Airs Above the Ground (30 page)

I suppose this would in normal circumstances have made the going much more difficult, but it lifted just then the worst of our responsibilities, that of being seen by our quarry; and there was certainly no danger of our losing the way with visibility varying from ten to twenty-five yards. The railway led us as surely as a pillar of fire into the dim heights of the mountain.

But by no means as straight. If we had to keep to its track we had to go the long way round. It was to be assumed that the permanent way would double back
on itself to take the easiest course up the mountain, as a road zigzags its way up the steepest slopes. If we had been able to see, we could have short-circuited the curves; as it was, not knowing the terrain, and afraid of where a false step or a false trail might lead us, we were forced to stay beside the rails. There was only one comfort in this, that, unless he knew the mountainside very well indeed, Sandor Balog would have to do the same thing. With any luck we should be following closely on his exact trail, and in his turn, Timothy would be able to trace us.

Lewis said: ‘It’d be interesting to know what time the first train comes up.’

‘I do know. The first one’s at seven. The porter told us, and there was a sort of time-table in the hall at the hotel, and we checked with that, because we thought that if we were here a few days, we might take the trip.’ I added, grimly: ‘It seems funny, doesn’t it, to think of coming up here for pleasure?’

He grinned. ‘You never know your luck.’

Then he put his arm out quickly, barring my path, and we stood still. Ahead of us the mist had thinned, smoking momentarily aside to show us a long empty stretch of the mountain ahead. I saw long reaches of pale rock, strewn with dwarfed bushes and drifts of thick tough grass, and here and there a solitary tree, warped and broken by frost, and reaching long fingers down the wind. What bushes there were were low growing, thin-leaved mountain varieties, that seemed to cling against grey rock where nothing should have been able to survive.

But I hardly took this in, except as a quick impression. I was looking at Lewis. That last response of his had been casual, even ironic, but – it came to me like a blinding light out of the thin mist – he had meant it. I knew every tone of his voice, and he had meant it. For me the night had held terror, relief, joy, and then a sort of keyed-up excitement; and drugged with this and sleeplessness, and buoyed up by the intense relief and pleasure of Lewis’s company, I had been floating along in a kind of dream – apprehensive, yes, but no longer scared; nothing could happen to me when he was there. But with him, I now realised, it was more than this; more positive than this. It was not simply that as a man he wasn’t prey to my kind of physical weakness and fear, nor just that he had the end of an exacting job in sight. He was, quite positively, enjoying himself.

‘Lewis,’ I said accusingly, ‘can you possibly be
wanting
some rough stuff?’

‘Good heavens, no!’ He said it very lightly, and it was a lie – a lie he didn’t even trouble to follow up, but gave it away with the next sentence. ‘Is your face still sore?’

‘My face? I – yes, I suppose it is.’ I put a hand to the swollen cheek, realising how stiff my bruised mouth was. ‘I was too busy to think about it, but it must look awful, does it?’

‘Not from this side, beautiful. Praise be, this blessed mist’s clearing just in time. There’s a tunnel ahead.’

‘A tunnel?’

‘Yes. See? It looks like a cave mouth. Heaven knows how long it is. I wish to God we could see a little
farther, and take a short cut straight up. Too bad if we had to – ah!’

Even as he spoke there came another of those queer freak currents of air, lifting the mist away. He pointed straight up the mountainside away from the rail track. ‘There, you can see where the track goes, cutting along above this again. Come on, we’ll take a chance on this. Let’s by-pass this tunnel.’

Luck was still with us. A few minutes’ scramble brought us to the place he had seen, with only a few stray trails of damp mist to blur our way, though the crest of the mountain remained lodged in cloud, mercifully blinding our quarry to the pursuit. We had seen no more sign of him and heard no sound, except here and there the trickle and splash of little springs that threaded the rock, and once the bells of sheep still tingling in some small agitation from Sandor’s passage ahead of us.

Just before the mist of the upper track swallowed us in our turn, we saw Timothy away below. He waved, then spread his hands in the time-honoured gesture which means ‘I found nothing’. Lewis lifted a hand in acknowledgement, then pointed higher up the mountain. The gesture said as clearly, ‘Follow us’, and the distant figure, wasting no time, turned aside from the railway and began the steep scramble after us.

