The Numbered Account (32 page)

The top of the pass was crowded with cars. Antrobus with some trouble found a space, turned, and parked facing downhill before they went off to eat their lunch, sitting on an outcrop of rock a considerable distance above the road. A patch of Alpenrosen projected from underneath the grey stone on which they sat; the deep rose-red flowers, just opening, filled the air with their aromatic scent.

‘Oh, they are delicious,' Julia said; she stooped and tried to pick a sprig, but the stems were surprisingly tough —Antrobus cut some for her. Up where they sat there was space and peace, but the slopes down by the road were thronged with people: hikers eating modest lunches out of paper bags, car-travellers feasting from elaborate picnic-baskets; several parties had even set up canvas chairs and tables, and were eating at those—meanwhile charabancs came up, paused for five minutes, and passed on, ceaselessly. Julia surveyed this scene with astonished distaste.

‘It might be the Portsmouth Road on a Sunday,' she said.

‘Well today is Saturday; this is the week-end traffic. At mid-week it's much quieter.'

‘You're sure they aren't in any of those buses?' she asked, as two more huge vehicles, coming up from the St. Gotthard and Andermatt side, manœuvred into a parking-space and disgorged a swarm of tourists.

‘Quite sure.' He looked at his watch. ‘We're at least an hour and a half ahead of them. Have another roll.'

Julia realised that she had been foolish to hope for any manifestation which might make Antrobus's attitude to her more defined on this expedition—the teeming crowds made anything of the sort out of the question. She accepted her disappointment philosophically, and concentrated on
two things she could always enjoy, scenery and food. Antrobus had rather surpassed himself over their lunch. Instead of the fairly tough-crusted
Brötchen
with slices of ham in them, hard-boiled eggs, and an apple and orange, normally provided by Swiss hotels, he had brought delicious squashy Bridge rolls lined with smoked salmon,
pâté de foie gras
, and Emmenthaler cheese; there was a polythene bag of fresh lettuce, and a white-wood box of Carlsbad plums.

‘You do do yourself well,' Julia said, taking another
pâté
roll.

‘Why not? In nice places, eat nice things. This is rather beyond my usual style, I may say—laid on for you, Julia.'

‘Thank you, John. I do like food.'

‘So I observe—and applaud. I cannot stomach those austere women who subject their guests to what really amounts to garbage! I believe that in reality thinking gets higher in proportion as the living becomes less plain.'

Julia laughed and took a Carlsbad plum, while from a thermos Antrobus poured coffee into two pretty Chinese porcelain bowls.

‘Oh, don't I know!' she said. ‘Good works and bad food! Thank God Mrs. Hathaway combines her innumerable good works with quite excellent food.'

‘Ah, she would. But she is a most exceptional person.'

After they had eaten they drove down again to the main valley, passed through Innertkirchen, and on to the lower entrance of the Aar Gorge. Here a small restaurant was flanked by a large car-park, where Antrobus left the Porsche; the restaurant had a sort of open-air extension roofed over and full of little tables, now, at the week-end, thronged with holiday-makers—Antrobus walked past them towards the ticket-gate.

‘There,' he said, pointing to a framed drawing on the wall, ‘that's what I should so very much like to see.'

The picture was of a small bird poised, apparently in perfect comfort, against a vertical surface of rock, on which it appeared to maintain its hold by long curved claws; its beak was slender and also curved. Otherwise,
apart from rather defined light and dark markings round the head and on the wings, it was thoroughly insignificant.

‘It looks rather like a tree-creeper,' Julia said.

‘Naturally. It's his first cousin, the wall-creeper—only this fellow has red splashes here, and here.' He touched the drawing with his finger. ‘But this particular bird is rather rare; the Aares-Schlucht is one of the few accessible places in Europe where one may hope to see it, because the gorge is so enclosed. And this is unusually low for it; its normal bottom level is seven thousand feet, and here we are not much over two thousand. Come on in—there's a pause between the buses just now, so we might have a chance. He's rather shy.'

