The Black Baroness

by Dennis Wheatley

  ‘Yes. Rome bristles with shops that sell clerical outfits, so I should have no difficulty in finding things to fit me tomorrow morning.’

  ‘Bon! Come here a little after twelve, bringing your things in a suit-case, and by the time you leave I will have transformed you as far as lies in my power into the Reverend Eustace.’

  Gregory thanked him and, returning to the Ambassador’s, tried to put a telephone call through to London but he was told that there would be at least six hours’ delay, so he booked one for the following morning. That night he had dinner with Desaix, whom he found to be an amiable though not particularly gifted man whose only grouse was that as he was over forty they would not let him fly a fighter plane in the service of his country.

  Gregory endeavoured to console him by saying that he was doing every bit as good work by making secret trips like the present for Colonel Lacroix, and he explained that he did not know how long he would be in Rome but that he might have to leave in a great hurry. It was agreed that he should vacate his room the following morning and that they should see nothing of each other until the time came for a quick get-out to France; also that the airman should remain at the Ambassador’s, going out only to places from which he could return in twenty minutes and leaving with the hall-porter the telephone number of the place at which he could be found.

  Afterwards, up in his room, Gregory read the forged letter of introduction from the pro-Nazi Mayor of Bordeaux to the Baroness, together with the particulars of the Mayor and the Reverend Eustace which had been in the packet from Lacroix that Riband had handed him that morning. In an hour and a half he had committed to memory all the available data about the man he was to impersonate and went to bed.

  Having spent a restless night, due to worry over Erika, Gregory took his London call only to learn that she was still in grave danger. He then paid his bill and went out to do his shopping. Since he had abandoned his suit-case in Ghent eleven days earlier his only luggage had consisted of shaving and washing gear which he carried slung around his shoulders, in a small gas-mask container; so, after changing some of his English bank-notes for Italian lira, it was a joy to be able to re-equip himself with fresh underclothes, dressing-gown, brushes and pyjamas as well as the black suit, black slouch hat and clerical collars necessary to his new role. With the whole of his purchases packed into a large Revelation suit-case he arrived at Collimard’s at a quarter-past twelve.

  ‘I fear that I have some bad news for you,’ was the Frenchman’s greeting. ‘La Baronne Noire is in Rome no longer; she has left her villa out at Marino and gone north; one assumes to keep in touch with Il Duce, who is said now to be inspecting his troops in the Cottian Alps and other places on the French frontier.’

  ‘Damnation!’ muttered Gregory. ‘Still, I suppose Mussolini is pretty certain to make his headquarters in Turin, so if I go there I ought to be able to get on her track.’

  Collimard shrugged. ‘Who can say? She left Rome only last night, but she may quite well be back here in a day or two. Il Duce is not a man to stay in one place for long and he moves very swiftly; if you go north you may pass her on her way south again.’

  ‘That’s true.’

  ‘Also, you will find your disguise uncomfortable and worrying at first, so it is far better that you should wear it for forty-eight hours before putting it to the test.’

  ‘But the matter is so frightfully urgent.’

  ‘All right; go if you wish, but you would be far wiser to wait at least until I have been able to secure further news for you. By tomorrow I may have fresh information about Il Duce’s intentions.’

  ‘You’re right,’ Gregory admitted reluctantly. ‘There’s no sense in my setting off on a wild-goose chase without even knowing for certain where she is.’

  Collimard then set about changing Gregory’s appearance. He washed and set his hair à la Adolf Hitler so that it hid the scar over his eye, then he proceeded to pluck his eyebrows in one place and add single hairs, with minute particles of very strong gum, in another, until their shape was completely altered. He next opened a packet of false eyelashes and trimming them to half their length added them one by one to Gregory’s own so that although his did not appear longer they became very much thicker. After that he placed more false hairs just in front of his ears, thereby giving him short side-whiskers, and, lastly, he attended to the moustache.

