Read Online The Salzburg Connection by Helen MacInnes - Free Book Online Page A

something dead and buried like the corpses under the burned ruins of the Cathedral. No one spoke of it; all was silence, all seemed forgotten. Seemed... How often did the memory steal unexpectedly into a man’s mind and make him want to seize the whole bloody world by its filthy throat and break its hypocritical neck?
    “Johann! Please eat it while it’s hot.”
    She had set before him his favourite omelette, fluffy and soft, slightly sweetened, filled with heated apricot preserves, powdered on top with fine sugar. He turned his head aside and blew his nose violently. “Has Dick any spare handkerchiefs?This cold is all in my head now, blast it.”
    “I’ll get them. And his slippers.”
    “They won’t fit.”
    “They are better than shoes that are damp,” she told him severely. “You men!”
    Yes, he thought, you men... He had almost finished the small omelette before she came running downstairs. There had been no other sounds from the bedroom overhead except her quick light footsteps. He frowned, pouring himself a mixture of hot milk and coffee, and then, as she placed the handkerchiefs at his elbow and the slippers beside his feet, he asked quite simply, “Where is Dick?”
    “Your shoes are really sodden,” she told him, and poured her own cup of coffee. She didn’t sit down, though. “That must have been quite a shower you were caught in. Where were you anyway?”
    “On the Mönchsberg.”
    “With a very pretty girl who is probably dying of pleurisy right now. Oh, really, Johann, couldn’t you just have taken her to a café or the movies?”
    “We were at a café and we were at the movies, and then we walked along the heights to see the view.”
    “At midnight?”
    “There was a full moon until the rain came. And stop worrying about Elisabetha. She had my cape. How do you think I got soaked?”
    “Elisabetha. No, I don’t need to worry about that one.”
    “Anna,” he asked quietly, “where is Dick? Sit down. No; across the table from me. Have some more coffee. Where is Dick?”
    “He went up to Finstersee.”
    Johann stared at her, put his cup down slowly.
    “But it’s all right, Johann. It’s all right. He is at Unterwald right now. That was Dick telephoning me.”
    “From where?” he asked quickly. There weren’t so many telephones in Unterwald.
    “From the Gasthof Waldesruh. He was going to have breakfast with Herr Grell and his son Anton.”
    “I thought you told me all the photographs were ready.”
    “They are.”
    “Then he didn’t go up to Finstersee to take some more shots? He went up to Finstersee to—” He couldn’t finish. Anger choked him. Then he thought, That’s impossible; Dick must only have been taking another look around. He calmed down. “What did he tell you?”
    “Everything.”
    “And what is everything?” His anger was rising again. Dick wouldn’t have told Anna anything unless he was actually taking action about that damned chest. “Did he really believe that a box was lying on the ledge?”
    “He thought he would see, at least.”
    “But it was only an informant’s story—years ago—and he didn’t even believe it then. I know. We laughed about it together when he told me, and that was a long time ago.”
    “There is a ledge at that part of the lake.”
    “I know! I’m the idiot who found it for him!”
    “He told me that, too,” she said gently. Johann had taken a party of amateur climbers up around Finstersee last summer and brought them back close to the shore, just at the point where Dick thought the chest might be hidden. And Johann hadstarted telling the girls in the party that the lake was so deep, so filled with strange currents, that no one would swim there. Anna could imagine the scene well enough: time out for rest, the girls teasing Johann about his wild statements. She could see his handsome tanned face smiling as he weighted the end of his climbing rope and threw it out into the lake to let it keep on sinking, sinking. And