Snare of the Hunter (2 page)

“They could have searchlights mounted in jeeps,” she said as she rose. She pulled her scarf over her head, fastened it tightly around her chin. Barbed wire, she warned herself, and repressed a shudder. She picked up the canvas bag which had lain against the tree that had sheltered them.

“It won’t be dark enough for searchlights to be really effective.” Not altogether true, but he wanted to reassure her. She would have no need for extra worries in the next five minutes. “Besides, they’d have to bump along six kilometres of rough grass. The road is on the Austrian side, remember?” He smiled widely, a gaunt-faced man of thirty-three with sharp brown eyes that now softened as he studied her face. “You’re all right, too, Irina. Now, are we ready?” He pointed down towards the small ribbon of road. The Volkswagen had just come into view, travelling slowly without lights.

“Don’t come back this way, Josef,” she said quickly. “Don’t even collect your motor-cycle where you left it. Go in another direction altogether.” She was thinking of Jiri.

He paused for one brief moment, stared at her in surprise. “Don’t worry, Irina. I’m an old hand at this game.” He shouldered her bag and left, running swiftly. She made sure that the knot on her scarf was tight, ended a spaced count of ten, and stepped out of the trees. She raced after him, stumbled twice on the rough ground, but kept on running. He had reached the fence before she was half-way there, had started cutting the wire expertly. The car was still some distance off. Thank God, she was thinking as she reached the cruel tangle of barbs, thank God Jiri had kept his promise: no patrols crashing out from the shelter of the trees behind her, no sudden burst of machine-gun fire raking the field, no searchlights. There was just the grey veil of dusk falling more thickly over the wooded hills, shrouding colours, deepening the silence. She knelt down, touched the earth with her hand outstretched.

“Now!” Josef told her. He had dropped the wire cutters. He anchored the lower strands with his feet at one side of the gash he had made. The middle strands were forced aside, held with an effort. She crouched low, kept her arms close to her body, passed safely through with only one small rip on the sleeve of her raincoat. “Step clear,” he warned her as she turned to look at him. He stepped back himself as he let the wires go. He picked up her bag, tossed it high over the fence towards her. She couldn’t speak. She stood there looking at him.

Behind her, the car had stopped. A man jumped out, came running over the narrow strip of grass that separated the road from the boundary fence. He grasped her arm—it was Ludvik Meznik—and swung her round towards the car. “Get in!” he told her as he pushed past her to reach the fence. “Okay, Josef? No alarms?”

“All okay.” Josef was picking up the wire cutters, stowing them into his pocket.

And at that moment there was a shot. One bullet only, neatly cracking the deep silence, sending a swarm of ravens out from the tree tops. Their hoarse cries echoed across the shallow valley.

Irina, almost at the car, turned swiftly. At first she could only see Ludvik’s thickset body backing away from the fence. “Get in, get in!” he yelled at her, catching her arm. “They’ll shoot us all!”

She pulled herself free, stood looking at the cut fence. Josef was lying quite still. She started forward. Ludvik took a firmer hold on her arm, dragged her back to the car. The driver had left it. Ludvik caught hold of him too. “Get in, you damned fools,” he said. “We can’t help him. He’s dead. Get in, damn you, or they’ll get us all.” He thrust them ahead of him.

“We can’t leave him there,” Irina was screaming.

“He’s my brother—” Alois shouted.

Then all protest, all argument was over as a searchlight beamed across the sky and the distant sound of a powerful engine came closer, closer. “I’ll drive,” Ludvik said.

He drove furiously over the cart tracks and bumps, grim-faced, silent.

Alois said nothing at all. He was still in shock.

Irina was weeping. When she had enough control over her voice, she said, “But where did the shot come from?”

Ludvik was intent on the road they had entered, a broader road, well marked. He had turned on the car lights, kept a saner pace through a straggle of traffic. “We’ve just turned south from the border crossing. See the guardhouse back there? Symbolic last view of Czechoslovakia, Irina. Look well!”

She didn’t turn her head to look. She repeated her question. “Where did the shot—”

“From the wood, I thought.”

“No, no. We were hiding there. Josef had scouted it. He said it was safe.”

“Then from the trees farther east. That’s where those damn birds were nesting.”