While Antrobus got out a handful of coins to buy their tickets, Julia idly looked round at the crowded tables behind them. At one, fairly close to the ticket
guichet
, sat M. Chambertin. She touched Antrobus's arm—‘Half a moment.'

‘What is it?' He was all impatience for his bird.

‘There's Chambertin,' she murmured.

For a moment the name failed to register.

‘Who?'

‘Chambertin, from the Banque Républicaine—sitting there, reading a newspaper. Do you suppose he's waiting for them too?'

Antrobus frowned, and walked back towards the carpark. ‘That wretched von Allmen must have told him,' he muttered vexedly. ‘He promised to leave this part to us. Has he seen you?'

‘He's reading his paper so hard that I think he must have,' Julia said. ‘Shall I thwart him?'

Antrobus thought for a moment. ‘Yes, do,' he said then, grinning. ‘It may cramp his style. I've never met him.' As they turned back towards the restaurant Julia saw, sitting several tables away from the banker, the man sho had come into the Gemsbock garden the previous day and shadowed Wright and Borovali when they went to the police-station.

‘He's got his detective in tow, too,' she said.

‘Where?'

‘Three tables to the right of the door—the very ordinary-looking little man.'

‘By Jove, so he has! Well really that is rather much, to bring Müller along! All right—go and accost him, Julia.'

‘Shall you come too?'

‘Yes, I think I will. Damn, now we shall miss that bird! There are more buses due soon.'

Antrobus watched with amused satisfaction Julia's manner of accosting the banker.

‘Oh, how do you do, Monsieur Chambertin? What a surprise to see you here! But how nice to meet again.' Chambertin rose, quite as embarrassed as the Secret Service man had hoped, and greeted Julia fussily.

‘I am on holiday,' he explained needlessly. ‘I have a little villa near Spiez.'

‘Oh how nice. Are you going to look at the Aares-Schlucht?' Julia pursued. ‘So are we. This is my friend Mr. Antrobus'—Chambertin bowed, with noticeable coldness. ‘There is a rare bird here which he desires to see. Are you interested in birds?'

‘Not birds—no. They are not a subject of mine. I am here simply
en touriste
, sight-seeing.'

Antrobus, still resentful that the Interlaken Chief of Police had obviously betrayed his information about the bus-tour, which he had given him the evening before, to the Bank, now decided to add to the other man's discomfiture.

‘Not even interested in birds of prey, Monsieur Chambertin?' he asked, with a sort of deadly relish.

‘In no birds, Monsieur.' Chambertin raised his hat—of which the tourist effect was increased by a tuft of chamoistail stuck in the back—to Julia, bowed, and abruptly stumped off into the restaurant with a cold
‘Au revoir, Mademoiselle'

‘Not
pleased to see us,' Julia murmured.

‘No—nor I to see him, and his flatty. This may complicate things.' He looked at his watch. ‘Their bus is due at the top end in about half an hour. For goodness' sake
let's go in and see if we can spot
Tichodroma muraria
meantime.'

‘Heavens what a name!' Julia observed.

They went in and walked along that strange little wooden pathway propped out precariously over the grey-green rushing water. The Aares-Schlucht is both deep and narrow; its cold grey limestone walls limit the sky above to a thin pale line; a deadly chill comes up with the loud sound of the water, racing by so close below—on Julia the whole place produced a highly disagreeable, almost an uncanny impression. ‘Why any bird should choose to live here!' she remarked.

‘Walk very slowly, and don't make any abrupt movement,' Antrobus said, taking a pair of Zeiss glasses out of the big poacher's pocket of his tweed jacket; he returned the leather case to the pocket, slung the glasses by their narrow strap round his neck, and then focused them carefully on the opposite wall of the gorge. For the moment no tourists seemed to be coming through it, and they walked slowly forward, Julia constantly looking at her watch, her companion incessantly scanning the opposite cliff.

‘There it is!' he exclaimed suddenly. ‘Look! Oh what luck!'

