Authors: Eric Ambler
‘Where’s this international security agency you made such a song and dance about?’ he asked as I came up to him. ‘All I’ve seen is that Citroën back there that began following us just after Judenburg. What have we stopped here for? They seem harmless enough.’
‘That’s why we stopped. I don’t want you to waste any more time giving us protection. It was getting clear of the security people at the mine that turned out to be the big headache. They tried to confiscate the film.’
‘Did they succeed?’
I gave him the package. ‘You can tell me when you’ve had that lot processed. That’s His Highness on camera telling you the whole story. I think you’ll like it. I took your advice.’
‘About the questions to be asked?’
‘No. I had my own questions. I mean that I took your advice about not rehearsing. It worked well, I think. I listened, he talked. The results were fairly surprising. It’s all there anyway, all that really matters to you. Did you speak to New York?’
‘Yes, that’s all straightened out. What did you mean by “all that really matters”? Is there more?’
‘Pick-up footage, cut-aways, mine gallery background. That you don’t get. Sorry.’
‘They took it from you?’
‘They took two reels of film. I had to give them something. What you have there is what you asked for, plus a lot you didn’t ask for. They may be the best bits. The sooner it’s in your lab the better, and I’d advise you to move quickly. You
will
have the lawyers after you. That’s for sure. But get it on the air right away and they’ll have to change their tune. He’s blown his own case all by himself. I didn’t ask him a single question to which any lawyer could possibly object.’
He had opened the outer wrapping of the package. Now, he made up his mind. He decided, rightly, that I was being reasonably honest with him. He could be reasonably amiable to me.
‘I’m glad the no-rehearsal approach worked out,’ he said. ‘It’s always a risk the first time, but sometimes a risk worth taking.’
We shook hands, I thanked his driver for his patience and Rainer picked up the car-radio mike, presumably to tell his
truck driver that the escort mission had been successfully accomplished and that they would now head for their respective bases. Then, in spite of everything that Zander had said about my not getting beyond the airport if I tried to pull out on my own, I began to wonder if I wasn’t being very stupid, if it wouldn’t make complete sense for me to change my mind again right there and, as I had originally intended, ask Rainer for that ride with him back to Vienna.
Zander had been standing beside the Ortofilm van talking earnestly to Guido, but as I started back to the station-wagon I saw him turn quickly. The Citroën had parked behind the ORF truck, but now there was one of the men with moustaches walking towards Zander.
He was in his mid-thirties, with bony, aquiline good looks that didn’t really need the moustache to emphasize their owner’s masculinity. He wore a stylish Italian suit, only slightly crumpled, and had the sort of naturally graceful walk that knows when it is being watched and is used to admiration. When Zander faced him he raised his hands slightly to show that they were empty and smiled. His teeth were excellent.
I had reached the station-wagon by then and saw that Simone was watching too.
‘It’s Bourger,’ she said. ‘That’s the big smile he always had when he wanted something that wasn’t his. You’d better wait in here with me. Leave them to it.’
I got in beside her. She watched them in the rear-view mirror. Rainer’s camera-car roared away back towards the Autobahn and Vienna.
‘When you were talking to him just now,’ she said, ‘and giving him the film, I thought for a moment that you were going to change your mind about taking the patron’s advice. I thought you were going to leave with Herr Rainer.’
‘I did think about it, yes.’
‘Bourger thought you might also. He had a man in the café pay-phone cubicle watching you. If you had decided to go
with Rainer, no doubt the fact would have been quickly reported to their Vienna contact. So Bourger waited. Now that he knows you are staying with us and that all the eggs are in his basket, he makes his approach to the patron.’
‘Do you think there’s still a chance of a deal?’
‘If there is a deal offered now I would be very surprised indeed. If the possibility had ever existed it would have been discussed months ago.’ She shrugged. ‘I can’t say that it is quite impossible. With someone like The Ruler involved, anything is possible. But you can be sure of one thing. Whatever Bourger’s orders are, he will try to talk the patron into making them easier for him and his team to carry out. You know, I was a very observant child and I saw three things about Bourger. Why are you smiling?’
‘I wasn’t smiling. I was thinking of you, at the age of nine, observing Bourger. What did you see?’
