by Ellis Peters
‘I wish you had accepted the gun,’ she said, in a voice unnaturally quiet and dulled. ‘It isn’t going to be easy to kill you in cold blood.’
She had been consistent throughout, that fantastic touch of chivalry identified her beyond any doubt.
‘Yes,’ he said aloud, the faint smile warming into something very close to tenderness, ‘you are his daughter, I see that. It wasn’t my intention to make things harder for you, but I couldn’t risk carrying a weapon. I never really got used to guns, you know. I might easily have done something I never meant to do.’
He reached behind him, and set down the glass very carefully. It would be a pity if it broke when he fell, it was Venetian, and old. To say nothing of the stain on the carpet – though, of course, the brandy wouldn’t be the only stain.
‘I suppose it was you who lobbed a stone into the bushes to draw Geestler away? And then shot out my window from the window opposite. Why didn’t you shoot to kill then? I’m sure you could have. It would have been the easiest way.’
True, she was somewhat under-gunned for that distance, but he knew that was not the reason. She could have taken her stand somewhere closer if she had wished.
‘I owed it to myself and you,’ she said in the same soft, hopeless, relentless tone, not denying her ability, ‘to face you as I killed you.’
‘I’m grateful for that,’ he said. ‘I prefer it this way, too. To know you, and to have everything open and clear between us, that makes everything better. For me, and I hope for you. Now I have time to see death coming, as he did, and to understand how much I regret and resent it, and yet how little afraid of it I am when it comes to the point. And to realise that I bear you no grudge at all. Don’t be afraid that I shall upset you by pleading for my life. That’s no longer the main issue between us two.’
It was true. How and when had it happened, this metamorphosis, this release from the fear of fear and from all restraints? With almost no time left at all, no room for anything but absolute sincerity, all the non-essentials fell off like a cast skin. He looked her full in the face, gravely and gently, and said what he had to say.
‘I’m more concerned for you. When you come round to believing my story, some day – as you will – remember that I said to you, you need never reproach yourself. I’ve always understood your position. Now I’m even becoming reconciled to my own. Yes, I was afraid, that night when I ran for the border. I was afraid when I waited over there in the woods. Yes, I was to blame. If I had stayed I might have died, too, but I might have been able to save him. It’s not for nothing that I’ve had this burden on my mind all these years. Now it no longer distresses me. I behaved like a man, not a demi-god, because a man is all I am. So be it, I accept myself as I am, fallible, irresolute, complex, no hero. But I did my best with the material I had, and that’s enough for me. I came to the meeting-place. Late, and shaking in my shoes, but I came.’
She said: ‘I do not believe you.’
But how could she shut her mind against belief, she who had grown to know every wincing impulse that moved him, all his self-doubt and self-harrowing? He saw and was sorry for the suffering he had cost her since she had come to know him. All her dispositions for his privacy and protection, part of her rôle at first, had generated their own warmth as the hours passed, and become real, until now her whole instinct towards him was to guard and shield him, she who had all her life been waiting to fulfil herself by killing him.
‘You needn’t take my life,’ he said gently, ‘I give it to you, if that will make it better for you. All you have to do is squeeze the trigger, and remember afterwards that you did me no wrong. All you are doing is accepting a free gift from me. It’s not much to give you, in return for what you’ve given back to me, my peace of mind.’
Her eyes seemed to grow still larger in her fixed and tormented face. She drew back her head against the door as though in recoil from a convulsion. He saw the corners of her lips contract. But she never stopped watching him, and her hand never wavered.
‘You know how to turn everything to your advantage,’ she said in a whisper, ‘but it won’t save you. I’m expendable, like you. What happens to me afterwards doesn’t matter.’
‘It matters to me,’ he said. ‘It’s the only problem left. For God’s sake, if there was no escaping this, why couldn’t you put a second bullet in me out there on the terrace, and then throw the gun in the lake? Who would ever have thought of you? Now it’s too late for that. There’s got to be another way of saving you.’
