by Peter Watson
“RMC, the Recorded Music Company, out of New York.”
“Do they make the records or the machines to play them on?”
“Records, for the moment.”
“You mean you’ve heard something?”
“I mean it’s a risk, but maybe it’s not a bad risk. Remember what I said. It’s speculative.”
I thought it over, but not for long. I had to get out to Mondsee. I fished in my wallet and took out some money. “Here you are, Sammy. This has to be the last company I try. Atlantic Insurance is worth eight hundred and sixty eight dollars … here’s another seven dollars. Do as you did before and buy me eight hundred and seventy five dollars worth of RMC. Or as close to that as you can get. And let’s pray this works.”
We grinned at one another. He was a good man.
When I arrived at Mondsee that day Konstanze and Dieter were waiting on the other side of the road, in the summerhouse. I turned the car before parking so that it was facing the way we needed to go to get to Dachstein, then I let myself in through the wooden gate. The heat that had accumulated over the previous days was reflected off the lake, now very still, and from the walls of the summerhouse, waxy and shiny.
I had brought with me a brown paper parcel. Fancy wrapping paper was a thing of the future. I handed it to Dieter. “For your return to school. And happy birthday on Friday.”
He took the packet, delighted. “Gosh!” he said. “You know my birthday. You know everything.” He tore at the paper. Inside was a box wrapped in tape, which his mother helped him to open. Inside the box was some white tissue paper, which Dieter sent tumbling to the floor in his hurry, and a new pair of binoculars, very similar to the ones he had cracked on the Löser. He grabbed them and scanned the lake, searching out some fisherman in the hazy distance. “They’re good,” he said in a mature tone. “Very good.”
“They were made in America.”
Dieter examined the maker’s mark critically. It had not occurred to him that such good equipment could be other than German. At first, I think, he was disappointed—not being German, to Dieter, meant that the binoculars were not the best. So I added, quite correctly, “They are what we use in the Army.” That made all the difference. Now he had something to show off at school; no other boy could boast a piece of genuine U.S. Army equipment so soon after the war. He turned to me and gravely shook my hand, his way of saying thank you in a man-to-man fashion.
Konstanze, I noticed, had turned her back on this scene. She had been delighted with the gift but, obviously, shocked when I had revealed that I knew Dieter’s birthday. I realized why. Not only did this confirm that I had read her letters, but also that I had been through them again, perhaps recently, perhaps as recently as the night before in order to check Dieter’s birthday.
I had been deliberately obvious in my approach that day. It was the only way for me to gain the upper hand, to bring everything out into the open.
And for a time it seemed to work. During the drive to Dachstein, Konstanze was moody and she let Dieter do most of the talking. Since it was his last day I had promised to let him sit at the wheel and now the boy kept up a number of technical inquiries about cars which, at the least, filled in the time.
Dachstein was one of our most distant destinations and, as on previous occasions, the plan was to take in a couple of churches after visiting the glacier. This we reached shortly after noon. Dachstein is fairly spectacular, as glaciers go. The observation point is, or it was then, a little way above the ice and from there you can see not only the two-kilometer-long silver tongue slithering out of the mountains but also the end of the ice, thick as a New York skyscraper is high. I had no idea how noisy glaciers are; the dripping and the cracking could be heard from where we were, a hundred meters away. A notice on the railing of the observation point drew the visitor’s attention to the fact that the glacier was 3.6 million years old and grew at the rate of forty-three centimeters a year. Just to emphasize how slow that was, forty-three centimeters was marked on the railing by two deep cuts in the wood.
For a brief moment I borrowed the glasses from Dieter. There was something on the far side of the valley which I wanted to show him. I found it.
I pointed, handing back the binoculars. “A frozen waterfall,” I said. “Scan along the edge of the glacier till you come to the waterfall, then track up the cascade of ice. When you come to it, you’ll recognize it.”
“Recognize what?” said Dieter, looking up at me.
