall, her face set in a death mask of fear and pain, lay the rigid body of a woman. She was almost unrecognisable in the disarray of hair and clothing. Mathison’s breath strangled in his lungs. His eyes shifted unbelievably towards the coat, the matching gloves and pocketbook, the sensible hat; then back to the silk scarf tightly twisted around the woman’s neck.

  Nield said quickly, “Touch nothing. Leave this all to Keller’s experts.” He put out a hand to keep Mathison from lifting the coat to cover the contorted face.

  “Very wise,” said Keller’s voice behind them. He was alone. He stopped at the threshold, his lips tightening. “Greta Freytag?” he asked Mathison.

  “Yes.”

  Keller crossed over to the last unopened door. He kicked it wide, but found nothing inside that narrow room except a cot and blankets. He returned slowly. He looked only at Mathison, kept talking only to him. “So that is what it was: a safe house. They could shelter several people here if necessary, keep them apart from each other while new passports and identities were being faked.” He went on to the well-furnished bedroom and glowered down at the waiting suitcases. “The caretaker lived here—the woman who came running out into the night. I see she was ready for flight anyway. A neatly planned operation. Up to a point.” He glanced at Nield for the first time, gave a brief nod of congratulations, and ignored him once more. “Have you the revolver with which you wounded the man downstairs?”

  “But I didn’t—” began Mathison. And then he caught on. Nield, quite silent, was holding the revolver out to him. Mathison took it. Nield didn’t seem too happy about parting with it, but he could scarcely object; he was the man who had never been here. “How’s this?” Mathison said, passing the revolver over to Keller. And that, he thought, keeps your report in good order. No difficult questions about Nield’s presence to be answered. A neat and satisfactory solution for all.

  “Thank you,” Keller said most seriously. “The police like to check weapons and match them with bullets.”

  Mathison had rising doubts about that satisfactory solution. “Awkward for me,” he suggested.

  “But why? You fired in obvious self-defence. The police will find the other bullet somewhere in the staircase wall—the one that came from the wounded man’s pistol.”

  The other bullet? Mathison glanced sharply at Nield. But of course—there had been a silencer on that pistol, and it had deceived him. All he had noticed was a faint plopping echo to the shot that Nield had fired. Christ, thought Mathison, no wonder he lost his sense of humour down in that hall. Willi’s bullet must have whistled close.

  “The man did fire at you?” Keller was making sure of that.

  Nield nodded. Mathison replied for him. “He fired.”

  “His pistol was empty when I picked it up.”

  “Oh yes,” Mathison said quickly, taking the small handful of bullets from Nield to give to Keller. “It seemed a good idea to make sure he wouldn’t sneak another shot. Lesson one, I believe,”

  Keller wrapped the bullets carefully in his handkerchief. “Can’t be too careful,” he agreed. “Well, now that we have everything straight, it’s time to leave. I would suggest that back-bedroom window. The roof of the kitchen and scullery jut out right underneath it, an easy drop for anyone in training. Except it might be wiser if you, Mr. Mathison, were seen to be leaving by the front door. There are some neighbours gathering down on the street, and it’s possible that a friend of this house is pretending to be one of them. So you and I shall leave quite naturally, even if the back way is safe for anyone going out that window for the next five minutes. But just one moment,” he finished in the same grave voice, “I have to give orders to get Homicide along here.” He looked at the doorway of the room where Greta Freytag lay. He shook his head angrily, slowly. “I did not expect that,” he said. Then he was walking to the head of the stairs and began giving instructions to the man who waited for him half-way down.

  Nield signalled his good-bye, switched off the light in the bedroom that Keller had pointed out, made for its window. He eased it up gently, looked down at the drop, then around the small patch of back yard. A hedge, some bushes, no lights, an opened gate, cold blackness of enclosing night. He nodded, swung over the sill, and lowered himself out of sight. Mathison, listening intently as he watched Nield disappear, heard a faint thud. Then silence. He crossed over to the window, restraining an impulse to look out and see Nield’s second drop into the yard, closed it carefully. He was back at the door and had switched on the light before Keller returned.

  Two men followed Keller. They had been assigned their jobs. One went into Greta Freytag’s room, the other started a careful check on all the others. “I’ll have more help for you in half an hour. Tell Homicide we need both these suitcases intact. Intact! That goes for anything else we find hidden in the attic—there is no need for them to crawl up there, and they know it. So keep them down here where
they belong.” To Mathison, he said, “Better leave. Soon this house will be too crowded for comfort.” He gave one last look at Greta Freytag. “Perhaps,” he said softly, “she knew more than she told you. Or whoever instigated this murder thought she knew more than she actually did.”

