This time, Francesca looked. She saw a dark-haired man, with a prominent nose and chin, sitting down not far from them, seemingly nonchalant and yet carefully facing the door. He wore a dark-green corduroy jacket, a loose red tweed tie. She would have taken him for a graduate student or an instructor at the University. He had a long glass of light lager in front of him, and he was making it last. He didn’t seem to be bored, he didn’t seem to be waiting. And yet—
“He’s looking this way,” Paula said. She smiled and bowed towards Max Meyer. “Well—” she said in some embarrassment.
“He didn’t recognise you,” Francesca said. What, she wondered worriedly, is so interesting in the Café Henzi to an American officer?
“He doesn’t remember me at all,” Paula said. “I feel about six inches high.” She looked down at the tablecloth. “I think we should get back to the hotel, don’t you?”
But Francesca, watching the man in whom Andy had put so much trust, didn’t reply. He was only three tables away. He couldn’t hear what they were saying, for their voices were low, but he must have marked Paula’s American voice. For, without turning his head, he was looking at them. Yes, he was verifying Paula. But he made no move. He took another drink of beer. And then, on the table in front of him, Francesca noticed a pack of cigarettes lying squared off with a box of matches. Yet he didn’t touch them. He wasn’t even smoking.
Paula had been searching for her gloves. “I think I’ve got everything now,” she said. “Ready?” She looked round for their waiter, and then her eyes widened. “Of all things!”
Bill Denning stood at the doorway, taking off his coat and hat. He shook them before he hung them on a peg, and then made his way to one of the last empty tables on the other side of the room.
“This,” said Paula in a faint voice, “this is ridiculous.” Look at them, she thought, sitting in the same room: two friends, two Americans in a foreign city, neither knowing the other is here.
Francesca laid a quiet hand on her arm, and Paula’s pretty face—round, ingenuous, wide-eyed—looked almost comical in its disbelief. Did Francesca mean that Bill and Maxwell had seen each other?
“Smile,” Francesca said. “Smile and tell me all about that apartment you’re looking for.”
“But I’ve told you,” said Paula. “And look, where did you develop that grip of yours? I bet you were good with a machine-gun.” She began to laugh.
Francesca, smiling, said, “That’s better. I just want you to stop looking like a stuffed Sphinx.”
“I don’t see how a Sphinx could possibly be stuffed.”
“If we say it is, at this moment, then it is stuffed. Go on talking, I’d like to stay here just a little longer.”
“Why don’t you do the talking?” Paula asked.
“Frankly, I can’t think of anything to say.” And I’m too busy watching the door, Francesca thought.
“The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.”
“Original.”
“Then you try. Must we talk, anyway?”
“Oh!” said Francesca suddenly. Her handbag seemed to spill open, and she bent quickly to search for its scattered contents. Paula picked up a small comb. Francesca was searching under the table, now, for her compact and cigarettes. And then Paula noticed that a woman had entered and was walking across to their side of the room. She was a middle-aged woman, plainly dressed in a black coat and a black felt hat bulging sideways over the heavy braids wound round her ears. She halted, looking down at Meyer’s table. Then she nodded and took a chair beside him.
Paula thought, well, I don’t think much of Meyer’s taste in women—overweight above, thin hard legs below. She looked across at Bill Denning, but his head was bent over a wine list. “Haven’t you found everything yet?” she asked Francesca.
Francesca finished her search. As she raised her head, she was busy draping the scarf she had worn at her throat over her hair. She kept her back to Meyer’s table as she knotted it firmly under her chin, covering not only her hair but her brow and the sides of her face.
“Expecting a storm?” Paula asked with a smile, but Francesca only turned up the collar of her coat. She had already started towards the door.
“Where’s our waiter?” Paula wanted to know, but she followed Francesca. Francesca’s face, turned towards Paula, was white and cold.
“We can pay outside,” Francesca said, her voice low, her head still turned away from Meyer’s table. The ordinariness of her words was strange when contrasted with the little sigh she gave as they reached the lobby.
