Rogue Justice

by Geoffrey Household

  I threw into a corner my sheepskin and the now ragged suit which Casimir had given me, took a shower, put on the dressing gown and breakfasted. It all seemed the lap of luxury to Don Ernesto. Death, as Cantescu had warned, might be looking over my shoulder, but meanwhile I revelled in the touch of a silk dressing gown which called for Noël Coward to do it justice.

  Thinking that it was about time I had some instructions, I waited for my host. Assuming that the people who had marked me down in spite of the crowded station knew what they were doing, I left the door unlocked as I had found it. Anybody could walk in and I might have to explain who I was and what was my business, when I had no idea what I should say and what I shouldn’t.

  There were curious faint thumps from the lavatory which I put down to whims of Romanian plumbing. The door was opened from the inside by a woman who remarked in charmingly accented English, ‘Good morning, Don Ernesto.’

  ‘Good morning, madam. May I thank you and congratulate you on your efficiency?’

  ‘If spiders can come up, I can.’

  ‘Then at last I have found someone who can tell me why they aren’t drowned. What I meant was that I don’t see how your people spotted me on the station.’

  ‘Oh, that was easy. Cantescu had a man travelling on the train.’

  She was in her early thirties and lovely as well as witty: dark hair, laughing grey eyes, classical features which were not too severe, and skin, to judge by her forearms in a summer frock, as soft as the bloom on a fruit. At first I thought her slightly tanned by sun, but later I found that Romanian women gave an impression of pink and white over tan rather than the other way round.

  ‘A lot of trouble for a Slovakian bandit.’

  ‘But for a British agent no trouble is enough.’

  I foresaw unnecessary complications if I passed myself off as an accredited spy and was then put in touch with secret operators, who would inevitably suspect that I was in enemy pay and clumsily trying to infiltrate their organization.

  ‘I am British but not an agent.’

  ‘That was what the Voevod thought. He called you a fighting man, too proud for a spy.’

  ‘It’s true I don’t like the Nazis.’

  ‘Don’t like! You are a flame of hatred, he said.’

  ‘How do you know all this?’

  ‘I travel sometimes, but in first class. And it seems there is another side to you. You remember Mr Shapir?’

  ‘I only parted from him the day before yesterday.’

  ‘He said to the Voevod that never in his life had he known such love and tenderness.’

  It was an extraordinary tribute from Moshe, to whom, I should have thought, I gave the impression of a ruthless killer.

  ‘He is safe?’

  ‘What a question! Are you? Am I? I don’t know where he is. Sometimes Cantescu exchanges information with quite a different underground. Tomorrow or the next day your Moshe will be under their wing. But you must stay here until we have a sure route to Turkey for you. Show me what papers you have!’

  I gave her the Nicaraguan passport, telling her that it belonged to one of Hitler’s agents, whom I had killed. The trouble was that the SD knew it and were on the lookout for me all over occupied Europe.

  ‘And you have nothing else?’

  I slit open the wide hem of my sheepskin coat and produced Haase’s documents.

  ‘To start with I had his uniform too, and it helped me to escape from Germany. But no one could mistake the photograph for me.’

  ‘This Haase reported direct to the heads of the SD,’ she exclaimed. ‘We must fix the photograph. I am sure we can.’

  ‘If your forger is reliable. Otherwise a word from him and it’s the end of us.’

  ‘You will not mind if I come to talk to you from time to time? The spider will be careful not to come up when you are – well, engaged.’

  ‘And may I know how she gets in?’

  ‘The floor of your shower cabinet is hinged and steps lead up from a passage. It’s not dug out. It’s the cellar of a house which was knocked down in the earthquake and my friends and I built this room on top. We foresaw trouble before the Germans arrived. I sometimes entertain the least awful of the officers. Very correct they are. They like to think I am a true Aryan princess.’

  ‘I am not surprised.’

