Authors: Eric Ambler
‘Never mind. Are you still friends with that producer who got burned over
First of the Week
?’
‘Reasonably. I’ve always maintained that it wasn’t entirely your fault. He’s with Public Service television now and leads a better life.’
‘Would he like something for nothing?’
‘Robert? Is this you speaking or those memoirs?’
‘It’s nothing to do with the memoirs. All he has to do is take a call from ORF, that’s Austrian television in Vienna. The man calling will be a current-affairs producer named Christian Rainer. Here’s what he’ll say.’
It was two-thirty before I got back to bed.
Breakfast came at seven-thirty and I gave the room waitress the letter to deliver to Rainer’s room. He called within minutes.
‘A very pleasant surprise so early in the morning, Mr Halliday.’ He said it very cautiously though.
‘I’m glad you think so. How about the delivery arrangements? Will you go along with them?’
‘If you really believe that they are necessary. But first we shall have to be more businesslike. I must know now who is your principal in New York.’
‘Okay. As I told you, I’ve already called and explained the situation. It’s a PBS project and the producer in charge will be expecting a call from you this morning New York time. I’ll give you the name and number in a moment. Meanwhile, he’s given me a message to pass on. He wants the processed film airmailed to him by the fastest route you know, and he doesn’t care whether
I
get to see a run-through or not. He wants it in his hands as soon as possible.’
‘I understand perfectly.’ And he did. If the situation had been reversed, the processed film in his own cutting room would have been what he would have wanted, and the hell with any other interested parties.
‘He suggests,’ I went on, ‘that you sort out the business details and accounting when he has the film.’
‘Very well. I will make arrangements, then, to play our part in your delivery plan. May I say something personal, Mr Halliday?’
‘Sure.’
‘You will not take it amiss, I hope, if I tell you that the reports we have had on you as an interviewer have been, as they say, mixed.’
‘Mostly bad you mean?’
‘Mostly, though not all. What I have to offer is a thought for you. I have noticed that some interviewers who work for me do better when they don’t rehearse. I think you may be like that.’
‘Do you think it’s the same way with persons being interviewed?’
‘I am sure of it.’
‘Then what’s your guess about The Ruler?’
‘No need to guess. He has been silent. The first difficulty will be to persuade him to start talking. If you succeed, then you will have trouble stopping him. You may need a great deal of film. Tell Dick Kluvers that from me.’
There was one more bridge to cross. Sitting with Simone and Jean-Pierre in the privacy of the Ortofilm station-wagon, I told them what I had arranged with Rainer.
‘It could postpone the battle for a little while,’ Simone said calmly. ‘In these matters, later is usually better than sooner. I say it is a good idea.’
‘Only the patron can decide,’ Jean-Pierre said heavily.
‘Okay. Let Simone call him then. They can speak Berber. I’ll bet nobody in The Ruler’s entourage will understand what they’re saying.’
‘Out of the question.’ His face had become white and pinched. ‘When he is with The Ruler we wait to be called, as the patron himself is called, like dogs. To call the patron at this moment would be to tell them that we have understood their treachery.’
‘Then we’ll have to decide without calling, like sensible men and women who’d rather not be sitting targets. Listen to me, Jean-Pierre. If we had armoured personnel carriers instead of the Ortofilm logo to protect us, I’d say come along too. But there’s no reason for you and Guido to take these risks. You stay with the van and you follow us only as far as the frontier. Then, you stop. Agreed?’
He looked me in the eyes. ‘And what is
your
position now, Mr Halliday? Which way home do
you
need to go?’
‘I’m being paid to act as a go-between and to do a television interview with The Ruler. I shall arrive with Ortofilm. Obviously, I should leave with Ortofilm.’
‘You could leave with your Nato friends,’ Simone said. ‘There would be nothing to stop you accepting a ride from them, and nothing embarrassing for them in offering it.’
‘My arrangement with Rainer is that I hand over the film to him personally at the frontier.’
‘Very well. If we get as far as the frontier and your handing over of film, then you can leave us.’
‘I’ll see how things go and decide later.’
