Faked Passports

by Dennis Wheatley

  “Gracious! How he hates this Jewish business rival of his,” Angela laughed. “And what a lark that the Jew is marrying into the family.”

  Erika smiled. “Apparently the family is by no means united. Father and Mother seem to have been living apart. Listen to this!

  “‘In one respect we start off with much better prospects this time, because Father and Mother have made up their differences. Mother has taken a new lease of life and has at last been fully persuaded that she can do better for herself by coming in with the family than by dragging out a penurious old age as a pensioner of Cousin Julia and her Jewish fiancé.

  “‘The amount of active help which she can be expected to give us is still debatable as Jacob is certain to exercise financial pressure upon her to restrain her as far as he is able. Therefore she must not be unduly pressed to come to the party during the first days of our Family-week but must be persuaded to work behind the scenes wherever possible in getting our more distant relatives together; particularly the Müller branch of the family as she has great influence with her nephews and nieces.

  “‘Apart from Jacob, the two people who might most seriously menace our plan for securing complete family unity are Mr. Saxe and Mrs. Klein—or Aunt Marta, as we have always known her—although she cannot really be considered as a member of the family.

  “‘As well as being our competitor in some respects Mr. Saxe is immensely rich and, as money gravitates to money, he was persuaded to give his support to Jacob when our interests last clashed. But it cost him a considerable amount and, as usual, Jacob took all the credit to Julia and himself for the success of his operations; so Mr. Saxe was far from pleased and is much less likely to give Jacob his assistance this time when we eventually come into the open market against him. However, it is too much to hope that Mr. Saxe would support an amalgamation of the family interests to the detriment of Jacob—to whom he is allied by ties of blood. The probability is that he will sit back and reap what advantage he can for his own firm while we are endeavouring to reconstruct ours and Jacob is occupied in endeavouring to check our expansion. Our objective, so far as Mr. Saxe is concerned, should therefore be to promote as much bad feeling between him and Jacob as possible so that he will reject any fresh advances that Jacob may make to him and, lulled by a false sense of security for his own concerns, be glad rather than sorry to see us putting a check upon the insatiable ambitions of the Jew.’”

  “He seems to be a proper crook, doesn’t he?” Angela broke in.

  “No,” Erika shrugged. “Just a very shrewd business man,” and she continued:

  “‘Mrs. Klein presents a very different and particularly knotty problem. Her firm cannot be considered as a competitor to ours or Jacob’s, and she has no particular love for either of us; yet, potentially, she could prove an immense asset to either of our rival concerns.

  “‘The half-derelict chain of stores which she inherited is still incredibly badly run but they cover a huge area; and while for some years Aunt Marta’s firm has failed to pay a dividend, it is quite certain that if the chain were taken over and placed under proper management it could be made to show handsome profits.

  “‘Any suggestion of an amalgamation with Mrs. Klein may seem extremely revolutionary from many points of view. Mother positively loathes her, while Uncle Rudolf and Uncle Ulrich—with both of whom we are on the best of terms at the moment—dislike her as much as does Mother; in addition, Aunt Marta has a long-standing quarrel with our managing director, Ernst.

  “‘Can all these difficulties be overcome? Aunt Marta’s dislike of Ernst is not so much a personal one, as in many ways they think alike, but is mainly due to fear. Knowing Ernst’s ability and enterprise she is always frightened that one day he may decide that our firm should launch out in a new direction which would jeopardise her own rickety business. If she could be persuaded that Ernst has no such intention and, in fact, that she has much to gain from settling her quarrel with him, since he could then offer to reorganise her business and put it on a sound footing, and possibly help her in other directions too, she might well consider an amalgamation with us; in which case it would certainly be worth our while to invite her to our Family Reunion.

