“The Captain wishes…?” Wroclinski’s elderly French butler asked after opening the door.
“I wish to speak to the Count, Octave.”
“I regret, Captain, the Count is not available.”
“Tell him that I am here and see if he is still unavailable, Octave.”
“The Count left the strictest orders not to be disturbed, Captain.”
“Octave, I am one of the Count’s very best friends, as you perfectly well know. Now go tell him that I would appreciate a few minutes of his time. Meanwhile, I will wait in the salon.”
“Very good, sir,” Octave said, finally yielding to the habit of deference towards any gentleman that a lifetime of domestic service had ingrained into him. Von Falkenburg normally hated being curt with servants. But dammit, he thought, any good subordinate should use intelligence in carrying out general orders like the one Wroclinski had given.
Von Falkenburg seated himself in an exquisitely beautiful and surprisingly uncomfortable chair while Octave disappeared to announce him to his master. It was a long wait.
Then von Falkenburg remembered what von Horgenhoff had said that Wroclinski’s new mistress was an actress. That would mean she would be engaged in the evenings but free in the daytime….
And sure enough, Wroclinski was wearing a Chinese silk dressing down when he walked in the door.
“Sorry to leave you cooling your heels, old man,” he said, “but I was engaged in something that could not be interrupted very easily. It was damn distracting to hear Octave shuffling his feet outside the door waiting for a chance to open it. But what can I do for you, von Falkenburg?”
“I’m the one who owes the apology, Wroclinski. Please tell your little friend that you were called away from her by a lunatic who just escaped from the Kaiserin-Elisabeth-Spital. But to get to the point: I don’t want to pry, but I urgently need to know some things about a Colonel von Lauderstein. Do you know him?”
“Only at the club. We play baccarat à deux panneaux sometimes. That is, we play it together sometimes. He is always playing baccarat.”
“And winning?”
“More often losing. He’s one of those fellows who combine a total lack of card sense with a real mania for gambling. Rather like a man with a liver ailment who is also a drinker. Mind you both are common enough phenomena. Cigar?”
“Thanks. Do you remember anything you might have told von Horgenhoff about von Lauderstein’s card playing? Any anecdote?”
“Not really an anecdote. You know how von Horgenhoff is always snooping around. Well he asked me once if von Lauderstein could always pay his gambling debts – not a very gentlemanly question, if you ask me – and I told him as far as far as I knew, von Lauderstein had a solid line of credit. In fact, just a couple of nights ago, he lost heavily to me, and looked awfully pale. I thought he might not be able to pay, and you know what it means not to be able to pay one’s gambling debts.”
Von Falkenburg thought of how worms might have already penetrated Endrödy’s coffin, and be crawling over the tightly stretched skin of his face.
“Of course, I would have given him an extension. I always thought that that 24-hour rule was a bit tough. But sure enough, the next day one of Putzi’s servants came around to my place with a check signed by his master.”
“A check signed by Robert von Lipprecht?”
“Yes, Putzi. Do you know him? Rather a cold fish.”
“So Putzi paid von Lauderstein’s debt?”
“That’s right. I don’t think it’s the first time, either. I suppose he and von Lauderstein must settle later between themselves.”
And von Falkenburg could imagine just what that settlement might include. Suddenly, a whole chunk of reality had risen from the sea, like a new island. Von Lauderstein was a colonel on the Staff, and as such had access to military secrets, and also had access to poor devils like Röderer who could be lured into helping him. And now, von Falkenburg had learned that von Lauderstein was a compulsive gambler whose debts were paid by the very rich, very socially well connected Prince Robert von Lipprecht, otherwise known as Putzi. Until now, von Falkenburg’s only justification for suspecting that Putzi might be part of the plot against him was the fact that he hung out with von Lauderstein. But what he had just learned from Wroclinski made von Falkenburg certain that Putzi had to be the ultimate source of the espionage, unless there was another layer above him.
Above him. Helena had told him that Putzi was on an intimate footing with at least one member of the Imperial Family. An archduke from a collateral line, but an archduke nevertheless, a Habsburg with the hereditary right to wear the Order of the Golden Fleece.
If an archduke was involved, von Falkenburg knew, he would never be able to touch him. In the precious time remaining to him, he had to concentrate on Putzi, and hope that the latter’s connections with the Court were not as good as Helena thought they were.
But what the devil was Putzi in it for? Von Falkenburg realized, not for the first time, that what made the conspiracy so difficult to pierce was that it made no sense. He did not know much about espionage, but he was of the definite impression that it was not terribly well paid work. If Putzi made a habit of paying von Lauderstein’s gambling debts, that could run into thousands and thousands of Kronen. Putzi could not possibly be in it for the money.
And what was the connection with himself? If, as Major Korda had said, he was “nothing in this,” why the elaborate efforts to incriminate him?
Von Falkenburg looked at his watch and saw how fast time was passing. The more he discovered, the more he found remained to discover, and it was four in the afternoon of the Fourth Day.
“Wroclinski,” he said, “I’ll leave you to your labors.”
