Background to Danger (16 page)

“Of course not. They’re with the
patron
at the Café Schwan. I arranged with him that he was to hand them over to nobody except me in person. He’s open all night, and it’s near the Hotel Werner. We’ll go now if you like.”

“Is the envelope deposited in your name?” said Zaleshoff sharply.

“Of course.”

Zaleshoff looked inquiringly at the girl.

She shook her head.

“We cannot risk it,” she said.

Zaleshoff nodded and turned again to Kenton.

“I regret,” he said, “that you will have to spend what remains of the night here. In the morning we will consider what to do.”

Kenton looked grimly from one to the other.

“I don’t quite understand.”

“It will be more comfortable—” began Zaleshoff in a conciliatory tone; but the girl interrupted him.

“He had better know the truth,” she said. “Mr. Kenton, it is quite impossible for you to return to your hotel. It is equally impossible for you to claim that packet at the Café Schwan. It would even be dangerous to be seen in the street.”

“Why?”

“Because,” said Tamara, “there is not a newspaper in Austria to-night that does not carry your name and description and a large reproduction of a fingerprint found on the wash-basin in room twenty-five at the Hotel Josef. Every policeman in Austria is on the look-out for you. There is a price on your head of one thousand
schillings
. You are wanted for the murder of Herman Sachs.”

At a quarter past two that morning the proprietor of the Café Schwan telephoned the police with news that, ten minutes earlier, three masked men had driven up in a black closed car, menaced the occupants with revolvers and ransacked his premises. One of the two clients present at the time, a railway official from the station, had attempted to resist the bandits and had been shot in the foot. No money had been taken, but a small packet, left by a young American, had been taken from the poste restante box. The packet, he understood, had contained compromising letters from a lady. The man who had shot the railway official was tall and thin. The other two had been of medium height. The arm of one of them, the left arm, he thought, had appeared to be rather stiff at the elbow—but he could not be sure. They had declared that it was an affair of honour. No, he could not describe the men, owing to the masks. He had not remarked their clothes. No, he had not noticed the make or number of the car—who would, under the circumstances? No, he could not remember
the name of the American—if he were to remember the name of every traveller who left things to be called for, he would have no head left for the conduct of his business. The name might have been Krause.

The police promised to investigate the affair.

T
HE
more fanciful among recent interpreters of history have frequently drawn attention to the grotesque intrusion of the trivial on the larger affairs of mankind. They have elaborated the idea. What, they ask, might have been the course of history had, say, Napoleon fought the battle of Marengo with his judgment impaired by a cold in the head?

Such whimsical speculations are symptomatic of an a-religious age. Yet, in the complex anatomy of cause and effect, in that crazy
pastiche
which some dismiss as “the blind workings of Fate,” there is often to be observed a certain artistry.

In 1885 there lived in Salzburg a young married couple named Hoesch. Karl, the husband, was employed in the office of one Buscher, a maker of glass beads. Early in 1886
Herr Buscher died. In his will, among other bequests to his employees, he left his clerk Hoesch two books “for the nourishment and improvement of his mind and that of his good wife.” One of the books was a
Life of Charlemagne
, published in Berlin in 1850; the other was a German translation of the Iliad. With a generosity as characteristic as it was pointless (for Frau Hoesch was unable to read) Karl shared his good fortune with his wife by giving her one of the books. This, the
Life of Charlemagne
, was carefully packed away with the lady’s Sunday dress and some keepsakes from her mother. The Iliad Karl read assiduously, both to himself and to Frau Hoesch. When, in 1887, it was known that their first child would soon be born, the pair decided immediately that if it were a girl her name should be Helene; while that if, as Karl secretly hoped, it were a boy, then he should be called Achilles. In the August of that year, Achilles Karl Hoesch was baptised.

It might be expected that as he grew up the young Hoesch would have become ashamed of his first Christian name. But he did not. That may have been because his mother invariably called him by his second name. After two or three years’ nightly readings of the Iliad, Frau Hoesch had taken an almost active dislike to Homer. Once, she had suggested turning to the
Life of Charlemagne;
but her husband had refused, pointing out that he had given the book to her, and could not take back his gift. She had accepted this punctilious verdict without question; but her dislike of the Iliad had intensified. It was then that she had begun to call the boy Karl.

To the world outside his family, however, the young Karl was always Achilles; and, as he was a lusty and pugnacious lad, the name was regarded with envy instead of scorn by his contemporaries. It was perhaps the self-confidence engendered by the distinction that caused him, on leaving school, to reject his father’s plan for a career in the glass bead
factory and enter the service of the State Railways.

Of the career of Achilles Hoesch little need be said. In a dim way he prospered. After twenty-six years’ service in various capacities he was made a sub-inspector of goods traffic at Linz; and it was about two years after this appointment that he formed the habit of dropping into the Café Schwan when he was on night shift, to drink a
Kaffee ausgeheitzter
and eat a piece of
Kuchen
.

He had been thus occupied when Colonel Robinson and his assistants had appeared on that November night with pistols in their hands and threats on their lips. Quivering with a rage worthy of his namesake, Achilles, on being invited to put up his hands, had grabbed a chair and hurled it at Captain Mailler’s head.

The Captain ducked, fired at Achilles’ legs and hit him in the foot. At the hospital it was found that the bullet had passed through the fleshy part of the heel.

