The Black Baroness

by Dennis Wheatley

  ‘Capitulate?’ cried Gregory. ‘But this is ghastly!—unthinkable! What in God’s name can Weygand be thinking of to permit even the suggestion of capitulation to be mentioned in the French War Cabinet?’

  Lacroix looked up sadly. ‘Mon ami, it is best that you should know the truth. It is Weygand who heads the party that is urging Reynaud to move to Bordeaux.’

  Gregory mopped his forehead as he murmured: ‘Weygand—France’s hope; and Leopold warned me, yet I was fool enough to laugh at him. Is there nobody whom one can trust?’

  ‘You may trust de Gaulle; but Weygand must from now on be counted among the enemy. Almost hourly, from Sunday last—Black Sunday—he has been telephoning Reynaud to say that there is no more than he can do and urging the Government to leave Paris. Today we reach the crisis. This morning Reynaud actually signed the order for the move to Bordeaux, but de Gaulle made him countermand it and preparations are still going forward for a move to Quimpier. But it was necessary for de Gaulle to remain with Reynaud in his office all day in order to ensure that he was not got at and that he did not change his mind once more. Then, an hour ago, your friend, the Baroness arrived there.’

  ‘Oh hell! I thought you said she was at Fontainebleau?’

  ‘She was. And it is virtually certain that she will return there tonight to collect her papers and valuables before moving south out of the new battle area, of which Fontainebleau will now automatically become a part; but this afternoon she did something which she has never done before—she came openly to the Ministry and demanded to see Reynaud in his office. At first de Gaulle made him refuse to see her, but no one dared to stop her and she forced her way into his room. She insisted on seeing Reynaud alone, but de Gaulle would not leave; and, as far as I know, they are still in conference. Those are the facts; I had them from de Gaulle’s secretary, who left the room only after the Baroness had forced her way into it.’

  Gregory had overestimated his strength when he left the hotel and he was now feeling desperately ill and weak again. ‘I thought,’ he said slowly, ‘that the Baronne’s affair with Reynaud was all over, long ago?’

  ‘It is, I believe, many years since they were lovers but they have always remained close friends; and unfortunately she still has great influence with him.’

  ‘God! That woman! How I wish I’d shot her in Rotterdam when I had the chance. If I can’t manage to do something about it soon she’ll hand us all over, bound hand and foot, to the Nazis. But can’t you telephone—find out if there’s anything fresh? To wait here like this is simply intolerable.’

  Lacroix glanced at his watch. I should have been informed at once if any definite decision had been taken; but it’s over an hour since I had the last report so I’ll inquire how things are going.’ He moved over to his telephone and asked for a number.

  They waited in silence for a few moments while Gregory closed his eyes and mopped the perspiration from his forehead; then Lacroix made a series of meaningless exclamations. Replacing the receiver he turned back to Gregory.

  ‘They have just come out. De Gaulle remained in the room all the time but they persuaded him to stand by the window so that he was practically out of earshot. Five minutes ago Reynaud suddenly snatched up his hat and stick. He pushed the Baroness out of the room and exclaimed as he followed her: “De Gaulle, it will be the South after all—and this is final.”’

  Gregory roused himself and nodded. ‘That, of course, means Bordeaux; so the Baroness wins once again. But I mean to see to it that she doesn’t live to enjoy her triumph.’

  ‘You are determined to go down to Fontainebleau tonight, then?’

  ‘Yes. What’s the name of her house?’

  ‘It is the Pavillon de Chasse, Mirabeau, and you will find it deep in the forest, down a side-turning to the right of the main road, some three miles this side of Fontainebleau.’

  The Colonel paused for a moment. Gregory felt positively deathly. There seemed to be a great weight on his chest and he could no longer see clearly, but he heard Lacroix go on:

  ‘Since you are set on making this attempt let us derive all the benefit possible from it. Whatever may be the outcome of the present battle, you may take it that there are many men like General de Gaulle and myself who will fight on. Among the Baroness’s papers there must be many letters and other documents which will inform us whom we can, and whom we cannot, trust. Those papers must already be packed for removal; if you can secure them you will have rendered us a service of the utmost importance.’