Madame, buxom, blithe, and debonair, calculated the price of a bottle of Valais wine. “Poor fellow,” she said, pointing to their waiter who was in the telephone booth, “his wife is expecting a baby tonight. He’s trying to ’phone the hospital, and of course its number is engaged. Don’t worry, Emil!” she called loudly. “Just count to fifty and then try again.” She stared at the money in her hand. “Now, how much did I say it was?”
Hurry, hurry, Francesca thought, hurry and give me back my change before that woman who’s talking to Meyer comes out through this lobby. She might recognise me here, even with my head covered: she studied me enough last Tuesday when she followed me.
“Now did I add service? No…let me see…” Madame smiled at Paula, listening to the new outburst of song from the upstairs room. “Enjoying themselves,” she said cheerfully. She lowered her voice confidentially: “They sound younger than they look, I can tell you.” She counted out the change with maddening honesty. “It’s stopped raining,” she informed them. “It’s going to be a fine day tomorrow.” Under her white hair, her pink cheeks glowed with her good news. Her blue eyes, her broad smile gleamed with pleasure.
“That’s splendid,” said Paula, embarrassed at Francesca’s silence. But her politeness was ill-advised.
“Have you visited the bear pits, yet?” Madame asked, leaning her arms comfortably on the small counter. “All you visitors should see the bear pits. If you haven’t seen them, you haven’t seen Bern.” Then she spent a full three minutes describing the historical meaning of the bear pits, the simplest way to reach the bear pits, the best time to see the bear pits, and the bear pits. She had even begun (and the waiter in the telephone booth was trying to reach his number for the third time, Francesca noted) to tell them about her favourite bear, Willy, she called him, a most comical fellow. Quickly Francesca said, “We must leave this for the waiter,” and she handed over a tip to Madame, who thanked her, and, in thanking her, looked at the telephone booth and forgot even Willy. “Don’t despair!” she shouted. “Keep trying, Emil!” She turned again to her guests, but they had gone.
Bill Denning had reached the Café Henzi quickly. And safely, he hoped. But in a crisis, speed could be as important as caution. He might not be much of a reinforcement, but at least he was here.
He took off his raincoat at the entrance to the downstairs room, giving himself the necessary minute to make sure that this was the meeting place. Or else he’d have to turn into an Econophilosophist pretty damn quick to get upstairs past Madame’s warnings. But this was the room: there sat Max, very much at ease, his arms resting comfortably on a red-checked tablecloth, a glass of beer at his elbow, cigarettes, matches, everything under control. And there, too, was Paula Waysmith with her Nefertiti friend.
He hung up his hat and coat, got the startled look out of his eyes, and made his way to the nearest free table. He became engrossed in lighting a cigarette, in looking at the chess game next door to him. Paula knew Max Meyer; not well, but well enough. She and Andy met him at Princeton just after Peggy had been killed, when Max had come telling him to get out of the ruins of his private life, to go back to Germany, and to bury himself in a job which carried no memories of Peggy. What shall I do, he wondered now, if Paula comes over here, what the hell shall I do? Damnation, why couldn’t Andy keep his Paula chained up in a cellar, a nice pink satin cellar, lace-fringed? The first thing she’d tell him, with those bright blu
e eyes sparkling, would be “Guess who’s here! But didn’t you see? Poor old Bill, let’s buy him new glasses. Come on over, let’s join Colonel Meyer, let’s all have a party together. Isn’t this fun?”
Yes, isn’t it?
Oh, forget Paula, he told himself. Register a few prayers that she didn’t see you. Concentrate on Max and his problems.
The waiter brought a lengthy wine list, a beige parchment thing looking appropriately venerable, decorated with curlicues and sixteenth-century pen-twiddles and a potbellied monk laughing at a spare old man, skull-headed, with a scythe over his shoulder. The thick black script was teasing to read in the dim light. Denning decided that Max had taken the easiest way out by ordering beer—and, remembering the tall glass on Max’s table, he also remembered the pack of cigarettes lying at neat right angles to a box of matches. “Beer,” he said to the waiter. “No! Better make that brandy.” There wasn’t much future in mixing grain and grape. His thoughts flickered back again to that pack of cigarettes. Max didn’t smoke. Neatly arranged cigarettes and matches—a signal! an identification?
