by Desmond Cory
Mai Weill was leaning awkwardly in the doorway, half-doubled up, but with a heavy .45 revolver held tightly in her right hand. Behind him, he heard Hilse mutter a soft and unprintable epithet and, out of the corner of his eyes, he saw her hands, too, rising slowly to shoulder-level.
The revolver was pointed straight towards him and the bullet itself came as no surprise. It caught him high on the shoulder – just below the collar-bone, tearing through the flesh and smashing the shoulder-blade into numb splinters; but, even as the impact shook him back on his heels a far greater force lifted him almost off his feet and sent him sprawling backwards on the floor, with Hilse’s warm, soft body somewhere underneath him.
He had a brief glimpse of Mai Weill being lifted into the air as if she were a leaf, and thrown bodily against the filing shelves, even as the air seemed to strip itself from his lungs and his ears were suddenly cold from the unbelievable slam of high-explosive.
Then the great steel door crashed to, as though slammed by a giant, and the whirring of the tumblers were as a faint tickling upon his stupefied ear-drums.
“Blimey!” said Johnny, in English.
He got up awkwardly, holding his shattered shoulder with his right hand, and helped Hilse to her feet.
“What the hell was that?”
“That bloody detonator,” said Johnny bitterly. “A natural phenomenon known as ‘a sympathetic explosion’, originated by that young lady’s injudicious use of a heavy pistol in a confined space. I’m afraid that that’s torn it…”
Hilse, still slightly shaking at the knees, leaned back against the wall. “I thought you hadn’t hit her hard enough.”
“Apparently not. I certainly didn’t hit her as hard as I would have hit a man. A mistake –”
“Obviously. What happens now?”
Johnny took out a packet of cigarettes. “A few moments’ cogitation, I think. This will call for some radical alteration in our plans. Unless my ears deceived me, this safe is fitted with a self-locking device.”
“Yes – it locks on being closed.”
“I hope it’s possible to get out again?”
“Oh, yes. It requires a different combination from inside, that’s all. We’d better get out at once.”
“No.” Johnny perched himself on top of a filing-box and raised his left wrist. It was painful – but possible. He glanced at his wrist-watch and dropped his arm again. “No. At this moment a large crowd will be waiting outside the building. In five minutes the flics will arrive and, acting on the principle that where one unaccountable explosion has occurred, another is imminent, will clear the vicinity of onlookers. There’s an even better reason, of course; namely, that the other side of this door must bear a vague resemblance to an inferno.”
“You think the incendiaries have gone up?”
“That’s what’s so interesting – not being quite sure. The fuse hadn’t been lit, of course; but an explosion like that would almost certainly set them off anyway. The point is that we don’t make a move for – four minutes.”
Johnny eased himself off his improvised seat and stopped to examine the prostrate form of Mai Weill, flung face downwards across the floor – and devoid of movement.
“Dead?”
“Still breathing.” Johnny’s fingers probed curiously round Mai Weill’s body. “This young lady takes a lot of killing. She stopped the full blast of that 808 – and she’s still with us. Not for long, I fancy.”
“She doesn’t seem to be hurt.”
“Yes. Oh, yes. She’s broken her neck.” Johnny looked at the revolver lying just to the right of Weill’s outstretched arms and bent to pick it up. Before he could touch it, the pain came up from his shoulder and curdled his brain into agony.
Blast! He thought: I’d better be careful.
“Johnny, you’re hurt. I thought she missed you! Let me have a look…”
“Bullet went through my shoulder. May be a bit troublesome later.”
She pulled back the collar of his jacket and then drew her hand sharply away, staring at the warm red blood on her fingers. “That’s not so good.”
“It’s all right. We’ll get it fixed when we’re out of here.”
She took a handkerchief from his pocket, and began to push it gently inside his shirt. “You’re losing a lot of blood.”
