Background to Danger (9 page)

“And this Herr Kenton; did he arrive?”

“I do not know. I go.”

“What did this American on the train look like?”

“Tall, thin, a soft hat, young perhaps.”

Zaleshoff turned to the others.

“It is necessary that we search that room immediately. You, Tamara, and I will go. You have a pistol, Rashenko?”

Rashenko nodded.

“Good. Ortega the traitor will remain here with you. If he tries to go, shoot him.”

The Spaniard burst into excited speech.

“No hara Vd. esto! Debo ir. El hijo de zorra tenia una pistola—a que dudar? Lo maté porque era necesario. No tengo fotografías, lo juro. Dejeme escapar, seré perseguido por la policia—tenga piedad!”
His voice rose hysterically.

Zaleshoff, struggling with his overcoat, took no notice of him.

“He says,” said Tamara in Russian, “that he must go.”

“Tell him,” said her bother in the same language, “that he is a fool, and that it is safer for him to remain. Safer, because the police will not look here for him, also because if he tries to leave, Rashenko will shoot.”

When, a few minutes later, they hurried away, Rashenko was sitting in his chair, a large revolver in his hand. Ortega had taken a rosary from his pocket and was kneeling by the fire, the beads clicking through his fingers and words bubbling from his lips. As the Russian listened a smile spread over his drawn face, for he knew a little Spanish. Señor Ortega’s orisons would have made even a Bilbao docker blush.

Andreas Prokovitch Zaleshoff was, as many could have testified, a deceptive character. For one thing, he gave the impression of being almost childishly naïve; for another,
he possessed a subtle sense of the value of histrionics. Violent displays of emotion, if well timed, distract the shrewdest observer and hamper his judgment. Zaleshoff’s timing was invariably perfect. He rarely said what he really thought without making it sound like a clumsy attempt to dissemble. Passionate conviction was with him a sign of indifference to the point at issue. For Tamara, who understood him better than he supposed, he was a constant source of entertainment.

As she kept watch in the darkness behind the Hotel Josef she was, however, worried. His anger with Ortega had been very nearly genuine. That could mean only one thing: that he was badly puzzled. He did not, she knew perfectly well, expect to find the photographs in the murdered man’s room. She also knew that he was taking an unnecessary risk to confirm the obvious.

She was turning these matters over in her mind when she was startled by the noise of Kenton’s arrival on the roof of the outhouse. Wondering why her brother had not returned the way he had gone (by the tradesmen’s door), she moved away from the wall to meet him.

Tamara was not used to automatics. But for that fact, the career of a little-known but promising journalist might have been cut short by death in, as the newspapers say, mysterious circumstances. As the light from her torch showed for a split second that the man before her was not her brother, her forefinger jerked involuntarily at the trigger of the gun Zaleshoff had slipped into her hand before he had gone inside. If the safety catch had been disengaged, not even Kenton’s leap for the wall would have saved him.

Zaleshoff joined her some five minutes later with the expected news that the photographs were missing. Hurriedly she told him of her encounter. He listened thoughtfully, then asked for a precise description of the man. The description
she gave would not have flattered Kenton, but he would have been struck by the accuracy of it.

“He might easily,” she concluded, “have been an American or possibly English.”

“Did you see his tie?”

“No his coat collar was turned up. But the hat looked American or English.”

Zaleshoff was silent for a moment or two. Finally, he led the way into the street again.

“Go back to the Kölnerstrasse and wait there until I telephone you,” he said.

He watched her out of sight, then turned and made his way by a circuitous route to the street in front of the hotel. As he drew nearer, he slowed down and kept in the shadows. When he was about twenty yards from the saloon car which stood near the entrance he stopped.

So far as he could see there were four men in the car besides the two gazing up at the hotel windows from farther up the street, and for a quarter of an hour they sat motionless. He began to get stiff with cold. Suddenly a door of the car swung open and two men got out, walked slowly towards the hotel and went inside. It was too dark to see their faces, but as they disappeared through the frosted glass door, the leading man raised his left hand with an awkward gesture to the inside breast pocket of his coat. His arm seemed slightly stiff at the elbow. If Tamara had been there, she would have recognised the look of stony indifference that spread over her brother’s face. Andreas Prokovitch was feeling pleased with himself.

