Background to Danger (8 page)

Having reclaimed his suitcase and learnt that the Hotel Werner, two streets away, was both good and cheap, he decided that after the excitements of the past hour or so, a cup of hot chocolate would be a good introduction to sleep.

While it was being prepared, he bought some matches, and was feeling in his pocket for his cigarettes when his fingers met the wallet he had picked up in Sachs’ room.

He fingered it a trifle unhappily. He should have left it for the police to find. He had not meant to take it and had slipped it into his pocket without thinking. However, now he
had
got it, he might as well learn what there was to be learnt from it. He took it out of his pocket.

It was of imitation leather with the initial “B” in one corner and had obviously cost very little. Inside, however, were over eight hundred marks in notes, four hundred and fifty of which belonged by rights to him. The only other thing in the wallet was a small green note-book. All but
two pages of it were blank. The two pages contained addresses; but the writing was so bad that Kenton postponed the task of deciphering them. He tore them out and stuffed them into his overcoat pocket.

There remained the money. After a good deal of quibbling with himself, he decided that he had a legitimate claim against the estate of Herr Sachs. Accordingly, he transferred four hundred and fifty marks to his own wallet.

He finished his chocolate and thought for a moment. Then he asked the man behind the counter for envelopes and stamps.

In the first he placed the balance of the money and addressed it to Herr Sachs at the Hotel Josef. The police would take charge of it. In the second he put one hundred marks with a note of thanks to the Havas man. In the third he put the photographs.

The first two he stamped. The third he marked with his own name and handed it over, accompanied by five marks and a circumstantial story, to the man behind the counter for safe keeping.

He had cleared his conscience on the subject of Herr Sachs’ money. The Havas man’s loan had been repaid. He had relieved himself of the compromising presence of the photographs. He had five hundred odd marks in his pocket. Moreover, he was feeling sleepy. Later on that day, he would return to Berlin. With something approaching a light heart, he posted his letters and made his way to the Hotel Werner.

The sky was greying by the time he got to his room.

He flung his suitcase on the bed, drew the curtains and sank into a chair. His eyes were aching and, leaning over to the bedside lamp, he switched the light off. He sat still for a minute, then started to take off his tie. But even as he fumbled with the knot he felt sleep pressing on his eyelids. His fingers relaxed and his head fell slowly forward
as he slid into an uncomfortable doze. It must have been about twenty minutes later that he was disturbed by a knock at the door.

He rose wearily to his feet. The knock was repeated. He walked to the door.

“What is it?”

“Service,
mein Herr,”
said a voice. “The gentleman may be cold. I have brought extra blankets.”

Kenton unlocked the door, and turning away, started once more to remove his tie.

The door opened. There was a quick movement behind him. The next instant he felt a terrific blow on the back of the neck. For a split second an agonising pain shot through his head and he felt himself falling forward. Then he lost consciousness.

Z
ALESHOFF
and Tamara arrived in Linz at ten o’clock in the evening and drove from the station, in a taxi, to an address on the other side of the town.

Kölnerstrasse 11 was a grocer’s shop in a quiet residential quarter. Leaving his sister to pay off the taxi, Zaleshoff rang a bell at a side door. After several minutes’ waiting, the door opened an inch and a woman’s voice demanded hoarsely who it was who rang.

“Rashenko?” said Zaleshoff.

The woman opened the door. Motioning Tamara to follow him, Zaleshoff went in. Just inside the door was a flight of bare wooden stairs and, with the woman puffing and blowing ahead of them, the two went up slowly.

On the second landing the woman opened a door leading off it and, grunting that Rashenko was on the top floor and that she couldn’t be bothered to go any farther, went inside and left them. Three more flights brought them to a landing over which the ceiling sloped steeply. There was only one door. Zaleshoff stepped forward to knock, paused, then turned to his sister.

“You have never met Rashenko?”

Tamara shook her head.

“You must not be surprised at him. He was taken by some Czarist officers and badly treated. As a result he is, amongst other things, dumb.”

The girl nodded and he rapped loudly on the door.

