Ellis Peters - George Felse 05 - The Piper On The Mountain (16 page)

It accepted his weight perfidiously, and then at the last moment it lurched, and almost brought him down. He swayed and stared, afraid to close his eyes, fighting for balance, streaming with sweat in a sudden flood that scalded his eyebrows and eyelids, and burned bitterly on his lips. His supporting foot slipped, the stone under it rolled with agonising slowness between its fellows, and ponderously found a new equilibrium. He was down on hands and knees, quivering, toppling, wrestling with the air within him and without, fighting to balance his terrified flesh with the poised wings of his desperately calm mind. Under his spread, cautious fingers the stone felt like a ploughed field shaken by earthquake. Slowly, slowly the convulsions settled. He hung still, intact, amazed, running with sweat.

Through the thunder of blood in his ears, he heard a voice behind him saying very clearly and coolly: “Don’t be startled! Keep quite still. I’m here close behind you.”

And indeed the voice was close, steady and sourceless, like voices heard in delirium; and like those voices, it did not startle him, it was strangely acceptable, almost familiar; even the fact that it spoke in unaccented English did not strike him as surprising. The only thing he wondered about then was time. How long could he have been kneeling here sick and blind, fighting for his nerve and his balance, if the stranger had had time to drop down the slope to him and follow him out on to this vibrating man-trap?

“Don’t move until I tell you.”

A hand, long, large-jointed and muscular, came steadily sliding past his shoulder, and closed over his right hand, holding it down hard against the stone. The hand’s invisible fellow settled bracingly under his right arm-pit.

“Now! Turn inward towards the slope. Gently! I’ve got your weight.”

The hands holding him felt like the only stable things in the universe. He trusted them, and turned about the pivot of his own anchored arm. He could see nothing but the close, grained surfaces of rock, and the light on the side of him where the fall was; but now it had changed to his right side. When he had blinked away the sweat that stung his eyes, the range of his vision took in also the hand that gripped his own, a muscular, naked forearm, the edge of a wide linen sleeve, and a knee, cased in cream-coloured felt, drawing back slowly to a new position.

“All right?” asked the voice.

“Yes. I’m all right.”

“Keep still, then. I’m going to turn ahead of you. No, keep down!”

The hands withdrew from him. He drew breath cautiously, and through the interstices of his human and commanding terror intimations of reason and will came floating back to him.

“Good! Now follow me closely. I’ll go slowly. Hold by my ankle as you move up after me.”

“I’m all right. I’ll follow.”

But sometimes he accepted the offer, all the same, closing his fingers firmly on the lean ankle above the laced sheepskin shoe, partly for the comfort of another human being’s solidity and nearness, even more with a sort of detached elation, because he had risked his life to draw this man down within his reach, and here he was now in the flesh, under his hand.

The way back seemed longer than the way out. They moved by careful inches, spreading their weight low and delicately, like cats. The sun was burning on the exposed nape of Dominic’s neck, a new and almost grateful discomfort; the stones were warm under his palms, warm and shaking like live flesh, searing his skinned finger-tips. He felt for the places that had held firm under his guide, gripped the heel of the soft shoe, and crawled doggedly on; until suddenly the shoe was drawn out of his grasp, and set its sole to the ground, and there were a few blades of bleached, seeding grass that fluttered beside the arched foot.

Dominic stared at them, and for a moment could not realise what they were doing there. A hand reached down to lift him by the arm. His companion was on his feet, on the pale, terraced hillside at the end of the talus. They were out of it, and they were alive. Dominic put foot to ground eagerly, and the ground held steady under him; now it was his knees that gave way and all but let him fall.

He could hardly stand. But for the arm that encircled him and hoisted him down the slope, he would have had to sit down in the grass and wait helplessly until the shock and reaction passed. Shamed and dismayed, he let himself be hustled into the highest hut, and dumped without ceremony on the camp-bed that stood in one corner of the single room. He sat with his head in his hands, drawing in deep, steadying breaths, his eyes closed.

A hand tapped him smartly on the shoulder, and he opened his eyes to find a glass being dangled in front of him.

“Here, put this down.”

The voice had abandoned its cool, unstartling detachment; it was peremptory, warm and formidably angry.

