The Second Victory, page 14
“A wise man doesn’t argue with a gun,” said Hanlon sharply.
Then another voice spoke, from behind the oldest mask. An educated voice, he noticed, free of the raw peasant accent.
“Do as he says. We don’t want trouble.”
“But listen…!”
“Do as he says.”
Slowly, the first man raised his hands and began to lift his mask. Hanlon’s attention wavered for a moment so that he missed the swift movement as the second man flicked up his chain belt and swung it against the side of his head.
There was a crack like splitting timber and Hanlon went down, spreadeagled in the roadway, his face buried in a drift. A slow spreading of blood stained into the snow and quickly froze. The feet of the goatmen trampled him savagely as they hurried off into the darkness of the trees.
His wakening was a slow nightmare of pain and blindness and nausea and stifling perplexity. He was smothered by darkness and the darkness was a stone roof against which he battered himself till his head seemed ready to burst. It was a black liquid forced down his throat by faceless torturers. It was fire scalding his face and his hands. It was a honor that enveloped him like the stink of a charnelhouse. It was a sea on which he floated, a whirlpool in which he spun dizzily, a swamp in which he gasped helplessly against drowning.
There were leaden pennies on his eyes and when he tried to move them he realised that his hands were bound in cerecloths and his face was swathed like a mummy’s. He was choked with sickness, and his tongue fell backward into his gullet when he tried to shout. He heard voices that babbled without meaning and names that he had once known but were now alien symbols. He was alive in a world too small for movement. He was adrift in a space without limits.
Then the nightmare passed and a small comforting death took hold of him. The resurrection came slowly. He understood that he was in a bed. He was alive and warm. And if he moved there was pain.
The first thing he saw was the broad, ruddy face of Doktor Huber. It was blurred at first and wavering. Then slowly it came into focus. There was a band around his forehead with a mirror in the centre of it. He held a pencil torch close to Hanlon’s eyes and his big fingers were holding up one eyelid and forcing down the lower conjunctiva.
Hanlon blinked and the fingers released their grip. Huber gave a small exclamation of satisfaction and stepped back. Behind him Hanlon saw the tense white face of Captain Johnson and the blonde head of Anna Kunzli. He tried to turn his head to take in the details of the room, but a stab of pain checked him. He closed his eyes and struggled to hold on to consciousness.
When he opened them again, Doktor Huber was smiling at him. He tried to speak, but his voice seemed to come from another man, small and far away.
“What are you doing here, Huber? Where am I? What happened?”
Huber smiled gravely and shook his head.
“It’s a long question, Major. Let’s leave it awhile. I want to have another look at your eyes. Can you see me quite clearly?”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
Huber bent over him again, peering into the pupils with his tiny light, angling it carefully into the dark lens of the eyeball, searching for any sign of hemorrhage or clotting in the intricate network of blood vessels. Then he straightened up and put the torch back in his pocket.
“You’re a very lucky man, Major. You could have been killed. You might have been blinded or deafened.”
“What happened to me?” asked Hanlon weakly.
“Give me a mirror,” said Huber to the girl. She turned away and a moment later she was back with a small hand mirror. Huber held it up in front of Hanlon’s face and he stared at the image that confronted him.
His head was bound with swathes of bandage, bloody on the left side. His face was covered with lint held in place by adhesive plaster. When he tried to lift his hands to touch it, he saw that they too were bandaged. He looked at Huber’s grave face.
“I—I don’t understand.”
“Herr Kunzli’s housekeeper found you lying in the snow outside the gate. Your head was laid open by a massive blow. How it didn’t crack your skull or give you a brain hemorrhage, I don’t know. Your face and hands are badly frostbitten. If you’d lain there much longer you’d be dead. She called Herr Kunzli and Anna here and they brought you up to the house, then sent for me. I called Captain Johnson.”
“How long have I been here?”
“Thirty-six hours,” said Huber soberly. “You’ve had me very worried.”
“Thirty-six hours?” He could feel the nausea coming back, his hold on the world weakening again. He struggled to tell them. “I—I met the Krampus…our man…hit me with…with…chain…” Darkness closed over him again. His eyes drooped and his head lolled slackly on the pillow.
Huber stood looking down at him a moment, then turned back to Johnson.
“Did that mean anything to you, Captain?”
“Attempted murder,” said Johnson curtly.
Huber nodded.
“I understand. He spoke to me about this business. It might easily have been murder. It—it could still be…”
Johnson stared at him, shocked.
“But I thought you said…”
“I can’t find any sign of hemorrhage. There may be one, none the less. We can only wait and see how he progresses over the next few days.
“Shouldn’t we get him back to the Sonnblick?”
“No!” Huber was emphatic about it. “I cannot have him moved in any circumstances. Fräulein Anna here can look after him. You can come to see him whenever you want. I’ll visit him twice a day until we are sure there are no complications.”
“I’m—very grateful,” said Johnson awkwardly in German.
Then for the first time the girl spoke:
“We’re happy to do what we can, Captain. I promise you I’ll give him every care. What should I expect, Doktor? What should I do?”
