Vanishing Point, page 18
part #7 of Birdcage Series
“I’ve no idea – and that’s God’s truth. Still, as you say – it is a bit odd, ain’t it?”
A little crossly for once, Warboys said, “You must have some idea.”
“Sorry. I’m too old. I don’t deal in ideas or ideals any longer. I just rise each morning with the sun my daily round of duty to run – and that takes all my time. I tell you this stately homes business is worse than Barnum and whoever the other was.”
“Bailey, I think.” Warboys laughed.
“Do you know what happened the other morning? A fair old gypsy type turns up here. Splendid face he had – Rembrandt would have gone crackers over it. Nobbles me in the sunken garden, pulls out a fistful of hundred pound notes. Fans them in my face as though he was showing a Royal Flush and wants to buy the centre piece of the fountain for some customer he’s got living up in Golders Green. I had to make up my mind quickly about kicking his arse out of the place or liking him. Chose the latter on humanitarian grounds and we ended up having a nice chat and I took him in to the kitchen for a bottle of Guinness. He told me he had eighteen children – not all by his wife – and God knows how many grandchildren. Then he pulls a bottle from his pocket and offers it to me for a fiver. He said two spoonfuls at night, no matter what your age, would work wonders when you bedded with your woman.”
“And you bought it?”
“No. But I think Lloyd, my chauffeur, could have done.”
Warboys laughed and then said gently, “Well, we do seem to have strayed from the point. Would it have been deliberately on your part?”
“The question direct. And the answer truthfully. I haven’t the faintest idea what this Crillon is playing at. You have my word. But whatever it is, I hope he is enjoying himself while he can. By God, I wish I were his age again – no need for any bottle of buck-you-up-oh then!”
“Odd you should have taken a great fancy to him.”
“I’ve taken fancies to all sorts in my time. Cheeky buggers and sneaky buggers. Good, sound, solid upright types make dull company. That’s why for years I’ve enjoyed yours. Nothing penny plain about you, dear Warboys.”
“Or you – I think you’re holding something back from me.”
“Well, I’ve done that before as you know. But it’s always been for your own good.”
“Thanks. Now come clean. What is or has been going on between you and Crillon?”
Sir Andrew laughed and raising his port glass rubbed it gently against the side of his nose, starlight brightening his eyes as he regarded Warboys. He said, “Nothing. What could?”
“That’s what I’d like to know. I think, maybe, that this is the first time in my life that I have showed the quick flirt of the underskirt of frustration.”
“Something wrong with your metaphor. But I get the meaning. If there is any answer it is that I’m enjoying myself. Here’s a rather wayward, brilliant Froggy, with the eyes and the hands of a great artist, a law unto himself, a dealer in magic and spells who’s got everyone at Birdcage and beyond with their knickers in a twist. He’s an adventurer and a rogue and has a silver tongue and a silken touch with women – and he’s got the Establishment, Birdcage, the Mafia and God-knows who else all running round and tripping over one another for no reason at all on God’s earth that any of them can think of – and all over a few sheets of paper with a list of names of bloody-would-have-been traitors most of whom now are pushing up the daisies. Of course, one of that lot will get him in the end.”
“And that doesn’t worry you?”
“Not in the least. Why should it?”
“I can’t think.”
“Then give it a rest.”
Warboys smiled and shook his head. “As far as Birdcage is concerned there can be no burial without the body.”
Somewhere in the far woods a bird called and Sir Andrew said, pleased, “Did you hear that? A bloody night-jar calling. Haven’t heard one around here for years. In my father’s time there were plenty. Night hawks he called ’em.”
Warboys, later in the main guest room, lying under the canopy of the Elizabethan four-poster bed, the mattress offering only lumpy and Spartan comfort to the body, pondered Sir Andrew’s obvious evasions – knowing, too, that Sir Andrew knew he knew that they were evasions – and knew more, that nothing could extract from this man anything he wished to keep secret. He understood, too, that he was gone beyond all claims of loyalty to his old service. Curiosity inhabited his mind like some sylph making nudity more apparent by its absence as, dancing, her draperies swung about her like wood smoke in the wind.
He shrugged his shoulders and gave up, reaching for his bedside book – Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, volume two, knowing that he was never in his lifetime ever going to finish the complete work – but it was a healthier way to court Nature’s soft nurse than taking sleeping pills.
* * * *
It was Berini, by nature a lazy man though very far from unintelligent and certainly absolutely diligent in his commitment to Signor Andretti, who proposed the arrangement with the other two, the Englishman and the German. Each of them, for some days, had monitored Trudi’s movements to her school and back from it in the afternoon. Inevitably they had become aware of one another. Once she was at her school they were free. Contact with the Englishman had been made easy since they both now worked towards a common purpose – to find Crillon, obtain his document and see it safely to Birdcage Walk. This link was, however, unknown to the German, since he had not been briefed with the full past history of the affair, or the nature of the document which Crillon possessed. After two days of monitoring Trudi from her lodgings to her school and then picking her up again as she left for her lodgings and then hanging about until the light went on in her bedroom or, sometimes, following her evening stroll to the lakeside before she retired, Berini approached the Englishman as the light went out in her bedroom and said, “Signore, what we are doing is completely pazzo”
“Pazzo?”