She stepped away from the door, one long, steady pace, and slowly lifted the hand that held the gun, levelling it at his heart.
‘I don’t want to be saved,’ she said. ‘There will be nothing to survive for, why should I make the effort?’
He never knew why his heart turned in him at that, as though it had read into her despair something that had reversed suddenly into hope. Time was so short now that his thinking was done with his blood and his flesh, and the mind had no conscious part in it. Perhaps she had meant only that her life had been trained all into one narrow purpose, and once that was accomplished would have no further meaning. But perhaps that was not all, not the only source of the total emptiness of grief and desolation that he saw in her eyes. The world without her enemy was not worth the effort to keep it … or the world without Lucas Corinth, whatever he was, enemy or …?
‘Then it’s up to me, isn’t it,’ he said, his eyes holding hers, ‘to make the effort for you. I told you you could have my life, did I ever say you could have and throw away your own? I’ll fight you for that as long as I have breath. I’ll repeat and repeat to you that I have never told you anything but truth, and truth is what I’m telling you now, and you shall hear me, whether you want to or not, whether you kill me or not. Your father was my friend, the man I admired more than anyone I’d ever known, and the orders he gave me I carried out, to the letter, until there was a cordon between him and me, and I couldn’t get to him. Yes, I was young, yes, I was afraid, yes, I would even have liked to run, but I did not. As soon as I could I came to the gate …’
‘You’re lying,’ she said. ‘Do you think I haven’t heard this story a thousand times over from my mother? They told her! That you ran, with the papers that should have been for him—’
‘They told her! THEY? The authorities? The Nazis who killed him? She might be crazy with her loss, and believe their word rather than mine, but can you? She might need a scapegoat, to make survival bearable, but do you need one?’
He watched her, and it seemed to him that somewhere in her deathly coldness some core of live, unsuspected heat had burned up suddenly, for two crimson flashes sprang into her icy cheeks, and two more into the blackness of her dilated eyes. It seemed, too, that there was a tremor from somewhere outside them both, that caused strange vibrations to flicker through the air, errant whispers like distant voices. If he could have detached enough attention to identify them they might even have been significant; but there was no longer anything of significance except the two of them, and the death condensing now very slowly in the crook of her forefinger.
‘If you throw both our lives away now,’ he said, ‘at least I’ll make sure you live the rest of yours, minutes or years, knowing that they lied, and she was mistaken, and I told you the truth you wouldn’t hear.’
He had raised his voice, though he did not realise it, he was discharging the words at her with deliberate ferocity, like bullets.
‘I did come. I did see a man standing in the darkness among the trees, I did call him by your father’s name – your name.’ He was watching her finger tighten, and the tension of waiting for the shot sharpened his utterance almost into a cry: ‘I called out to him: Valentine, Gott sei Dank!’
The world rushed abruptly back in upon them like the recoil of a wave, bursting the bubble of their isolation, snatching away the last of his words, startling her into the first long tremor of feeling and horror. Yet she understood before he did. Outside the door a g
reat, hoarse voice, a beery voice that might have well been dragged unwillingly out of an inn, was shouting in triumph that those were the words, that was the voice, that in all his life there had been only one such night, and how could he forget, in twenty-eight years or fifty, that encounter at the Filsertal gate?
And again and again the voice repeated, for vindicating emphasis:
‘“Valentine, Gott sei dank!-Gott sei dank!…”’
And then hands rattled at the door-handle, and the anxious knocking began, and all the invading, clamouring voices demanding to be let in.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Lucas put up both hands to clutch at his head in a momentary access of faintness. The room went round. For an instant he even thought this might be dying, and he had somehow failed to feel the small puncture that was draining away the world from him like a stream of blood. Then his head cleared again, and sound and vision reassembled. She stood as before, motionless between him and the door, her face so drawn and exhausted that she might have been the one who had all but died.