  ‘There!’ he exclaimed in triumph when he had done. ‘You must use only a very soft brush each morning, and you are bound to moult a little as you turn in your sleep each night, so you must come to me to be touched up every two or three days, but I do not believe that your best friend would know you.’ And when he looked in the mirror Gregory had to agree that his face had been changed beyond anything he would have believed possible.

  Having dressed in his clergyman’s clothes he thanked Coilimard for his artistry and, going out, took a taxi to the station, where he mingled with the crowd, and a few minutes later took another one to the Hotel Excelsior, as though he had just arrived by train.

  After registering there as the Reverend Eustace Arberson, and handing in his passport in that name for the usual police check-up, he wrote a note to the Baroness, on the hotel paper, saying that he was in Rome for some days and asking permission to call. Enclosing the letter of introduction with it, he posted it in the hall, then purchased the latest papers and sat down in the lounge to see how the war was going.

  Lacroix’s belief that the German preparations for the next stage of their offensive had been completed on the Tuesday night had proved correct. On Wednesday morning, June the 5th, the battle for France had opened at 9 a.m. On a hundred-and-twenty-mile front, from the Somme to the Aisne, the Germans had attacked with great masses of troops supported by over a thousand dive-bombers. Hitler’s weather still held in France, but the paper said that the smoke of battle had been so thick that it had blotted out the bright June sun. The enemy had made no progress until the afternoon, but they had then succeeded in securing bridge-heads across the river and their tank columns had struck through Amiens, Peronne and Laon towards Paris. The French Cabinet had met to discuss the new crisis shortly before midnight.

  That evening Churchill had made a statement in the House in which he had frankly referred to Dunkirk as a ‘colossal military disaster’ sustained by the British Army, which had enabled the enemy to acquire strategic bases of great importance and many of France’s most valuable industrial areas. Britain had lost vast quantities of material and over 30,000 killed, wounded and missing, but 335,000 British, French and Belgians had been saved and the R.A.F. had covered themselves with glory. The B.E.F. was to be reconstituted and, said Mr. Churchill, Britain would never surrender.

  Owing to the pro-German bias of the Italians the Government-controlled Press had printed Mr. Churchill’s speech only in small type on the back page of the paper. The front page was devoted to that day’s news; the announcement of a new French Cabinet in which Daladier, the sworn enemy of Italy, was out altogether, Reynaud’s taking over Foreign Affairs as well as the Premiership; and a statement that although the French centre was reported to be holding for the moment it must soon give way, since the Germans had hurled 2,000 tanks into the battle.

  Another headline on the front page announced Italy’s declaration that a band of twelve miles round her coast and that of Albania must now be regarded as dangerous to shipping and that exit permits would be distributed to foreigners who guaranteed to leave Italy within two days.

  Gregory’s Italian was by no means as perfect as his German or French but he knew quite enough to read the paper with reasonable ease and its contents were extremely perturbing. The matter of issuing special exit permits might be only one more measure designed to scare the Allies and there was no suggestion that foreigners who did not take advantage of it would be interned; but the whole tone of the paper was openly threatening and it looked as though Mussolini was now very near the brink.

  On the Friday morning, the third day of the
battle, the news looked somewhat better. The French were reported to have destroyed at least four hundred German tanks and although at some points they had made withdrawals they had succeeded in throwing back the enemy forces which had reached the south bank of the Aisne.

  Gregory rang up Collimard but the Frenchman had as yet no news and urged him to wait another day, as by that time either the Baroness would be on her way back to Rome or else he would have definite information of her whereabouts. He also tried to get through to London, but, owing to the crisis, the Exchange refused to take his call.

  A small item in one of the afternoon papers caught Gregory’s eye and he saw that Captain B. A. W. Warburton-Lee, of H.M. destroyer Hardy, had posthumously been awarded the first Victoria Cross of the war for his gallant attack on Narvik. The action had taken place barely eight weeks before, but Gregory thought sadly how far away Narvik seemed now and how utterly unimportant compared with the vast struggle which was at that moment taking place in Northern France.