  ‘Straight out of Wagner? For God’s sake, no! I am descended from Byzantine emperors. Lovely pure blood! Greeks, barbarians, Egyptians and probably the odd eunuch. There were three kinds of them, you know, and the imperial gelders didn’t always make a proper job of it.’

  A complex creature, that mermaid-spider! Evidently it was assumed by the enemy that such an aristocrat must be anti-Russian. Well, of course she was, and that made her contempt for Hitler and his Nazis easier to disguise.

  ‘What am I to call you?’

  ‘Just Domnitza – the little lady.’

  She sat on the bed flicking one crossed leg as if the pointed toe were a dagger. By way of the Voevod and his exploits, she led me back into the last century, rightly or wrongly envied. People forget that the Austro-Hungarian was not the only empire in Europe, she said. In the Ottoman empire injustices and corruption were obscene but it ruled its subjects according to established laws, without regard to religion, language or blood.

  ‘The Voevod’s ancestors and mine were governors of great provinces,’ she went on. ‘I expect they were thoroughly disliked by their subjects but they made no distinctions between them. So we loathe the Nazis and their cruel myths only fit for little bourgeois without any reason for pride.’

  An interesting theory. But I think she and the Voevod had made it up to account for a hatred which was only due to outraged humanity.

  ‘Now we must get you some decent clothes,’ she said, ‘so that you can move on the streets when the time comes. I have brought a tape measure. What class would you like to belong to?’

  ‘Poor, but honest. Some craftsman who can only afford one suit every three years, and the cloth must last.’

  The intimacy of measurement was pleasurable but no more than a sister’s caress. When a man has loved as I, he remembers too clearly the divine dual surrender of the spirits for any imitation by mere bodies to be tolerable.

  I felt secure in that room of hers. A new sensation. I had not felt secure since that summer of 1938 when I had Hitler in my sights. Meals came up through the shower cabinet carried by a manservant who tidied the place and spoke only Romanian, When I asked Domnitza how she managed to keep my presence secret to the kitchen staff, she told me that she had a small stove in her private apartment on the ground floor and that she had accustomed servants to a pretended habit of preparing favourite dishes herself. Only the manservant and her personal maid knew of the existence of the secluded room, and they were none too sure whether occupants were lovers or political dissidents.

  ‘It held Cantescu for a few days before we got him away,’ she said.

  ‘I hear he was condemned to death.’

  ‘Oh, nothing so legal as that. We grabbed him with only minutes to spare. He tried to poison the dictator Antonescu, and the wrong man drank the cup. Medieval, isn’t it? All was faultlessly planned but he didn’t bother to protect himself from suspicion. He didn’t care what happened to him, but we did. Antonescu is a personal friend of Hitler, which meant that every torturer in the Reich would be encouraged to try his skill on Cantescu.’

  ‘They didn’t search your house?’

  ‘They searched the house of everyone who knew him but found nothing. Such a lot of apologies I had.’

  My feeling of security was somewhat dented after that, though she had intended to give me added confidence. Cool and daring were these resisters of rank, but I could not help thinking they took unnecessary risks: the Voevod with the stream across his front; Cantescu at the frontier; Domnitza, who had just
told me more than I ought to know; the taxi driver. However, their organization was none of my business.

  My suit, when it appeared, was of brown serge, hideous, indestructible as old friendship but infernally hot in the flowering June of Bucharest. I’d have been glad of it in the high Carpathians, and under a bit of waving green stuff it would make good camouflage. The photograph on Haase’s comprehensive pass was a perfect job. Domnitza herself had taken it, laughing at her attempts to get me to compose my face into the stolid insensitivity of a Gestapo officer. Her tame craftsman – there was another fellow who held our lives in his hands – had successfully reproduced the embossed stamp, but, if anyone had reason to suspect it and used a magnifying glass, he could detect that one photograph had been substituted for another.

