Next morning I woke late, feeling bad. I had a suspicion that I had not only drunk too much the night before, but that in some way I had made a fool of myself. However, before I could get into a complicated state about it, I went to sleep again, and didn’t wake up this time until two o’clock in the afternoon.
Me, the Sleeping Beauty.
I got up, shaved, dressed, and wandered down. The place was as lively as a boarding school in holiday time.
I tugged on the bell rope and when the bearded lady appeared demanded black coffee. She seemed unsurprised. Schloss Obersteinbruck was the sort of place where black coffee was drunk at all hours, I suspect.
Afterwards I annexed a rug from my bed, retired to the woods behind the castle and slept some more.
I dreamed that I was playing water polo for England and came to the surface with a struggle to find my face being licked by a mastiff. Attached to the mastiff by a steel chain was Trüe. She was laughing at me.
“It was a shame to wake you,” she said. “For you looked sweet in your sleep.”
“All right. You needn’t tell me. Mouth open, and dribbling lightly.”
“Certainly not. You mouth was tightly compressed like a typical reticent Englishman.”
“How did you find me here?”
“Lippi found you. He is an industrious tracker. We train him every day on offal.”
“That makes it quite perfect,” I said, sleepily. From where I lay she looked wonderful. She looked all right from almost any angle, but all the cameras in Hollywood would have sung together like the morning stars for joy if they could have caught her just at that moment, with one hand on the big dog’s head and the rays of the dying sun making gold out of her hair.
“Trüe,” I said. “How old are you?”
“What a funny question to ask. Why do you wish to know?”
“I’ve no idea,” I said. “It’s just one of those things we always ask girls when we meet them in England.”
“Ah, yes. I know. In England, you have a law. You must not rape any girl until she is sixteen.”
“It’s time you went home,” I said.
When we got back Lisa met us in the hall. She gave us a quick, sharp, look, under those dark eyebrows, and said to Trüe: “We have been looking for you.”
“You ought to have sent out Tutti to hunt for Lippi,” I said.
“What has happened, Lisa?” said Trüe.
“He has had to go to London. He caught the four o’clock train to Klagenfurt. From there he can fly.”
“Curiously urgent,” I said. They both looked at me. “The problems of ethnography, I mean,” I explained. “Klagenfurt today. London tomorrow. Has he mislaid a valuable Croat, or stumbled on the missing Slovene link?”
True laughed.
Lisa said, rather sharply, “I do not enquire where he goes or why.”
“That’s the girl,” I said. “You and the Light Brigade.” I went up to change for dinner.
Dinner that evening proved rather good fun. Everyone was more themselves with Lady away. And when I realised that, I realised a little of the grip he had on these people. Trüe, of course, was only a child, but Lisa and Gheorge and the General were considerable personalities in their own right. Yet it was only when the sun went in that you could see the lesser lights.
When the wine came round I remembered what the Baron had told me and took a quick look at the young lady who was serving it. And I saw what he meant. She had black hair, sloe-black eyes, clear skin and a pouting mouth; and everything else that God ever gave woman.
The Baron called her something or other. It sounded like “Dim-Wits”. She walked away from me with a petulant waggle, picking up a fairly hot glance from the Baron as she went by.
“Yugoslav,” said Lisa in my ear.
“If I was Tito,” I said, “I should put her on a list of forbidden exports.””I don’t think she came through the customs.”
I was still digesting this thought when the party broke up. Trüe said something about filing and disappeared, like a good girl, who works even when the boss isn’t there, in the direction of the headquarters office. Gheorge Ossudsky went with her. The rest of us took our coffee into the small drawing-room.
(The more I saw of Schloss Obersteinbruck the more did Colin’s description seem just. It was a most peculiar sort of fairy palace. It came to life at dusk. Then lights were kindled; fires sprang up in the grates; servants appeared who had not even existed before. From then until dawn the whole place hummed with suppressed, self-satisfied, life.)
“I understand,” said the Baron, in careful English, “that all your great houses have now been turned into museums.”
“A lot of them have,” I said. “Some of the best of them are used as schools for delinquent children.”
The Baron then translated his own observation and my comment to the Baronin, who gave out a sharp cackle. The conversation continued in this way for some time until the Baronin dropped off to sleep. The Baron then refilled my glass, and his own, with brandy and said, in a somewhat challenging voice: “You noticed Dmwitza then?”
“The young lady who handed round the Tokay?”
“The maid servant.”
“Yes. I noticed her.”
“What was your reaction to her?”
“A striking girl,” I said.