“Mad I am from Signor Andretti and you are from Signor Warboys. Why we not share our work?”
“Why not? The whole thing is daft anyway. I’m only here on a flier. From what I know it seems to me unlikely that Crillon will show up. For what reason?”
“Ah, signore, I feel that too. But such are my instructions. Wherever this Crillon has had contacts then there is someone waiting for him. In Cragnac. Also in England, in Salisbury with this Sir Starr.”
“What about the Kraut?”
‘ ‘He is – as you say – a different pot of tea. I have no warmth in my heart to spare him his fatigue.”
So it was arranged that one day the Englishman would do the morning to the late afternoon when the school closed for the day, and then Berini – who loved his siesta – would take over until Trudi was safely in bed. After two days it was noticed that the German had been given supplementary help. Two Germans now shared the vigil.
Through all this Trudi pursued her well-regulated life and all the watchers were content that, if Crillon made personal contact with her, or by telephone or letter arranged a rendezvous, then they would be aware of any deviation from her routine and could act accordingly. Personally the Englishman, knowing that Birdcage had swamped every possible venue where Crillon might show, thought the whole thing was a waste of time. Still the weather was good and the food at his hotel excellent. He had had such assignments before and knew how to make himself comfortable – the car radio, a supply of books, and the correspondence course he was taking in Hebrew in the hope of getting a Middle East assignment which would take him away from the English winters. And Berini, when on school duty, just sat in his car with his mind a pleasant and restful blank except for the recurring phases when he thought of the way Crillon had treated him – though these tended to become wider spaced as the days passed and he concentrated more and more on his feelings for Carla who in a very long session had told him all she knew of Crillon and so some yet-to-reach-ripeness accord had been born between them. And how Aldo – his eye always on the main chance – had encouraged this to the point of hinting that the baby she carried could . . . well, there were ways. But Berini had been in his own mind firm about this. Life was sacred – unless of course someone had crossed his uncle – and that of a child doubly sacred. But anyway . . . one would see.
* * * *
On the Thursday morning of that week Maurice Crillon left his hotel at Brient for good, with a few slight regrets about the receptionist, and motored down the lake to Interlaken and then took the north shore road along Lake Thun a few miles to Merligen – some four kilometres from Gunten. He booked into a lakeside hotel – taking a double room – in his own name and saying that his wife would be joining him late on the evening of the next day for the weekend. That evening before, during and after dinner he drank heavily and quite genuinely so that the staff and the other guests were well aware of it. He slept late the next morning and came down with a hangover which was yet far from abandoning him.
Just before lunch he drove off and took the road back to Interlaken and then around the far shore towards Spiez. Some way from Spiez he pulled off the road and slept again for a couple of hours and woke feeling more his old self, though still tender-headed, but with a growing lift in his spirits. At about the time that the watchers outside Trudi’s school were anticipating her leaving for the day he drove into Spiez.
That afternoon the Englishman was on duty, parked a little way beyond the school, listening to a reading from Goethe on Zurich radio and wishing he were back home in Hampstead waiting for his own children to return from school. Children he loved because they were genuinely unpredictable. The unpredictability of the adults he so often shadowed always had an artificial air, never entirely natural. . . borrowed suits he called it. The creases made by others never fitting those of their temporary hosts. The tubby little Fritz down the road had turned up this day in a battered old van and was wearing – perhaps simply to give himself a change of personality, or was he an amateur dramatic following a hobby in his employer’s time? – workmen’s overalls and a black beard. A zealous servant he thought, remembering his days in Birdcage’s Berlin office, but – Blinder Eifer schadet nur.
After the children had come scattering out of the school, a colourful noisy flock to be met by parents on foot, in cars, and two or three to hang around the request stop to wait for the Beatenburg-Thun bus, the Birdcage man kept his eye on the bicycle stand to the side of the main entrance steps where Trudi’s machine stood with others belonging to teachers.
He waited and saw the teachers emerge until there was only one bicycle left – Trudi’s. He waited another hour and there was still no sign of Trudi. A little later an elderly woman whom he had seen before and had placed as probably the headmistress of the establishment came out wearing a hat and a light summer coat, got into a Volkswagen parked in the forecourt and drove off and – to his relief – was waved away from the top of the steps by Trudi who, as the car disappeared, turned and went back into the school. A little sigh of relief escaped him. Friday night, the end of the working week, and the good Direktorin was probably off for dinner and bridge with a covey of other headmistresses while Trudi Keller held the fort in charge of the few boarders for whom the notice board at the entrance gate said the school catered. The poor little brats whose parents were glad to be shot of them, telling themselves without guilt that absence makes the heart grow fonder. He thought back to his own miserable days at boarding school. Well . . . Berini would turn up in due course, wondering what had happened, and he could take over the all night shift if it came to that. After all die Direktorin might have some cosy friend whose Friday nights she brightened. Male or female he wondered, but not with any great degree of concentration.
