by Desmond Cory
“After such a series of dazzling deductions, that one comes as something of an anticlimax.”
“Yes.” Johnny jiggled his tongue against his cheek. “As you say, a horrifyingly complex case. The prospect of making sense of it horrifies me, and I therefore don’t propose to. Not any more.”
“No,” said le rossignol cheerfully. “Let’s have another demonstration.”
“Let’s have a shave and a few hours’ sleep,” said Johnny disengaging himself. “I’m practically thinking double.”
Johnny moved slightly on the bed, swung up his wrist and examined the face of his wrist-watch. The time was twenty minutes past two… At the other end of the room, Hilse von Hettering was seated by the window, looking out across the rooftops – a paper-backed novel lay open on her lap. Johnny closed his eyes once more. His head still ached abominably but on the whole he was feeling distinctly better. He straightened his left leg and pushed his face farther into the pillow.
He began to consider the developments that le rossignol’s offer of alliance had occasioned. In many ways, it was surprising. Johnny knew the historical parallels to be innumerable, but the individual case was outside his experience. The criminal turning King’s Evidence is a common enough phenomenon – the spy turning traitor another; but neither category quite applied. As the lady had said, there was more to it than that. It was more nearly a case of the spy turning outlaw. And Johnny, whose meteoric career had been spent as much in defiance of established canons of law and order as in the more respectable trade of intelligence agent, felt to the full the attraction of the suggestion. It was not merely the financial incentive that gripped him. It was the prospect of working completely alone again for the first time in years. The idea intrigued him immensely.
There was really no question of disloyalty on his part. His task in Paris would be completed; if von Hettering was not dead, her career as a Nazi agent would be completed. Holliday would be satisfied. Then Johnny had only to leave the Service – one of the privileges of his dangerous profession was that of resignation at a moment’s notice.
His loyalty, after all, had never been to any one country. It was a personal oath that he had taken on the death of his parents, to fight Fascism with all the cunning and skill that he possessed. Partnership with Hilse would enable him to continue to do so, and in a personal way: in a manner that had a great appeal to him. It would involve a Jesuitical adoption of evil means to attain a good end; an alliance with a Nazi to destroy Nazism. And that was what the successful prosecution of Hilse’s aims would amount to. The post-war Nazi underground movement was run on finance, on hoarded goods; removal of the capital would result in its complete destruction.
And Hilse, he was sure, had spoken the truth of her knowledge. The things of which she had spoken – Goering’s legendary collection of plate, the gold shipment from the Burgkirchen vaults at Leipzig, the records of the Wandervögel, of German Overseas Intelligence, the diamonds of von Huysen, destined for the Essen Works – all were things for which Allied Intelligence forces had sought desperately and unsuccessfully. Those Nazis who had escaped the comb-out, who had cached the proceeds of six years’ systematic looting, who were now trying to reorganise the German Secret Service – they were the richest men in the world. And, as Hilse had said, the most dangerous. Hunting tigers would be table-tennis in comparison with robbing, blackmailing and killing such men.
Oh, yes, thought Johnny, the idea is attractive. She put it up to the right man. But there is the other side to be considered…
Johnny, after all, was no fool. The possibility of le rossignol’s offer being a desperate attempt to gain time was an overwhelming one. When he went out that afternoon to kill Weill, every nerve of his unique intuitive system would be tingling, waiting in readiness for the first false move on Hilse’s part. The whole thing was a gamble… It was a gamble that he had decided to take.
He turned slightly on the pillow and squinted past his nose at the tall figure still staring impassively out of the window. She was slouched slightly in the chair so that her coat, unbuttoned mannishly, draped itself against the side of the chair and concealed all but the outline of her figure. Her hair was tumbled loosely across her left shoulder, stirring slightly in the breeze that came through the half-opened window; then, as he watched, she turned back to her novel and pushed back its tresses with an unconscious but reassuringly feminine gesture.
