1
Albin Boschetto
Lengberg is a compact village of red brick, red tile, and chestnut trees, dominated by the gaunt, yellowing prison built on its south-facing slope. It was from this prison that Albin Boschetto was released, at a quarter past eleven, on the morning of November 15.
Commandant Krimmer felt no regrets at Boschetto’s departure. He had held him for three years, and in his view three years was enough. Boschetto was an Italian from the South Tyrol, large for his race, not corpulent, but tall and thick. He had black hair which, when free of prison discipline, would grow down into greasy ringlets almost to his collar; light-grey eyes; and a jaw which had been broken and set so badly that the bottom half of his face seemed to belong to a different man.
In the Commandant’s view Boschetto was not entirely sane. He had said as much to Landesminister Drukl, who had visited the prison a month before and had shown interest in him and his record.
“A bad case of assault, Herr Landesminister. He held up a motorist, on the road to Villach, forced him at gunpoint to dismount, beat him on the head with the gun barrel, robbed him, kicked him, and left him for dead. I have a duplicate of the record if you would care to see it.”
“I would rather see the prisoner,” said the Landesminister.
They had walked together across the interior court, where privileged prisoners were tending the flower beds, and into the inner keep. Here it was dark and cold, and their feet fell softly on the fibre matting laid over the stone and iron-grated floor.
The Commandant slid back the shutter in the door. That part of the prison had been cut into the hillside.
The cells received a ration of daylight and air, by a shaft, from above, but a light burned all day behind a thick glass set high in the ceiling.
Albin Boschetto sat on his bed. He was staring at the wall opposite him. He did not look happy. Nor did he look unhappy. He looked like an uncomplicated piece of machinery which has been laid, for the moment, to one side.
The Commandant felt Drukl shudder. “Yes, it is cold in here,” he said. “You feel the difference, after the sunlight. Let us go back to the office.”
“Does he always sit like that?”
“Oh, no. He has different moods. Sometimes he sings.”
“Sings?”
“Marching songs. He was in a battalion with other Tyrolese during the war. At times he – well, he has habits that are less pleasant.” He looked doubtfully at Drukl, and then decided that the dapper little man at his side, with the small, neat feet and the wispy beard, who had under his control all the prisons and prison officers in the Lienz district, must by now know something of the effects of prolonged imprisonment on simple men.
“To be specific…” he began.
Drukl listened to the recital impassively. Then he said, “They are a primitive race, the men from the High Tyrol. Unsuited to captivity. In my view there was something to be said for the old methods with such people. Liquidation might be kinder than incarceration.”
Krimmer jerked his head up sharply. The Landesminister smiled at the look on his face. “I speak, of course, as a private person,” he said, “not as a minister. He will be released – when?”
“On November fifteenth.”
“Would you make a point of seeing, please, that all preliminaries are completed in good time, and that he is released at fifteen minutes past eleven.”
“At eleven-fifteen.”
“At exactly eleven-fifteen. It is not my request. I pass it on to you from its originator, Colonel Schatzmann.”
Krimmer’s face lost all outward expression. He said, in a carefully modulated voice, “Very well, Herr Landesminister. I will see that it is done.”
And so at nine o’clock on November 15 Boschetto was led to the shower bath. His prison uniform was taken from him, and the clothes in which he had been arrested were returned to him, together with a pile of his possessions, which he checked and for which he scrawled some sort of receipt. The sum of four hundred and fifty Austrian schillings, which he had earned in prison, was handed to him. By eleven o’clock his documentation was completed, and the chief warder led him to the gatehouse. At eleven-fifteen the wicket gate opened and Boschetto stepped out onto the white dusty road.
He stood for a few moments, blinking and swinging his head from side to side. It was a lovely morning of high autumn. The fields were a patchwork of brown stubble and turned earth. The vineyards stood stripped and tidy. A frame of mist hung along the mountain, marking the limit of the early snow.
