Passenger to Frankfurt - Agatha Christie [42]
They returned to their seats for the two final musical offerings. A Symphonic Poem, ‘Disintegration in Joy’, by a new young composer, Solukonov, and then the solemn grandeur of the March of the Meistersingers.
They came out again into the night. The car which was at their disposal every day was waiting there to take them back to the small but exclusive hotel in the village street. Stafford Nye said good-night to Renata. She spoke to him in a lowered voice.
‘Four a.m.,’ she said. ‘Be ready.’
She went straight into her room and shut the door and he went to his.
The faint scrape of fingers on his door came precisely at three minutes to four the next morning. He opened the door and stood ready.
‘The car is waiting,’ she said. ‘Come.’
II
They lunched at a small mountain inn. The weather was good, the mountains beautiful. Occasionally Stafford Nye wondered what on earth he was doing here. He understood less and less of his travelling companion. She spoke little. He found himself watching her profile. Where was she taking him? What was her real reason? At last, as the sun was almost setting, he said:
‘Where are we going? Can I ask?’
‘You can ask, yes.’
‘But you do not reply?’
‘I could reply. I could tell you things, but would they mean anything? It seems to me that if you come to where we are going without my preparing you with explanations (which cannot in the nature of things mean anything), your first impressions will have more force and significance.’
He looked at her again thoughtfully. She was wearing a tweed coat trimmed with fur, smart travelling clothes, foreign in make and cut.
‘Mary Ann,’ he said thoughtfully.
There was a faint question in it.
‘No,’ she said, ‘not at the moment.’
‘Ah. You are still the Countess Zerkowski.’
‘At the moment I am still the Countess Zerkowski.’
‘Are you in your own part of the world?’
‘More or less. I grew up as a child in this part of the world. For a good portion of each year we used to come here in the autumn to a Schloss not very many miles from here.’
He smiled and said thoughtfully, ‘What a nice word it is. A Schloss. So solid-sounding.’
‘Schlösser are not standing very solidly nowadays. They are mostly disintegrated.’
‘This is Hitler’s country, isn’t it? We’re not far, are we, from Berchtesgaden?’
‘It lies over there to the north-east.’
‘Did your relations, your friends–did they accept Hitler, believe in him? Perhaps I ought not to ask things like that.’
‘They disliked him and all he stood for. But they said “Heil Hitler”. They acquiesced in what had happened to their country. What else could they do? What else could anybody do at that date?’
‘We are going towards the Dolomites, are we not?’
‘Does it matter where we are, or which way we are going?’
‘Well, this is a voyage of exploration, is it not?’
‘Yes, but the exploration is not geographical. We are going to see a personality.’
‘You make me feel–’ Stafford Nye looked up at the landscape of swelling mountains reaching up to the sky–‘as though we were going to visit the famous Old Man of the Mountain.’
‘The Master of the Assassins, you mean, who kept his followers under drugs so that they died for him wholeheartedly, so that they killed, knowing that they themselves would also be killed, but believing, too, that that would transfer them immediately to the Moslem Paradise–beautiful women, hashish and erotic dreams–perfect and unending happiness.’
She paused a minute and then said:
‘Spell-binders! I suppose they’ve always been there throughout the ages. People who make you believe in them so that you are ready to die for them.