Authors: Eric Ambler
While we were still in the hotel Zander did as he had been told, but as soon as we were on the road again heading east, he wanted a report.
‘No problems,’ was all she said.
‘What sort of an answer is that? They did not notice
this
?’ He banged the door beside him with his fist. ‘The television name on the side?’
‘Of course they noticed it. It caused great interest. The manager asked me who you both were.’
‘What did you tell him?’
‘I said that you were temporary production assistants to a French producer-director at present making package-tour travel commercials for an American airline, and of no importance in the company.’
‘Good,’ he said and then repeated the word.
‘Good.’
His tone lacked conviction. He did not like being described as of no importance, even for a sound security reason. He must, I thought, be longing very eagerly now for the moment when a meeting of minds of the Abra Bay project would free him both from his past and from the attentions of Mukhabarat Zentrum.
At the Austrian frontier we had no trouble, but half a mile beyond it, in the frontier town itself, we ran into trouble of a peculiar kind. The road forked and there was resurfacing in progress on the main through section to the right. At the fork a small, hand-painted sign announced an
UMLEITUNG
but had no arrow directing traffic into the detour. Instead, there was a cardboard sketch-map below the sign. This looked as if it had been done by a four-year-old experimenting with finger-painting in a play school. The message it conveyed was that there were two ways of getting through – straight ahead or via the detour. On the straight-ahead road the map had a box with four wheels travelling along. On the detour road there was a box with four wheels travelling and a bicycle. So, if you were travelling on four wheels, it seemed, you had a choice – go straight on over the ruts and loose rocks or save your tyres and go with the bicycles along the smoother road out of town.
Most went straight ahead. The police were waiting to pounce just around the bend about a couple of hundred yards beyond the ‘map’. Cars with Austrian plates were turned back and directed to the detour. Straight on was for trucks only it transpired. Those of us with foreign plates were lined up along the shoulder of the road while the police proceeded to collect fines. They seemed to be going through a familiar routine. As each driver was directed to pull off the road the cop would yell
‘Passport’
. Then, when he had the driver’s passport, he would yell
‘Fined one hundred Schillings’
or, as we had French plates,
Amende de cent Schillings
’ and then walk away. The driver had to buy the passport back by paying the hundred Schillings. Some argued that the sign was misleading, as Simone did, but argument got you nowhere. They ignored it. A Dutch driver ahead of us had no Austrian money and was obliged to cash a travellers’ cheque at a change booth across the road from the police trap, where the con-man operating it was paying twenty-five percent below the going rate. Luckily, we had Austrian money with us.
‘Pay, Simone,’ said Zander, ‘and let us be on our way. Yes, it is a racket and they could only get away with it in a frontier town where there are always foreign tourists in a hurry. Have you noticed that there are no men or machines working on the road? Very interesting. They do not mind if we notice. They don’t care what we think of them as police. Let us pay and go.’
She paid the hundred Schillings and received a scribbled receipt with her passport. She passed the receipt to Zander who glanced at it, snorted with amusement and passed it back to me. It was headed
Organstrafverfügung
and was an official, numbered receipt for ten Schillings. The signature, of course, was illegible.
‘Welcome to happy Austria,’ Simone snarled as she wrestled the station-wagon back on to the ‘detour’.
‘Why be angry?’ Zander asked. ‘They gave you an official receipt. And don’t forget your history. Austria has often been nearly as anti-Semitic as Russia.’
‘What has anti-Semitism to do with it?’
‘To those policemen, maybe, all foreigners look Jewish.’
‘Patron, you are talking nonsense.’
‘Perhaps,’ he said dreamily; ‘but think for a moment of Judenburg. Do you know of any other country in Europe which would call a place Jewstown and never, even in the second half of the twentieth century, trouble to change its name?’
‘The Ruler should feel very happy here.’
‘Oh he does, my dear. He has even begun to forgive them for the fact that the founder of modern Zionism was an Austrian Jew.’
I was watching his eyes through the rear-view mirror and he caught me doing so. The eyes twinkled. If he enjoyed teasing her, he was also beginning to enjoy disconcerting me.
