“Kronsteiner the ski instructor who keeps a shop down at Bad Aussee?”
“Also a guide in the summer season. He’s all right. We checked him out when he brought that bunch of students to stay overnight at the inn last July. Remember?”
Grell remembered. Johann Kronsteiner was one of those amiable dolts, handsome and charming, who climbed and skied their lives away. “He has a girl in Unterwald, hasn’t he?”
“He has a girl in every village between here and Salzburg.”
“Has his brother-in-law noticed us yet?”
“Yes. He is walking down to meet us.”
“He is, is he?” Grell turned around slowly to face the oncoming man.
Richard Bryant had seen the two men just as the younger one had noticed him. He had no time to step behind some cover. And perhaps it was better that he hadn’t made the try. These men had the instincts of hunters. Both were facing him now, and he could recognise them: August Grell and his son Anton, from Unterwald, where they kept the small inn that stood on the meadow above the village. They both wore loden capes that ended just where their grey knee breeches met their heavy woollen stockings, heavy boots tight-laced over their ankles, and a look of definite speculation.
Bryant reached them, greeted them nonchalantly, and then looked around him vaguely. “I left my jacket somewhere here,” he explained, and noted the quick glance the two men exchanged. They hadn’t expected that admission. Had they thought he would pretend he had just arrived at the lake and hadn’t hidden any jacket? They don’t catch me as easily as that, he thought, as he found the jacket. It seemed to be folded as he had left it, and in the same place. “I had an idea of getting a photograph with the early sun on the lake, but the clouds closed over just as I reached here. Then I had a brighter idea. The hill to the north of the wood seemed clear, so I went up there for a shot of sun struggling through mist. Very effective, you know, if you can have long enough exposure.”
“You got quite another kind of exposure,” Anton said, looking at Bryant’s sweater fuzzed with fine beads of rain. Grell was smiling very much at ease, but his glance rested on Bryant’s hands.
“Got trapped on the hillside, couldn’t even see this wood. I fell, nearly lost my camera. So I sat down and waited for the clouds to lift. That’s what all good mountaineers do, isn’t it?”
Anton nodded. “Did you hurt your hands badly?”
“Just a scrape.” Bryant looked down at the rags of handkerchief wound around them and laughed. “This gave me something to pass the time. Pretty messy bandaging, though.” He laid down his camera and tripod, peeled off his sodden sweater, slipped his arms quickly into the warmth of his jacket, buttoned it gratefully. He still needed a sweater, but a dry one. He repressed a shiver, and privately cursed the bandages he had left on his hands (he had thought he might need them for handling the steering wheel on his way home), while he talked casually. “My name is Bryant. I stopped off at your inn, last July, when I was taking some pictures around here.” Anton remembered now, yes, indeed he remembered; Herr Bryant had sat out in front of the inn and drunk a tankard of beer. The older Grell kept his silence and that same benevolent grin on his face. “I think I’ll head for my car and start back to Salzburg. It has been a long time since breakfast.” He saw the same quick glance pass between them when he mentioned his car. His frankness puzzled them, perhaps. And they were puzzling him a little. Everything seemed normal, as if they were only a couple of hunters out after marmot and had been cheated by the weather, too. He could see the shape of their rifles under their lodens. What else were they hiding there? Knives? That would be less noisy than firing, but of course the butt of a rifle could be just as silent. And just as lethal.
He began walking down towards the picnic ground. They came with him. Anton was saying it wasn’t much of a day for anything, and he wouldn’t mind a lift in Bryant’s car as far as the inn. August Grell spoke his first words. “We might all have breakfast there. You’d feel the better for it. And you can dry your pullover at the stove. You’ll need it on your way home.”
“Thank you,” Bryant said. “That sounds a fine idea. Only—” What else could he do except play along with them? They were huskier than he was. August was a solid mass of a man, red-faced, brimming over with good health. Anton, perhaps thirty years old at most, was six feet and strong-muscled. The safest thing was to keep on being the harmless photographer, who certainly wouldn’t refuse a hot breakfast at the Gasthof Waldesruh.
