by Ellis Peters
But he had! Already he had. No very clear idea as yet, but a perception, at least, of the hand of his enemy. If one party in the duel could begin marshalling his forces and planning his moves, so could the other. And if one withheld his hand from attacking in public out of a morbid but characteristic tenderness of conscience, the like punctilio was not necessarily to be expected of the other.
‘You mean you really don’t know? No one has mentioned …? Don’t you read the papers?’ It was incredible to him that there should be anyone who did not read the papers.
‘Very seldom,’ said Lucas, and glanced involuntarily at the small table by the door, where the folded newspapers still lay untouched.
‘Then read now. See what this rag blazons across the front page!’ Even in this disturbing moment Una could not help reflecting that the Zeitung must be one of the few things in Gries in which Heinz-Otto Graf did not own a controlling interest. A small, smooth fist brandished the offending paper before Lucas’s eyes, and slapped it down upon the table in front of him. But in his agitation Graf made such heavy weather of refolding the sheets to display the front page that for a few moments it was impossible to read anything. ‘Yes, read it for yourself! See what kind of story someone is casting up against us, and then consider what it can mean to me. After the most ambitious plans ever conceived here! On the day after the opening – this! Do you wonder I’m upset?’
Una stole silently across the room to her father’s side. The aggressive motion of the heavy head towards him, thrusting like a bull, the very tone of the indignant voice, seemed to be accusing him of some act of sabotage. Between the blunt, enraged hands that smoothed the front page she caught a glimpse of a banner headline, of Lu’s name, and a large, clear photograph. Something about a letter, received unmailed at the editorial office – signed …
Signed Valentine Gelder. And Lucas, with drawn brows and motionless face, was reading it, with deliberation now, from beginning to end.
Una walked unregarded and in silence round the table and the two men who confronted each other across it, crossed the room, and took up the virgin Zeitung that still lay in its crisp, flat folds on the side table. She read as Lucas read. She had to know the whole of it, the worst that hung over them.
‘LUCAS CORINTH BETRAYED MY FATHER,’ said the headline, prudently qualifying the assertion in smaller print with: ‘says Son’, but making its point as violently as possible from the outset. She could read German reasonably well, and the meaning of the whole, jettisoning an unfamiliar word here and there, was all too clear.
‘The following letter has been received by the editor, dropped into the office letter-box presumably during the hours of darkness. As a matter of extreme public interest we publish it entire. We do not express any opinion on its contents, apart from having satisfied ourselves that the older Gelder certainly was arrested and executed in the circumstances here described, and that the letter contains personal matter of such a nature that we accept its authorship as that of the dead man’s son.’
The letter followed.
‘The town of Gries-am-See is being asked to celebrate the return of a distinguished son in Lucas Corinth, who is held up not only as a fine composer, which he may well be, but also as a hero of the wartime resistance, a title to which his claim is spurious. It is true that he worked, as a young man, with my father in keeping open an escape route into Switzerland for anti-Nazis threatened with imprisonment and death. It is not true that he is therefore a hero. He was not tested until his own safety was at stake, and that test he failed.’
The story followed in scrupulous detail, except that it was seen from another pole. And there was one important omission. No mention was made of Helmut Vogel, waiting in hiding in the hay-hut on the alm. Valentine Gelder had, of necessity, told his wife about the arrangements for his own departure, and therefore had also told her about the planned meeting with Lucas at the Filsertal gate. He had not told her, and therefore she had not told her son, anything about the affairs of other men, but only what she needed and had a right to know. For what is not confided cannot be extracted, and ignorance would be a partial protection for her. No, there were only two characters in this drama, the man and the boy who made an appointment to meet at the gate at eleven o’clock. The man who went there faithfully, because of the boy, though he already knew the time was running out, and waited, and waited. And the boy who got back into Gries to find the opening of the Filsertal cordoned off, and who was never seen or heard of again in the town, by a single soul, until news came through that he was safely in Switzerland. The boy who did not attempt to come to the meeting place, but took to his heels thankfully, skirting the foothills where there was no patrol, and never stopped running until he was over the border.
