Classic Spy Novels 3-Book Bundle (132 page)

“Coup de Tonnerre,” Morath said. “He took a third place, the last time he ran. And the odds are attractive.”

Von Schleben handed Silvana a few hundred francs. “Take care of it for us, will you?” Morath also gave her money. “Let’s try Count Morath’s hunch.”

When she’d gone off to the betting windows, Von Schleben said, “Too bad about your uncle. We had good times together, but that’s life.”

“You didn’t hear anything, did you? After it happened?”

“No, no,” Von Schleben said. “Into thin air.”

As the horses were walked to the starting line, there were the usual difficulties, a starter’s assistant leaping out of the way to avoid being kicked.

“There’s a lawyer in Vienna I’d like to get in touch with,” Morath said. “Gerhard Kreml.”

“Kreml,” Von Schleben said. “I don’t think I know him. What is it that interests you?”

“Who he is. What kind of business he does. I think he has connections with the Austrian party.”

“I’ll see what I can do for you,” Von Schleben said. He handed Morath a card. “Call me, first part of next week, if you haven’t heard anything. Use the second number, there, on the bottom.”

The race began, the horses galloping in a tight pack. Von Schleben raised a pair of mother-of-pearl opera glasses to his eyes and followed the race. “Take the rail, idiot,” he said. The horses’ hooves drummed on the grass. At the halfway point, the jockeys began to use their whips.
“Ach scheiss!”
Von Schleben said, lowering the glasses.

“This Kreml,” Morath said. “He has a client in Vienna, a friend of a friend, who seems to be having tax problems. There’s a question of being allowed to leave the country.”

“A Jew?”

“Yes. A Hungarian musician, who lives in California.”

“If he pays the taxes there should be no problem. Of course, there are special situations. And if there are, irregularities, well, the Austrian tax authority can be infernally slow.”

“Shall I tell you who it is?”

“No, don’t bother. Let me find out first who you’re dealing with. Everything in Vienna is—a little more complicated.”

The winners of the race were announced. “Too bad,” Von Schleben said. “Maybe better luck next time.”

“I would hope.”

“By the way, there’s a man called Bolthos, at the legation. Friend of yours?”

“Yes. An acquaintance, anyhow.”

“I’ve been trying to get in touch with him, but he’s hard to get hold of. Very occupied, I suppose.”

“Why don’t I have him call you?”

“Could you?”

“I’ll ask him.”

“I’d certainly appreciate it. We have interests in common, here and there.”

Silvana returned. Morath could see she’d freshened her lipstick. “I’ll be on my way,” he said.

“Expect to hear from me,” Von Schleben said. “And again, I’m sorry about your uncle. We must hope for the best.”

Shoes off, sleeves rolled back, a cigarette in one hand and a glass of wine by his side, Morath stretched out on the brown velvet sofa and read and reread Kolovitzky’s letter.

Mary Day, wrapped in one towel with another around her head, came fresh from her bath, still warm, and sat by his side.

“Who is R. L. Stevenson?” Morath said.

“I give up, who is he?”

“It’s in this letter. From Kolovitzky, who played the violin at the baroness’s Christmas party. He managed to get himself trapped in Vienna, and they allowed him to write to his wife—just once, I think, there won’t be another, to see if they can get anything more out of him before they throw him in a canal.”

“Nicholas!”

“I’m sorry, but that’s how it is.”

“The name is in the letter?”

“Code. Trying to tell his wife something.”

“Oh, well, then it’s the writer.”

“What writer?”

“Robert Louis Stevenson.”

“Who’s that?”

“He wrote adventure novels. Terrifically popular—my father had all the books, read them when he was growing up.”

“Such as?”

“Treasure Island.”
She unwound the towel from her head and began drying her hair. “You’ve never heard of it?”

“No.”

“Long John Silver the pirate, with a peg leg and a parrot on his shoulder. Avast there, maties! It’s about a cabin boy, and buried treasure.”

“I don’t know,” he mused. “What else?”

“
The Master of Ballentrae
?”

“What happens there?”

She shrugged. “Never read it. Oh, also
Kidnapped.
”

“That’s it.”

“He’s telling her he’s been kidnapped?”

“Held for ransom.”

