The Salzburg Connection Read online

  “I hope so. You sound as if you were a native.”

  “I’m from Chicago. I came here last spring. But now—” She sighed quite openly. “Oh well, money does run out. And my father refuses to send any more except for the fare home. Tomorrow I leave for Zürich to visit my grandmother for two or three weeks. Father’s orders.” She laughed then.

  “Zürich? I may be there myself for a week or so.”

  “But how fantastic!” she said delightedly, and halted abruptly again, almost slipping, letting her weight rest on his arm for a moment.

  “And how dutiful of you,” he said with amusement. “Do you always obey your father?”

  “It’s economic necessity,” she reminded him severely.

  “What about a job? If you like Salzburg so much—”

  “Oh, I made some extra money in the summer months. Translator, sort of a guide for special parties, that kind of thing. But the season is over now and jobs are scarce for foreigners. So it’s Zürich for me. At least that gives me two more weeks abroad. Any excuse is a good excuse for travel, don’t you think? But what about you? Are you on holiday or business?”

  “Business.” And he remembered the man whose business it had been to follow him. He glanced back, but the path was empty. So were the fortifications. The man had vanished. “The light’s fading,” he said. “We’d better hurry.”

  She was somehow amused. “We’ll be all right. Look!” She pointed to the courtyard lined with houses that lay ahead of them. There was a large tree with children playing around it, and lighted windows, and the sound of women’s voices as they worked indoors. “And that’s the main entrance gate around the corner at the other end.”

  So people lived up here, he thought. He kept an eye open for the man who had followed him so persistently. He could see only half a dozen men, who looked like guides or caretakers or artisans. She was watching him curiously, as if she had noticed his interest in the people. He said lightly, “I suppose these are the fellows who build all those wooden catwalks and railings? Now there’s one who is obviously a tester.” He pointed to a massive figure who was carrying an outsize tankard of beer across the sloping cobblestones. “His job is to jump three times daily on each wooden step so the tourists won’t break their necks.”

  “He’s an artist,” she said with a faint giggle. “Some of them live up here, too, you know. There’s an international school of fine arts—I took some classes here last spring.”

  “You are full of surprises.”

  “Hi, Jan!” she called to the artist, and waved.

  “Hallo!” he called back in German. “Don’t forget the dance next week!”

  “He’s Polish,” she explained as she walked on.

  “Refugee or devoted party member?”

  “Refugee.” She disengaged her arm from his.

  “If you want to explain to him that you are leaving Salzburg, I’ll wait at the gate.”

  “I hate good-byes,” she said curtly. “Besides, artists never notice anyway whether you come to their parties or not. As long as there’s a crowd, they’re happy.”

  Now what did I say to annoy her? he wondered. Or perhaps she would like to be at that party more than she will admit. “Well, what about that toast to Salzburg and a quick return?” he tried.

  “Let’s have it in town.” Her voice was back to normal. She glanced at her watch. “Yes, that’s the best idea. It always seems so spooky up here when it gets dark.”

  Or she might see more of her artist friends, he thought. And as she said, she hates good-byes. “Anything suits me. Don’t you think we had better start having names? I’m Bill—Bill Mathison.”

  She studied him. “Yes, that suits you. And I—I’m Elissa.”

  “That suits you completely.” Soft, pretty and romantic, and different. “Elissa what?”

  “Lang. Elissa Lang. It’s really Eliza-Evaline, shortened by me aged nine.”

  “Your first revolt against the family?”

  “And my most successful one. Nothing since has been half so permanent!”

  “You haven’t done too badly,” he said teasingly. “The last one brought you six months in Salzburg.” He made a guess at her age and thought of something around the early twenties, although in some ways she seemed older than that—it was difficult nowadays to pin a precise number of years on most women. “So what now? Back to college?”

  “I’ve finished with all that,” she said indignantly. “It’s another world.”

  “No more picket lines, demonstrations, or LSD parties?”

  “You know what? I don’t believe you take me seriously.”