Dominic took the glass meekly; he didn’t know what was in it, but it was fiery and bitter, and burned into all the corners of him with a salutary shock. Everything shook into place again, sun and shadow and forms and thoughts. He realised for the first time the full implications of what he’d done. Apart from risking his life in that perilous passage, he had presented himself as a sitting duck for anyone who wanted to wipe him out. What could he have done in his own defence, quaking out there on a rolling heap of marbles, without even a hand free to throw stones, much less the possibility of running for cover? If he had miscalculated about this man in front of him, he would have been dead by now, and buried, and probably beyond identification if ever they recovered what was left of him.

But he hadn’t miscalculated. He was here, alive; and this man had brought him here.

He looked up over the empty glass, the drink stinging his throat and eyes, and for the first time gave all his attention to his rescuer. He found himself looking up into a frowning face, broad across eyes and brow, lean of cheek and long of chin, with a scimitar of a nose, and a long, sceptical mouth. Light brown hair arched high at the temples, duplicating the line of his brows; and the deep eyes beneath stared hard at Dominic, and not precisely indulgently, or with any great liking.

“And now perhaps you’ll tell me,” he said grimly, “what the devil you thought you were doing, out there?”

“I was looking for you, Mr. Alda,” said Dominic. “And I’ve found you.”

There was a moment of silence, blank and profound, while they stared at each other. Anger left the formidable, self-sufficient face, and something of wonder, interest and speculation came into it, but nothing at all of either understanding or disquiet.

“You know my name, it seems. Should I know yours?”

“It’s Dominic Felse. But no, you won’t know it. I’m English.”

“That I’d already gathered,” said Alda drily. “Only an Englishman, and I should guess a Londoner, would go striding out on treacherous places with quite such aplomb. Do you realise now that you did your best to kill yourself? Or are you completely a fool?”

The
becherovka
had begun to burn in Dominic’s cheeks. “I’m not from London. I’m a countryman, almost a hill-man. I knew what I was doing.” He was angry with himself the minute he’d said it; it sounded like a child’s pique, though he had intended something quite different and very much more respectable. “I’ve climbed quite a bit,” he said, almost apologetically. “I know the sort of places where one shouldn’t go.”

“Then you
are
completely a fool! Or else,” he said, narrowing his deep-set eyes intently, “you wanted me very badly. Perhaps you’d better tell me why.”

“You
are
Karol Alda?” He knew it, but he wanted it said.

“They call me Karol Veselsky here. But yes, I am Karol Alda. Karol Alda or Charles Alder, whichever you prefer. And what do you want with him?”

“I’ve got a friend who’s in trouble, and I want your help. It concerns you. But it’s quite a story.”

“You’d better tell me.”

And Dominic sat with his hands gripped tightly together between his knees, and told him, almost in a breath. He was not afraid of not being understood. And now he was no longer afraid of any kind of evasion.

“There are four of us here together, I daresay you’ve seen us around. One of the girls is Tossa Barber, and her stepfather was a man named Terrell, who was killed here in this valley, about three weeks ago. It isn’t that she was fond of him, or anything, but she felt bound to him, and she wasn’t satisfied about his death, that’s why she got us to come here. She wanted to find out for herself. And what she found out was that
you
were somewhere here, and he’d picked up your trail and was looking for you. Tossa felt it might have been murder. But the Slovak police had closed the case and lost all interest in it.”

“Perhaps,” said Alda, eyeing him levelly, “because for them there was no mystery about his death.”

“You mean they
know
how he died?”

“They know exactly how he died.”

“How?” asked Dominic, moistening dry lips. “I mean, how do they
know
?”

“They know because I told them. I reported his death.”

“
You reported it?
I thought the Martíneks… They called out the mountain rescue people…” He broke off there, remembering Dana’s account of that night search. The Martíneks had notified the mountain rescue service, and then gone out to hunt for their missing guest, but the police had been first on the scene. Because the police, it seemed, had known exactly where to go. “Would you mind telling me about it? This isn’t curiosity, it’s terribly important.”

“It’s very simple. I was on my way home by the high-level path that crosses the open rock there. Since you came to investigate his death, I take it you’ve looked at the place. I wasn’t thinking of Terrell. I haven’t thought about him for five years at least, I’ve had other things to think about. I had no idea he was within seven hundred miles of me.

