Pray for a Brave Heart (8 page)

“The Lower Town?”

“—the Lower Town, by night.”

“Now, we aren’t house-hunting at this hour!”

“No, no no. I just like getting the feel of a place, that’s all.” Paula glanced at a table nearby, and then casually across the room at its curve of giant windows, at its sedate groups of families out together for an evening’s relaxation, at the clusters of couples who were engrossed in each other. “There’s a man over there,” she said with amusement, “who’s much too interested. He pretends he’s only studying this huge room, but you know how it is—the more he avoids being found watching
us, the more he actually gives himself away. Is he a friend of yours?”

Francesca let her eyes wander slowly round the tables. “That creature in the silver-grey suit?” she asked.

“No,” Paula said. “That’s only a landmark.”

“He certainly is.”

“Beyond him to the left. I mean to the right. Your right, his left. It’s always so mixing.”

“I see,” Francesca said slowly, and looked at the man, and then quickly at another table where three girls expanded in pink blushes, pure Renoir colour, under the proud eyes of their parents. “No, he is no friend of mine.” She looked back at the man. He was hunched, now, as if he were trying to contract into nothingness. Thin face, weak chin, nondescript clothes. He wasn’t even the kind of man who would seem likely to be interested in anything except his own dull life. “You’re joking, Paula,” she said.

“Oh, he’s just some little clerk putting in a lonely evening,” Paula said. “But why come here if he enjoys himself so little? Perhaps he’s going straight back to his attic room to start chapter three of his autobiographical novel
—How I Suffer Among the Bourgeoisie.
You’ll be the heroine with the sensitive face who is being led astray by Swiss comfort and American materialism. Now, wouldn’t he be delighted if that dark-haired gigolo in the fancy suit came over here to join us? It would fit all theories perfectly.”

“I’m afraid the pearl-grey suit is too interested in his brandy and cigar,” Francesca said, “and thank heaven for that.”

“He’s leaving, trailing clouds of richness,” Paula reported.

“Some men would do better to stay poor,” Francesca said. “Money only exaggerates their vulgarities.”

Paula laughed. But her eyes were thoughtful as she noticed that the thin-faced man paid no attention at all to the departure of the pearl-grey suit, so that when he had been looking in this direction he must indeed have been watching Francesca and herself. Paula didn’t need to glance over her shoulder to see what table lay behind theirs: there was none—Francesca and she had chosen a corner.

Francesca said, “Shall we leave, too? Then let’s do it quickly.” Paula looked at her grave face and nodded. Within three minutes they were standing at street level far below the high terraces of the Kursaal, deposited there by an outsize elevator which had descended through the solid rock of the Schänzli. Their luck continued. Even as Paula looked with dismay through the drizzling darkness at the long, lonely expanse of bridge back into town, a solitary taxi passed them, hesitated, halted. “Quick, quick!” said Francesca, and ran for it. But once they were over the Kornhaus Bridge, it was Francesca who suggested they might drive slowly around the Lower Town following the loop of the River Aare which semi-circled this tongue of land with its eighteenth-century houses and twisting streets. “To let you see how it looks on a rainy night,” Francesca said. “Houses are like husbands: you should see them at their worst before you decide which to choose.”

The rain was easing, but the weather had kept many people indoors. Most of the restaurants were closing, the streets were bleak, the fountains lonely, chattering shadows robbed of colour and design by the blackness around them. It might have been three o’clock in the morning instead of eleven at night. It could have been almost a medieval city, except that the gutters
held only rain, the streets were not buried in mud and garbage, the lights were steady and methodically spaced, the smells were unnoticeable, the few pedestrians did not need a torchbearer or an armed retainer to get them safely home.

“The twentieth century adds a little something, after all,” Paula said as she got out of the taxi. “The Middle Ages were probably only romantic when seen from this distance. Yet I used to think I’d have been happier in another era.”

“You couldn’t take penicillin with you,” Francesca reminded her.

“I’d just have to cover the pock-marks on my face with black patches. If I lived through the plague.”

But Francesca had stopped listening. She glanced along the arcade, and then back over her shoulder at the quiet Henziplatz.

“It’s peaceful enough,” Paula said reassuringly, and they crossed the bright threshold of the Café Henzi.