He watched her face for a few minutes, looking for some indication of her thoughts now that she was temporarily off-guard. It remained a beautiful but obstinate blank; the dark, sweeping lines of her eyelids were turned upon the pages of her novel and stayed there. The face itself was greatly altered from that of the young girl who looked out from the photograph on the dressing-table, was altered nearly as much as his own, though in a far subtler way. It was not that she was older, though her complete maturity was an indefinable quality absent from the photograph; it was rather as if the girl’s face had become adapted, moulded around a completely new character that underlay it. The young blonde was an unmistakable Aryan girl of the Strength-through-Joy period; the older brunette was cosmopolitan in her sophistication while the half-casual chic of her appearance and the preter-naturally rounded cheek-bones were typically Parisienne. She had, as she had put it, become a Frenchwoman: she was the girl in the photograph magically altered into a woman moulded by vastly different circumstances and surroundings.
The new maturity seemed an emanation rather than a visible quality, showing itself in her movements rather than in her appearance. A camera, perhaps, would only capture the smooth skin and lovely features, would reduce that extraordinary abstraction of character to the level of the other scantily-dressed bombshells that grinned tooth-pastily from the dressing-table. Even to an inexperienced observer that strange indefinable something might be considered merely the veneer of supreme sophistication. In a way, Johnny thought, it was. It was the sophistication of death. He himself had seen it too often to be fooled. During his many long months with the Maquis, he had seen it in the faces of the young ladies of the F.T.P. – mingled sometimes with fear, sometimes with delight, sometimes with despair; finally, with a total absence of any emotion whatsoever; but it was always there and always unmistakable… It was, maybe, ironical that he should recognise it again in the face of a German. Ironical but inevitable. It was only important now that he was able to recognise it and that he knew what it meant; knew that it stood for a long familiarity with battle, danger and sudden death; with hope, despair, loyalty and treachery in all their forms; with an absolute starvation of Love.
It was a look that he, too, had in some degree, and a look that Hilse knew as well as he. With this sobering reflection Johnny snorted softly and rolled over on to his back.
Hilse turned slightly at the sound, then closed her novel gently and moved across the room towards him. She sat down on the side of the bed.
“How are you feeling?”
“A trifle gummy,” said Johnny. “A vague, squashed-by-a-steam-roller sensation. On the whole, considerably better.”
“Sleep longer,” she said gently, “if you wish to.”
Johnny yawned, lowered his right foot from the bed to the floor and sat up.
He walked out into the bathroom, held his head for a few moments under the cold-water tap and returned, rubbing his hair vigorously with a towel.
He said: “I feel more like eating than sleeping. I propose we have lunch here and then arrange the deportation of Fräulein Weill to another – and better – world.”
Hilse’s quiet smile had the naïveté of a twenty-year old’s.
“That would be nice,” she said.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
WHEN Johnny had finished his lunch, he made a quick series of visits: first to d’Ambois’s office, where he was given his favourite automatic pistol and an up-to-the-minute account of the measures that were being taken to capture the elusive rossignol. (“Malgré son nom, m’sieu, elle n’a pas des ailes!”) And
then to a gunsmith’s, where he tested the Mauser carefully and supplied himself with a box of high-velocity 9-mm. ammunition.
After this, he repaired to a minor branch of the Western Defence Organisation, emerging with a small brown suit-case and a thoughtful expression. Whistling quietly to himself, he walked to the nearest car-park and there dexterously stole an unassuming but reliable motor-car.
He returned to Rostand’s, changed from his dark-grey suit into grey flannels and a shapeless leather windcheater, took Hilse by the left arm and led her down to the car. He drove some way towards their objective and, finding a quiet spot, pulled up there. He lit a cigarette.
“All right?”
“Quite all right,” said Hilse.
“Good. Let’s go over this thing, once and quickly. I don’t want there to be any slip-ups. If anything goes wrong, you must go ahead yourself. Can you use explosives?”
“With reasonable skill. What have you got?”