“He’ll be like this for a day or two, drifting between consciousness and unconsciousness. The conscious periods should become longer as he progresses. Feed him a little broth when he can take it. You know how to take a pulse count and a temperature; call me if there is any perceptible slackening, or if there is fever. He may vomit today—let me know if it is severe, or if the unconsciousness lasts too long. I’ll change the dressings when I come. No visitors, except the Captain. Even from you, Captain, no long talk until he begins to mend properly.”
Johnson nodded.
“I understand, Doktor.”
“Fräulein?”
“I understand too.”
“If you want medicine, drugs…” said Johnson uncertainly.
“I’ll call on you,” Huber answered him with a ghost of a smile. Then a new thought struck him and his broad face clouded again. “There’s a murderer in the town, Captain. What do you propose to do about it?”
Johnson told him savagely: “I’m going to take the town apart, house by house. Why?”
“Advice from a friend,” said Huber slowly. “Leave it a day or two, until the Major can talk to us. You will lose nothing, I promise you. On the other hand you may gain much.”
“I’ll think about it.”
“Do that, Captain. Come, Anna, there are more instructions for you.” He turned and led the girl out of the room.
Johnson stood a long time looking down at the slack figure on the bed, at the frostbitten hands and the ravaged face and the bandaged head lolling against the white pillow.
Whenever he woke, the girl was there. Sometimes there was sunlight behind her, so that her hair shone like a golden coronet. When he woke, babbling in the dark or moaning with the pain of his burnt face and hands, she would be bending over him, her hair in plaits, her body ethereal in a white gown with lace at the throat and at the wrists. Her hands soothed him and her voice calmed him, and the fragrance of her perfume lingered with him. When he lapsed again it was as if she followed him past the borders of sleep and into the blackness beyond.
He fought his way out of nightmares, shouting her name: “Anna! Anna!” and she was with him even before he knew it. He submitted without humiliation to be washed and cleansed by her, and, when the dressings were stripped off his wounds and he gasped with the pain, her arms were there to support him. She fed him like a child, spooning the food over his swollen, blistered lips.
He understood now that he was sleeping in her room, and in her bed, and that she had moved to a small cubbyhole across the hall to be within sound of his voice, day and night.
She sat with him through the day, reading, knitting, mending, dozing sometimes because her night had been broken. If he tried to talk she answered once or twice, then hushed him, so that he lay relaxed in a healing doze until the next pains shook him and she came running to his side.
Because he was a man who had been disappointed in one woman he was all the more surprised by the solicitude of this one. Because he was sick he accepted it without question, but gratitude deepened in him as consciousness established itself.
For the first forty-eight hours he tossed uneasily between the brief crests of waking and the long deep troughs of darkness. Then slowly the rhythm changed. There was more day than night; less sleep, more pain; more comfort in the hands and the voice and the young, attentive face under the coronet of corngold hair.
One morning when she had finished washing him and smoothing the sheets, she sat down on the end of the bed. He reached out his bandaged hands and laid them on hers. He said languidly:
“You’re very good to me, Anna.”
“I like doing it, Mark,” she told him with gentle gravity. His name was a habit with her now, after the watchful hours and their struggle together.
“Why? Sickness is never pleasant, least of all for the nurse.”
“All my life people have cared for me,” she told him simply. “Now, for the first time, there is someone I can care for; I like that.”
He nodded agreement. It was a thing he understood; something he had once believed in before he had put on cynicism like an armour against the disappointments of passion. Now he was sick and he wore no armour—and who could mistrust such patent innocence? He asked her again:
“Have I been hard to manage?”
She smiled at him.
“Not really. Sometimes you were afraid—and I was afraid too. Sometimes in your sleep you cursed and swore. But men always do that when they’re hurt, don’t they?”
He tried to smile at her, but his lips were cracked and painful, so that the smile was only in his eyes.
“I’m afraid we do. Was it very bad?”
“Most of it was in English, so I didn’t understand it. The German was bad enough.” She was silent a moment, watching his face—the stubble growing up around the dressings, the blue sunken skin under the eyes, the prominent bones of the jaw and the lines etched around the mouth by pain and experience. She reached forward with an oddly intimate gesture and brushed away a wisp of cotton trailing towards his lips. Then she asked him quietly:
“Mark, who is Lynn?”
The smile went out of his eyes. His voice was no longer languid, but tight and strained. “Where did you hear that name?”
“You were calling it in your nightmare, over and over again.”
“What did I say?”
“I didn’t understand. You were talking in English.”
“Oh.”
He relaxed again, closing his eyes and feeling his body limp under the sheets. Anna’s voice seemed to come from a long way off:
“I’m sorry. Perhaps I shouldn’t have asked. I—I didn’t mean to pry. It seemed to trouble you, that’s all.”
“It does sometimes.”
He opened his eyes and tried to smile at her again, but when he saw how troubled she was, he drew her a little closer with his maimed hands and said gently:
“It’s an old story. Old and unhappy. Lynn is my wife.”
She was not looking at him now, but down at his hands, muffled and shapeless in the bandages, and at her own, clasped over them gently.
“You don’t have to talk about it. Unless you want to.”