‘No, Mr Halliday,’ he said, ‘I am not a Jew. Nor do I belong to an ethnic minority. No. For me there is a special kind of undesirability, a special category. I am every country’s, every people’s bloody foreigner.’
‘Everyone’s bloody foreigner? That phrase sounds as if you learned it from your British officer friend, the Arabist scholar.’
‘Of course I did!’ The eyes lit up in triumph. ‘And it was old-fashioned even then. He told me so himself. But I still like it, though your version may be better. Everyone’s bloody foreigner,’ he repeated, and then burst out laughing.
That was the first time I had heard him laugh aloud freely at something that really seemed to delight him. It was a strange sound though, more like that of quiet weeping.
We had arranged to meet up with Vielle’s party at Feldkirch and they were already there when we arrived. The van had been waved through the police trap and they had had no problems at all. The young people were behaving circumspectly and Vielle himself had made a useful discovery. The van had a well-insulated food and drink locker. With ice from their motel rooms and a quick marketing expedition in Feldkirch while they had been waiting for us, we had supplies that would make us independent for the day of the tourist stopping places. By eleven we were in Innsbruck. From there we headed for Kufstein before starting to work our way south through the mountains and the tunnels. We reached Villach at five and were at the Gasthaus Dr Wohak an hour later.
I never found out anything about Dr Wohak except that he was dead and that it had been he who had made an attractive hotel out of a cluster of nineteenth-century farm buildings. It had an imposing porte-cochère style of entrance into a central courtyard with two smaller courtyards leading off it. The walls were of stone, a grey stone but one with a lot of life in it. After the prettiness of the Tyrol the whole place was very refreshing.
The desk clerk spoke English. As soon as I was in my room I called down and asked him to get me the Velden number. The answering voice was that of a hotel switchboard operator.
‘Herr Kurt Mesner?’
‘One moment, please.’
‘Mesner.’ It was Schelm.
‘We’ve arrived.’
‘Then we should have a little chat, you and I. Perhaps you would join me for dinner. If I sent a car for you in, say, an hour, would that be too soon?’
‘No, but our friend has become a little possessive.’
‘We can become possessive too. Tell him that the senior negotiator wishes to see you for identification purposes well in advance of any meeting. Their side insisted on a name and a face he could identify. So now we’re insisting on the same thing. If he is difficult, tell him that.’
In the event I had to tell Zander nothing more that day. I freshened up, changed and was thinking of going down to the bar, when there was a sharp knock on the door. It was Simone. She pushed past me without a word and quickly locked the door behind her.
‘We have troubles,’ she said a trifle breathlessly.
‘The local press? I told you they’d be around.’
‘It is not the local press. Much worse. It is radio and television.’
‘Already?’
‘The manager here likes publicity. The moment he sees a television unit he becomes excited. Then he discovers that you are an American journalist.’
‘How?’
‘From visas in your passport. So then he asks Jean-Pierre, who has been acting here as the French boss of Ortofilm, why we are here and what we are going to do. Jean-Pierre gives him the agreed cover story. We are here to interview The Ruler at his famous health mine for an American TV network.’ She threw up her hands. ‘It could not have been worse.’
‘Did Jean-Pierre forget his lines?’
‘He said what had been prepared for him to say.’
‘Then I don’t follow you. What’s gone wrong?’
She sat down abruptly. ‘Too many things have gone
wrong, and The Ruler hasn’t thought it necessary to let us know about any of them, even though they compromise the conference rendezvous that
he himself
selected.’
‘What kind of things?’
‘There are so many.’ She stood up and began panthering around the room as she ticked them off on her finger. ‘First, there is a law in Austria controlling the putting up of new buildings in the mountains and high valleys. This is to protect the natural beauties, the – what do you call it?’
‘The environment.’
‘Yes, that. A new house may only be put up where an old house has been. So, when someone wants to build in the countryside where it is beautiful he buys an old house first.’
‘Which is what The Ruler did.’
‘But not to put up an ordinary house.’
‘Ah, I see. The authorities are objecting to his plan to build a clinic instead.’