“And at the blind point in the path I met him, face to face.” He caught the brief, fearful gleam of Dominic’s eyes, the one returning instant of doubt, and smiled wryly. “No, I didn’t touch him. I had no time for anything beyond recognising him. Because he’d recognised me, and his reactions were the quicker and the deadlier. He shrank back from me. Jumped back would be nearer the truth. And he went over the edge. When I climbed down to him—it takes ten minutes or so from there—he was already dead. Well, my own telephone at home was as near as any other, so I went on there, and called in the police from Pavol. There was never any mystery for them about his death, except perhaps the mystery of what he was doing there at all, in the dusk alone.”

“But do they know,” asked Dominic pointblank, “about the connection there was between you before? Did you tell them he was the man who was put on your case when you left England?”

Alda’s eyebrows rose. “You’re very well-informed, I see. I told them I had known him and worked in the same institute with him. That was necessary, they wanted him identified, of course. But as for the rest… why bother? It seemed to me irrelevant. I could and did tell them exactly how he fell to his death, and they didn’t question my word. I didn’t think our past connection had anything more to say in the matter. The man was dead. I took it for granted, then, that our meeting like that was pure chance.”

“It wasn’t! He was looking for you, trying to find out what you were doing here, what you were working on. He’d found a piece of scrap paper, music paper, with your handwriting on it, and that brought him here to Zbojská Dolina, searching for you. I suppose it would have been another feather in his cap if he’d been able to bring home word of something sensational.”

He had got so far when he saw that Alda was leaning back against the wall in a convulsion of silent laughter. He sat staring, confounded.

“Forgive me! But how baffled he’d have been if he had found out what I’m working on! Do you know what it is? Do you know why my privacy was left largely undisturbed, why things were arranged so that I did not have to come into the limelight with my story? Because of my vitally important work! Because I am at work on an opera about Comenius! How many sinister codes he’d have read into every note! Especially into the evangelical psalms! That was his profession, and his occupational hazard. It seems he died of it.”

Every word rang true. Dominic believed him all the more readily because there was no attempt to convince; belief was taken for granted, as between honest men who recognise each other on sight. But he still did not understand.

“But
why
did he fall? Even if he was startled, even if the dusk was coming on,
why
? He was used to mountains, he climbed the big stuff. Why did he jump back like that? Did he expect you to attack him?”

“Possibly, though nothing was farther from my mind. If only he’d known how little ill-will I bore him, how little I thought of him at all! But more probably he suffered a reflex of conscience, a superstitious recoil. Coming face to face quite inescapably, as he did,” said Alda softly, “with a man he had, by his own standards and in his own way, murdered.”

Alda lifted the empty glass from Dominic’s clenched fingers, and went and refilled it at the rough cupboard on the wall. “Here, it won’t hurt you. You still look as if you need it. How much do you know about myself and Terrell and the Marrion Institute? And how did you get to know? Security must be as tight as ever there.”

“Tossa had it from a man named Welland, some sort of secretary at the embassy in Prague, who knew Terrell as a good climber, and didn’t believe his death could be an accident. He began poking into the past, and he… well, he found…”

“He found me. Quite! A Slovak, an enemy, a possible murderer. A defecting physicist-cum-mathematician on highly secret work. A little hackneyed now, perhaps, but to him convincing, I’m sure. Do you need to know the rest of it? How much do you know?”

Dominic told him, and blushed feverishly over the telling. It was like recapitulating the plot of a sausage-machine thriller; in this clear air he marvelled that anyone should be able to view motives and actions in such crude and unlikely ways.

“Yes, I think you do need to know everything. After your recent effort,” he said tolerantly, “I think you’ve earned it. When I went off into Savoy for my leave, to consider whether or not I should resign, I went up alone into the highest routes I could manage, and kept in touch with no one, either at home or locally. I was trying to wear myself out, body and mind, in the hope of a revelation. And just at the end of my time I was cut off in a solitary refuge in Dauphiné by bad weather and a slight injury, and kept there for a fortnight. The place was well stocked, and I was glad of the extension. But when I got down into Briançon at last, with a fortnight’s beard, burned dark brown, and much thinner than when I went up, I found out from the first English paper I bought that the hysteria of the times had turned me into a fugitive and a traitor. The main points of Terrell’s dossier on me were already in print. They hadn’t given me even two weeks’ grace.”

“You mean,” demanded Dominic, the glass shaking in his hand, “you never ran away at all?”

