Back at the Hotel Regina, Trudi was luxuriating in a hot bath when the telephone rang. Her first thought was that it would be James Dacre checking to see if she had returned but when she answered it, the voice was the receptionist’s telling her that Herr Jünger’s car had come to collect her.
‘Tell him to wait,’ she said. ‘And would you have some coffee and rolls sent up to my room?’
The receptionist started to say she would transfer the call to room service but Trudi replaced the phone. Ten minutes later as she was dressing there was a tap at the door. She opened it and saw the tray of coffee and rolls before she saw that it was Dacre carrying it.
‘Welcome back,’ he said. ‘I intercepted a waiter.’
‘I thought you’d got a new job,’ said Trudi. ‘Come in.’
She poured herself some coffee and buttered a roll. Dacre reclined on the bed, watching her. His silence, she guessed, was aimed at making her give an account of all her adventures since last they met. In fact, she had been looking forward to an audience as a mirror in which to reexamine her experiences, but now the opportunity was here, she felt strangely reluctant. There are intimacies far beyond sex, and she was even less used to admitting strangers to her mind than she was to her body.
A longing for Jan came over her and though, as on every other occasion she had found herself missing her friend, it was immediately drowned by bitter anger, the echo of the longing still reverberated deep down.
It felt like a triumph that her silence had provoked him to break his. Immediately she was ashamed. This was no way to treat a man who was her lover and who had been as assiduous in her protection as Dacre had.
The telephone rang.
It was Jünger.
‘My driver has just contacted me to say that he is still waiting to collect you,’ he said. ‘The thing is, I have to leave town at noon. Something’s come up unexpectedly and I shall be away for a few days. I don’t think there is a great deal left for us to do together, but if there is a hold-up on your side, perhaps it would be best if I let one of my assistants deal with you. In fact, he could come to your hotel and save you the bother of coming here if you are not feeling well …’
‘I’m feeling fine, Herr Jünger,’ interrupted Trudi. ‘I shall be with you in five minutes. Good morning.’
She replaced the receiver firmly. Had she been manipulated? she was already thinking. Yesterday, the thought of not having to go to that sinister building again would have seemed delightful, and she would not have been much bothered at the prospect of missing Jünger himself.
Now, however, she was determined to see the man, come what may.
James Dacre said, ‘Trudi, what’s going on?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘All I know about what’s been happening to you since you went into that block house yesterday morning is a couple of messages, one saying you’d got out early and would see me later, the other saying you were snowed in out in the woods somewhere and would see me when you could!’
‘That’s about the strength of it, James,’ she said, finishing her coffee and putting her coat on. ‘Look, I’ve got to dash now. Jünger’s leaving at noon, so that should be me finished. We can have lunch and the afternoon together and then head for home as soon as we like. I’ll see you here at, say, one o’clock. Be here, James, and then I shan’t have to leave a message, shall I?’
It all sounded more cumbersome than she intended. She was still learning the art of the light touch. She went over to him and kissed him and that did not quite work either. But she had no time to sort out these deficiencies at the moment, and she had already stopped thinking about them by the time she got into the car.
Prepared to do battle with Fräulein Weigel, she was almost disappointed to be dropped not in the gloomy courtyard but at the entrance she had left by in the elegant street off Kärntner Strasse. The uniformed commissionaire ushered her through the tall doors, put her in the lift, pressed a button, and when the lift halted and the door slid back, Jünger himself was standing there.
In his comfortable office, he offered her coffee.
Trudi refused and said, ‘Herr Jünger, I spent last night snow-bound in the Kahlenberg Klinik, or perhaps you know that already?’
He made a gesture which could have meant anything and she did not press the point.
‘While I was there, I had the chance to talk with Herr Schiller,’ she said. ‘Herr Manfred Schiller, head of Schiller-Reise, remember?’
‘Of course. I told you he was in a nursing home, I seem to recollect.’
‘But you didn’t mention the Kahlenberg Klinik.’
‘There was no reason.’
‘Not even when you cross-questioned me about my last visit to Vienna and I told you that I’d been there to talk with Dr Werner?’
