The Salzburg Connection

by Helen Macinnes

  “Stood her up, did he?”

  “Perhaps.”

  He looked at her sharply, but she was watching Anna Bryant, who was telling Trudi that Mrs. Conway was indeed a friend. Then Anna fell abruptly silent as she listened to a torrent of words made unintelligible by tears that could be heard across the narrow shop.

  “I was afraid of that,” Lynn said. “I did try to quiet her down.”

  Anna Bryant looked over at them. “Please go. Get your friend here at once.” Her voice was calm, but her face was white and tense.

  “Come on,” he told Lynn, and held out her coat for her. We have an errand to do.”

  “You go. I’ll wait here,” Lynn said, watching Anna Bryant.

  “Lynn, I need you.” He pulled her around to face him. “Come with me. Please.” He dropped the coat around her shoulders, hurried her over to the front door, unbolted it. He had wanted to try one of the short cuts, but unless Anna could have given him directions, it might have ended being the long way around to Tomaselli’s. “Please,” he said again, as Lynn hesitated at the door. To Anna, he said, “Cliff will be here within half an hour. Lock the doors, will you?”

  Anna nodded. She was saying into the receiver, “Not over the telephone, Trudi! I’ll come up and see you. Tonight if possible. If not, tomorrow. I promise. Mr. Mathison and Mrs. Conway will drive me up to Unterwald.” Her eyes, troubled and pleading, looked at Bill Mathison.

  “Of course we will,” Lynn said, and almost ran down the steps into the street with the force of Mathison’s tug on her wrist as he closed the door.

  “Bill!” She wasn’t amused.

  “Just come with me. I’ll explain.”

  “I bet.”

  “I’ll explain. Everything. It’s time you knew.”

  “Now there I agree.” She looked at his worried face. Her voice softened. “Please help me on with my coat.” She noted that they scarcely stopped walking while he did that. She noted, too, the briefcase under his arm. “I thought that was empty.”

  “There’s a newspaper inside.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “For a cup of coffee at Tomaselli’s.”

  “For a cup of—Oh, really, Bill!”

  “And by the time we have drunk it, help will be on its way to Anna Bryant.”

  “This Cliff person?”

  “This Cliff person.”

  “But why do I have to go along? I should have stayed with Mrs. Bryant. That phone call bothers me the more I think of it.”

  “Because,” he answered frankly, “your auburn hair and your blue coat and my jacket and this briefcase—” he opened it as he spoke—“and this folded newspaper now under my arm will get the message across to Cliff, and no doubts about it either.”

  She stopped in amazement.

  “Come on,” he said firmly, catching a sure grip on her arm, “and tell me what bothers you about Trudi’s phone call.”

  They had left the Neugasse and passed through another twist of narrow street. Now they were entering the Altmarkt, a small wide square, empty and placid, edged with handsome low buildings, pleasant shops, and well-dressed window-gazers who walked slowly through a quiet Saturday afternoon. He led her obliquely across the smooth pavement of the square toward a café, restrained and handsome, that stood at one upper corner. Lynn said, “I thought at first that Trudi’s pride had been hurt. Johann drove past her house last night, didn’t stop. He didn’t appear this morning either. So she went down to his house. And she found it in a complete mess. She has been waiting and tidying it up all afternoon.”

  “A party? Johann’s quite a lad. Trudi wasn’t his only girl.”

  “I supposed that, too. Only she added a strange remark. She had been chasing on a hundred words to the minute, no pause, no stop, not even listening to me saying ‘Please, would you wait a moment? Let me fetch Mrs. Bryant.’ Perhaps my German isn’t so good, not for the Unterwald region anyway.”

  “What strange remark?” he asked quietly. They were now in the centre of the Altmarkt. He measured the remaining distance to Tomaselli’s with a careful eye, and eased their pace.

  “She said, ‘Such a mess everywhere, such a terrible mess, but they did not find anything.’ And she broke into tears which took a full minute to control. Then I managed to get through to her that I was not Mrs. Bryant, and that threw her into a panic.”

  They didn’t find anything... Mathison halted, looked down at Lynn. “These were her exact words?”