The hand that held the gun had sunk to her side, and hung nervelessly. She did not seem able to move, or to turn away her eyes from his face. And outside the door a commanding fist was thumping for admittance, and the voices went on with their frightened threnody, Una’s voice pleading with Lucas to be alive, and a young man’s voice loudly urging that the door should be opened. It took Lucas a moment to identify his horn-player. Never before had he heard him sound so desperately in earnest.
The other voice was still there, too, it had been no illusion; that rough, chesty voice rumbling harshly in the depths, in broad local dialect, reiterating insistently: ‘Those very words he cried to me that night – who else should know them? And I told him: They’ve taken him, I said, and they’re looking for another – they’re looking for you!’
She heard everything, and understood everything. Now there was no more power in her to move, or think or speak; she stood in a pale, exhausted stupor, waiting for something, anything, to fill the vacuum where the hate and the dedicated purpose had been. In a sense she had died.
‘Unlock the door,’ shouted Mike Brace, shaking it with the weight of his shoulder. ‘We’ve found our witness, he’s here, he’s ready to testify. You heard him. Open the door!’
‘I’m coming,’ said Lucas mildly. ‘Everything’s all right. Stop that noise!’
It stopped on the instant, on dead silence; and then he clearly heard the long, soft, indrawn breaths, the vast releasing sighs of relief and astonishment.
‘Nothing whatever has happened,’ he said firmly. ‘I’ll be with you in a moment.’
He went towards her, and she still seemed not to hear or see him. But when he held out his hand silently, she gave him the gun. He slipped it into his pocket, and then, laying his arm gently about her shoulders, drew her to a deep chair and put her into it, turning it so that the high back sheltered her from the sight of anyone entering the room.
Only then did he let them in. Una, soiled, crumpled and barefoot, weak with reaction, but intact; her eyes wide with mystification and – yes! – mistrust, her hands scratched. Mike Brace breathless and bright-eyed and uneasy, still clutching his horn in its shabby case – did the boy take it to bed with him? And the third, a lean dark bandit of a man under a limp old felt hat, who slid his foot across the threshold as though feeling for a possible step, and faced into the light with unwinking eyes, turning his head sidelong from one to another as they moved or spoke, with a sharp, listening attention which made it clear that his ears made up to him for another sense he lacked. And this visitor, too, to add to the dreamlike surrealism of this reunion, clutched a battered violin-case under his left arm. The witness had known what he was about when he had identified his man unseen. Lucas had talked in the dark with a blind man.
‘I’m all right,’ said Lucas, briefly hugging Una to his heart, and even raising a concerned hand to stroke back her dishevelled hair and touch a long scratch on her cheek. ‘Everything’s all right now, nothing to worry about any more. It’s I who should be worrying about you. Look at you! What have you been doing, climbing trees?’
‘I’m all right – all I need is a bath and a clean dress. I … Lu, we thought – we heard the shot …’ She looked over his shoulder to the arm of Crista’s chair, and the pale hand that lay lax on the brocaded upholstery; and she looked into his face, and knew that he wanted her not to say anything of what she knew or guessed. He was alive and unhurt, and he had said that there was nothing to worry about any more. But there was more to it than that, something he had recovered, something that made him more complete than he had been before. She kissed him briefly and lightly instead of finishing the sentence. Whatever he wanted he should have; there would be a good reason for it. He was back in unmistakable command, and she was content with that.
‘Mike’s been all day looking for Herr Spindler,’ she said, ‘except for the rehearsal. That’s why he was late. I don’t know how he knew where to look, or what to look for, but he did, and he found him.’
‘This,’ said Mike, his hand at the blind man’s elbow, ‘is Heini Spindler.’
‘I’m beginning to feel,’ said Lucas with a slightly dazed smile, ‘that you carry that horn for magic purposes, Mr Brace. Are you sure you didn’t just blow it, and summon him?’
