Gregory gave a faint grin. “You’re right, of course. If I’d found out about this on my own I should have been too impatient to wait, and certainly have done something pretty crazy.”
“Well, you won’t when you do get to Switzerland,” Kuporovitch put in. “I’ll take care of that.”
“D’you mean you’re coming with me?”
“Of course. You are in no fit state to be allowed to go anywhere alone.”
“That’s darn decent of you, Stefan.”
“Nonsense!” the Russian shrugged. “You would do the same for me at any time. And the sooner we start the sooner we shall get back.” He looked at Sir Pellinore. “When will it be possible for us to start?”
“You must have proper papers, and tomorrow’s Sunday. Bit awkward that. Some of the people I’ll need to get hold of may not be in their offices. Still, by pulling every gun I’ve got, I ought to be able to get you off by Monday afternoon.”
“Thanks,” said Gregory, “I’m sure you’ll do your best for us.”
Sir Pellinore emptied the remains of the Kümmel into their glasses. “I suppose so,” he grumbled unhappily, “but I know what I ought to do with you two lunatics.”
“Lock us up, eh?” Kuporovitch smiled.
“Exactly! But I’m getting old; that’s the trouble. I’m allowing sentiment to overrule my sense of duty. By all the laws of the Medes and Persians I ought to have you both clapped into the Isle of Man for the duration. I’m not yet certain that I won’t, either.”
“Thanks,” said Gregory curtly. “But personally I have no desire to be prevented from risking my life against my will.”
The elderly Baronet raised his bright blue eyes and stared at him angrily. “It’s not your life I’m worrying about, you young fool. It’s what the Gestapo might get out of you if you’re caught. Surely you two realise that your recent success in Russia has turned you into dynamite. You’re both flesh and blood, like anyone else. Those fiends may do things to you until you’re both driven out of your minds. Then you won’t even know what you’re saying. And under your bonnets you’ve now got the whole of Russia’s future strategy. Why, damn my eyes! If the Nazis get that out of you we might lose the war. Hell’s bells! The very thought of taking such a risk makes me sweat.”
“You’re going to take it all the same.” Gregory stuck out his lean jaw.
“Yes, I’m going to take it.” Sir Pellinore’s voice had now dropped several tones, and he spoke very quietly. “I’m going to take it on one condition; and in order to be in a position to insist on this was the main reason why I had you arrested. I’m going to give you both some capsules containing cyanide of potassium. If you go into Germany you will carry them in your mouths. One gulp and death is instantaneous. You’ve got to give me your word that if you’re caught you’ll swallow them.”
Chapter XVIII
Back Into Germany
When Sir Pellinore Gwaine-Cust had privately made up his mind that any particular person should do a certain thing they almost invariably did it; so that night, or rather at about two-thirty on Sunday morning, Gregory, having partaken after the old Kümmel of fine brandy, champagne, more brandy, and finally a mixture of the two, swayed his way upstairs, just managed to undress, flopped into bed and swiftly passed into oblivion.
But not so Stefan Kuporovitch. He had gone upstairs nearly five hours earlier; not because he wanted to but because Sir Pellinore had taken occasion to tip him off that he wished to be left alone with Gregory. The news about Erika had appalled him, and privately he had little doubt that she had fallen into the hands of the Gestapo; his arguments as to the possibility of von Osterberg’s letter not being a trap having been put up solely in the hope that even the chance she might still be free, although in hiding, would prove a comfort to his friend.
Yet, once having accepted the situation with true Russian fatalism, he had imagined that he was in for a very good evening. He loved fine liquor and, knowing Sir Pellinore’s boundless hospitality, had felt that many good things would follow the Kümmel in a possibly melancholy, but nevertheless enjoyable, drinking party. Good-natured as he was, he could not but feel a little resentful at having been packed off to bed, still as sober as a judge, at a quarter to ten. But he consoled himself with the thought that he was at least now free to ring up Madeleine and have a long talk with her.