‘That he was very vain, of course, but so was I. There were two special things about him. He was very – what is the word? – indolent. And he always mistook cunning for cleverness. He never saw that cunning can be learned by stupid people.’
‘He killed four policemen without being caught. And he’s in business with Rasmuk. He must have something.’
‘He has. You don’t have to be modest or clever or energetic to be an effective assassin. All you need are certain blind spots in your mind and a feeling for the work. The patron is coming back.’
I opened the door to get out and make way for him, but he motioned to me to stay where I was and climbed in behind us.
‘Bourger sends you his regards, Simone,’ he reported, ‘and he tells me the following. His orders are to see us into Italy. He says, in what he believes is a joking way, that he is to be our shepherd. Trying to be businesslike, he says that his planners had assumed that we would make for Italy. Not because of Stresa, but because they suspect that I may have made a bargain for Nato protection. Why? Because they
could not believe that a man of my experience would ever have trusted The Ruler enough to turn my back on him even for a moment. He pretends to be greatly saddened by the situation in which he finds himself with old friends.’
‘I can see the tears in his eyes. Is he in radio contact with his Italian team?’
‘He speaks as if he is. He must be.’
‘Then they are well this side of Tarvisio in the pass at Thöl. Not even powerful transceivers will work on the opposite sides of these mountains.’ She looked at me. ‘You see? We would meet Rasmuk long before we reached your Carabinieri.’
Zander held up his hands. ‘Simone, we need daylight for what we have to do. Pay attention to me. I asked Bourger, in the friendliest way, what his orders were if we were to turn and go north, perhaps to Germany. He said that he would remain our shepherd, but that an already-alerted team from Linz would come down to intercept us. He begged us not to attempt such a journey. I asked him, as if I doubted his manhood, what firepower he had. He said that, as mere shepherds on land owned by others, all they had were modest revolvers.’
‘How modest?’
‘Police Special thirty-eights. His task all along, and he repeated this, had been simply to watch and report. He had been given the assignment only because he knew my face and yours.’
‘Did you believe him, patron?’
‘Yes.’ But I had turned to watch him and saw the doubt in his eyes, and the hint of fear it brought with it.
‘Why do you believe him, patron?’
There was a gleam of defiance. ‘He didn’t ask me what
we
had. He doesn’t want to know anything that he might not want to report to his colleagues waiting to receive us. He doesn’t like this assignment. He remembers that I still have friends in North Africa who might not like the hand he had in killing me.’
‘You don’t think he’s bluffing?’
‘No. He will do no more than he has to. We shall ignore him and go ahead as we planned. When he has lost us he will have his excuse for doing so, and we shall rendezvous with Jean-Pierre. Now, let’s get moving. And remember, you must go very slowly to begin with. Guido knows what he has to do, but doing it will not be easy.’
She said no more, just turned the ignition key and started up.
I was still watching him though. He knew it and didn’t like it. ‘May I know what this plan is?’ I asked. ‘Hadn’t I better know?’
He turned away and began signalling to Guido in the van right behind us. ‘The plan is first to lose our shepherd,’ he said. ‘If there’s anything I want you to do, I’ll tell you.’
As Simone pulled out of the truckers’ parking lot the Ortofilm van was about ten feet behind us. As she very slowly accelerated it stayed that distance from us. We were coming to a crossroad. A sign pointing left gave the names of a couple of small towns and added the information, in German, Serbo-Croat and Italian, that there was no through-road for unauthorized traffic to the Austrian frontier with Yugoslavia.
The big fork in the main road was half a kilometre further on. There, a huge sign made things absolutely plain to all southbound traffic.
If you wanted to go to
Italien, Italia, Italie
, via Arnoldstein, Maglern and Thöl, you kept to the right. If you wanted to go to
Jugoslawien, Jugoslavija, Yugoslavia
, via Radendorf and the Wurzenpass, you went to the left. Both frontiers were about the same distance away.
We went to the left, and then, as the road ahead of us narrowed, suddenly began to go faster.
At first the van kept up with us. The road there was fairly straight and ran along the floor of a valley with high, steep, tree-clad slopes on both sides. Ahead of us, though, was what looked like an impenetrable wall of mountains. There was little traffic coming from the opposite direction and most of it consisted of small trucks carrying farm produce. If I had not seen the sign promising that the road led to a pass I would have said that we were heading for a dead end.