I’m right, he thought. That’s it. Max had arranged with Maartens, on the chance that there might be a delay or an accident, some other means of getting in touch with a substitute for the little jewel thief. That would explain why Max waited so peacefully here while everyone else had given up all hope. Denning thought angrily, I must have been influenced after all by Le Brun’s doubts: I was beginning to forget how carefully Max worked out every angle.
“Brandy,” he told the waiter again. The man was standing very still, his head inclined politely, but he was watching the woman who had entered and was now walking slowly, almost carefully, along the row of tables on the side of the room where Max Meyer sat. She halted in front of Max, and as she sat down she turned her head to look at the rest of the room. It was all very quietly done, as quietly and naturally as the waiter had walked towards the lobby, leaving Denning with his order unheard.
Denning bent his head over the wine list. He could have been mistaken. He had only risked a brief glimpse of her face. But a cold sweat broke over his forehead, and for a moment his mind was paralysed.
Yes, the woman was Eva. The messenger from Maartens had arrived. And it was the fat chamber-maid with the quick thin legs, the woman who had no connection with anything so civilian as jewel thieves. An agent, Keppler had said. And Meyer, with all his careful planning, how could he know? The woman had recognised the right signals—the cigarettes and matches arranged just so, perhaps the colour of Max’s jacket, the side of the room where he sat. But who had told her all this? Not Maartens surely, not Charlie-for-Short? She was as much his enemy as she was Meyer’s.
Now, Denning thought, what do I do? Telephone Keppler— but I haven’t got the number of that pink nightmare of a room, damn it, I haven’t got it… But didn’t Keppler have one of his men here as a waiter? Where the hell was that God-damned waiter? Then he remembered his own waiter, so quietly vanishing into the lobby. The man would be on the telephone to Keppler by this time, telling him that a contact had been made. Denning relaxed a little, and his language calmed down too. He checked his watch. Barely two minutes had passed since the woman had entered, two minutes that felt like two hours. Abstractedly, he noted that Paula and her friend were leaving. Vaguely, he wondered why the waiter hadn’t ended his ’phone call by this time. But actively, his mind—now recovered from its first blank shock—raced through one plan after another, proposing and rejecting them in turn. How was he to warn Max?
The easy thing would be to walk over to Meyer’s table and say, “Hallo, Eva! And what are you doing here? Elizabeth won’t like it, at all.”
That tempted him. But it was dangerous, too. He’d certainly blow his own cover, but, what was more important, he’d probably paralyse what was left of Meyer’s mission. And he would arouse interest in “Elizabeth” and give a lead towards Keppler.
Or he could leave when Max left, bump into him in the lobby, say, “Achtung, Achtung, Achtung! Look where you’re going!” Rude, but effective. Except that, when Max took the warning, there might be someone else within hearing distance who’d report on it. Again, cover blown; mission paralysed.
Or if that dutiful waiter would only finish telephoning Keppler and come back here, then he could take a note over to Meyer’s table. A note? Why not a menu? That was subtle enough to please even Max. A menu, or a wine list.
He looked down at the piece of imitation parchment lying on the table. He found his pencil. With a smile, he studied the skeleton face of Old Father Death. Carefully, he shaded in two heavy coils of hair over each ear. Then he drew a round felt hat lightly over the top of the skull, and was a little proud of the way he made the hat bulge where it rested on the braids. With quick heavy strokes, he fattened the skeleton’s body into a squarish mass. He left the skeleton legs exactly as they were.
He looked up to see that Eva was leaving. It was Denning’s guess that Max Meyer would follow her quite soon. He looked over at Meyer’s table, to try and catch his eye, to give him at least a warning sign, however careful or vague. But Max was studying the pack of cigarettes, holding them in his hands. His face was thoughtful. Then he slipped the cigarettes into the breast pocket of his jacket, leaving the matches on the table, and raised his hand to signal for the check.