“Not quite what I wanted, but good enough.” Johnny reached across to the back seat and pulled the little brown suit-case on to his lap. “Plastic 808 of the usual type – that’s the H.E. Four German elektron bombs of the demonstration type, kilo magnesium – that’s the incendiary agent. A length of instantaneous fuse and four feet of Bickford safety fuse. You can handle all that?”
She nodded.
“Right. The elektrons in each corner of the room, near the bed and the curtains, the plastic anywhere seems best. Use the cortex in a ring linking all five agents. Detonate simultaneously.”
“Have you detonators?”
“I have got them, yes. I had a little trouble with them, though. Apparently they’re a test lot and are considered highly unstable; they’ll need damned careful handling.”
Hilse nodded again. “All right.”
“Good. Here’s the layout. We go straight up to her room and take her. When she’s out, we fix the explosive as arranged, take whatever papers may be useful and get out. The Bickford fuse’ll give us two minutes… We wait downstairs for the bang and mingle with the crowd that’s bound to appear. We can’t take a chance on being seen leaving the place prior to the explosion… Once away, we travel by Métro back to Rostand’s as fast as we can. All clear?”
“How about the car?”
“We leave it.” Johnny smiled slightly. “It’s not mine.”
“I see. That seems to be all right.”
“It should be. About these papers. The only ones we must get away are those that concern our future – er – program. The rest can be left to Allied Intelligence. Can you lay your hands on all such papers directly?”
“Perhaps not directly. But very quickly.”
“Good. Once we have started we mustn’t waste a second.” Johnny inhaled deeply at his cigarette and eyed, almost with horror, the minutest of tremors pass his hand as he did so. He looked sideways at Hilse and saw that those pale-blue experienced eyes were also troubled.
“Nervous?”
“A little,” she admitted. “And you –?”
“Me?… Yes. Yes, I am. I don’t know. I’ve a nervous sensation of being followed.”
“I, too, have that exact presentiment.”
For a long moment they eyed each other in silence. Both knew that that strange tension was not mere nerves, but a definite warning from the sixth sense that all people in their profession develop, a faint rising of the human hackles.
“Nothing definite?”
“Oh, no. You know how it is.”
“I do, indeed. Let’s get on with it.” And as Johnny engaged the gear –
“It’s probably just that we don’t trust each other,” said Hilse thoughtfully.
Johnny said nothing further until he had parked the car close against the curb two blocks away from their ultimate destination. Then he said, more as a statement than as a question: “You haven’t got a gun?”
“No. I rarely use one.”
Johnny smiled suddenly. “In that case I think perhaps I can trust you. Kiss me for luck.”
She slipped into his arms and kissed him, slowly and satisfyingly. His hands caressed her body gently for a few moments, then moved to the dashboard and turned off the ignition.
“You were quite right,” said Johnny gently. “You haven’t got a gun. Now let’s go,”
The door was still fresh with its coating of green paint, and opened without a sound. They moved silently up the stairs together and paused in front of the door at the top. Hilse’s clenched knuckles gleamed whitely in the soft light as she rapped softly on the door.
“Who the hell’s that?”
“It’s Mony…”
“Oh, all right. Just a moment-”
There was a faint scuffling noise from behind the door. Johnny’s right hand quietly pulled down the zipper of his windcheater and slowly slipped the Mauser from its shoulder-holster.
“I’m coming.”
There came ten seconds of silence, then the door-handle rattled and the door opened – perhaps four inches. As one enormous kohl-fringed eye appeared at the aperture, Johnny threw his shoulder against it, swung it back and tumbled the woman behind it to the floor.
“Good evening, Odette,” said Johnny. “I think you dropped this handkerchief.”
Johnny slid the Mauser back into its holster, and bent down beside the crumpled figure that had spread its fluffy blonde hair over the threadbare carpet.