“Wait and see.”
He fiddled with the glasses to get them focused. Slowly he moved up the glacier, stopping at the foot of the waterfall, inspecting the peculiar shapes of the ice at this point of collision and the strange ways the light was trapped and reflected. Then he began to follow the line of the waterfall back up the way it had come, millions of years ago, before it had been frozen.
“The shapes get better and better,” he said. “Wait till I tell the boys at school. Is that what you mean? Long white needles.” A thought struck him. “Surgeons should use stalactites as operating needles. They wouldn’t need to sterilize them and they could throw them away after.”
I said nothing.
His glasses continued to slant upward toward the top of the waterfall. I was just beginning to think that he had missed it when, to my satisfaction, he let out a scream, a half-swallowed shout, both excited and repelled.
“Ahhhrrgh! Is … is … he dead?”
“Is who dead?” Konstanze flashed me a look of anger as she snatched the glasses from Dieter and searched the waterfall herself.
The boy was horrified but enthralled too. All children are morbid and he was no different from anyone else. The grin on his face may have been macabre but it was a grin all the same. He couldn’t wait to have the binoculars back from his mother.
“It happened in 1938,” I said. “Eight years ago. His name is Albert Fest and he used to be well known in Austrian climbing circles.” I had been told the story at the dance in Salzburg by another lieutenant, from a different unit, who had also had his woman of the evening stolen from him. “Besides being a climber he was a gambler and, one day for a bet, he was challenged that he could not climb the waterfall. It’s a sheer drop, of course, but on the other hand the ice is as hard as iron; a fit, experienced climber should have no difficulty hammering in those metal pitons they use. The chief problem is the cold, but there again an experienced climber could foresee that and plan accordingly. As you can see, Fest nearly made it; in fact he got higher than where he is now before he slipped. Unfortunately for him the waterfall had been hit by debris from an avalanche a couple of weeks before and some of those slender icicles you were talking about had been snapped in two, turning them into jagged daggers sticking up in the air. He slipped onto one of those and it pierced his lung.”
“How do they know?” said Dieter. His mother had given him back his glasses now. “I can’t see that clearly from here.”
“There is a closer spot, above the glacier. Fortunately, Fest died instantly. But as it’s so cold up there, his body just froze and will not decompose.”
Dieter’s eyes widened in wonder. “You mean he will stay there like that … forever?” What a story for the other boys at school.
I nodded and Konstanze gave me another black look.
“What happened to the bet?” Dieter asked carefully. “How could the loser pay?”
“Good question. Apparently the man who won felt so guilty at being the cause of Fest’s death—however accidentally—that he behaved as if he had lost and donated the money to a charity which helps the families of climbers who have been killed in the mountains.”
“What a cheerful story,” said Konstanze, speaking at last. “Don’t you think we have had enough of ice and glaciers, Dieter?”
“Yes. All right,” he said, taking a last glimpse through his glasses at the body. Then a fresh thought struck him. “Can I have my driving lesson now, please? You did promise.”
This was much more t
o his mother’s liking. His legs were much too short to reach the clutch or the accelerator pedal but I let him sit on my lap and steer the car as we drove back down the mountain. I found a track which turned off the road and led around a tiny lake; there he could steer legally and make all the mistakes he wanted.
Seeing her son so absorbed helped to relax Konstanze that day but even so she remained on edge much more than on any of our other excursions. It was the effect, I suppose, of my having harped on about the letters. It became more obvious when we finally managed to prize Dieter away from the wheel and we visited the churches at Schladming and Radstadt. They were small but exceptionally elaborate, making up in prettiness for what they lacked in grandeur. By now Dieter would do anything to avoid the dark interiors of the churches and he dashed off to play in the cemeteries. Konstanze, for her part, introduced a new ploy that day. On entering each church, she simply knelt in prayer for what seemed, to me, an eternity. I wandered about for minutes on end all by myself looking at stained glass and inspecting the stucco, and trying to work out what was going on inside her head.