‘No. What the authorities object to is his refusal to submit what he plans to do for their approval. Secondly, he insists upon importing French mining engineers to supervise the work of restoring the deep mine workings, of installing electrical pumping equipment and of making it all safe. Third, he will no longer permit official inspection of the mine. Fourth, he has employed so far five architects for the clinic above the mine. Four of them he has discharged. All of them have been foreigners, one Italian, three Germans and the latest who is Swiss. Nothing is yet known of his design, but one of the Germans who was fired has talked to the German press. What he said was that what The Ruler wanted was not a clinic but a sort of palace. He also said that what might look very romantic in the middle of a desert would at Petrucher look highly offensive and absurd.’
‘Petrucher? Is that the name of the village?’
‘No, it is the name of the mine. Johannes Peter Petrucher was the amateur archaeologist who bought the disused mine and built the house and museum that The Ruler is going to pull down. The nearest village is two kilometres away. The
Petrucher is quite isolated. I have seen photographs. It is a lot of trees and this old building on a hillside. It is certainly not a great beauty spot.’
‘But the authorities are behaving as if it
were
, because this foreigner, The Ruler, refuses to go by the book and submit a set of plans before he builds. Yes, I see. I’ll bet he could have submitted any old set of plans at the start and then quietly modified them later. But I guess that’s not The Ruler’s way.’
‘Didn’t the patron tell you about pride?’
‘He’s not in the Gulf here. Why don’t they take him to court?’
‘He employs five Viennese lawyers. In addition, he retains a professor of law who has represented two Gulf members of OPEC before the International Court on questions involving Human Rights.’
‘What have Human Rights to do with this?’
‘The Ruler claims that the government of the Austrian province of Steiermark, that’s Styria, is invading or attempting to invade his privacy. In particular, he refuses to acknowledge that the media, whether press, television or radio does not matter, have any right whatsoever to question him, his servants or other employees, or his legal representatives on the subject of his personal property wherever it may be. He has refused all requests for statements and interviews. It has caused a great scandal and the matter has even been raised in the Federal Council in Vienna. Why is this oil sheikh being allowed to defy the law? If he has nothing to hide, why does he remain silent and reject legitimate questioning? Can it be that this clinic he says he wishes to build is to be used for quite other and immoral purposes? The whole affair has caused much suspicion and, in some political quarters, great anger.’
‘At which point we arrive and announce casually that
we
’re all set to do what nobody else has been able to do, namely, interview The Ruler for television. I see. That’s really great! How does the manager react?’
‘With delight, of course. He telephones the local radio station. They telephone the Austrian radio-television service
in Vienna. ORF it is called, Österreichischer Rundfunk. Then, ORF telephones back. They have found out that you are a professional writer who is known. So,
you
are to be interviewed. At once. Tonight. There is a current-affairs interviewer on the way to do the preparatory work. An ORF mobile television unit will soon follow. You see the problem?’
‘There’s no problem. It’ll be one of those non-interviews. Sorry I have nothing to tell them. I don’t know The Ruler. That’s why I’m here. To meet him. Yes, I’d heard he was having trouble over this health-mine of his. Anything they can give me on that I’ll be glad to have.’
She gave me a shrewd little smile. ‘Ach so! But if you are not interviewing him about the mine scandal, Herr Halliday, what could be the object of your interview? What else is it that America cannot wait to learn about from the lips of this interesting Arab personality?’
‘The Ruler is seen as an increasingly significant figure in Gulf politics.’
‘That is what you will give them to quote? That is what you will actually say into their microphones?’
‘I’ll try to make it sound a little better than that, I guess, but it’s all I’ve got until I’ve actually met The Ruler.’
‘It is still too much.’ She had stopped fooling and was looking quite fierce. ‘There must be no publicity.’
‘Look,’ I said, ‘there’s a car on the way from Velden to take me in there to dinner. If there’s an interviewer and a unit on their way from Vienna they could be waiting here when I get back. There’ll probably be phone calls too, any minute now, from the radio people. I can’t say nothing. No story, gentlemen, and no comment? Believe me, it doesn’t work. They just get mad at you. You have to give them
something
.’