“Never until then, certainly. After that you might say I walked away. The hue and cry was out after me as I sat reading the catalogue of my offences in the middle of it. All I did was to accept the omen. No, I didn’t run, I walked to the nearest exit. It was a work of art, that dossier. No absolute lies, you understand, only double truths. Maybe it was only the work of a suggestible, ambitious mind bent on rising in his profession, and able to convince himself in the process. Maybe it was coldly and deliberately constructed, for the same personal reasons. I gather he got the Security Office on the strength of the job he did on me. He was a junior in the secretariat when I knew him. All I know is, when we ran headlong into each other he sprang back from me, and went over the edge. How do I know what he saw, and what do I care? Why go further into it now?

“I could have come back, of course, but it would have been to a shower of mud, and a hard fight ahead of me to clear my name. The times were against me. But that wasn’t why I walked away. It was disgust I felt, not fear. And something else, too. A sense that a gate had opened before me for a purpose, and I mustn’t hesitate to pass through it. So I simply turned, without haste, and walked away again into the blue.”

Dominic’s teeth chattered faintly against the rim of the glass. “But you must know that you left people in England convinced that you’d changed sides in the cold war. Even your coming back here would be interpreted as backing up that view.”

“Boy, I was born here. The old lady who has the farm just over the col is my grandmother. Her home is my home. I became English at fifteen because my parents became English, at a time when I was a minor, and went along naturally with them. Don’t misunderstand me, I have nothing against being English. I have simply recognised the fact that in spite of the filling in of papers, I am
not
English. The process is more complex than that. I took my time over the decision, but in the end I came home.”

“But you did bring your gifts with you. To be used here.”

“Gifts are to be used wherever one goes. But what gifts? That attack on me was an oracle and an opportunity. For years I’d worked earnestly in government service, trying to keep my belief in the professed ideals of government, against all the evidence, forcing myself into the mould of a life for which I was never intended. It took that crisis to make me realise I’d been using my energy in the way least suitable for me, and least effective. Every man must use his own tools for the re-shaping of the world. I’ve gone back to mine. Music, tranquillity, human affection, human dignity—they can all be used to state the political truths I believe in. Putting aside, of course, the narrower meaning of ‘political’. I came home and asked them to take me back as what I am first and foremost, a composer. And they accepted me as a Slovak again on my own terms. I chose to take my grandmother’s name, which is Veselsky, simply because I didn’t want to be an international sensation or a bone of contention, in Czechoslovakia or England or anywhere else. I refuse to be used as ammunition against either of my two countries, and I need privacy and peace in which to work. They must have thought them reasonable requests—they’ve been almost too religiously respected.”

“Then you’re giving
all
your time to music?” asked Dominic doubtfully.

“You think all my time is too much? This pastoral life is only part of the picture. For composition I find it ideal here in the mountains, but there are other aspects of my life, too. I give occasional piano recitals, I do a great deal of conducting. Oh, I assure you all my time is hardly enough.”

“No—I suppose not. But in England,” ventured Dominic hesitantly, “you had other work as well, this work with aircraft design, and all that. And that was important, too. Tossa said Welland told her you could have been Director of the Marrion. Don’t you miss all that? Don’t you ever want to get into it again here?” He had not quite the hardihood to add: “And if you don’t, why did you bring your notebooks with you?”

Alda smiled. “I won’t say it gave me no satisfaction. I may even take it up again some day, if I do it will be in a very different way. Meantime, with only one life to spend, I’m making sure of the first essential first. Nothing is going to elbow out music a second time. But I keep in touch,” he said, meeting Dominic’s absorbed stare with faintly indulgent good-humour. “I have a friend in America who keeps me supplied with technical magazines. If I ever do decide to get back into the field I shan’t be starting under any great handicap. Not that I think it likely,” he admitted tranquilly. “If ever I thought myself indispensable, I’ve been cured of that. At least one of my undeveloped ideas went into commercial production this spring with a French company—and to better effect than if I’d worked it out for the Institute. What they’d have kept it for I daren’t imagine. Prunières have incorporated it in a light helicopter for crop-spraying in tropical countries. No secrets, reasonably cheap production, and a sensible use. They’re welcome to the profit. I’m content. No doubt somebody or other will happen on all the other ideas, too, given a few years. Simultaneous discovery in music is less likely. I’ll stick to music.”

“Then, of course,” conceded Dominic, “I suppose it wouldn’t be liable to occur to you that Terrell might have been prowling round to spy on your work. And you couldn’t guess—how could you?—that there was likely to be another death.”