Was she really praying, or just avoiding me? Was she praying for Rudolf? In any event, she was showing me that she was capable of having a private life into which I could not pry. At Radstadt, the second church we visited that afternoon, she kept me waiting for twenty-five minutes. Who could pray for that long? And about what?
I wrote a postcard to my mother and one to Konstanze. I drew pictures of the frescoes and the mosaics on the back of Konstanze’s, so she would remember what she had seen, but even then she kept her distance.
As we drove back along the Enns Valley, with Dieter once more curled up asleep on the backseat, his binoculars wrapped around his neck, I reflected that what should have been a very successful day had backfired in some ways. I had thought myself so clever to have remembered, dimly, from the letters, that Dieter had been born about this time of the year. And I had been really pleased with myself, the night before, when I had found the letter which confirmed the date. A lot of good it had done me. It was as if the intimacies of the previous day—the move to first names, sharing the brandy—had never happened.
At home Dieter woke and thanked me again for the binoculars and his driving lesson. He promised to write me a proper thank-you note from school. He ran off across the lawn to show his new acquisition to Martha.
“Tomorrow?” I said diffidently, trying to show Konstanze that I was aware of her mood. She was bending down to pick up Dieter’s jacket, which he had left lying on the backseat.
She shook her head. “We have to visit the doctor—to check Dieter’s Then I must take him to the railway station at eleven. He has a heavy trunk.”
“I could help.”
“No. The train is always late. And I hate long good-byes. We are always very sad. Let us be alone.”
5
I sat at my desk the next morning watching the clock. I had looked at the map and knew that, to get to Vienna by rail, Konstanze and Dieter and Martha would have to travel to Frankenmarkt to catch the train. I knew that it would take them about an hour to get there and that the train was supposed to leave at eleven. I was therefore able to follow their movements inside my head.
I can admit my feelings now better than I could then. I missed Konstanze. Having to be by myself, even for a day, in Salzburg seemed an endless ordeal. Worse, Konstanze had left me with words which suggested she was not overanxious to see me again. I had blundered that day. I should not have looked up Dieter’s birthday; we had been set back yet again. I should never have read those letters. For the first time I saw what I had done from a different perspective. I would have hated it if anyone had read my correspondence. It was like been burgled psychologically, like having your past stolen. Now that I had become something rather more than Konstanze’s interrogator, I could see that. And I was, for the first time, truly sorry. So I was eager to see her once more and try to set things on an even keel.
That day I performed all sorts of time-wasting chores to fill up the hours as best I could. I walked to the office. I read the paper thoroughly. I answered my mail, writing to my wife, giving her the name of a mutual friend in San Francisco who, I told her, would be my lawyer and handle our divorce.
I called Maurice, just for a chat. He was cheerful, friendly as ever, but his news upset me. He was going home. He had heard from Wren, he said, who had told him that the art recovery unit was winding down and that in view of his success with the old masters stolen from Vienna, Ghent could be one of the first to leave, having done his bit.
“When are you going, Maurice?” I asked, feeling suddenly bereft.
“Two, three weeks, dear boy. Got to bring all my reports up to date first. Then it’s back to Cambridge in time for the summer term. That’s the best of all. Punting on the river, summer tea parties, the rowing races, the May balls. All that will be getting going again. Time to put away wartime things, eh?”
It was not what I wanted to hear. “What about Hermann, Maurice? And Spitfire and Messerschmidt?”
He chortled. “For a start, they’ve become Spit and Mess. Very apt names, Walter, I congratulate you. Everything they touch is disarranged and covered in slobber. We are all good friends except that, since they were born here, they treat this place as home. It’s as if they just evacuated to the trees for the duration of the war and are now back in their real habitat. You’ll never wear your cap again, Walter. I’m afraid it now looks like what it has become—a squirrels’ nest. But I’m sure they’re very grateful. Hermann licks them all the time, her way of cleaning them, I guess. But it does tend to make everything wet.”