‘I think not,’ Jean-Pierre said firmly. ‘You ask me to accept decisions in the patron’s absence and I agree in principle. But where and when you leave us will be something the patron himself must decide. Now, it is after nine and time we went.’
‘I have to call Velden first.’
‘The bills are already paid. Is it absolutely necessary?’
‘Yes. I’ll use the pay phone in the lobby. Yes, I’ll be as quick as I can.’
Schelm listened to my plan for getting to the frontier in one piece without marked enthusiasm, but he didn’t try to discourage me.
‘It could work,’ he said. ‘I hope it does.’
‘Can’t your friends on the other side move a bit closer to the border than Tarvisio?’
‘I’ve already asked them to. You told me that the Ortofilm station-wagon is distinctively marked and easy to spot. What is arranged is that the Carabinieri will set up a temporary roadblock
on a straight bit just north of a village named Coccau-alto. It’s barely four kilometres from the frontier and that’s a busy road. They’re doing us a big favour. What the driver of the station-wagon must do is this. It’s a winter sports area and there’s a small road off to the right just there that in the season leads to a chair lift. As soon as the driver sees the Carabinieri’s halt signal he’s to pull off the main road into the narrow one and stop.’
‘What then?’
‘All persons in the station-wagon will be taken immediately to the Carabinieri barracks. What happens to them from there need not concern you, Bob.’
‘How many Carabinieri will there be and what sort of transportation will they have?’
‘I don’t have that sort of detail. Why do you want to know?’
‘Jeeps would be no good, and some of those panel trucks the Carabinieri use are quite flimsy. I’d hate to be inside one that was being shot at.’
‘The Carabinieri’s anti-terrorist squad is one of the most experienced in Europe. Anyway, if you have any sense, Bob, you’ll be on your way back to Milan by another route. Nobody’s going to be shooting at you. By now, I would think, Pacioli probably has a second cheque waiting for you.’
‘My agent takes care of the cheques, Herr Mesner. I’ll see you later.’
The manager was at the desk and most affable. He refused to let me pay for the call. I said that if there were any way in which I could casually mention the Gasthaus Dr Wohak in the course of the press and radio interviews I would be doing, he could count on me to seize the opportunity.
Mokhtar and Jasmin were sitting in the back of the station-wagon chewing on something pink. They looked bored. The last couple of days had been no fun at all for them. Their special skills had not been called upon. They had simply had to look solemn and keep quiet. The only candy bars obtainable locally were not the kind they really liked.
‘There’s something I forgot,’ I said as I got into the front passenger seat beside Simone. ‘You said that you had rifles and ammunition hidden in the van. It’ll only be going as far as the frontier.’
‘I didn’t forget,’ she said. ‘It’s all in here now. Under the baggage behind the back seat. The young people cleaned the rifles early this morning. Can’t you smell the oil?’
I found, now that she’d mentioned it, that I could smell gun oil. I had thought it must be the smell of the local candy.
The valley of the river Pölstal runs north from the Klagenfurt–Vienna road three miles west of Judenburg. Today, it is mostly pasture-land with wedge-shaped plantations of black pine on the hillsides, but in the twelfth century a stretch of fifteen miles or more centred on the town of Möderbrugg had long been a mining and industrial area. For how long no one can be sure, but, as the floor of the valley once carried a busy Roman road, the outcrops in the limestone hills of silver-bearing lead and zinc ores must have been known about before the Dark Ages and long before the skills needed to exploit them were available locally. Probably it was men from Saxony who eventually provided the skills. They were the great mining experts of the early Middle Ages. In the fourteenth century, however, there was extensive flooding in some of the deeper mines. By the fifteenth, most of the accessible wealth had gone, and with it went the families of the miners, the smelters, the cupellers and the silversmiths along with those of the less skilled, the ore-millers and the workers
mit Schlegel und Eisen
who had once made the valley ring. The neat green and brown landscape through which we now drove looked as if it had been modelled as scenery for an expensive toy train set.
The approach to the Petrucher property was along an inconspicuous turning on the left-hand side of the road between Unterzeiring and Möderbrugg. Simone passed without seeing it the first time and we had to go back. The only signpost was a small poker-work board nailed to a sapling. It said:
PETRUCHER
–
Zutritt verboten
.
