They Used Dark Forces gs-8

by Dennis Wheatley

  In the bar, on the old principle that when in enemy territory one should live off the land, he helped himself to a pint flagon of Branntwein and stuffed his pockets with as many Brotchen and biscuits as he could get into them. Then, shortly before six o'clock, still carrying the hold-all, he quietly let himself out of the front door.

  He had entered the capital from the north-east, and although he knew the centre of the city well his knowledge of the metropolitan area was only rudimentary. He was aware that its equivalent to London's East End lay in Moabit and Charlottenburg, and that the rich lived further out to the south and west, mainly in the exclusive suburb of Dahlem or on pleasant properties along the east bank of a long stretch of water known as the Havel, at the extremity of which lay Potsdam. But of Berlin north of the River Spree he knew nothing so, taking the sun for a guide, he headed south.

  Now that daylight had come he found his surroundings more than ever depressing. Unlike the English and the Dutch, the Germans have never been keen gardeners so, although it was high summer, there was hardly a flower to be seen in front of the long rows of small houses and blocks of workers' flats. Here and there along the road there was a factory, to which men and women were now cycling up in droves to start on the day shift, or a line of still-closed shops. Every few hundred yards buildings had been reduced to rubble by the bombing, and several times he had to turn down a side street because the main road was closed owing to time bombs dropped in a recent raid.

  Whenever he had to turn off course he veered to the west and, after a time, found himself in the broad Friedrichstrasse. Proceeding down it, he reached the bridge over the Spree. In The middle of the bridge he halted, put his hold-all on the stone coping and stood there for a while looking down at the river. As is always the case on a city bridge, several other loungers were doing the same thing. Having stood there for a few minutes, he made a gesture as though to take up the hold-all, but knocked it off the parapet. As it hurtled downwards and splashed into the river there came excited cries from the nearest bystanders. Gregory leaned over and stared down in apparent consternation. A few people moved up and commiserated with him. But there was nothing to be done. The hold-al1 had already sunk, and there was no possibility of its recovery.

  With a glum face, which concealed his inward satisfaction, e turned away. He had now disposed of everything which could connect him with the affair at Malacou's cottage.

  So far, so good. But he was still faced with two far more difficult problems-how to reach and cross a neutral frontier and, more difficult still, how to acquire the money to reach one.

  Walking on, he came to the Unter den Linden, with its imposing blocks and three lines of fine trees. He found it sadly altered since he had last seen it in the winter of 1939. Bomb blast had torn great gaps in the trees, every few hundred yards there were railed-off craters, and during four and a half years of war the paint had peeled from the handsome buildings that lined it. Many of them had collapsed as a result of the air-raids, or had been burnt out.

  Turning west, he decided to make a short tour of the principal streets in order to refresh his memory of the geography of the city. Strolling down the Wilhelmstrasse, he saw that Goebbels' Ministry, the Reich Chancellery and the huge block formed by Goering's Air Ministry all had chunks out of their upper storeys due to bombs. Had he still been wearing his stolen S.D. uniform he would never have dared to turn into the Albrecht Strasse, as in it was the H.Q. of the Gestapo, and from it officers were constantly coming and going, one of whom might have challenged him. But now that he was again in civilian clothes, with nothing to distinguish him from other ordinary Berliners, he passed the building with impunity, wondering only where his old enemy Gruppenfьhrer Grauber was at that moment.

  By way of the Potsdamer Platz and the Hermann Goering Strasse he made his way back to the Linden where it ended at the Brandenburg Gate. Beyond it to the east lay the Tiergarten. That, too, was pockmarked by bomb craters with, between them, a veritable forest of long-barrelled ack-ack guns and batteries of searchlights. In a part of it in which the public were still allowed to walk, he sat down on a bench to consider his extremely worrying situation.

  In Berlin every man and woman was an enemy. There was no-one from whom he could borrow money or secure any other form of help, and however carefully he endeavoured to conserve the small store of marks he had taken from the S.D. men's wallets they must be exhausted in the course of a few days. It therefore seemed that his only means of obtaining

  funds was by robbery. Although he was armed he decided that to attempt a bank hold-up would be too risky, while if he tried burgling a private house it was very unlikely that he would find in it the sort of sum he needed in ready money.