8:30
P.M.
The Balalaika was packed, smoky and loud, the Gypsy violins moaning, the customers laughing, and shouting in Russian, the man down the bar from Morath weeping silently as he drank. Balki glanced at him and shook his head.
“Kabatskaya melankholia,”
he said, mouth tight with disapproval.

“What’s that?”

“A Russian expression—tavern melancholy.”

Morath watched while Balki made up a diabolo, a generous portion of grenadine, then the glass filled with lemonade. Balki looked at his watch. “My relief should be here.”

A few minutes later, the man showed up, and Balki and Morath headed for a bar up in the place Clichy. Earlier, during a lull in business, Morath had laid out the details of Kolovitzky’s letter, and the two of them had discussed strategy, coming up with the plan that couldn’t go wrong and what to do once it did.

In the bar, Balki greeted the owner in Russian and asked him if they could use the telephone.

“Maybe we should go to the railroad station,” Morath said.

“Save yourself the trip. Half the White Russians in Paris use this phone. Mercenaries, bomb throwers, guys trying to put the czar back on the throne, they all come here.”

“The czar is dead, Boris.”

Balki laughed. “Sure he is. So?”

Morath asked for the international operator and got the call through to Vienna almost immediately. The phone rang for a long time, then a man said, “Hotel Schoenhof.”

“Good evening. Herr Kolovitzky, please.”

The line hissed for a moment, then the man said, “Hold on.”

Morath waited, then a different voice, sharp and suspicious, said, “Yes? What do you want with Kolovitzky?”

“I just want to talk to him for a minute.”

“He’s busy right now, can’t come to the phone. Who’s calling?”

“Mr. Stevenson. I’m in Paris at the moment, but I might come over to Vienna next week.”

“I’ll tell him you called,” the man said, and hung up.

He called Von Schleben from the Agence Courtmain. A secretary said he wasn’t available, but, a few minutes later, he called back. “I have the information you wanted,” he said. “Gerhard Kreml is a small-time lawyer, basically crooked. Barely made a living until the Anschluss, but he’s done very well since then.”

“Where is he located?”

“He has a one-room office in the Singerstrasse. But he’s not your problem, your problem is an Austrian SS, Sturmbannführer Zimmer. He and Kreml have a swindle going where they arrest Jews who still have something left to steal. I suspect your friend was lured back to Vienna, and I should also tell you that his chances of getting out are not good.”

“Is there anything you can do?”

“I don’t think they’ll give him up—maybe if it was Germany I could help. Do you want me to try? There would have to be a quid pro quo, of course, and even then there’s no guarantee.”

“What if we pay?”

“That’s what I would do. You have to understand, in dealing with Zimmer you’re dealing with a warlord. He isn’t going to let somebody come into his territory and just take away what belongs to him.”

Morath thanked him and hung up.

“Liebchen.”

Wolfi Szubl said it tenderly, gratefully. Frau Trudi turned at the wall, gave him a luscious smile, and walked across the room, her immense behind and heavy thighs wobbled as she swung her hips. When she reached the end of the room, she turned again, leaned toward him, shook her shoulders, and said, “So, what do you see?”

“Paradise,” Wolfi said.

“And my discount?”

“
Big
discount,
liebchen.
”

“Yes?” Now her face beamed with pleasure.
Even her hair is fat,
he thought. A curly auburn mop, she’d brushed it out after wriggling into the corset, and it bounced up and down, with all the glorious rest of her, as she walked for him.

“I take all you have, Wolfi. The
Madame Pompadour.
My ladies will swoon.”

“Not just your ladies. What is that I see? Did you drop something, over there?”

“Did I? Oh dear.” Hands on hips, she walked like a model on the runway, a shoulder thrust forward with every step, chin high, mouth set in a stylish pout. “Two dozen? Sixty percent off?”

“You read my mind.”

At the wall, she bent over and held the pose. “I don’t
see
anything.”

Szubl rose from his chair, came up behind her and began to unsnap the tiny buttons. When he was done, she ran to the bed with baby steps and lay on her stomach with her chin propped on her hands.

Szubl began to undo his tie.

“Wolfi,” she said softly. “Not a day goes by I don’t think about you.”

Szubl took off his underpants and twirled them around his finger.

The apartment was above her shop, also
Frau Trudi,
on the Prinzstrasse, next to a bakery, and the smell of cookies in the oven drifted up through the open window. A warmish day in Vienna, the beastly
Föhn
not blowing for a change, Frau Trudi’s canary twittering in its cage, everything peaceful and at rest. By now it was twilight, and they could hear the bell on the door of the shop below them as the customers went in and out.