“Yes. All right. We’d better go. Have a crack at that door…”
“Poor Johnny.” Her hands slipped upwards and circled his neck. She kissed him with a kind of desperate urgency, and Johnny – seeing the wall opposite him suddenly blur out of focus before slipping back to normal – rested his weight against her body as gently as he could. This, he thought, was very pleasant. Her body was warm and comforting, and the pressure of her smooth, firm hands on his back was reassuring… This was very pleasant indeed.. But they would have to move soon. Very soon… Get the door open…
Then suddenly her back arched inwards and her lips, pressed against his own, drew back so that her teeth clicked together – a tiny noise completely lost in the heavy masculine bark of a pistol. He held her tight as the gun kicked again in Weill’s hand and she gave another agonised little jerk in his arms; while his own draw was as smooth and unhurried as the dipping swoop of a falcon. His Mauser snuffled once from under Hilse’s armpit and Mai Weill, leaning on her elbow and desperately trying to raise the Colt higher, dropped arm and shoulder together and stretched herself on the floor like a rag-doll.
These things had happened with such bewildering speed that it seemed an incredible space of time before Hilse – taut and rigid in the crook of his right arm – went limp against him.
Actually, it was about three seconds… Her hands relaxed and slid nervelessly off his shoulders, and from behind his heels came a hard, metallic tinkle.
Johnny looked round, still bearing her entire weight on his arm, and saw the thin, steel, double-edged knife gleaming murderously at her feet.
“You people,” he said, “you keep on trying.”
“It –” she said, and stopped. Then, forcing the words from between half-numbed lips: “It didn’t come off…”
“No. Thanks to the late Fräulein Weill. There’s a moral in this somewhere.” Johnny kicked the knife away and laid Hilse gently down on the floor. He rested her head against his right knee.
“Where did you get it?” he said softly.
“Back… spine’s shot away. Doesn’t hurt… Funny.”
Johnny looked at the slowly-widening patches of red on the waistband of her skirt, and lifted her chin slightly. “Comfortable like that?”
“Thanks.” Her wide blue eyes searched his face interrogatively. “I was going to kill you… Did you know?”
“Uh-huh. You probably would have done, too. Bad luck.” He turned up the sleeve of her coat and fingered the thin worn leather of the wrist-sheath. “Cute device, that. Fortunate for me, I suppose.”
Her eyes held more than a vestige of humour as they stared upwards at him. “You think so?”
“Why – yes.”
“You wait till you try to get out of this thing. It won’t be easy.”
Johnny said nothing.
“The air – won’t last very long. Not a nice death… you may need your pistol…”
“I may.”
“Oh, God!” Her eyes moved from his face and switched restlessly from side to side. “Why does it take so long? Oh, God – it’s beginning to hurt me, Johnny… Shoot me, for God’s sake… Like you did Mai Weill… It’s taking too long!”
“It won’t be long,” said Johnny, almost tenderly. His eyes turned downwards again to the moist redness spreading remorselessly towards the floor. “Just relax, kid – take it easy. Take it nice and easy. It won’t –”
He stopped. Hilse’s eyes were staring fixedly now and her mouth had slipped open, letting a thin trickle of blood pass down her cheek. He was talking to a dead woman
Johnny let her slide out of his grasp on to the floor, and stood up – teetering back giddily on
his heels. He passed his sound arm swiftly over his forehead and shook his head angrily. This was a time for quick and clear thinking, and never had he felt less in the mood. He realised he was once again bursting with sweat. The tiny room was getting warm already – almost as hot as an oven…
An oven…
Without any train of logical thought whatsoever, he knew that the house was well and truly blazing. He put a hand against the brickwork and drew it away quickly. Those incendiaries had done their work a damned sight too well.
Johnny went back to the file, moving with a kind of half-dazed deliberation, and worked desperately through the papers. His knowledge of German was sketchy enough to hold him up considerably, sometimes he had to examine a sheaf of papers closely before he could grasp their import… But the word Burgkirchen, heading a thin wad of typescript in red lettering, was clear enough; he thrust the folio inside his jacket, kicked over the file and then, picking up Hilse’s knife, settled down to a rapid examination of the walls.
