gagged and cuffed to the bed rail. Springing open the ankle cuffs, she
slipped off the bed, her body feeling buoyant, and cuffed Gerta to the
anesthesia machine as well, which would not easily move.
She removed Gerta’s key ring from her belt, and glanced at the
anesthesia cart.
It was full of weapons. She scooped up a handful of packaged hypodermic
needles and several small glass ampules of various drugs, then
remembered she was wearing a hospital Johnny with no pockets.
In the supply closet hung two white cotton doctor’s jackets. She put
one on, stuffed the pilfered supplies in both slash pockets, and ran
from the room.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE.
The records office for the Semmering area occupied a small basement room
in a Bavarian-style building housing a scattering of municipal workers.
There were rows of green filing cabinets, arranged by the number of the
parcel of land.
“The Schloss Zerwald is not accessible to the public,” the white-haired
woman who ran the office said flatly. “It is part of the Semmering
Clinic. Strictly private.”
“I understand that,” Ben said. “It’s actually the old maps themselves
that I’m interested in.” When Ben went on to explain that he was a
historian researching the castles of Germany and Austria, she looked
vaguely disapproving, as if she’d just smelled something fetid, but
ordered her trembling teenage assistant to snap-to and pull out the
property map from one of the drawers along the side wall of the room. It
was a complicated-looking system, but the white-haired woman knew
exactly where to find the documents Ben wanted.
The map had been printed in the early nineteenth century. The owner of
the parcel of land, which in those days took up much of the
mountainside, was identified as J. Esterhazy. A cryptic series of
markings ran through the parcel.
“What does this mean?” Ben asked, pointing.
The old woman scowled. “The caves,” she said. “The limestone caves in
the mountain.”
Caves. It was a possibility.
“The caves run through the Schloa’s property?”
“Yes, of course,” she said impatiently.
Under the Schloss, that meant.
Trying to contain his excitement, he asked, “Can you make a copy of this
map for me?”
A hostile look. “For twenty shillings.”
“Fine,” he said. “And tell me something: is there a floor plan of the
Schloss anywhere?”
The young clerk at the sporting goods shop examined the property map as
if it were an insoluble algebra problem. When Ben explained that the
markings indicated a network of caves, he quickly agreed.
“Yes, the old caves run right underneath the Schloss,” he said. “I
think there even used to be an entrance into the Schloss from the caves,
but that was long time ago and it must be blocked off.”
“Have you been in the caves?”
The young clerk looked up, appalled. “No, of course not.”
“Do you know anyone who has?”
He thought a moment, “/a, I think so.”
“Do you think he might be willing to take me there, be my guide?”
“I doubt it.”
“Can you ask?”
“I’ll ask, but I don’t value your chances.”
Ben hadn’t expected a man in his late sixties, but that was who entered
the shop half an hour later. He was small and wiry, with cauliflower
ears, a long misshapen nose, a pigeon chest, ropy arms. He spoke
rapidly and irritably in German to the clerk as he entered, then fell
silent when he met Ben.
Ben said hello; the man nodded.
“He’s a little old, frankly,” Ben told the salesman. “Isn’t there
someone younger and stronger?”
“There is younger but not stronger,” the older man said. “And no one
who knows the caves better. Anyway, I am not so sure I want to do
this.”
“Oh, you speak English,” Ben said, surprised.
“Most of us learned English during the war.”
“Do the caves still have an entrance into the Sc Moss
“There used to be. But why should I help you?”
“I need to get inside the Schloss.”
“You can’t. It is now a private clinic.”
“Still, I must get inside.”
“Why?”
“Let’s just say it’s for personal reasons that are worth a great deal of
money to me.” He told the old Austrian what he was willing to pay for
his services.
“We’ll need equipment,” the man said. “You can climb?”
His name was Fritz Neumann, and he had been caving around Sem me ring
for longer than Ben had been alive. He was also immensely strong, yet
nimble and graceful.