For the first time in years he did want to talk about it. Here, in the privacy of the sick room, in the sexless intimacy of the first healing day, he could do it without shame. The patient has no pride when the nurse strips him down and bathes him like a babe. Why should he have it when she asks him about his nightmares and he has so much need to purge them out of his soul? So, he told her:
“I was very young, very hungry for love. I had been in a monastery, you see, where passion is suppressed by discipline and love is supposed to be transfigured into a love of God, which the divines call Charity. It is sometimes, when a man is old and the urges of youth have been boned out of him. Sometimes, too, when a man is young—but then only by a special intervention of the Almighty, who wants a saint or two in each century. Me? I should never have been there in the first place; so I was out of both classes.”
“How did you come there?”
“By accident.” He grinned at her disarmingly. “My father died when I was young. He was a Liverpool Irishman who stayed in Germany after the First War to garrison Hamburg.”
“Just like you, Mark.”
“Just like me. The week before he was due home, he was killed by a runaway car. We were left to fend for ourselves. I was the youngest and a drain on the family. I was lonely too, and I didn’t know where I was going or why, so when the good Father came around with his sermon on vocations and his little handful of leaflets, I was in—body, soul and reach-me-down breeches.”
“And you were unhappy?” The wide innocent eyes were fixed on his face.
“Not at first. Not for a long while. But I wasn’t happy either. And it’s a big truth, Anna “he leaned on it sombrely—“we’re meant to be happy—in monasteries, in marriage, even the Christus on the cross. If we’re not, there’s something amiss with ourselves, or the folk we live with: generally it’s both. So, after a few years, I left. Father Albertus tapped me on the head and gave me his blessing and sent me back to the big wide world I knew nothing about, except that there were girls in it, and I hoped one day one of ’em might love me…”
“Father Albertus!” She stared at him, unbelieving. “You were with him, here? In Austria?”
He nodded, amused at her shock.
“In Graz. He was Novice Master then.”
She shook her head vaguely as if trying to clear it of some confusion. Her eyes stared past him to some secret speculation of her own.
“So strange, Mark…so very strange.”
“What?”
“That you should both be here now and that you should be—what you are.”
“Not so strange, Anna.”
“Why?”
“I wanted to come back. I pulled all the strings I knew to arrange it.”
“What made you want it so much?”
“That’s the end of the story,” he told her lightly. “The riddle you guess at when you have the clues. Three months out of the monastery, I met Lynn. I fell in love with her. Three months after that we were married.”
“Did you really love her?”
“Desperately.”
“What happened then?”
“Nothing.”
“I don’t understand you, Mark.”
“Nothing happened, Liebchen, nothing at all. We were married. We had two children, who write to me sometimes. Then we didn’t have any more because Lynn refused to have them—or me either. It took me a long time to understand that she didn’t love me. I was necessary to her, but not as a lover, not as a husband. I thought time might bring love, or patience and tenderness, but I was wrong. I thought passion might bring it, but there was no passion in her—not for me. Then one day I understood something else. Love can die too. It sickens like a plant and wilts slowly, and one day it is dead. Nothing can resurrect it—nothing.”
“You are still married?”
“Yes”
“Why?”
“For the children’s sake—for religion’s sake. But there’s nothing left in it. I’m here, she’s in England, neither of us missing the other.”
“Yet you cry for her in your sleep.”
“Not for her, Anna; for love, yes. The love I spent for no return. The love I pleaded for but never had.”
“One should never plead for love,” said the girl gravely. “I found that with Uncle Sepp. It is there or it is not there. If it is not, one can never waken it.”
“That,” said Mark Hanlon wryly, “is one lesson Father Albertus never taught me. I must remind him of it sometime.”
It was out now, and the last of his small strength seemed to have gone with it. He closed his eyes and lay back on the pillow, feeling the drowsiness lap over him in soft, grateful waves. It seemed to him then that Anna Kunzli came and bent over him and touched her lips to his forehead. Illusion? A sweet inconsequent reality? He did not know, and by then he was too tired to care.
CHAPTER 11
AS SOON as Hanlon was able to sustain a coherent conversation, Johnson was there with his list of problems. The young captain was willing enough to accept responsibility, but wise enough to know his limitations. Huber’s counsel had left him dubious about precipitate action and he knew Hanlon would disapprove of a hasty application to Klagenfurt. Somewhat to his surprise, Hanlon disagreed with Huber.
“Let’s have action, Johnny, by all means. It won’t catch our man but it’ll worry hell out of Fischer.”
“What do you want, Mark?”
“House searches first, Johnny, simultaneously, all over the town. Keep the areas as widely separated as possible and stagger the times and places so that there’s no apparent pattern. Four men to each search: one to the back door, one to the front, two to work the place over from ceiling to cellar.”
“Do you want him dead or alive?” asked Johnson with a grin. His good humour was returning now that Hanlon was in the saddle again.
“Alive,” said Hanlon definitely. “But let’s not take crazy risks.”
“Like you, for instance?”
“Like me.”
“Any other ideas?”
“I’d like to tap Fischer’s telephone and keep a tail on him twenty-four hours a day. But the town’s too small and we haven’t the men for it. He’d know in ten minutes.”
