The Salzburg Connection

  “We are taking action on that right now. Linda is getting the manager of First Maritime on the other wire for me. So we had better sign off.”

  “Do I stay here and see Bryant myself when he gets back? Or do I return to Zürich and start throwing my weight around there?”

  “I think Zürich—no, perhaps you should see Bryant himself.” There was a pause. “I’ll have to call you later about that, Bill. I have a conference waiting, and I can’t cut that. Actually, I’ve nothing but conferences today, one after the other. Look—I’ll call you much later; make it the end of the day. Around seven?”

  “Your time?”

  “That’s right. It will be around midnight your way. Okay with you?”

  “Well, I’ll have to give up that champagne supper with the polka girls over at Ossi’s Feinschmecker Restaurant, but I’ll be here.” Newhart actually had a laugh coaxed out of him, which, for a Monday morning like this one, was no small triumph. “My hotel is the Salzburger Hof. And not a bulldozer in sight. Good-bye, Jimmy.”

  “And thanks, Bill. I mean that.”

  Mathison set down the telephone by his feet, lit a cigarette, and sat studying the view of the Old Town opposite him. Had he been too quick to judge Yates? Was Richard Bryant quite so much the injured party? Could he have arranged for Mr. Emil Burch to send him that cheque, faked something that looked like a contract, concocted Yates’s brief notes?

  Well, let’s see... Bryant had written a letter to Newhart and Morris two weeks ago. Three days later, it was on James Newhart’s desk. He had tried to straighten the matter out right away by a telephone call to Eric Yates in Zürich. The call had been taken by Yates’s secretary, Greta Freytag—he was away on one of his business trips. She hadn’t known much about Richard Bryant except that he had visited the Zürich office last summer. She was not sure about any contract; however, she would search Mr. Bryant’s file and call back. But when she did, she could only report that she couldn’t find any file at all. She would search further, she promised, and suggested that Mr. Yates would be able to answer all Newhart’s questions when he returned at the end of the week.

  But Yates had explained nothing, actually. He had been astonished and politely regretful. Bryant was a very light acquaintance of many years ago, so light indeed that Yates had only remembered him with difficulty when he had dropped in for a social call at the Zürich office last summer. There had been no business talk between them whatsoever, just a general kind of conversation about publishing. Perhaps Bryant had assumed too much, or had jumped to wrong conclusions—he might be a psychopathic personality with delusions of authorship; there were plenty around who’d take one word of friendly interest as a definite promise to publish. In any case, Yates would telephone Bryant right away and tell him he had better drop his wild story about a contract. A couple of well-chosen phrases would sober him up.

  “I wonder,” Mathison had said when Newhart called him with the full story.

  “You don’t think Richard Bryant will be so easily scared off?”

  “I don’t imagine he would have written to you unless he had something plausible to back up his statements. His letter is very specific, you know. He considers you his publisher, bound by contract and an advance.”

  “Any use telephoning him ourselves?”

  “Not at this stage. He would only repeat what he stated in his letter. We’d have to see his evidence. What did Yates report back to you, by the way?”

  “A complete foul-up. Not Yates’s fault,” Newhart added quickly. “He’s a very competent and capable fellow. You know what he landed for us on that last business trip? A manuscript from a couple of physicists working in the field of elementary particles.”

  “But he landed nothing for us in Salzburg?”

  “He phoned several times, and only got a polite brush-off from Mrs. Bryant. Her husband always seemed to be out. However, Yates is persevering—”

  “Let’s call Yates now. I’ll be at your elbow. And I have some specific questions to ask him.” Mathison listed them carefully. But they were never answered over the telephone. It was Miss Freytag who took the call. Yates had come down with grippe and was at home nursing a temperature. And when Mathison questioned her about a file on Richard Bryant, she froze completely. There never had been any file, she insisted now. She had been mistaken.

  “I don’t like it,” Newhart was forced to admit. “It looks as if there has been some kind of office bungle and they are trying to cover up. Why the hell can’t people just admit they made some small mistake, lost a couple of letters or something?”