  Gregory mopped his head again. “All right,’ he said; ‘I’ll go now—I—I.…’ As he stood up the room seemed to sway about him. He rocked unsteadily for a moment then crashed to the floor, unconscious.

  24

  Death in the Sunshine

  As he knelt down beside the still body the little Colonel sadly shook his head. He knew that Madame la Baronne Noire was not destined to die by Gregory’s hand that night and he felt that it might be many days—vital days—before Gregory was again fit to strike a blow at the enemy. Standing up, he rang his bell, and when it was answered, gave swift instructions for Gregory’s removal in a police ambulance to his hotel.

  Gregory came out of his faint before they reached the Saint Regis and by the time he was carried up to his room he had recovered sufficiently, in spite of his anger with himself at his own weakness, to be faintly amused at the reception accorded him by his pretty nurse.

  ‘Méchant, méchant!’ she upbraided him, wagging a slim finger in his face before proceeding to help him back to bed. ‘What children men are! They think there is no limit to their strength, and that however ill they are the world will cease to turn if for one moment they must give up the new games with which they amuse themselves when they are too old any longer to play with their lead soldiers and their model aeroplanes, if women ruled the world your nasty dangerous toys would be taken from you for good and all, then there would be some peace and happiness for a change.’

  For a moment Gregory wondered if there was not a great fundamental truth in what she said. Women ask very little of life except a mate and security in which to bring up their offspring. It is men who are the dreamers for good or ill, and for every outstanding male who lifts the human race by some great scientific or artistic achievement there is always an Attila, a Napoleon or a Hitler whose visions lead him to inflict untold misery upon his fellow-men. Perhaps, he thought, it would be better if, like the ants or bees, the human race were content to live under a matriarchy, where there was no progress, no ambition, but work and food for all; yet somehow he could not believe that, because if one rejected all hope of advancement as the price of permanent peace it meant the death of the spirit, by the possession of which alone man differs from the insects and the animals.

  He slept well and woke the following morning still weak but better and with the knowledge that work lay before him which must be done.

  Even with dissension rife among France’s War Cabinet and a defeatist spirit in the very person of her Commander-in-Chief, that spirit had not yet spread to her junior Generals, her regimental officers or her soldiers, who were still fighting gamely; so France might yet be saved.

  Reynaud had given in to the Baroness on the previous afternoon, but only after many days of constant pressure from her associates. It was quite on the cards that he might change his mind once again when the Government was removed from the atmosphere of Paris, which was now flooded with the defeatism brought by a million refugees from France’s northern provinces. It needed only a slight weakening of the German effort—which by all reasoning was already overdue—a small counter-offensive launched with success in some sector by a Corps Commander, or even a Divisional General, to make the fighting spirit of de Gaulle once again paramount in the counsels of the wavering Premier; but as long as the Black Baroness lived she was a constant menace to any such last-moment recovery. She had to die, and it was Gregory’s business to bring about her death.

  After he had breakfasted he tol
d Sister Madeleine quietly but firmly that his good night’s rest had really given him the strength to carry on, this time, and that he meant to get up; but he was not destined to do so. With a superior air she lifted the receiver of his bedside telephone and asked for the agent de ville to be sent up.

  ‘Come, come,’ Gregory laughed. ‘The law doesn’t give you power to keep a sick man in bed against his will, so it’s no good sending for the police.’

  ‘They’re here already,’ she smiled, ‘and what powers they have you will soon learn for yourself.’

  When the agent de ville arrived he was very tactful, but it transpired that he was acting under the orders of Colonel Lacroix. He had been instructed to tell Gregory that the Colonel did not consider him in a fit state to operate for the time being and that if he attempted to leave his bed he was to be placed under arrest; also that Paris was in no immediate danger, but should the capture of the city become imminent the invalid would be evacuated before there was any risk of his becoming a prisoner. In the meantime, Lacroix sent his best wishes for Gregory’s speedy recovery and a promise that he would be allowed his freedom the moment that the doctor’s reports showed him well enough not to abuse it.

