Pray for a Brave Heart (16 page)

“Then,” the policeman said reassuringly, “we shall warn her. Her address?”

“She lives with her aunt, Fräulein Louisa Lüthi—”

“Swiss?” He was, at least, taking notes once more.

“—who lives in Falken,” Paula said. “Falken.” She began spelling it.

“I have heard of it,” the policeman said, with a polite smile. “I go skiing there each winter. A quiet little village.”

“Falken,” Andy repeated. Suddenly he was on his feet, moving towards the door. “Better make your report as quickly as possible; gentlemen. And as quietly as possible, too. If this is political law-breaking, then you will have to alert the proper authorities.”

The two policemen looked at each other. Until this minute, there had been a feeling of alliance in this room—three men trying to calm a pretty young woman who had been through a frightening experience and was best soothed by being humoured. But now, Herr Waysmith had suddenly been persuaded there was some truth in this vaguely defined danger. At least he was standing near the door, trying to hurry them away. The policeman looked down at his note-book.

“Please,”
Paula said. “I’ll give you all the other details tomorrow. But now—
please
—”

“This is all very unusual,” he told her severely. “Yes?” he added, watching her face. “The lady has forgotten something important?”

“It’s just—that if they came to force Francesca to go with them—wouldn’t they have needed a car?” She looked at Andy for help. “Near the hotel?”

“All cars are being searched tonight,” the policeman said. He didn’t explain further. But he rose at last. Frau Waysmith really believed her own story, he decided. No questioning would alter it.

“If I were you, I’d keep a firm eye on that man Rauch,” Andy said. “Just in case he knew he had friends waiting for him in a car.”

The policeman shook his head as he walked to the door. “He doesn’t have much courage in him, that one.” Anyone who ran away from a screaming girl wasn’t much of a problem.

But Andy wasn’t listening to him. He had opened the inner door. Now he could hear the sound of quiet scuffling from the corridor. He flung open the outside door, and he broke into a run. So did the two policemen.

Paula followed slowly. He’s escaped, she was thinking.

But Rauch had not escaped. Not quite. He had almost reached the flight of stairs just beyond the Englishman’s room, but Andy and the two policemen had him in a firm grip. The remains of the silent battle were strewn along the corridor. The assistant manager was picking himself slowly up from the floor. The lame porter was still sitting there, one arm over his brow. And at Rauch’s feet the house detective was stretched flat on the ground, one hand (with the handcuffs still secure about his own wrist) grasping the man’s ankle.

Now he let go, and tried to rise. As Andy bent down to help him, he held up the useless handcuffs on his wrist. “He slipped out of these,” he began in a breathless whisper. He wiped away some blood from a gash over his eye. He gained some more breath. “Ju-jitsu,” he warned the two policemen in a whisper that had strengthened to hoarseness. “He was so quiet. Wanted
a cigarette. Then—” He snapped his fingers. “Like that. So quick. One, two, three. But I tackled his leg. I held on.” Pride raised his voice to normal. “He dragged me all the way.” He felt his shoulder and wiped away more blood from his brow. “He kicked.”

“Sh!” the assistant manager said, gesturing towards the closed bedroom doors. “Quiet, everyone!” he added in a whisper.

“Good man,” Andy said to the house detective in a normal voice. “Good man.”

“A most dangerous criminal,” the assistant manager told the policeman, as they started to lead a thoroughly subdued Rauch downstairs, “see that he doesn’t escape.”

“He won’t,” the older policeman said grimly. “Come on, you! Quick!” He tightened his grip on Rauch. Thank heaven for that, Paula thought. She had liked the way the policeman had meant “Quick!” too.

To Paula, the assistant manager gave a bow as he pressed a handkerchief to his swelling jaw. “My apologies, Frau Waysmith.”

“Why the hell didn’t you give a shout?” Andy asked.

“Sh! Please! The other guests, Herr Waysmith,” he murmured unhappily. “Besides, we held him, didn’t we?”

Andy gave him a look. Then he put his arm around Paula and turned back towards their room.

The Englishman’s outside door opened as they passed. “Thought I heard voices—”

“Round two,” said Andy. “All over.”

The Englishman looked astonished. “But I heard nothing alarming.”