Denning rose quickly, taking the wine list, noting the waiter who had made a sign of coming-sir to Meyer. He cut the man out as neatly as a calf, and roped him too. He said quietly, slipping the wine list under the waiter’s arm, “Will you take this list to the gentleman in the green jacket who wants his check? It’s a joke he will like.” And he pressed a two-franc piece into the man’s hand, which was ready enough, readier than his wits. “A joke?” the man repeated, and then nodded eventually. “Yes, sir. Certainly.” He moved away, still nodding.
Denning reached the row of pegs, and searched for his coat and hat. He pulled on his coat, half-turning to see if the waiter had delivered the wine list. But from the neighbouring table to Meyer’s another customer was now signalling, too. The waiter did his best, or perhaps he was colour blind. With a bow, he handed the list to the stranger, who was dressed in a bright-blue suit. He even explained that it was a joke, for he pointed to Denning at the door and laughed heartily. The customer looked more puzzled than amused. Denning made a bleak attempt to smile. The man in the blue suit smiled back politely, but he looked embarrassed. Then he turned to Max Meyer, his hands and shoulders raised as he expounded on incredible people, senseless jokes.
Denning’s smile became real as he entered the lobby, for the man in the bright-blue suit was showing Max the wine list, as if he wanted to have his indignation shared. Denning thought, well, that’s the first time that a joke against me ever got turned to my account. He could almost feel his heart, descended into his stomach, returning left of centre in his breast.
Madame told him, “But you ought to have got the check from the waiter.” She shook her head over the impatience of customers, over her own stupidity at sending all the waitresses to serve upstairs tonight: they stuck to the rules and made out the checks properly “One brandy?” He was probably being accurate, she decided, he hadn’t been in the room very long. And she liked his face, she always liked men’s faces that were serious and sad if the eyes were not glum. She looked up from her money drawer to see him staring at the waiter in the telephone booth. “Poor Emil,” she explained, “he’s been trying to telephone the hospital and its line is engaged. Now that’s four, five, and ten makes fifteen, and five is twenty. His wife is having a baby.”
“He’ll pull through, probably,” Denning said with a last glance at the waiter. He remembered the telephoning that Keppler had begun as he left the pink room in No. 10 Henziplatz. Keppler was thorough, at least; and he must be taking Max seriously, too. Denning felt better for that. He handed over a tip for Emil. “A little extra,” he said quickly. “Good night.” He left Madame still talking.
There was a fan of
yellow light spreading out from the Café Henzi’s doorway, bright and dangerous. But beyond, on either side, the arcade was dimly lighted, bleak, its doorways dark, its square pillars casting black bands of shadow over the gutter on to the cobblestones of the little Square. Denning walked along the straight stretch of arcade at a normal pace, with no sign of hurry, no sign of alarm. Then, just before the arcade twisted to the right to form the north-west corner of the Henziplatz, he halted beside one of the pillars as if to light a cigarette. There was no one near him. The doorways he had passed had been empty. A short step took him into the pillar’s broad black shadow. He slipped his cigarettes back into his pocket, keeping close to the base of the arch. From here, he could see much. He took a deep breath and examined the Square.
A couple sauntered past the café, their arms linked, the woman’s high heels echoing under the arcade. Two men crossed the cobblestones. On the other side of the Square, a man walked briskly. Beyond the café, just south of the lighted doorway, a car was drawn up close to the arch of the arcade. That seemed all. Yet, his uneasiness grew. It was a long minute of waiting.
He heard a car coming from the northern part of the Henzigasse, moving slowly with excessive care. It entered the Henziplatz. He could see it now, gathering speed, bumping over the cobblestones, travelling past him towards the south end of the Square. With satisfaction, he watched its tail-lights vanishing down the south section of the narrow Henzigasse. And then his relief was wiped out. Why had it travelled so slowly through the northern part of the little street? It had been one of those little German Volkswagens, easy to manoeuvre. Why had it crawled its way into the Square?
There must be a car parked on that stretch of narrow street, Denning decided: a car parked to the north of the Square, as well as the car parked just south of the Café Henzi. Meaning… ? Yet people did park their cars in narrow alleys where—judging by the emptiness of the Henziplatz and the southern part of the street which he could see clearly—parking was not encouraged. Motorists were very much alike in any language.
Pray for a Brave Heart Page 9