  The headline of the paper was to the effect that all Italian ships had been ordered to the nearest home or neutral port, which seemed to Gregory really sinister. Mussolini had been filling his money-bags by working his merchant fleet for all it was worth during the past nine months while his peace-time competitors were compelled to use theirs for war purposes. For him to have cancelled all future sailings was therefore showing the red light in earnest. That evening bands of excited young Fascists marched through the streets of Rome calling for war and hurling abuse at France and Britain.

  On the Saturday morning Gregory telephoned Collimard again and learnt that both Mussolini and the Baroness were in Genoa, so he decided to go north at once. Having paid his bill he went to Collimard’s, where he spent an hour having his disguise touched-up. At first its strangeness had irritated him exceedingly, particularly the moustache, which was the very devil while eating, but he was getting accustomed to it now and Collimard expressed his satisfaction at the way in which it had stood up to two days’ wear and tear. Gregory then drove to the station and before catching his train bought all the papers—Italian, British, French and German—that he could lay his hands on to read during his journey.

  The Germans had launched a new attack on a sixty-mile front, from Aumale to Noyon. To the forty divisions already engaged they had hurled in seven fresh armoured divisions and twenty new infantry divisions. The Nazis were now using 4,000 tanks, 2,500 planes and 1,000,000 men.

  The British Admiralty had announced that after nine months of war the balance of naval strength in our favour was greater than ever before and that nearly a million tons of warships were building in British shipyards. That little paragraph made cheering reading, but the trouble was that it was of very little help to the French at the moment.

  He arrived at Genoa at 6.30 in the evening and immediately bought fresh papers. The stop-press told him that the new enemy attack had sent the French reeling back from the Aumale-Noyon line and that the Germans had secured a small bridgehead over the Aisne but had not succeeded in actually breaking through; there was a rumour that Mussolini would speak on the following day.

  He drove up the hill to the Hotel Miramar and, having secured a room, set about making tactful inquiries as to the whereabouts of Mussolini, representing himself as an American parson, since feeling was now running very high against the English. No one seemed to know anything for certain although the Italians—polite as ever—were willing enough to gratify the goggle-eyed foreigner’s obvious desire to catch a glimpse of the great man. Il Duce had certainly been in Genoa that morning but he was living on his special train, which had moved out of its siding at half-past two in the afternoon; the probability was that he had gone up again to inspect other units on the potential battle-front. A little after midnight Gregory went to bed depressed and miserable. The awful uncertainty about Erika was preying on his mind, and he knew that it was hopeless to look for the Baroness until he bad managed to locate Il Duce.

  On the Sunday morning Gregory was up and out early. He found that the whole great city was alive with troops and pulsing with activity. Sailors, soldiers, airmen, Blackshirts, singly and in groups, crowded the hot pavements; aeroplanes hummed overhead, tanks, guns and lorries clattered through the streets or bounced along on their big balloon tyres. Genoa was the nearest Italian port of any size to the French Riviera so it was naturally a base of the first importance and it already had the appearance of a war-time city.

  From the morning papers it seemed that the German war machine was at last losing its impetus and between Montdidier and No yon the attack was certainly less incisive. It was not until after midday that he learnt definitely that Mussolini was now in Turin, so he took the afternoon train there and sat sweltering in his shirt-sleeves while the train wound its way up through the mountains and across the plain of Piedmont.

  On arriving, he learned to his delight that II Duce’s train was actually on a siding just outside the town but he soon found that he could not get within half a mile of it; every approach was guarded by both Fascists in their black-and-silver and the picturesque Carabinieri with their comic-opera hats and fierce-looking black mostaccios. However, he thought it unlikely that the Baroness was on the train and spent the evening combing every hotel in the city to try to get news of her.

  Turin was also packed with troops and, if possible, even more of an armed camp than Genoa, Mussolini had not yet spoken, but it was thought that at any hour he might do so.