“I wasn’t there,” Paula said. “Men don’t scream, seemingly. But I must say a scream in time saves—”

“Good night,” Andy said quickly and hurried her along the corridor. As they entered their bedroom, he said, “Come on, Paula. Tell me all about it.” He led her over to an armchair.

Paula didn’t answer. She was looking at the half-opened wardrobe door. The man in the long dark coat had touched that handle. And I forgot to tell the police, she thought now. What else did I forget?

Andy was saying, “If you can stand out in the corridor and chitchat to that ageing Sir Walter Raleigh, you can damn well sit on your husband’s knee and tell him how you happened to get into this—this mess.”

“I wasn’t chitchatting. I was only being polite. He did help when I—” Then she saw Andy’s face, worried, drawn. She sat down on his knees and slid her arm round his shoulders. She kissed him. “That’s for believing my story so quickly. No one else did, very much. Not until Rauch tried to escape.” Her lips drooped suddenly. “Oh, Andy, it is terrible to give a true warning, and have everyone look at you as if—” All the emotions she had felt in the last hour suddenly culminated in frank tears.

“Now that’s all right, all right,” Andy kept saying as he found a handkerchief for her.

“But it isn’t—that wall of unbelief… And everyone listening is your friend, everyone is really on your side, only they just can’t believe. What makes us all so
slow?
So slow and stupid? Gregor said I was stupid. He was right.”

“Darling, let me get you to bed.”

“But I have so much to tell you—”

“Later, later,” Andy said worriedly. “I’ll get you to bed.” And next time, he was thinking, you’ll damned well stay beside me, and travel with me. No more of this. If Francesca had been here, if they had kidnapped Francesca, what would they have done to Paula to silence her? He bit his lip.

The telephone rang. Andy groaned. But Paula, suddenly alert, was saying, “Is that Francesca?” He watched his wife in amazement as she slipped off his knee and ran across to answer the call, all her exhaustion gone, her tears vanished. How long did you have to live with a woman to know what to expect next? He studied her as she listened; then as she spoke. It must have been Francesca on the other end of the wire, because Paula ended with “Take care…please take care.” She came away from the telephone, slowly. I’ve come to Bern, he thought, and found a different kind of Paula: or had we all these unsuspected resources which we called upon when we needed them? Were the hidden possibilities within each of us our true character, the essential core of a human being which surface manners and normal behaviour only veneered?

“Andy, I’m afraid,” Paula was saying, and her face was white and haggard. “I’m afraid, terribly afraid.” She covered her eyes with her hands. She sat down on the bed.

“I’m here,” Andy said, and he rose and crossed the room to sit down beside her. He took her cold hand and kissed its palm. “You ought to get some rest,” he added gently.

“It’s Schmid I’m afraid for,” she said. “And Francesca.”

He unbuttoned her jacket and began drawing it off her shoulders.

“Schmid is gone. He hasn’t been found. They’ve been searching all evening, all night.”

“Who?”

“The Falken Committee.”

Andy folded her jacket and placed it carefully on a chair. “What do you know about that Committee?” he asked quietly.

“You remember when I helped find a job in California for Andrássy, and had to keep it all so quiet?”

“Andrássy, the composer? Was he being helped by the Falken group?”

Paula nodded. “And while he waited to leave for America, he was called Schmid. He worked as a waiter at the Café Henzi. And now he has vanished. This afternoon. In Falken.”

“You never told me that Andrássy, had any connection with Falken.”

“I didn’t know. Until Francesca told me today—”

“She’s on this Committee?”

“Yes.” Then Paula looked at him quickly. “What do
you
know about Falken?”

He didn’t answer for a second or two. “Remember when I went to see Meyer in Frankfurt recently? Well, what bothered me was a story connected with Falken—”

“Maxwell Meyer? But he’s here!”

“In Bern?”

“I saw him tonight.”

“By God, that’s something. Where can I reach him?”

“Bill Denning could tell us. He’s in Bern, too. At the Aarhof.”

“By God—” Andy said again. He bent down and kissed her shoulder. “Either get into bed, or put something warm around you,” he told her as he lifted the telephone.

But there was no answer from Denning’s room at the Aarhof. “Then I’ll have to keep bothering you every fifteen minutes until I do get an answer,” Andy warned the operator. He turned to
see his wife carefully pushing the wardrobe door farther open with the side of her arm.