“I almost wish I’d let you do it. I have singularly few inhibitions, but smacking down women with revolver-butts is an ungentlemanly pursuit. How fortunate that I am no gentleman… Pass me the suit-case.”
Johnny worked fast and competently, swiftly placing the dull nine-inch incendiary tubes in strategic positions; piling together the 808, soft and waxy, like green sticks of rock; scarfing and grating the cortex to the safety-fuse, his hands going through the well-known motions almost independently of his mind.
“Where are the papers?” he said, biting with extreme care at the end of a detonator, and tamping it to the fuse. “You may as well start getting them out; I can handle the rest of this alone.”
“I’ll need help to move that long mirror; the safe’s behind it.”
“Oh. All right. I’ll finish this. One thing at a time.”
He forced the detonator into the putty-like explosive, and checked the joins of the fuse-wires. He stood up, weighing the last stick of explosive in his hand, and finally pushed it inside his windcheater.
“There. All set for the big bang. For the Lord’s sake don’t drop anything heavy now; I don’t trust that detonator a blooming inch… How does this mirror work?”
“It slides back in the groove; needs quite a lot of force at first. Mai could do it; I never was able to.”
“All right. Gen-tly does it… Now that’s a safe and a half!”
“A masterpiece. A thirteen-letter combination; fire-proof doors; acid-proof and blast-proof. Quite a job, the Gestapo did, installing this.”
Johnny eyed the massive steel door malevolently. It was five feet high by three feet broad, made of tempered steel; but for all its size and weight, a razor-blade could not have been inserted between door and jamb. The line of partition was barely discernible to the eye. It was, as Hilse bad said, a masterpiece of the safemaker’s art.
“Yes – well, we didn’t come here to admire the work of the Führer’s ironmongers. Can you get it open, that’s the thing?”
“Yes, of course. Don’t be so impatient.”
Johnny stood back and watched her as, head bent she fingered the rollers set squatly in the solid steel; listened to the whirling and clicking of the tumblers faIling steadily into position.
“What’s the point in installing a thing like that?”
“This was the office of a branch of the Abwehr,” she said, without ceasing her adjustment of the rollers. “Weill acquired it some time before the end of the war… The size of the safe is not really disproportionate to the value of the papers contained therein… As you will now have
the chance to see for yourself.” She stepped back, pushing a strand of hair away from her slightly flushed face. “There is an electric-light switch just to the right of the door.”
She watched him closely as he pulled open the door with a slight effort, stepped inside the safe and thumbed the light-switch. His movements were easy and economical, betraying neither surprise nor alarm; but when he turned back to face her, she noticed a slight involuntary tightening of his eye-muscles.
“I must confess I wasn’t expecting anything of these dimensions.”
She stepped in after him, pushing the door slightly farther ajar, and surveyed the bricked-in apartment with its rows of rather dusty files, the clips full of typewritten flimsies.
“It used to be a bathroom, I believe. The window was bricked in and the door was – adapted.”
“Yes. But – my word I – you’ve got some wastepaper here. Never saw so many files in my life.”
“Possibly not. But we didn’t come here to admire the industry of our Führer’s typists. Reach me that filing box – the red one marked 1942.”
Johnny passed it to her, and looked round the room while her fingers flicked deftly through the card-index within the file.
“There are not many papers here of any use,” she said. “Most of the matters with which we have to deal are top secret – and are filed elsewhere. But this” – she reached up and pulled a thin cardboard file from its shelf – “this we had better take. It covers the disposal of Mayer’s diamonds up to 1948. That, really, is the main thing we need.”
Johnny took it and slid it without a glance, inside the capacious front of his windcheater.
“The only other things we don’t particularly want anyone else to get hold of are the Burgkirchen files and the report on the North African uranium stocks,” she said pensively. “Now, I wonder… Reach me down the next filing-cabinet.”
Johnny turned back to the shelves and stretched up to the big gold-stamped red-leather box that lay at the end of the row. His fingers touched it, hesitated, then moved slowly upwards above his head.