‘Lucas Corinth abandoned my father to save himself, and has enjoyed, unquestioned, his role of hero while my father suffered torture and death. In the interests of truth I make known the real facts concerning him. In the interests of justice I accept it as my role to redress the balance, and require the price of my father’s life from the man who might have saved it, and instead took advantage of circumstances to make sure of saving his own.’
It was signed, and the signature was reproduced, though the letter was typed. ‘Valentine Gelder’. Type can be good evidence of origin, but not unless you find the typewriter itself, and how many are there in Gries? Handwriting can be identified, but not unless a specimen of the actual hand turns up for comparison. And for any such investigation, the great need is time, Una thought, and time is just what we haven’t got.
‘Yes,’ said Lucas, slowly and clearly. ‘Yes, I see. Indeed I do see how grave a matter it is for the festival, and for you.’ The slight note of satire in his careful omission of himself didn’t prevent his voice from being the bleakest and saddest sound Una had ever heard.
‘Grave? It is monstrous! It could cause a complete boycott. We must take action this very day, you must see that for yourself. Any delay could be fatal, with so much at stake. My reputation … all the time and money I have ploughed into this festival … You understand what this could do to my prospects?’
My prospects! Lucas had merely anticipated by a few seconds, his intuition was always acute. The truth was coming out now with a vengeance. Graf had a lot to gain by a successful season, in prestige, in local influence, above all in money, with future events in view, and those superhotels just taking shape. He’d brought home the strayed lion, and rubbed his hands over a great coup; but if it was turning out a mangy sort of lion, after all, he wouldn’t be particular how he rid himself of it, provided he himself got out clean.
‘It isn’t true, of course?’ he shot out bluntly, with a belligerence which meant that it had better not be true.
‘I tend to avoid “of course” in commenting on human actions. But as you say, it isn’t true.’
‘Then we must take steps instantly to brand this Gelder as the liar he is.’
‘That hardly follows,’ said Lucas, lifting his pale face sharply. ‘What he alleges against me is not true. I didn’t leave his father to die. I did come to the meeting-place as soon as I could, and I didn’t leave until I knew that he’d been taken, and I couldn’t hope to save him. This boy is mistaken. But he is not therefore a liar. Clearly he believes what he says.’
‘Mr Corinth, I’m not interested in his motives. As far as I’m concerned one who spreads lies is a liar, and I’ll call him what he is. If you didn’t run off with the papers at the first sign of danger, and leave him there waiting for you – and of course, you didn’t?’
He stared hard into the drawn face that confronted him, still more than half afraid that his enterprise and initiative had only landed him with an indefensible liability. Great composer or not, if Lucas turned out to be a handicap rather than an asset to this man’s personal plans, if he could not be publicly and gloriously cleared of this charge against him, then he would be ditched as ostentatiously and brutally as possible, to absolve Graf from any suspicion
of loyalty to his bad bargain. It was all shamelessly clear. Valentine Gelder had hit Lucas as hard as he could; but that was a clean blow, it seemed to Una, compared with the tactics of which Herr Graf would be capable. Even his attitude now seemed a worse insult than the accusations of cowardice and treachery.
‘I did not,’ said Lucas quietly.
‘Then it’s a simple matter to reply to this. And you must. In justice to me, you must, Mr Corinth. He’s given his account of the way you left Gries, you must give yours. Equally publicly.’
‘Certainly, whenever you please.’
‘If Mr Corinth would care to dictate,’ said Crista, from the corner to which she had withdrawn when this confrontation began, ‘I will gladly take down his statement and type it for him.’
Una gave her a flashing look of gratitude and liking for the unchanged deference with which she had spoken Lu’s name. But Graf shook his head decidedly.