  “Yes. I didn’t pay too much attention at the time—not until Mrs. Bryant started listening to Trudi. Did you see her hands as she gripped the receiver? The knuckles were ridged white. She must have understood at once.” And it wasn’t good news, whatever it was, thought Lynn unhappily.

  “She’d get the meaning.” They started walking again, but slowly, while Mathison’s thoughts raced on. Johann had disappeared and his place had been searched. Everything had gone wrong. In spite of Nield’s briefing, planning, arranging, everything was flying wild, and what signal could Mathison send? Anna Bryant was willing to help, wanted to help; Anna Bryant once knew where the box was, but no longer; Anna Bryant could convince her brother to co-operate, and would; Anna Bryant’s brother was missing. I’ll throw the book at Nield, Mathison thought in desperation, I’ll give such a flurry of signals that his agent will report everything has gone haywire. And that’s just about as accurate an alert as Nield could get. That should start him heading for the Neugasse.

  Or what if Nield’s agent didn’t get the message? What if he thought Mathison had gone haywire himself?

  “Come on, Bright Eyes. Drop the anxiety. That’s an order.” He managed a confident grin. “But it’s going to be a very quick cup of coffee.”

  She stopped frowning at the street that ran along the top of the Altmarkt and led to other squares, grander, larger, with domes and cupolas to match. A heavenly place, she was thinking, if only... She suppressed a sigh. “Even the clouds are baroque,” she said as they reached the café’s sidewalk, which was covered by a pleasant upstairs terrace. “A pity it isn’t warm enough to sit outside. I must come here some summer and watch the dirndls stroll by.” She glanced around at some passing capes, and almost frowned again. “There’s a man who seems to be walking after us, keeping our exact pace. I saw him as we left the Neugasse. He’s dressed in heavy tweeds—”

  “Grey hair, beak nose, dark moustache?” Mathison’s voice sounded amused. I saw that bastard, he thought worriedly. “A little too old for you, isn’t he?”

  “I may be suffering from a father fixation.”

  “Don’t look at him,” he warned her.

  “I wasn’t,” she said indignantly. “I was just wondering where oh where is friend Andrew?” This time, she could even produce a small smile.

  “That’s better,” he told her as they entered the café. He took a split second to look back at the square. The beak-nosed man had turned away. No more interest, seemingly. “You’re right about friend Andrew. He has deserted us.” Mathison tucked the folded newspaper firmly under his arm and steered her to the nearest vacant table.

  20

  Friend Andrew had watched the two Americans leave for Tomaselli’s, standing discreetly to the side of a dentist’s waiting-room window, which lay on the first floor above a shop directly opposite the Bryants’ building.

  “There they go,” he told friend Bruno, who had made himself very much at home in the dentist’s office since he had arrived from Vienna this morning. Beside Bruno’s chair were binoculars and camera, and he had set up narrow mirrors on either side of the net-curtained window, angled sufficiently to let him see arrivals and departures from both ends of the Neugasse as well as the traffic on the sidewalk below him. On the table beside the neatly stacked magazines that helped calm the nerves of the dentist’s prospective patients, Monday to Friday (closed Saturday—the dentist was an ardent fisherman and hunter, like most of Salzburg’s vanishing week-end population), Bruno had placed a two-way radi
o that looked remarkably like a cigar case. This let him keep in touch with friend Chuck, patiently installed in a parked car on the Mozartplatz within easy approach of the entrance to one of the short cuts to the Bryant place. “I don’t suppose there is any need to follow Mathison and Conway into the Altmarkt. You have someone there, I expect?”

  The Englishman’s diffident way of checking tactfully—if Bruno had not arranged for them to be observed all the way to the Café Tomaselli then he’d better start giving orders immediately—amused the Austrian. “They’ll be watched.” The wide curve of humorous lips in his round pink face, with its snub innocent nose, and his fine fair hair, thinning away from his high forehead into light tendrils, made him look like one of the angelic cherubs hovering over the pulpit of the pilgrimage church at Maria Plain. But there the likeness stopped. The brown eyes were sharp and watchful, and the husky body, heavy in its clothing of thick tweeds and high-necked sweater, was as hard as Mount Dachstein. There were some who said his heart was as cold as the Dachtstein Glacier itself, but his wife and seven children and even old antagonists like Andrew and Chuck Nield would have disagreed violently.

