by Jack Higgins
“Thank you!” Von Kraul smiled slightly. “Perhaps you will not be too harsh on us in the future.” He got to his feet. “Are you ready, my friend?”
Chavasse shook his head. “No, I think I’ll stay and have another. Don’t worry about me. I’ll make my own way back.”
Von Kraul held out his hand. “A real pleasure, Herr Chavasse. Perhaps our paths will cross again. I hope so.” For a moment he appeared to hesitate, and then he said, “Forgive me for stating the obvious, but time is a great healer.” He turned without waiting for a reply and went outside.
Chavasse ordered another brandy and sat there for a little while longer, thinking about von Kraul’s last remark, but it didn’t help. It didn’t help at all. Suddenly the noise and the bustle and the cheerful laughter of the beer house was too much for him and he got to his feet and left, pushing his way roughly through a party of people who were at that moment coming in through the door.
As he walked along the pavement, collar turned up against the rain, a car drew up beside him and Sir George Harvey said, “Hello there, Chavasse. I thought it was you. Can I give you a lift?”
Chavasse hesitated, and then climbed in beside him without a word. As they moved away, Sir George said excitedly, “Terrible business at Nagel’s reception. Absolutely astounding. Somebody shot him and then committed suicide!”
Chavasse lit a cigarette and said carefully, “Were you there when they discovered the bodies?”
Sir George shook his head. “No, we were all requested to leave. The excuse given was that Nagel had met with an accident. Naturally, I was curious and had a word with one of the servants on the way out. He gave me the details.”
“Have they identified the man who killed him yet?” Chavasse said.
“Not as far as I know,” Sir George told him. “The police had just arrived as I left.” Chavasse didn’t say anything more, and Sir George looked sideways at him curiously. “You don’t know anything about it, do you?”
Chavasse nodded slowly. “I should imagine they’ll just be discovering that the dead man is Inspector Steiner of the Hamburg police.”
The car slewed violently and Sir George fought for control, and finally brought it to a standstill. He took a handkerchief and mopped his brow. “Sorry about that,” he said, “but to be perfectly frank, you rather took the wind out of my sails.” Chavasse didn’t reply, and after a moment of silence Sir George went on. “I suppose it all ties in with the Bormann affair?”
Chavasse wound down the window and flicked his cigarette out into the rain. “There is no Bormann affair any longer. It’s finished, all wrapped up.”
Sir George frowned. “But what about the manuscript?”
“A heap of ashes,” Chavasse said. “I’m afraid Steiner was just one step in front of me.”
Out of the silence that followed, Sir George said awkwardly, “And Miss Hartmann?”
For a moment, the words refused to come, but Chavasse swallowed hard and forced them out. “I’m afraid he got to her as well.”
Sir George turned slowly and looked at him, horror in his eyes. “You mean she’s dead?”
Chavasse didn’t bother replying, and they sat there for some time in silence. After a while, Sir George said, “Is there anywhere I can take you?”
Chavasse nodded slowly. “Yes, I think I’d like to go back to her apartment, if you don’t mind.”
Sir George nodded, seemingly too full of emotion to speak, and switched on the engine. A moment later, they were continuing through the heavy rain toward the center of Hamburg.
When they reached the house, Chavasse got out quickly and Sir George kept the engine running. He leaned out of the side window and said, “Is there anything more I can do for you?”
Chavasse shook his head. “No, I’ll be fine, thanks.”
“I’m leaving on the afternoon train tomorrow,” Sir George went on. “Will I see you again before I go?”
Chavasse nodded slowly. “I’ll probably be returning by that train myself. I’ve nothing to hang on here for any longer.”
Sir George smiled tightly. “I won’t say good-bye then. If I don’t see you on the train, we must certainly have a drink together on the boat going over.” He let in the clutch and the Mercedes moved away quickly, leaving Chavasse alone on the edge of the pavement.
He went upstairs slowly, taking his time, reluctant to go into the empty apartment. He hesitated outside for a moment, and then took out the master key the caretaker’s wife had given him, and unlocked the door.
