Presidential Agent

by Sinclair, Upton;

  The stair door was not locked. Lanny opened it with care, making no click, and stood listening. The silence was that supposed to be appropriate to the tomb. He flashed his torch for one moment and saw that the stairs were made of heavy blocks of stone, well worn by nearly two hundred years of use. One glance was enough and he shut off the light, which might alarm either his enemies or his friends. He went down the steps, one at a time, stopping to listen for the faintest sound, and using his utmost efforts not to make any. At the bottom was another door, and he tried it softly and found it was unlocked. Had Hofman unlocked it? He had said that they would close every door they found closed, so as to avoid attracting the attention of anyone who might happen to be passing.

  The intruder flashed his light again. A long corridor, about six feet wide, running in both directions; walls of stone, and a number of doors of heavy wood, all having locks. Storerooms, no doubt; the locks were large and old, something that was to be expected. The conspirators had agreed that there would hardly be prisoners behind wooden doors without openings; also, a door which shut off the dungeon part of the cellars from the storeroom portions would almost certainly be of steel, or at least of heavy iron.

  Which way had Monck and Hofman gone? Lanny might have told them to drop a scrap of paper for an indication; but the idea that he might follow them had never been contemplated. He had to make a guess, as they had doubtless done; he chose the direction in which he knew the main part of the building lay. Before he started he took a franc from his purse and laid it in front of the door. If his friends saw it, they might guess what it meant; in any case, it would serve to tell Lanny himself how to find the stairs again. He would count his steps, and make careful note of every turn he made.

  One—two—three—four—five—six—seven. Lanny taking tiptoe steps, in black darkness, guiding himself by the walls; stopping every few steps to listen, and thinking that the crazy pounding of his heart must be echoing up and down the corridor like any other sort of pumping plant. He knew he was in the midst of dangers, and didn’t try to deny to himself that he was scared. He wanted very much to be out of there, and all that held him was the desire to take Trudi with him. Try as he would, he failed to think of any plausible reason he could give Seine Hochgeboren for tiptoeing about in the cellars of that nobleman’s country home at half past three in the morning. He could say that he craved a drink of liquor; but what about the half bottle of cognac he had in his pocket? Could he say he had found that in the cellar? They would surely ask him: “Where?”

  V

  Presently he came to a cross corridor, and there he stopped and listened long. Not a sound in this tomb. He felt about him with his hands and made certain of the layout; he had three directions to choose among, and no time to be wasted; he flashed on his light, down one corridor and then the next. He saw a shadow darting swiftly down one of them, and his heart leaped so that it hurt. A sound of scurrying feet—a rat. He and his friends had discussed this as one of the phenomena to be expected. “Rats go wherever men go,” Monck had said; “they have better brains and will outlast us.” The three had debated this idea; an ex-sailor, who had lived among rats and observed them closely, pointed out that men chose to think about a great variety of matters, but rats thought about nothing but taking care of rats. Their method was outwitting men and stealing their food. Also, they didn’t fight one another, at least not persistently, and in armies, as men did. “And doesn’t that prove they have better brains?”

  Here they were, taking this old château for their own, and having nothing to do but burrow themselves into safe hiding places and get access to stores of food. Doubtless they compelled Seine Hochgeboren, and before him M. le Duc, to pay tens of thousands of francs every year for food for them. They had gnawed holes at the bottom of most of these wooden doors. Perhaps—oh, God!—they had got into the cell where Trudi had been confined, and eaten the ends of her fingers and toes on occasions when she lay unconscious. Doubtless there were cats also in these cellars; they do not concern themselves about strangers, and would make no trouble for Lanny—but one little terrier dog might bring all their plans to ruin.

  Lanny went down one of the side corridors and found himself confronting a row of coal bins, filled to overflowing. This building had not been modernized, and all its rooms were heated by grate fires; the coal was shoveled into scuttles—here was a row of them. A large dumbwaiter, the invention of the American Thomas Jefferson, went up through the floor above. This was the rear of the building, and Lanny had stupidly guessed that it might be where the dungeons were situaated—overlooking such commonplace necessities as coal chutes, and the delivery and storage of huge quantities of food and wine.

  He retraced his steps, counting them carefully, seventy-four tiptoe steps, which are not so long. He found the coin on the floor and left it there; he went in the other direction, and it wasn’t long before he came to another cross corridor. Again he felt about him, and listened, holding his breath. What sounds would his friends be making? Hofman would probably be crouched down, working on a lock, and the sounds he made would be so faint that he himself could hardly hear them. He might or might not be using a flashlight. Monck might be standing guard, or perhaps prowling in different directions to listen. Both men were wearing rubber overshoes. Both would be as nervous as Lanny, though their pride might forbid them to admit it. Certainly neither would thank him for sneaking up on them and causing their hearts to stop beating.

  The explorer turned his tiny light down one of the cross corridors. It vanished into nothingness, and he tiptoed in that direction and found a large space piled solid with split logs: a store of wood for the great fireplaces above. Doubtless there was a dumbwaiter leading to a service room above. There was a great scurrying of rats here, and Lanny guessed that hundreds of generations of them had come to being in the interstices of those logs. Perhaps they never went out into the daylight, and had lost the power to see except in the dark. The thought came: “At what hour in the morning do the servants start to get coal and wood up to the floors above?”