The valley was narrowing all the time and the gradient we were on was becoming steeper. The van was now fifty yards behind us. The Citroën, with our ‘shepherd’ in it, was beginning to edge out ready to pass and stay close to us. I wondered how long it would take the Rasmuk team in Italy – by now fully aware, no doubt, of our change of route from a busy, well-policed international highway to a relatively quiet mountain road on which anything could happen – to move their ambush a few miles across the Italian frontier with Yugoslavia. About as long, I figured, as it would take me to fill in the application form and buy a visa at the border. I turned to Zander.
‘Apart from reminding you that there’ll be no welcoming escort of Carabinieri to greet us on the far side of this frontier,’ I said, ‘I’d better tell you right now that I don’t have a visa for Yugoslavia.’
He took no notice. His attention was concentrated on the van. It was Simone who answered me.
‘We’re not going into Yugoslavia.’ Her eyes went from the mirror to the road and back again. ‘We are not going to Italy either. The patron knows this road. He walked it as a prisoner at the end of Hitler’s war. Here we will deal with
Bourger. Then we will go north to Germany. That is what the patron arranged with your Herr Schelm this afternoon while you were filming. Oh yes, I know. Bourger has threatened us with a gang from Linz, but what does that matter if he no longer knows where we are? North to Germany is the only safe route for us because that is the route they will find it hardest to cover.’
She made it sound matter-of-fact and businesslike, but I didn’t think she really believed it, any more than I believed that her father had walked that road as a POW. If he had walked it in nineteen-forty-five, it would have been as an Abwehr Feldwebel disguised in threadbare civilian clothes and carrying the identity papers of a non-German foreign worker. He would have been with others following the signs pointing in the direction of an American zone displaced-persons camp.
‘How are you going to deal with Bourger?’ I asked.
‘Make him lose us, of course.’
She tried to sound impatient with my slowness, but couldn’t quite make it. Zander caught the doubt in her voice.
‘Stop talking and watch the road,’ he said sharply. ‘We are coming to the first corner and must take advantage of every second.’
The road curled suddenly to the right and then went into a left bend that must have been nearly half a mile long. And it was climbing all the way like a huge ramp. Simone shifted down twice and went up at speed with the tyres screaming. Behind us, Guido moved into the middle of the road and stayed there.
At the top there was a hairpin bend to the right and I found that I could look straight down the hillside and see the van grinding slowly up the ramp below. It was at that moment that the driver of the Citroën tried to bulldoze his way past and both vehicles rocked and swayed as they touched. The Citroën had to fall back though. Zander said,
‘Ha!’ and went on giving the young people what was, presumably, a Berber running commentary on the action.
Then the Rasmuk driver tried again. This time he swung the car right across the downhill lane and up on to the shoulder there so as to gain height and put impetus into a charge that would take the van in the side and overturn it. Earlier it might have worked, but with the gradient against him he could not produce the kind of impact needed to overturn the heavier vehicle. The van only swerved and Guido returned it instantly to the middle of the road.
Zander went on reporting, but now to the front seat and in English. ‘They won’t try that trick again,’ he said. ‘That truck we just passed going down will keep them behind on the bend. Begin now, Simone, to look for the track on your left. There is a stone calvary, an old Bildstock with a pointed roof, in the field just by it. Better watch for that. The track may be long disused now and hard to see. But it should be only a little over a kilometre now.’
The Rasmuk car had fallen back to let the truck on the down lane go by. I was still wondering if Bourger had decided, after the failure of their attempts to run the van off the road, to wait for a more favourable moment and try again when he solved the problem in a different way.
The Citroën moved up close to the rear of the van, edging out slowly to the left as it did so. Then, Bourger himself leaned out of the front passenger window with both his elbows on the ledge of it. In his hands was a stubby machine pistol of the kind that has a skeleton butt which can be folded around out of the way of the pistol grip. Carefully he eased it forward until he could clamp the barrel casing with his left hand firmly against the windshield pillar. Then, he fired one long automatic burst into the centre of the left rear door of the van.