  This was a state of things against which it was difficult to take counter-measures. Gregory knew Lacroix too well to believe that the Colonel would succumb to pleas or argument, and he realised that he was really not yet up to tackling the job of evading both Sister Madeleine and the agent de ville. In his heart of hearts he knew, too, that Lacroix’s decision had been a wise one; so he resigned himself to accept it, but he sent for a war map and followed every fresh bulletin with the greatest anxiety.

  It was known that the Germans were now within twenty miles of Paris. By mid-day news came in that their armoured divisions had smashed through on the Lower Oise to Persan and Beaumont. To the East they were now endeavouring to drive a spear-head behind the Maginot Line; around Rheims the pressure was increasing hourly, and they succeeded in forcing the Passage of the Marne at Château-Thierry. West of Paris the situation was equally critical; between Rouen and Vernon the Germans had established bridge-heads across the Lower Seine and by evening it was learnt that Le Havre was in peril.

  This last piece of news seemed to Gregory especially grave. Le Havre was the main British war base and there stocks of millions of shells, thousands of lorries, hundreds of guns and colossal quantities of other equipment had been steadily built up during the whole nine months of the war. As long as Le Havre remained in our possession these could be used to re-equip fresh units sent from home; but their quantity was far too great for them to be moved, so if the Germans succeeded in forcing their way down the coast this incalculably valuable accumulation of brand new war material must be either destroyed or captured.

  There had been little movement on France’s Italian front, so it looked as though Mussolini was chary of testing out the valour of his Fascists, but the R.A.F, had bombed Turin, Genoa, Milan, Tobruk and Italy’s Abyssinian bases, with good effect. Spain had made a formal announcement of nonbelligerency in favour of the Axis, so evidently our new Ambassador, Sir Samuel Hoare, had cut little ice with General Franco as yet.

  On the Thursday Gregory telephoned a store for some ready-made clothes on approval and from them selected an outfit to replace his clergyman’s gear. The morning papers said that the French had made counter-attacks at Persan and Beaumont, winning back five miles of ground, but that further west, at Rouen, the situation was worsening hourly. The Germans were now throwing in their unarmoured infantry with utter recklessness and their troops were pouring over their bridge-heads across the lower Seine. East of Paris, Rheims had fallen and the new German thrust to outflank the Maginot Line was making rapid progress.

  During that day the enemy were steadily closing in on the western, northern and eastern approaches to Paris, and General Weygand formally declared it an open city. At night Reynaud broadcast a last desperate appeal to President Roosevelt while the B.B.C. proclaimed that Britain’s factories were now working night and day without cessation to equip a new army, the advance units of which were sailing hour by hour as rifles and gas-masks could be placed in the hands of the mea who had been saved from Dunkirk.

  On the Friday, Gregory had so far recovered that even Sister Madeleine agreed that he was sufficiently well to get up, and after breakfast he was just about to do so when, having left the room for a moment, she returned to announce a visitor. To Gregory’s surprise and delight Kuporovitch walked in.

  The Russian was in gigantic spirits. He had flown from England that morning and at last achieved his ambition of reaching Paris again after twenty-six years of exile from his beloved holiday resort.

  Even the sound of the battle which was raging outside the city, and the sight of the streams of refugees passing through it, could not altogether rob him of his joy. From his taxi he had seen many of the old familiar landmarks—the Opéra, the Madeleine, the Rue Royale, the Place de la Concorde, the Champs Elysées and the Petit Palais. Central Paris as yet had not suffered sufficient damage for the effect of the German air-raids to be apparent and the cafés, the crowded pavements and the gardens had seemed to him little altered, except for the change of fashion and the great increase in motor traffic, since he had seen them over a quarter of a century before.

  To Gregory’s anxious inquiry about Erika he replied at once: ‘Be of good cheer. For some days after we reached London her state was again critical, but she turned the corner on the Friday after we left Dunkirk and this last week has made a vast difference. At last she is able to talk a little and she says that it was her will to live for you which brought her through the dark places when she so nearly died; so you may be certain that she will not slip back now.’