‘No, that’s not good enough. Let this boy nobody’s ever heard of purvey his calumnies in letters to the editor. For us to do that would be undignified. No, a press conference is what we want. Today! Without reference to this business. We know that’s what they’ll want to ask about, but we don’t have to introduce the subject. There are correspondents here just now serving national and even international papers. All that is at our disposal, why shouldn’t we use it? You’re our visiting celebrity, it’s natural I should call a conference for you. Well, what do you say?’
Lucas said: ‘I’m prepared to face a press conference whenever you choose to call it. Can you get them together today?’
‘After that?’ The gesturing hand almost swept the paper to the floor. ‘They’d come running in five minutes.’
He was beginning to take heart again, to see the advantages there could be in this sensation; provided, of course, that Corinth had a complete and irrefutable answer to the charges. And he’d better have!
‘Three o’clock this afternoon, in the conference room here. Leave the press to me, I’ll have them here. Will that do for you?’
‘Perfectly,’ said Lucas. He said it well, but Una, watching every quiver of his face across the room, knew that he would almost rather have died.
CHAPTER FIVE
With the departure of Herr Graf some kind of atmospheric oppression seemed to have been lifted from the room. All three of the people left behind there in the sudden, blessed, sunlit silence stood mute and motionless for a full minute, coming gradually back to the realisation of mild outward things like the pattern of the damask on the walls, and the thin curl of blue smoke that still crept up out of the ash-tray from Lu’s last cigarette before the lightning struck. They stirred and looked at one another. Crista, the first to move, went silently and picked up the fallen sheets of the Zeitung, and crumpled them away into the waste-paper basket. Not with any passion or emotion, simply as one disposing of what was finished with, and clearing the ground for whatever was to happen next.
‘So it’s out in the open,’ said Una, and was almost startled by the resolute ring of her own voice. ‘Now we know.’
‘Now everyone knows,’ said Lucas, and with hands at this pass admirably steady lit another cigarette. ‘I find it preferable this way.’ He didn’t say he found it less than excruciating, all the same. He tended to use words with a rather extreme degree of precision, and resented their misuse by others.
‘Lu, I’m coming with you to this press conference.’
‘No,’ he said, ‘you are not.’
‘Think what you’re doing! He isn’t calling it to refute anything. Ostensibly, anyhow,’ she said impatiently, seeing him open his mouth to argue the point. ‘You are here as a celebrity. As the celebrity. Yesterday was the opening day. Today he calls the press to talk with his star performer. And that’s what you have to be, until the bombs start falling. And I am known to be here with you, your darling daughter, and what’s more natural than that I should be present at your press conference? Or more unnatural than that I should be absent? I am ammunition, father dear, and you’re wasting your assets if you don’t fire me.’
‘I never liked fire-arms,’ said Lucas, almost absently. ‘I was never any good with them, either.’
‘I’m rather special ammunition. More of a self-guided missile, really.’
‘I believe you! But no, love! Don’t!’ he said on a sharp note of displeasure and pain, seeing her brace herself to override him. ‘If you were there it would be harder for me.’
He turned his back on her, not abruptly but with aching self-restraint, walked gently into his own room, and closed the door. She looked round at Crista, who stood retired into distance and anonymity, with hooded eyes and oblivious face, rendering herself absent even while she was unable to withdraw and let them alone. Una declined to be ignored, even thus considerately. She was not good at pretending, and saw no future in it now.
‘What do you do?’ she inquired helplessly. ‘What do you say in answer to that?’
Crista was not happy. This must have been a shattering day for her. Una had not forgotten the responsive quivering of that correct little oval face while Lu’s hand lay close to hers on the table here, or her loyal offer to record his testimony in his own defence.
‘Fathers can be hell,’ Una admitted wryly, ‘especially when they’re widowers.’ And personable, she thought, but did not say.
‘It could be true,’ said Crista earnestly, ‘what he says. That you would make it harder for him.’
‘It is true, I know that. It could also be true that I should be useful to him. His life doesn’t consist just of this afternoon, and he owes me something too.’ She meant it. Who was he to shield his too-thin spiritual skin with a body and presence that meant so much to at least one other living being? Sometimes she could have clouted him, and rejoiced in his astonished and daunted revaluation of her in consequence.