On opening the door of his room his frown gave place to a slow smile. Beside the large, comfortable-looking Queen Anne bed stood a wheeled tray. On its two shelves reposed a cold lobster, salad, a foi gras, some hothouse fruit and, in an ice bucket, a magnum of champagne. Stefan was fond of drinking much more for the sake of good company and good talk than for drinking itself, but, all the same, he thought it a darn decent gesture of Sir Pellinore’s to provide him with such an excellent cold supper.
His eye then fell on a chair at the far side of the high canopied bed. Upon it were neatly arranged an array of feminine clothes, with the silken undies uppermost. His dark eyebrows shot up and he gave a low whistle of surprise. For a second he thought that he must have got into the wrong room. Despite his age, Sir Pellinore’s extraordinary virility and great wealth suggested that he might still keep a beautiful young mistress. But Stefan saw that the meagre outfit with which he had travelled from Cairo was also in the room. He then jumped to another conclusion. To his pre-Revolution Russian mind, there was nothing particularly strange in a great nobleman like Sir Pellinore providing a little feminine entertainment for his guests.
His ear caught a faint splashing in the adjacent private bathroom; then, as he closed the door behind him, a gay voice called:
“Stefan! C’est toi chéri?”
In one bound he was across the room. In another, he was through the bathroom door, and, a second later, he had his beautiful but wet young wife in his arms.
The explanation of her presence was very simple. Earlier in the day Sir Pellinore had telephoned to her to come at once to London. On her arrival he had told her that her husband would be back that night but that he did not wish Gregory to see her, because the sight of her and Stefan together would have made Erika’s absence so much harder for him to bear. Sir Pellinore had added that if they cared to consider themselves prisoners over the Sunday in the suite he had placed at their disposal this would be all to the good, and he would see to it that they lacked for nothing which would make their captivity endurable.
Had they arranged matters themselves, or possessed Aladdin’s Lamp, there was nothing more that they could have desired or asked of the all-powerful Jinni.
Sir Pellinore had popped a dose of veronal into Gregory’s last drink, so he slept until nearly midday. On waking he felt pretty heady but he remembered perfectly clearly all that had taken place the night before. For a little he lay in bed torturing himself with thoughts of what might be happening to Erika; but, after a bit, he realised that he was acting like a fool, as unnerving speculations about her could do neither her nor him any good, and that his best hope of defeating Grauber lay in regarding the problem of her rescue as coldly and logically as if it was no personal concern of his at all.
After a bath he felt slightly better; then, downstairs, he had a Pim and three cocktails with Sir Pellinore, which made him feel more his own man.
When they had lunched Sir Pellinore provided the best possible antidote to his guest’s depression. Upstairs in his library he had a fine collection of maps, both historical and modern, and he produced a great pile, all showing either Lake Constance or the ancient Kingdom of Wurttemberg, in which Schloss Niederfels lay. Work, and work connected with the hazardous journey he was soon about to undertake, was the very thing Gregory needed to occupy his mind. He spent most of the rest of the day concentrating on memorising the names of German villages, the by-roads that connected them and the situation of wooded areas which would give good cover if required.
On the Monday morning Sir Pellinore introduced both Gregory and Stefan to a clever-looking little man wearing thick-lensed s
pectacles. He had at one time been a dentist but, owing to the war, had gravitated to certain highly specialised duties connected with sabotage operations. From a little box he produced some small squares of hardish, jelly-like substance each of which had a little lump in its middle. The lump was the cyanide of potassium and its coating so composed that, with a little pressure, it would stick to the side of a back tooth and, once stuck, would need a really hard thrust of the tongue to dislodge.
“If you—er—get into trouble,” he explained gently, “you simply rip it off with your tongue and bite through its centre. The result is very swift and, I believe, affects the user only by a sudden contraction, as though he were about to give a violent sneeze.
“You will see,” he went on, “that they are of two colours. The green ones are dummies for you to practise with; the red ones are the real thing. Both kinds can be kept permanently in the mouth for a considerable time without any likelihood of their dissolving and becoming dangerous. But, if necessary, I advise that you should replace a used one by a new one after a fortnight. Now, I’d like to look at your mouths to decide the most suitable places for you to wear them.”