The man who opened it was tall, white-haired and stooping. He was incredibly thin and his clothes hung about him in long folds, as though there were no body beneath them. His eyes were set deep in his head, so that it was impossible to see the colour of them, but they gleamed like two pin-points of light from the dark hollows. His thin lips stretched tightly in a smile of welcome when he saw Zaleshoff, and he stood aside to let them in.

The room was so full of furniture that it was almost impossible to move. An unmade bed in one corner and a small stove in another contributed considerably to the general air of confusion. A wood fire burnt in the stove and the place was insufferably hot.

Rashenko waved them to chairs, then sat down himself and looked at them expectantly.

Zaleshoff took off his coat, folded it carefully over the back of his chair and sat down. Then he leaned forward and laid his hand gently on the other’s arm.

“How are you, my friend?”

The dumb man picked up a newspaper from the floor, produced a pencil from his pocket and wrote in the margin. Then he displayed it.

“Better?” said Zaleshoff. “Good. This is my sister Tamara.”

Rashenko wrote again and held the paper up.

“He says,” said Zaleshoff, turning with a smile to Tamara, “that you are very beautiful. Rashenko was always considered an expert in these matters. You should be flattered.”

The girl smiled. She found it extraordinarily difficult to say anything to the dumb man. He nodded vehemently and smiled back at her.

“Have you heard from Vienna?” asked Zaleshoff.

Rashenko nodded.

“Have they told you that I am taking charge of this business here?”

The other nodded again and wrote on the paper:
“Ortega will come here when he has interviewed Borovansky.”

Zaleshoff nodded approval and surveyed the dumb man sympathetically.

“Go to bed when you are tired,” he advised. “Tamara and I will wait.”

Rashenko shook his head wearily, rose to his feet, and going to a cupboard, produced two glasses which he filled with wine from a stone jar and handed to them.

“You are not drinking with us?” said Tamara.

Rashenko shook his head gravely.

“He is not allowed by the doctors to drink wine,” explained Zaleshoff; “he is too ill.”

The dumb man nodded and, smiling reassuringly at the girl, made a gesture of distaste towards the wine.

“Rashenko,” remarked Zaleshoff, “is a very obstinate fellow. In Moscow they wished to send him to a sanatorium in the Crimea to recover his health; but he prefers to serve his country here.”

The dumb man smiled again—very pathetically, Tamara thought.

“Did you ever hear of a man called Saridza?” said Zaleshoff.

Rashenko shook his head.

“He was with Almazoff’s army.”

The dumb man raised his head quickly and looked from brother to sister. Then he opened his mouth and seemed to be struggling to speak. At last a guttural noise came from his throat. Then he snatched at the fallen newspaper and started scribbling furiously.

Zaleshoff stood up and looked over his shoulder; then, firmly but gently, he pushed him back into the chair. Tears were streaming down the sick man’s face and he fought feebly to shake off Zaleshoff’s hands. Suddenly he was still and the lids drooped over his burning eyes.

Zaleshoff turned to the girl.

“It was Almazoff’s men who tortured him,” he said. “It was over eighteen years ago, but they did their work well,” he added quietly.

Rashenko’s eyes opened and he smiled apologetically at them. Tamara looked away. The heat of the room was making her head ache.

A telephone bell shrilled suddenly.

Rashenko rose painfully to his feet and, going to the cupboard in the wall, lifted the instrument from a hook inside and put it to his ear. Then he pressed a small Morse key and signalled three sharp buzzes into the transmitter. For a moment he listened; then he signalled again, replaced the telephone and turned to Zaleshoff.

“Vienna?”

Rashenko nodded, reached for his pencil, wrote a message and passed it to Zaleshoff.

The latter turned to Tamara.

“Vienna says that Ortega telephoned twenty minutes ago from Passau. He and Borovansky arrive at two-thirty.”

For the girl the next hundred and fifty minutes were an
unbearably slow procession of as many hours. There were two clocks in the room, and for a time their different rates of ticking fascinated her with the seemingly endless rhythmic variations they evolved. Soon, however, she found that the changes of rhythm were part of a pattern that repeated itself every three-quarters of a minute. She glanced at the two men. Her brother was frowning fiercely into the fire and twiddling a key between his fingers. Rashenko’s eyes were closed and he looked asleep. Murmuring that she was going to smoke a cigarette, she put on her coat and went out to the landing.

