Come into my Parlour

by Dennis Wheatley

  “Yes. She once told me so herself. That was a year or so after his death. She said that although it would have made her much less useful to him at the time, she regretted having so persistently refused him. She was tired of being a successful adventuress and would have liked to have left the merry whirl of Berlin for a quiet home in the country with children to bring up. I asked her why she didn’t marry, and she replied that it was too late now; she would never find another man like Hugo, to give her the sort of children that she wanted born out of real love between two good-looking and gifted people.”

  “I wonder if time has changed her views and she now loves Sallust enough to want him to be the father of her children.”

  “I should think it highly probable,” the Admiral said meditatively. “She must be about twenty-nine and the urge to settle down and start a family will almost certainly have increased since she first met Sallust. From what little information I have it appears that they are still devoted to each other, so the odds are that they would get married if they could. But the snag is that she would first have to get a divorce from von Osterberg.”

  “Yes. But why, after all you’ve said, did she marry him? In nineteen thirty-eight she could have married pretty well anybody, so why the devil pick on such a colourless fellow; and there were no children of the marriage?”

  “She did it to please her old father, who was practically on his death-bed at the time. His one wish was to see her respectably married into some good old family before he died. I suppose she had given up all hope of really falling in love again, so in order that the old man might die happy she permitted the most easily manageable of all her many suitors to make an honest woman of her. But the marriage was purely one of convenience. Von Osterberg was always hard up for money to carry on his scientific experiments and she could well afford to give him a princely allowance. He is, too, rather weak, a vain type of man, and he admired her beauty so much that he agreed from the beginning that if she would become his Countess he would leave her completely free to amuse herself in any way she liked.”

  Grauber remained silent for a moment, then he said: “I could make von Osterberg dance to any tune I like. How would it be if I made him write to her via the Swiss Legation, and dangle before her the prospect of a divorce if she is prepared to come over and meet him somewhere just inside the German border, to discuss the legal aspects of the thing?”

  “I agree that if you could once succeed in luring her back into Germany she would make the best possible bait to draw Sallust into the net afterwards. But she would show him the letter, and no man in his senses would allow the woman he loves to risk such a trip simply on the off-chance of getting a divorce.”

  “I was counting on her showing the letter to him, and I think you’re right that he would not let her come—alone.”

  “I see. You think there is a chance of killing these two birds with one stone?”

  “Yes. The war may go on for years yet, so if he really wishes to marry her I don’t think he will let such an opportunity slip. The odds are that he will accompany her to Switzerland, and with a little luck I shall snare them both in the same noose.”

  Canaris shook his dome-like head. “It’s not good enough, my dear Herr Gruppenführer. It’s much too obvious. I feel sure that two such clever people would realise that it was a trap.”

  “Not necessarily.” Grauber’s solitary eye glinted as the swift thoughts sped through his brain. “The whole plan would, of course, be worked out very carefully. Von Osterberg could say that he had had to give up his war job on account of some illness and that he was greatly in need of money. He could say that he had heard through some neutral diplomat that she could never come back to Germany as she was now living with an Englishman. He could offer her a divorce in exchange for her making over to him a certain sum, to be agreed, in German securities. He could tell her that he was living very quietly somewhere on our side of the Bodensee, and that he could not make the crossing into Switzerland on account of his illness, but there would be very little risk in her slipping across one night to see him and get the whole thing fixed up.”

  “It stinks, my friend, it stinks,” said the Admiral. “They would never fall for such a story as that. But if you plant von Osterberg on the Swiss side of Lake Constance—that would be very different. It might not even occur to them then that a visit to him would entail any risk at all; but he, or one of your people that you sent with him in the guise of a servant, could give a prearranged signal on the night they came to see him. He would have to arrange to make it a night appointment, of course. Then a squad of your men, that you would have ready for the purpose, could easily carry out a little raid into Switzerland, surround the house, put them both in the bag and bring them back across the lake.”

