Come into my Parlour

by Dennis Wheatley

  Grauber not only hated but also secretly feared the little Admiral. He was shrewd enough to know that most of these top men of the High Command had something that the great majority of the Nazi leaders lacked, and could now never obtain.

  Few of the Party chiefs had ever been outside Germany before their rise to power; they knew little of the customs and mentality of other races, and the bulk of their followers, young men brought up as fanatics in the Nazi tradition and not even allowed to read the true histories of the countries with which Germany had gone to war, were abysmally ignorant of every type of thought that animated human endeavour outside their own political creed.

  The Generals and the Admirals, on the other hand, had, as young men, travelled freely before the First World War, and, as they were drawn from Germany’s upper classes, had competed at horse shows, sailed their yachts, hunted, gambled and shot on the most friendly terms with their opposite numbers in Britain, France and the United States. They were, moreover, infinitely better educated, as they had been free of all the world’s literature in the days before the Nazis had banned a great part of the human race’s most important contributions to religion, history, philosophy and ethics.

  In consequence, the wisened little Admiral and his middle-aged cronies were far better qualified to understand the enemy’s mentality, and invariably made much shrewder appreciations of their future intentions than Grauber’s young thugs were able to furnish for him, despite his constant urging of them to apply ice-baths, hot irons and thumbscrews to anyone even remotely suspected of possessing useful information. And Grauber always had an uneasy feeling that one day the Admiral would show up the shortcomings of the Gestapo Foreign Department U.A.–I so blatantly that in a fit of cold unforgiving rage Himmler would consign its Chief to Dachau.

  However, Grauber was far too clever to allow his personal feelings about his rival to prevent his making use of him whenever he felt that he could do so without unfortunate repercussions; and now, having reached his own handsome office, which was only a few doors away from Himmler’s, he seated the Admiral in a comfortable armchair, gave him one of his own genuine Havana cigars, lit it, and said:

  “It is our mutual misfortune, Herr Admiral, that there are times when our interests are not altogether identical, but this is happily not one of them. No one could be more anxious to put Sallust out of the way for good and all than I am myself, but it is you who have taken the initiative in this matter, so I do hope that I may count on your assistance.”

  “Assuredly, my dear Herr Gruppenführer, assuredly,” agreed the Admiral, puffing contentedly at the long cigar. “Although, of course, my little organisation has nothing like the ramifications of your own, and I don’t suppose for one moment that there is any really worthwhile help that I can give you.”

  “You can tell me what you know of Sallust?”

  “That would, I am sure, be no more than a repetition of the data that is already in your own files and, unlike yourself, I have never had the questionable advantage of making personal contact with the fellow.” Canaris shifted his glance maliciously to Grauber’s pebble-filled left eye-socket, knowing perfectly well that the original eye had been bashed out by Gregory Sallust with the blunt end of an automatic.

  Grauber flushed, but went on persistently: “Nevertheless, you may have picked up something about him that I have not, so I would like to hear your version of his activities.”

  “Very well then. It fills many pages, so I will give only a résumé and you can stop me at any point on which you require further information. Sallust comes of good middle-class stock, but his parents were only moderately well off and both of them died when he was quite young. He was an imaginative and therefore troublesome boy and after only two and a half terms was expelled for innumerable breaches of discipline from his public school, Dulwich College. With the idea of taming him, his uncle sent him as a cadet to H.M.S. Worcester. The freer life seems to have suited him, but again, owing to his refractory nature, he was never made a Petty Officer, as they term their Prefects. On leaving he did not go to sea, because he did not consider that such a career offered a sufficiently remunerative future. Instead he used a portion of his patrimony to give himself a year on the Continent. He has a quite exceptional flair for languages so he could soon speak German and French like a native. He was still at an age when he ought to have been at school, but he was already his own master and a handsome, precocious young blackguard. The women adored him and he had an insatiable curiosity about the night life, both high and low, of all the cities he visited, so there wasn’t much he hadn’t done by the time the war broke out and he returned to England.”

  Canaris paused for a moment, then went on: “He got a commission at once in a Territorial Field Artillery Regiment, and in due course was sent to France. At the age of twenty-one he was serving on the staff of the Third Army. At the battle of Cambrai he was wounded and carries the scar to this day; it lifts the outer corner of his left eyebrow, giving him a slightly satanic appearance. He showed great gallantry at the time he was wounded and was given the M.C.

  “After the war he took up journalism; not regular work, but unusual assignments that took him abroad again. As a special correspondent he saw the high spots of the Graeco-Turkish war of nineteen nineteen, and the Russo-Polish war of nineteen twenty. Then he spent a lot of time in Central Europe, studying the development of the new states that emerged from the Versailles and Trianon Treaties—Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and so on. It was through his articles on such subjects, I believe, that he came into touch with that formidable old rascal Sir Pellinore Gwaine-Cust.”

  Grauber’s solitary eye flickered slightly and he suddenly sat forward. “So you know about him, do you? My compliments, Herr Admiral; he keeps himself so much in the background that I thought hardly anyone here had the least idea of the power he wields behind the scenes on every major problem concerning the British Empire.”

