by Peter Watson
8
It was pouring the next day, too, silver and slate-colored streaks hitting the pavement with such ferocity that they bounced back into the air. The Goldener Hirsch had given my old room to someone else. I could hardly blame them, but my new room felt quite different and I regarded it as an omen.
Hobel insisted that I not take my own car on this last journey but that I ride in a jeep, with an armed guard, plus a backup vehicle—“in case of any funny business.” No one, not even I, expected the von Zells to turn up as arranged.
Early that morning, Sammy had winked at me and shown me his slip of yellow paper. The previous day Galaxy had bought a chain of radio stations with which they could plug the records they made at RMC. My shares had jumped another five cents; at $1,026.45, I had made my first money on the stock exchange and was within $31.55 of Maurice, whose shares were “steady.” But I didn’t have time to call him.
The convoy, if it can be called that, left Salzburg around 9:30 A.M. and took the main road to Linz, which meant that I never had a final look at Konstanze’s house in Mondsee, as I had intended.
If anything, the weather got steadily worse as we drove east. We were held up at Linz due to a damaged bridge and for a while I was worried that we would not make it to St. Florian in time. But within twenty minutes we were through the town and crossing the plain toward the white building.
It was just before a quarter to noon as we pulled up by the Prandtauer gate. The rain was slapping against the long white wall of the monastery, the grass and trees cowed by the weight of the water and the wind. I got down, motioning the others to stay where they were. I turned up my collar and hurried along by the wall into the church. As I pulled back the huge door I glimpsed, beyond the edge of the church itself, the black headstones in the graveyard, like the shiny lumps of black tar that had stuck to the wheels of my car when the weather had been so hot. When Konstanze and I had been getting to know one another.
Inside the church it was empty but unexpectedly light. I had forgotten that. I slapped at my tunic to shake off the surplus water and stepped down the aisle. It was ten to twelve.
I sat more or less where Konstanze and I had sat on our previous visit. But I didn’t pray this time. What would I have prayed for? That they both came? Or that only she would come? I still didn’t know. I didn’t know anything. I stared toward the altar. Someone had changed the flowers, they were now yellow, Konstanze’s color, that I remember. The sound of the rain could be heard against the windows, an uneven clattering. In one or two places it had forced itself inside the church, staining the walls and ceiling. I had brought with me the book Maurice had given me. I dipped into it. I had not realized what a foolish old man Bruckner had been. All those young girls he fell for who hardly knew he existed. I pitied him in the way Konstanze pitied me.
The monastery bell struck the hour. Noon to the world no longer at war but sext to the monks who still used the medieval ecclesiastical clock.
There was no sign of anyone. Despite the coolness of the church, I began to sweat. All of a sudden I realized that I was desperate for Konstanze to come. No one else. I wanted to see her again. I could not quite remember what she looked like; my mind was betraying me. The precise arrangement of her features became blurred. I wanted to see her again, had to see her again, like a man in need of a drug.
The rain was drumming against the windows, slapping against the roof. The light in the nave seemed to come from the walls rather than from outside, as if the architect had enlisted divine aid in decorating the church and the walls had absorbed light from more generous days and now gave off a glow when it was needed. I heard footsteps.
What startled me at first was that the footsteps came not from behind, as they should have done if the main door had been opened, but from the crypt. Konstanze and Rudolf must have been down there all this time, alone together, and, I suspected, praying.
I rose as they came toward me. Konstanze was dressed in her gray coat, with the maroon scarf. The man was taller than I expected and wore a long blue coat, with a belt. His hair was swept back and he had a scar on his left cheek. He carried a hat, a trilby. He stopped.
The war was over—no salutes—I shook his hand. Like his wife, he did not whisper in churches. His voice was deep, warm, a voice that was easy to like, more at home with soft vowels than hard consonants.
“Thank you for helping my wife, Professor,” he said, setting his jaw to one side, just as I had seen Dieter do. “You are a better German than I.”
Involuntarily I looked at Konstanze. She nodded and smiled but didn’t speak. I turned back to him. “You just have time to kiss your wife goodbye, Herr Doktor. Then we must go.”