The two had been gone about three minutes when the door of the hotel was flung open and they came hurrying out again. Zaleshoff heard a sharp order in German to the driver of the car as they climbed in. He caught only two words—
“der Engländer”
—then the door slammed and the car roared away.

Zaleshoff went in search of a telephone booth. Five minutes later he was speaking to Tamara, to whom he gave certain instructions. An hour later he stepped out of another telephone booth near the station and asked a man hosing the roadway how to get to the Hotel Werner.

But as he turned the corner of the street in which it lay, he saw by the cold grey light of the early morning that he was too late. Two men were carrying between them what looked at first like a large limp sack from the entrance of the Hotel Werner to the waiting car.
Der Engländer
had been found.

W
HEN
consciousness began to return to Kenton’s brain it brought with it several varieties of pain. The most immediate was the horrible ache in his head. Then he became in turn aware of cramp in his legs, a hard surface battering his left thigh, and a sharp edge crushing the back of his left hand. He opened his eyes.

The first thing he saw was a trouser leg made of coarse material in an unpleasant shade of fawn. Following this down, he saw that its owner’s foot was pinning his hand to a fibre mat. Then he realised that he was lying on the floor of a car moving fast over rough ground. Instinctively he made to lever himself into a sitting position. There was an agonising throb in his head and he let out a
gasp of pain. The sound evidently reached the man on the seat above him, for the foot shifted to his fingers and a hand pushed him down again. Striving to keep his head from contact with the vibrating floor, he lay still and closed his eyes. For a time he slipped into semi-consciousness, and there was only the steady whine of the car climbing fast in lower gear to remind him where he was. Then the car slowed down and he felt his body dragging on the mat as the driver turned a sharp corner. The vibration ceased suddenly, the wheels rolled smoothly over concrete for a few yards and stopped.

The door at his feet opened and two men clambered over his legs to get out. There was a muttered conversation too low for him to hear and the sound of receding footsteps. He opened his eyes again and, raising his head slightly, looked out through the open door of the car. The back of a man wearing chauffeur’s uniform partly obscured the opening, but what he could see through the gap was sufficiently astonishing. He was looking at a ridge of snowcapped hills, their summits radiant with the halation of the rising sun behind them.

Kenton was one of those persons, of whom there are many, who find the contemplation of scenery very boring. For him, half an hour in a pavement café at, say, the lower end of the Cannebière was to be preferred to all the peaks in the Dolomites, with a dozen Aegean islands thrown in. He would have exchanged a valuable Corot for a not-so-valuable Toulouse-Lautrec and considered himself the gainer. He preferred Satie to Delius, George Gissing to Richard Jeffries, and the feel of pavements beneath his feet to that of the springiest turf ever trod by Georgian poet. But for a moment now he contemplated and was not bored; for a moment he forgot his aching head; then, as he eased his cramped legs and his head swam when he tensed the muscles in his neck to raise himself, he began to think again
and to remember. He had had a room in the Hotel Werner. It had been getting light when he had arrived there. If the sun were only just rising, he must be somewhere in the hills very near Linz. What on earth had happened?

His mind was still searching feverishly among a jumble of impressions when someone shouted in the distance and the chauffeur turned round and tapped him smartly on the leg with the barrel of a revolver.

“Aussteigen.”

Kenton slid forward until his feet touched the ground, hauled himself gingerly to his feet and looked round.

He was standing on a concrete runway leading to a garage surrounded by bushes of mountain ash and tall fir trees. Through them he could see the top of a white house, with two small spired turrets, set in a niche in the hillside. Behind him, the hill sloped away to the foot of a deep and narrow valley and rose again to the early snow altitude. The entire landscape was carpeted with firs. The only indications of contour were given by the roads—thin streaks of white laid here and there at odd angles across the dense green-black masses.

He shivered. The air was clean and exhilarating, but very cold; and he had no overcoat. The chauffeur prodded his arm with the gun.

“Los! Vorwärts!”

