by Eric Ambler
“So you are not the hotel sneak-thief after all.”
It was said softly, almost wonderingly, yet with a corrosive quality about it that scared me badly.
“I told you I wasn’t a thief,” I said jauntily.
He stepped forward suddenly, gripped the front of my shirt, and pulled me towards him until my face was a few centimeters from his. I was so startled that I forgot to resist him. He shook me slowly backwards and forwards as he spoke.
“No, not a thief, not an honest rat, but a filthy little spy. A cunning spy, too.” His lip curled contemptuously. “To the outside world a shy, ingenuous teacher of languages with a romantic appearance and sad Magyar eyes that would deceive a painter. How long have you been at the game, Vadassy, or whatever your name is? Did they pick you for the job or did you graduate from the flogging cells?” He gave me a violent push that sent me staggering back to the wall.
His fist was clenched and he was coming towards me again when there was a knock at the door.
For a moment we stared at each other in silence; then he straightened his back, walked to the door and opened it. It was one of the waiters.
“You rang, Monsieur?” I heard him say.
Schimler seemed to hesitate. Then:
“I am sorry,” he said; “I did not mean to ring. You can go.”
He shut the door and, leaning against it, looked at me. “That was a fortunate interruption for you, my friend. It is many years since I lost my temper so completely. I was going to kill you.”
I strove to keep the tremor out of my voice. “And now that you have regained your temper, perhaps we can talk sense. A little while ago you remarked that the best defense is attack. I am afraid that your calling me a spy is a somewhat naive way of putting that notion into practice. Don’t you agree?”
He was silent. I began to regain my self-possession. This was going to be easier than I had thought. The main thing now was to find out what he had done with the camera. Then I would get the waiter back to telephone Beghin.
“If,” I went on, “you knew the trouble you had caused me you would be far more sympathetic. I can still feel that crack on the head you gave me last night. And if you haven’t already spoiled those two rolls of film I should like them back before the police come. You know, they talked of not letting me go back to Paris until the matter was cleared up. However, now that it is cleared up, I hope you are going to be sensible. By the way, what did you do with the camera?”
He was frowning at me uncertainly. “If this is some sort of trap…” he began, and paused. “I haven’t the least idea what you are talking about,” he concluded.
I shrugged. “You’re being very foolish. Have you ever heard of a man named Beghin?”
He shook his head.
“I am afraid you soon will. He is a member of the Surete Generale attached to the Naval Intelligence Department at Toulon. Does that suggest nothing to you?”
He came slowly to the center of the room. I prepared to defend myself. Out of the corner of my eye I could see the bell-push. A couple of strides and I should be able to reach it. The next time he moved I would make a dash. But he stood still.
“I have a suspicion, Vadassy, that we are talking at cross purposes.”
I smiled. “I don’t think so.”
“Then I am afraid I do not understand you.”
I sighed impatiently. “Is it really worth denying? Be sensible, please. What have you done with the camera?”
“Is this some very clumsy joke?”
“It is not, as you will soon find out.” Feeling that I was not handling the situation particularly well, I began to get annoyed. “I propose to call the police. Have you any objections?”
“To the police? None at all. Call them by all means.”
He might be bluffing, but I felt a little uneasy. Without the evidence of the camera I was helpless. I decided to change my tactics. For a second or two I stared hard at him, then I broke into a crestfallen grin. “Do you know,” I said sheepishly, “I have an unhappy suspicion that I have made a mistake.”
His eyes searched mine warily. “I feel quite sure that is the case.”
I sighed. “Well, I am very sorry to have caused you all this inconvenience. I feel extremely foolish. Monsieur Duclos will be most amused.”
“Who?” The question was like a pistol shot.
“Monsieur Duclos. He is a pleasant old man, a little talkative, it is true, but sympathetic.”
I saw him control himself with an effort. He came nearer to me. His voice was dangerously calm. “Who are you and what do you want? Are you from the police?”