‘If it is of any help,’ said Crista, ‘I will come and stay with you this afternoon, while he goes to this conference.’
It occurred to Una then that it was sensitive of her not to offer to arrange a trip to the circus, or something, to distract the anxious daughter while the press crucified the father. Perhaps she really did feel some of the currents that raged about her. And perhaps she had a genuine glimpse of what Lu would be experiencing when he faced his dissectors.
‘That’s very kind of you,’ she said. ‘I’d like you to.’
‘I think he would like me to,’ said Crista.
It was five o’clock before they came up from the conference room, Lucas, Herr Graf, and the elderly stranger with the mild, weather-beaten face.
Crista had come to spend the waiting time with Una, as she had promised, had ordered tea for her, filled up the dragging moments as well as she could, and blessedly refrained from being either cheerful and rallying or hushed and over-sympathetic. They had been only too well apprised of the influx of newsmen by the sound of car after car turning in on the fine gravel of the forecourt. By mutual consent they said not a word of Lucas.
The tea had been removed long before they heard voices in the corridor, and a hand at the outer door.
‘They are here,’ said Crista, rising, and reached at once for her handbag. ‘I will have fresh tea sent up as I go, shall I?’
Then the first emphatic voice erupted into the room ahead of its owner, and the first voice, naturally, belonged to Heinz-Otto Graf, in mid-sentence and stopping for no man.
‘—very well, we have now to plan our own strategy. This is to be a council of war. What we have just done is only the first move. Defence is not enough, we have to attack. Let us sit down and consider how to spike this maniac’s guns.’
His metaphors, Una thought with dislike, but also with a degree of sour and reluctant amusement, were not only juvenile but absurdly out of date. But his energy was real enough, and his ruthlessness was beyond question. He looked round the room with the eye of a proprietor – it was, after all, his hotel! – observed Crista unobtrusively preparing to leave as soon
as the others had entered, omitted her from the perfunctory grunt of greeting he directed at Una – Crista, after all, was his employee, practically his property! – and issued instead an order and a dismissal: ‘We shan’t require your services now, Fräulein Lohr, but I shall have occasion to get in touch with you later this evening. You’ll be at home, if I call you in, say, an hour?’
‘Fräulein Lohr is very welcome to stay, if she would like to,’ said Lucas, giving her a brief and shadowed smile. ‘I have every confidence in her.’
‘Thank you,’ she said gravely. ‘But I have things I must do, if you’ll excuse me.’ And to Graf: ‘I will be in my flat, if you wish to telephone me.’
The stranger held the door for her, and closed it gently after her when she was gone. He came forward into the room, a big, rangy, lean man of about sixty, with a mountaineer’s long bones and wind-burned skin, and blue, bright, far-sighted eyes. Short curls of crisp iron-grey hair clustered at his temples and fringed a bald scalp, polished and tanned to glossy Indian red.
‘This is Herr Dieter Wehrle,’ said Lucas. ‘My daughter.’ A seamed brown hand, a countryman’s hand, engulfed Una’s fingers. ‘Herr Wehrle is chief of police here in Gries.’
‘He did not call me in,’ said Wehrle, observing the questioning glance Una darted at her father. He had the mountain man’s vast, deep but quiet voice, a murmur out of a cavern, and a smile that creased the corners of his eyes. ‘I can also read.’
‘I’m glad you’re here,’ said Una truthfully; all the more because it seemed clear that he had not been summoned to the press conference by Herr Graf, either, and almost certainly he was not in that indefatigable collector’s possession. ‘I wanted to come to you from the beginning.’
Lucas crossed to the table and helped himself to a cigarette. He looked drawn and tired, and the faint, fastidious disgust that showed in his eyes and lips told her all too clearly how he had been handled. She watched him narrowly, and asked, with some hesitancy: ‘How did it go? They weren’t – hostile?’