She shook her head, unconvinced. “But the light was so poor. How could anyone shoot—”

“They’ve got all the gadgets, infra-red tricks. Don’t ask me. I’m not a small-arms expert. Or perhaps it was just a lucky shot from one of their special snipers. There was no wind, not even a breeze tonight. That’s what they like: no variables. A lucky shot, though. The first one came nowhere close.”

“Two? I only heard one.”

“The first that missed both of us. And just as Josef turned to run, and the birds loosed all hell on us, the second shot came. That’s when he fell.”

Yes, Irina could agree, she had heard nothing above the wild clamour of the ravens. She fell silent. Beside her, Alois was sitting stiffly, his hands clenched, his eyes closed.

Ludvik told her, “We are on Highway 2. We’ll have you safe in Vienna in a couple of hours.”

Safe. She thought of Josef’s still body. She began to weep again, but this time quietly.

Ludvik’s voice was angry. “Someone had to keep his head tonight. And what could we have done, anyway?”

Then they were all silent.

David Mennery kept trying to concentrate on his desk. There was plenty of work to finish there before he drove back to New York tomorrow morning. This week-end he had written a fairly good article, in spite of distractions from the weather (Saturday and Sunday had been perfect for swimming and lazing), but it needed editing, tightening up. As always, before writing a piece, he’d spent days worrying that he hadn’t enough material; and then, once he started, he would find he had far too much. So he re-read his typescript with a hard critical eye, began sharpening a batch of pencils, and made an effort to ignore the rhythms of the Atlantic breaking over firm white sand, or the afternoon sun baking down on the high dunes outside the beach cottage.

Its windows, recessed under the roof’s deep overhang, were opened wide, shutters folded back, letting the south-west breeze play through the free arrangement of rooms. (But not near this alcove, where loose papers and notes and concert programmes were scattered around to suit his reach.) The lighting, from a plexiglass skylight overhead, was efficient and tilted towards the north. He was almost cool, even with the temperature on his front porch hovering around ninety-four degrees. No complaint there. Since Caroline and he had split up—four years ago, my God, could it be really four? He had made sure his working conditions were good, simple but satisfying. Out had gone Caroline’s tripping rugs, draperies, cushions piled on unsittable couches, baroque-framed mirrors and Venetian sconces, however charming; in had come bookshelves and stereo and hi-fi speakers, a few comfortable armchairs on a wooden floor, lamps to read with, and a telescope for the stars over the ocean. He could accomplish more here than he did in the city, even allowing for a morning round of golf or a walk along the beach, or an afternoon spent soaking in the sun, or a dinner in the evening with one of the charmers who spent their summers perfecting their tans: pretty girls bloomed as rampant as roses in this stretch of Long Island. Four years had slipped easily away.

The city, of course, was his necessity, his base of operations as a music critic for
The Recorder
, a monthly magazine with an appreciation of sound whether it was classical or contemporary, jazz or rock, lieder or country-and-western, opera or symphony. David Mennery was one of
The Recorder
’s permanent stable of writers, with a couple of pages of general criticism in each issue. In addition to that, he headed a specialised department of his own, which he had more or less invented by virtue of having written a book dealing with music festivals. He had combined two of his chief enthusiasms, travel and music, and discovered that thousands of Americans who loved music were also travel-prone.
A Place for Music
established him as a foot-loose critic with wide-ranging tastes. Just as importantly, it had provided for his travels as well as for such necessities as butcher’s bills and house repairs. He had never quite fathomed how a book he had so much enjoyed writing should have earned him money and won him an opening into a steady career. The freelance criticism which he had done, previous to the book, was all right for the feast-or-famine years when he had been in his twenties and was still searching. Now, at thirty-nine, he knew what he could do and couldn’t do; and at least he could feel he had a definite idea of where he was going. He would settle for that and count himself lucky. (He need not have been so modest. He wrote well, with a good critical bite. He had standards and wasn’t afraid to judge by them. He knew a lot about music, about the composers, about the people who conducted or performed it. He belonged to no clique, followed no fashion. He was very much his own man.)