“I am connected with the police.” This, I thought, was rather neat. “You know my name. All I want is a piece of information. What have you done with that camera?”
“And if I still tell you that I don’t know what you’re talking about?”
“I shall hand you over for interrogation. What is more”-I watched him narrowly-“I shall make known what you seem so anxious to keep quiet-the fact that your name is not Heinberger.”
“The police already know it.”
“I know that. I regret to say that I have no confidence whatever in the intelligence of the local police. Now do you know what I am talking about?”
“No.”
I smiled and went to pass him to go to the door. He gripped my arm and swung me round.
“Listen, you fool,” he said savagely, “I don’t know what’s the matter with you, but you seem to have got some idea into your head about me. Whatever it is, you seem to regard the fact that I am anxious to conceal my identity as some sort of proof that your idea is correct. Is that right?”
“Approximately.”
“Very well, then. My reasons for using the name Heinberger have nothing whatever to do with you. Koche is aware of them. The police have my correct name. You, who have no idea what those reasons are, propose to be wilfully indiscreet unless I give you some information which I do not possess. Is that correct, too?”
“More or less. Assuming, of course, that you haven’t got the information.”
He ignored this last remark and sat down on the edge of his bed. “I don’t know how you found out. The police here told you, I suppose, and those passports in the wardrobe. In any case, I’ve got to stop the news getting any further. I am being perfectly frank with you, you see! I must stop you. The only way I can hope to do that is to give you my reasons. There is nothing very strange about them. My case is by no means unique.”
He paused to relight his pipe. His eyes met mine across the bowl. The ironic expression had returned to them. “You look, Vadassy, as though you weren’t going to believe a word of anything.”
“I don’t know that I am.”
He blew the match out. “Well, we’ll see. But you must remember one thing; I am trusting you. I have, of course, no alternative but to do so. I cannot persuade you to trust me.”
There was a hint of a question in the pause that followed the remark. For one fleeting instant I weakened; but only for an instant.
“I am trusting nobody.”
He sighed. “Very well. But it is a long story. It begins in 1933. I was editor of a social-democrat newspaper in Berlin, the Telegrafblatt.” He shrugged. “It is no longer in existence. It was not a bad paper. I had some clever journalists working for me. It was the property of a sawmill owner in East Prussia. He was a good man, a reformer, with a profound admiration for the nineteenth-century English liberals, Godwin and John Stuart Mill, people like that. He went into mourning when Stresemann died. He used sometimes to send me down leading articles about the brotherhood of man and the necessity of replacing the struggle between capital and labor with co-operation based on Christ’s teaching. I must say he was on the best of terms with his own employees; but I have an idea that his mills were losing money. Then came 1933.
“The trouble with postwar German social-democracy was that it supported with one hand what it was trying to fight with the other. It believed
in the freedom of the individual capitalist to exploit the worker and the freedom of the worker to organize his trade union and fight the capitalist. Its great illusion was its belief in the limitless possibilities of compromise. It thought that it could build Utopia within the Constitution of Weimar, that the only sublime political conception was reform, that the rotten economic structure of the world could be shored up at the bottom with material from the top. Worst of all, it thought that you could meet force with good will, that the way to deal with a mad dog was to stroke it. In 1933 German social-democracy was bitten and died in agony.
“The Telegrafblatt was one of the first papers to be closed down. Twice we were raided. The second time the machine-room was wrecked with hand grenades. Even that we survived. We were lucky enough to find a printer who could and would print a newspaper of sorts for us. But three weeks later he refused to print any more papers for us. He had been visited by the police. The same day we had a telegram from the owner saying that owing to losses in his business he had been compelled to sell the paper. The purchaser was a Nazi official, and I happen to know that the price was paid with a draft on a Detroit bank. The following night I was arrested at my home and put in the police cells.
“They kept me there for three months. I was not charged. They did not even question me. All I could get out of them was that my case was being considered. The first month, while I was getting used to it, was the worst part. Those police weren’t bad fellows. One of them even told me that he had sometimes read my stuff. But at the end of the three months I was moved to a concentration camp near Hanover.”