  “I wouldn’t mind trying,” he said softly. Then he retreated instinctively, and covered that slip in his emotions by looking at the view. They had come out of the gateway of the castle on to one of its lower terraces. Dusk was deepening rapidly. The lights in the town at their feet were a handful of diamonds scattered on a dark velvet cushion. On the black curve of river, the reflected gleam from the bridges was rippled by the strong currents. Almost reaching eye level were the peaks of the other hills that rose on either side of the river bank. And far beyond all that—the mountains, ringing the town around.

  She studied his face. He is different from what I expected, she thought as she changed her mood to suit his. “Let’s walk down instead of taking the funicular,” she suggested. “It’s always fun to see the domes and towers coming up to meet you.” Why, she thought again in surprise, this man may even be what he says he is. I won’t have to cover my interest in him with pretty prattle about their Excellencies the Prince-Archbishops who held court for centuries in the heart of that fortress while their judges held court above the torture chambers, or about their mistresses, or about all the little footnotes to history which usually make an hour pass easily and safely. I might even relax and enjoy myself. He’s attractive, definitely; a twentieth-century romantic. “And this is an evening for walking, isn’t it?” she added gently. She slipped her arm through his, and they started down the steep road.

  “It will have to be a very quick drink,” she said regretfully as they entered a bar-restaurant that lay, tucked into a spare space between two Grimm’s fairy-tale houses, on the narrow street near the base of the castle’s cliffs. She stole a glance at her watch and frowned a little.

  “You can’t have dinner with me?” Mathison asked, guessing what was coming, masking his disappointment, looking around for a quiet corner. The place was so small that he hadn’t much choice. Fortunately, the half-dozen customers were grouped before the bar, and the lighting was so artfully dim that they only appeared as a cluster of silhouettes in a haze of cigarette smoke. He pulled off his raincoat and hooked it on a wall. He selected the table farthest from people.

  “I’m so sorry, Bill.” She stretched out a hand to touch his as he sat down beside her on a narrow bench against the roughly plastered wall. “It’s my last night in Salzburg. I already promised—Oh, if only I had known we were going to meet—” She paused abruptly. Her voice brightened. “I have an idea. I’ll telephone while you order the drinks. Better stick to Scotch or beer. Avoid the Martinis. The man behind the bar is Italian and he is devoted to vermouth.”

  He watched her walk to the telephone near the door. She had her coat around her shoulders, and he had the odd idea that she was perhaps leaving him, that she was going to slip out of his life as quickly as she had stepped into it. But she came back to their table as the drinks were arriving. She was walking slowly, and as she reached him, he saw that the small frown had returned to her brow. It cleared as she became aware he was watching her. She sat down, pushing back the coat from her shoulders, and let him help ease it off. But she looked dejected. “It can’t be as bad as all that,” he said with amusement. “Didn’t your idea work out?”

  She shook her head. “I’ve got to keep my appointment tonight—just can’t even be late for it. Sorry.”

  “We’ll have dinner in Zürich.”

  “Where are you
staying?”

  “I may have to move. A bankers’ conference is going to take up most of the rooms next week. But what’s your address?”

  “My grandmother lives out of town and refuses to have a telephone. But I’ll be in Zürich often enough. I have a friend there who will put me up at her apartment if I stay overnight.”

  “Then give me her number.”

  She hesitated. “I wonder. You see—” She was trying to soften her excuse. Then she shrugged her pretty shoulders, looked down at her bare arms. “I don’t like bothering my friend too much. There is nothing so annoying as a phone that keeps ringing not for you but for someone else. She—well, she—”

  “I promise I won’t pester her. I’ll only call once and leave a message that I’m in town. She wouldn’t object to that, would she?” He had his address book and pencil ready. She gave him a number, slowly, as if she were trying to remember it, or perhaps because she had something else on her mind. “That saves a lot of trouble,” he told her reassuringly. “Of course I could have given you the Newhart and Morris office number, but there’s a dragon called Miss Freytag who guards the entrance to Yates’s office—that’s the head man around there—and she is allergic to social calls. Business is business is business.”