“Only what?” asked Grell.
“I’m late as it is. My wife will start worrying.”
“You can telephone her from the inn.” There was no arguing allowed by that tone of voice.
The three of them passed quite close to the spot where Bryant had hidden the chest. Whatever happens, he thought, it has been a good morning’s work. “You know,” he told them as they reached the trail that ran downhill to Unterwald, “I shouldn’t be surprised if this mist has cleared in a couple of hours. I might get my photographs yet. It would save me coming back tomorrow or the next day.”
“What’s so urgent about the photographs?” Anton asked.
And that gave him a chance to talk about the book he was planning on the lakes in this part of Austria. He had photographed sixteen of them so far, at various times of year, at various times of day, to show—as he could explain at length and with real enthusiasm—their various characters, their amazing changes of mood. August Grell was interested; Anton seemed impressed. Bryant, in spite of his exhaustion, felt his spirits pick up. Yes, a good morning’s work, he thought, as Grell and he drove the short distance to the inn. (Anton had decided there was too little room for his long legs and had taken a short cut down through the wood.) Bryant wondered a little when Grell told him to park the car at the back of Waldesruh, but otherwise there seemed no attempt at secrecy. Grell hadn’t blinked an eye when a couple of villagers walked past, but gave them “Grüss Gott” and a wave of his hand.
Anton was already there. He had added wood to the big earth-coloured stove and set a pot of coffee on one of the openings of its black iron top. Now, he was whistling as he moved cheerfully around the large kitchen. It seemed as if the two men used only one corner of it when they were by themselves. It was a practical place. Cooking utensils crowding the niches above the stove, pots and pans hanging from a beam, a smell of cheese and apples and freshly ground coffee, scrubbed-wood floor and tables, blue-patterned tiles around the oven and sink. And the remains of one man’s breakfast. Bryant’s glance flicked quickly away from the single cup and saucer and plate. One man. Where had the other been? “I think I’ll call my wife,” he said easily, and waited for an abrupt refusal, a reversal in manner.
“This way,” Grell said with a polite gesture towards the dining-room. He led Bryant through the ice-cold room with its chairs upended on bare wooden tables and its rows of mounted heads, antlered and glassy-eyed, staring down from the walls. “We have only one telephone, but this is a very simple inn. And we do not charge much, no more than fifty schillings a day for everything.”
“Very reasonable.” Fifty schillings meant about fourteen in English currency, two dollars flat in American. “I must remember that.”
“Over there,” Grell said, pointing proudly at the desk in the entrance hall. Tactfully, he headed for his bedroom and left Bryant alone.
Bryant looked at the telephone and then at the front door just a few paces away. It was barred. Probably locked, too. Even so, if his car had been out there, he would have been tempted to try that door. He fought down the impulse to try it anyway. Once he was outside, someone in the village would see him. The Grells could hardly stop him leaving then. But it would be a mistake on his part; he would only confirm any suspicions they had, and he would be watched and followed and menaced for the remaining days he was given to live. If they were Nazi agents, that was. He wasn’t sure about them any more than they were sure of him. He picked up the receiver, knowing that if August Grell was an agent he m
ust have devised a way to monitor any conversation on this telephone.
At last he heard Anna’s low voice, uncertain, hesitant. “I’m fine,” he told her quickly, trying to keep her from asking any questions that might give him away. “Sorry I’m late. I’m in Unterwald. I was delayed by the mist and got properly soaked, but I’m drying off at the inn—the Gasthof Waldesruh—and Herr Grell and his son have invited me to breakfast. I’ll be home around midday. By one o’clock at the latest.” There, he thought, I’ve named them. They won’t risk anything happening to me here. “Stop worrying,” he told her, suddenly cheerful.
“Dick—”
“Yes?”
“Perhaps you ought to telephone Eric Yates right away. He called you early this morning. He seemed really upset when I told him—”
Bryant cut in, even if he wanted to know what she had told Yates. (He hoped to God she had kept Yates guessing; he was pushing far too hard.) “How early?”