Having asked on which side of their mouths they chewed by preference, he made a very careful examination of their teeth, and affixed two of the dummies. Then, wishing them good luck, he departed.
At first, both of them felt as though they had had plum stones stuck in the sides of their mouths. It was difficult for them to keep their tongues from worrying the capsules and they could not help thinking that the bulges in their cheeks must be obvious to anyone. But Sir Pellinore assured them that this was not so and, somewhat to their surprise, they found at lunch they could still eat without undue discomfort.
Sir Pellinore had told Gregory on the Sunday of Madeleine’s presence in the house, and she joined them for the meal. Afterwards, Kuporovitch had half an hour to say good-bye to her, then Sir Pellinore accompanied the two friends in his car out of London to the airport.
They met with none of the delays that had so irritated Erika and Piers four months before, as Sir Pellinore, who never did things by halves, once he had made up his mind on a matter, had laid on a special aircraft for them.
It was the 1st of December and a grey, depressing winter’s day, but up to the very last moment he never ceased to joke with them and speak with bluff good humour of the great time they would all have at Gwaine Meads over Christmas. It was only as the ‘plane lifted into the air that his bright blue eyes grew misty. For once, he was really feeling his age. He loved Gregory as a son and, despite all his confidence in his courage and audacity, he doubted very much if he would ever see him again.
That evening Gregory and Stefan were safely landed in Switzerland. They spent the night at a quiet hotel and next morning went on to St. Gall. There, they put up at the Pension Julich on the very slender chance that Erika might have found means of sending out of Germany some message to the proprietor, which he, for some reason, had failed to relay to London. But this frail hope of a clue to her whereabouts proved abortive. The proprietor remembered the lady well, and produced the suit-case that she had left behind. Gregory was so moved at seeing her things that he could not bring himself to go through the case; so, instead, Kuporovitch did so with the proprietor; but there was nothing in it from which they could make fresh deductions.
On the Wednesday morning Gregory wanted to go straight down to Steinach, but Kuporovitch persuaded him that, since von Osterberg was supposedly still in hiding from the Gestapo, a visit by strangers to the Villa Offenbach would more suitably be made at night. In consequence, he waited until the evening before taking the little local train down through the bleak wintry weather to the lake-shore and, at Stefan’s suggestion, he went alone, so that it should not yet emerge that he had brought a friend with him to Switzerland.
Although only seven o’clock it was already fully dark when he reached the Villa, as the moon had not yet risen to silver the snowcapped mountains and turn the landscape into a fairy scene.
He rang twice at the door, then Einholtz opened it.
“May I ask if I am addressing the Hen Graf von Osterberg?” Gregory enquired in German, although he knew that it must be Einholtz to whom he was speaking.
“I regret, but there is some mistake. This house is occupied by Dr. Fallstrom,” Einholtz replied, with a suspicious look.
“I am from London,” Gregory persisted. “A letter that the Count wrote to a friend of mine there has recently been passed on to me: and in it he expressed a wish to see me. My name is Gregory Sallust, and—”
“Ach so!” Einholtz broke in. “I am so sorry, but we have to take precautions here. The Count is far from well. His experiences have unnerved him, and at times you will find his manner strange; but, all the same, I am sure he will be delighted to see you. Please to come in, Herr Sallust.”
As he stood aside for Gregory to enter, and closed the door after him, Einholtz went on: “Let me introduce myself. I am Fritz Einholtz and I know all about poor Kurt’s affairs. You see, I, too, am a scientist, although a very minor one compared to him. I was his assistant and we escaped together from the Nazis. Then I accompanied him and his wife back into Germany, last August. Ach! that was a terrible experience. We became separated from the Countess and we have been distraught with anxiety on her account ever since. But we still hope that she is hiding with friends. We had to hide, ourselves, for two months before we dared to attempt the return trip. This way, Herr Sallust. Please to come in.”