They were made of brick and cement, hot to the touch and quite impregnable to anything smaller than a pickaxe. Johnny attacked the wall with his knife, but made no impression at all. He stood back again, panting.
No – the floor was coated with a thin layer of concrete; the ceiling was tiled…
But the ceiling was far more hopeful. In the corner nearest the great steel door and above the shelves, the tiles had been loosened by the blast and, where they had stood Johnny could see ordinary plaster and the brown outline of a wooden beam.
He swung himself up on to the shelves and tested the plaster with his knife, stabbing upwards ferociously. The white powder flaked off on to his wrist and on to the floor… It was hopeless. At the precise moment when he realised that he would get nowhere like that, he smelt the unmistakable tang of smoke and swung himself down from the shelf.
Whatever got him out of that cell would have to be pretty drastic. He took from his pocket the thin green stick of explosive that he had left aside, and looked at it pensively.
Moving much more slowly now that his mind was made up, he pushed the blade of the knife carefully through the explosive; then took out the round cardboard box of detonators. There were three left. Without hesitation he pushed them all into the waxy surface of the 808, one by one; and, holding the dagger gingerly by its hilt, he clambered back on to the shelf and began to work the needle-sharp end of the knife into the wooden beam that crossed the white solidity of the plaster. He pushed it in as far as he could, wriggled it tentatively and took his hand away. The explosive remained against the ceiling, pinned against the rafter, while the snub grey heads of the detonators gleamed unpleasantly from its candle-smooth surface.
Johnny stepped down as softly as a cat and walked to the other end of the cell, where he crouched down and rendered himself as like a ball as he possible could. He slid the Mauser from his holster once more, raised it until the sights were aligned with the macabre green lump of high explosive and, without a second’s hesitation, squeezed the trigger.
“Mon Dieu!” said the gendarme, recoiling. “All right. Keep well back, please. Well away, ladies and gents.”
But the small crowd of sightseers needed no urging. He was addressing their retreating backs.
The gendarme looked once more through the door into the red-hot roar of flames. “Wonder what the hell’s going on in there?”
His companion shrugged. “Who knows?… It’s about time those lazy scélérats of the fire brigade got here. What are they doing – playing poker?”
“That suggests itself as a likely enough game for those arsonists. Communists, every one of them. It is well-known that they light fires themselves in order to justify their weekly wage-packets.”
“That savours of idealism rather than of atheism.”
“What else are Communists? This fire, here, for example; this is no accident!”
“Indeed?”
“Certainly not. That silvery glow when it started – what do you think that was? Magnesium. Depend on it, the Communists are at the bottom of this.”
“Well, you’d better tell the sergeant that. Here he comes.”
The gendarme turned again and saw the tubby but muscular figure of the police-sergeant striding up the steps. He simpered ingratiatingly.
“Good evening, Sergeant.”
“’Evening, Leclerc.” The sergeant wasted few words. “All right. Let’s have it.”
“Well, it’s like this, Sergeant. My attention was attracted at eight minutes past five by the sound of a loud explosion from this building. I was standing at the end of the street and gained the impression that the sound came from the first floor… On arriving here it was clear that the rooms on that floor were in flames. It looked to me as if magnesium had been ignited.”
“Magnesium, eh? Go on…”
“I went into the house and found that the corridor of the first floor was already in flames, and at once went downstairs to ’phone the fire brigade. They have not yet arrived,” said the gendarme enigmatically. “I then endeavoured to clear the building.”
“Anybody in that mess?” asked the sergeant, shielding his eyes and staring into the flames.
“The house seemed empty. But there was a young lady outside who ran into the building immediately after the explosion.”
“You went after her?”
“I called after her, but received no reply,” said the gendarme with dignity. “I wasn’t going into that. I am a married man, Sergeant, with three children. Ca s’explique.”