Albin Boschetto stumped off down the road toward Lengberg. In the distance a Volkswagen started up fussily and moved down a track toward the road. It was driven by a stout man in a dark-blue suit, who could not have been in a hurry, since he waited for quite five minutes before turning the nose of his car to the right and cruising down toward the roofs of Lengberg.
Boschetto was seated on a low wall at the crossroad outside the village, beside the halt sign for the Post Bus. He seemed indifferent to delay and content to relax in the sunshine. The only part of him that moved was his tongue. Every few minutes it came out, licked round his lips, then took fright and disappeared. His big hands hung motionless by his side. Two boys, on their way home to lunch from school, came to the conclusion that he was worth a second look. They stopped to stare. Boschetto stooped, picked up a stone, and threw it with speed and precision. The boys scampered off down the road. Boschetto did not trouble to look after them. But the episode had broken his reverie. He fumbled in his pocket, got out a packet of cigarettes, and lit one.
The Volkswagen fussed through the village and passed Boschetto without stopping, the driver intent only on the road. Behind the car rolled the great yellow-and-silver Post Bus. Boschetto climbed aboard.
Half an hour later he dismounted in the main square at Lienz. By this time the Volkswagen was tucked into a line of cars on the other side of the square. Boschetto did not see it. Shouldering his pack, he strode out of the square toward the lower town. He walked straight ahead, paying no heed to other pedestrians. The pavement was crowded, and more than once a collision seemed imminent, but on each occasion it was the other man who stepped aside.
A hundred yards from the railway station he turned into a smaller road, walked quickly up it, crossed a footbridge over one of the branch lines, and turned into the road running parallel with it. It was one of the least agreeable quarters in the town, a district of railway workshops, dirty cafés, drinking cellars, and brothels. Boschetto walked without a glance to right or left, though many eyes observed him, over raised glasses, through smeary windows, from behind lace curtains.
Near the end of the road, chipped white letters on a plate-glass window spelled out “Franzkeller”. A step down led into the single front room. It smelled like the inside of a wine cask.
The thin man sitting behind the table jumped to his feet.
“Ernst!”
“Albin! I heard you were coming out today. Come in. Sit down. A drink?”
“Where’s Clara?”
“In the kitchen. It was she who heard you were coming out.” He was pouring wine into a glass as he spoke.
Boschetto put his pack carefully on the table, drank half the wine, and set the glass down beside the pack, then turned on his heel without a word, padded across the floor, and flung open the door.
There was a tiny scream from inside, though whether of joy or alarm it was hard to say. The door slammed shut. Ernst sat listening, his lips drawn back in a set smile. He heard the low rumble of Boschetto’s bass and the higher notes of Clara, shrill with excitement and laughter. After a few minutes he heard the farther door, leading from the kitchen to the bedroom, open and then shut, cutting off the voices.
Ernst finished his own glass of wine. Then, since it seemed intelligent to assume that his meal might be some time in coming, he emptied the half glass left by Boschetto. He was a careful man, who abhorred waste.
Next, he wandered across to the telephone that stood on a shelf behind the counter. It was coin operated, and the box was heavily padlocked. Ernst turned his attention to the till, sliding the drawer open half an inch and plunging his finger in to hold down the bell before opening it entirely. He extracted the schilling pieces that he wanted for the telephone and closed the drawer. Then he inserted the coins and dialled a number.
All his movements were gentle, and his brown eyes were soft as a spaniel’s.
A female voice at the other end said something. Ernst asked for an extension number. A male voice growled.
“Ernst Radmacher. I am speaking from the Franzkeller Bar in Spargasse. Boschetto has arrived.”
The voice said, “Yes.”
Ernst said, “He is clearly very hungry. I should suppose that it will be some hours before his appetite is satisfied.”
“Yes.”
“Have you any further instructions for me?”
There was a pause, and then the voice said, “No,” and there was a click as the receiver was replaced. Ernst sat for a moment rubbing his ear. It was almost as if he had been cuffed.