“The girls of northern Yugoslavia,” said the Baron, speaking in the dispassionate voice proper to an ethnographer, “are constructed for love. They are all of the same mould. It is depth of body, you understand, that gives pleasure to love. They are as deep in body as—as they are shallow in wit. They have only one fault, to my mind. They are quite insatiable.”
“Who are quite insatiable?” demanded the Baronin, waking up sharply.
“We were discussing the English Income Tax system, my dear.”
“Ah, the English Income Tax system,” said the Baronin. “In Austria we have the best system. We have no income tax.” She disposed herself for sleep again, but the interruption had thrown the Baron out of his stride. He turned to politics.
“Here we are well placed,” he said, “to watch the Soviet System in operation. We have, you might say, a dress circle view of one of her most unmanageable satellites. Hungary.”
“According to the newspapers, they seem to stage a purge or a re-shuffle every six months. I fancied, however, that they had been a little more stable recently.”
“For the last year, yes. That is David Szormeny. He is a strong man. Too strong, perhaps. There is danger, you understand, in inserting a steel component into a machine which is otherwise constructed entirely of soft iron.”
I tried to summon up my recollection of Szormeny. A few photographs had been allowed to filter across to the Western world. I remembered one of him at a Farm Worker’s Congress. A tall man with an ugly, superficially pleasant face who reminded me of someone – I couldn’t place it – one of our own public characters, perhaps.
“Since the War,” said the Baron, “the fate of the popular leaders of Hungary has not been encouraging, you will agree. You remember Rakosi.”
“Who died in a sanatorium in Moscow.”
“Regretted,” said the Baron. “Deeply regretted. He was given a Senior Hero’s funeral with a procession exactly a mile long. Then there was Szakasits – he is still working out a comparatively lenient sentence of twenty years hard labour. And Laslo Rajk. Well, possibly he was the most fortunate. They hanged him after a public trial.”
“They were only puppets,” I said. “The real leader was the Communist Secretary.”
“Until last year, yes. But Szormeny is Secretary General of the Communist Party. As well as President of the Republic.”
“Quite a boy,” I said. “But I expect they’ll execute him, for all that, next time the harvest fails.”
The Baron elected to take this suggestion seriously.
“Not the harvest,” he said. “In Bulgaria, yes. The Bulgars live like animals, by the soil. They know no better. But Hungary is an industrial country. They have skilled workers, and the workers have their own leaders. They were all Socialists until the Socialist Party was abolished.”
“How easy you make it sound,” I said. “’The Socialist Party was abolished.’ Just like that. Do you know there are people in England who would give their right hand to learn the trick?”
“To abolish a workers’ party does not entirely solve the problem of the workers,” said the Baron. “There were Unions; a relic of 1944. These too, were abolished or absorbed. But it did not terminate the resistance. If a hundred thousand workers decide to work badly, you would need a hundred thousand overseers to prevent it. A Peyer can be imprisoned and a Kellemen executed but that will not make a single mechanic turn a screw or drive a rivet faster than he wishes.”
“I see,” I said, thoughtfully. “And is there much unrest?”
“There was,” said the Baron, “until Szormeny doubled the industrial workers’ ration and gave them certain privileges. Now they are quiet again.”
At this point, to my annoyance, the Baronin fell out of her chair, and when we had picked her up and sorted her out the Baron decided that he had better take her off to bed.
Lisa had gone off to join Trüe and Gheorge in the office and I had decided to make for my own room and the prospect of an early bed when a cough from the deep armchair beside the fire reminded me that I was not, after all, alone.
It occurred to me that General Milo had somewhere acquired the art of sitting still. Now his head turned slowly and as his great glasses swivelled in my direction I felt like an enemy aeroplane caught by twin searchlights.
“I fear,” he said, “that my father rides his hobby horse. You must stop him if you are bored.”
“On the contrary,” I said, sincerely. “I find him most interesting. And he seems, if I may say so, well informed.”
The General turned this one over in his mind for a few seconds and then said, with all the deliberation of a chess player offering a gambit, “So he should be well informed.”
I moved a pawn forward myself, and said “Why?”
The General did not answer this directly. He nodded his head at an oil painting above the fire. I saw it was Honneger’s ‘Duelling Students’. “My father lives in the past. He was at Heidelberg, you know. He is still absurdly proud of a scar down the side of his chin. It was long a matter of anxious debate with him whether he should cultivate those Franz Joseph side whiskers. They suit him admirably, but they hide the scar.”
I moved another pawn.
“Not a man who would take kindly to the restrictions of the modern world?”
