Free Pray for a Brave Heart by Helen MacInnes Page A

streets were not buried in mud and garbage, the lights were steady and methodically spaced, the smells were unnoticeable, the few pedestrians did not need a torchbearer or an armed retainer to get them safely home.
    “The twentieth century adds a little something, after all,” Paula said as she got out of the taxi. “The Middle Ages were probably only romantic when seen from this distance. Yet I used to think I’d have been happier in another era.”
    “You couldn’t take penicillin with you,” Francesca reminded her.
    “I’d just have to cover the pock-marks on my face with black patches. If I lived through the plague.”
    But Francesca had stopped listening. She glanced along the arcade, and then back over her shoulder at the quiet Henziplatz.
    “It’s peaceful enough,” Paula said reassuringly, and they crossed the bright threshold of the Café Henzi.
    Madame at the cash desk gave them a cheerful greeting. There were a few tables left downstairs, but tonight the Convention of Econophilosophists had taken all upstairs for its annual social dinner.
    “Of what?” Paula asked, as Francesca led her past a telephone booth into the downstairs room, wood-panelled, dimly lighted. It was fairly crowded, gently noisy, with groups of men talking over smoke-circled tables, some women sprinkled here and there among them, students arguing, one or two solitary guests enjoying a glass of wine within the friendliness of the room.
    “I told you we had our share of conventions and committees,” Francesca said, with a smile. “Is this all right?” She had chosen a quiet corner. “We can hear the singing when it begins, just as well down here. More comfortably, perhaps.” In spite of herlight voice, she had glanced quickly round the room. Seemingly she felt reassured, for she sighed now and relaxed. Paula was suddenly aware that the tension which had followed them down from the high terraces of the Kursaal was over.
    “Perhaps we ought to have gone straight back to the hotel,” she said. The enjoyment of the evening was diluted somehow. She was vaguely disturbed, worried. To her, the dim lights, swinging from the cart wheels which hung from the ceiling, made everyone seem a Pirandello character. But Francesca was more at ease, as if she welcomed the shaded anonymity of the room. And then Paula wondered if the long roundabout drive through the Lower Town hadn’t been partly inspired by the chinless little man’s interest in them at the Kursaal. “Anyway, he didn’t follow us,” she said, dropping her voice, keeping her eyes on the doorway. I’m going to watch that entrance as long as we sit here, she promised herself. I wish I had never joked about him, never drawn Francesca’s attention to him. He was just a harmless little man, lonely and bored, with a wandering eye.
    Francesca ordered the wine, something called Fendant de Sion, and Paula began talking about Paris where Andy and she had spent part of the winter. But Francesca’s listening was broken by her own thoughts. It was only to be expected, she told herself, that someone had started being interested in the Falken Committee. It was amazingly good luck that they had been left so long in peace. Or was it possible that they had been watched for some time, and that only this week the watchers had grown careless? Last Tuesday, when she had visited Bern, there had been that woman with the braids heavy over her ears making her round face rounder, the woman with the thick heavy body and the thin legs. And now, tonight at the Kursaal,there had been that haggard-faced man with the shifting eyes. And yet how did the fat woman or the thin man know she was in Bern, know where to look for her? Who had told them where to look for her? Who had told them where to find her— or to let themselves be noticed once they had found her?
    They are trying to scare me, she thought suddenly. That was an old trick: frightening people into making a false move. She smiled suddenly,