  VI

  Lanny hastened his steps, exploring the anatomy of the ancient establishment of the Belcour family, favorites of King Louis the Sixteenth of France. Surely they had had enemies and the need to keep these enemies where they could do no harm. Even if it hadn’t been so, even if they had relied upon the King to protect them, the architects would have put in dungeons, because dungeons were a proper feature of châteaux.

  Lanny’s gloved hands came to a door which seemed different from the others and he flashed the torch. Iron, black-painted, with rust in spots. He tried the knob softly, and it turned; the door came open, with the faintest trace of creaking. The intruder listened again; not a sound, not even a rat. He flashed his torch, and saw stone steps going down. Here was the place! He and his friends had agreed that if they could find a way to a second level in the cellars, that was where the dungeons would be. A place where the cries of the unhappy could never reach the guests in the banquet hall and on the dancing floor! A place where nobody could signal the unfortunates by playing Blondel songs on a grand piano!

  Lanny took one step down, and then silently, oh, so carefully, closed the door, cursing its faint creaks. He didn’t want to alarm his friends, and he could count upon it that they were here. Almost certainly the reason this door was unlocked was that the Meister-Schlosser had solved its mysteries.

  As soon as the door was tightly closed, Lanny gave the signal agreed upon, an owl’s hoot: “Hoo, hoo!” with the accent on the second syllable, long drawn. They had planned it for outdoors, where it would be more appropriate. Or was it conceivable that there were openings into these cellars through which owls might find their way? Would they be nesting in crannies up above the piles of logs, and pouncing on the rats that scurried on the floor? Just as rats have nothing to think about but rats, so owls would have nothing to think about but owls; and they, too, might outlast men, having brains enough not to fight their fellow-owls.
<
br />   No answer to the call. With his gloved hands on the walls at each side of the narrow passage, Lanny went down, step by step—sixteen of them, and sixteen times he put his weight on the stones with painful slowness, for he had no rubber shoes to dull the sound. At the bottom the corridor went straight ahead, and he didn’t dare to flash the light, but stood again and called, a bit louder: “Hoo, hoo!” This time he heard an answer, faint but prompt. Some other owl was in this subterranean tunnel!

  Lanny wasted no fraction of a second, but went toward the sound, as quickly as he could on tiptoe. There was a turn in the passage, and when he came there, the beam of a flashlight appeared suddenly full upon him. He stopped, and flashed his own tiny light, and there was the spectacle he had been imagining for the past two hours; Hofman on his knees before a door, with his metal box of tools beside him, and Monck on guard behind him with a torchlight in his hand. One glimpse was enough for all three, and they shut off their lights at the same moment. Lanny came to the locksmith and whispered, barely audibly: “What have you found?”

  “There is somebody in here.”

  “Is it Trudi?”

  “We can’t be sure. We hear groans; nothing else.”

  “Man or woman?”

  “We can’t tell that.”

  “Can you get the door open?”

  “I think so. I am working.” Not a word more; he went to work.

  Monck drew Lanny a short way into the corridor, so that they would not disturb Hofman. The German whispered: “Why did you come?”

  “I thought you must be in trouble.”

  “The dogs are penned up?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is there a watchman?”

  “I have him blind drunk. I don’t think he will move.”

  “Everything else O.K.?”

  “So far as I know. Have you opened any of these other doors?”

  “We haven’t had time. We had to open three doors on the way here. I’ve listened at all the cell doors and heard nothing. All the slots are closed but this one, and that seems to indicate the others are empty.”

  VII

  Hofman whispered: “Hush!” and they fell silent. He was working in darkness, guided by his senses of touch and hearing. He had some kind of instrument in the keyhole and was moving it ever so gently. Only he could hear the sounds, and know what they meant; that was his business, at which he had worked and played most of his life. Lanny would have liked to listen at those other doors, but he was afraid to move a muscle; Monck had listened, and that had to be enough. Time, which had stood still for Lanny, was now racing for all three of them.

  Suddenly there came a clicking sound, and a whisper: “I have it!” The lock turned, and the door creaked on its hinges. In the second which that took, Lanny and Monck had moved to the locksmith’s side, and when he flashed his torch into the cell, all three pairs of eyes were as one.

  The place was about ten feet long and eight wide. It had no window; only the two openings, one at the top and one at the bottom of the door. The air was fetid, and had the smell of dried blood which Lanny had learned to know in Nazi dungeons. In the far corner, to the right as you entered, was an iron cot, and on it lay a figure covered with a dirty gray blanket. Hofman stepped in and they followed, all three with their torches turned on. In that bright light they saw that the prisoner was a man, stoutish, gray-haired, and with a straggly gray beard which might have taken a week to grow.

  In the light the prisoner stirred and groaned, but did not open his eyes; he was alive, but perhaps not much more than that. There were wounds on his head, unbandaged, and the blood had run over his face. Apparently he had been left here to die, if he chose to do so. Beside the cot was a plate with dry bread, a tin cup, and a pitcher with water. Whether he was able to help himself to these was apparently no concern of the men who had left him here.