Almost every town of any size has its nightly quota of violence. Only the character of it changes from country to country and district to district. In the East End of London the knuckleduster, the razor, and the broken bottle are the common weapons. In the Paris suburbs knives and pistols share the work. In Central Europe, north of a line Basle-Trieste, the revolver comes into its own. Newspapers rarely report these drab incidents. Unless the case possesses that mysterious quality called “news value,” little is heard of it. The wounding in the heel of an unknown Linz railway official would have possessed no news value. Nor would the wounding in some unspecified part of the body of Achilles Hoesch. But the wounding in the heel of a man named Achilles
did
possess news value—it was a good joke.

Half an hour after Achilles was carried into the hospital, an agency message was being ticked out by tape machines in the offices of every Vienna morning paper. All but one extreme left wing sheet promptly squeezed it in on the front
page of the late editions. It was headed “ACHILLES’ HEEL.”

Shortly after half-past seven that morning, Zaleshoff rose stiffly from a chair beside the stove in Rashenko’s room in Kölnerstrasse 11, felt his way in the semi-darkness to the wash-stand and sluiced his face and hands with cold water. This done, he peered at his sister curled up in an armchair.

“Tamara,” he whispered softly.

“Yes?”

“I’m going out to get some air.”

“All right.”

He listened for a moment to the faint snores coming from the sofa and to Rashenko’s heavy breathing from the bed.

“Don’t wake them,” he added.

The door squeaked slightly and he was gone.

The girl gazed for a moment at the dull glow of the dying fire, then shut her eyes again. It seemed to her that she had scarcely done so before her brother was by her side, shaking her arm and whispering to her to get up and put on her coat. In his hand was a newspaper.

When, two hours later, Kenton awoke, Zaleshoff and Tamara had gone. A shaft of pale sunlight filtering through the gap between the curtains was shining in his eyes. He sat up on the sofa and something fell to the floor beside him. It was a piece of paper folded in three. He opened it.

The note was unsigned. Zaleshoff was nothing if not careful.

Kenton read the “latest developments” in the Linz murder with detached interest.

His first reaction to the news that he was wanted for murder had been to laugh. Then the evening papers had been produced and laughter had been replaced by a feeling of amused indignation. He would go to the police immediately, curse them for their stupidity, exact apologies, lodge complaints right and left. Finally he had lost his temper and accused Zaleshoff of murdering Sachs. There had been a stormy scene.

The girl had calmed them both down.

As she had pointed out, the suspicions of the police were not, after all, unreasonable. It must look as though Kenton had been the last person to see Sachs alive. There was money missing. There was the damning testimony of the Hotel Werner. She had ended by suggesting that rest was needed by all concerned and that decisions were best taken in the morning.

Well, the morning had come and Zaleshoff and his sister had decamped. He looked a little doubtfully for the news item to which the note referred. Finally, the facetious little paragraph recording the wounding in the heel of Achilles Hoesch caught his eye and he understood. So Saridza had got his photographs after all! That was that. Meanwhile.…

He moved the curtains aside and gazed out of the window,
down at the pavement far below. There were a few children playing, an old woman, one or two hurrying men. He experienced a sudden desire to get out of Rashenko’s cramped, stuffy room and walk in the open air. There was, after all, no reason why he shouldn’t do so. He had done nothing criminal. It was absurd that they should suspect him. Absurd that … but, he thought suddenly, they didn’t
suspect
him. This was Austria, not England. Until he should prove his innocence, he was not merely suspect—he was guilty!

He let the curtain fall and stood up. The bottom half of his body ached badly. This, he discovered, was due partly to the stiffness of his joints and partly to a colourful display of bruises. His arms and back had, however, suffered less. A small mirror on the wall showed that, except for an unsavoury growth of beard, his face had returned to its normal proportions. His clothes had fared badly. In addition to the huge rent in his trouser leg, there were minor tears on the sleeves and back of the jacket. His linen was all that could be expected after the stresses of seventy-two hours’ continuous and unusually hard wear. A bath was badly needed. He stripped and, going to the washstand, did what he could with the small hand-basin and a jug of cold water.

Rather to his surprise, he found that being wanted for murder produced in him an effect almost identical to that of a dentist’s waiting-room—a sense of discomfort in the intestinal region, a certain constriction in the chest. He supposed that the same glands discharged the same secretions into the blood stream in both cases. Nature could be absurdly parsimonious. That, perhaps, explained why murderers so often behaved with such hopeless real lack of discretion when confronted by the police. Too much assurance could be more dangerous in those circumstances than blind panic. He must do nothing hastily.

He dried himself somewhat inadequately on a small hand-towel and put on his shirt and trousers again. When Rashenko
awoke he would borrow a razor from the Russian and shave himself. He found some cigarettes, lit one and sat down to think.

The immediate question was whether or not he should accept the suggestion in Zaleshoff’s note.

The decision might be easier to make if he really had murdered Sachs, for then he would have to think only of saving his skin. As it was, there was the complicating necessity of having to prove his own innocence. A real murderer would not bother about that. With the evidence available, the last thing he would want would be a trial. For that matter, the last thing he, Kenton, wanted was a trial; but he had not yet come to the point of admitting it as a possibility. He had not killed Sachs; therefore they would not, could not, try him for doing so. The whole thing was fantastic. The Consul would put things right.

Then another thought began to germinate. Supposing they
did
convict him of murder. Supposing his efforts to prove his innocence failed and that the Consul could do nothing. It was all very fine to say that Right triumphed in the end, that Justice sought out the guilty and punished them. In actual practice, Right and Justice were far from infallible. Stupid, honest and blind, they blundered in pursuit of their quarry. The innocent sometimes crossed their paths. Right and Justice pounced. The innocent were sometimes convicted; and with conviction Justice was satisfied. The case was closed as far as the police were concerned. Not much use then to hope for the triumph of Right.