Colonel Julius Schatzmann, known, though not to his face, as the Grey Bear, stood behind his desk. Seventy-six inches separated his hair, which was cut short and en brosse, from his well-polished shoes. He was thick. His nose was thick, his lips were thick, and his neck was thick. A thick trunk was supported on thick thighs. He had button-bright eyes and a mischievous smile. The bear is one of the few animals known to have a sense of humour. Colonel Julius Schatzmann had a sense of humour. During his adventurous life he had found himself able to laugh at everything, even at his own discomfiture.
“Had I not been able to laugh,” he said to his subordinate, Major Osler, “I should long ago have been dead. I laughed my way through the war, in the ranks of the SS, and I rose to be Feldwebel. I laughed at the occupying forces, with their tribunals and commissions, and they all left me alone. If you laugh at an American, he likes you. If you laugh at an Englishman, he respects you. If you laugh at a Frenchman, he hates you – but he too leaves you alone. Once – but only once – I remember, I laughed at Himmler.”
“Not many people laughed at Himmler,” said Major Osler.
“Not many. Now, to business, gentlemen. The Minister arrives by road from Vienna at seven o’clock this evening. I have, as you know, cancelled all leave, withdrawn sleeping-out permits, and some weeks ago I made preliminary arrangements, which I trust are now well advanced, for calling out the auxiliary police.”
“The arrangements are complete, sir. The men report to their depots tonight.”
“Good. The parade is timed for eleven-thirty tomorrow. From nine o’clock all roads out of the town come under traffic control. Arranged, Inspector Biedermann?”
“Arranged, sir.”
“To last until when?”
“My orders are that control shall continue until cancelled by you.”
“Very well. The approaches to the square are to be manned at ten-thirty. To do it sooner would interfere unduly with the town traffic. Nevertheless, it gives you only an hour to complete your cordon, Inspector Moll.”
“An hour will be sufficient,” said Inspector Moll. “It has been carefully rehearsed.”
“I hope,” said the Colonel, “that everything has been carefully rehearsed. The safety of a minister of state and a cardinal bishop is not a matter to be taken lightly. You all know the difficulties we have had with Italian troublemakers from the South Tyrol. I need hardly say that we want no incidents tomorrow. Not only the safety of the eminent persons but the honour of Lienz is in your hands.” The thick lips parted in a smile. “I am certain it will be safe with you.”
It was four o’clock before the door of the Franzkeller opened and Boschetto came out into the street. The grim mood of the morning was gone. The thick lips were parted in a smile. As he walked along the pavement he met and nodded to one or two acquaintances, who nodded cautiously in return.
In front of the post office in the main square he boarded the bus for Glaren, catching it as it was on the point of moving and booking a ticket to the terminus.
It is a forty-minute run from Lienz to Glaren, and Boschetto sat, his nose glued to the window, watching the mountains rising, high on both sides of the twisting road, but higher on the left than on the right as they approached the Italian border.
These were the Lienz Dolomites, the most beautiful but not the least formidable of the mountain ranges of Central Europe, looking their best that autumn afternoon. It was a landscape arranged vertically in four strips, each as sharply different as the colours on a hatband. First the hayfields, green after their last careful mowing, laced with little silver streams; above the pastures, the woodland, birch and pine and fir; above the woodlands, the rough uncultivated slopes, traversed by paths zigzagging between boulders and outcrop, seamed with ravines, a desolate buffer state; above that, the first snow of winter.
At the halt before Glaren, Boschetto got out, waiting beside the road until the bus had roared away, round a bend and out of sight. For the first time since he had left Lengberg prison that morning, a certain wariness seemed to have gripped him. He sat hunched on the bank beside the road and let three or four cars go by before hoisting himself to his feet and stepping up the track which left the road at this point and slanted up through orchard and pasture to the edge of the wood.
Once in the wood his movements became even more cautious. After a few yards he left the path and worked his way back through the undergrowth until he had reached a point where he could peer back down into the valley.
Below him, following side by side each twist in the valley floor, ran road, railway, and river. Ten miles ahead he could see the final twist in the valley where a shoulder of rock masked the road to Cortina and the Italian frontier.