  “‘It is inevitable that Uncle Rudolf and Uncle Ulrich will take offence if Mrs. Klein is asked to our Reunion; but that need not give us any immediate concern, because Uncle Rudolf is so far removed from the family sphere and Uncle Ulrich has been so ill recently that it is very doubtful if either of them will appear—at least until the end of the week during which the party is held—and they need know nothing of any overtures which we may make to Mrs. Klein until the whole matter is settled. They will be very annoyed when we have to inform them of it, but if we get satisfactory results from Mrs. Klein’s attendance they will realise that we had good reason for our decision to ask her—and, in any case, their interests are too closely allied to ours for there to be any danger of their going in with Jacob.’”

  “Is there much more of it?” Angela asked, stifling a yawn.

  “Reams of it, my dear,” Erika replied. “Would you like me to stop?”

  “No, no,” said Freddie. “Go on, do.”

  “All right, then.”

  “‘Mother is the remaining difficulty, and by far the greatest; but, whereas it would be a major triumph to get Mrs. Klein to appear early in our Reunion Week, we have no intention of asking Mother to join us until the party is properly under way. Her function will be to gather in the Müller family in secret and to allow Jacob to believe, until the very last moment, that he still has her under his thumb. Her appearance will then be all the greater triumph for us, and by the time we wish her to arrive we shall have had an opportunity to explain to her how wise we were in our decision to amalgamate; and that she will participate, just as much as any other member of the family, in the benefits to be derived from Mrs. Klein’s chain of stores.

  “‘It is of the first importance that as much work as possible should be put in before the invitations are issued, in order to ensure as great a number of acceptances to the Reunion as possible. Our first concern should be to link up with Cousin Vicki; our next to rope in those members of the family, such as Greta and Paula, who own small firms which were originally part of our business but were severed from us by Grandmother’s iniquitous Will.

  “‘It is also of the first importance that we should absorb as many of these small firms as possible on plausible excuses such as our excellent case for being granted the legal guardianship of Little August and Little Paul—so as to postpone arousing Jacob’s open antagonism as long as we can. At any stage of our arangements he may realise that our firm is once more becoming a serious threat to his and he may decide to take active counter-measures against us; but Mother must be used to quiet his suspicions. The longer we can prevent his endeavouring to wreck us by an open price-cutting campaign the more likely we are to succeed in undermining his business to such an extent that when he wakes up to what we have been doing it will be too late to save himself from bankruptcy.

  “‘The following are the stages in which it is proposed eventually to bring about a complete Reunion with all interests amalgamated under the head of the family.’”

  “Erika darling,” Angela interrupted, “must we really hear the stages by which this awful man proposes to blackmail all his relatives into letting him make a combine of their businesses?”

  “Not if you don’t wish to,” Erika smiled. “As we don’t know any of these people his schemes aren’t of the least interest to us. I must say, though, that I should like to know how the thing came into Gregory’s possession.”

  Freddie frowned. “Yes, it’s hardly likely that you would have kept a thing like this in a secret hiding-place on your person if it wasn’t of some importance. Perhaps we can help you recall where you got it if we go back over the last few times you’ve taken money out of your shoes.”

  “I don’t even remember when I took out the money last,” said Gregory despondently,
“let alone ever having seen these sheets of flimsy before.”

  “Well, you changed some German money into Finnish the day we arrived in Helsinki.”

  “That’s right—with that fair-haired, half-German chap in the hotel who did us down; but that was part of the money that Goering gave me and I was carrying it in my pocket.”

  “Right, then. Did you take off your shoes for any purpose while we were at Karinhall? Didn’t you have a bath in the morning?”

  “I’ve got it!” Gregory suddenly snapped his fingers. “That’s when I put the papers with the money. Those bits of typescript came out of Goering’s safe.”

  “Out of Goering’s safe?” echoed Erika. “Then they must be something important.”

  “I remember now”—Gregory stood up and began to pace quickly up and down; “I did have one look at them in Helsinki; when I was up in that room we took at the hotel, Freddie, just before you came in with the invitation to lunch with Angela and her father. I read the first few paragraphs, and as I couldn’t make head or tail of them I put the sheets back to study when I had more leisure.”