“We must get the police back here, first thing in the morning,” she told him. “The tall man opened this door, and he didn’t wear gloves, so it’s got his fingerprints. That’s better than any description I can give of him.”

Andy stared at her. She was too busy tying the red silk sash of a lace dressing-gown around her, to notice his amazement. He suddenly smiled. “Is that your idea of something warm?” But there was a discreet knocking at the bedroom door, and Paula retreated modestly into the bathroom while a table was wheeled into the room.

“What a waste of a perfectly good supper,” Paula said, when it was safe for her to come back into the bedroom. And what a waste of a perfectly charming negligee, she thought. “I’d feel properly Edwardian if only I wasn’t so—so angry.”

“Angry?” Andy looked down at the assistant manager’s excellent apology: chicken in aspic, asparagus,
coeur de crème
, wild strawberries, and a bottle of Piper Heidsieck 1947. It seemed ungrateful to say that all he had indeed wanted was a plain ham sandwich and a good Scotch and soda.

“Yes, angry,” Paula said, slipping her feet into red satin slippers. And she was angry, now. “What do these men think they are, anyway?” She lifted a roll and broke open the hard crust. “I’ll have a glass,” she added, pointing to the champagne. “Yes,” she went on, her lips tight, her eyes hard, “these men who think they can take away people’s freedom. By lifting a telephone, as Gregor said. By having a secret conference. By deciding, in cold blood, that a man like Andrássy has no choice in where he is going to live. By hunting down a girl who was
only trying to help him and all the others who wanted freedom to choose. Mind you”—she watched Andy pour carefully—“if Andrássy had stayed in Hungary and actually plotted against the government, then they would have a case against him. But all he wants is to leave a country against which he had neither conspired nor fought. His only crime is that he wants to go and work in another country. But
they
don’t want that.
They
won’t allow any innocent man to have freedom of choice.” She lifted her glass of champagne. “Gregor was right, Freedom of choice! Now
there’s
an editorial for you, Andy!”

“Who is this Gregor?”

“If you’ll have some supper, I’ll tell you all that happened today.” Paula’s eyes softened as she looked at her husband. “When did you eat last?”

“This afternoon. Two o’clock.” He waved that away as unimportant now, but she began serving him some food.

“At least,” he agreed as he took her advice, “this will keep us awake until Bill Denning gets back to his hotel.”

But by four o’clock, they gave up even that idea.

“No one followed us,” Keppler said reassuringly, as the car barely stopped to let them out on a quiet street, tree-shaded, near a narrow gate in a garden wall. Denning watched the car disappear round the corner into a broad avenue. They had driven quickly from Keppler’s dingy office, crossing the River Aare by the Kirchenfeld Bridge. That much he knew. But apart from the fact that this house belonged to Keppler’s sister, that Keppler stayed here when he visited Bern, he knew little else. He had the feeling, though, that the route they had followed, however quick, had been circuitous once they had crossed the bridge, that Keppler had been taking precautions, that now they were entering a house which did not lie so far from the river. Perhaps it was only his nerves, but he felt an irritation that he had been told so little. Yet Keppler must trust him enough, or he wouldn’t have been brought here. But he was uneasy.

Keppler noticed it. “No one followed us,” he repeated as he
unlocked the heavy front door of the stolid house, encircled by its compact garden, shielded from neighbouring houses by small trees and flowering shrubs. He stood aside politely to let Denning enter the dark hall. “A crime reporter keeps strange hours. The neighbours pity me, but they aren’t curious. My sister only says that there must be easier ways to make an honest living.” He switched on a dim light. His manner, like his voice, was calm and matter-of-fact. Now, he led the way from the narrow hall—a gleamingly clean hall, smelling of beeswax and turpentine, of spices from the kitchen, with a woman’s gardening hat, old raincoats, a dog’s leash hanging against one pine-panelled wall, a bowl of flowers on a polished table—and they climbed a steep staircase which led up through this seemingly normal house. On the first landing they passed a room where someone snored. “My sister,” Keppler said. “But my rooms are on the top floor. She won’t disturb us.”

Denning felt a wild fit of laughter about to seize him. He gripped the railing hard, tensing all his muscles to control himself, and fought the laughter down. The joke wasn’t as funny as all that, he realised. And he gritted his teeth in anger against himself when he started nervously at the appearance of a large dog on the landing above them.