He sighed and turned on the radio to be met by the sound of a set of Swiss handbell ringers. He reached for a bar of Toblerone chocolate and wondered briefly whether it was a Pavlovian reaction.
* * * *
Maurice Crillon ran the nose of the motor boat which he had hired in Spiez into the soft sand of a tiny beach two hundred yards east of the school and jumped out, taking the anchor with him. He jabbed one of its flukes deep into the soft turf of the low bank which backed the beach and then, in the fading light of the warm July night, he began to walk along the narrow strand towards the lakeside garden of the school. A little mist was rising over the lake, distorting the lights of the waterside houses and towns and the air was full of the scent of unseen flowers.
The first few moments he knew would be difficult, but after that she would crumple. She always had and she always would. Often before he had come to her this way of a Friday night when she stood in for the headmistress. She would be sitting in the little garden room, windows and door open to the night, knitting or reading or doing both. The blonde Hausfrau . . . once loved, still loved in a way . . . who had loved and still loved him . . . finding resolution to discard him only when he was absent. He had treated her badly, like so many others. But could the leopard change its spots? Anyway, he was coming bearing gifts.
He came to the waterside steps that led up to the garden. Going up them he saw the light through the open door of the garden room, the phantom movement of moths making a moving mist around the outside door light. The air was full of the richness of the night-scented stocks that bordered the path between the play-scuffed grass of the lawns. Children, she loved them. Himself? No – he always had the feeling that they looked at him with wiser and more discerning eyes than any adult. Grown-ups were fools – only looking for what they wanted to see. Children saw things as they were.
She heard him coming for he deliberately scuffed at the gravel. He had no wish to alarm her. He needed her – perhaps now more than he had ever needed anyone. Another paradise lay ahead but she had to help him reach it . . . would do, he knew, because he could make it worth her while. After all, his role was a new one . . . a kindly magician, opening up an Aladdin’s cave for her. She had to help him because for the first time in his life he knew he was in deep, bad trouble. Some people, most people, were born to be made fools of. But not the likes of Signor Andretti. What devil in him had made him think he could pull the nose of such a man? Perhaps the simple fact that the temptation to play David with a Goliath was irresistible. After all, David had got away with it. . .
When he stood just outside the garden door she looked up at him without surprise, and then she said calmly, “I must tell you, Maurice, that I had a funny feeling that something like this would happen. Always, when you are in real trouble you come back to me.”
“How would you know I was in trouble?”
She dropped her knitting to her lap, pushed the ends of the needles into the ball of wool, and said, “At this moment there are men out on the road, put there to watch me. But not because they want anything from me. They are hoping I might lead them to you. And this is what I shall do in a few minutes unless you can give me good and honest reasons why I should not.”
“This I swear to God I will do. When are you off duty?”
“At ten-thirty when Frau Schliegel returns.”
“I have a boat along the beach. I will wait for you at the bottom of the steps.”
“I may not come.”
“Then I am destroyed.” But in himself he knew that he was not. In her mind, he knew, was the wish to abandon him, but in her heart there was the other thing which had no true name. It was a thing, he knew, which had been from birth forever denied him. God, for some reason, had not made him that way.
She said, “I make no promises.”
“I shall be waiting below the steps.”
He turned and went away down the path and on to the little strip of strand and sat down.
Trudi picked up her needles and returned to her knitting.
Outside the school the watchers watched. Just after half-past ten the school principal’s car came up the road from Gunten and turned into the courtyard.
The watchers waited for Trudi to come out and take her bicycle to go back to her lodgings. They waited an hour and one by one the few window lights in the school went out and, last of all, the light over the main entrance.
Seeing this, Berini, who was sitting with the Englishman in his car said, “Friday night – and she stays the night. So?”
“So,” said the Englishman, “you take the first part of the night and I’ll be back at four to relieve you. You know, when I first got into this game I was young and looking forward to all the excitement. Now I know that excitement is only one-tenth of the business – the rest is tedium.”
A little later, some two hundred yards east of the school on the lakeside, Maurice Crillon poled the motor-boat gently off the strand and when it was a hundred yards out shipped the oar he was using and sat facing Trudi. Until now they had spoken only a few brief and – on Trudi’s side – guarded words together.
Crillon said, “Because of the men outside the school we drift up the lake some way before I start the motor. Happily the wind is in the right direction. Maybe that it is so is a good sign. It is also a good sign for us both that you have decided to join me.”
“Have I?”
“Oh, yes. One day you will fully understand your own character. I think you begin to now. Underneath that Trudi you show the world is the other Trudi – the one I first knew and then loved in Zurich. Since I have treated you so badly, you could long ago have cut yourself free from me. But you did not — because deep in your heart there was something in you of the same nature as myself.”
“This talk tells me nothing. If you now want something from me – then tell me what it is. Then you shall have my answer. Yes or No. And yes – you go away and leave me, and I hate you and then you come back and at the first touch I forget my hate. I despise myself for it. For being like that.”