  “Kolossal, Herr Admiral! Kolossal!” Grauber exclaimed. “How right I was to ask you for your assistance. But wait a moment. What reason can von Osterberg be told to give for having gone to live in Switzerland? He would not be permitted to do so on grounds of ill-health alone; unless he was a consumptive, and then he would not be renting a house on the lake-side, but in some sanatorium up in the mountains.”

  “True. Do you know what sort of war work he is now employed on?”

  “Yes, as it happens I do. He was in one of Krupps’ laboratories; but I was doing a security check only last week on a list of scientists who have recently been transferred to work on our new ‘K’ weapons—his name was on it, so he must now be up at the experimental station on the Baltic.”

  Canaris pulled thoughtfully on his cigar. “Von Osterberg was always a dreamer and I should think that normally he is a very squeamish kind of man. It would be quite in character for him to have been overcome by horror at the thought of the wholesale and indiscriminate slaughter of men, women and children that these new weapons of ours will cause, once we begin to launch them against England. Instead of illness, could he not give that as his reason for having left Germany? He could say that he felt the Führer was going too far in contemplating methods of warfare which ignored all human considerations and, in consequence, had abandoned his post and sought refuge in Switzerland.”

  “Good! Excellent! Such a story would greatly strengthen his reason for wanting money, too. If that were his case he would not be able to get any funds from Germany, so he would have a much more plausible reason for offering her a divorce in exchange for a good round sum in cash.”

  “There’s one serious snag to it, though.” The Admiral paused a moment. “I don’t at all like the idea of giving Sallust even an inkling that von Osterberg has been employed on a new type of weapon. Our gravest concern for the next twelve months, or more, will be to prevent the British from learning that we are preparing to destroy them by the thousand through an entirely new form of warfare; and our present object is to forestall any attempt by this very man to find out about it.”

  “True! Yet your idea about von Osterberg ratting on us for such a reason is so good that it seems a great pity not to use it. After all, we have no firm grounds for our assumption that Sallust and the von Epp woman wish to get married, and would, if she were free to do so. The inference that von Osterberg had been employed on secret scientific work would enormously increase the inducement for Sallust to come over. In fact, I am certain that he would not be able to resist such a lure. He is an immensely conceited man and would immediately flatter himself into the belief that he would be able to either bribe or trick von Osterberg into giving him some really valuable information. Besides, our scientists are working on innumerable problems. It would be quite unnecessary to give any indication of our ‘K’ weapons at all. Von Osterberg could hint that he had been asked to work on some new form of gas—something particularly horrifying and against which the British respirator is no protection. It might be gas that sends people mad or causes parts of the body exposed to it to go gangrenous, so that its victims gradually rot to pieces before they finally die.”

  “What a horrible mind you have, Herr Gr
uppenführer! However, I think you’re right. The double bait of a speedy divorce, if Erika wants it, and providing an apparently easy opportunity for Sallust to pull off another fine feat of espionage, should certainly be sufficient inducement for the two of them to make a trip to neutral Switzerland. I take it, though, that you are quite satisfied about your ability to control von Osterberg?”

  Grauber smiled. “Yes. In the first place I have no reason at all to doubt his patriotism, in the second, by the time I’ve had a talk with him he will be far too scared to do anything except exactly what he is told; and in the third, I shall send one of my best men with him into Switzerland with orders to watch him at every step.”

  The Admiral stood up and made a faintly mocking little bow. “In that case, my dear Herr Gruppenführer, having rendered you such small assistance as lay within my power, like my illustrious predecessor, Pontius Pilate, I wash my hands of this affair. Erika was once a dear friend of mine, and I have never believed that she was a traitor to her country; but expediency demands that I should leave her and her lover to your tender mercies. I pray that God may cheat you in the end and bring: them death more swiftly than you would desire.”

  Chapter III

  The Fly

  “Well, glad to see you, my boy. Here’s how!” Sir Pellinore Gwaine-Cust raised his silver tankard to Gregory Sallust and took a long swig at the champagne that it contained.

