Free The Salzburg Connection by Helen MacInnes

Nazis are raising them to use again. Then we’ll move. And if anyone else is idiot enough to think he could find these documents—these old Hitler boys will get him before he even reaches the spot, and another good man will be dead. Tell your brother-in-law to stop being curious. He isn’t serious by any chance, is he?” And Johann had said no, he didn’t think Dick was anything more than curious.
    Anna was watching him and wondering and guessing all the wrong reasons for his indecision. “But we don’t know anyone here to whom we could report all this about Finstersee. And why report Dick? You wouldn’t do that. He isn’t hurting Austria. Please wait until he gets back and talk it over with him.”
    “Why didn’t he tell me about the diving gear? What kind was it anyway?” And I told Felix he was only curious.
    “Don’t shout!” she pleaded. “I don’t know what kind. It is something he used for underwater pictures this summer.”
    “Where did he buy it?” Not in Salzburg, certainly. Word would have drifted around. And there had been no talk of Bryant dabbling in underwater pictures, either.
    “I think in Zürich.”
    He’s a close-mouthed bastard, thought Johann. He stifled some stronger language, thinking of what he was going to say to Felix, and came back to the table to get another handkerchief. He blew his nose again, and that seemed to clear his brain for a moment. “Anna! He can’t have found the chest! Don’t you see? He never would be having breakfast at the inn with anything as valuable as that chest lying in his car. Now would he?”
    She was silent. I won’t have to tell Johann any lies after all, she was thinking, and relief spread over her face. “No,” she said, at last.
    Johann’s resentment faded. She’s as glad as I am, he thought, that Dick failed. Felix was right: some things were better left to rot. “Just as well he didn’t find anything. He’d be in danger, and so would you. It isn’t only the Nazis we have to worry about. Did you know that a couple of Russian tourists in Bad Aussee were politely escorted to the frontier? They weren’t what their passports said they were. And then there was that Frenchman pretending to be an Italian schoolteacher on vacation. He was wandering around Lake Toplitz trying to find out whether we had salvaged more documents there. He left along with the Russians.”
    “Have we salvaged all those documents? Dick thought not.”
    “And what gave him that idea?”
    She half-dried her hands and went over to a drawer in the little writing desk where Dick had filed that newspaper clipping of last week. Someday, she thought, we’ll have a real kitchen and a real living room, both separate, both neat. “Here,” shesaid, giving it to Johann as she returned to the sink. She glanced at the clock. “Oh, dear! I ought to have done the shopping first. The soup should be on by now.”
    Johann watched her with amusement; you could depend on Anna to plan things the wrong way round. And yet, in the darkroom, her work was excellent. Even Dick, who fussed and fumed about texture and light and shade and flawless prints, admitted she was good. Now she had decided to let the dishes drip and fetch her coat and shopping basket from the crowded closet near the door. By the time she was ready to go, he had read the clipping. It was datelined Vienna, and only a few days old.
Since the first diving operations in Lake Toplitz during the summer of 1959, when various chests that had been sunk there by the Nazis in 1945 were recovered, there has been considerable speculation in informed circles concerning the contents of these discoveries. It was officially announced, at the time, that among the items recovered from the lake was a cache of counterfeit English five-pound bank notes amounting to more than 25,000,000 Austrian schillings in value, as well as plans for U-boat rockets. (The details were given in the August 11th publication of the German magazine “Der