  It then occurred to him that the cash desk in a smart restaurant such as Horcher's, or in the dining room of a big hotel, would be certain to contain a fat wad of notes, particularly after dinner; and that he would have a much better chance of getting away with it than by trying to rob a bank. The Adlon was not far off, so he stood up with the intention of paying it a visit and spying out the land.

  The buildings on either side of the great luxury hotel had been blitzed, but it appeared to have escaped damage. He felt a little dubious about going into this famous haunt of Germany 's aristocracy and millionaires, dressed in old country clothes; but the war had brought about as great a deterioration in Berlin 's social life as the Allies' bombs had on the appearance of the city. Prostitutes and profiteers now rubbed shoulders with the old hour monde and many people who had been bombed out, having lost their wardrobes, were reduced to wearing any clothes they could pick up on the Black Market. So, as he entered the big foyer, he was pleased to find that among the motley throng moving about its business there he was not at all conspicuous.

  By then it was the pre-lunch hour so dozens of people were arriving to join friends for cocktails. Walking through to the entrance to the restaurant he saw that a woman was seated at the cash desk and that it consisted of a wooden box the upper part of which was enclosed by plate-glass screens. That did not look very promising as it would be far from easy to grab the money through the low aperture in the front of the box. However, there were many hours yet to go before nightfall, so plenty of time for him to reconnoitre other places in one of which it seemed certain a snatch and run would prove easier, and it occurred to him that might be the case in the bar.

  On entering it he felt that he deserved a drink and that to have it in these pleasant surroundings would be worth the extra cost so, damning the expense, he ordered a large champagne cocktail. Sitting up at the bar, he turned on his stool and ran his eye over the many pretty women and their escorts who were having drinks at the little tables on the other side of the room. Suddenly his heart gave a bound. A slim young woman seated with her back to him had her hair dressed high, with a few delicious little dark curls on the nape of the neck, and he had many times kissed just such curls on thee neck of Sabine Tuzolto.

  Could it be? She looked the right height. If so… Quickly,, he picked up his drink and carried it to a place further along the bar. From his new position he could see the girl's face in one of the big gilt-framed mirrors on the opposite wall. At a glance he saw that her features bore no resemblance to Sabine's, and he was conscious of a sharp stab of disappointment. But her having called Sabine to mind gave him an idea.

  Although Sabine was Hungarian and her home was in Budapest,- since she had become Ribbentrop's girl friend.: she had spent a great part of her time with him in Berlin. If she was still the Nazi Foreign Minister's mistress it was possible that she was in Berlin now. Yet, even should she be, Gregory was-by no means certain that he could count her a friend.

  A he drank his cocktail, his mind shuttled back and forth recalling episodes from the two periods in which they had been lovers, and speculating on what her present feelings towards him might be.

  He had first seen her one night in 1936 at the Casino in Deauville,l a supremely beautiful girl just turned twenty. Her com
panion had been the head of an international smuggling ring and he had been making use of Sabine in his nefarious activities. She would have been arrested and sent to prison with others of the gang had not Gregory later got- her out of England. He had taken her back to Budapest and there, for several joyous weeks, she had willingly rewarded him by becoming his mistress.

  His mind moved on to those hectic weeks he had spent in Budapest in the summer of 1942; to' how Sabine had saved him from his enemies and returned with him to England; to the way she had fooled him and, when in London, spied for the Nazis, got caught and been arrested.

  1. See Contraband.

  When she was a prisoner in the Tower of London it had seemed near impossible to get her out. But by an intrigue with the Moldavian Military Attachй, Colonel Kasdar, Gregory had enabled her to escape and return to Germany. And he had done so without laying himself open to any charge for he, in his turn, had fooled and made use of her.