  When all was ready, Domnitza advised me to spend a day in the outside world to give myself confidence. I now had three different proofs of identity. Hidden in the lining of the brown serge suit were Haase’s papers, and Don Ernesto’s passport. In my pocket was the identity card of a Greek seaman from a coaster plying between Romanian and Turkish ports. My Greek was not nearly good enough but would pass so long as I was not speaking to a Greek.

  The day of normal city life did indeed give me confidence. I lunched. I spoke in deliberately bad French and German. I sat in public parks. I was only an ant in an anthill. When again I entered my private apartment I found Domnitza sitting on my bed wearing the Noël Coward dressing gown and only enough else to be provocative. I was infinitely sad. I felt as I might if coldly returning a bunch of wild flowers to some child who had picked them for me.

  ‘You said there were three kinds of eunuch at the emperor’s palace, Domnitza. Here is a fourth.’

  ‘Who is she?’ she asked.

  At the time I took her response as extraordinary insight, but perhaps it was not all that extraordinary. She knew how irresistible she was; she knew from my eyes, after nearly a week of intimacy, that I admired both her beauty and intelligence, and she realized, I suppose from my bearing and my past, that I was a whole man, so she arrived at the correct explanation.

  ‘I am faithful to the dead.’

  ‘Or to death itself?’

  The Voevod had said that, but as a statement not a question.

  ‘I am in love with killing those who killed her.’

  ‘Can’t you forget, my dear?’

  ‘No more than I could forget you, if it had been you.’

  ‘Only a sweet speech to stay with me after you have gone?’

  That night I was woken up by the familiar swish of the shower cabinet. I hoped Domnitza was not returning to cause us both more embarrassment; on the other hand, I could never be anything but glad to listen to her voice and luxuriate in her beauty as I would – though the parallel is far from exact – in full moonlight on a calm sea or among the breasts and hanging woods of my beloved English downland.

  A complete stranger entered my room, an old man with a bushy white beard who would have looked like Father Christmas except that he was very formally dressed with a white slip under his waistcoat. He was obviously a prince or politician of the old school up from his remote estate in the country. I wondered if he could possibly be Domnitza’s grandfather.

  ‘Cantescu, and at your service,’ he said with a slight and graceful bow.

  The disguise was perfect down to the lines on face and forehead. I doubt if he could have walked the streets by day as so distinguished a character. Passers-by would have saluted him feeling that they ought to know who he was though they didn’t. But at night one would have the good manners not to look too closely at this personage, already in the history books, on his discreet and dignified way to his mistress.

  ‘And where have you left your carriage and pair?’ I asked.

  ‘In the square,’ he replied.

  I could not tell whether that was the incredible truth or whether he was just answering jest with jest. He went on to say that the more conspicuous you made yourself, the less likely you were to be a wanted man – typical of these daring and debonair Romanians, but I doubt it.

  He had dropped in on me to arrange what he called a few details of my departure.

  ‘Tomorrow we are proposing to ship you on an oil tanker from the port of Constanza to Istanbul. You are a Greek seaman off a barge laid up in the Danube and you want to go home. The papers are very simple and we can manage them, all properly stamped. I don’t know what action the Turks will take – probably put you on any Greek caïque in the harbour. But you’ll have every chance to run for the British consulate.’

  It looked as if it might be the same old game. No proof of British nationality. Where have you been? How long? Why? But once ashore in Turkey I could somehow reach the army. From Sweden I could not.

  I felt that Cantescu was a little too fascinated by disguises, secret refuges and the easy corruption of minor servants of state. He and Domnitza had been quite right to keep me away from hotels and any other activities which involved registration with the police and their Gestapo associates; but since I had passed the Sighet controls and was legally in Romania it seemed to me that I could be safely shipped to Istanbul as Don Ernesto. True, I had no visa to enter Turkey. However, if he could have me smuggled ashore as a Greek seaman, he ought to be able to do it equally well as the Nicaraguan landowner.

