When I woke up the next morning and went downstairs, the cottage was empty. I waited round a bit, but nothing happened except that a black cat walked into the room, sneered at me, and walked out again. Probably my hostess of the night before.
I left the cottage, and found my way back to the path and, after one or two false casts, struck the main path down to the castle.
When I got there it, too, was practically deserted. I went up to my room and shaved and changed my shirt. I took two looks at my own bed, but Franz was quite right. One good night had done the trick. As a matter of fact, apart from a pricking behind the eyes I felt rather fit.
I made for the Operations Room. The ante-room was empty but I heard a voice speaking from the sanctuary, and went in. It was Gheorge, sitting at Lady’s desk and looking a bit like the office boy who has been left in charge whilst all the bosses were on holiday. He grinned quickly when he saw me, and then went on talking.
Someone at the other end of the line seemed to be worried. It was one of those booming telephones and I heard a good round German voice saying that something “must be stopped. If it wasn’t stopped at once there would be trouble.” Gheorge said, “Certainly, certainly. Herr Lady is down right now talking to the Chief of Police.”
Then he rang off.
“What’s the trouble?” I said.
“There’s always trouble,” said Gheorge. He looked almighty serious behind those horn-rimmed glasses, and very young. “It’s the Werkebund.”
“Come again.”
“They were Nazis. Now they call themselves the Workers’ Friends. They do nothing but make trouble.”
“Workers’ Friends are like that all the world over,” I assured him. “What particular trouble?”
“Last night they had a meeting in the Sportzplatz. There was a fight. Windows got broken.”
“Doesn’t sound a great deal to get excited about.”
“No. But when it was over there was a dead man.”
“Dead how?”
“He did not die of excitement. His head had been knocked in.”
“And you think the row was staged to cover his killing?”
“We are sure of it. He was one of Schneidermeister’s men. The second to go in a week.”
“Let’s be plain about this,” I said. “Schneidermeister and his boys are smugglers. Right?”
“Yes, that is right.”
“And when you want to pass a messenger over the frontier – into Yugoslavia or Hungary – you use their services. They act as sort of couriers.”
“Yes.”
“The other side probably know that, and don’t like it much. So they hit back – through the Nazis.”
“You make it sound splendidly simple,” said Gheorge, with a tired smile.
“If there is more to it,” I said angrily, “why not tell me about it? If you insist on treating everyone round here like ten-year-old boy scouts, you’ll only get the sort of help ten-year-old boy scouts would be likely to give you.”
The telephone saved Gheorge the embarrassment of answering. This time it was Lady.
Gheorge told him that I was back. I thought Lady sounded a little surprised, but it may have been the telephone. He asked to speak to me.
“I’m glad you are back,” he said. “Will you please tell Gheorge everything that happened. Good or bad.”
“Most of it was bad,” I said. Lady ignored this.
“Tell it to him slowly,” he said, “and see that he makes notes. When you have finished, come down to Steinbruck. I am at the Gasthof Hirsch. I have a job for you. Are you willing?”
“I’m a little worn,” I said. “As long as it isn’t too energetic, I expect I’ll make out.”
“Very well,” said Lady. “In one hour, then.”
Then Gheorge got out his notebook, and I talked to him. He had some shorthand system of his own. We didn’t waste much time over the journey. He seemed to think our adventures in the tunnel funny. “When I went that way I had no trouble,” he said. “Perhaps I am thinner than you.”
One thing struck me as odd – not perhaps at the time, but when I was thinking it over afterwards. The scene at the cabin did not seem to shock Gheorge at all. I had thought myself hardened, but to me there was something inexplicably horrible about it. The little family, stamped out, buried, obliterated. All because a message had reached them which they might have passed on. Gheorge seemed to find nothing in it. Nothing extraordinary, nothing nauseating, nothing pathetic. And once again I looked curiously at him and wondered just what lay behind his youngish white face and his thick-rimmed glasses.
He was interested in detail. How had they been buried? Did I know how they had been killed?
“There was no struggle,” I said. “My guess would be that two or three men came to the cabin the evening before, enough to kill the dog and man and woman without trouble, then I suppose they went up and killed the little girl. In her sleep, perhaps.”
“Yes, that would be the way it would be done, I expect,” said Gheorge.
When I couldn’t take any more of this interrogation I said goodbye to Gheorge. As soon as I was gone, he would start to type it all out neatly, in triplicate. One for the files of the Equipe Lady, copy to Washington, copy to London.
I found Lady in the foyer of the Hirsch. He was talking to a tall, grey man with a face like a tall grey horse.
“That was the mayor,” said Lady, and I thought this was so funny that I started to laugh; and when I had started I found it hard to stop.
“It’s all right,” I said at last. “Very difficult to explain. An English pun. Let’s skip it.”