He turned his attention to things nearer at hand: to the three men on bicycles who were pedalling laboriously up the road; to the two boys who were meant to be watching the cows in the meadow but were more intent on a small fire of sticks which they had built; to a man chopping wood on the edge of the woods immediately across the lateral valley ahead of him, the swing of his axe, the pause before the “clunk” followed in the still air.
A man came out of a cabin at the foot of the slope, below the point where the woodcutter was working. He was wearing a green coat, the uniform alike of the forest guards and the Grenzpolizei, or border police. Although the man was a full half mile away, Boschetto stiffened at the sight of him, then moved carefully back, farther into the bushes that concealed him.
The guard was smoking a pipe. He stared around him with the slow concentration of a man who is thinking of nothing much, waved to the woodcutter, who ignored him, and disappeared into the cabin.
It was a full five minutes before Boschetto stirred. Then he wriggled back through the undergrowth, reached the path, and started up it at a purposeful stride.
The path came out of the woods at a point where five ravines met, each running up at a different angle, splayed like the fingers of a hand. The palm of the hand was a tiny plateau, hidden from below by the woods and from above by the overhang of the hill.
Here Boschetto deserted the path, which went off to the right, following the contour, and selected the centre ravine, which ran almost directly uphill. It was a narrow, winding cleft in the earth, formed by some glacial freak, its floor sprinkled with huge stones, its sides seamed with cracks. For perhaps a month in springtime, when the high snows melted, it would be a watercourse. For the rest of the year it was dry.
Boschetto was now going very slowly and seemed to be counting his paces. Once he hesitated and retraced his steps. Then he came on again. At a point where it was at its deepest, the ravine turned sharply round an outcrop of worn rock. Here Boschetto went on hands and knees and started to crawl.
With his body almost flat to the earth he moved forward an inch at a time, past the base of the rock. He was scanning the ground with minute care. Once, and again, he paused, then moved on. Above his head the rays of the sun marched across, lengthening the shadows of rocks and trees, moving them almost perceptibly across the hillside. Down in the ravine it was already evening.
At last Boschetto saw what he was looking for. It was a stone, roughly square in shape and lighter in weight than the surrounding rock. He took out a knife, opened it, slid the big blade behind the edge of the stone and levered it out. Behind was a shallow cavity. In the cavity was a package, wrapped in oilskin, folded and refolded, and secured with black insulating tape.
Boschetto felt the weight of the package in the palm of his hand and smiled. It was safe. So much might have happened in three years. But no one had found it, no one had touched it.
He pushed the packet down inside his shirt and climbed the side of the ravine. He was moving more freely now and seemed to have lost some of his fear. As he came out onto the hillside, the long, level rays of the sun, shining directly across the valley, touched a splinter of reflected light. The reflection winked once and vanished.
A man who was not sharp-sighted would not have noticed it. A careless man would have overlooked it. Boschetto was neither short-sighted nor careless. He knew that a pair of binoculars had been turned on him for a moment from the hillside opposite.
He started off at a lumbering run down the bare hillside, toward the sheltering woods. As soon as he was among the trees he squatted down and tore open the package. First the insulating tape came off, strip after strip, then the outer covering of oilskin, then an inner covering. This was more difficult to deal with in haste and half-light, since the joins had been tamped down under a coating of grease. In the end Boschetto pulled out his knife again and sliced through the covering, pulling it off in strips in his eagerness to get at the contents.
First came a flat tin which had once held cocktail biscuits or something of the sort. It was full of Austrian and Italian currency: 500- and 1,000-schilling notes, and 5,000- and 10,000-lire notes, pressed together into a hard wad. These went, without further inspection, into Boschetto’s pocket. The next item was an Italian passport, in a plastic case. This went into another pocket. The final object that Boschetto picked up and weighed lovingly in his hand was an automatic pistol. It was a Belgian Vorsicht, with the long barrel and the sliding sight. A marksman’s gun, made with all the tender skill that the Brussels factory lavishes on its instruments of destruction.