‘Are we going to wait for him?’ I asked.

‘We can’t afford to, but he can’t get lost. There’s always the railway. That’s a good lad, Vanessa. From what you tell me, his father must be a fool. What’s he going to do?’

‘He’s talking of a job with the Spanish Riding School. I don’t know what Carmel would say, but I think she’ll find he’s a bit over her fighting weight now – and of course if she’s marrying again she may be too wrapped up in that to bother. I don’t know what the regulations are about getting work here, Lewis? He’s hoping his father can help.’

‘I could probably help him there myself. I know a man – Watch that stone, it’s loose.’

‘You know, I’m beginning to think you’re quite handy to have around.’

‘Time alone will tell,’ he said, with a glance up ahead through the mist. ‘We’ll see what Tim says, anyway. But if I’d a son like that . . . Managing all right?’

‘I’m with you, literally all along the line.’

‘Meaning we can give it some thought, as soon as this job’s over?’

‘Why not? I dare say supply can meet demand, as the PEC Sales Department would put it.’

He reached a hand back and helped me up a steep patch. ‘How my other Department would put this I hate to think; but thank God it’s turned out to be a police job after all.’

‘And Tim and I have a perfect right to be here and help as ordinary citizens?’

‘Indeed you have. What’s more, so have I, in as private a capacity as you like. Mark you, I’m certain there’ll turn out to be a Security tie-up, simply because Paul sent for me in the first place; but that’s another story, as they say, and by the time we’re through with this the Department may well decide to let someone
else cope with it. I have a feeling that Lee Elliott has just about exhausted his cover with the Circus Wagner. As for your part in this, even if I weren’t quitting, I doubt if my Department could raise much hell over it now.’

‘A man’ll do anything when he’s under notice,’ I said.

‘How right you are.’

At something in his tone I said quickly: ‘What d’you mean?’

‘What I have to discuss with Sandor,’ said Lewis, ‘isn’t exactly in the book.’

‘You mean your “private reasons” for wanting to catch up with him?’

‘Exactly that. Any objections?’

‘I can hardly wait.’

‘I always did say you weren’t a nice girl. Damn this mist, it’s a mixed blessing. From what I can see of this blessed mountain, they couldn’t be better placed. I seem to remember that the place has what’s called a “panorama” . . . that is, it’s got a clear signalling-line across at least two borders.’

‘What are you going to do?’

‘Go straight in, if I can, and pick up Balog, his contact, and the dope. The police might have got more information by just watching the Gasthaus, but Balog knows his cover’s been blown, so we might as well muscle straight in and pick up the two of them before they clear out of it. Something’ll turn up if they take the place apart – and two birds can be made to sing faster than one.’

‘What do you want me to do?’

‘When we get there, stay under cover till I give the word. I may need you to do the telephoning, if I have my hands too full . . . Or, if anything goes wrong, you’re to get straight downhill with Tim, get to the car, drive down to the hotel and get them to telephone the police at Graz. Then get the local bobby and a few solid citizens and send them up here. Don’t come back yourself.’ He smiled down at me. ‘Don’t look like that; that’s only if things go wrong, but they won’t . . . I’m only doing what they call covering all contingencies. Got it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Now we’d better stop talking. Sound carries in mist the way it does over water, and I don’t think it can be far now.’

‘Look,’ I said.

Away above us, and slightly to the left, nebulous and faint through the fog, like a strangled star, a light suddenly pricked out and hung steady.

‘Journey’s end,’ said Lewis.

‘Or the start of the fun?’ I asked.

‘As you say,’ he agreed, smoothly.

Heat not a furnace for your foe so hot
That it do singe yourself
.

Shakespeare:
King Henry VIII

The Gasthaus was not a big building. As far as one could see in that misty half-light, it was solid, long, white-washed, with the roof of grey wooden shingles so common in the valleys, and to one side a sheltered veranda made of pine where tables were laid in summer. It lay some twenty yards beyond the final halt of the rack railway. At the other side of the Gasthaus lay a terrace edged with a low wall, a belvedere, beyond which the cliff dropped sheer away for some two or three hundred feet, but on the railway side, from which we approached, it was just an ordinary long low building with shuttered windows and a heavy door, to the side of which were the refuse bins and crates of empty bottles.