He paused for a moment. I sat down on the chair by the window.
“I dare say you’ve heard a lot about concentration camps,” he went on. “Most people have; and their ideas are mostly wrong. To hear some talk you would imagine that the entire day was spent in knocking the prisoners’ teeth out with rubber truncheons, kicking them in their stomachs and breaking their fingers with rifle butts. It isn’t; at least it wasn’t in the camp I was in. Nazi brutality is much less human. It’s the mind they get at. If you’d ever seen a man come out of a fortnight’s solitary confinement in a pitch-dark cell you’d know what I mean. Theoretically, it is possible to pass the time in a concentration camp no more uncomfortably than in any other prison-theoretically. No one, I should think, has ever done so. The discipline is fantastic. They give you work to do-shoveling piles of stones from one spot to another and then back again-and if you stop working, even to straighten your back for an instant-you get a flogging for disobeying orders and a week’s solitary confinement. They never relax for a moment. They change the guards constantly so that they don’t get tired of watching. They march you about the camp under cover of a machine-gun. They feed you on offal and cabbage stumps stewed in water and there’s a machine-gun covering you while you eat the filth. One man there used to be so worried by the gun that as soon as he’d eaten he used to vomit. Some became so debilitated that they couldn’t stand. When you were new to it you fought against it. They were ready for that. They used to get to work systematically to break your spirit. Regular floggings and long spells of solitary confinement soon did the trick. As long as you held out you were conscious that very gradually your mind was going. I pretended to knuckle under. It wasn’t easy. You see, they can tell by your eyes. If you let them see you looking at them, let them see that your mind is still working like a human being’s instead of a beast’s, you’re done for. You keep your eyes on the ground, never look at the guard who addresses you. I became quite expert; so expert that I began to think that I might be deceiving myself and that I was really no better off than the rest. I spent two years in that camp.”
His pipe had gone out. He tapped the bowl reflectively against the palm of his hand.
“One day I was taken to the commandant’s office. They told me that if I would sign a paper renouncing my German citizenship, saying that I would leave Germany and would not return, I would be allowed to go. At first I thought it was merely another of their tricks for making you give yourself away. But it was no trick. Not even their precious People’s Court could find anything to convict me of. I signed the paper. I would have signed anything to get out. Then I had to wait for three days for my permit to arrive. During that time they kept me away from the other prisoners. Instead of working with them I was put on to cleaning latrines. But at night we went to the same dormitory. And then something curious happened.
“Talking between the prisoners was forbidden, and the rule was enforced so savagely that the eyes-on-the-ground idea applied as much between prisoner and prisoner as between prisoner and guard. If you looked at another prisoner they might say you had been thinking of talking. The result was that you recognized the man next to you not so much by his face as by his shoulders and the shape of his feet. I had a shock when, as we were being marched into the dormitory on my last night there, I saw that the man next to me was trying to catch my eye. He was a gray-faced, heavy sort of man of about forty. He’d only been there six months, and by the way they’d singled him out for floggings I had guessed that he was a Communist. There was a guard near us and I was frankly terrified of giving them an excuse to cancel my permit. I got into my bunk as quickly as I could and lay still.
“It used to be quite common for the prisoners to have nightmares. Sometimes they would just mumble, sometimes they would shout and scream in their sleep. As soon as a man started one of the guards would get a bucket of water and empty it over him. I never slept much there, but that night I didn’t sleep at all. I kept thinking of getting away the next day. I had been lying in the darkness for about two hours when this man next to me started to mumble in his sleep. One of the guards came over and looked at him, but the mumbling had ceased. When the guard moved away it started again, but now it was a little louder and I could hear what he was saying. He was asking if I were awake.