Mike looked down at the scuffed leather case, and grinned. ‘I didn’t have time to take it back to my room after the rehearsal. I had to leave it where I borrowed the bike, and pick it up when I got back. I can’t afford to leave it lying about, it’s all I’ve got.’
‘You seem to me to need nothing more. It seems I’m infinitely obliged to you, even if I don’t quite understand yet what’s been going on. And to Herr Spindler, too,’ he said, turning to the blind man. ‘I remember seeing you once, at least, before, though I didn’t know you then. And hearing you, which was also a pleasure. You are the fiddler we were admiring in the procession.’
The blind man tilted his shaggy head and slid off the limp hat into his left hand, holding out the right to Lucas.
‘You’re the man,’ he said, feeling at the fingers he held, his own hand gnarled like the knotty roots of a tree. ‘Even your voice I might have known, for all these years. I never forget a voice, it’s face and walk and all to me. I had good reason to remember yours. But better than that, here were you with the words in your mouth again that you said to me then. Every word between us I remember. That was the kind of night a man doesn’t forget.’
‘I’m very grateful,’ said Lucas from his heart, and for far more than his life. ‘Has Mr Brace told you already what we need from you? Will you be willing to tell the police about that night, and let them write down your statement for you? It would be of the greatest help to me. And to others.’
The lean, beaked face had cocked sideways at the mention of the police, who in the usual way were no particular friends of his. The thought tickled him. He said he would be pleased, and laughed aloud at the irony.
‘And you? I hear you got safely away over the mountains that night, and are come home now a great man. You heard my music, shall I hear yours?’
‘You shall,’ said Lucas, shaken and pleased. ‘I’ll see to it. And you won’t object if the newspapers are allowed to publish what you have to tell?’
‘What I say I say for whoever cares to hear.’ Being a celebrity was not important to him, but it would be entertaining for once in his life. In his own chosen way he was a celebrity already. Hardly a wedding or a patronal festival in the province was complete without him.
‘I’m deeply grateful to you both,’ said Lucas, ‘and in a quarter of an hour or so I hope to be able to show it. But just now would you mind going away and leaving Crista and me alone for a while? What I think you might do, if you’ll be so kind, is to go and call in Hugo Geestler and Richard from their wildgoosechase in the garden, and tell them we’ve found our witness, and he’s willing to confirm my story just as soon as we can get it into the press.
I wonder you managed to bring a boat in and get up here without being challenged—’
‘We didn’t,’ said Una. ‘They know we’re here, they stopped us right down below, but when they saw who we were they told us to get up into the house quickly, and make sure you stayed in cover. They’re still beating the shrubberies.’
It was curiously gratifying to know that they had not let even these allies creep in unchallenged. ‘They could stop that now,’ he said. ‘Please ask them – will you? – not to disturb us just yet, but assure them we’re all right.’ He met their doubting, respectful eyes calmly, and said: ‘Crista was rather upset by the incident, she insisted on locking the door for safety. Don’t worry, all she needs is time to recover from the shock.’
And he smiled at Una, so guilelessly that she almost believed him. He was hardly even trying to deceive, only to enlist them all in whatever it was he was doing, and meant to do.
‘And please take care of Herr Spindler for me until I come, find him a drink and a meal. Will you go with them? I’ll come very soon.’
And to Mike, with the authoritative and tranquil mixture of laughter and gravity that seemed to have come to him as a gift out of this evening’s crisis: ‘I should think you might blow our friends a fanfare from the terrace, Mr Brace, that should bring them running. Please apologise to them for all the trouble I’ve caused. And tell them it’s at an end.’ But how was he ever going to explain away the bullet-hole in Herr Graf’s window? Better not even try. Never explain, never – except to two boys erroneously included in the roster of possible assassins – apologise! ‘Would you ask them to be so kind as to take a statement from Herr Spindler before I join them? Then I can’t be held to have done any prompting.’