  Whoever instigated... Elissa? Impossible, Mathison kept telling himself. A foreign agent, yes; but someone who could command abduction and murder? Surely not Elissa... He said, “Who did arrange this?” He wanted more than some of Nield’s clever deductions. He needed something factual, something conclusive.

  But Keller wasn’t going to help him argue out his bitter thought. Keller wanted some facts himself, and he knew where to start. He looked at the handsome troubled face of the young man who stared at him almost angrily. Keller said very quietly, “You may have the answer to that question, Mr. Mathison. Come! We can talk as I drive you to your hotel. I’d stay close to my room for the next few days if I were you. We’ll send someone to keep an eye on you. Much safer.” He took Mathison’s arm and led him towards the staircase.

  A friendly gesture? Mathison decided it was only that, and relaxed. “I’m leaving for Salzburg tomorrow. Unless, of course, someone thinks I’m a murder suspect.”

  “No one will. Miss Freytag was obviously killed several hours ago. Two policemen can swear to the time you entered this house.”

  “They didn’t see me enter it alone.” And it would be impossible to mention Nield, far less produce him as a witness.

  “You entered along with a young man I had specially detailed to accompany you who is now on another assignment,” Keller said calmly. “And are you going to Salzburg on business?”

  “Yes. For Newhart and Morris. I’ll have to deal with a bogus contract issued in their name.”

  “How long will that take you?”

  “A couple of days.”

  “You might stretch them a little. Salzburg is a safer place for you than Zürich.”

  “Is it?”

  Keller’s quick eyes studied him briefly. “Unless the person who wanted to delay you in reaching Salzburg has as many resources there as here.”

  She has less of a ready-made organisation to help her in Salzburg, thought Mathison—and there he was, putting the guilt right on Elissa Lang’s shoulders again. Yet, as Eva Langenheim, she had Yates’s group to help her in Zürich. But would they have obeyed her? How could she have asserted authority over them? “Do you think the Nazis were behind all this?”

  They had reached the hall. It was empty now. Inside the abject living room, Willi was being guarded by a couple of men. Keller took Mathison’s arm once again in a surprisingly firm grip, lowered his voice even more. “This looks better, just in case our casualty is feigning unconsciousness. Those fellows have lawyers, you know, who don’t mind carrying messages out of prison. At least we know who he is. One of my men identified him as a Chicom sympathiser who has been organising anti-war meetings at the university. We thought him harmless.” He halted at the front door. “That answers your question, doesn’t it?”

  “Then he is one of Yates’s group?”

  Keller nodded. “We have also learned why he was here tonight. He seemed to think he was dying—he’s a type that always dramatises itself—and he made a brief impassioned speech denouncing the poor woman who is lying upstairs. She betrayed Yates to the Nazis. Yes, he really believes that. And you were the CIA agent who paid her to play traitor.” Keller opened the door. “Now brace yourself, Mr. Mathison. Let’s get quickly to the car.”

  Its driver had the engine running, the door already opened. “Good!” Keller said as they climbed into the back seat and shut out the curious eyes. Far along the street was a sweep of lights. Ambulance, thought Keller; Homicide, too. “And reporters,” he said aloud. “I think we’ve both had a lucky escape tonight, Mr. Mathison.”

  16

  But it wasn’t until Bill Mathison was actually walking through the lobby of his hotel that he could really believe he was a free man. He could still feel Keller’s tight grip on his arm, a reminder of what might have been. And here was the warm lobby, bright with lights, busy with people (some arriving for dinner, some leaving to eat elsewhere, the perpetual motion of the let’s-try-somewhere-else tourists), looking so blandly normal, so far removed from the strange world he had just left with its doubts and dark visions and danger, that it shook him. Keller and Nield, he thought, must have nerves of Toledo steel.

  And then, as he waited for his key at the porter’s desk, he was startled to catch a glimpse of himself in one of the mirrored walls; he looked absolutely normal, too. The last ninety minutes of his life, for it was almost half-past eight, might only have been a particularly hideous nightmare, except that, in undreamlike fashion, its quick succession of events had been logically developed and connected, and the memories it had left were sharp-edged. Tonight he had been administered a grim lesson in realities. He would no longer be able to talk blithely of the end of the Cold War, of the completely different set of problems that the sixties had brought into the political world; the Cold War in its old evident terms might have eased, but the Hidden War was there. Even a peaceful nation like Switzerland could vouch for that, or it wouldn’t have men like Keller in its service.

  “No messages tonight,” the porter told him, unasked. “You did find the Bergstrasse, Herr Mathison?”