“I’m glad you preserve your sense of humour,” said Lady, sourly. “Now, if you are able to attend to me, perhaps I could explain.”
“All right,” I said. “Explain away. Anything I can do, count on me. Philip the Reliable.”
“You know we have been having trouble here.”
“Gheorge told me something about it.”
“Good. Do you know a man called Wachs?”
“I’ve seen him.”
“Has he seen you?”
I reflected. “I don’t think so. I’ve no reason to think so; no. “
“Could you make friends with him?”
“Make friends with him,” I said, doubtfully. “I don’t think he’s a very friendly character.”
“If you exerted your charm?”
“Quite frankly,” I said, “I should think he’d be as easy to charm as a warthog with piles. If it will help the cause I’ll try. But there is one person who already knows him quite well. Mitzi. I don’t know her real name. Major Piper’s secretary.”
“Yes,” said Lady. “I fear she would not be of much assistance to us. She is not reliable.”
“You mean she has been seduced by the enemy.”
“I do not think it was a question of seduction. She has worked for them from the beginning. That was why they procured her a job in Major Piper’s office. And instructed her to make herself available to him.”
“Does he know?”
“Of course.”
I felt that I was being stupid.
“If he knows, why hasn’t he got rid of her?”
“Why should he. They would only attempt to place another one. That one he might not know about. He would be worse off then. Surely that is obvious.”
It sounded about as obvious as Alice Through the Looking Glass. I said: “I’ll see what I can do. I can’t promise anything. It’s just possible I might be able to get a line on Wachs through the friend of a friend.”
“Splendid,” said Lady, and added, insincerely. “Don’t get into trouble.”
As you won’t need telling, as soon as I left him I made for the Marienkirche. Messelen had a big wooden bowl of bird seed in his hand and was feeding his birds. We talked about nothing in particular until he had finished.
Then I told him what I wanted.
“I know Herr Wachs,” he said, “and like him not at all. Why do you wish to know him better? And why do you wish me to help you?”
I had, of course, seen that this one would come and had given a certain amount of thought to it. I had decided on a limited amount of plain speaking.
“I’ve been sent out here,” I said, “by our Government, to keep an eye on things. There has been trouble in this town—”
“Steinbruck was constructed by nature for trouble,” agreed Messelen.
“Naturally, I don’t want this talked about. But equally I can’t ask help unless I tell you what I am doing.”
“You are Secret Service?”
“I am accredited to the British Foreign Office for Intelligence work.”
“That means Secret Service?”
“If you insist.”
Messelen said, “I do not think I shall help you.”
I must have looked a bit blank, because he added, “There are two reasons. First, I do not like trouble, I had plenty of trouble in the War. I want no more. Second, I am a business man. What you propose does not go well with business. I may wish to sell Herr Wachs a tractor. What then?”
“I don’t think he is an agriculturalist,” I said. “Never mind. Will you forget what I said?”
“I will forget it. And I will give you a piece of advice. Go to the Post Office.”
I could only assume that this was some sort of code. I looked blank but receptive.
“In most Austrian towns the centre of the black market is outside the Post Office. There are men who seem to have no business but to hang about there all day and talk to people and make telephone calls. Herr Wachs is usually there. His associates also.”
“I’ll try it,” I said.
I’d been past the Post Office half a dozen times before without noticing anything in particular, but when I used my eyes I could see at once what Messelen meant.
Like most Austrian Post Offices it had a fairly large outer foyer with four telephone kiosks and a couple of benches. Outside the doors were other benches. There were half a dozen men hanging round, two of them writing things in notebooks, two arguing, one picking his nose and one doing nothing. As I watched them, Wachs came out of one of the telephone booths, said something to one of the arguers (a tall, thin, man in a Panama hat) and dived indoors again. The note-takers closed up and a general argument took place. Wachs reappeared and said something else, and three of them went in.
Just like the Stock Exchange.
I found myself a seat in an Espresso across the way and watched. People came and went, but there were three regulars. Wachs was one. Panama hat was another. A third was a dapper little type with a dark chin and a face like Joey the Clown. The way he carried on I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d done a couple of back springs or stood on his hands. He acted as runner to the group, and kept darting off down side streets and reappearing. Once he came back with a lady’s handbag, and pulled out the compact and pretended to powder his nose. This kept them in fits for five minutes.
I was so engrossed with watching them that I only gradually became aware, without looking round, that someone had sat down at my table.
When I turned my head, it was Messelen.
“Come to see the fun?”
“I’ve changed my mind,” said Messelen. He looked, I thought, a little sheepish. “If you try this alone you are bound to make a mess of it. What is your plan?”
“Flexibility,” I said. “I mean, I haven’t got one. How long does this go on?”