After the heat of the sick man’s room, the cold air was immediately refreshing. Through the sloping skylight, just above her head, she could see the sky. It was a bright, clear night, and the stars, dimmed by the rising moon, seemed infinitely derisive. Gusts of wind buffeted the house with increasing force. She found the sound curiously soothing and stayed there until the sharp rattle of a bell far below told her that the man they were waiting for had at last arrived.

The moment the Spaniard came into the room it was obvious that something was wrong. He was out of breath from running, and the grey, puffy cheeks were flecked grotesquely with two patches of colour. His dull pebble-like eyes, blinking in the light, darted suspiciously round the room, like those of a cornered animal. One corner of his mouth twitched slightly. Zaleshoff, who had let him in, followed him into the room and shut the door.

“Well,” he said in German, “you have what you were sent for?”

Ortega shook his head and strove to regain his breath.

“No,” he said at last, “they were not there.”

Zaleshoff looked at him steadily for a moment; then, stepping forward, he gripped the sleeve of the man’s coat and jerked him towards him.

“No lies, my friend,” he said grimly. Then let go of the coat and held up his hand. Tamara saw that it was smeared with blood.

“What happened?” he added dangerously.

The Spaniard was recovering his breath. He assumed a jaunty air. His dry, bloodless mouth twisted a little.

“I kill him perhaps, eh?” He snickered and his eyes wandered towards the girl, seeking approbation. “He saw me on the train and tried to escape me at the station; but I was too quick for him perhaps. He took a taxi and drove about to escape me, but though he was cunning, I was more cunning, and I follow him to the Hotel Josef.”

Zaleshoff turned quickly to Rashenko.

“The Hotel Josef, where is that?”

The dumb man wrote quickly. Zaleshoff looked at the paper and nodded. Then he turned again to Ortega.

“Go on.”

“I follow him to his room.”

“How did you know which room?”

Ortega shrugged disdainfully.

“It is a poor hovel, not such as I am perhaps used to in my native country, where I am rich. I wait outside the door and hear the porter give him the number. He named himself Sachs. It was room twenty-five on the third floor. Then he ask to telephone and I do not hear that. But also I hear him tell to expect a Herr Kenton who would call.”

“Kenton? That is an English name.”

“Perhaps. On the train with him from Ratisbon there is an American or perhaps he may have been English. Perhaps this American has the photographs. I do not know. I could not wait.”

Zaleshoff made a gesture of impatience.

“Quick, what did you do?”

“I go to his room by the back way so that no one sees me and I knock at his door. He says to come in, Herr
Kenton, and although my name is not Kenton, but Ortega, a great family name in Spain, I go in. When he sees me he cried out and go for the gun he had. But I reach him first and get him. It hurt him,” added the Spaniard reminiscently.

The veins stood out on Zaleshoff’s forehead.

“You were ordered not to kill,” he said quietly.

Ortega shrugged.

“It was a small thing—nothing.”

“You fool!” shouted Zaleshoff suddenly. “You were ordered not to kill. You kill. You were ordered to get the photographs from Borovansky. You do not get them. There is only one place for you, my friend.” His voice dropped suddenly. “You know where that is, Ortega, do you not? Lisbon, my friend, Lisbon.”

“There were no photographs, no photographs at all.”

“Or perhaps,” went on Zaleshoff viciously, “you would prefer the Austrian police to the Portuguese. The telephone, please, Rashenko.”

“Mother of God,” screamed the Spaniard, “I tell you that there were no photographs.”

Zaleshoff sneered.

“So you say. But, you see, I do not believe you. There was no doubt a wealthier bidder for your services. How much, Ortega? How much did they offer you to turn traitor?”

“Madre de Dios, juro que es mentira!”
Sweat was pouring from his face.

“Where did you look?”

“His coat, his luggage, everything.”

“The lining of his coat?”

“I tear it to pieces; also his luggage. There is nothing.”

“He had hidden it in the room.”

“He had no time.”

“Did you look?”

“It was necessary that I go perhaps.”