Not yet feeling well enough to translate his resentment into words, Kenton obeyed the man’s gesture and started along a path sloping up to the house through the firs. The path ended at a flagged courtyard in front of the house. Waiting for them at the door was the owner of the fawn trousers.

He was a tall, lean, middle-aged man with a hard, stupid, rather handsome face. A small fair toothbrush moustache bridged a very short upper lip. He wore a belted raincoat with shoulder straps and carried what looked like a short
thick stick in one hand. He dismissed the chauffeur with a nod and gripped Kenton’s arm tightly. To the journalist’s surprise, the man addressed him in English.

“Feeling a bit dicky, are you, old man?” He grinned. “Neat little tap I gave you, wasn’t it? Well, well; better pull yourself together a bit; the chief wants to see you. Come on.”

“Look here—” began Kenton angrily.

“Shut up and come on.” His fingers moved slightly on the muscles in Kenton’s upper arm. Suddenly he tightened his grip. The journalist cried out with pain. It was as though a red-hot poker had been jabbed into his arm.

The other laughed.

“Good trick that, isn’t it, eh? Better get a move on, old man, or I’ll do it again.”

He jerked Kenton forward through the door.

There are houses which can give the impression of wealth and luxury without the aid of soft carpets and splendid furniture. This was one of them. With the exception of two or three fine rugs, there was no covering on the waxed pine floor of the spacious entrance hall. On the far side a broad staircase curved up to a small gallery. In the recess below the balustrade a narrow table stood against the wall. On it stood a pair of exquisite Cinquecento candlesticks. On the wall to the right was a good copy of Tintoretto’s
Miracolo dello Schiavo
. A fir-cone fire roared in a massive grate.

The Englishman led Kenton across the hall to a small door below the gallery, opened it and pushed him in.

The first thing he noticed was a very pleasant smell of freshly made coffee. Then the door closed behind him and he heard from the other end of the room the clink of a cup being placed in a saucer. He looked round. Sitting behind a large desk with the sunlight now streaming through the tall windows glinting on his grey hair, was a
man eating breakfast from a tray.

The man looked up. There was a pause. Then he spoke.

“Good morning, Mr. Kenton. I think you could probably do with a cup of coffee.”

He was an impressive-looking man in the late fifties, with a smart grey cavalry moustache and a monocle. At first sight, he looked like a cross between a
Punch
drawing of a retired general and a French conception of what the continent of Europe so oddly terms “the English sporting.” That he spoke with a pronounced Russian accent, and that the skin of his face was stretched like creased yellow parchment over a bone structure which was certainly not Nordic, indicated, however, that he was not English. That below the grey moustache there was a loose and curiously cruel mouth, and that the monocle did nothing to hide a pair of pale, calculating and very dangerous eyes, suggested that he was probably not “sporting” either. Kenton experienced an immediate and powerful sense of dislike. He came to the point.

“I should like to know by what right—” he began angrily.

The other held up his hand imploringly.

“Mr. Kenton, Mr. Kenton, please! I have not been to sleep all night. I must ask you to spare me your outraged feelings. We are all feeling outraged this morning, aren’t we, Mailler?” He addressed the last words over Kenton’s shoulder.

“My God, yes,” said Kenton’s escort.

“All the same,” continued the man at the desk, “I understand your indignation. What right have I, a perfect stranger, to tell my men to club you and to carry you off in so high-handed and uncomfortable a manner—you, an English journalist, if the Press card in your pocket does not lie? What right, I say?” He thumped the desk with his fist.

“Exactly,” said Kenton, a little bewildered by this vigorous presentation of his case.

The grey-haired man sipped at his coffee.

“The answer is,” he said, “none! No right at all except my own wishes.”

“And those are?”

The man raised his eyebrows.

“Surely,” he said, “you are in no doubt about that?”

“I’m afraid I am,” said Kenton with rising irritation. “I can only conclude that you have mistaken me for someone else. I don’t know who you are or what your game is; but you have placed yourself in a very awkward position. The British Consul in Linz will not, I should think, be disposed to intercede with the police on your behalf and, unless I am immediately released and taken back to Linz, nor shall I. Now, if you please, I wish to go.”