“There’s a chance she went out the back door, I suppose. Probably the owner.” The sergeant flicked with his finger at the card that bore the name of Mademoiselle Odette Brahms. “It’s surprising the way –”
He stopped and he peered, down the street.
“Ah, here are the firemen. Eight minutes. Not bad… All right. Get those people out of the way.”
“One side, please’” chorused the gendarmes enthusiastically. “Come along there. Plenty of room. Come along. Come along…”
“Come along. Come along, Johnny. Oh, Johnny – come along!”
Johnny had a vague impression of having been listening to those words for some five minutes or so, and it was dawning on him to do something about it. He stirred feebly, and was aware of an excruciating pain in his left shoulder. Ah, yes. He had been shot… Of course. And somebody was slapping his face rather hard. He would have to do something about that. Such as opening an eye… How did one go about opening one’s eyes? He had known how to, once…
He worked a hand up to his face and pushed his fingers vaguely in the direction of his eyelid. Ah. That did the trick. Yes, he could see now. A perception of light and shadow and – yes, that was a wall over there. He could see the outline of the bricks quite clearly… Funny, though. The room seemed full of smoke. He knuckled his eyes again – more confidently this time – and raised his head slightly.
The room was full of smoke. Crikey!
His head seemed to be supported by something soft, like a pillow but firmer and warmer. He squinted nervously upwards, and shut his eyes again… Hilse. He was on Hilse’s lap. His head was, anyway. Curious. She was supposed to be dead. She couldn’t be, though. She was still slapping him methodically. Silly girl…
Hey. Hilse was dead. He remembered quite distinctly. Weill had shot her. This was curious. This would bear looking into. He opened his eyes again and stared.
It wasn’t Hilse at all. It was What’s-her-name… Little What’s-her-name. How did she get here? Where was he, anyway? He couldn’t be sure…
“Johnny. Are you all right?”
“What a damned silly question,” said Johnny slowly and distinctly. “Help me up.”
“I’ve been trying to for ages, chump! Here – put your arm round my shoulder… That’s it. Can you stand?”
“Apparently,” said Johnny, removing his arm and rocking muzzily to and fro. “Gosh. I’m all right. I say, this is wonderful!” He kissed her enthusiastically, b
ut somehow missed the spot he was aiming at. “Can’t remember your name, but I know you, don’t I? Rather. Well, how are you?”
“Johnny, sober up, for the Lord’s sake. We’ve got to get out of here. The place is on fire. You understand?”
Johnny nodded owlishly. Yvonne? No. Arlette? Surely not… “How?”
She pointed upwards. “Through that hole you made. Can you do it?”
“Do what?”
She smacked her hands together in despair.
“Get through that hole. Come on. Put your foot on that shelf there. That’s it. Now put your weight on my shoulder…”
Through the hole. Yes, it looked possible. It looked easy… Andrée, Marie-Andrée. That was it…
“Marie-Andrée,” he said aloud.
“Yes?” she said, looking up.
“Nothing. That’s your name.”
“That’s right. Now – see that rafter? Reach it. Get hold of it. Now try and – Oh, well done!”
Johnny had by now got the idea. He was to go through the hole. All right. Nothing to it.
Guarding his left shoulder through some unconscious self-suggestion, he jumped, and went through the hole in the roof with the smooth easiness of a performing sea-lion.
As his head went up and through, the heat struck him in the face as though hurled towards him.
By God – the room was blazing. The flames were hurting his eyes, and were blistering the skin of his face and hands. And, in some way, completely clearing his befuddled brain.
“All right. Come on up. Take my hand.”
Marie-Andrée came up somehow, choking and coughing in the thick smoke. A sliver from the twisted, torn rafters cut a gash in her leg as she wriggled upwards, but she did not even notice it.
“Good! Keep low… Which way do we go?”
“I came in through the door.”
“Stay here.”
Johnny travelled across the carpet on his knees to the door, lay flat and reached up to turn the handle.
The blast of flame that came through the door removed his eyebrows in a second and cast smouldering sparks all over him. He rolled over and wriggled back.