Toward the end of the war, he said, when he was a boy of eight, his
parents had joined a Catholic workers’ Resistance cell that was secretly
fighting the Nazis, who had invaded their part of Austria. The old
Clockworks had been seized by the Nazis and turned into a regional
command post.
Unknown to the Nazis who lived and worked in the Schloss, there was a
crawl space off the basement of the old castle with a slot entrance to a
limestone cave that ran beneath the castle’s property. The Schloss had
in fact been built over this mouth quite deliberately, because the
original inhabitants, concerned about attacks on their stronghold, had
wanted a secret exit. Over the centuries the cave mouth had largely
been forgotten.
But during the war, when the Nazis had commandeered the Clockworks, the
members of the Resistance realized they were in possession of a crucial
piece of knowledge that would enable them to spy on the Nazis, to commit
sabotage and subversion–and, if they were quite careful about it, to do
it without the Nazis even realizing how it was done.
The Resistance had spirited dozens of prisoners out of the Schloss, and
the Nazis had never figured out how.
As an eight-year-old boy, Fritz Neumann had helped his parents and their
friends, and he had committed the cave’s intricate passages to memory.
Fritz Neumann was the first off the ski lift, Ben close behind. The ski
area was on the north face of the mountain. The Schloss was on the
opposite side, but Neumann had judged it easier to reach the mouth of
the cave this way.
Their skis had Randonee bindings, which allow the heel to go free for
cross-country skiing but can be locked in for downhill. Even more
important, the bindings allowed them to wear mountaineering boots
instead of ski boots. Neumann had outfitted them both: flexible
twelve-point cram pons favored by Austrian climbers on hard ice; Petzl
headlamps; ice axes with wrist leashes; climbing harnesses; pitons; and
carabiners.
All easily obtained at the shop.
The guns Ben wanted were not so easily found. But this was hunting
country, and quite a few of the old man’s friends had handguns as well
as shotguns, and one of them was willing to make a deal.
Wearing woolen balaclavas, windproof pants and gaiters, alpine climbing
packs, and thin polypropylene gloves, they cross-country skied to the
summit, then locked in their bindings for the long downhill stretch on
the south face. Ben considered himself a good skier, but Neumann was a
phenomenon, and Ben found it difficult to keep up as the older man
negotiated the virgin snow. The air was frigid, and Ben’s face, the
exposed part anyway, quickly began to smart. Ben found it amazing that
Neumann was able to lead the way through paths that were barely paths,
until he saw the dashes of red paint on the occasional fir tree, which
seemed to mark the way.
They had been skiing for twenty minutes when they came to a crevasse at
the beginning of the timberline, and shortly thereafter a steep gorge.
They stopped about ten feet from the edge, removed their skis, and
concealed them in a copse.
“The cave, as I tell you, it is very difficult to get to,” Neumann said.
“Now we rope down. But you say you know how, yes?”
Ben nodded, inspecting the cliff. He estimated the drop at about a
hundred feet, maybe less. From here he could see Lenz’s Schloss, so far
down the mountain that it seemed an architect’s model.
Neumann set out a neat butterfly coil of rope. Ben was relieved to see
it was dynamic kern mantle rope, made of twisted nylon threads.
“It is eleven millimeters,” Neumann said. “It is O.K. for you?”
Ben nodded again. For a drop like this, that was just fine. Whatever
it took to reach Anna.
From this angle, he couldn’t see the mouth of the cave. He assumed it
was an opening on the cliff face.
Neumann knelt near the cliff edge by an outcropping of rock, and began
driving the pitons in with a hammer he took from a holster. Each piton
gave off a reassuring ringing sound that rose in pitch the deeper it was
driven in, indicating that it was sunk in solidly.
Then, looping the rope around the largest rock, he pulled it through the
pitons.
“This is not so easy to do, getting into the cave mouth,” he announced.