“Far from it. He has been, you know, a great smuggler.”
The outline became clearer.
“He is well placed for it here,” I agreed. “I suppose he gets his Tokay from Hungary, and his girls from Yugoslavia. And pays no duty on either of them.”
The General frowned very slightly. “You put the matter somewhat crudely,” he said. “You will remember that my father is nearly eighty.”
“I meant no disrespect. We could do with more individualists in our world today.”
“Well,” said the General. “That may be so. I will wish you good night.”
I was unable to detect whether he was really annoyed with me or not. A face trained in the fleshing sheds of Nazi politics was unlikely to give away much to a stranger.
It was after breakfast next morning that I happened to stroll along the terrace and turn into the long, dim conservatory which hung along the south wall of the Schloss.
The smell of any glasshouse, the wet earth and the greenery and the central heating, takes me straight back to my youth. Sunday morning, between my father and the head gardener, tremulously picking a flower for my mother.
“Nip it with your nails, Master Philip,” and, “Long stalk, Philip,” from my father.
This one was narrow and dim and full of hanging baskets of feathery Cycas and Cyathea. As I picked my way along the duck boards on the floor I realised that it was more extensive than I had thought, opening out finally into a balloon-shaped annexe at the corner. I also realised that the General had sadly underestimated his father’s prowess. One of the long wicker chairs was occupied by the Baron. Another pulled up alongside it, by little Dim-Wits. He seemed to be engaged in tickling the front of her bodice with a palm frond. How she was reacting to this I was unable to observe as she had her back to me.
Blessing once more my rubber-soled shoes, I withdrew carefully, the way I had come. I was almost back at the terrace when a complication presented itself. The door clicked open, and the Baronin appeared.
She was moving slowly, but with the steady inevitability of a snail in a salad border; and I didn’t really see how the Baron was going to get out of this one. He might of course, follow the example of the Duke of Marlborough and jump for it. But not only was he rather older than Churchill; he had about ten times as far to fall.
I backed nervously ahead of the Baronin. “A lovely collection you have here,” I said.
“August keeps it quite ten degrees too hot,” she said. I gathered after a moment’s thought, that August was the head gardener, not the month.
“It is excellent for palms and ferns.” She prodded a dark green Cycas with her ivory headed, rubber tipped, stick. “But the seedlings grow too fast. Then, when they are potted out, they die.”
I backed a bit further and resisted the impulse to look over my shoulder.
“Do you grow orchids,” I said, loudly.
“My husband is very fond of them,” agreed the Baronin. “He has a weakness for tropical flowers.”
There was an element of Aldwych farce about the situation; but I found little inclination to laugh. The Baronin might be deafish but she was not blind nor, I felt certain, complaisant.
“You get a lovely view from here,” I said, desperately.
This held her for a moment.
“On a clear day,” she said, “you can see the tip of the Radkersberg.”
“Would that be north or south of the pass?”
I indicated the white road which snaked up through the vineyards and disappeared round a shoulder of the mountain. (I assumed that the frontier post was on the other side. I could see no sign of it.) Like most women she had little idea of topography. By the time we had fixed the relative positions of the pass and the Radkersberg I had got my second wind.
“Surely,” I said, pointing over her shoulders the way we had come, “that is a flammarium orchid. I had no idea they could be grown in Europe—”
Once she had started in the other direction it wasn’t so bad. It took ten minutes, and three more leading questions, to get her out on to the terrace, and after that, feeling that I couldn’t very well drop her, I went with her to examine her collection of Japanese potpourri bowls.
That afternoon I went for a proper walk. I felt the need of it. Some people walk to keep fit, or to pass the time, or to work up an appetite. It doesn’t take me that way. I walk for the sake of walking. After half an hour, at a stiff pace, some centrifugal armature flies back, some valve opens almost with an audible click and I find myself in concert and ticking over again. It is immaterial to me where I go. On this occasion I made my way down to Steinbruck, skirted the town to the left, went fast along the good road to Graz for about eight kilometres, then took the first track to the left. There was no chance of losing my way. The mountain crests to the south were ruled, in one dark, hard line, across the whole of my horizon. I was out for walking, not climbing, so I stopped when the track ran out of the forest on to the outcrop and swung east skirting the edge of the trees. The tops above me looked stiff, but nowhere unclimbable.
I kept up a fair pace, in and out of the gullies, and was back above Obersteinbruck by four o’clock. When the gnome answered the bell he told me the Baron wanted me. I asked if it was urgent. The gnome thought not. I had a bath, changed, and made my way to the Baron’s study.