  “He looks to be a German,” whispered Monck; but of course one couldn’t be sure, since there are so many types of Germans, and they have been so thoroughly mixed with bordering and invading peoples through the centuries.

  Lanny suggested: “Your uniform may frighten him. Better wait outside for a bit.”

  Monck went out, and Lanny poured some water into the tin cup, and sprinkled it into the man’s face. He stirred and moaned, but did not open his eyes. Lanny whispered: “Lift up his head,” and Hofman set his torch on the stand and did as requested. “The whole back of his head is bloody,” he declared.

  Lanny put the water to the man’s lips and tried to get him to drink. Lanny had to take one gloved hand and press his jaw down to get his mouth open; then he poured in a little water and the man swallowed it. He began to moan: “Ach! Oh weh!”—which confirmed the guess as to his nationality. He laid his head down, but still he did not speak, and Lanny said: “I’ll try a little cognac.”

  He took the bottle from his pocket and uncorked it. Hofman raised the poor fellow again, and Lanny poured in a few drops of the liquor; this started the man to coughing, and Lanny waited, then tried a little more. At the same time he murmured: “Wir sind Freunde”—we are friends; and then: “You have nothing to fear.”

  The man opened his eyes, which were pale blue; one had been badly bruised and may have been useless. Lanny went on whispering reassurances, but perhaps his words were not understood. There was terror in the prisoner’s face, and he cried faintly: “Nicht peitschen!” Do not whip me!

  Lanny repeated, over and over: “We are friends. Do not be afraid.” But the prisoner began to whimper in a faint voice. Evidently nobody had come into this cell for any purpose but to torture him, and whatever else they told him would be a trick.

  Hofman whispered into Lanny’s ear: “We cannot stay. Our time is up.” But Lanny had no idea of leaving without some further effort.

  “I have an idea,” he said. He pulled off the blanket, revealing a sickening spectacle; the man had apparently been whipped on both his front and back; the former was a mass of bloody stripes. But Lanny was hardened to Nazi methods and didn’t stop for comment; he hastily folded the blanket, and said to Hofman: “Lift him up.” He placed the folded blanket so as to prop the man’s head up, facing forward; then he sat beside the victim, leaning over him, and flashed the tiny torchlight into his eyes. Lanny began to murmur softly: “Wir sind Freunde,” and “Keine Angst!”—don’t be afraid. Then in a sort of singsong, slowly: “Sie wollen schlafen”—you want to sleep. “Sie wollen schlafen, Sie wollen schlafen!”—over and over. Lanny had read somewhere that you cannot hypnotize a man without his own consent; but perhaps a man in a daze like this wouldn’t know how to refuse. Anyhow, why not try? He went on and on trying, in spite of Hofman’s whispered protests.

  The prisoner was staring into the light, and perhaps he was getting the words; his whimpering ceased, and apparently he was being calmed. Lanny began passing his free hand before his face, just below the beam, not interrupting it entirely. He changed his formula: “Sie schlafen—Sie schlafen. Schlafen—schlafen.” It is a good singing word, with a broad “a” as the Germans say it; and after seemingly endless repetitions of it, the eyes closed. The man might be in a trance, or he might be asleep, or he might be dead. It wouldn’t take long to find out.

  VIII

  Lanny shut off the torch and bent close to the man’s face, whispering: “We are friends. Freunde, Freunde. We won’t harm you. Tell me who you are. Was ist ihr Name?” He kept repeating these words, until at last there came a reply, so faintly that Lanny couldn’t be sure whether he heard, or whether his own imagination was supplying it. He wanted Hofman to hear it too, so he said: “Lauter. Noch einmal. Ihr Name.”

  This time Hofman could hear, and what a jolt it gave him! First Paul, and then Teicher, the first name pronounced “Powl,” in German fashion. The name that both Lanny and Hofman had heard in the séance room from the lips of the old Polish woman, supposed to be speaking for Ludi Schultz! The old man who was kind, and who had tried to help Trudi, and who was being tortured by the Nazis! This
was he!

  “Sagen Sie, Paul, there was a woman prisoner here?”

  “Ja—eine junge Frau.”

  “What was her name?”

  “Nein, nein! She wouldn’t tell! She didn’t tell me! Ich weiss nichts!” Evidently this question terrified the victim.

  “Don’t be afraid, Paul. We are friends. Your friends and her friends also. Was her name Trudi?”

  “They said that was her name.”

  “The Nazis said that?”

  “But she wouldn’t say. She wouldn’t tell me.” Still the terror.

  “What did they do with her?”

  “They beat her, but she never talked.”

  “Is she here now?”

  “No, they took her away.”

  “Where did they take her?”

  “To Germany.”

  “Why did they do that?”

  “Because she wouldn’t tell them anything.”

  “They didn’t kill her?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Why did they beat you?”

  “I tried to help her.”

  “What did you do?”

  “She wrote a letter and I tried to take it out. They were watching me and they got it.”

  “Who was the letter to?”

  “A French name, I forget. Long—something.”