Boschetto opened the front of his shirt and felt the gun drop down until it lay against his bare stomach. It felt hard and cold and heavy, and infinitely satisfying. His manhood was restored to him.
He bundled the tin and the wrappings together and pushed them under a bush. In all his preoccupation he had not forgotten the tell-tale eye that had blinked at him. He had to move. But the darkness, which was now flowing, flood-tide, into the valley, would help him.
He started off, traversing the woods, avoiding paths. His intention was to slip out at the farthest corner from his point of entry. Fortune was with him. The woods did not end abruptly, but straggled down into a fold of ground running toward the valley floor. If he kept in this he would have, at most, a hundred yards of meadow to cross before he came to the road, and once on the road his plans were made.
There was a ground mist lying in the meadow. Better still. Boschetto dropped onto his hands and knees and crawled forward. An unexpected obstacle loomed. It was a strong wire fence of six or seven strands. He scrambled over it and realized that he was on the railway line. He realized too that a train was coming. A fold in the hill had masked it, but now it came, swinging out of the gathering darkness, headlamps cutting a bright swath.
There was no time to climb back and nowhere to hide. Boschetto flattened himself against the wire.
It was a big, heavy train, with restaurant and sleeping cars. The lighted windows flicked past. The passengers, he was glad to see, were busy, reading, eating, and talking, lolling back in their seats, half asleep. Except for this one. Here was someone sitting upright staring straight out of the window.
Boschetto was relieved to see that it was only a girl; English or American, he thought, in the brief glimpse he had of her face.
The last carriage passed him, and the red tail lamp swam steadily away into the mist and darkness.
2
Laura
The day had started at four o’clock, in cold blackness, when the telephone beside Laura’s bed had buzzed at her and the night porter had announced, with the complacent alertness of someone who has himself been up all night, that it was time for the signora to arise.
It would not have been so difficult if she had gone to bed sober and at a reasonable hour; but when you were twenty and in Rome for the first time, and had been looked after so well and so kindly, a last night meant a farewell party, and a farewell party, with Lorenz, meant a good deal to drink.
Laura sat on the edge of the bed wondering if she was going to be sick, and if so, whether she could reach the handbasin before it happened. Then she pulled herself together, walked quickly across, and started to brush her teeth. When in doubt or difficulty, brush your teeth.
Twenty minutes later she was down in the hall, packed and ready, her bill paid. Ten minutes later she was still packed, still ready, and still in the hall. The car, bespoken the night before, had not arrived.
The night porter shrugged his fashionably pointed shoulders. Things like that happened. Possibly the driver had mistaken the hour. Possibly he had gone to the wrong hotel. He must see if he could find a taxi, must he not? A further five minutes evaporated. Laura began to get worried. The Verona-Lienz express left Rome at ten minutes to five and it was not going to wait for her, not for a single second. If she missed it, there was no other train until midday, and that a slow one. It would mean changing her plans. It would mean telephoning her brother. It would mean saying hello to Lorenz, whom she had – well – almost finally said good-bye to the night before.
On the other hand, it would mean she could go back to bed.
At this point a screaming of worn brakes announced the arrival of the taxi.
She would have to tip the porter now. She knew exactly how much Italian money she had left. Two notes of a thousand lire and one of five hundred. Would five hundred lire be enough for such a majestic official as the night porter of the Hotel Maggiore, who had gone out, moreover, especially to get her a taxi? No. Better give him a thousand. A taxi ride to the station could hardly cost more than fifteen hundred lire.
In front of the gaunt concrete-and-glass façade of the Stazione Centrale she was undeceived.
“What did you say?”
“Tre mila.”
“Three thousand?”
The small, black-haired driver with the urchin face held up three fingers and repeated, “Tre mila.”
“But it’s absurd,” said Laura. “I never agreed to that.” The long hand on the illuminated clock on the station front was nearing the three-quarter mark.
“I’ll give you fifteen hundred – quindici cento – it’s all I’ve got.”