  “What letters?” Mathison asked. Poor old Jimmy was flapping around, trying to find some simple explanation to some simple problem. But nothing was as easy as that, especially with a possible lawsuit looming over the horizon.

  “You’re right,” Newhart admitted slowly. “We know nothing. We’d have to talk with Miss Freytag face to face. We’d have to get Yates to take this really seriously—he thinks my worries are exaggerated, that he can handle Bryant with a couple of sentences. And we’d have to find what possible basis there could be for the story this Bryant fellow has cooked up. Is that what you are thinking?” And as Mathison nodded, Newhart said gloomily, “A lawsuit could be more trouble and expense than a trip to Zürich. That’s where to begin, obviously. It could all be settled in a couple of days. Bill, you handle this. When can you leave?”

  And that was why Mathison had been sent chasing over to Zürich. Last year, it had been to Amsterdam, to settle a threatened suit for a supposedly broken contract, a three-day visit that had stretched into two weeks before the author turned out to be an unemployed draftsman with more time spent on money-making schemes than on his own drawing board. Jimmy Newhart was developing quite a sixth sense for picking out a trickster. And Bryant was his present choice for that kind of character. Yet, thought Mathison, it wasn’t any feeling of guilt about any cooked-up scheme against a New York publisher that had created the scene in Bryant’s shop today. The moment of real tension did not arise when I was looking at his file on Yates. Or even photographing his records. It arose when I looked at the photographs on the wall, and it didn’t involve just Mrs. Bryant, whose nerves were on edge long before I arrived. (Remember the way she came running through from the back of the shop as I stepped in the front door and then stopped as she saw me—a stranger about whom she knew nothing—and the excitement and welcome on her face drained away into disappointment?) Her brother became as tense as she was, more so if you add up the obvious facts about him: a husky man, the kind whose job must keep him in the open air much of the time, an extrovert with a carefree look and impudent humour once he stopped being suspicious—not the type to panic easily. And what was wrong about paying so much interest to a first-rate camera study of the lake with the dark name—what was it called?... Finstersee.

  He rose, coiling up the extension cord roughly as he carried the telephone back to the bedside table. Time to get out and take some photographs of his own before the light faded. It was a fine afternoon now, with clear blue sky and strong sun, but the high wooded ridge that jutted up behind the Old Town was already shadowing the tight-packed roofs that stretched along the bottom of its cliff. Soon the rest of the tall stone houses, made miniature by the medieval spires, renaissance towers, baroque domes that soared above churches and palaces, would be covered by that soft-grey blanket of premature dusk. He found his camera bag, took out his Rolleiflex. And at that moment there was a scraping of a key in the lock of his door. Possibly a maid with towels, he thought. But it was a man who entered, quickly and silently. He was dressed in dark-grey overalls and held a telephone in his hand. He stopped abruptly as he saw Mathison.

  “What do you want?” Mathison asked in German. His two years’ army service in Berlin had left him with an authoritative bark when he needed it.

  “I am sorry to disturb you,” the man said, hesitating, mustering some composure. “I did not know the gentleman had returned to his room.”
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  You’re half an hour late, thought Mathison. He didn’t reply. The onus of proving the innocence of his presence, as his heavily legal friends would say, was certainly not his to bear. He simply stared at the telephone the man was now keeping close to his side, as if it were part of his trouser leg.

  “Your telephone is out of order, sir.”

  “It seemed all right to me.”

  “I have orders to change it.” The man was thin, young, undersized, and sweating slightly at the temples.

  Poor guy, thought Mathison, you are doing your job, but I’ve a strange suspicion it seems necessary only to you. “Shall I test my phone?” he asked blandly. “Or could it possibly be a mistake? Are you sure you have the right room? This is 405.”

  The man seized the excuse with a slightly embarrassed grin. “Then it is a mistake.” He made the pretence of checking in a small note-book. “I’m looking for 305. I’m on the wrong floor.” And with many apologies, the nervous man left as quickly as he had entered.

