Dr Morelle and Destiny

by Ernest Dudley

  Dr. Morelle and Destiny

  Ernest Dudley

  © Ernest Dudley, 1958

  Ernest Dudley has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 1958 by Robert Hale Limited.

  This edition published in 2018 by Endeavour Media Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter One

  THE PARTY AT the Post Hotel was in full swing. U.S. Army personnel and their wives, or German girl-friends, the war had been over more than three years, milled around; cigar-smoke and a variety of exotic scents filled the atmosphere, champagne corks popped, there was plenty of back-slapping and laughter. A local dance-band had been brought in to play American jazz with a Teutonic lilt. Plenty were dancing in the big dining-room, decorated with coloured lights. The party was going great.

  Outside the Post Hotel the town of Mittenwald, snug beneath the Alps, which had not long ago looked down on a desperate swarm of frightened refugees and fugitives, from Nazi officers and generals to politicians, fleeing from the advancing American troops, looming like white, ghostly towers in the darkness, was blanketed with snow. The narrow street of shops was bright with Christmas decorations, the low roofs glistened white.

  Johnny Destiny turned from the window overlooking the street, drained his glass of champagne, and glanced at his watch, pushing back the heavy gold identity-tab he wore low on his wrist. He looked slim and dapper in his Third United States Army sergeant’s uniform, his fancy-dress was how he privately regarded it. Taking a drag at his cigarette, he made his way round the crowded floor, eyeing the dancers until he paused to cut in on a big lieutenant who was dancing with a blonde girl.

  “Hello, Johnny,” she said. She slipped easily into his arms, while the big lieutenant scowled and went off in search of alcoholic consolation. “I was wondering where you were.” She spoke English well, with a soft Bavarian accent.

  “I been thinking,” Johnny said. “I been thinking it’s time we took off.”

  “Whatever you say, Johnny,” she said, and smiled into his pale, glinting eyes.

  “Get your coat, hon,” he said, and patted her wrist on which was the gold watch he had given her for a Christmas present. He watched her, her curves shown off alluringly by the Paris frock she was wearing, slip quickly through the crowd with a stare of mingled admiration and speculation. Her name was Minna Borgmann. She was nearly nineteen. She reappeared with the fur coat which he had also given her over her slim shoulders.

  He stubbed out his cigarette and they went out together into the street, where he found the Mercedes coupé which he had parked in the shadows round a corner from the hotel. This was a Christmas present he had given himself. He had stolen it two days before.

  Minna got into the car and he slammed the door shut, and got in after her. The Mercedes drove off with a thunderous roar, and soon was speeding out of Mittenwald over the white roads. Johnny drove with one hand, the other arm was round Minna’s waist, his hand cupping her breast. Two or three times he let go the steering-wheel to put both his arms round her. She implored him to stop if he wanted to kiss her, she was frightened there would be an accident, the car would skid on the icy road.

  He only grinned at her in the glimmer of the dashboard-light. He took the steering-wheel between his knees and steering the car without slackening speed he held her in both arms and kissed her. She was breathless with fright and the intensity of his kisses and then he grasped the wheel again.

  “You really love me?” he said, from the side of his mouth.

  She pouted at him reprovingly, her red mouth smudged. “Johnny, darling,” she said, her eyes brilliant, “don’t you know I do?”

  There was no smile on his thin face. “I’m not sure,” he said. “I wish I could be sure of something.”

  His mind went back over the rackets he’d been in since the war had ended. There’d been the spell at Hamburg, recovering from the pulverizing it had received from the Allied air forces, where there had been plenty of Germans prepared to do business. He had found it easy to contact the right people, those with diamonds, not the industrial stuff but the real sparklers, and gold and platinum, cameras and liquor, antiques and carpets.

  The krauts wanted food and cigarettes and soap in exchange. He’d been able to supply that demand, all right. There’d been a German girl then, too, who’d acted as his go-between and whom he had loaded with silk stockings, jewellery. There’d been a gold watch and a fur coat for her, too. Through various agents he had disposed of the gold and platinum in Brussels and Antwerp, the diamonds on the Antwerp Diamond Bourse, and other stuff through ships sailing in and out of Hamburg for London and other ports.

  There was the coffee and cigarettes he’d run into the battered city of Berlin, netting him five thousand dollars a trip; smuggling arms, which were left lying in enormous stocks round about Hamburg, to Mediterranean ports, en route to Morocco or the Middle East. He had linked up with a mob in Belgium, mostly deserters from Allied forces, who stole cars and trucks as they were unloaded and ran them down to Spain. There was another racket, smuggling German automobiles across the Channel, and works of art, and suites of furniture.

  Then when he had moved south, to Garmisch-Partenkirchen, he had made contact with some ex-SS types and an ex-agent for the Abwher, who were pumping drugs into Switzerland, with Paris dope-addicts as their ultimate destination.

  Johnny had liked it at Garmisch-Partenkirchen, not so much the wonderful mountains rising on every side, or its swift-flowing River Loisach, with its pretty wooden bridges, which ran through the town on its way to the Danube, but the night-clubs and hotels, the bars and weinstubes, where he did business, that he liked. He had never had it so good. Just off a street where the shiny Cadillacs and army trucks shoved the oxen-drawn carts out of the way, he occupied a villa with Minna.

  It was here that he and Minna now arrived, to find another party under way. Minna’s friends, U.S. Army personnel and Johnny’s German stooges were already taking care of the champagne and the food which loaded the tables. Dance-music from the radio filled the villa. After a while, Johnny his expression abstracted, left Minna dancing with a fat American colonel, and went upstairs to the luxurious bedroom, and made a phone call.