  To Andrew, quiet and restrained, his thin intelligent face now tightened in speculation as he looked down at the subdued Neugasse, it seemed that Bruno would be better described as a large hot cup of strong Viennese coffee, whipped cream and all. But Andrew was one of those who had crawled beside Bruno through the darkness on the Hungarian border ten years ago, and helped pull the wounded Freedom Fighters across no man’s land to safety. Chuck had been there, too. It seemed as if at least half the attachés and agents who circulated around the foreign embassies in Vienna in 1956 had found their way to that grim frontier. “Well, it’s good to be co-operating again,” Andrew said. And with official blessing, for a change. No reprimands or demotions this time.

  “Less worrying for me than having you as a competitor.”

  Andrew smiled. The Viennese were masters of the delicate compliment, veiling a direct allusion to several less happy occasions. “Chuck definitely pulled a hot coal out of the fire this time. How much has he told you?”

  Bruno’s eyes never swerved from the street. “Not as much as I hope he will tell me. But, of course, we see his problem, don’t we?”

  Yes, thought Andrew, we see it. If Chuck told all he knew, there would be no need for him, or Andrew either, to be here. Bruno would handle everything, and Vienna might not consider it necessary to share the knowledge contained in the Finstersee chest. “You have certainly put up the manpower,” Andrew said tactfully. “Pity we couldn’t have helped you more there.” He had at least two agents drifting into Salzburg today, and Charles Nield had possibly as many already here. But it was unnecessary to mention that and embarrass one’s host. Bruno no doubt guessed. He would have done the same himself if he were co-operating in London or New York. No Intelligence agent let any government, however friendly, take charge of his own private arrangements such as communications with his own government.

  “Each makes his contribution,” Bruno was saying. “We have the men who know this country in detail; you supplied important information about Bryant and Yates and the woman Lang; and Chuck discovered the crisis and gave us warning. Also, he may have developed the best possible lead.”

  “Mathison?”

  “Mathison.”

  “Were there no other means of reaching Mrs. Bryant?” Andrew took a dim view of involving anyone but a trained professional in matters like this.

  “We tried them. Three days ago, we had two agents contact her. Two days ago, Werner Dietrich. Yesterday, Felix Zauner. Four altogether, two of whom she knows well.” Bruno shrugged his shoulders. “No results whatsoever. Perhaps they asked too many questions.”

  “How else does one get information?” Especially in an emergency situation. “Chuck is really moving very quickly.” There was more doubt than criticism in the Englishman’s quiet voice.

  “Perhaps. But, on the other hand, we were almost too slow,” Bruno reminded him. A signal came from the cigar case. “Excuse me, please. Would you watch the street?” Bruno turned to the radio, adjusted it, listened to the message, signed off. “They have just entered the Café Tomaselli.”

  “I wouldn’t mind some coffee myself.” One couldn’t even smoke here. The antiseptic atmosphere of the waiting room must be kept virgin pure. “Most obliging dentist, though. What excuse did you give him? Police business? Hush-hush capture of a drug ring? Or of diamond thieves?”

  Bruno looked bland, busied himself with the radio. Speedily, he made contacts with his other agents, who were observing the entrances to the short cuts that led to the courtyard behind the Bryant place. “All quiet,” he reported as he joined Andrew at the window again.

  But shouldn’t Felix Zauner have been here, doing all this? Andrew wondered. He watched the light foot traffic on the Neugasse below, made a few remarks about this being a very dull time on Saturday afternoon. Most of the Salzburgers seemed to have closed business and headed for the country while those who lived in the country and planned coming into town for a pleasant evening had, as yet, not arrived in any numbers. All this led quite naturally to the question that really interested him. He said most casually, “By the way, where is Felix Zauner?”

  “He left for Unterwald this morning. He has some men stationed up there, wandering around as woodcutters, keeping an eye on the lake.”

  “Does he know we are here?”

  “He knows we are co-operating. But he hasn’t the particulars.” Bruno’s brown eyes were quite expressionless. “He left Salzburg before I could talk with him.”