As Gregory listened to these eager confidences it occurred to him that, after all, Kuporovitch might be right. One of the points that had seemed most suspicious about von Osterberg’s letter had been his omission to make any mention of Einholtz, yet here was the man himself filling in the gap quite spontaneously about the subsidiary part in the affair that he, apparently, had played.
On entering the sitting-room of the house Gregory saw a rather frail-looking man, considerably older than himself, and with two small scars from student duels on his right cheek, sitting by a log fire reading a book. In spite of the fact that it was quite warm in there his knees were covered with a blanket.
As he looked up Einholtz said cheerfully: “Kurt, this is Herr Sallust. You know how anxious you have been at not hearing from him, but now he has arrived in person. Is not that splendid!”
Von Osterberg stood up, brought his heels together, bowed, and said with formal politeness, “Mr. Sallust, you are very welcome.”
Gregory smiled. “I’m sorry that I’ve been so long in getting here, Count, but now I have, I do hope that we may succeed in tracing Erika and getting her out of Germany.”
“Erika,” von Osterberg repeated. “Yes, yes, poor little Erika. I dare not think what they may be doing to her.”
“Now, don’t be silly, Kurt,” Einholtz said sharply. “You keep on imagining things that have not the least foundation. She may not be very comfortable, living in some barn, perhaps, but there is no reason at all to suppose that she has been caught. In fact, if she had, we should have been certain to have heard of it before we left Germany.”
While speaking he had rearranged the chairs and now held one for Gregory, opposite the fire. As they all sat down Gregory said:
“I know only the bare facts that you put in your letter, Count, and in view of your state of health I can well understand your feeling that this thing is too much for you to take on alone; bat if I’m to pull my weight I ought to know the full details of all that has happened up to now.”
With hesitations here and there von Osterberg gave the outline of the story. The hesitations were easily ascribable to his highly nervous condition, and Einholtz helped him out with fuller accounts at all points where Gregory put in a question.
They told how they had crossed the lake to Freiherr von Lottingen’s summer villa, borrowed a car there and reached Niederfels without accident a few hours later. The Count’s mother had given them a late supper and the old lady had been so pleased to see h
im that they had allowed her to persuade them to stay for twenty-four hours, instead of returning that night, as had originally been intended. The only people who were aware of their presence there, as far as they knew, were old servants whose loyalty was beyond question. The sleepy castle, surrounded by its forest-clad heights, had seemed, as Einholtz put it, a thousand years and a million miles from modern war and totalitarian politics. The Frau Gräfin Bertha was getting on in years and might never see her son again. How could they refuse to take what seemed an almost negligible risk of remaining with her till the following night?
But the next afternoon while they had been sitting in the sunshine on the battlements they had seen two cars coming up the winding road that led to the Schloss. They were full of police and in the back of one of them had been sitting the Frau Gräfin’s personal maid. The old lady knew that when the girl was in Berlin she had had a S.S. trooper as a lover, but the man was now far away on the Russian front, and the old Countess was so out of the world at Niederfels that it had never even occurred to her that men or women once infected with the Nazi virus could never again be trusted. Yet here was her maid in the very act of betraying them.
Only Kurt and Einholtz had been with the old lady at the time. Erika was resting on her bed to fit herself for the exhausting night that lay before her. The Frau Gräfin had insisted that the two men should take to the woods at once while she went to warn Erika. They had already arranged that in the event of any unforeseen visitation they would rendezvous at a place in the forest some two miles away, where they had hidden the car.
They had reached it without being spotted, and they had waited there all night, but Erika had not come. In the dawn they had driven to the house of an old bachelor tenant-farmer whom the Count had felt confident was to be trusted. He had agreed to take them in, hidden them in a loft and concealed their car in the middle of a hayrick. They felt certain that Erika had not been caught because the whole district had been placarded with notices offering a reward for her capture as well as theirs, and they thought it even possible that she was still at the Castle, having been hidden by the Gräfin in one of its many secret rooms. After remaining concealed for two months they had decided to try to recross the frontier. No one suspected that they had been using the Freiherr von Lottingen’s car, and when they returned in it to his villa they found their launch still in the boathouse, and got away in her.
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