  “Cheers!” murmured Gregory, taking a somewhat more modest pull at his tankard of the freshly iced wine.

  “Don’t sip it as though you were a deb. at her first dance, man,” chid the elderly Baronet disapprovingly. “Only way to get the full flavour of this stuff is to take the first half-tankard non-stop.”

  “I agree; but it’s too precious to treat like that in these days; unless, of course”—Gregory’s saturnine features lit up with a sudden grin—“one happens to be a munitions magnate trying to work off excess profits through the old expense account.”

  Sir Pellinore’s bright blue eyes opened wide with indignation. “Insolent young devil!” he boomed. “How dare you make your dirty cracks at me! Admittedly I’ve a few shares in one or two companies, but what the Government doesn’t take off us to pay for the war wouldn’t keep a baby in napkins. I’m living on capital. Only thing to do unless I gave up Gwaine Meads and this place. And at my age I’ll be jiggered if I move into some poky little flat.”

  They were sitting out on the terrace behind Sir Pellinore’s London mansion, and Gregory glanced up at the great pillared façade that rose behind them. Its cream paint looked grimy in the July sunshine, and here and there it had been scarred by bomb splinters. The windows of the big library that opened on to the terrace had been shattered and were now boarded over; a large chunk of the stone balustrade had fallen on to the public footway below, leaving an ugly gap. But he had known the house well in peacetime, and recalled its splendid staircase lit with great crystal chandeliers and thronged with distinguished people, while a string band played softly in the distance and a score of liveried footmen served the guests with every delicacy that money could provide.

  Even now, in war-scarred London, he felt that there were many worse places to live in than Carlton House Terrace, with its beautiful view over St. James’s Park. To the right, at the extremity of the double avenue of The Mall, the upper storeys of Buckingham Palace rose white above the fresh green of the tree-tops. In the left foreground stood the Admiralty, Horse Guards Parade, the back of No. 10, the Foreign Office, and the Offices of the War Cabinet. Between them a constant stream of little figures was weaving to and fro, mainly Naval, Army and Air Force officers hurrying from conference to conference, at which the next moves in the war would be planned, while in the very centre of the scene lay the green sward, made coloured with flower-beds and girls’ summer dresses; and the lovely tree-fringed lake, upon which swam flotillas of bright-winged ducks, and where the three white pelicans gravely stood knee-deep in water for hours on end—so inanimate, but apparently wise, that they had irrelevantly been nicknamed “The Three Chiefs of Staff”.

  Who, Gregory wondered, with a war in progress, would willingly live anywhere but here, right in the vortex of the cyclone, or, in peacetime, not prefer the outlook on this ancient Royal pleasance to a view over some dusty London square?

  He glanced at his companion. Sir Pellinore stood six-feet-four in his socks, and his limbs were big in proportion. He was now over seventy, but he could still have thrown most men of thirty down his staircase. His bright blue eyes were full of animation and his great white cavalry moustache flared up across the rubicund cheeks that it had taken a hundred pipes of port to bring to their present healthy glow.

  “We don’t breed men like him in these days, more’s the pity,” thought Gregory. “He just wouldn’t do in a flat. He’d begin to feel suffocated in no time and he’d be knocking the ornaments down with those great hands of his every time he made one of his sweeping gestures.”

  After a moment he said: “Even in wartime I suppose Gwaine Meads and this little shanty cost you a pretty penny to keep up. Still, you are lucky to have lived in the days when you could salt down a fair part of your ill-gotten millions. No one of my generation will be able to put by anything worth while. In fact, when the State has no more use for us we’ll probably spend our declining years in some frightful institution, where the highlight of our existence will be a piece of cake to eat with our tea on Saturdays.”

  “Oh, come, that’s a gloomy view to take.”