  “Oh, yes, I know about him.” The Admiral’s thin mouth twisted into a cynical smile. “He took seven thousand marks off me at baccarat one night at Deauville in nineteen twenty-four, drank me under the table afterwards and sent the money back next morning with a charming little note to the effect that, seeing the poor state of Germany’s post-war finances, he did not feel it fair to take such a sum off one of her secret agents at a single sitting. You can repeat that story if you like. I have often related it as a lesson in good manners, to my subordinates.”

  “Since there is nothing in it which redounds to the credit of the Service to which we both have the honour to belong, I would not dream of doing so, Herr Admiral,” Grauber said pompously. “But tell me, was that your only meeting with him?”

  “By no means; and I am quite certain that he would not have returned the money but for the fact that we were old friends and had had many good times together when we were young. In those days he was a subaltern in a crack cavalry regiment, and he won a particularly well-deserved V.C. in the Boer War. I used to stay with him at his lovely old home, Gwaine Meads, in Shropshire. There have been Gwaine-Custs living there ever since the Romans gave up their attempts to subdue the more savage tribes of Britons on reaching the Welsh Border; and I don’t doubt that the place is still maintained in almost feudal state, since he’s as rich as Crœsus.”

  “Yet he had to resign his commission on account of his debts,” put in Grauber. “It’s very remarkable that a hunting and shooting squire, of all people, should have succeeded in amassing such a vast fortune.”

  “He is a very remarkable man. But in his young days titles and connections counted. When he left the Army he got himself taken on to the board of a few not-too-sound companies in the City. Before they were much older his co-directors found that they had given a seat to a wolf in guinea-pig’s clothing. But they had no cause to regret it. With that hearty innocent laugh of his he did them out of half their profits, but the half he let them keep was ten times as great a sum as they had ever made before. They used to send him to Turkey, E
gypt and India. He could twist Orientals round his little finger, enable his companies to pay twenty per cent dividends and keep the rest himself, for ‘man’s time’, as he used to call it.”

  Grauber shook his head in puzzled wonder. “These English, they are incredible,” he murmured, as the Admiral went on:

  “Yet for over half a century he has managed to maintain his extraordinary fiction that he is just a lucky fool. I’ve heard him say a score of times in that booming voice of his: I’ve an eye for a horse or a pretty woman, but no brains—no brains at all,’ and he’s said it so often that people have really come to believe him.”

  “To get back to Sallust, Herr Admiral, you were telling me how these two first became associates?”

  “So I was. Well, Sir Pellinore must, I think, have read some of Sallust’s articles in the more serious weeklies and realised his extraordinary flair for getting to the bottom of complex political situations. In any case, he began to employ him on a series of special missions to assess commercial possibilities in hitherto unexploited markets and in the more dangerous business of finding out the truth about the ramifications of certain cartels. But Gwaine-Cust, as you must be aware, is far from being only a money-spinner. For the past twenty-five years, at least, he has been the friend and confidant of practically every British statesman who has shown any aggressive or Imperialistic spirit. He has got all sorts of ‘off the record’ jobs done for them that would have endangered their positions if they had done them themselves. Today his name is still hardly known outside the West End clubs and the city, and he holds no official position of any kind—he is not even chairman of any of his companies—yet I believe him to be the most dangerous enemy we have and the most powerful man in Britain after the Members of the War Cabinet.”

  Grauber nodded agreement. “That is my view, too; and it follows that as soon as war broke out Sir Pellinore naturally switched his ace private investigator on to war problems. I will not bother you for an account of Sallust’s war activities as those are well known to me; but I should be interested if you would give me your views on his woman.”

  “Which woman?” asked the Admiral blandly. “He is quite a Don Juan, and has had affairs with many.”

  “I know; and that makes the present one all the more interesting to us, as there is some reason to suppose that after the best part of two years he is still in love with her. I only knew her slightly as I—er—never moved very much in Reichmarshal Goering’s circle, but you must have known her quite well. I refer, of course, to the Countess von Osterberg—or, if you prefer her maiden name by which she was more widely known—Erika von Epp.”

  “Ach die liebe Erika,” sighed the Admiral. “Yes, I knew her intimately.”

  Grauber bridled: “The Herr Admiral seems to have forgotten that the Frau Gräfin betrayed her country to run away with this accursed Englishman and, in her absence, has been condemed to be executed as a traitress immediately she is caught.”

  “I forget nothing, my dear Gruppenführer; but a beautiful woman remains beautiful whatever she may do, and no laws ever made have been strong enough to control a woman’s heart. Your torture chambers must often have revealed to you that a woman’s love is stronger than pain, stronger than death and often stronger than the ties of country too. As we sit here many thousands of girls—French, Dutch, Norwegian, Belgian—have fallen in love with fine young German soldiers, who a few months ago they regarded as the hated conquerors of their race; and many thousands of pretty German girls have fallen in love with the foreign workers we have brought into the Reich, although we regard them as little better than slaves. Even the Gestapo cannot prevent that, and although we may sometimes have to harden our hearts in such cases for the protection of the State, it is absurd to hold the simple fact of anyone falling in love with a foreigner as a crime. Besides, as far as I am aware, Erika did not betray her country, she only gave her lover certain useful information about an organisation which had for its object the overthrow of the Nazi Party.”