  The convoys carrying the Allied troops for `Torch' were already on their way to North Africa. With the connivance of the Deception Planners he had sent her back to Ribbentrop with false information about the objective of the expedition. Later it had been learned through secret channels that the information she took back had duly reached Hitler, and had so fully corroborated all the other measures already taken to fool the Germans that the deception plan had proved a complete success.

  Believing that the `Torch' convoys ware making for the east coast of Sicily, so would have to pass through the narrow Straits of Bonn on the afternoon of Sunday November 9th, Kesselring had grounded his air force the previous day, when the convoys were within range,, intending to blitz them with maximum effect on the Sunday. But at midnight the convoys had turned back and at dawn on the 8th landed their troops in Oran and Algiers without the loss of a single ship.

  As Gregory toyed with his champagne cocktail and thought of all this, he wondered what Sabine's reactions would be if she were in Berlin and he could find her.

  Since the Nazis had shot so many W.A.A.F.s and other courageous women who had parachuted into German-occupied territory the British authorities had decided to put chivalrous scruples behind them and have Sabine shot. As he had got her out of the Tower she owed her life to him; while by having enabled him to escape from Budapest he owed his life to her. That cancelled out. But in order to save her he had had to deceive her so that she in turn would deceive Hitler; and how she had come out of that he had no idea.

  It was quite probable that on discovering that he had been fooled Hitler had been furious with Ribbentrop and Ribbentrop furious with her for having led him to communicate false information to his Fuehrer. The odds were, therefore, that she had been through a very sticky time and if she realized that Gregory had deliberately lied to her there was a risk that her resentment might be so intense that she would hand him over to the Gestapo. As against that, in this great city filled with enemies she was the only person who might, for old times' sake, be persuaded to befriend him; so he decided to try to seek her out.

  Finishing his drink, he went to the row of telephone booths and looked in a directory for the name Tuzolto. As he had feared, it was not in the book. The only other way of tracing her, if she was in Berlin, was through Ribbentrop; but to ring up the Minister was out of the question. All the same, Gregory looked up Ribbentrop's private number, found that he still lived in the suburb of Dahlem, and made a note of the address.

  Leaving the Adlon he went back to the Tiergarten, sat down on a bench and made a scratch meal off some of the now mangled Brotchen and crumbled biscuits that he had hastily pushed into his pockets early that morning.

  At about half past one he walked to the nearest tram halt and asked a woman standing near him if a tram went out to Dahlem.

  `No,' she replied, `you would have done better to go to the Potsdamer Bahenhoff and take an electric as far as the Grunewald; but these days there's always a chance that the line is blocked and they're not running. You'd best now take the next Potsdam tram and get off at the Round-point in the wood. The conductor will tell you.'

  A few minutes later Gregory forced his way on to a crowded tram. It followed the main artery west towards Charlottenburg. As it clanged its way into the workers' quarter he was amazed to see on both sides of the highway the havoc that bombs had wrought. Whole rows of buildings had been rendered uninhabitable. Many had been reduced to piles of debris, others gaped open with tottering, shored-up walls rearing skyward. It seemed impossible that anyone could have survived in what must have been such a hell of explosions, flame and collapsing houses. Yet the pavements were swarming with ill-clad, glum-looking people.

  After traversing two miles of this nightmare area the tram turned south-west and entered a slightly more prosperous neighborhood. Here, too, there was much evidence of the air raids and at one point the passengers had to leave the tram because the road was blocked. But after walking a few hundred yards they boarded another tram which carried them into better suburbs on the edge of the Spandau Forest. In due course they reached the Round-point. The woman conductor told Gregory to take the road to the east and that there was no tramway to Dahlem, but he might get a 'bus if he waited long enough.

  Deciding to walk, he set off along a road lined with houses standing in their own gardens. Half an hour later he arrived in the leafy side road he was seeking and another two hundred paces brought him to the gate to Ribbentrop's villa.

  It was a commodious monstrosity typical of those built by wealthy industrialists in Victorian times. That Ribbentrop had not left it after his rise to power for some more spacious and imposing mansion showed that he had neither the taste nor ostentation of Goering; but he would naturally do his public entertaining at the Foreign Office and, Gregory suspected, probably continued to make the villa his home for sentimental reasons, as it had been the scene of many momentous meetings during the rise of the Nazi Party.