  “But not unrealistic. We’ve had two years of war, and with Hitler in control of as big a slice of Europe as Napoleon ever had it (nay go on for another twenty. Britain has had to sell the shirt off her back to get dollars for America, and to keep our end up against our Totalitarian enemies we’re being compelled to Nazify ourselves to a point at which we shall be able to call nothing but our souls our own. Of course, I’m quite prepared to go on fighting in the hills and on the beaches, and all that, until my hand is so shaky that I can no longer hold a gun, but it does seem a bit hard that if I chance to survive to your age I shall be either in a workhouse or an antiquated wage-slave of the State.”

  “Nonsense, my boy! Things won’t be as bad as all that. Think of the summer of nineteen sixteen. We were in a pretty pickle then. Yet we got the Jerries down in just over another two years; and afterwards there was a mint of money lying about for those who had the initiative to pick it up.”

  “It won’t be like that this time.” Gregory glumly shook his head. “Coming events cast their shadows before. The bureaucrats have at last got us where they’ve wanted us for years. This war is being used as an excuse to strangle all free enterprise, and to prevent any Englishman’s home ever being his castle any more. Last time Lloyd George wanted to give us all three acres and a cow. This time we’ll have to have a permit to milk the cow, even if we can afford to buy it; another to make butter from the milk, and a third to grow the grass that the cow feeds on. But no, I’m wrong about that. We won’t be allowed to have any acres or cows, because the Government will issue us with a ration of powdered milk. We’ll all be dreary little people living in dreary little houses and forced to work eight hours a day in some ghastly factory making luxury goods for export to our richer neighbours, and we shall sustain life on a packet of vitamised chemical foods that we’ll have to queue for once a week at the local Food Office.”

  Sir Pellinore took another pull at his tankard, wiped his magnificent white moustache with the back of his hand and exclaimed with a puzzled stare:

  “What the devil’s got under your skin, Gregory? I’ve never known you like this before.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Gregory shrugged. “For one thing I’d like to get married and settle down. Of course, I know that’s out of the question until the war is over, and even then Erika will have to get her divorce. But these last few weeks, since I got back from France, have pretty naturally increased the urge in both of us—and it’s a bit depressing to think how remote the
chances are of our ever being able to live the sort of life we’d like.”

  “What sort of life had you in mind?”

  “Nothing terribly extravagant. Just a comfortable home somewhere in the country. An old place for preference, with the sort of rambling outbuildings that children love to play in, and a decent garden. I’d like a south wall to grow peaches, a glasshouse for a vine, and a meadow for a cow. Four or five acres and a house with two spare bedrooms would be quite big enough. Something large enough to have friends down to stay in comfort, but that wouldn’t need a big staff to keep up.”

  “All right, now’s the time to buy. The public never can see further than its nose, otherwise there would never have been rich men like myself in any generation. Just because things aren’t too good they think the war is going on for ever. The idiots have all got cold feet about house property and they’ll be fighting each other for it in a few years’ time. For five or six thousand today you can take your pick of a score of places in any county that would have cost you ten before the war and will fetch fifteen after it.”

  “Yes. You’re probably right, and I could just about run to that without making too big a hole in my capital. I must think it over.”

  “Don’t think it over. Tell Erika to look round for the sort of place you’d both like, and when she finds it, buy it. You can’t possibly go wrong; and don’t interfere with your investments. I’ll give you a cheque before you go.”

  “But, hang it all—”

  “That’s all right. Ten thousand ought to do you. Most places of any size have been taken over for the duration by the Army or the Air Force, and by the time they’ve kicked hell out of it you’ll need a thousand or two extra to make it really habitable again.”

  “It really is terribly good of you.”

  “Nonsense, my boy. Consider it as a wedding present in advance, if you like, But, anyhow, I was going to give you a good fat cheque for your last little exploit; and, as I’ve told you before, if I hang on to all my money, the bulk of it will only go to the Government in death duties when I die. Much better give it away to people I like, to have a bit of fun with it now.”