“They’ll have finished business for the day soon.”
“We might follow one each, and see where they go.”
“They’ve got eyes in their bottoms,” said Messelen. “I was afraid you’d do something like that. That’s why I came along. And it is unnecessary. I have been making some enquiries on your behalf. I have ascertained where they go in the evening. It is a small cinema, called the Blue Cinema, near the outskirts of the town. I have been there only once, to my knowledge. But I recollect that it is on the ground floor of a big building with an office block above it. Also I think there is some sort of club in the rooms behind it. A photographic club, something of that sort.”
“Not bad, for one visit.”
“I remember it,” said Messelen, seriously, “because it occurred to me at the time that it was one of the least attractive places I have ever set eyes on.”
“It sounds terrific,” I said. “What is your plan?”
“Not my plan. Yours. I bring you information. You make the plan.”
I thought hard for a moment. The trouble was that I was quite uncertain how much of what Lady had told me was confidential and how much was common knowledge. I compromised.
“What we think,” I said, “is that Wachs & Co. are not only racketeers. They’ve got a political slant as well.”
“You mean that they are Nazis?”
“Neo-Nazis was the term I heard used.”
“They smell the same by any name. And there is no secret about it. Any form of gangsterism would suit them. National Socialism was founded by gangsters for gangsters.”
There was such unusual bitterness in his voice that I wondered whether some personal motivation was at work.
“It isn’t only gangsterism,” I said. “The idea is that the Russians may be using them. You know that there is regular border traffic from here, into Hungary and Yugoslavia. There are probably a lot of people involved, but one of the big crowds – a crowd which was, incidentally, very helpful to us – has lost two good men in a week.”
“So,” said Messelen. He sat staring at me. I would have given a lot to know what was going on behind his wooden face. “I heard something. The last death, I thought, came of the riots.”
“The suggestion is that the riot was stage-managed to cover the killing.”
“It would be a well-worn technique. Now, what comes of all this?”
“My ideas are still flexible. But it did occur to me that someone of the group – Wachs, if he is the head of it – must some time report to his contact. If we could find out who that contact is, it would be a step in the right direction.”
“It would be a big step. But –I do not wish to exaggerate – almost impossible. These men have a thousand contacts. Their business is contacts. You saw them at work this morning. There are many different ways they could meet an agent, to receive orders, or pass on information. They could write to him, telephone him, meet him in the street, at the cinema—”
He paused for a moment and our eyes met.
“I wonder,” I said. “There must be some reason for choosing a cinema as their meeting place. It’s mad, of course. But it would work. You go in separately when the place is half empty, sit at the back of the circle, talk to your hearts content.”
Another thought struck me.
“Suppose the messenger is a girl. You can sit in the quietest corner with one arm round her. You could glare at anyone who came near you.”
The table was shaking. It was Messelen laughing. “I knew as soon as I spoke to you,” he said, “that you were a romantic. Shall we proceed to the cinema tonight? I the swain, you the girl—”
I started to get angry, and then I laughed too.
“I’m damned if I’m going to dress up as a girl – although, in fact, I did once go to a hunt ball as a blonde for a bet and had the most peculiar suggestions made to me by a drunken Colonel – but if you’re game for a visit to the cinema, I’ll come.”
Messelen sat, for quite a long time, silent and looking out of the window. In the light of early evening his normally pleasant face had a grim, set look. Wachs and Co. had disappeared and the square was almost empty.
“It’s quite mad,” he said at last. “It will do no good, and may land us in trouble.”
It was himself he was trying to convince, not me. I leaned on the other side of the scale.
“They don’t know you,” I said. “And I’ve no particular reason to think that they know me. I’m new on the scene and I’ve never interfered with them.”
“I think you have not yet quite realised. This is not England, where every man sits secure in his own back garden, with policemen in the streets. Here you are close to the end of the world. The place where the water gathers speed and goes over the black cliff.”
“What you want is a drink,” I said.
“All right,” said Messelen. “I’m behaving like a maiden aunt. I’ll come with you, but one thing I insist on. You must change your clothes. It is not a high class place.”
“What do you suggest?”
“Something old, but not too shabby. You are not to dress up as a workman in a play, you understand. I suggest you should seem to be respectable but poor.”
“A blue suit with shiny elbows and knees, a thin black tie and a cap.”
“That should be admirable. Can you find such clothes?”
“Yes; I think so.”
“Then we will meet at my flat. Tomorrow? Very well. At eight o’clock it will be beginning to be dark. And one other thing. Have you a gun?”
“I’m afraid not. I might be able to borrow that too, but I’m no sort of shot.”
Messelen looked surprised. His ideas of the British Secret Service had evidently received a blow. “I will see if I can find you a gun,” he said.