“Tre mila.”
He no longer looked like an urchin. His face looked white, and ugly, under the neon lights.
“But that’s nearly two pounds. It can’t be two pounds to take me a quarter of a mile.”
If I give him the money I’ve got, grab my suitcase and run, she thought… The driver, reading her thoughts, jumped down from his seat and scuttled round in front of her.
“Could I help?” asked a pleasant American voice.
She saw a young man carrying a battered suitcase.
“He’s trying to charge me three thousand lire for taking me from the Hotel Maggiore,” she said. “It’s far too much – and anyway, I haven’t got it.”
“It’s daylight robbery,” said the young man.
“And I’ve got to get the ten-to-five train.”
“So have I. How much have you got?”
“Fifteen hundred.”
The young man said, “A thousand’s quite enough.” He took the note and gabbled something fluent-sounding in Italian. The only word Laura understood was “carabinieri”. The taxi driver seemed to understand that too. Then the young man pushed the mille note into his hand, seized the suitcase, and took to his heels. Laura ran after him. They caught the train with one minute to spare.
As she rolled herself up in her coat and snuggled down into her reserved corner seat in an empty first-class carriage, determined to catch up with a few of the missing hours of sleep, Laura was plagued by a memory. Everything that had happened in the station square seemed to her to have happened before.
It was the situation. The girl, in a foreign country, getting into a situation, not of danger but of embarrassment, and being rescued from it by a resourceful young man. The stereotype of every woman’s magazine. If she shut her eyes she could even see the picture, in four colours; it would occupy most of the left-hand side of the first page, an opening splash, after which the story, together with its hero and heroine, would dribble away into the obscurity of the advertisement columns, drying up, ultimately, a thin trickle of romance, lost in a desert of salesmanship.
Yet had he been resourceful? Had the driver, in fact, understood any of the fluent Italian that had washed over him or had he understood only that the young man meant business? If she had thrust a mille note at him, grabbed her suitcase, and run, would he have tried to stop her? Almost certainly not.
Ker-thud, ker-thud, ker-thud, said the train, gathering speed as it ran out of Rome and swung northeast along the banks of the Tiber.
He was an American. Americans always seemed to have their wits more about them than English people. They had more – more something or other – what was it?
The train whistled.
It was a succession of images that woke her. The train was running out of a tunnel, the light coming and going through slots in the tunnel wall, like a cinema film running off its spool. Her mouth was dry, and she felt as stiff as if she had spent a morning in the saddle.
It was after eight o’clock. There would be breakfast, if she could find it.
She made her way down the long succession of swaying corridors, past a German in shirtsleeves, unwashed and enjoying an early morning cigar, past an Italian woman with three children waiting patiently for the lavatory door to open, past a party of students who had filled the corridor with a mountain of rucksacks and were sitting on it, looking as pleased as mountaineers on a peak.
In the restaurant car she found the young American. He waved to her and she came and sat down opposite him.
“I’m Joe Keller,” he said without preamble. “From Galsworthy – that’s in Pennsylvania, though I don’t imagine you’d know that. It’s not a very large place. Two thousand one-fifty at the last census.”
If he’d just add his age and occupation, she thought, she’d have all the information necessary to fill out one of those little green cards they gave you in hotels.
“I work for a newspaper,” he added. Feeling that she was getting left behind, Laura said rapidly, “I’m Laura Hart. I’m just travelling abroad for fun. Well – not just for fun. It’s a sort of convalescence.”
“Nothing serious, I trust.”
“I had my tonsils out. It doesn’t sound bad, I know. But they were large tonsils. The surgeon who cut them out said they were the biggest he’d seen that year.”
“What do you know?” said Mr Keller. “I had mine out when I was four. My uncle – he was a medical student – did it for us, free. When he’d finished the tonsils, he got sort of enthusiastic and wanted to try his hand on my adenoids. I think he had ideas of tackling my freckles and pinning back my ears too. He was ahead of his time in plastic surgery. Where are you heading for?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Where are you going?”