As he turned the handle, he became aware of a slight flurry of movement inside. For a moment he hesitated, and then flung the door open and went into the room half-crouching, his hands ready.
Mark Hardt was standing in the center of the room. He was wearing a heavy driving coat, but his trousers were wet and clung to his legs. His face looked white and tense, and when he saw Chavasse he relaxed with a deep sigh. “You had me worried for a moment.”
Chavasse unbuttoned his hunting jacket slowly. “How did you manage to get away from them?”
Hardt shrugged. “It was easy enough. Once I’d led them away from you, I stopped making such a damned noise. The dogs couldn’t pick up my scent in the heavy rain. I crossed the main road and hid in the loft of a barn for two or three hours. Then I thumbed a lift from a passing truck driver. I told him I’d been camping and got washed out by the heavy rain. I don’t think he believed me, but he gave me this coat and dropped me off in Hamburg.”
“How’s the arm?” Chavasse said.
“Bloody awful!” Hardt replied with a tired grin. “But I’ll survive. Where’s Anna?”
Chavasse said slowly, “I think you’d better sit down, Mark. I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news for you.”
Hardt frowned. “What are you trying to say?”
“She’s dead,” Chavasse said quietly. “Steiner and his friends got hold of her.”
Hardt swayed slightly, and then reached blindly for a chair and sat down. After a while, he said in a dead voice, “How did it happen?”
Chavasse told him. When he had finished, he hesitated and went on. “If it’s any comfort, both Steiner and Nagel are dead. I was waiting in the garden of Nagel’s house in Blankenese with a German intelligence man when Steiner arrived to assassinate Hauptmann.”
Hardt got to his feet slowly. “It’s no consolation at all,” he said. “Steiner, Nagel, and Martin Bormann might have crawled out from under a stone, but Anna…” He smiled sadly. “Suddenly, it all seems so silly. I wonder what we’ve come to.”
He walked across to the table by the window and gently touched one of the Hebrew books. “She always did her homework, as she called it. It doesn’t seem possible, does it, Chavasse?”
And then his shoulders started to shake and the fine face crumpled. He slumped down into the chair and bowed his head upon his arms and wept.
For a little while, Chavasse stood there watching him with pity in his heart, and then he turned and went out, closing the door gently behind him.
CHAPTER 14
It was bitterly cold at the Hook of Holland as the ship nosed her way out of the harbor, and fog was rolling in steadily from the North Sea, pushed by a slight wind.
Chavasse leaned over the rail and smoked a cigarette and watched the lights disappear into the darkness. Somewhere in the distance, a bugle sounded faintly on the wind from one of the Dutch Army camps, touching something deep inside him and filling him with a curious sadness. For a brief moment, he remembered Anna’s words in the hunting lodge at Berndorf: Lights out, you’re through, it’s all over, and as Holland disappeared into the night behind them, he flicked his cigarette down into the fog and went below.
He had a cabin to himself, and stripped to the waist and washed and shaved. Afterward, he dressed slowly, putting on a fresh shirt, and went up to the bar.
He hadn’t slept in over twenty-four hours, but after the first double whiskey he felt a little better. He lit a cigarette and looked about h
im. Sir George Harvey was sitting in a corner with two other men, and he waved across the room. Chavasse nodded slightly and turned back to his drink.
He rested an elbow on the bar and stared blindly into space, his mind going back over everything that had taken place during the last few days, preparing for the report he would have to give the Chief.
But it was very difficult. No matter how hard he tried to concentrate, it was unimportant things that persisted in pushing the other things, the things the Chief would want to know, into the background.
It was a touch of brain fatigue, that was all, and he sighed and gave up the struggle. He closed his eyes, and her face seemed to float in the darkness before him. There was a sweet, grave smile on her lips, and he was suddenly reminded that this was how she had looked in the hunting lodge at Berndorf when they had waited for Sir George’s car.