Madame at the cash desk gave them a cheerful greeting. There were a few tables left downstairs, but tonight the Convention of Econophilosophists had taken all upstairs for its annual social dinner.

“Of
what?”
Paula asked, as Francesca led her past a telephone booth into the downstairs room, wood-panelled, dimly lighted. It was fairly crowded, gently noisy, with groups of men talking over smoke-circled tables, some women sprinkled here and there among them, students arguing, one or two solitary guests enjoying a glass of wine within the friendliness of the room.

“I told you we had our share of conventions and committees,” Francesca said, with a smile. “Is this all right?” She had chosen a quiet corner. “We can hear the singing when it begins, just as well down here. More comfortably, perhaps.” In spite of her
light voice, she had glanced quickly round the room. Seemingly she felt reassured, for she sighed now and relaxed. Paula was suddenly aware that the tension which had followed them down from the high terraces of the Kursaal was over.

“Perhaps we ought to have gone straight back to the hotel,” she said. The enjoyment of the evening was diluted somehow. She was vaguely disturbed, worried. To her, the dim lights, swinging from the cart wheels which hung from the ceiling, made everyone seem a Pirandello character. But Francesca was more at ease, as if she welcomed the shaded anonymity of the room. And then Paula wondered if the long roundabout drive through the Lower Town hadn’t been partly inspired by the chinless little man’s interest in them at the Kursaal. “Anyway, he didn’t follow us,” she said, dropping her voice, keeping her eyes on the doorway. I’m going to watch that entrance as long as we sit here, she promised herself. I wish I had never joked about him, never drawn Francesca’s attention to him. He was just a harmless little man, lonely and bored, with a wandering eye.

Francesca ordered the wine, something called Fendant de Sion, and Paula began talking about Paris where Andy and she had spent part of the winter. But Francesca’s listening was broken by her own thoughts. It was only to be expected, she told herself, that someone had started being interested in the Falken Committee. It was amazingly good luck that they had been left so long in peace. Or was it possible that they had been watched for some time, and that only this week the watchers had grown careless? Last Tuesday, when she had visited Bern, there had been that woman with the braids heavy over her ears making her round face rounder, the woman with the thick heavy body and the thin legs. And now, tonight at the Kursaal,
there had been that haggard-faced man with the shifting eyes. And yet how did the fat woman or the thin man know she was in Bern, know where to look for her? Who had told them where to look for her? Who had told them where to find her— or to let themselves be noticed once they had found her?

They are trying to scare me, she thought suddenly. That was an old trick: frightening people into making a false move. She smiled suddenly, feeling the excitement coming back into her blood. An old hand didn’t scare so easily at old tricks. Why, she had known that one when she was sixteen. She and her brother had used it to frighten a Nazi informer into warning the leader of his pro-Nazi group. Am I supposed, now, to run to the head of the Committee with my alarms? Am I to lead them to him? Her smile broadened.

“But I’m being serious,” Paula protested. “When it comes to deciding between living in the country and living in the city, I’m almost driven to schizophrenia. Just as I was talking about Paris, I suddenly remembered how good it was to wake up in the country and see fields and trees all around me. Yet in the country I’ll suddenly remember how a city looks with the lights coming on. What do you make of me? I’m not really a fickle kind of person.”

“You are certainly devoted to watching that doorway.”

Paula flushed. “I was just trying to help.” But she smiled, too. “Are you sure you don’t have to be worried?” Then she stared at the doorway again.

“I’m sure,” Francesca said. That’s the Italian in me, she thought. Quickly, she added a touch of Swiss to balance it: “Reasonably sure.” How strange was that phrase, that calm phrase,
reasonably sure:
it always awakened equally reasonable
doubt. “Don’t keep looking at that door, darling.”

“But guess who has just arrived—Maxwell Meyer. Imagine! Look, he’s coming over here.” Paula was delighted with the smallness of the world.

“And who’s Maxwell Meyer?”

Paula, who had been about to wave, let the hand she had half-raised in welcome drop back on the table. “He didn’t see me,” she said. She lowered her voice. “He’s sitting just over there to your left.”

“You seem to have picked a blind batch of male friends,” Francesca said teasingly, remembering Bill Denning.