  “The Americans seem a little nervous about Zauner.”

  “Oh, they are always worried about any penetration, and Zauner’s organisation here was certainly penetrated by Elisabetha Lang. But not to any depths; he has only used her in the most routine matters of minor surveillance.”

  “At least, he has now been warned about her?”

  “He was told yesterday in Vienna. He was obviously shocked.”

  “It’s always a pretty hard blow to take.”

  “Especially with his record. It has been excellent. His potential was high—very high. Next year he would have been considered for a top post in Vienna itself. He may still be, if he has any success with the Finstersee problem.”

  “Well, he has one trump card. Elisabetha Lang, so-called, has no suspicion that any of us know she is an illegal agent.” And for the dispensing of that small piece of knowledge, thought Andrew, I take one modest silent bow.

  “I imagine he will find some pleasure in—how would Chuck express it?—in stringing her along.”

  “Is that his plan?”

  “So I was told in Vienna. But it may be the only way of tracking down the KGB man in Salzburg who is running her. We’d like to catch that colonel and the rest of his illegals.”

  “I just hope Zauner knows who is stringing whom,” Andrew said, thinking of Elisabetha Eva. But then, he was something of an expert on the girl with the impeccable passports and papers who was also equipped with the most plausible legends to match what the KGB could fabricate, so that she could be launched illegally across some unsuspecting border, there to settle down for a few years as one of the added blessings to its democracy. “But I agree about rooting up the illegals. They are becoming a plague. It might be a bright idea if the Western nations had a discreet meeting and started a joint uncovering job. We have all had them planted on us.”

  “First,” Bruno said, keeping his eyes on each passer-by in the street below, “you would have to get most Western nations to accept the premise that peaceful coexistence also includes illegal agents. How many would believe that? It is quicker if we just pick off the illegals as they—Now what does this mean? Something or nothing?” He was watching a man who had already strolled earlier along the Neugasse and was returning past the Bryant shop, slowing his pace as he reached the building, taking out a cigarette. He seemed to have some trouble lighting it, and
stepped just within the shelter of the door. Now he had decided to finish his cigarette while he stood at the threshold of the hall and casually watched the foot traffic on the street. It was increasing slightly, as if the town was coming awake from its after-lunch siesta.

  Bruno reached for his camera, handed Andrew the binoculars.

  “Never seen him before,” Andrew said, as the field glasses brought the man’s face right up in front of him and showed even the tightening of a face muscle, a quick shift in the eyes. He was a serious-looking man of about fifty years, dressed in heavy tweeds; tanned and lean, with dark moustache and eyebrows, strong features, and a beaklike nose. The hair that showed under the slight tilt of his green velours hat was greying, cut long, well brushed. “What is he hanging around for?” Andrew asked irritably. In another fifteen minutes or so, they might expect Mathison and the Conway girl to come around that corner; and then, minutes after that, Chuck would be making his way through the Mozartplatz short cut to Mrs. Bryant’s back door. If Mathison’s signal for Chuck had been the right one, that was. Otherwise, there would be a no-go message from Chuck and their alternate plan would have to be put into motion; they’d all take off in various directions to meet near Unterwald early tomorrow. As we should have done in the first place, perhaps, thought Andrew, even if it meant the beginning of a blind search and dangerous risks. None of us are in this business for the good of our health. “That blighter is lighting another cigarette,” he said in chagrin. “He’s there for the duration it looks like.”

  “A problem,” Bruno admitted. He finished taking his last photograph, quickly laid the camera aside, and began making contact with his three agents stationed at the outlets to the short cuts from the Bryant courtyard. He passed on their reports without comment to Andrew as they came in, one by one. The first mentioned a woman and two small boys using the short cut from the Mozartplatz within the last half hour. The second, at the Residenzplatz exit, had noted three young girls and then—twenty minutes ago—a single man, dressed in a heavy coat, about thirty-five or so, unhurried, carrying nothing, accosting no one, behaving normally. The third agent, near the Altmarkt, had only one man to report, young, fair-haired, dressed in a heavy dark coat, unhurried, carrying nothing, accosting no one, behaving normally, and he had taken the short cut twenty minutes ago.