When I came in he got up, moved across and shook me by the hand. Nothing more was said, then or at any other time, about the incidents of the morning; but I reckoned I had received the accolade.
The Baron said, “By the way, I have news for you.”
“News?”
“Of a friend of yours.”
“Colin?”
“I would say also, a friend of mine. A most estimable young man. His knowledge of the intricacies of Hapsburg genealogy – quite remarkable.”
“What have you heard?”
“It is, I fear, only at second-hand. But it may offer you a lead. I have, you know, friends in the—” the Baron paused for an instant—”the transport business.”
“The General told me that you had interests in some of the neighbouring countries.”
“That is so. Interests in neighbouring countries. There is a man in Steinbruck who does much work for me. Herr Schneidermeister—”
“I know him,” I said. “A wine merchant, and shaped like a tub.”
“So. He is a largely built man. But his sons are young and active. They travel the countryside. They have not, perhaps, an undue respect for the artificial demarcations of frontiers—”
At any other time I should have enjoyed the courteous circumlocutions in which the Baron wrapped up the fact that he was hand in glove with a gang of smugglers. At the moment, however, I was too anxious to play.
“Tell me, please, Herr Baron,” I said. “Who has seen Colin and where?”
“It was young Franz Schneidermeister. He was talking to a man called Thugutt, a Yugoslav of German origin, quite an ethnological curiosity himself—”
The Baron must have seen my face, because he hurried on. “He is a forester. A very useful man, who lives with his family on the Yugoslav side of the Austrian frontier line, in the mountains, overlooking Hungary.”
I could well imagine that a man so placed would be useful to the Baron.
“And he had seen Colin?”
“I understand so. Either seen him or spoken to someone who has seen him. It was not easy to discover which, because on this occasion Thugutt appeared unanxious to talk. In fact, he would say very little. It seemed to Franz, however, that he might have talked, perhaps, if face to face with a personal friend of Studd-Thompson.”
“Would he talk to me?”
“That was in my mind.”
“When do I start?”
The Baron said, “On that we must consult Herr Lady.”
“What’s it got to do with him?”
“You must realise that we must not do anything to upset his plans.”
“I could judge better of that if I had the least idea what his plans are.”
“He has not told you, then?”
“I’ve been given a lot of cock and bull about ethnography which I not only didn’t believe but I don’t even think I was expected to believe.”
“He will tell you in due course, I am sure.”
“I’m afraid I can’t wait,” I said. “If you won’t help me, I shall have to see Schneidermeister and do what I can on my own.”
The Baron looked distressed. “I beg you,” he said, “to wait for Herr Lady.”
“Until he has finished buying his hand-sewn shirts or getting his hair cut in Bond Street, or whatever he has waltzed off to London for?”
An unaffected laugh brought my head round. Lady was inside the door.
“In fact,” he said. “I did have time for a haircut at Mr. Truefitt’s establishment, but, as you see, I have not allowed it to delay my return.”
I said, truculently, “I don’t know how long you’ve been eavesdropping, but if you heard what I told the Baron, you know what I want—”
“I expect it is the same as we all want. Would you be good enough to come with me?”
I followed him into the Operations Room. Lisa and Trüe were there, doing something to the maps. He waggled his little finger at them and they disappeared.
Then he looked up at me, and said: “You were the chief reason for my visit to London.”
“Oh,” I said, rather blankly. It was obvious enough, but it had not occurred to me. “What did they tell you?”
“Very little, except that you really were what you said. An old friend of Colin Studd-Thompson.”
“Why should I have lied about it?”
“No reason why. No reason why not.” He moulded the tip of a fresh cigarette between his thin brown fingers and added: “Also that, judging from your movements at the end of last week, you were a man of some resource. And that, so far as they knew anything at all about you, of integrity.”
“That only means,” I said, “that they don’t keep my papers in a buff file with a red label in the top left-hand corner.”
“Quite so. As I said, they know nothing against you, and very little about you. In the circumstances—” having got the cigarette to his liking he squeezed it into his long amber holder—”they have left the matter to my discretion. And I have come to the conclusion that you should stay here, and help us.”
“Why?”
“Because I like you,” said Lady, with a broad smile, that might have meant anything. “And trust you, of course,” he added.
“In other words, I’m here, and it might cause more trouble if you tried to sling me out, than if you let me stay. And anyway, whilst I’m here, you can keep an eye on me.”
“My dear fellow,” said Lady. “You insist on imputing the worst of motives to everyone. It is a defect in your character. If I am to be candid with you, you must be candid with me.”