Chapter Nine
There was something purposeful about the sound of the footsteps behind him. Von Falkenburg was walking rapidly through the cool evening darkness, but someone with heavy-soled shoes was walking just as fast some thirty paces back.
Heavy-soled shoes. Who wore heavy-soled shoes? It was almost a vaudeville joke: the plainclothesman who could be identified as a cop even by school children, let alone by professional criminals.
Von Falkenburg thought of turning around to check, but decided not to at present. If it was one of Commissar Rogge’s men, there was no point in giving the impression that he had a reason to be nervous about being followed.
Heavy-soled shoes. Work boots might sound like that. The kind of work boots a hired thug might wear. A hired thug like the one who stuck a knife between Lasky’s ribs. Maybe the same was planned for him. He was suddenly conscious that except for whoever was behind him, the street was deserted, for it was getting late.
By God, von Falkenburg thought, if it was one of von Lauderstein’s bully boys who was following him, he could hardly wait for the man to make his move. He clutched the hilt of his sword and imagined what it would be like to smash that hilt into the face of one of those cowards! Like all the officers of Europe’s long peace, von Falkenburg had had little experience of violence, at least outside of the formal ritual of the dueling ground. But there was a first time for everything.
Keep a grip on yourself, he told himself. He knew that beating up some underworld goon would not make that signed confession of his disappear.
Keep a grip on yourself. But he was still not able to keep his teeth from clenching.
It was time to learn who was behind him, he decided. A thug or a cop posed two separate types of threat. He stopped just past one of the gas streetlights that cast greenish-yellow circles on the pavement, and then pulled his watch out of his pocket, as if he wanted the light to read the time.
Sure enough, the footsteps slowed down. Whoever it was did not want to catch up with him.
Still looking at his watch, von Falkenburg pretended to wind it. The footsteps stopped altogether.
Von Falkenburg snapped shut the lid of the watch and glanced around, as anyone might. Sure enough, about thirty paces back, someon
e was staring absurdly into the blackened window of a shop.
“My God, but the police are stupid,” Von Falkenburg thought, for it was clearly the police who were represented in the person of his pursuer. Everything about the man, from the inappropriate brown derby hat to the cheap suit with its loud checks, identified him as a plainclothes detective.
Even though he hardly needed to, von Falkenburg could not resist looking at the shoes. Sure enough. The marching boots of the men in his regiment could hardly have had thicker soles or more massive uppers. Not for the first time, von Falkenburg realized that life was almost a parody of itself.
He flipped his watch over and snapped open the back. It was a double-case watch, and on the inner case was the von Falkenburg device “not without honor,” and the further words, “from a father to a son who he knows will ever keep these words engraved on his heart as they are in this gold.”
Von Falkenburg snapped the case shut and put the watch back in his pocket. As he thought of those words, the desire flared up in him to walk up to the policemen and demand his business.
God, but the temptation was keen! Von Falkenburg mastered it, however. Honor did not preclude common sense in all situations.
So he turned and continued the way he had been going before. And the footsteps took up behind him once again.
Having spent the rest of the afternoon after leaving Wroclinski on unavoidable military duties, he was eager to get to Helena, both to see her again, and to find out if she had learned anything from her Court contacts. But he certainly could not allow this clown to follow him to her house. He knew that considering the odds against him, and the small amount of time remaining, his own life would probably soon be over. But life would go on for her, just as it had gone on for his mother after the death of his father, even though his mother had literally fainted when her husband’s best friend, von Pritterberg, then a colonel, had appeared before her with a black armband and said, “Gnädigste, it is my fearful duty to inform you….”
She had fainted before von Pritterberg could finish she sentence, for she had known what it meant for an officer’s wife when a mysterious absence of her husband was followed by such a visit. But she had had a life after that.
For his mother, life had been raising him and his sister, and fighting tenaciously to save at least something of the family estates. For Helena, it would be different, for she was younger and a different kind of fire burned in her veins. Von Falkenburg did not like to think about his inevitable future successor in her affections, but he knew he must leave all possibilities open to her.
Which meant that he must not, under any conditions, allow her name to be dragged down with him.
So the first order of business was to get rid of this fool in the bad suit and thick-soled shoes. Von Falkenburg looked around him, trying to remember his cadet days. Maybe a little further on…. If his memory did not fail him, there was a building with a curious arched porte-cochère that he had used back then. Unless that was two blocks to his left….
His cadet days. Hiding from the Platzvogel, the semi-retired officer whose job was to catch any soldier or cadet who was behaving inappropriately or whose dress failed to conform to the meticulous Regulations.
God, but that seemed eons ago! The last time he did it was the day he had had his first woman, a pathetic-looking creature with a plastered face who had nevertheless cost him his whole allowance. Which did not mean he had been overcharged, for his allowance was small enough.
Platzvogel, Platzvogel, Platzvogel, he thought in time to the steps behind him. If doing this right were not so important for Helena’s sake, it would be good fun. In fact, it would be good fun anyway.