  “But how on earth did you get hold of them?” Erika asked.

  ‘I stole them,” Gregory replied promptly. “It was while Goering was getting me the money. He had just taken a big packet of bank-notes out of his safe when the telephone rang. Thrusting the bundle into my hand he said: ‘Here! Count yourself out three thousand marks,’ then he turned his back on me to answer the call.

  “They were one-hundred-mark notes so I peeled off thirty, then I noticed that those flimsies had got wedged underneath the packet, in the rubber-band that held the notes together. I suppose it was a crazy risk to take but it seemed to me at the time that any typescript out of Goering’s private safe might contain some terrific secret; so I acted on impulse, pulled the sheets from under the rubber-band and slipped them in my pocket. Later, when I undressed to have a bath, I took the opportunity to transfer the flimsies to my boot. It looks now, though, as if I risked my neck for an extract from his family album.”

  Erika glanced at a few further passages in the closely-typed sheets. “Goodness knows! I’ve met most of Hermann’s relatives at one time or another but I don’t recognise any of these surnames and the Christian names don’t seem to fit, either. It looks to me as though this has been sent to Goering because he is the commercial dictator of Germany and would naturally be interested in any amalgamation of big business interests that was projected; but how he could be expected to know all the ramifications of somebody else’s family, I can’t think.”

  “Perhaps it isn’t what it appears to be at all,” Freddie suggested, “but particulars of something quite different, set out in secret code. I’m jolly good at crossword puzzles; let me have a look at it.”

  “What is a crossword puzzle?” Gregory asked.

  While the girls explained to him Freddie studied the latter part of the document; his German was just good enough to make out the general sense. At last he looked up and said:

  “The chap who compiled this seems a most awful thug and means to go to any lengths. In one place he suggests that his mother should forcibly remove a girl named Marlene from the Schwartz’s because they didn’t look after her properly; and in another that they should get Mrs. Klein’s daughter, Paula, certified as insane if she refuses to come into the ring. There’s a lot, too, about the careful preparation of cases for the courts by which it’s proposed to try to secure the custody of several children with a view, apparently, to influencing the parents through them afterwards.”

  “Big business is often as dirty as politics,” Angela shrugged. “Many a rich man has made his millions by taking for his motto the saying: ‘The end justifies the means’.”

  Freddie nodded. “I expect you’re right. It’s just a very carefully worked out plan to amalgamate a whole lot of commercial interests which are under the control of different branches of two or three families, and to break the rival concern of this Jew chap, Jacob Bauer, whom the writer seems to dislike so much. Still, as it came out of Goering’s safe there’s just a chance that it might contain some hidden meaning; and it will amuse me to see if one could possibly read any other interpretation into all this blather about uncles and cousins and aunts.”

  He slipped the papers into his pocket and pulling on his furs went out to give the horses their afternoon feed and rub-down.

  In the days that followed even the joy which the two couples derived from being together was a little marred by their extreme boredom. All four of them had hitherto led very active lives with many friends and interests, whereas now there were no papers, no posts, no radio, no parties, no cinemas, no shopping-expeditions, no business to transact, no minor family worries or joys to engage-their thoughts. They had not even the pleasurable anticipation of looking forward to seeing their respective lovers from day to day, or receiving letters from them, as for twenty-three out of each twenty-four hours they were cooped up together in the same room; and the spells of wintry daylight were so short that, in that room, it almost seemed that they were living in eternal night. There was not even enough blank paper in the house for any of them to contemplate writing some short stories or a book, and when Angela decided to make a pack of cards she had to use the crudest materials; moreover, as Erika loathed cards the experiment did not prove much of a success.