“Just—just after you left. He said it was something about the book. I couldn’t quite understand.”
“Where is he staying in Salzburg? Did he leave a number?”
“It was a long-distance call from his home.”
“Zürich?” Bryant was incredulous.
“Yes. And such a strange time to call! He sounded so sharp, almost angry. Do you think he won’t publish your book? Was that the reason he—”
“He’ll publish the book all right. I have a contract and an advance.”
“I was worrying in case we would have to give that back,” she confessed. “But that was the least of my worries. Oh, Dick—I’m so glad you’re safe.”
“This isn’t the first time I’ve been caught in a mist,” he told her quickly, before she could add anything more. “See you soon, darling,” he ended abruptly, and cut her off. He counted out some money to cover the cost of the call, and left it beside the telephone. As for a call to Zürich—Eric Yates could wait. Is he checking on me? Bryant wondered. Yates was becoming too damned curious. Last week he wanted to know when the completed set of photographs would be ready. He had mentioned Finstersee in particular, yet in a careful way. Too careful for Bryant’s taste; he had replied vaguely that he would be up at Finstersee by the end of this week, possibly next Friday. But that hadn’t been enough for Yates, seemingly. He had made this phone call shortly after one o’clock this morning just to test if Bryant was still in Salzburg. Was that it? He can trust me, Bryant thought irritably as he moved into the dining-room.
We were together in the war and did the same kind of work, too. Yates has contacts with British Intelligence, may even be working for them. He knows perfectly well that anything I find in Finstersee is going to be handed over to our side. What does he want—everything spelled out? I had to give him a hint, back in June, just to make sure he could act as a go-between when the time came for that. I need his help. He is the quick route to the right people in London. But any more of this pressure and I’ll start thinking about my old friends in Washington. I have at least two there who will remember me from the old days.
But that was just momentary annoyance, he told himself as he returned the cold stare of the beheaded deer on the wall. There was a personal stake—call it vanity—in showing London what he could do.
“I see you admire our collection,” Anton was saying at the kitchen door.
“Impressive. How many did you bag?”
“Some,” Anton admitted modestly. He was a handsome fellow, with clear blue eyes and brownish hair and healthy skin. “My father shot most of them. Including the chamois.” He pointed to the head mounted over the door. “Do you do much hunting?” Something caught his eye in the hall behind Bryant, and he took Bryant’s arm and drew him firmly but politely into the kitchen. “Do you?” he asked again.
Bryant didn’t glance back at the hall. He had heard the telephone click as August Grell had lifted the receiver. “No. It’s on the expensive side, isn’t it?”
“Depends what you kill. Breakfast is ready. Shall we start?”
That was a neat turn-aside from costs, thought Bryant. The fee for killing a chamois could come as high as four thousand Austrian schillings. It seemed that August Grell didn’t do too badly, considering he owned a simple little inn that charged fifty schillings a day in high season. He swallowed the hot coffee and hoped it would pull him together; all he wanted to do was lie down in front of that warm stove and sleep. He couldn’t eat much, after all. He was completely exhausted physically; and mentally he seemed to be dissolving in worry. He could scarcely listen to Anton’s constant chatter. He was thinking of August Grell and what kept him so long on the telephone. Or why he had even needed to use the telephone at all. Something is wrong, Bryant’s instincts kept telling him, something is wrong.
“Look,” he told Anton, rising to his feet, reaching for his sweater, “I really must go. It’s well after ten. Time I was on my way to Salzburg.”
“It only takes an hour and a half,” Anton protested. He looked almost alarmed, nervous.
More like two hours in my condition, thought Bryant. Last night he had taken fully three, dawdling his way carefully through the night. “Sorry I can’t say good-bye to your father. Give him my thanks, won’t you? Perhaps I’ll bring my wife up here for some skiing in December. You do open then for skiers?”