  It was the fifth day of the battle for France, and for the Allies it might well have been termed Black Sunday. As Gregory listened to the last radio broadcast in his hotel that night he realised that for the French things were very black indeed. Near the coast a force of three hundred enemy tanks had penetrated the Bresle defences the day before. They had now reached the outskirts of Rouen and Pont de Larche, on the Seine. The Germans were within fifty miles of Paris and the French radio announced that all schools in the capital were to be closed and the children sent out of the city.

  That morning at dawn a new attack had been launched on a wide front, from Château-Porcien to the Argonne. The French had stemmed it, but 2,000,000 men and 3,500 tanks were now storming their line along the entire front from the sea to Montmédy, and General Weygand, the hope of France, had spoken, saying: ‘We have reached the last quarter of the vital hour.’

  Italy’s entry into the battle was unquestionably imminent, but Gregory felt that if only he could find and kill the Black Baroness there was just a chance that, with her evil influence removed from Mussolini’s immediate followers, wiser counsels might yet prevail.

  That night, therefore, he went back to the station for another endeavour to get near enough to Il Duce’s train to question some of the people on it. He felt that, as the Italians are very open to bribery, if only he could get hold of one of the cooks or attendants they might be induced to tell him whether the Baroness had visited the train, or give him some fresh line to work on; but when he got to the station the train was no longer there. Il Duce was on his way back to Rome.

  Weary, angry and despondent, Gregory inquired about the first train south by which he could follow and found that the next did not leave until 5.40 in the morning. For a moment he considered ringing up Desaix to ask him to fly north and take him back to Rome in his plane, but he abandoned the project almost as soon as it entered his head. Desaix was a Frenchman and he, as the Reverend Eustace, was travelling on an English passport. Turin was now a military area and it was certain that the Italian authorities would not allow aircraft belonging to their potential enemies to come and go freely from it any longer. The two of them might even be arrested on suspicion and detained. If that happened it might be days before they could get free again, or if Italy entered the war they might find themselves in a concentration-camp for good. He went back to the hotel, slept naked on account of the torrid heat, and caught the train south just as dawn was breaking.

  He had come to loathe the sight of his thick, black clergym
an’s clothes and during the seemingly endless morning they proved almost unendurable. By mid-day the steel train was like a furnace and his clerical dog-collar had been reduced to a limp rag.

  The papers that he bought in stations where the train stopped informed him that the French Army was still intact and that for the last few days fresh British forces which had been landed in France had been holding a sector on the French left flank. Churchill had sent a message to Reynaud promising that every available man should be rushed across from those units which still had arms and equipment, and calling upon the French to hold fast.

  The Italian Press was now openly screaming for war. ‘Nice, Corsica, Tunis!’ they cried in union, aching to get their dirty fingers on the loot, like a sneak thief who sees a householder at night already being bludgeoned by a powerful burglar. To add to the overflowing cup, the British aircraft-carrier Glorious and the destroyers Asarta and Ardente had been sunk while pulling the Army’s chestnuts out of the fire in another ‘skilfully conducted’ evacuation. After all the shouting we had abandoned Narvik and left to their fate all that remained of the wretched Norwegians, who apparently had covered our withdrawal by a gallant action.

  Arrived in Rome, Gregory drove straight to the Excelsior, and from there rang up the Villa Godolfo. A manservant answered him and he asked if Madame la Baronne was at home. To his immense relief he learned that she was, so he gave his name as the Reverend Eustace Arberson and asked the man to find out if the Baronne had received a letter of introduction which he had sent her some days before.

  The man left the line and after being away some minutes returned to say that Madame la Baronne regretted her apparent discourtesy in not having acknowledged Pére Arberson’s letter, but that she had been away for several days and had got back only early that morning. Unfortunately she was leaving the Villa Godolfo again that evening so she could not ask him to lunch or dine, but if he cared to come out that afternoon she would be most happy to see him.