Frau Trudi, damp and pink after lovemaking, nestled against him. “You like it here, Wolfi? With me?”

“Who wouldn’t?”

“You could stay for a while, if you liked.”

Wolfi sighed. If only he could. “I wonder,” he said, “if you know anybody who needs to make a little money. Maybe one of your ladies has a husband who’s out of work.”

“What would he have to do?”

“Not much. Lend his passport to a friend of mine for a week or so.”

She propped herself on her elbow and looked down at him. “Wolfi, are you in trouble?”

“Not me. The friend pays five hundred American dollars for the loan. So I thought, well, maybe Trudi knows somebody.”

He watched her. Fancied he could hear the ring of a cash-register drawer as she converted the dollars into schilling. “Maybe,” she said. “A woman I know, her husband could use it.”

“How old?”

“The husband?” She shrugged. “Forty-five, maybe. Always problems—she comes to me for a loan, sometimes.”

“Is it possible tonight?”

“I suppose.”

“I’ll give you the money now,
Liebchen,
and I’ll stop by tomorrow night for the passport.”

28 June. A fine day with bright sunshine, but not a ray of it reached the hunting lodge. Three stories, thirty rooms, a grand hall, all sunk in dark, musty gloom. Morath and Balki had hired a car in Bratislava and driven up into the wooded hills north of the Danube. They were in historical Slovakia—Hungarian territory since 1938—and only a few miles from the Austrian border.

Balki looked around him in a kind of dispirited awe—trophy heads on every wall, their glass eyes glittering in the forest light. Tentatively, he settled himself on the leather cushion of a huge wooden chair with hunting scenes carved into the high back.

“Where giants sat,” he said.

“That’s the idea.”

The old empire lived on, Morath thought. One of the baroness’s pet aristocrats had agreed to loan him the hunting lodge. “So very
private,
” he’d said with a wink. It was that. In the Little Carpathians, thick with pines, by a rushing brook that wound past the window and a picturesque waterfall that foamed white over a dark outcropping.

Balki wandered about, gazing up at the terrible paintings. Sicilian maidens caught as they filled amphorae from little streams, Gypsy girls with tambourines, a dyspeptic Napoleon with his hand on a cannon. At the far end of the room, between the stuffed heads of a bear and a tusky wild boar, he stood before a gun cabinet and tapped his fingers on the oiled stock of a rifle. “We’re not going to play with these, are we?”

“We are not.”

“No cowboys and Indians?”

Emphatically, Morath shook his head.

There was even a telephone. Of a sort—easy to imagine Archduke Franz Ferdinand calling his taxidermist: a wooden box on the kitchen wall, with the earpiece on a cord and a black horn in the center into which one could speak.
Or shout, more likely.
Morath lifted the earpiece from the cradle, heard static, put it back, looked at his watch.

Balki took off his workman’s cap and hung it on an antler. “I’ll come along if you like, Morath.”

That was pure bravery—a Russian going into Austria. “Guard the castle,” Morath said. “Enough that you took vacation days for this, you don’t have to get arrested in the bargain.”

Once again, Morath looked at his watch. “Well, let’s try it,” he said. He lit a cigarette, put the telephone receiver to his ear and tapped the cradle. From the static, an operator speaking Hungarian.

“I’d like to book a call to Austria,” Morath said.

“I can get through right away, sir.”

“In Vienna, 4025.”

Morath heard the phone, a two-ring signal. Then: “Herr Kreml’s office.”

“Is Herr Kreml in?”

“May I say who’s calling?”

“Mr. Stevenson.”

“Hold the line, please.”

Kreml was on right away. A smooth, confident, oily voice. Saying that it was good of him to call. Morath asked after Kolovitzky’s health.

“In excellent spirits!” Well, perhaps a little, how to say,
oppressed,
what with his various tax difficulties, but that could soon be put right.

“I’m in contact with Madame Kolovitzky, here in Paris,” Morath said. “If the paperwork can be resolved, a bank draft will be sent immediately.”

Kreml went on a little, lawyer’s talk, then mentioned a figure. “In terms of your American currency, Herr Stevenson, I think it would be in the neighborhood of ten thousand dollars.”