The lane beyond was steep and winding with tall, thick hedges on both sides that made it impossible to see more than
a few yards ahead. We went up slowly over a dirt surface that had been deeply rutted by heavy trucks. Then, as we came out of a hairpin bend, the lane widened and we were on asphalt. We were also faced by closed gates in a high fence with barbed-wire coils along the top and notices forbidding entrance, warning of dangers and threatening penalties. Three security guards in grey uniforms and a snarling dog peered at us through the wire mesh. One of the guards consulted a piece of paper and then nodded to the others. The dog handler persuaded his charge to back off a little so that his colleagues could open the gates. Then we were waved through. The dog started snarling again as the van followed us.
‘Jean-Pierre will not like this,’ Simone said. ‘He is afraid of dogs trained to attack.’
‘I don’t much like the look of that one myself. What’s worrying me more, though, is being out of touch with the patron for so long. Who’s going to tell those characters on the gate to let the Dutch unit in? What about the arrangements I’ve made with Rainer? Who’s going to tell him about the Carabinieri?’
It was Chihani who answered. ‘Dealing with these Nato persons has made you officious,’ she said snappishly. ‘All you have to worry about at present is your interview with The Ruler. You address him, by the way, as Your Highness.’
Where the patron was concerned, I noted, Jean-Pierre wasn’t the only one who could be jealous. ‘Just plain Your Highness? I’ll remember that,’ I said.
Now I could see the steeply-pitched roof of the Petrucher house above a screen of trees. Then the driveway swung sharply left and we were in a bulldozed clearing occupied by two of those long, narrow temporary buildings that contractors bring in for use as offices, canteens and changing rooms on a construction site. Beyond them was a row of parked cars. The big Buick with Zürich plates had to belong to the Swiss architect. An Opel and a Taunus, both with W-prefixed
Austrian plates, were probably used by the security guards. A little apart stood three white cars, all brand new. Two were Series 7 BMWs, the third was a Mercedes 600 limousine. All three had temporary Z-plates from West Germany. Another guard with a dog signalled to us to park alongside the Buick.
I could see all the house now. It stood on a rocky ledge at the foot of a hillside to which it seemed to be clinging. It wasn’t in fact, but Simone, who had found out all about the place, had explained the effect. Nearly all the old mines in the valley had begun as small open-cast operations on hillside outcrops. Then, when the ore veins had been followed, the original holes in the ground had become what miners called adits, level passageways into the hillsides. The sinking of shafts from the passages had been the third stage, and that had always been when the problems of drainage, ventilation, hauling and underpinning began. So keen had Dr Petrucher been to explore the ancient wonders of his mine that he had built his house on foundations set back into the wooded hillside. This had enabled him to have the mine adit right in the main living room. As a result, of course, all the windows had to be in the front of the house. To a man who had felt so strongly about his hobby, however, this would have been a small price to pay. His wife must either have been very fond of him or else a little bit dotty herself.
To the left of the main house there was a small annexe on the end wall of which someone, Petrucher’s grandson perhaps, had once painted the word
MUSEUM
in Gothic lettering. It was still just visible. As Simone finished parking and switched off, the guard with the dog moved back to make way for his superior, a martial figure who wore a highly-polished officer’s sword belt on which to carry his revolver holster. He said something to me in German which I didn’t understand. It was Simone who answered and interpreted.
‘The patron wishes to see me in the house,’ she said as she climbed out. ‘You and Jean-Pierre can stay here or have a seat in the museum. It’s as you choose, but there must be no
wandering about. The young people stay with the transport.’ She repeated the instructions so that Mokhtar and Jasmin could understand them and then went over to the van to speak to Jean-Pierre before telling the security captain with a nod that she was ready to be shown the way.
I got out of the station-wagon and went across to Jean-Pierre.
‘Coming to see the museum?’ I asked.
‘Thank you, no.’ He glanced meaningfully in the direction of the guard with the dog. ‘There are two of those beasts here, perhaps more. The men with them think they can control them, but I have seen what happens when something goes wrong. There is a lot of blood and everyone says it has never happened before.’