  Gregory regarded it with interest, recalling what he had heard about the place. Ribbentrop had been one of the very few of Hitler's early adherents who had money; or, rather, his wife had, for he had married Anneliese Henkel, the heiress of the great German Sparkling Wine House, of which he had been an employee. Hitler had often stayed with the couple in this Dahlem villa and as he understood no language other than German, Ribbentrop, who was fluent in both French and English, habitually read out to him translations of the political articles in the leading foreign Press. It was their long discussions after having read these articles that had convinced Hitler that Ribbentrop was another Bismarck, and later led to his appointment as Ambassador to Britain, then as Foreign Minister of the Third Reich.

  As Gregory stood there he thought how differently things might have gone had those intimate talks never taken place. It was Ribbentrop who had convinced Hitler, in spite of the strenuous, contrary opinions expressed by the professional diplomats and by Goering and the General Staff, that the British people had become entirely decadent and that there was not the least likelihood of their Government going to war on behalf of Poland. That he had proved completely wrong had not shaken Hitler's faith in him; for, even to himself, the egomaniacal Dictator would never admit that his judgement had been at fault; so it was the vain, self-opinionated, ex-wine salesman who had been mainly responsible for bringing about the war, and who continued to lord it at the Foreign Office.

  Pushing open the side gate, Gregory walked up a path. that led to the back entrance of the villa and rang the bell. It was answered by a kitchen maid, of whom he asked if he could have a word with the Herr Reichsaussenminister's valet. She told him to wait and alter a few minutes an elderly fat-faced man came to the door. Departing a little from his normally impeccable German, Gregory said to him:

  `Forgive me for troubling you, mein Herr, but I am a Hungarian, recently arrived from Budapest. My mother was the nurse of the Frau Baronin Tuzolto and I have messages for her. But I have not her address and she is not in the telephone book. My mother told me that she is a close friend of the Herr
Reichsaussenminister; so it occurred to me that someone in his household might be able to help me.'

  The fat- faced man grinned. `Yes, she was a friend of his and as lush a piece as anyone could find to go to bed with; but i don't think he sees much of her now. She never comes here, of course. The missus wouldn't have stood for that. The boss installed her in a nice little villa he owns on Schlachten Inset, just at the entrance to the Wannsee. Used to use it for boating parties when times were better. For all I know she's still there. Anyway, you could go there and enquire. That's the best I can do for you.'

  Having learned that the place was called the Villa Seeaussicht and the best way to get to it, Gregory thanked the man profusely and turned away. From Dahlem he walked back to the Round-point, from there he took a tram a further two miles along the road to Potsdam, then walked again down a side road through the woods to the Havel.

  At that point the fifteen-mile-long lake was a good mile and a half wide and he saw that Schlachten Island projected from near the shore on which he stood, about three-quarters of a mile into it. Crossing a, short causeway to the island, he found that there were several properties on it and that the Villa Seeaussicht was on the south shore; so evidently derived its name from having a splendid view right down the broad arm of the Havel known as the Wannsee.

  Framed in trees, the villa stood about fifty yards back from the road. To one side there was a separate building, obviously a big garage with rooms for a chauffeur above, but it was shut and no car stood outside it. The villa itself had three storey’s and its size suggested that it was about a ten-room house. Muslin curtains in the-upper windows implied that it was occupied, but in the drowsy heat of the summer afternoon no one was about; so Gregory felt that he could carry out a reconnaissance without much fear of being seen.

  Being so doubtful about the sort of reception Sabine would accord him-if, indeed, she was still living there-he was most anxious to avoid presenting himself in circumstances which might prejudice the results of their meeting. For that it was essential that he should come upon her unannounced and alone, so that should she prove willing to help him there would be a chance for her to hide him there temporarily without any servant being aware of his presence or, should she at first grove hostile, he would at least have a chance of talking her round before she gave him away in front of any third party.