“Yes, of course! We have no ski lift here, of course, no special slopes. But there is good ski-running. That is the best sport anyway. Here—let me show on this map.” Anton had followed Bryant as he talked, and was now rummaging in a dresser drawer near the back entrance. “You can ski for thirty kilometres across—”
“I’d be satisfied with three,” Bryant said. “You over-estimate me, Anton.” He unlocked the back door, began to pull its heavy weight inward.
“Wait!” said Anton softly. “I think I hear my—”
Bryant half turned his head to see where the blow was coming, ready to dodge. He was a split second too slow. The side of Anton’s right hand, hard as steel, cracked the back of his neck. He keeled straight over like a tree under a woodsman’s axe. His hand fell away from the door, his face hit the floor, and he lay quite still.
3
August Grell came out of his room to find Anton, a nervous look on his face that pinched his lips and tightened his eyes, waiting in the hall. Grell froze, then burst into anger. “He has left? Hell take you, you let him leave!”
Anton listened in silence to a string of curses, but his eyes were widening and his lips beginning to ease before he asked too innocently, “Didn’t you want him to leave?”
Grell looked more closely at the spreading smile. He ran through the dining-room, burst into the kitchen, halted abruptly. He stared back at Anton, then he went over to kneel beside Bryant. Yes, his suspicion was right. The man was dead. “You were too quick,” he told Anton grimly.
“I aimed for the side of his neck, but he jerked his head around and the blow caught him right at the back of—”
“So I see.” Grell rose to his feet, picking up Bryant’s sodden sweater.
“There was no choice. He was leaving. He had the door open.” Anton felt the side of his hand. It was numb. He shrugged his shoulders. “Why did you bring him here anyway?”
“Because I wanted him for questioning. I wanted no body found near Finstersee. I wanted no repeat of Lake Toplitz.”
“It had its uses,” Anton suggested. “It scared them all.”
“And made everything twice as difficult for us.” Grell glanced at his watch. “All right, all right,” he said irritably. “You take his jacket, wear it. Get him loaded into the front seat of the car and cover him with your cape.”
“The back seat would be better—gives me more room.”
“You won’t have time to move him out of the back seat into the front, and that’s where you’ll need him when you leave the car. Whiten your hair a bit—use some flour. Not too much! Where’s his hat? Didn’t he wear a—”
“Here’s something,” Anton said
as he searched in a deep pocket. “A beret! Imagine wearing a beret with a loden jacket,” he added contemptuously. “Who was he working for?”
“It would be nice if we could ask him, wouldn’t it?”
“Oh,” said Anton, and shrugged his shoulders again. “Don’t think we would have got much out of him.”
“He has a wife,” Grell said simply.
Yes, that always made a good threat, Anton thought. But why blame me for what I had to do? After all, Bryant would be alive and tied securely to a chair, ready for questioning, if old Grell hadn’t been caught up in all the precautions he took for security’s sake. He was secretive about the methods he used for an emergency call, but he wouldn’t have locked himself up in his bedroom if he wasn’t decoding the double talk that had come over the telephone in thick, rich Saxon dialect. “Didn’t you find out anything?” Anton asked, challenging as much as he dared, his eyes innocent.
“If he hadn’t died today, he would have been killed tomorrow.” Grell hesitated, then added, “Two men were being sent from Warsaw to Salzburg. They intended to get the chest from him, and then silence him completely.”
“But he hasn’t got it. I searched the trunk of his car in case he had carried it that far before he doubled back through the woods to get his jacket.”
Grell studied Anton with amusement. But his tone was gentler now. “And what about his equipment? You think that all a man has to do is take off his shirt and dive into Finstersee? There is more to it than that.” He relented completely. “You’re right. I don’t think he could have found the chest.”
“This jacket is too small. I can’t button it.” Anton laughed at his wrists popping far out below the cuffs.
“You aren’t going to be seen closely by anyone. You’ll drive quickly through the village, climb the hill at high speed—give every appearance of a good driver who takes chances. You are someone going home in a hurry.”
The Salzburg Connection Page 4
