Dead Man Falling: A Johnny Fedora Espionage Spy Thriller Assignment Book 3

by Desmond Cory

  “Very nice,” said Johnny appreciatively.

  The boy lowered his gun and turned towards them; not, apparently, in any way surprised at their sudden incursion upon the scene. “Good morning,” he said politely.

  “Good morning. I hope we’re not intruding,” said Johnny. “We wondered what the shots were.”

  The boy laid the rifle across his knees and pushed forwards for the safety-catch before replying. “Sometimes I go through the woods, looking for wood-pigeons. They are very good to eat – my mother likes pigeon-pie. But today I couldn’t find any, so I was just practising.”

  “I see. That’s a dangerous-looking weapon. Suppose we’d come through the woods from the other direction?”

  “If you had done so, it’s most improbable that a bullet would have struck you,” said the boy. “Even if it had, it’s most improbable that it would have killed you.”

  “Let’s suppose, for the sake of argument, that it had killed me.”

  “Then I should be very sorry, of course,” said Martin thoughtfully. “But whether I was sorry or not, you would be just as dead; and the matter would cease to concern you.”

  Johnny perched himself on the flat bole of a tree and fingered his ear. “Well,” he said, “It’s an interesting philosophy; not without a certain appeal to the realistically-minded.”

  “Do you really think so?” asked Martin; and Johnny glanced at him curiously, expecting to see in his face some indication of a sarcastic intention that the words’ intonation had not conveyed. But his expression was one of extreme seriousness. “It’s odd you should say that.”

  “In what way?”

  “My father thinks it’s very important to be realistic. He’s always saying so. And so I always try to be.” Martin’s eyes concentrated on Johnny’s face with something of that interest which he had shown on their introduction but had not revealed since. “Perhaps my father thinks I tend to dream too much. What do you think, Herr Videl?”

  “I expect your father is right.”

  “I’m sure he is,” said Martin firmly.

  “It’s a funny thing. I had the idea that Herr Mann must be your stepfather.”

  The boy’s eyes instantly dissociated themselves from the implied question, and looked vacantly out towards the trees. Then he stood up, swinging his rifle comfortably in his right hand. “I think it is time I returned to lunch. My mother will be expecting me. What is the time, please?”

  Johnny looked down at his wrist-watch. “Almost twelve o’clock.”

  “Yes. It is time I went. Though it does not matter so much today, because my father isn’t here. He’s very strict about being punctual, you know.”

  He had pronounced the words Mein Vater in exactly the same tones as before; quiet, unself-conscious, with no hint of their usage being intended either as a snub or as a reply to Johnny’s question. But Johnny knew at once that that was their true significance and knew that even this boy, even this child, was somebody to be reckoned with in their curious ménage at the Hunting Horn.

  “… Herr Mann is away today, then?”

  The boy nodded; and Johnny thought for a moment that to that question, too, he could expect no direct reply. Then Martin unbent slightly and said,

  “He has gone to Linz on business, as usual. He will probably be away for several days. May I ask if you and Frau Videl are returning to the inn?”

  The extreme formality of the question surprised Johnny, who had grown accustomed that morning to interrogations disguised as statements. “Yes,” he said. “Why, yes.”

  “Then perhaps I can show you the best path. Through the woods, it is rough going for a lady.”

  Johnny looked at Marie-Andrée, seated silently behind him, and grinned at her. “I think the ladies manage very well, on the whole. Didn’t I hear someone say your mother had climbed the Old Man?… We must be realistic about that, too.”

  “But mother is different.” For the first time, the boy’s voice showed emotion; it was filled with an affectionate pride. “Oh, mother is altogether different. Mother can climb as well as I myself.”

  “And you’re a good climber?”

  Martin’s voice immediately returned to its normal lack of expressiveness. “I am a very good climber,” he said woodenly. “… The path is this way – if you are taking it with me.”