  She was sitting very still. Suddenly, she laughed and said, “No, I don’t think I want to leave any messages with a dragon. She’d breathe flames all over them.” She looked down at her hands. “When do you expect to reach Zürich? And how long will you stay?”

  “I’m not sure in either case. I’ll know more about it later tonight.”

  “You are so mysterious.” She sounded as if that idea delighted her. Her eyes turned briefly to look at the door as two people entered.

  “There’s nothing very mysterious about a phone call from New York.”

  “From your friend the publisher? You know, you never did tell me why he sent you here.” She adjusted the watch bracelet on her wrist, studied her hands. It was exactly six o’clock.

  “Just a simple matter of checking on a contract for a book.” The door of the restaurant opened again, and this time a man entered. As he took off his dark-grey coat, he looked around the room. Seemingly he decided against a table and went to the bar instead.

  “It must be wonderful,” she said, now completely relaxed, half dreaming, “to have a job like yours. I mean, a real career with travel as part of it.”

  “That only happens now and again. I’m mostly in New York.”

  “You never think of going back to Denver? Why didn’t you settle there after law school? You sounded as if you liked open-air life.”

  He laughed, thinking that she had learned quite a lot of little things about him on that walk down from the castle. But although he had long got over Nora and a broken marriage—these things hit you hard when you were serving overseas—he wasn’t the type to talk about something that had once almost broken him too. When a man had been spread-eagled on that kind of wheel, he became very wary of any repeat performance. There had been Joan and Mary, Clarissa and Peggy and—yes, there had been plenty of them, perhaps too many. A man got into a routine of independence just as easily as the routine of suburban commuter.

  “But don’t you? Bill—what do you really like?”

  “That’s quite a question—” he began, and stopped short in surprise. She had looked at her watch, openly this time, and was rising as she pulled her coat back over her shoulders. He rose to his feet, looked around for the waitress to pay his bill.

  “No, please don’t come. Finish your drink, Bill.”

  “Nonsense! I’ll walk you home.”

  “But I’m not going there. My friends are waiting for me just around the corner, at the Marionette Theatre. We are driving out to Schloss Fuschl for dinner.”

  “Very gemütlich,” he said. And the message was very clear: a car meant a fixed number of people; if he took her to meet her friends it would only look as if he were trying to crash their party. He helped her put on her coat properly. “Sorry I kept you.”

  “I’m not.” She was smiling up at him as he took her hand. “I never knew that walk down from the castle could take so much time. I usually do it in twelve minutes.” Impulsively, she kissed him on his cheek. “And I do want an answer to my question. I’ll hear it in Zürich,” she said very softly. Then she was walking to the door, her heels clicking lightly on the tiled floor.

  Mathison sat down at the table. It was small and lonely. He finished his drink, paid, and reached for his coat. The evening ahead of him seemed small and lonely, too. Damn it all, he told himself angrily, you were a perfectly happy man wandering around by yourself this morning, or exploring the castle this afternoon before you met any Elissa. You are still you, and Salzburg is still Salzburg, and that’s that.

  He was at the door when he remembered his camera lying on the bench where they had sat. He turned to retrace his steps and almost collided with a man who was unhooking his dark-grey coat from a wall peg. Well, he didn’t stay long, thought Mathison; did his girl stand him up?

  He left the little room with its warm smoke-spiralling air, the encrusted candles guttering low on red tablecloths, the crowded pack of baying voices at the bar, and stepped out into a street that was now dark with early-autumn night, and cold. He was thinking of Elissa’s last question. Bill—what do you really like? A man could answer that differently every five years of his life, and yet be giving the truth. He turned down the short run of narrow street to reach the square with the marble horse-pond. He was so deep in his own thoughts that he never noticed the man in the dark-grey coat who walked a discreet distance behind him.