  Mathison looked down at the small Minox lying in his camera bag. It looked lonely, he decided. Especially with all those telephones needing to be exchanged. After all, the film it contained was all the proof he had of Bryant’s file on Yates. So he thought for a minute and then removed the valuable roll of film, wrapped it carefully in a sheet of soft tissue from the bathroom, dropped it into the breast pocket of his shirt, disliked the small bulge it made and decided it was too close to warm skin anyway, found a thin Italian matchbox in his raincoat pocket, flushed the delicate little sticks of wax matches down the toilet, and inserted the covered film neatly into their place. The flap-over lid closed and no more. It was secure.

  He looked around the large bedroom for a hiding place, something so obvious that no one would think it of any importance. Beside the ashtray? No, it had better be somewhere he could touch it and reassure himself it was safe. He slipped the box into the deep pocket of his tweed jacket, added a half-smoked pack of cigarettes. Not original, he told himself, but you’ll know what is happening to it. Then he filled the Minox with a new roll of film, snapped a few quick pictures of Salzburg through glass before he dropped the miniature camera back into the bag and replaced it on a wardrobe shelf.

  All that trouble possibly for nothing, but at least—as he had photographed the town through the window—he had determined where he was heading with his Rolleiflex. Right up there, crowning its own massive hill to the left of the wooded ridge, was the Hohensalzburg, the enormous castle old in story. It was girded with walls and battlements, plenty of space for strolling and climbing around its towers, plenty of light, too, for it overlooked everything from its eyrie. That’s for me, he thought, and grabbed his coat.

  Outside his hotel, there was a short stretch of busy street before he reached the long low bridge to take him over the strong flow of the river. He didn’t notice the man then. But halfway across the bridge, when he almost collided with two women carrying a load of packages and turned to apologise, he saw the stranger who stopped abruptly, not far behind him, to light a cigarette. Mathison paid little attention, thought nothing about it until ten minutes later, when he was striking quite a rapid course through the Old Town’s mixture of narrow streets and broad squares. (His long search this morning for Neugasse 9 had given him basic training in some necessary geography. Distances here were actually short; they only seemed complicated because so much was grouped in so little space.) He had cut around the Cathedral, walked briskly past the white marble fountain which had been built for watering horses two centuries ago, became aware he was about to take a wrong exit from the square, veered quickly to reach the right one, and saw the man again. Same raincoat, same height and breadth, same fair hair, same man. It might have been coincidence, of course; Salzburg was the kind of place where you could keep remeeting people. Only, thought Mathison, it was odd that this one was always the same distance behind him. The man wasn’t lighting a cigarette this time; he was completely absorbed in the beauties of the marble horse-pond.

  Mathison increased his pace and in a few minutes reached the cobbled street that backed right up against the steep rise of the castle’s hill. Here he could take the funicular for a quick ride up to the castle itself. And he was in luck; the cars were now finishing a descent, and he wouldn’t have long to wait until they were hauled uphill again. He bought his ticket and stood in the waiting room with half a dozen varied characters. No sign yet of the man in the raincoat. Then everyone filed out of the waiting room to find places in the nearest car, and Mathison could only wonder if the man was now arriving and buying a ticket. The idea amused him, although he felt annoyance too. Who the hell would want to have me followed? he wondered; and then he decided the whole thing was ridiculous and his imagination had been running wild.

  But the man was doing more than buying a ticket. He was using the few minutes before the scheduled departure uphill to put in a hasty call over the attendant’s telephone. “I picked him up in the hotel lobby, but I think he has seen me,” he told Dietrich at the other end of the wire. “He is bound to notice me on the funicular. He’s on his way to the castle. So get someone up there as fast as possible to take over. I’ll keep near him to mark him out. In case that’s difficult, Here’s the description of what he is now wearing: fawn tweed jacket, two vents in the back, well-cut: narrow dark-grey trousers; light-blue shirt, blue tie; brown shoes; raincoat at present over his arm; camera. And he’s—sorry!” The man jammed the phone back in place and made a dash outside to the funicular.