  ‘Thank God!’ Gregory sighed. ‘And I’m eternally grateful to you, Stefan, for the way in which you looked after her.’

  Kuporovitch shrugged. ‘It was a joy, my friend. The good Sir Peliinore, to whom I took her immediately we reached London, has entertained me in a most princely fashion. To live in that great house of his is, except for some slight differences in national custom, to be back again in the mansion of a Prussian nobleman as we lived before the Revolution. I had no idea that even in England such a state of things still survived outside the story-books, and London, too, is a revelation. In spite of everything the people lunch and dine in the crowded restaurants and go about their business as if there were no threat to their security at all; yet things are being done there now. Churchill, Beaverbrook, Bevin and some others are cutting the red tape at last and underneath the casualness one senses the iron will of the people to defeat Hitler whatever it may cost them.’

  ‘I’ve never doubted that,’ said Gregory. ‘It seems always to take a frightful knocking about really to rouse the fighting spirit in us; but once it’s there woe betide the enemy. Things are in a pretty bad way here, though.’

  ‘So I have gathered. But who is to blame for that? The British were responsible for holding a great sector of the Allied line; instead of doing so they went home with little but their shirts. That left a great gap which the British could have filled again if they had broken through, or counterbalanced if they had dug themselves in on the coast as a threat to the German rear. But they did neither, and the French were left to get out of the mess as best they could, alone.’

  ‘I thought that too,’ Gregory agreed, ‘until I learned that the British had good reason for going home when they did. The French High Command is rotten, Stefan. Weygand is not the great man we thought him. There is treachery right up at the very top. I’ve now come to the conclusion that our Government must have known that and decided to get our men out alive, before the French ratted on them and they were left to face the whole weight of the German Army on their own, which would have meant absolute annihilation.’

  Kuporovitch shook his head. ‘No, Gregory; you are wrong there. The evacuation from Dunkirk was ordered on May the 29th and it is now June the 14th. As you and I sit here, th
e British Government is shipping troops back to France as hard as it can go. Do you believe for one moment that they would be doing that if they had already formed the conclusion sixteen days ago that the French meant to throw their hand in?’

  ‘I suppose you’re right,’ Gregory sighed. ‘If they brought the men off from Dunkirk because they feared the French were going to do a “Leopold” on us they could hardly be sending them back again while the situation remains so uncertain.’

  ‘A “Leopold”, eh?’ Kuporovitch’s dark eyebrows went up with a quizzical expression. ‘I hope you realise, my friend, that when the history of this war comes to be written Leopold and the people responsible for Dunkirk are going to be lumped together. Whatever the English school-books may say, the school-books of the rest of the world will record that after seventeen days’ fighting the Belgians ratted on the British and that after nineteen days’ fighting the British ratted on the French. What other word can be applied to the fact that, while still whole and undefeated, one of the finest armies that your country has ever put into the field gave up any further attempt to wage war upon the enemy and abandoned its Ally?’

  ‘I suppose one can’t blame the French for looking at things that way,’ Gregory admitted. ‘The retreat and evacuation has certainly given Hitler’s Fifth Column in France just the ammunition they required for their work of severing the Allies, and it’s quite on the cards now that within a few days France may make a separate Peace.’

  ‘True. But there is still hope that they may be induced to carry on the fight. Even now our good Sir Pellinore is with Mr. Winston Churchill and Lord Beaverbrook, who are on their way to Bordeaux to see if they cannot bolster up the shaking edifice.’

  ‘Is that what you came to tell me?’

  Kuporovitch nodded. ‘Now that Erika is out of danger I at last felt justified in appeasing my desire to see Paris again, and when I told Sir Pellinore that he said to me: “Find Gregory, if you can, and tell him how uncertain things are now with the French. If they decide to fight on—well and good; but if they surrender there is a risk that he might be caught in France. Tell him to make his way to Bordeaux and to join me at the Hotel Julius Caesar; then I shall be able to get him safely out of the country should France collapse.”’