He remembered what she had said. One day, you’ll look back on it all and it will simply be something that happened a long time ago. And then she’d quoted from one of Marlowe’s plays. But that was long ago and in another country.
For a moment, he sat there, eyes closed, a slight frown on his face, and then he remembered the quotation in full and shivered violently, coldness seeping through him. But that was long ago and in another country, and besides—the wench is dead.
Had she perhaps had, for a brief moment only, a sudden foreknowledge of what was to happen? But his brain refused to function efficiently, and he reached for his glass and emptied it.
As he started to rise, Sir George Harvey sat on the stool beside him. “Got time for a nightcap?” he said.
Chavasse nodded and sat down again. “Just one if you don’t mind. I’m desperately tired. Haven’t slept since the day before yesterday.”
Sir George nodded sympathetically. “I’m sorry we couldn’t meet on the train. Unfortunately, several of the delegates decided at the last minute to spend a day or two in London before breaking up. Naturally, I was compelled to travel with them.”
“That’s all right,” Chavasse said as the barman placed two large whiskies before them.
Sir George offered him a cigarette and shook his head. “I felt particularly bad about it under the circumstances. I wanted time to discuss things with you.”
“There isn’t anything to discuss,” Chavasse told him.
“But there is,” Sir George said. “I get the definite impression that you’re feeling pretty grim about everything. Your original mission a failure, Miss Hartmann’s unfortunate death. But there is another side to things, you know. After all, you did manage to save Hauptmann. Who knows what effect that may have on the future of Germany?”
Chavasse nodded slowly. “Yes, I suppose one could look at it that way.” There was a dull, throbbing pain behind his eyes and he felt curiously light-headed. He got to his feet and said, “I hope you’ll excuse me now. I’m desperately tired.”
Sir George hastily finished his drink, his face full of concern. “Stupid of me to keep you here at all, Chavasse. You look terrible.”
They walked out of the lounge and paused at the top of the companionway. “I’ll leave you here,” Sir George said. “I feel like a turn around the deck. I can never sleep during this particular crossing.” He held out his hand. “If I don’t see you again, good luck. If you should ever feel like returning to a more normal life, come and see me. I’ve a great deal of influence in business circles.”
Chavasse went along the corridor to his cabin, thinking about Sir George’s offer. He wondered what the Chief would say if he walked into his office and handed over his resignation along with the report on the Bormann affair. It was tempting—very tempting.
He opened the door of the cabin and went inside, yawning as the tiredness seemed to melt into his very bones, turning them to jelly. He stood in front of the mirror and started to take off his tie, and images and thoughts circled endlessly in his brain, disjointed and meaningless, and then something erupted out of his subconscious to scream one name at him through the silence.
He gripped the edge of the washbasin with both hands and stared into the mirror, the shock of it like a bucket of ice water thrown in the face. And then he no longer felt tired and he pulled on his raincoat quickly and left the cabin.
The ship was moving through a silent world of thick fog when he came out onto the top deck, and a light rain was falling. He lit a cigarette and moved forward, his eyes probing every corner.
He found Sir George leaning over the stern rail, a cigar burning between his teeth, one hand thrust deep into the pocket of a heavy overcoat. A seaman in knitted cap and reefer jacket was coiling a rope nearby, and he moved away into the fog as Chavasse approached.
Sir George turned from the rail. “Oh, it’s you, Chavasse. Changed your mind about going to bed, eh?”
Chavasse nodded. “There are one or two loose ends to the Bormann affair. I thought you might be able to help me tie them up.”
“Certainly, my boy,” Sir George said. “Only too pleased to be of assistance.”
“I hoped you’d feel that way.” Chavasse smiled. “You can start by telling me how you came to be involved with Nagel, Steiner, and the rest of that pleasant bunch.”
Sir George’s face looked suddenly old and careworn in the sickly light of the deck lamp. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Then I’ll make it plainer for you,” Chavasse told him. “You’ve been sticking a knife into my back from the very beginning of this affair. I’d like to know why.”