  They followed the narrow path, strewn with pine needles, that dipped through the woods and led down directly towards the inn; at first in single file, then, as the path widened, all three abreast, with Martin in the middle. His legs were long for a boy of his age, but gave no hint of overgrowth; and he matched Johnny’s smooth feline tread with a swinging, half-rolling step that was not without a grace of its own. From time to time he halted and pointed out some of the local landmarks; hills, ridges and tors, all with the quaintly romantic names of Wagnerian cosmography; and sometimes, as he spoke of them, his voice held a vestige, at least, of the warmth it had taken on when he had spoken of his mother. He knew every yard of the wild country overlooked by the Old Man, and was proud of the fact… Johnny, realising this, decided to take a risk and inquired after the huts in a suitably veiled manner; so veiled in fact, that Martin failed to grasp the drift of his question, and did not reply at all. Johnny didn’t force it any farther. The boy was too acute, and possibly within the enemy’s camp.

  … Acute, yes; but not quite so surprisingly mature as he had seemed at first. His maturity was mainly the outward manifestation of a deep internal gravity, which in turn sprang from a total absence of any sense of humour whatsoever. That did not make him a less interesting subject in Johnny’s eyes, however; he was highly intelligent, receptive, and… and there was something else besides; something so vague that Johnny could assess it only by comparison, by a comparison with somebody that he had once met or known or seen and had since forgotten, somebody who had held that peculiar quality… But the face and character of that somebody were lost in the depths of Johnny’s memory, and refused to emerge; so that that this strange feature of Martin’s remained unrecognisable…

  … except in that it was something of which Johnny was quite unreasonably afraid…

  It showed strongest on those rare occasions when the boy was speaking earnestly; strongest of all when he was talking of some climb he had made last year towards the twin cliffs called the Lovers, and was telling the story with an eloquence and enthusiasm that contrasted strongly with the more hair-raising but infinitely more soporific narrative of Herr Biel, remembered from that strange train journey. For one brief second, a second in which the boy was pointing far across the country to show the track he had followed, with his head raised and hair ruffled by the breeze… in that moment, as he struck that half-heroic posture, then Johnny almost had it. The remembrance of that person of whom Martin reminded him flicked through his brain and disappeared again as the boy’s hand dropped; and, although Johnny wrestled with the problem for the remainder of their walk back to the inn, recollection would not come to him. It was altogether maddening.

  … They went past the waterfall, and on to the long stretch of sward that ran up to the very door of the inn. The building, viewed from that angle, was much as Johnny remembered it from last night, squat and sprawling; but this time, in full daylight, a thin trickle of smoke from the chimney was clearly visible in the sun, and it had a prosaic air of cheerful everyday activity. A slim feminine figure, slightly foreshortened by perspective, moved slowly towards them; and another figure, lanky and immobile, was seated before the side door, partially screened by a newspaper. The nearer of these two people waved to them as they approached, and Martin waved in return, enthusiastically but quite without urgency.

  “There’s mother,” he said happily; and, in spite of the negligence of his greeting, he moved forwards at a perceptibly faster pace. Johnny and Marie-Andrée followed him at a more comfortable amble.

  “Martin – you are almost five minutes late. You are taking advantage of your father’s absence, as you know very well. Go
od morning, Herr Videl; good morning.”

  They murmured politely in reply.

  “I’m afraid,” said Johnny diffidently, “I’m afraid it’s our fault if Martin is a little late. We met him in the woods, and he very kindly showed us the path back here – I’m sure he’d have been in good time if he’d been by himself.”

  “In that case I must excuse him, mustn’t I?” She flashed a quick smile at the boy, indicating that she would certainly have done so in any case. “So you haven’t brought back any pigeons for me?”

  “No, mutti. I only had one shot, a very hard one, and I missed.”

  “Never mind. Everybody misses, sometimes. You had better go in and get ready for lunch. I hope,” said Eva Mann, “he hasn’t been in the way at all?”

  “Quite the contrary,” said Johnny. “He pointed out all the local beauty-spots to us on our way down; it was really most interesting. Quite a conducted tour. There seems to be very little he doesn’t know about this part of the country.”