It was from one of these windows – the only one unshuttered – that the light came which Lewis and I had followed. Half the outside shutter had been pushed open, and the window with it, back against the wall. It was possible that this had been done deliberately after
Sandor’s telephone call in order to guide him up the mountain in the mist. There was no other light.

There was a shed at the terminus of the rack railway, a squat oblong building which did duty as a station. We ran forward under cover of this, and dodged through the crush barriers to the misty window at the rear. Between the window and the Gasthaus there was no cover except the stacked boxes and dustbins near the wall. We could see clean in through the open window, and what was going on in the room was as obvious and well lighted as something on a picture stage.

The room was the kitchen. To the left as I looked I could see the gleam of the big cooking stove and above it a row of copper pans and a blue dish hanging. Against the wall opposite the window could be seen the top of a kitchen dresser, shelves of some sort with more of the blue dishes, and some cardboard boxes stacked. The wall to the right, where presumably the door was, I couldn’t see. The end of a big scrubbed table jutted out near the window. More important than anything, on the wall beside the dresser, at shoulder height, was an old-fashioned telephone, and near this Sandor Balog stood, talking hard to another man, obviously his host, who stood by the stove with his back to the window. From what I could see of him this was a stocky, heavily built man, with thinnish, greying hair. He had an old overcoat huddled on anyhow, over what I assumed were pyjamas or whatever he wore at night. He was in the act of lifting what looked like a coffee pot off the top of the stove, and had paused to say something over his shoulder to Sandor.

All this I got in one swift impression, for in that moment Lewis, with a breathed ‘Stay here’, had left my side and was running lightly across the intervening space between the shed and the kitchen wall.

He ran in a curve, keeping out of the direct line of vision, and in a few seconds, unnoticed, was backed up against the wall to the side of the open window, from where, presumably, he could hear what was being said.

I don’t know to this day whether the light in that room was electric or whether it came from a lamp, but in the uncertain dawn it seemed very strong, and lit the scene in the kitchen with startling clarity, in spite of the veils and fingers of mist that still drifted between; whereas Lewis, crouched beyond the direct beam of the light, was less than half visible. All the same, I saw the gun in his hand . . .

But at the same moment a movement within the room caught my eye. The second man carried the coffee pot across to the table, still talking, and proceeded to pour coffee into a couple of mugs. I saw the steam of it rising, and I still remember – over-laying even the excited apprehension of the moment – the glorious sudden pang of hunger caused by the sight of that coffee. I seem to remember that I could even smell it; but that of course was ridiculous. There were still twenty yards of damp grey air between us.

Next moment I forgot the coffee completely. I saw Lewis drift away from the window, along the wall, to try the door.

It was locked; they must have shut it again after Sandor had been admitted. Lewis drifted, ghost-like,
back towards the window. I was surprised that they had left that, but perhaps they hadn’t noticed, and Sandor, after all, had shown no suspicions of being followed.

Even as the thought crossed my mind, he did notice it. He said something, pointing, then put his mug down on the table, and turned towards the telephone. His host glanced, shrugged, then stepped towards the window. He was going to shut it. Sandor had lifted the receiver, and was waiting. And Lewis – I could see it now – Lewis, incredibly, had put out a hand to hold the window and shutter tightly back against the outside wall.

The man thrust out an arm and yanked at the window. It jerked, and stuck. He pulled it again, and even from where I stood I could hear his irritable exclamation as it still stayed fast open. Sandor gave a half glance over his shoulder, then turned back to the telephone, and said something brief into it, a number, perhaps. The man at the window leaned right out over the sill and reached to one side to pull it to.

Lewis hit him hard over the head. The heavy body slumped across the sill, then slowly slipped back into the lighted room. It had hardly begun to slide before Lewis had gone with it, and was astride the sill, silhouetted sharply against the light, with the gun in his hand.