  7

  At six o’clock, Johann Kronsteiner drove back to Unterwald from the scene of Bryant’s death. The village was quieter now than when he had first arrived over an hour ago. The groups of people had faded away into the warmth of their lighted kitchens, talking in subdued voices about the accident that had taken place only a few miles from their own home. The where of the accident seemed to shock them as much as the how of it. It was the constant murmur of “accident” that had made Johann drive to St George’s Church even if the light was fading rapidly and he would have to scramble down to the burned-out car with a flashlight in one hand. One of the policemen from the Gendarmerie at Bad Aussee had accompanied him; two were staying to talk with August Grell when he returned to the inn—he had gone hunting up around Finstersee, it was said, and hadn’t yet heard about the burned car—and the fourth policeman had left with the ambulance and Richard Bryant’s body. Now, as he swung himself out of his jeep, Johann saw that Felix Zauner was standing at Postmistress Kogel’s door (it was one of the few houses where there was a telephone, Johann remembered, and if he hadn’t been plunged into gloom he would have been amused at Felix’s artful position), and there was Trudi, too, waiting anxiously, keeping Felix company. He called his thanks to the Gendarme and went over to the lighted door. Trudi took his hand. He stood close beside her, but he said nothing at all.

  “Did you get down to the ravine?” Felix asked.

  Johann nodded. The car had cooled off enough to let him examine it.

  “Then you saw the body behind the steering wheel?”

  The charred corpse had been transfixed by the wheel’s column; there had been no possible escape for him. No possible identification, either.

  Trudi Seidl said in her soft voice, “Who could it have been? There’s no one missing from Unterwald. Besides, we saw the car drive through the village. There was only one man in it then.” She was a dark-haired, dark-eyed girl with glowing cheeks and an easy laugh, but tonight there was no smile on her full red lips and she watched Johann anxiously. “The police say it could have been a hiker—there was a Frenchman here on a walking tour. He stayed with my aunt last night; the inn was closed, old Grell said. He left before eight this morning. Do you think it was him?”

  “Did it take him two and a half hours to hike to St George’s?”

  Felix said, “He could
have visited the church to see the wood carvings, or strained an ankle, or anything. We won’t know he isn’t the man until we find him at one of the other hill villages.”

  “He could have cut down to the valley, taken a bus or a train from there, and be in Munich by this time.” Johann looked hard at Felix. And you should have said that, he thought.

  Trudi’s worry increased. She found the logical solution. “Come and have supper with us, Johann.”

  Johann looked at a lighted ground-floor window of the Gasthof Waldesruh, perched on its meadow above the village. “I’ll go to the inn first. August Grell is back, I see.”

  “The Gendarme are talking with him now. He only got back half an hour ago.”

  “And young Anton? Where is he?”

  “But didn’t you know?” asked Trudi. “He’s on holiday. He left last week.”

  Johann looked at Felix again, standing there so silently with one foot on Frau Kogel’s threshold. “Did you find out if anyone saw him leave?”

  “We heard his motor-cycle,” Trudi said quickly. “You know how it roars. It woke everyone up in the village last Thursday morning. Johann, what’s wrong with you?”

  “Johann has a theory and he doesn’t want it spoiled,” Felix Zauner said wearily. He cocked his head as the telephone rang. “Excuse me.” He hurried indoors.

  “He’s been doing that for the last hour, either sending calls to Salzburg or getting them,” Trudi said. “He’s a funny kind of man. I never know what he’s thinking.”

  “He’s just worrying about his business back in Salzburg. Never thinks anyone can do anything right except himself.”

  “It was some day he chose to come up and try again to talk old Grell into his ski lodge idea. Doesn’t he take a refusal?”

  So that is Felix’s story for being at Unterwald, Johann thought. But why isn’t he at Waldesruh, right now, watching Grell’s face as the two Gendarme talk with him? Felix has his own methods, that’s for sure, but they certainly aren’t mine. He bit his lip and frowned, then blew his nose. “Damn this cold, it’s almost better but I can’t think straight.” All he kept feeling was that he and Felix were being drawn apart, and he couldn’t understand any of it. Felix, the bright one, didn’t seem to be aware of it, while he, who never pretended to be one of the clever ones, was seeing a long friendship—well, not end exactly, but certainly change. I’ve never criticised Felix before, he thought, and the idea disturbed him.