He sounded exactly like my housemaster.
“All right,” I said. “Then you can be candid first. What’s it all about and you can leave out the ethnography.”
Lady said: “Very well. You shall know.”
And he told me. I won’t try to reproduce it word for word as he said it, because he took some time telling the story, and I can’t remember all of his background stuff. But what it amounted to was this. The Western powers – America and England specifically – had established a series of teams to deal with the problems of each of the satellites. The “Equipe Lady” were the top Hungarian specialists. It was quite a large affair, with an office in The Hague and branches in London and New York. Analysing the press reports and monitoring the wireless were its bread-and-butter activities. But there were more specialised branches. One of these was concerned with screening all refugees from Hungary; screening them and, in very exceptional circumstances, sending them back again.
“We are not a military organisation,” said Lady – and looking him over, from his openwork shoes, via his shot-silk shirt to his amber cigarette holder, I was forced to agree that he did not fit into my picture of any military headquarters. “Our role is to accumulate information. The larger part of it we get by sitting still and keeping our ears to the ground. Very occasionally, when there is an unexplained corner to be filled in, or some little job to be done, a man goes over the mountains.”
“But here at Schloss Obersteinbruck,” I said, “you are far from your comfortable offices in The Hague. In fact, you are at action stations. Why? Is a man being sent over the mountains?”
Lady looked at me. “I can perceive,” he said, “why you were unpopular with your own Intelligence.”
“But I want to know.”
“Yes, a man went over the mountains.”
“Colin?”
Lady’s laugh sounded spontaneous. “Of course not,” he said. “Why should we send an Englishman, who would be known every time he opened his mouth when we have a dozen home-grown Hungarians with families and back grounds.”
“All right,” I said. “Then what was Colin doing here?”
“He was our liaison.”
“With whom?”
“With our sponsors, of course. With England, and, through England with America.”
That seemed possible enough.
I said, “I am sorry to ask so many questions. I know enough about Intelligence to realise that it is exceedingly bad form. The preferred attitude is one of studied indifference. But whilst you’re in the mood there is one more thing I must know. What has happened to Colin?”
“He disappeared,” said Lady, “three weeks ago. He walked down to Steinbruck one evening, and did not return.”
“Who saw him last, and where?”
“He was at Pleasure Island, with Trüe—Miss Kethely.”
“Yes, I know her.”
“According to her, he made an excuse to leave her, pushed off into the crowd, and did not come back.”
“No one else saw him?”
“No doubt other people saw him. But no one has come forward to say so—yet.”
“And you have done nothing about it?”
“We have done what we could. One of our best local men was put on to the job.”
“Yes,” I said, bitterly. “And in a few months’ time he will report in triplicate to the effect that he has left no stone unturned and no avenue unexplored.”
“He will not report to anyone,” said Lady. “He was picked out of the river three days ago, a mile below the town. It is not clear whether he died by drowning or not. The top of his head was missing.”
I cannot remember what else was said. Lady did not appear at dinner, which was a silent meal, and after it I went up early to my room. I undressed, turned the light out and sat for a long time in a chair in front of the window. I may even have dozed, for I have no idea what time it was when I opened my eyes and saw Trüe.
There was a clear, silver moon, quite full and undimmed by the faintest mist. Trüe had come out of the shrubbery at the foot of the long lawn. She looked like Titania in a belted raincoat. She walked slowly across the grass and I saw that there was no spring in her step. She had come either far or fast. I knew that she must be making for the little side door under the balcony; and that from there three flights of the back stairs would bring her out, into the passage, a few paces from my bedroom.
On an impulse I got to my feet, opened my own door, and stepped out into the carpeted passage.
It was only a minute before I heard her coming. If it had been longer my internal monitor would have told me I was behaving like a fool, and would have sent me back to bed. Dragging feet scuffled the stair carpet. As she came past I put a hand out and touched her am. She came round like a steel spring. Her hand went down, and up again, and a thin point, blue in the moonlight, touched my pyjama jacket.
If you should be so unwise as to touch a sleeping scorpion, just so, on the touch, without the least intermission of time between sleeping and waking, the armoured tail swings round and is fastened to your finger.
Trüe dropped her hand and said, rather breathlessly. “Philip. That was a silly thing to do.” Then she was gone.
I stood, watching her, a tiny cold feeling still tingling on my skin like a drop of iced water. Up the passage a door opened. There was a whisper of voices. A door shut.
Christ’s sake, the place was like a rabbit warren.