  “Oh yes, he knows it well.” She looked fondly after her son, retreating towards the door of the inn and passing the sedentary figure beside it. “He goes everywhere – even where it is dangerous, sometimes. I don’t worry; he is very self-reliant.”

  “He’s very lucky,” said Marie-Andrée, “to be living in this lovely country, especially at his age. You can’t think how I should have enjoyed it.”

  “Yes. Yes, that’s very true. Of course, it has its disadvantages.”

  “You mean… the dangerous places?”

  “Oh, no. That doesn’t worry me, not really; not any more. But there are other things. For instance, there aren’t any boys of his own age around that he can play with. It’s not good for a child to have grown-ups around all the time; I think he’s a little precocious, you know, just because of that. But it really can’t be helped.”

  “Aren’t there any boys in the village?” asked Marie-Andrée, surprised.

  “Well, yes, one or two. Very nice boys, of course. But Martin doesn’t mix with them very much. He is German after all, and… and it doesn’t really do.”

  “That’s rather a shame,” said Johnny.

  “It is, rather. He goes to school at Linz, of course, and has his friends to stay sometimes… He’s a funny boy,” said Frau Mann, in tones of complete satisfaction. “But I really mustn’t bore you with all that. We don’t see many strangers here in the winter, and when we do they usually learn everything about our domestic affairs in a couple of days or so… Sometimes we make fun of poor Helmut and his everlasting Mussolini stories, but we’re just as bad, really.”

  “But I’m really most interested,” said Johnny.

  He meant it, too. He was really most interested.

  How on earth did Martin and his mother fit into the scheme of things? Explicably, if Mann was indeed Mayer; but not completely explicably. Mayer could have married; could be the father or, much more likely, stepfather of a fourteen-year-old boy; but it seemed almost impossible that the fact could have escaped the vigilant dossier-compilers of British External Intelligence. Unless Mayer had kept the wedding secret from his own Nazi comrades – again, almost impossible – and why should he have done so? By no stretch of the imagination could either Frau Mann or Martin be considered to have the taint of Jewish blood…

  Of course, there were other sins equally heinous in the Nazi regime. Anyone of Mayer’s superior officers might have had it in for Eva Mann-Mayer-what-you-will, and for anyone of a hundred different reasons… Disloyalty to the Reich – which could mean anything from sabotaging the Essen steelworks to refusing to sleep with a Gestapo high-up… and not necessarily very high-up at that… Mayer was a wartime discovery, with very little pull prior to his sensational coups in 1943… So that anybody might have proscribed Eva, from a Standartenführer to the Führer himself… Certainly the Führer himself, look at what happened to Geli Raubal… No, that line was all wrong. Mayer was Nazi to the core; if the edict had gone against his own wife, Mayer would have been the first to shoot… That line was rubbish.

  Maybe Mann was not Mayer. There wasn’t the slightest proof of it. Maybe the whole family had nothing to do with the Mayer business at all.

  “It must have been difficult,” he said, almost without realising that he was voicing the question, “when the boy’s father died.”

  Eva Mann’s face turned towards him in surprise. “When his father…? Oh, yes. Yes. I suppose everyone must notice that Kurt isn’t his father; they’re so very different, aren’t they? But they get on very well together, for all that. That was… in a way… why I married again.”

  “It very often is,” said Johnny. He was about to amplify this remark when he saw that the man in the chair was easily within earshot; and so changed his mind. Eva Mann, however, showed no such diffidence on the subject, and rattled happily on.

  “Martin’s father, Herr Videl, was… Well, let us say that we mention him very rarely. I try to encourage Martin to look on Kurt as his father, it is really better that way… A pleasant morning, Herr Gruber.”

  The newspaper rustled and folded itself, revealing the countenance of the Man on the Munich Train. “Most,” he said concisely. He fluttered the pages, turned them over, and re-erected his fortification.

