Free The Salzburg Connection by Helen MacInnes Page A

Stern” of 1959.) But until today silence has been officially maintained about subsequent discoveries, leading certain interested people to believe that documents might still be hidden in Lake Toplitz. Such ill-founded beliefs can now be laid to rest. According to a reliable source, the documents have been identified as German records and receipts of the period 1936–39, including a list of Balkan agents working for the German Reich at thattime. A government spokesman stated today that all diving operations ceased some years ago when it was officially decided that our Styrian lakes had given up the last of their secrets. Such operations were highly expensive to maintain and, without further results, a waste of time and money.
    “What got into Dick? It’s obvious we did fish up the documents, too.” And they were scarcely worth the trouble, thought Johann. Now that hoard of counterfeit bank notes and the submarine rockets had been something; but a list of Balkan agents, who probably never survived the war anyway... He laughed.
    “Is it?”
    “Of course it’s obvious! It says here—”
    “It doesn’t say anything of the kind. ‘A reliable source,’ it says, and that’s all. What reliable source?”
    “But the government spokesman—”
    “Is stating the truth, and just read again what he says. It simply means we stopped diving.”
    “But it says here—” Johann insisted.
    “It doesn’t.” Anna was impatient. “It is simply trying to give that impression. It’s trying to convince people like your Russian tourists and Frenchmen that they are wasting their time. Which means there must be some interest starting up in the lakes again, enough to worry our government and make them want to discourage prowlers. It’s—it’s hidden diplomacy. That’s what Dick says.”
    “That’s what Dick says,” he mimicked, and then laughed.
    “Yes,” she said, blue eyes large with indignation.
    “But he doesn’t think they are going to be discouraged?”
    “Some of them won’t be. They know that the Nazis sunkseveral chests, and these held more important things than the names of Balkan agents.”
    “So that’s what triggered him off!” Johann lit a cigarette and poured the last of the coffee. “He’s a crazy idiot,” he added, shaking his head.
    “Yes,” she flashed back at him, “only a crazy idiot would have given shelter to a fifteen-year-old refugee with a three-months-old baby in her arms.” The door closed behind her, leaving him staring at nothing.
    The coffee was cold, but he drank it. The cigarette tasted like floor sweepings. It was the first time Anna, in all these years, had even mentioned Vienna to him. Dick had kept his silence, too, except for one brief explanation of why he had brought her to Salzburg. “I took her away from everything that reminded her of what Vienna had suffered.” And it was Dick who had arranged for the adoption of the child. That was part of the therapy. “It was Anna’s only chance. And mine. Rape distorts a girl’s mind, leaves revulsion and fear in place of trust. For months, even when she would share my room willingly, she wouldn’t leave, wouldn’t go out into the street unless I was with her—she wasn’t afraid of me somehow, only afraid of being abandoned again—she would flinch if I ever touched her hair, tremble against her own will when I put a hand on her cheek.” So, thought Johann bitterly, it was a stranger who found my sister wandering in the ruined streets—the family friends she had hoped to find either dead or scattered, new addresses unknown. I wasn’t any help to her then, when she needed most help. I wasn’t even there.
    But what good would a sixteen-year-old kid have been anyway? He hadn’t described himself as that, of course, backin those days. He was a veteran, a courier for the underground that the Americans and British had formed in the mountains both south and north of the Italian border; he was a man, a grown man by his