‘I noted the coincidence, did not think it worth mentioning,’ murmured Jünger.
‘No? And perhaps you didn’t think it was worth mentioning either that Schiller was my grandfather!’ she shouted.
To his credit – or perhaps not – he didn’t affect surprise but merely sighed deeply and said, ‘Well, either you knew it or you didn’t.’
She took this in and said in bewilderment, ‘But if I had known, then of course …’
‘… of course, you would have mentioned it,’ he completed the sentence, smiling. ‘Perhaps. But can I be sure you always mention everything you know to me, Frau Adamson? Is there nothing you have held back? About Schiller-Reise for instance? Or about what has happened since your husband’s death?’
Avoiding this unattractive diversion, Trudi said, ‘But I didn’t know about my ancestry, Herr Jünger. And now I only know part of it and I can’t find out more, not from Schiller. He’s dead, you see.’
‘So I understand,’ said Jünger, unsurprised once more.
‘You know already?’ She digested this. ‘Is this anything to do with your change of plan?’
‘In a way.’ He sighed again. ‘You see, Frau Adamson, Schiller-Reise, or at least that level of it with which I’m concerned, is like a kingdom. When the king is dying, the battle for the succession begins. Sometimes, it seems to have been settled beyond all doubt. But there is always room for debate and sometimes the obvious heir might not be approved by the colonial governor if the country is a tributary state. No, it’s not until the king is dead and his successor crowned that you can be really sure.’
‘Schiller’s dead now,’ said Trudi. ‘Who’s the likely heir?’
‘Oddly enough, in strict legal terms, I suppose you are!’ said Jünger. ‘He has no other family.’
‘He had no family!’ she exploded. Then, calming down, she said, ‘Tell me what you know about him.’
‘What do you know already?’
‘Only what he told me last night,’ she said, and outlined what had been said.
Jünger nodded and said gently, ‘Then you know just about everything. He was a rabid anti-semite. The Anschluss was for him a heaven-sent opportunity to pay off old scores and make a lot of money while he was at it. When he discovered his daughter was seeing your father, he must have been enraged. He probably ordered her to break off the liaison and then learned that she was pregnant and proposed marrying her lover. The best that can be said for Schiller was that he was probably genuinely afraid of what this might mean for his daughter’s safety. But, even without the Nazis, I don’t doubt he would have used every device, legal and illegal, to stop his daughter marrying a Jew. Now he had the simple solution of turning Schumacher over to the Gestapo. But the plan went wrong, your father got away and your mother went with him. Schiller probably chased them as far as Switzerland, but they put themselves temporarily out of reach by moving to England, and now the war was close to breaking out. After the war, he had other things to occupy him for a while. He came close to being put on trial, but some documents mysteriously disappeared and he was downgraded from Category 3, militarists, activists and profiteers, to the fifth and lowest category of Nazi, non-offenders. I suspect the first bit of hard information he got out of England was that his daughter was dead. That would be a matter of record. When he became aware of your existence, I don’t know, but you must have presented him with what in his own terms was a moral problem. His own flesh and blood, yet …’
‘I know,’ said Trudi dully. ‘The Jew’s daughter. The cause of his own daughter’s death.’
‘Just so. Well, there you have it. I’m sorry you had to find all this out in this way, always assuming …’
‘Yes?’
‘… that you have just found it out.’
Trudi said, ‘What other assumption is there?’
‘Ask yourself, Frau Adamson.’
She asked herself, nodded and said, ‘Of course. It seems too much of a coincidence, doesn’t it? Schiller’s granddaughter not knowing she is Schiller’s granddaughter, but so clearly connected via her husband with the firm.’
He nodded. His unblinking gaze never left her.
Trudi’s mind was racing now, devouring in huge strides what might have taken an age of painful plodding not long before.
She said, ‘Trent.’
‘Yes?’
‘I know I’m telling the truth even if you don’t. If I discount coincidence, which I must, that leaves just one link. Trent. In the sixties it was, when he gave up flying. We left Zürich and went to Brussels where he started to work for Schiller-Reise proper.’
‘Proper?’