He remembered now. He had left his gloves behind him in the whore’s room, and had felt so proud of “being a man” at last that he had not noticed until he heard the word “Cadet!” pronounced with an unmistakable Croatian accent. Yes, the Plazvogel had really been a Croatian, just as army humor had it. Even in those days, life had been a parody of itself.
Von Falkenburg turned to the left, hoping the building he was looking for was really where he remember it being. Suddenly, looming through the darkness, he saw the huge porte-cochère with caryatids holding up an elaborate cornice over it.
As if he were doing the most normal thing in the world, von Falkenburg turned and pushed open the small door set in one of the great double doors. The latter had probably not been unlocked for half a century: a “carriage entrance,” but certainly no carriages ever went through it now.
A shabby courtyard with galleries around it. He did not have any time to waste, as he well knew. The plainclothesman would probably hesitate a moment before following him quite so obviously. But police thoroughness would always win out in the end over subtlety.
Von Falkenburg started running up the steps that led to the galleries, and had the sudden uncomfortable feeling of having never been there before.
Was this really the same building? he wondered frantically.
First floor…second floor…all very, very unfamiliar. A woman leaning against the railing looked at him in astonishment.
Third floor… Von Falkenburg heard the door close in the darkness below. That had to be the plainclothesman.
But by God, instinct had served, here it was, he realized with relief: a very dark passageway, more like a hole in the wall…something no one would notice who was not looking for it. Von Falkenburg plunged through and found himself on one of the galleries surrounding the courtyard of another building, built back-to-back with the first one.
He hurried into a stairwell dimly lit by gas, and clattered down the steps as fast as his legs could take him. The Platzvogel had not found that passage in time all those years ago, and neither would the detective….
Another door, and he was out on a street that ran parallel to the first one. And here was a tiny, unlit alley. He had forgotten all about that alley. Forgotten why, as a cadet, he had so liked those two buildings during one of the reconnaissance missions cadets undertook to find places where a Platzvogel could be shaken off.
Von Falkenburg saw and heard no more of the plainclothesman, and it was not long afterwards that he was sitting with Helena in the pretty “Small Salon” of her mansion.
He knew he should not risk worrying her by telling her of his adventure. After all, the fact that the police were following him was sinister enough. But he quite simply could not resist doing so, so satisfied did he feel at having been able to repeat a trick he had last used when he was a seventeen-year-old boy.
He wove the story in with the account of how he had made a similar escape the time he had lost his gloves as a cadet. If Helena was worried by the fact that the police were tailing him, she managed not to show it. Instead, she laughed at the idea of some fussy half-retired major looking about in all directions after an errant cadet had vanished in a puff of smoke, so to speak.
“Highness, dinner is ready,” Alphonse the butler announced.
“Come on, Ernst,” she said, “I think you’ll like what the cook has prepared.” Then, as he took her arm to lead her to the dining room she asked, “by the way, if you’d spent all your allowance on debauchery that night, how did you manage to buy new gloves to keep out of trouble?”
“Endrödy lent me the money,” he said, and suddenly his face froze. The world was no longer an amusing place for games of hide-and-seek.
“What’s wrong Ernst? Who’s Endrödy?”
“Oh…a friend. He was a cadet with me.”
“If he’s a friend of yours, I hope I have a chance to meet him some day.”
Von Falkenburg was silent. He suddenly felt very alone. And very frightened: the loneliness and fear of the condemned to death.
“I have some interesting information to report,” Helena said quickly, sensing instinctively that she had committed a gaffe of some kind and that the topic of conversation needed to be changed.
“Forgive me, Helena,” von Falkenburg said, recovering himself, “I did
not mean to be inattentive.”
Despite the pain of having been reminded of Endrödy’s death, von Falkenburg found himself actually enjoying the meal. It was Helena’s smile, her laugh, the way she sometimes cocked her head to the right – but never to the left – when she asked a question, which allowed him to relax and realize how good the food and wine really were. The perfection of her body filled him with desire, and the gleam in those blue eyes of hers promised the most perfect satisfaction of that desire. Every minute he was with her he was increasingly convinced that there was no other woman in the world like her. Certainly, there was none in his extensive album of memories. She had learned some interesting things about Putzi from her friend the elderly Baroness von Stobbe. But looking at her, he had difficulty concentrating on what she was saying.
The lights made the room grow hot. They had finished their meal, and on an impulse Helena went to the window herself to open it instead of asking Alphonse to do so.
Von Falkenburg, filled with good wine, good food and good feelings, watched her admiringly as she threw back the curtains. There was a vitality, a suppleness, about her, he realized….
And suddenly, the vitality and suppleness were gone. It was as if for an instant she had turned into a photograph of herself. Just for an instant. But that was enough to tell him that something was wrong.
“Ernst,” she said slowly, “your friend with the thick soles on his shoes…did you say he wore a round hat?”
“And a vulgar suit with loud checks,” he added desperately. But she did not go on to say something like “oh, that’s all right, then, the man below is wearing a solid color suit in excellent taste.” She just strode out onto the balcony and pretended to take the air, without looking down any more. That way, the man below might think she had not noticed him. For Helena was a woman to keep her head, even in the face of catastrophe, von Falkenburg realized.
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