  “Herr Gruber,” said Eva in a penetrating whisper, as soon as they had passed through the front door. “You saw him arrive last night, I believe. He is a mountaineer.”

  “Good heavens,” said Johnny. “Is everybody who comes to this place a mountaineer?’”

  “Not everybody. Yourself, for instance.” For a moment, Eva Mann’s eyes seemed unpleasantly penetrating. “The Old Man is quite a popular climb – or used to be, before the war. It would be again, were it not in the Russian zone. And that reminds me – I had quite forgotten. Herr Biel has returned from his little jaunt; he was very surprised to learn of your arrival, and I think is anxious to see you.”

  “No doubt we shall all meet for lunch,” said Johnny pleasantly.

  Marie-Andrée lay at full length on the bed, resting her tired feet and regarding Johnny’s – which were at that moment accompanying him on his forty-third perambulation round the room – with a mystified awe. She had been made aware of a new aspect of Johnny; she had always known him to possess an extraordinary reserve of stamina – that had been made clear from the start – but she had regarded him so purely in the light of a permanent inhabitant of the Parisian boulevards that she was surprised to find him also the possessor of that type of stamina so greatly admired in military circles; that which enables one to march madly about for five hours non-stop and to finish the performance as chock-full of energy as when one had begun. Yet that was exactly what Johnny had done… Even though the word “energy,” with its suggestion of sustained nervous agitation, seemed hardly applicable to his present loose-limbed but perfectly controlled pacings.

  “Johnny, do sit down. You’re making me feel all giddy.”

  Johnny instantly changed direction and seated himself at the foot of the bed. “Are your feet hurting you?”

  “Not much. They’ll be all right with a little airing.”

  “I suppose we tried to do too much,” said Johnny contritely. “I shouldn’t have dragged you round with me… I wish I could understand just what goes on here.”

  Marie-Andrée sighed – partly with pleasure; for Johnny had begun to massage her feet in a perplexed but nonetheless expert manner. “It does seem more complicated than we expected.”

  “Complicated? It doesn’t make sense. If this is the hideout of some branch of the neo-Nazi underground movement, all I can say is, it’s the oddest damned branch I’ve ever come across. Well, look at it… First of all, we’ve got that old sinner von Knopke alias Helmut – he’s right in the picture; he’d be the perfect man to run a hideout such as we’re imagining… or would be, if he made the slightest effort to conceal his real identity. In actual fact, he almost seems anxious to draw attention to it. There’s this character Mann, who seems so
likely to be Mayer that somehow I just can’t quite believe in it. There’s his wife, who’s a nice strong healthy outdoor girl; and Martin, who’s a nice strong healthy outdoor boy with something odd about him—”

  “Odd? In what way? – I thought he was very nice. Or did you mean his being so… grown-up?”

  “No; I mean odd. There’s something about him I just can’t put my finger on to explain; and I’m not at all sure that I like it.”

  Marie-Andrée shook her head, bewildered. “I don’t see how you can either like it or not like it, when you don’t even know what it is.”

  “Maybe not. But there’s something about the mother, too – not so marked, but something… I was thinking about her while we were walking back together, just trying to make out how she fitted into the picture, and there was something I thought… something in my sequence of ideas… It didn’t mean anything at the time, but it does now. I’m sure it does now.”

  “It’ll come back to you, I expect. At the moment, I agree neither of them seems to fit in at all.”

  “No. Well, in spite of what she said, we know next to nothing about them yet, except that they’re obviously devoted to each other. Let’s get on with the list. Next, we’ve got this queer fellow with the penchant for jumping off trains. His name seems to be Gruber and, according to Eva Mann, he’s a mountaineer; and that’s all we know about him… Oh, except that he speaks Italian well enough to swap Dante quotes with our old pal von Knopke. At least, it sounded like Dante; all that stuff about sewn ladies under green leaves and the streams of the Alps. Now, he’s just as likely—”

  “I thought you didn’t understand Italian?”