‘I mean, he’d worked for them before, or rather the Swiss charter company had. I can remember meeting Herr Schiller early on in Zürich. I remember how he looked at me … Could it be he realized then who I was? I was still young. I still looked like my mother’s photo. Could that be why he gave Trent the job?’
‘To keep tabs on you? Perhaps,’ said Jünger.
He looked as if he might be about to say something else, then shook his head as a climber might do who has experienced an unaccustomed giddiness on a steep traverse.
Trudi thought she could guess the reason why.
‘I think you know a lot more than you tell me, Herr Jünger,’ she accused.
‘Why do you say that?’ he enquired mildly.
‘Because whenever we talk, I feel that it’s like … well, like a fencing match. We exchange blows, not information.’
He nodded as if he liked the idea – or its expression.
‘If it is a fencing match, Frau Adamson,’ he said, ‘that implies both sides have a weapon.’
She laughed and said uneasily, ‘I’m just a defenceless woman, anyone can see that.’
‘Perhaps. Or perhaps you too know a lot more than you tell.’
For the first time it came fully home to Trudi that Jünger really considered her a possible danger, or a threat, or an opponent of some kind. A life of self-effacement had left her with so little self to efface that to be taken so seriously was like stepping out of your shower on to a floodlit stage.
She opened her mouth to protest, closed it again as she recalled all the things she did know but had not passed on to Jünger.
Especially about his brother, deep-frozen in that Plague village cottage.
He smiled at her humourlessly, as though interpreting her silence as the admission of guilt it was. But her recognition of how seriously he took her had forced another revelation into her mind. She voiced it instinctively as it formulated itself.
‘Nothing that happens here happens accidentally, does it, Herr Jünger?’ she burst out. ‘That business when I came yesterday, those awful women, that assault! That was no administrative error, was it? That was done according to your express order!’
He stood up and buttoned up the few buttons of his old-fashioned Austrian jacket. So constrained, he should have looked rather absurd, like a man in a corset, but he managed instead to look more like a weary knight strapping on his breastplate for yet another foray.
He held out his hand and said, ‘I must go now, Frau Adamson. Leb’ wohl.’
‘Not Wiedersehen?’ said Trudi.
‘I don’t care to tempt fate. Not too often.’
They shook hands.
The meeting had only taken half an hour. Obscurely Trudi felt that the initiative she had thought to grasp by insisting on seeing Jünger himself had been wrested from her.
‘What about Astrid?’ she asked. ‘Why was she murdered?’
‘That is a good question to ask yourself, Frau Adamson,’ he replied.
The door opened and Fräulein Weigel appeared. Jünger turned away. This was her dismissal and though Trudi resented it, she did not know yet how to resist it.
As she followed the young woman to the lift, she felt her inward agitation growing, an as yet unchannelled urge to action. Something must happen, was going to happen, and she wanted to be for once an initiator, not a passive object. Perhaps this was how Samson had felt on his way to the Philistine games.
And look what happened to him! she thought ruefully, and chuckled aloud. Chuckling was not a common activity of hers and possibly the sound came out odd, or perhaps it wasn’t a sound the po-faced Fräulein Weigel was used to hearing in this building, but she shot Trudi a sternly reproving look as she summoned the lift.
As they descended, Trudi said conversationally, ‘So, it turns out you were only following orders after all, Fräulein?’
Weigel stared ahead indifferently which irritated Trudi into adding, ‘Like Eichmann and the rest.’
This got through.
Weigel glanced at her contemptuously and as the lift stopped, said, ‘You may be right, gnädige Frau. It is after all perhaps still a version of the Jewish problem.’
As the doors opened, Trudi hit her. She did not plan it. And it happened so quickly that she was already feeling the amazement that followed the blow before she truly experienced the anger that launched it. Nor was it a slap but a full-blooded punch, the first she could recollect ever having thrown. It caught the woman on the side of the mouth. And Trudi’s last image before she marched across the marble floor and out of the double door, which the commissionaire had difficulty in getting open in time, was of Weigel’s lips parted in pain and shock, with a smear of blood across the porcelain perfection of her left upper incisors.