  Too much of a risk, he said. A boatman could cheaply and easily be persuaded to row a seaman to a dark beach or watersteps and take him back again, but not a suspiciously respectable passenger. Also, I must not forget those two black-uniformed watchers at Sighet who might by now have examined the Romanian records and could be on my trail.

  To that I objected that it would take time for officials at the port of Constanza to send in their returns to headquarters and by then the tanker would be at sea.

  ‘They are not as inefficient as all that,’ Cantescu said. ‘Most of the traffic in the Black Sea is military, so they have plenty of time to check passengers.’

  I still would not give way. I did not like his casual phrase that I would have ‘every chance to run for the British consulate’. I might have none. At least the Nicaraguan passport would prevent me from being returned to the ship. So we compromised. If I insisted on taking the risk I could go on board as Don Ernesto but I must land as a nameless seaman. The oil engineer acting as supercargo was a trustworthy, well-paid agent. I should recognize him by his slicked-down grey hair. During the twenty hours or so of the passage I should not contact him, but on arrival at Istanbul he would make the arrangements for smuggling me ashore and tell me what to do.

  The plan once settled, I asked about Moshe Shapir. Had he been got away in a false beard and the robes of a Greek Orthodox bishop? But Cantescu was no more in a mood for light-heartedness. His responsibilities were too real and too urgent. He replied that he did not know how the underground run to Palestine was organized, but thought it probable that Moshe would be passed from hand to hand till he was in Turkey, and after that the Moslems, unlike so-called Christians, would have no special interest in hunting him down.

  I left next day as secretly as I had arrived, carrying a small case containing toiletries and that invaluable sheepskin coat, now cleaned and de-loused, with Hauptmann Haase’s papers in the lining. Domnitza did not come to say goodbye but sent me by the manservant a small locket, which opened into a diptych showing on one leaf an icon of St Jerome and on the other the head and shoulders of some Byzantine princess so like her that her meaning was clear.

  In the square I found the same taxi which had collected me from the café and the same silent driver. The road to Constanza was badly worn and we passed convoy after convoy of troops, on their way, I suppose, from Bulgaria and Greece to the Russian front. This show of power did not depress me – apart from wishing that I was behind the sandhills with an anti-tank gun – for this was the final leg of my journey to neutral Turkey and on at last to my own peopl
e and a war which need no longer be private.

  The taxi dropped me well away from the port offices and discreetly vanished. I had no difficulty in passing through the security controls and even received good wishes. My long voyage home to Nicaragua by way of Istanbul, Egypt and round the Cape struck them as unusually adventurous and frustrated by long delays. I was advised to stay in Turkey till the end of the war, which after the sweeping victories of the Reich could not be far off.

  I was rowed out to the loaded tanker. No cabin had been prepared for me but I was allowed to doss down in the sick bay. We sailed in the evening, and the following day, late in the afternoon, were anchored off the oil terminal at Istanbul. Some of the officers went ashore on the ship’s business, among them the grey-haired supercargo who I hoped was attending to my business as well. I waited for his return in the sick bay, where I could be contacted less publicly than on deck.

  He called on me after dark. He spoke French, like most educated Romanians, and told me that all was arranged. At ten o’clock – or as near to it as any Turk was likely to get – there would be a boat close under the bows and a rope hanging down from the rail. The deck would be empty except for the anchor watch, and I should make sure that none of them was anywhere near when I slid down the rope. The boatman would take me into the press of ferryboats on the Stamboul waterfront, one of which had been told to row me across the Horn to Pera.

  The plan worked with a precision which surprised me, though it was far from easy to descend the rope with a case in one hand, even one as light as mine. As we drifted silently away into the reflected lights of the city, I saw the supercargo hauling in the rope. We passed under the bridge and there, side by side on the Stamboul waterfront, were the little ferries. One of them drew alongside and I was transferred to it unobserved with again that remarkable precision. Unobserved, too, I was landed at dark steps on the other side of the Horn. The Romanian agent seemed most efficient. I had now only to walk to the consulate, and Cantescu had explained to me exactly where it was.