Sir George moved forward suddenly and tried to brush past him.
Chavasse pushed him violently and struck him a heavy blow in the face.
Sir George staggered backward and slipped to one knee. For a moment he stayed there, blood on his mouth. As he rose to his feet, his right hand came out of his overcoat pocket, holding an old Webley .38 with a specially shortened barrel.
“That won’t do you any good,” Chavasse said.
Sir George carefully wiped the blood from his mouth with a handkerchief. When he spoke, his voice was cold and impersonal. “How did you find out?”
“It was something you said in the bar earlier,” Chavasse replied. “You told me not to feel too badly about things because at least I’d saved Hauptmann’s life.”
For a moment, Sir George frowned, and then a light suddenly dawned. “Of course—I wasn’t supposed to know about the plan to assassinate Hauptmann, was I?”
“It was careless of you,” Chavasse said.
Sir George sighed. “We all make mistakes.”
“There were other things,” Chavasse said. “They didn’t make sense before, but they do now. The fact that the opposition knew Muller was to meet me on the train at Osnabruck. That was something I was never really happy about. And then there was something Nagel said at Berndorf when he first met Anna. His exact words were, ‘So this is the Jewish girl?’”
“What’s so remarkable about that?” Sir George asked.
Chavasse shrugged. “At the best of times, the word race is only an abstraction. The only way Nagel knew she was Jewish was because he’d been told, and only one person other than myself knew that an Israeli underground organization was also after Bormann and the manuscript. That was you, because I’d told you.”
“I seem to have been even more careless than I imagined.” Sir George sighed again. “It’s a great pity, Chavasse, because I’d really taken a liking to you, and now I’m going to have to kill you.”
Chavasse took out a cigarette and lit it calmly. “Not without an explanation,” he said. “Surely, I’m entitled to that?”
“A quick one.” Sir George’s eyes glinted in the dark. “There was a period in my life when I was very dissatisfied with the way my country was being governed. At that time, I greatly admired what was going on in Germany. In fact, I was censured by the press for my too-warm support of Herr Hitler.”
“And just how warm was that support?” Chavasse asked.
“I agreed to become he
ad of the provisional government when the Germans successfully invaded England,” Sir George told him calmly.
And then the whole thing began to make sense. “Bormann mentioned you in his manuscript, didn’t he?” Chavasse said.
“I should imagine he devoted at least a chapter to me. He was the only member of the Nazi hierarchy with whom I was in close contact during the years before the war. The whole arrangement was made through him and was so secret that only Bormann, Hitler, and a go-between from the political branch were in on it.”
“And who was the go-between?”
Sir George allowed himself a slight smile. “Kurt Nagel.”
“Now it is beginning to make sense,” Chavasse said. “Presumably, he’s been blackmailing you ever since.”
Sir George shook his head. “I wouldn’t say that. We’ve always understood each other very well. Let me put it this way. I saw that he got his start in industry during the bad days after the war when things were very difficult. In fact, it proved quite profitable for me in the end. We’ve always been on the best of terms.”
“Did you know about his activities with the Nazi underground?”
“Not until recently. When the directors of the publishing firm approached me regarding Muller’s offer, I was trapped. I couldn’t stop their story from getting to the proper authorities, so I decided that the best thing to do was to take it to them myself.”
“That was clever of you,” Chavasse said, “and also dangerous.”
Sir George shook his head. “I’ve been lucky, Chavasse. Incredibly lucky from the beginning. I got in touch with Nagel and told him what was happening. It turned out that he already had a line on Muller from the German end and he arranged the business on the train. It seemed clever at the time. A good way of grabbing Muller and getting rid of you.”
“But you hadn’t reckoned on Mark Hardt.”
Sir George sighed heavily. “One can’t think of everything. I was as careful as I could possibly be. I always acted through Nagel so that none of the others knew that I was involved. And then last night when you told me the girl had the manuscript, I had to act fast, and that unfortunately meant meeting Steiner and taking him to her apartment.”