  Freddie spent a lot of time poring over the flimsy papers that had been found in Gregory’s shoe. He ran all the words together then separated the letters into blocks of five and placed differently-arranged alphabets over them. He gave a different number to each letter, added them up and turned the resulting numerals back into letters again, reaching various conclusions none of which made the least sense. He then got Erika to translate the typed pages for him into both French and English and once again set to work with his groups of five letters and innumerable alphabets; but that did not get him anywhere either. Yet he could not let the thing alone.

  Perhaps it was lack of any other occupation, but the perfectly straightforward account of somebody’s plans to hold a Family Reunion and amalgamate various business interests seemed to have become an obsession with him, and the more the others chaffed him about his efforts the more mulish he became in his assertion that since the papers had come out of Goering’s safe they must contain information of importance, if only some clue to their real subject could be found.

  Now that the risk of being caught in a blizzard made it impossible for them to go on long hunting expeditions or journeys to the lake the only exercise they could get, apart from work in the house and rubbing down the horses three times a day, was an hour or so each midday playing games in the clearing.

  Freddie and Angela had always been winter-sport enthusiasts so they loved romping together out in the crisp air; Erika had never been interested in outdoor games and only joined in to oblige the others; but Gregory surprised them all. In his normal wits he would never have set foot outside the house, except when he positively had to do so, even if he had been confined there for a twelve-month. Physically, he was bone-lazy and loathed any form of unnecessary activity; so he would have slept a lot, talked a lot and made love to Erika whenever the other two were out of the way, and in the meantime would probably have taught himself to read Finnish with the aid of the Finnish-German dictionary which was among the books.

  As it was, his loss of memory seemed to have thrown him back to the period of his life when, as a very small boy, his animal spirits had not been submerged in the joy of mental pleasure and he had not yet developed that contempt for “hearties” which became apparent soon after he went to his public school. Somewhat to Erika’s annoyance, he entered with incredible gusto into snowball fights, games of leap-frog, tip-and-run, hide-and-seek among the trees and other childish pastimes. Not content with this, he made himself a long slide out of the frozen snow at which, from a slight eminence, he took a long run to come hurtling down it with loud, boyish cries of glee.

  It was, curiously enough,
this harmless if infantile amusement which on February the 17th resulted in an accident that had far-reaching results.

  He was careering down his slide for the fifth time that morning when he tripped on a little freshly-fallen snow which he had failed to brush away sufficiently far to the side of his ice-run. His feet flew from under him. Crashing backwards his head hit the ice a blow that could be heard; then he skidded on for about fifteen feet and remained there, lying quite still.

  The others ran to him and finding him unconscious carried him to the house. A few minutes later he came round, groaning, and complained of frightful pains in the back of the head. They gave him a hot drink and tucked him up on top of the oven where, after a little while, he went to sleep.

  When he awoke that evening he sat up and stared in astonishment at the others and round the room. It then transpired that he had got his memory back; that is, he could remember perfectly the whole of his previous life up to the point when he had been wounded in the head by a spent bullet, outside the Petsamo aerodrome, on the night of November the 30th; but things that had happened since seemed to him like the disconnected episodes in a dream.

  They were overjoyed at his recovery and it did not take them very long to run over with him the few excitements which had broken the pleasant routine of the two and a half months they had spent in the trapper’s house. He laughed a lot when they recalled to him how they had driven the Russians away by pretending to be ghosts and even more when he realised that he owed the recovery of his memory to his favourite occupation of sliding like a schoolboy on an ice-track that he had made with considerable labour for himself. Next day they had great fun in taking him round their small domain and showing him all the arrangements they had made to continue there in as much comfort as possible until the coming of the thaw.

  Two nights later Freddie was sitting up as he often did—long after the others had tucked up on the oven—straining his not very brilliant wits to find a hidden meaning in the now thumbed and crumpled typescript. Regardless of time, he worked on and on. It was past three o’clock in the morning when he suddenly stood up from the table, marched over to the oven and roughly roused the others from their slumber to declare with shining eyes that he had at last solved his puzzle.