I walked to the rear of the church, turning my back on them as they embraced. I couldn’t look. Absently I picked up a Bible from a stack at the back of the nave and opened it at random. It was Lamentations, chapter four, first verse: “How is the gold become dim! how is the most fine gold changed!”
After a moment von Zell joined me. I looked back but Konstanze had knelt to pray. He and I went out together into the rain. We pulled our collars about us and hurried to the jeep. He climbed in but I waited. I took a small package from the front seat and, as he settled, I said to him, “Will you excuse me a moment?”
He looked at me hard, but then nodded. I returned to the church.
Konstanze was still there, kneeling. The rain pelted against the windows, like chains being unraveled from out of the heavens, rasping on the roof. I walked forward to where she was kneeling, my footsteps all but drowned by the weather outside. Without a word I placed the letters on the pew beside her. She must have heard me but she never looked up. After a moment I went back to join von Zell in the jeep for the ride back to Salzburg.
EPILOGUE
That is not the end of the story, not quite. Hobel was promoted and for a long while after the war I used to receive a Christmas card from “Colonel Hobel.” My shares eventually passed Maurice’s and on May 31 that year I was worth $1,153.85 against his $1,084, though I never did get the helmet. Maurice became a professor soon after his return to Cambridge but was killed in a skiing accident in 1949 and I never saw him again. I still have the book that he gave me though I can never bring myself to read it now.
One loose end that was never tied up was that newspaper which Allie and I found on the mountain, the one from Worms with the strange advertisement circled in pencil.
Muhlman and the others were caught—eventually. They had indeed been a staging post in the underground pipeline helping renegade Nazis to freedom. I sent written evidence to the court which convicted them, so those nights on the mountain with Allie were useful as well as pleasurable. The pipeline, which Hobel and I thought ran from south Germany/Austria to Spain, in fact was shown later to run south most of the time, through Italy.
Von Zell, ironically, had been living under von Haltern’s identity as a wine merchant, but in Bernkastel, where he and Konstanze had met and been married, staying with the host who had introduced them and devised those games. So perhaps I didn’t deserve the medal I never got; the letters had contained that clue, but I never spotted it.
I sold my shares—for $1,800—after Maurice’s death and never bothered with the stock market again. But Sammy Hartt went on to make more millions, naturally. I followed his career in the newspapers. He put some of his money into Israel, some into Simon Wiesenthal’s research center in Vienna, the one which sought to track down renegade Nazis; and the rest he took with him to a private island he bought near Hawaii. But he became a golf fanatic so I could never bring myself to visit him, though he invited me several times. I’m hopeless at golf. He had a heart attack a few years ago and left all his money to create a Sammy Hartt Golf Classic.
The BMW went back to its rightful owner, minus the badge. I have mixed feelings, now, about open cars.
And Konstanze? I heard nothing until a few months after I had returned to America and had again taken up my post at the university.
I received a letter from her early in 1947. Being a great one for anniversaries and birthdays and so forth, she had written it on New Year’s Eve. I have it here, with all my other things, so I can quote it in full. It was written in English—her brand of English. She had started to learn as soon as I had left.
“Dear Walter,” she had written. “Dear Walter, I do not wish to let the old year come to an end without sending you a Christian greeting and blessing. You should not really believe that I have already forgotten you because I have for so long not let you hear anything. I have by contrast often thought of you, how you might be and whether you would, on some occasions, think back to here. Now I surprise you, with my English already. Better than Dieter’s, not so?
“How are you living after your long sojourn in Europe for the war? How did you adjust yourself back to your new existence? All of that I would like to know of course, very much and I would be eternally enjoyed to hear from you.
“Here with us since you left nothing changed very much in the village as well as with me personally. My husband was fourteen days after you saw him transferred to a large internment camp near Darmstadt and considering the circumstances he is in good condition. He is confident and hopes in the spring to be released. About that, Walter, you were right.