He had sharpened his last pencil, poured himself some cold beer, and could find no more excuses to postpone the compulsory, always painful, self-amputation. He began crossing out the unnecessary sentences, obliterating phrases, making rewrite notes in the margins. A passage he had somehow imagined last night to be tactfully diplomatic was a fuzzy mess to today’s colder eye: a spiritual wallow in intellectual ooze. There was just no way to handle a modern composer gently when his jangle of sounds was basically thin and tedious. Just no way. The kindest criticism you could give such a man was to tell him to stop wandering down a path to nowhere, avoid the cute tricks, and get back on to a road which could lead him to something with real promise. Music was more than a collection of sounds.

He worked on, forgot about the sea and the sun outside, forgot about time. He rewrote the whole article, got it into proper shape at last, and began to type it out into good clean copy. He wanted it ready for delivery tomorrow before he took off for the Salzburg Festival. It was then that the telephone rang.

As he rose to answer it, he noticed the dock at the side of his desk and was startled to see that it was almost six. He picked up the receiver. Cocktail time, he was thinking, and the usual casual summer invitation. He was preparing a gentle refusal, but he never had to use it. The call was from New York.

At first he didn’t recognise Mark Bohn’s voice, simply because he hadn’t expected it. Bohn was a journalist who now lived mostly in Washington, specialised in foreign affairs, travelled around. He was an old friend, but sporadic in his appearances: it must have been almost four years since he had last surfaced. And here was his voice, as quick and business-like as ever, telling Dave he was one hell of a fellow to track down. Bohn had called David’s apartment in New York several times, had eventually telephoned the superintendent and extracted—with difficulty—David’s unlisted East Hampton number. “And,” said Bohn reprovingly, “I only got it out of him by telling him your brother had had an accident and I was the family physician.”

“Brother James won’t be amused. What kind of accident?”

“Automobile accident. If he’s anything like you, he’s car-crazy, isn’t he?”

Which was Bohn’s way of saying that David enjoyed driving and Bohn did not. David said nothing. He was now past the surprise of hearing Bohn’s voice. He began to speculate on the reason for the call: Bohn in New York, finding the heat and humidity as bad as Washington, thinking of borrowing a cottage beside a cool ocean for a few days.

Bohn was rattling on. “I want to see you, Dave. Urgent. When are you coming to town?”

“Tomorrow around noon.”

“I’ll drop in at the apartment. Twelve o’clock?”

“Not possible. I’ll be clearing up some things at
The Recorder
.”

“Then after lunch. Two o’clock or three?”

“Packing. I’m flying out early tomorrow evening. I’m heading for Salzburg.”

“I know. I know.” Bohn sounded sharp, as if he were worried or annoyed. “You’re going to the festival.”

“How did you know?”

“I read
The Recorder
and listen to your friends’ chatter. But I thought the festival was in August?”

“It begins the last week of July. This Wednesday, I’ll be at the opening night, seven o’clock sharp.”

“What’s playing?”

“
The Marriage of Figaro
.”

“Couldn’t you skip it? Hear it the next time round? You must have listened to it twenty times.”

“But not with Karajan and the Vienna Philharmonic.” David’s voice was cool. Bohn was a highly knowledgeable man, but he was damned ignorant about some things. “And I can’t hear it next time round, because on that night I’ll be listening to Geza Anda, just one of the top pianists in this whole wide world. What’s more, you just don’t switch tickets around at this date. I booked last January, like thousands of others. Sorry, Mark. Can’t see you tomorrow. We’ll have to wait until I get back at the end of August. I thought I’d fit in a quick visit to Bayreuth after a week in Salzburg, and then breeze on to Switzerland for Lucerne, and then to Scotland for Edinburgh.” That silenced Bohn, or perhaps he was making other calculations. Or was he consulting with someone else? At last he said, “Could you possibly cancel any engagement for fun and games tonight?”

“I’ve no engagements, except for some work to be finished.” David hoped the hint was strong enough. It wasn’t.

“An hour will do us, not much more. Are you alone down there? No week-end guest helping you with the typing?”

“I’m alone.”

“Good.” There was another pause. (He
is
consulting with someone else, thought David.) “I’ll see you about eight o’clock.”

“You’re driving a hundred and ten miles in two hours?” That wasn’t Bohn’s style. “You know,” David added, “there
are
other cars—not to mention trucks—on the highway. I think you’ve a fixation on accidents today.” And what’s so urgent that he’d even suggest this idea? “What’s it all about?”