The Piper on the Mountain

playing cards, he wasn’t bothered about the foreigner who came and looked on. And in any case, you didn’t ask Dana about the hotel. You didn’t have to, you knew it already.”

“You seem,” said Tossa with a tight smile, “to be pretty well-informed yourself.”

“I listen at windows. Toddy ought to have warned you.”

They were beginning to hate and blame each other for the stone wall between them. He was catching her tone, and that wouldn’t help anyone. He dragged the dressing-table stool across the room and plumped it down close beside her chair, and leaning forward with desperate earnestness, closed his hands hard over hers. She quivered, but she didn’t draw away.

“Look, Tossa, you’ve got to listen to me. We’re not in England now. We’re in Central Europe, in a Communist country. If our people think we haven’t all that much reason to trust the Czechs, how much reason do you think the Czechs have to trust us? Historically, a hell of a lot less! How do you think it would look at home, if a chap with a Czech passport came poking around one of our small towns, asking a lot of nosy questions about a death that was officially accidental, cornering waiters in hotels and trying to pump them, and searching rooms for hidden bits of paper? Just give it a thought! Yes, I was listening under the window, I heard you talking to the waiter. That’s the only time, but I don’t give a damn, anyhow, you can call it what you like. What I want is for you to stay out of trouble. The way you’re going on, you’re going to end up in gaol. No, wait a moment!” he checked abruptly. “Let’s have it quite straight. There was one other time when I spied on you. At Zilina, when we were leaving the hotel. I saw you drop your comb-case for that fellow with the MG to pick up and return. You sent him a message that way, didn’t you?”

Tossa’s hands lay still in his. She looked at him helplessly, and shook her head, without vehemence this time, but no less conclusively. “I’m sorry, I can’t answer questions. I can’t tell you anything.”

“No, I beg your pardon, I said I wouldn’t ask. All right, I think you did send him a message. And he sent one back to you the same way. I know you knew him before—or at least that he knew you. Maybe he’s the one who started you on this hunt. The one who told you where your stepfather stayed in Strbske Pleso. The one who told you there was something wrong about the way he died. X with diplomatic plates. And then you begin drawing attention to yourself here by asking questions all over the place! Do you seriously think an English diplomat can make a move in this country without the authorities knowing all about it? It works much the same way in any country, they have to know where these people are and what they’re doing. Don’t you see, Tossa, why you frighten me to death? If you have to go on with this, why alone? If we knew what you were after we could try to help you at least, and you wouldn’t have to expose yourself even further, and make yourself more conspicuous, by having to evade us, too. Wouldn’t it be better?”

“I’m sorry,” she said again, her voice a little unsteady. “I can’t tell you anything. I haven’t said yes to any of this, you’re only guessing.”

“All right, I’m only guessing, but they’re pretty safe guesses.”

“I’m sorry, I really am sorry… but I can’t tell you. Not won’t—can’t.” Her hands turned suddenly in his, warmly returned his grip for a moment, and then struggled free in outraged shyness. “I don’t admit to anything. You’ll just have to let me take my chance.”

“That’s something I can’t do,” said Dominic, letting her go regretfully but hastily. He caught her eye, and the gleam of a smile passed between them, and foundered in the sea of their gravity. “Not won’t—can’t. I’m sticking close to you, and if you ever do want me, I’ll be around.”

“I shan’t need you. Nothing’s going to happen to me.

Do the others… I mean, they haven’t noticed anything, have they?”

“No, I’m sure they don’t realise there’s anything going on. And I shan’t tell them. Only you can do that.”

The air between them had cleared, they could look at each other again almost hopefully, and with a new curiosity. “There isn’t anything going on,” she said firmly, presenting the formal untruth with the assurance that it would be understood as it was offered. “Thanks, Dominic, all the same.”

“Then, look, is there anything I can do to help you? Without asking any questions? You don’t have to tell me why, just what I have to do.”

She looked up at him intently for a moment, a deep spark kindling in her eyes. Then she ripped open the zipper of her writing-case, and drew out from the rear pocket a four-inch square of newsprint.

“Yes! If you really mean that, there is. You can help me to find this man. He’s here somewhere, in this valley or near it. Take a good look at him, so you’ll know if you do see him around. And if you do, tell me.” She pushed the newspaper clipping across the table to him. “I stole it from the files,” she said, “the day before we left England. It was the best I could find.”

Dominic noted, even before he looked at the face, that the caption had been cut off. It was sharply printed for a newspaper photograph, almost certainly from a studio portrait. A man leaned forward across a desk, his jaw propped on linked hands. He might have been about thirty-five years old; a tapered face, broad across eyes and brow, lean of cheek and long of chin, with a thin, high-bridged sword of a nose, and a cool, long-lipped, sceptical mouth. The hands linked under his chin were large, broad-jointed and calm. They looked capable of anything. Light-coloured hair drew back at high temples, duplicating the arched, quizzical line of his brows. The eyes were deep-set, probing and lonely, and looked out from the page with an aloof, almost a hostile, composure.

Dominic forgot for a moment his promise to ask no questions. “Who is he?” he asked curiously, looking up across the photograph into Tossa’s face.

“By all the indications,” said Tossa, grimly and quietly, “he’s the man who murdered my stepfather.”

Above the chapel on its shelf of rock there were sudden moist meadows, and a wealth of brilliant green pasture. Beyond, again, lay the final great, irregular bowl, green in the base, rimmed round on all sides with paling slopes of grass and ashen slides of scree. Laborious zigzag paths climbed to two cols, where the snag-toothed rim of rocks dipped to let them through; and all the sides of the bowl were circled by contour paths, along which the hill sheep trotted confidently, and sometimes dark-red, handsome goats, chestnut-coloured like Dominic’s hair.

They had probed every corner of the valley itself, and discovered every cottage. They were known, now. One of the herd-boys brought Christine edelweiss from some secret place on the summits, and a woman at the highest cottage below the huts gave them an armful of flowers from her garden. Many of the faces were becoming familiar. But they had never yet caught a glimpse of the face in Tossa’s stolen photograph.

They climbed the more northerly of the two cols, and emerged among high, windy wastes of pale turf, billowing away towards more folded valleys beyond. There were no houses in sight here, only the true open, rolling, rounded crests of the Low Tatras.