Free Pray for a Brave Heart by Helen MacInnes Page B

feeling the excitement coming back into her blood. An old hand didn’t scare so easily at old tricks. Why, she had known that one when she was sixteen. She and her brother had used it to frighten a Nazi informer into warning the leader of his pro-Nazi group. Am I supposed, now, to run to the head of the Committee with my alarms? Am I to lead them to him? Her smile broadened.
    “But I’m being serious,” Paula protested. “When it comes to deciding between living in the country and living in the city, I’m almost driven to schizophrenia. Just as I was talking about Paris, I suddenly remembered how good it was to wake up in the country and see fields and trees all around me. Yet in the country I’ll suddenly remember how a city looks with the lights coming on. What do you make of me? I’m not really a fickle kind of person.”
    “You are certainly devoted to watching that doorway.”
    Paula flushed. “I was just trying to help.” But she smiled, too. “Are you sure you don’t have to be worried?” Then she stared at the doorway again.
    “I’m sure,” Francesca said. That’s the Italian in me, she thought. Quickly, she added a touch of Swiss to balance it: “Reasonably sure.” How strange was that phrase, that calm phrase, reasonably sure: it always awakened equally reasonabledoubt. “Don’t keep looking at that door, darling.”
    “But guess who has just arrived—Maxwell Meyer. Imagine! Look, he’s coming over here.” Paula was delighted with the smallness of the world.
    “And who’s Maxwell Meyer?”
    Paula, who had been about to wave, let the hand she had half-raised in welcome drop back on the table. “He didn’t see me,” she said. She lowered her voice. “He’s sitting just over there to your left.”
    “You seem to have picked a blind batch of male friends,” Francesca said teasingly, remembering Bill Denning.
    “Oh, he isn’t a friend: just a friend of a friend,” Paula said. She was a little hurt, though. Perhaps it wasn’t Maxwell Meyer after all, she thought. “What has happened to the singing?” she asked.
    “It will start soon,” Francesca said, glancing at her watch. “Any minute now.” It was almost eleven o’clock.

6
NO. 10 HENZIPLATZ
    The room of “Elizabeth” was small, square, warmly lighted by a pink-shaded lamp. Heavy red curtains covered the narrow windows, blotting out the rain which slanted through the darkness outside, and silencing the occasional noises of traffic from the Henziplatz. Highly coloured pictures of roses and unadorned nymphs were pinned on the wall. A double bed covered with cheap lace and pink silk took more than its share of floor space. A scrap of white fur rug lay before the bed, small cushions and a doll on a narrow red couch. A round table and two chairs waited near the screen which hid a sink and small cooking stove. There was another screen, too, probably hiding the bathroom.
    “I’m Keppler,” the man said, locking the door as Denning stepped into the room. He shook hands solemnly. He was a business-like man in a quiet brown suit: quick in word and movement; of medium height and solid build, with close-croppedgrey hair above a tanned face, heavy eyebrows over blank blue eyes, a mouth that was pleasant enough, a well-defined nose and a long chin.
    He had been studying Denning too. “You should change your photographer, Captain Denning. He doesn’t flatter you. Have a chair.” He waved a hand towards the table.
    Denning shook his hat free of the rain and slipped off his sodden coat. Keppler’s unobtrusive scrutiny made him still more conscious of his anomalous position here. Suddenly, he stood quite still. A tall thin figure came silently out from behind the bathroom screen.
    “Le Brun—Denning,” Keppler said, now placing the emphasis on the civilian approach.
    “You shouldn’t do that,” Denning said, smiling at his own tenseness, as he shook hands with the Frenchman. Perhaps Le Brun’s nerves weren’t too good either,