Julia, standing behind him and following the direction in which his field-glasses pointed saw—a little ahead of them and rather high up—a tiny bird, grey like the rock, but darker and splashed with crimson, with white spots on its tail, fluttering about on the farther rock wall.

‘It's not a bit like a tree-creeper,' she said rather resentfully. ‘It flits like a butterfly, it doesn't creep.' Her resentment was partly an echo of her disappointment with this whole expedition, as far as her relations with Antrobus were concerned, and partly of the irrational dislike which she felt for the Aares-Schlucht as a place. Once before, in Morocco, she had felt a similar irrational dislike for a house and garden in Marrakesh—but in Marrakesh, within an hour or two, she had been blown up by a terrorist's bomb.

Antrobus ignored her remark. The bird was slowly moving forward, upstream; he followed it, and Julia followed him. ‘I wish it would come down a bit,' he said. ‘Oh damn, what's this?'

‘This' was that the path now dived into a tunnel hollowed out of the rock; Antrobus hurried through it, Julia still following—when they emerged he eagerly scanned the opposite cliff. The bird, though now abreast of them, had gone higher up than ever.

‘Little brute!' Antrobus said, watching the small creature intently pecking at a thread-like crevice in the rock, clasped to the vertical surface by its claws. He looked about him to see if there was any means of reaching a level nearer to that of the bird. The cliff on their side was obviously impossible, but oddly enough behind them, close to the exit from the tunnel, a slender iron ladder, reddish from the remains of oxide paint, rose thirty feet or more against the rock wall, though for what purpose it was impossible to guess.

‘Corn in Egypt!' Antrobus exclaimed. He moved stealthily back towards the ladder and began to climb up it with slow, wary movements.

‘It may not be properly fixed—do be careful,' Julia said, alarmed at this manœuvre, for the ladder was fastened against a bulge in the cliff which projected out over the racing water below.

‘No, it's quite firm,' he called back—the noise of the river was so loud that the sound of their voices could hardly disturb any bird. Julia watched him anxiously as he climbed steadily upwards, pausing now and then to raise his binoculars and peer at the wall-creeper which, having apparently struck a rich vein of grubs or insects in the crevice, clung there absorbed, exactly as in the picture, prodding diligently with its slender beak. The ladder did appear to be quite firm, and one way and another it seemed to Julia that the bird was becoming rather a bore —reassured, she stopped watching Antrobus, and looked about her.

Some hundred yards away, coming downstream towards
her along the narrow plank-walk, where two people could barely walk abreast, she saw Mr. Borovali, moving partly behind a stout woman in a hideous tartan coat, with an enormous tartan shoulder-bag slung over her arm; a short distance behind them came Wright and a small man with a broad Teutonic face, who, like Chambertin, wore a green felt hat with a chamois-tail stuck in the back. Wright was carrying the black brief-case, still distended.

‘Yes, do the switch-over in the tunnel!—
I
see!' she muttered to herself as she returned to the foot of the ladder; there she called up urgently to Antrobus, who had now reached the top and was staring entranced through his Zeisses at
Tichodroma muraria
.

‘John, here they are!'

No response. In her fresh and different anxiety she actually shook the ladder. ‘John, they're
here
! Do come down.'

At this moment an immensely loud tune suddenly blared out from somewhere close by, filling the chasm and echoing from wall to wall. This, though Julia could not know it, was produced by a man round a bend in the gorge blowing the
Alpen-horn
, a musical instrument nearly ten feet long whose principal if not its only merit is the enormous volume of sound which it can produce. As these trumpet-notes suddenly echoed and re-echoed between the high walls of the narrow cleft, three things happened more or less at the same moment. The stout lady came to a halt, looked behind her, and started to walk back in the direction whence the sound came, followed by Borovali, who laid a restraining hand on her arm, clearly trying to stop her. Antrobus started, and nearly lost his balance on the ladder; the wall-creeper flew away.

Chapter 13
The Aares-Schlucht