“Oh, he isn’t a friend: just a friend of a friend,” Paula said. She was a little hurt, though. Perhaps it wasn’t Maxwell Meyer after all, she thought. “What has happened to the singing?” she asked.

“It will start soon,” Francesca said, glancing at her watch. “Any minute now.” It was almost eleven o’clock.

The room of “Elizabeth” was small, square, warmly lighted by a pink-shaded lamp. Heavy red curtains covered the narrow windows, blotting out the rain which slanted through the darkness outside, and silencing the occasional noises of traffic from the Henziplatz. Highly coloured pictures of roses and unadorned nymphs were pinned on the wall. A double bed covered with cheap lace and pink silk took more than its share of floor space. A scrap of white fur rug lay before the bed, small cushions and a doll on a narrow red couch. A round table and two chairs waited near the screen which hid a sink and small cooking stove. There was another screen, too, probably hiding the bathroom.

“I’m Keppler,” the man said, locking the door as Denning stepped into the room. He shook hands solemnly. He was a business-like man in a quiet brown suit: quick in word and movement; of medium height and solid build, with close-cropped
grey hair above a tanned face, heavy eyebrows over blank blue eyes, a mouth that was pleasant enough, a well-defined nose and a long chin.

He had been studying Denning too. “You should change your photographer, Captain Denning. He doesn’t flatter you. Have a chair.” He waved a hand towards the table.

Denning shook his hat free of the rain and slipped off his sodden coat. Keppler’s unobtrusive scrutiny made him still more conscious of his anomalous position here. Suddenly, he stood quite still. A tall thin figure came silently out from behind the bathroom screen.

“Le Brun—Denning,” Keppler said, now placing the emphasis on the civilian approach.

“You shouldn’t do that,” Denning said, smiling at his own tenseness, as he shook hands with the Frenchman. Perhaps Le Brun’s nerves weren’t too good either, for his melancholy face was not at all amused, and his handshake was brief. Then he sat down on the red couch, pushed aside the doll with a frown, and leaned forward, his long arms resting on his knees, his sad brown eyes watching Denning intently.

“I suppose we’ll speak in English?” he asked.

Denning looked at Keppler, but he was choosing a cigar from the case. Americans don’t speak French, Denning remembered. “That’s all right with me,” he said, keeping his voice friendly. I’m the unwanted stepchild, he thought.

“Did you have any trouble in reaching here?” Le Brun asked.

“I had a lot of walking. But no trouble.” Denning glanced at Keppler again. Who was in charge, anyway? But Keppler seemed content to let Le Brun lead the discussion. Colonel Le Brun, Denning suddenly remembered. But, as Le Brun asked
him some searching questions, about Berlin, his journey to Bern, his connections with Meyer, he became sure that it wasn’t only his first joking remark that had nettled a colonel. And it wasn’t just the fact that Le Brun’s pride was probably hurt: it had every reason to bridle over Charlie-for-Short’s preference for the Americans. Nor was it simply a matter of feeling obliged to the Swiss, although there were some people who never felt at ease in the role of guest, preferring to give favours rather than receive them.

Some of these emotions no doubt were mixed up in the basis of Le Brun’s growing impatience. But the real clue to his present temper came when he said, suddenly throwing up his hands in despair, “So you know as little as Keppler does about this whole business? As little as I do? Perhaps even less! My God!” Then he let his arms fall and his lips droop. He didn’t need to say anything more.

Keppler studied the end of his cigar. He said, “Le Brun is pessimistic about tonight.”

“It is too rash, too quick,” Le Brun said. “This will probably be a wild duck chase. That is all it will be.”

“Then we’ll have discovered it was a wild duck we were chasing,” Keppler said placidly. “That at least is something to know. What do you think, Denning?”

“Denning,” Le Brun cut in, “is as worried as I am, I can
see that.
”

But not about the same things, thought Denning.

“I came here yesterday,” Le Brun said. “The whole place is placid, quiet. I might have been one of these stupid tourists. Not a single attempt to follow me, to note what I was doing. No interest whatever.”

“Are you sure?” Denning asked.

“Of course I am sure. I am not an amateur in this business.”

But I am, Denning thought. Is this what is annoying Le Brun? He said, “I gathered you were strictly professional.”