“Of the rebuilding and of the often applauded democratic liberties one does not notice very much with us. Above all, no Austrian today may have any real taste of liberty because furnitures, living quarters, our existences are desperate. We are deprived but hope for a better and happier future.
“I envy all those that have thoughts to emigrate; to judge by the letters of my husband he also plays with such ideas. I am glad that he is in the American zone which is more generous than elsewhere. Perhaps for us too the sun will shine again someday. Not so much for myself do I desire that, but for Dieter, who should have it better. Walter, he does not forget your handsome car. And I do not forget the things you gave me, the feather of the swan, the statue of the saint and the pen, with which I write this letter.
“Often do I think still of the nice hours in the spring which I spent with you. But all of this is now for the past. That I have lost you so entirely and should never see you again makes me endlessly sad. Despite all the disagreeable things and torturings that I have experienced through you, you have nevertheless become very close to me and I am still very sorry that our separation was too soon upon us. So much did I still have on my heart that I should have liked to tell you. Konstanze.”
I am still unable to read that letter, after all these years, without feeling—well, without feeling. In fact, in normal circumstances I avoid it. If I come across the envelope, with its familiar Austrian stamp and Salzburg postmark, I push it away, bury it back in the recesses of my desk. It is too painful, still.
I am aware, of course, that at last I became a recipient of one of Konstanze’s letters. It was not a love letter perhaps, not in the strict sense of the word, but close. And I was aware too that I was being put on a par with Bruno and Rudolf—at least I like to think so.
But what pains—no, saddens me most—is the letter’s tone. Konstanze was saying—was she not?—that she regretted the outcome, perhaps that she regretted the choice she had made. And that a lifetime’s regret is what we both gave each other as the price for our mistake.
Or perhaps she was asking to love me at a distance—through letters—as she had done with Bruno and Rudolf. Letters, it always came back to letters, the letters I should not have read but would not have missed for anything.
I don’t know, for I never replied.
Author’s Note
The central encounter in this story actually
took place in Salzburg in the aftermath of
World War Two. The rest is fiction.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1985 by Peter Watson
Cover design by Drew Padrutt
ISBN: 978-1-5040-4686-2
This 2017 edition published by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
180 Maiden Lane
New York, NY 10038
www.mysteriouspress.com
www.openroadmedia.com
THE ART-WORLD MYSTERIES
FROM MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM
AND OPEN ROAD MEDIA
MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM
Otto Penzler, owner of the Mysterious Bookshop in Manhattan, founded the Mysterious Press in 1975. Penzler quickly became known for his outstanding selection of mystery, crime, and suspense books, both from his imprint and in his store. The imprint was devoted to printing the best books in these genres, using fine paper and top dust-jacket artists, as well as offering many limited, signed editions.
Now the Mysterious Press has gone digital, publishing ebooks through MysteriousPress.com.
MysteriousPress.com. offers readers essential noir and suspense fiction, hard-boiled crime novels, and the latest thrillers from both debut authors and mystery masters. Discover classics and new voices, all from one legendary source.
FIND OUT MORE AT
WWW.MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM
FOLLOW US:
@emysteries and Facebook.com/MysteriousPressCom
MysteriousPress.com is one of a select group of publishing partners of Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
The Mysterious Bookshop, founded in 1979, is located in Manhattan’s Tribeca neighborhood. It is the oldest and largest mystery-specialty bookstore in America.
The shop stocks the finest selection of new mystery hardcovers, paperbacks, and periodicals. It also features a superb collection of signed modern first editions, rare and collectable works, and Sherlock Holmes titles. The bookshop issues a free monthly newsletter highlighting its book clubs, new releases, events, and recently acquired books.
58 Warren Street
[email protected]
(212) 587-1011
Monday through Saturday
11:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m.
FIND OUT MORE AT:
www.mysteriousbookshop.com
FOLLOW US:
@TheMysterious and Facebook.com/MysteriousBookshop
SUBSCRIBE:
The Mysterious Newsletter
Find a full list of our authors and
titles at www.openroadmedia.com
FOLLOW US
@OpenRoadMedia