“I wonder if I’ll see you again, Maurice, before you go? I’m stuck down here.”
“How’s it going? No news of—von what’s-his-name yet?”
“It’s the most difficult case I’ve had, dear boy,” I quipped, imitating his accent. “I’m probably going to have to crack the wife, who’s very tough and very beautiful.”
“Well, I’ll definitely be here for two weeks,” said Maurice. “If you are not back by then you’ll just have to come visit me in Cambridge. You could do worse.”
We hung up. Our “race” had not even been mentioned. I felt very envious of him. He had not a care. He had never been married, had had a good war, finishing it with a great coup, and he was going back to a peace which for him was just as exciting and satisfying as the war had been. “Time to put away wartime things.” Those words had stung.
A corporal came in and said that Hobel wanted to see me. Thankfully, the old man’s secretary wasn’t at her desk as I went through. There was enough bad news around that day; I didn’t need her. Hobel was his usual watery self.
“I talked with Eisenhower’s office,” he snarled, without greeting or preamble of any kind. “The art recovery unit is winding up soon. You’ve got another week. Then I can play this case the way it suits me. Either bring me the information a week from now or get lost.”
I didn’t even sit down. He wasn’t interested in the progress I was, or wasn’t, making. He just wanted to be rid of me and he had finally managed it. So he could shove it. I wouldn’t tell him anything. At least I now had a week entirely to myself. I turned, but as I did so he spoke again.
“You know why you’ve got only a week?”
I stared at him.
“Two nights ago a U.S. Army staff car was hijacked in Southern France. No one was injured but the car disappeared. The same night, in Augsberg, a consignment of officers’ uniforms disappeared, stolen from a quartermaster’s warehouse.” Hobel permitted himself a sneer. “The guard responsible has been interrogated by real interrogators and has already confessed. He was paid off to turn a blind eye. The people who paid him were German or, at least, spoke German. They paid cash. Gold.”
I wanted to hit him.
“Who would need U.S. Army officers’ uniforms? Who would need a staff car? It would be a swift way of traveling, eh? There are hundreds of staff cars, all over Europe.
The underground would have to change only the license plate. We know they are already able to get access to ID documents. They can buy their way into anything, with all the gold they have. These people are getting away, Wolff. And you are doing fuck all to stop them. Well, not for much longer.”
It may have been that interview with Hobel that caused me to think the way I did that day. Or it may have been my conversation with Saul Wolfert, who had telephoned while I was out of the office and whose call I returned at once.
“It’s slow, Walter, when your men are having to work undercover, but there is some progress to report. This man Aubing hasn’t showed yet, but it appears that the warehouse I told you about is busy most nights and continues to look abandoned during the day. Something is going on there. A truckload of something is delivered every night. More exciting, though, my men have discovered that an inn backs onto the warehouse and they think that people go in via that. People walk in and out of the inn perfectly naturally all the time, as though they are going for a drink; but they slip through into the warehouse. My men have followed people into the inn, only to find they are not there.”
“What do you want to do?”
“That partly depends on you. I don’t want to let this situation in Krumau go on for too long. It might come to an end naturally, my men might be spotted—all sorts of things might go wrong. So I want to raid the place as soon as I can, one night after there has been an influx of people and after a truckload of whatever it is has just arrived. But how are you getting on? What would suit you? You’ve probably heard about these uniforms that are missing. It occurs to me they might turn up in Krumau.”
I was thinking fast, but not in directions I was supposed to. “Can you hold off for a week?”
Saul hesitated. “That’s on the long side, Walter. Longer than I had anticipated.”
“If you can’t, Saul, you can’t. But if you can, it might help me.”
“You’re playing a deep game, Wolff. I won’t ask you what it is, because I know you won’t tell me, so I’ll try to hold off for as long as you ask. I owe you something. But let’s talk daily. I may have to go ahead if anything changes. Okay?”