  It was a quick, steep-angled haul through boulders and small trees, tunnelling through the lower wall and the first huge bastion. Once on foot, Mathison began his climb of exploration around ramparts, across inner courtyards, up staircases to the tops of other walls. He was so astounded by the inventive genius of the medieval mind—this place was a complex of fortresses guarding the Archbishop’s palace on the crest—that he stopped paying attention to the man who plodded behind him. One idea he did borrow from the man: he put on his Burberry to keep the sharp breeze from freezing him. He took his last photograph from a railed platform that twentieth-century Salzburgers had built to keep tourists from falling over the side of a bastion, and then stood with the wind whipping at his coat as he looked southward over the plain far below to the mountains with their jagged peaks.

  “Is it safe up there?” a girl’s voice called. He turned to see her hesitating on the wooden steps (again, courtesy of the twentieth century) that led to his vantage point.

  “Safe but cold,” he warned her, holding out his hand to steady her as she reached him. “The view is worth a chill, though. Magnificent.”

  She studied his face. “An American?” she asked, breaking into English.

  “You always can tell, can you?” And I thought my accent wasn’t so bad, he thought ruefully.

  She was looking around her. “I never dare come up here alone,” she admitted, trying to clear her wind-blown hair away from her eyes. She hadn’t much success. Her hair was dark brown with golden lights in the rays of the late afternoon sun, long tendrils escaping from her fingers as she reached to take hold of a railing. “Heights scare me a little. But it is a wonderful view.”

  “When you can see it,” he said with a grin. “Perhaps I ought to hold on to you while you keep two hands on that hair.” He gripped her arm lightly while she smoothed her hair back from her temples. But its length and thickness defeated her.

  “I give up,” she said. “Would you help edge me off this platform? This is the point where I mustn’t look at my feet or I freeze.”

  They retreated down the solidly built steps and stood in the calm of a sheltering wall. She found a comb in her pocket and combed the tangles out of her hair until it fell smoothly to her shoulders. Now he could see her eyes, wide-set and large, dark grey in colour. “That’s better,” he told her approvingly. She smiled, pale-pink lips curving softly, widely. There was a touch of pale-pink, too, over the broad cheekbones, but whether that was due to t
he wind or skilful application with a light sure hand, he couldn’t tell. Eyebrows and lashes were enchanting even if the sure hand had been at work again. A short nose and a rounded chin completed a pretty picture. He felt a touch of annoyance with himself, and some sadness too; ten years ago, when he had been twenty-five, he would have just accepted the sum total rather than take a bloody inventory. And then he became amused as he felt somehow that she was taking her own inventory. It couldn’t have been altogether adverse, for she wasn’t saying good-bye, walking on, leaving him to follow at a polite distance. Instead, she was beginning a conversation as she slipped the comb back into the pocket of her coat. It was one of those expensive tweed jobs, fuzzy and soft yet somehow cut with slender shoulders, and its hemline was the shortest he had seen since he had left New York. Her legs, fortunately, were excellent. He liked the white mesh stockings, too, and the flat-heeled shiny black shoes with their silver buckles.

  She was saying, “I have been wandering around here making my good-byes. What about you? Is it hello or farewell?”

  “Both.”

  They had begun walking slowly down a cobbled path. “You mean,” she said in horror, stopping abruptly, so that her heel almost skidded on a worn stone and he had to catch her elbow to let her regain balance, “you mean this is your first and last visit?” She looked down at his hand on her arm. “And thank you. You really are very quick, aren’t you?”

  “And tenacious,” he said with a grin, keeping hold of her arm. “I’ll just make sure you get along this road without twisting an ankle. Are you positive this is the right direction, by the way?”

  “For what?”

  “For a drink at that restaurant. There is one somewhere around here.”

  “Near the cable railway,” she told him. She gave him that same warm and charming smile. “And I think a drink would be perfect. We’ll give a toast to a quick return to Salzburg. You do intend to come back, don’t you?”