  “The Nazi Party is the country!” bellowed Grauber, striking his desk.

  “Of course,” purred the Admiral, “none of us would dream of questioning that. I am only pointing out to you a purely academic difference which may have become overstressed in poor Erika’s obviously unbalanced mind. Moreover, as I was about to add, she did not run away. She was seriously wounded and evacuated from Dunkirk.”

  “You defend this woman?”

  “Ethically, yes, but for all practical purposes, no. She has offended against the laws of our country and been condemned; therefore if she is caught she must die, and if I were given an opportunity to catch her it would certainly be my duty to do so. I may add that if your dictaphone is working this morning and you are taking a record of this conversation it will be time enough to hand it over to Herr Himmler when you can prove that I have at any time failed to do my duty.”

  With a growl, Grauber sat back. “I suggest that we are wasting time, Herr Admiral. Will you be good enough to tell me what you know of this woman?’

  The Admiral drew slowly on his cigar and his mild eyes hardened as he recalled the sufferings that had been endured by his cast after the last war, then he said slowly:

  “Like so many of the Hochwohlgeboren, Erika’s family was completely ruined by the revolution and inflation that followed Germany’s collapse in nineteen eighteen. I suppose it was not unnatural that the people should blame the officer class for having led them to defeat instead of victory, but for several years they took it out of us by every means in their power. The financial policy of the Socialist Government reduced our investments to so much worthless paper. Fifty-nine out of every sixty officers who had served in the war were turned off on to the streets and they were the last people to whom anyone would give employment. The Jews are paying today for what they did to us then. We were forced to sell our houses, farms, jewels, furs and cellars to them for a miserable pittance in order to save ourselves from dying of starvation. Thousands of well-bred German women then had to haunt the big hotels and night clubs as prostitutes, as the only possible means of supporting their fathers, husbands and brothers—often gallant officers who were still incapacitated by wounds received in the war. That was the grim background against which Erika was brought up.

  “As a child she had known every luxury; by the time she was old enough to go to school she was living with her parents and elder sister in a tiny flat in Munich that was little better than a tenement. I have heard her say that during those winters she used to lie in her little truckle bed so cold that she could not sleep and that by the time she was seventeen she had forgotten what it was like not to be hungry. She got herself a job in a Munich department store and became the mistress of some little floorwalker there in order to get herself a square meal every evening. Who can blame her?”

  Canaris shrugged, and went on: “But Erika was made for better things than that, and she knew it. She soon left the shopwalker for a director of the company, and by then the natural ability of the officer class was bringing it back into prominent positions again. By the time she was twenty she had had a dozen lovers, each richer and more powerful than his predecessor. She had an apartment in Berlin, servants, furs, jewels, and it was already recognised that she and Marlene Dietrich were the two most beautiful women in Germany.”

  “It would be about then that she tied up with Hugo Falkenstein,” Grauber commented.

  “Yes, did you know him?”

  Grauber shook his head.

  “Hugo was one of the comparatively rare exceptions that justify the existence of the Jewish race. He had the soul of an artist, the brain of a great statesman and the generosity of an emperor. He could be utterly ruthless to his enemies, but I have never known a man who was kinder, more considerate or more gentle, not only to his friends but to all who came to him in trouble. It was not surprising that Erika fell in love with him.”

  “Did she? I’ve always supposed that she was out for his money.”

  “No
. Before she met him she was already one of the intimates of Reichmarshal Goering’s brilliant circle. She could have her pick of a score of wealthy men, and married them too, had she wished. She would have liked to marry Hugo, and he begged her to, but she wouldn’t do it because she knew that she could be more useful to him as his mistress than his wife. As long as she remained Erika von Epp she was a German aristocrat; people closed their eyes to her private life, and all doors remained open to her, but if she had become Frau Falkenstein no one who mattered would have received her any more.”

  “Nevertheless, she made a great fortune out of her association with Falkenstein.”

  “True, but she earned every Pfennig of it by her own fine brain. He soon realised that she was not just a beautiful plaything, and he employed her in the most secret negotiations of his great armaments concern. She became his principal ambassador and he sent her many times to Britain and France, and on several trips to the United States.”

  “Yes, I know that. And then Falkenstein was idiotic enough to quarrel with the Führer and withdraw the financial support he had been giving to the Government. What insolent folly on the part of a Jew who might have continued to enjoy our protection as long as he was any use to us.”

  “He was a fool as far as his own interests were concerned, but one must admire his courage. He simply refused to accept protection for himself if the persecution of the poorer people of his race was to continue. You know the result. He was sent to Dachau, where your people tortured him for six months and drove him insane before they killed him. Can you wonder that Erika swore that she would devote the rest of her life to a vendetta against the Nazi Party?”

  Grauber shrugged his great shoulders. “You say that she would have liked to marry Falkenstein; are you sure of that?”