  “I found it. Oh, by the way, I’ll be spending the week-end out of Zürich. I’ll be back on Monday.” I hope, he thought, and made for an elevator. He found he was more conscious of the people who stepped inside with him, but after one quick glance he paid little attention to the old lady who bickered all the way to the second floor with her companion except to note wryly that she had white hair pinned into a recalcitrant bun and leaned heavily on a stick. He got off the elevator with two ponderous men discussing soft loans, and did not even look to see what door they entered. There was a limit to suspicion. There had to be, or else he would find it a useless instinct when he most needed it in good working order. And that was the strange thing about suspicion: too much of it, and you had bricked yourself into a ten-foot-thick wall; too little, and you were buying the Eiffel Tower. It had been sold twice, he remembered hearing—and by the same crook. He was smiling as he opened his door.

  Suddenly, he was alert. There was someone here, someone possibly inside the bathroom. He switched on the overhead light to help strengthen the lamp he had left on near the armchair, closed the door, picked up a heavy ashtray as he moved quickly, silently, along the wall towards the bathroom.

  Its door swung fully open. Nield’s voice asked lightly, “Friend or foe?” He stepped into the room, looked at the ashtray approvingly and said, “You’re learning.” He went back to the armchair where he had been sitting. “How did you know?”

  “The chair cushion sags just after someone has been sitting in it.”

  “What, not pure down? Let’s complain to the management. Was that all you noticed?”

  “I didn’t leave the bathroom door half-shut. And I had the window open a couple of inches.” Mathison wasn’t amused.

  “You are learning.”

  Mathison replaced the ashtray. “You teach a hard lesson.” And was it necessary? he wondered.

  “I was simply safeguarding myself. It would be hard to explain to a valet with a pressed pair of pants just what I was doing here. Without a passkey too. The hotel wouldn’t like that.” He paused, asked blankly, “What happened to the automatic I gave you? Don’t tell me Keller frisked you and took it.”

  Mathison drew the pistol out of his pocket. “The hotel doesn’t like loud noises either.” He shook his head over his stupidity. And you thought you were so damned smart, he told himself. “I forgot about it,” he added frankly. Or perhaps I just trust my pitching arm more, he thought.

  “Keep it. And just remember to remember,” Nield said easily. He seemed completely relaxed. He had got rid of his bulky raincoat and unprepossessing cap. His hair, well brushed, now looked faintly By
ronic, and he had found time to change from rough tweeds back into banker’s grey. Was he actually staying at this hotel? Mathison wondered as he slipped off his coat. “Give me a few minutes and then I’ll be off and you can ring for that drink,” Nield told him as he eyed the telephone. “I’m on my way to Austria. I just wanted to make sure that Keller did deliver you to the hotel door.”

  “Had you doubts?”

  “Not really.”

  “I had. It was lucky we were dealing with Keller.”

  Nield’s voice became crisp. “I assure you that if I had been organising any clandestine operations in Zürich, like Yates, I wouldn’t be here now. Or you either. The Swiss are neutral, it doesn’t do to forget that. But there is another characteristic about the Swiss: they pay their debts. Tonight we helped them. Considerably.”

  “Yes. If you hadn’t put Willi out of action, the first of Keller’s men to enter that house would have caught it. Willi’s revolver was lethal.”

  “Not a kindly type,” Nield agreed. “Too much shock value.”

  “Keller didn’t take it so lightly. He told me—”

  “The point is,” Nield said, turning away any compliments, “what did you tell Keller?” The question was routine, a matter of simple checking; he could stop worrying about Mathison, the amateur who had stepped into a jungle. Mathison had had a shock, possibly a nasty scare, but he was in control—no rush of over-excited words, no dramatics, no braggadocio. And his reflexes were quicker than ever. He would be able to take care of himself, something Nield had not quite believed when he had made this special trip to Zürich. Amateurs were tricky to handle. Too often they fell into extremes after a touch of action: all zeal and zest, or all quibble and qualms.

  “The story of My Day,” Mathison answered as he lit a cigarette and walked over to the bathroom, stepped just inside and pulled the door half shut. He looked through the crack at the hinge, and could see the entrance to his bedroom. So that was how Nield had known it was safe to come out. “That saved me asking a silly question,” he said as he returned and pulled over a chair to face Nield. “I also told Keller I was going to Salzburg. He had no objections. It saves him having to detail a couple of men to look after me, I suppose. He will need all of them in the big roundup. He may also hope that I’ll run across Elissa in Salzburg—he calls her Eva Langenheim, of course. At least, if I see her, he wants me to let him know.”