“I coughed a little, turned restlessly, and sighed so that he should know that I was. Then he began to mumble again, and I heard him telling me to go to an address in Prague. He only had time to say it once, for the guard had come over again and he was suspicious. The man turned over suddenly and began flinging his arms about wildly and shouting for help. The guard kicked him and, as the man pretended to wake up, threatened him with a bucket of water if he wasn’t quiet. I heard no more from him. The following day I was given my permit and put on a train for Belgium.
“I won’t attempt to tell you what it felt like to be free again. It worried me at first. I couldn’t get the smell of camp out of my nostrils and I used to go off to sleep at all sorts of odd times during the day and dream that I was back there. But I got over that after a bit and began to think like a human being again. I spent a month or two in Paris doing a little work for the newspapers there, but the language difficulty made it almost impossible. I had to pay to have my stuff properly translated. I decided finally to try Prague. At the time I had no intention of going to the address that had been given me. I had, indeed, almost forgotten about it. Then something I heard from another German I met in Prague made me decide to investigate. That address turned out to be the headquarters of the German Communist underground propaganda organization.”
He paused for a moment to relight his pipe. Then he went on.
“After a while, when they were sure of me, I started working for the underground. The principal activity was getting news into Germany, real news. We produced a newspaper-the name of it doesn’t matter-and it used to be smuggled in small quantities over the frontier. It was printed on a very thin India paper and each one folded into a thin wad that a man could carry in the palm of his hand. Many different methods were employed for the smuggling, some of them very ingenious. The copies were even packed in small greaseproof bags and stuffed inside the axle boxes of the Prague-Berlin trains. They were collected by a wheel-tester at the Berlin end, but the Gestapo caught him after a while, and we had to think of something else. Then it was suggested that one of us should make an effort to get
a Czech passport, pose as a commercial traveler and take the papers in with samples. I volunteered for the job, and after some trouble we were successful.
“I crossed into Germany over thirty times that year. It wasn’t particularly risky. There were only two dangers. One was the chance of being recognized and denounced. The other was that the man who took the papers off me to pass them on to the distributing organization might become suspect. He did become suspect. They didn’t arrest him immediately, but watched. We used to meet in the waiting-room of a suburban station and then get into a train together. I would leave the parcel of papers on the luggage rack when I got out. He would pick it up. Then one day, just after the train had left the station, it stopped and a squad of S.S. men got in from the track. We didn’t know for certain whether it was us they were after or not, so we went into separate compartments and sat still. I heard them arrest him and waited for my turn. But they just examined my passport and went on through the train. It was not until I was nearly back in Prague the next day that I realized that I was being followed. Luckily I had the sense not to go back to headquarters. Luckily, that is, for my friends. It was less lucky for me. When they found that I wasn’t going to lead them to the persons they wanted they decided that the best way would be to get me back to Germany and use their persuasive resources to extract information. You see, our newspaper had begun to worry them, and I was the only real clue they had to the people behind it. The German end of the organization was concerned purely with distribution. It was the directing brains that they were after. I had to get away. And it had to be out of Czechoslovakia, too, for they had notified the Czech police that I was really a German criminal wanted for theft and that the Paul Czissar passport had been obtained under false pretenses.
“In Switzerland they tried to kidnap me. I was staying on the shore of Lake Constance and got friendly with two men who said they were on a fishing holiday. One day they asked me to go out with them. I was bored. I said that I would go. Just in time and quite by accident I found out that they were Germans, not Swiss, and that their boat had been hired on the German side of the lake. I went to Zurich after that; I knew they would keep track of me, but they couldn’t do any kidnapping so far away from the frontier. But I didn’t stay there long. One morning I got a letter from Prague warning me that the Gestapo had somehow found out that my name was Schimler. They had known before, of course, that Paul Czissar was no Czech, but a German; but now that they knew my real name they would not have to kidnap me to get me back to Germany. I’ve been on the run ever since. Twice they’ve nearly caught up with me. Switzerland was swarming with Gestapo agents. I decided to try France. The people in Prague sent me to Koche. He’s one of them.
