With that he dashed out of the room. Fiala watched him go. Sponer opened the door to the apartment, which was not locked, closed it behind him, listened for a moment in the darkness of the landing, and ran down the stairs. The front door was locked. He struck a match, looked for the housekeeper’s door and knocked. After a couple of seemingly endless minutes the housekeeper finally appeared, woken for the second time.
“Open the door!” Sponer commanded.
“Why didn’t you get the key from the Fialas?” she asked.
“Come on!” Sponer shouted. “Open the door!”
She shuffled to the door, mumbling to herself, and unlocked it. He quickly peered into the street and then stepped out. She closed the door behind him.
He first hurried in the direction from which Marie would have to come — if indeed she came. However, if she did, then she probably wouldn’t be alone. He therefore turned back, went past her front door, and stopped round the next corner.
The street was completely silent except for the flapping of a loose strip of lead under a roof guttering in the damp wind. After some time two people appeared from a side street, crossed the road, and disappeared at the far end.
He waited a further quarter of an hour. Nobody came. He was now convinced they’d caught Marie. And soon people would come, burst into Fiala’s house, and search the apartment.
He could not escape without money. At best he could try to lie low somewhere in the city, but there was no one left at whose place he could shelter. Besides, wherever he went, they’d immediately report him. So, from now on, all he could do was stay on the move and hope they wouldn’t find him. However, after a couple of days they’d be sure to catch him. He might just as well give himself up now. It was as short as it was long. He really didn’t have a choice.
He was now no longer Jack Mortimer; he was no longer even Sponer, the driver; he was no longer anybody.
He was finished. However, when he realized that the game was up, he didn’t do what he would have done if he were still Sponer, namely go and report to the police. He did what Jack Mortimer would probably have done in his shoes. He glanced once more along the silent streets and then walked on.
He went to Marisabelle’s.
The street lights flickered and swayed. His steps echoed between the bleak, grimy fronts of the suburban houses. However, as he drew near the city centre, he became aware of a continuous clanging and rattling sound, and the clip-clop of horses’ hooves, as if an occupying force were approaching while the city slept: it was the traffic from the country, coming to supply the early morning markets. When he turned into Burggasse, it was full of vans and carts. A straggling mass of draught horses and vehicles, with small lamps on the shafts of horse-drawn carts or dangling above the coachmen’s seats, were all bathed in the dim light of gas-lit street lanterns. Brass-inlaid leather finery dangled from the horses’ halters; their drivers, huddled in coats and blankets, crouched half asleep; milk carts laden with metal churns rattled over the cobbles; and the smell of horses and petrol, mixed with the smell of fruit, vegetables and autumn flowers, hung in the air.
Every night, out on the farms, carts are loaded, horses are brought out of the grange stables; every night a train of these conveyances performs its ghostly journey, which goes on for several hours at walking speed. Isolated farmsteads swim into view along the sides of the road and then sink back into the darkness; a wind blows from the wet fields. These are replaced by the brick walls of the suburbs; the roads are now paved; heavy hooves strike the surface noisily; the carts sway from side to side; the city finds its reflection in the horses’ huge eyes as in a dream; and as in a dream the people perceive the rattle of the carts outside their bedroom windows. Come the morning, everything’s gone. The horses, as they are unharnessed from the empty carts on their farms where snowflakes or blossoms fall from the fruit trees, have forgotten that it was a city they’d been to at night, and the city has forgotten that a procession of carts comes and goes every night.
Sponer hurried down Burggasse alongside the rumbling and clanking carts, then turned right onto Lastenstrasse, which was equally busy. Only at Karlsplatz did he turn off, and the clatter and rattle died away in the distance.
It must have been close on four in the morning when he reached Marisabelle’s house.
He went up to the front gate and rang the bell. While he was waiting, he suddenly fancied he could see Marisabelle’s outline in the shadow of the gate, like the other morning when her shadow receded as she shrank back, and the gate closed. He had not followed her then. Now, however, he would go through the gate, and the fact that she had backed away wouldn’t help her in the slightest. He would reach her.
Finally a light appeared in the glass panes over the gate; he could hear the sound of approaching steps echoing in the entrance hall, and the gate opened. A porter — a man of about fifty-five or sixty, clean-shaven and casually dressed — peered out of the gate and asked Sponer what he wanted.
“I must speak to Fräulein von Raschitz,” Sponer said.
“Who?” the porter asked.
“Fräulein von Raschitz.”
“What, now?”
“Yes.”
“That’s not possible,” the porter replied.
“Why not?” Sponer asked.
“What’s it about?”
“It’s urgent.”
“What do you mean, urgent? Can’t it wait till the morning?”
“No,” Sponer said. “It can’t.”
“Can’t you leave a message?” the porter enquired.
“A message?” Sponer asked. “No, I can’t leave a message.”
“But I can’t let you in all the same. You’ll wake up the whole house if you…”
“If I what?”
“If you ring.”
“Possibly,” Sponer said. “However, I have to speak to the lady.”
“Is it so urgent?”
“Yes.”
“Can’t you speak to the major?”
“No,” Sponer said and stepped through the gate. He knew that he would speak to Marisabelle. Now that he was so close to her on such a night, a porter was no longer an obstacle. The servants, too, wouldn’t prevent him, nor the major, not even Marisabelle’s mother. He pushed the porter aside and entered. The man immediately grabbed his arm.
Sponer tore himself free. “Keep away!” Sponer yelled out and pushed past him into the entrance. It was similar to the one in Prinz-Eugen-Strasse, where he had approached Marisabelle the first time. He could see the staircase on the left. A large electric ceiling lantern cast everything into light and shade. “Which one’s her flat?” he asked as he headed for the staircase.
The porter ran after him and asked if he was out of his mind or what.
“I have to speak to the lady,” Sponer barked. “Do you understand?”
“But you can’t wake them up at this hour!”
“That’s for me to decide!” Sponer retorted. “Which one’s their flat?”
The porter stood there, not knowing what to do.
“Well?” Sponer shouted.
“First floor, the one on the left,” the man said finally.
Sponer immediately made for the staircase, followed a moment later by the porter. He turned the landing light on and walked up the stairs, while the porter remained below, looking up at him.
On the first floor Sponer read: Raschitz.
He rang the bell.
While he waited for the door to open, he rested his hand on the heavy, polished door, then leant forward and let his forehead, too, rest against the door.
He had closed his eyes.
There was no smell of cooking or stale air on these stairs. The people who lived here didn’t have to drive a taxi for a living and wouldn’t be suspected of having killed Jack Mortimer. Although the difference was just a single rank, Major von Raschitz lived here, and not the son of Captain Sponer. Also, Marisabelle lived here, not Marie. One was an aristocrat, the other a simple seamstress now under arrest because of him; one had sacrificed everything for him, the other hadn’t even condescended to listen to him. However, he knew that she would listen to him now. One listens to a person who comes in the scarlet cloak of a murderer, even if he is only a driver.