  The phone call sent him a few minutes later slipping quietly out of the villa and speeding the Mercedes towards Munich, a hundred kilos away. He hadn’t stopped to tell Minna he was going to be absent from her party a couple of hours. The party would carry on okay without him.

  Driving fast over the icy roads, he found himself in Pariserstrasse, which was one of Munich’s less salubrious districts dotted with bars and restaurants. He drew up the Mercedes outside the particular bar he wanted, where the inevitable fruit-machines and skittle-tables were in action, and made his way upstairs. Here in a room overlooking the street, he
talked quickly with a grey-faced German, who wore a woollen cap over his round head. What the grey-faced man told him tightened the muscles in Johnny’s face, his pale eyes narrowed.

  Sixty minutes later he was on the outskirts of Garmisch-Partenkirchen again. He stopped the Mercedes outside his villa, and slipping in the back way, went up to the bedroom. The radio was still going full blast, the party was doing fine.

  He packed fast. Money, jewels; plus anything that might be of an incriminating nature.

  Then he went downstairs. Hardly anyone seemed to recognize him. No one had noticed apparently that he hadn’t been there all the time. The lights had been turned out in the room at the back, and through the half-open door he heard the familiar sounds of semi-drunken love-making. Minna wouldn’t be in there, he knew.

  She was true to him, in her fashion. Even though, as he knew now, she had been working for the American C.I.C. all the time, she hadn’t double-crossed him with any other guy. He was sure of that. He saw her in the front room, with a half-filled glass of champagne in her small hand, listening with a bunch of others to someone spinning smutty stories.

  He touched her arm. “Hon, I got a little present I want to show you.”

  She flashed him her brilliant look, brushed a lock of blonde hair back from her face and followed him upstairs.

  “Where have you been darling?” she said. “I missed you —” She broke off as she stood in the bedroom door way and saw the preparations he had made for his getaway.

  He had moved swiftly behind the door as she came into the bedroom, wide-eyed. The snout of the Star F .22 L.R. was behind her right ear as she started to turn to him. It was fitted with a silencer and there was hardly any noise at all as the bullet smashed a great hole in her skull. The radio downstairs was drooling out a waltz from the A.F.N. hit parade.

  Five minutes later the Mercedes was roaring off along the road for the Swiss frontier town of St. Gallen. Through the misty ravines with the white mountain tops glistening above him against the black velvet sky, Johnny Destiny drove with one hand, but his other arm wasn’t around anyone’s waist. He was alone, cigarette drooping from the corner of his thin-lipped mouth, his gaze concentrated on the road ahead.

  He was going A.W.O.L for a long time.

  He lay low in Switzerland a couple of years, moving around from Berne to Lake Lucerne, then Zurich and Geneva. Once in a while he toyed with the idea of returning to the States. He had a dream of setting himself up in Florida, where he’d come from, maybe a gambling setup, or California; or he might try South America. He’d been down to Rio, once, way back. He couldn’t be repatriated from South America, and from what he heard there should be something doing there that would suit his dubious talents.

  But it was only a pipe-dream. He knew in his heart he would never make it, would never see the States again. Johnny Destiny was quite right about that, too. Though he couldn’t anticipate that the reason why he would never see the U.S. again would be quite such a final one.

  It was a girl again who gave him the idea about Rome. She was dark-eyed, with a ripe, full mouth and a small, tilted nose like a kitten’s, and her name was Carla and she called herself a countess, and he met her in a bar in Geneva. But what interested Johnny most about her was that she could put him in touch with the sort of contacts he wanted to be put in touch with. And Johnny felt like a change of scene, so three years after he had skipped over the Swiss-German border, found him in Rome.

  Rome, where Johnny was to dream up a racket which was going to pay off bigger than anything to date. Rome, where he was never to have it so good.

  Chapter Two

  NOT FOR JOHNNY the Rome of the tourists rubbernecking the museums and art-galleries, the great squares like the Piazza Navona, the Campo del Fiori; the mighty Colosseum, or the pilgrims’ shrines such as St. Paul’s, San Lorenzo, or San Clemento.

  For Johnny it was the Rome which it seemed to him was more vice-conscious, where more rackets flourished than any other city he’d known, New York or Hamburg, Paris or Rio.

  To-day, Johnny went through the motions again, he looked in for a pre-lunch cocktail in the Hotel Excelsior on the Via Veneto, not far from the Borghese Gardens, generally referred to as the Snake Pit. He ducked down into the downstairs bar, that sombre dive for people, it seemed to him, who never faced the sun without dark glasses, who couldn’t even stand normal indoor lighting.

  There was the usual motley mob of Americans drinking Bloody Marys or whiskies, Italians drinking Campari bitters or Cinzano, or Americanos. He took in the local eccentrics and the Hollywood movie-set, plus all the men with beards, who looked too much like artists to be the real McCoy. The usual bunch of Italian counts and countesses, the inevitable cavalcade of gorgeously-dressed girls, either there by assignation, or swinging their hips hopefully and pointing their long Italian shoes coquettishly as they gave the men the speculative once-over.

  There was no one who interested Johnny so very much. He had been in Rome several weeks now, he had just about sized it up, with Carla’s help, and he was waiting for something to break. He was waiting for the big idea, the bright notion. It was very overdue.

  He lit another cigarette and went upstairs to the lobby and the outer bar of the Snake Pit. This was where the fast deals were done, where you waited around looking for that certain someone who might have some tip-off that was worth waiting around for. Johnny knew the men that met his eye. Fat or skinny, mostly old, with too-highly manicured finger-nails, balding heads and anxiety-filled creased faces. They had nothing for him.

  Johnny sized up the mob, and strolled over in the summer sunshine to Giorgi’s, a block or two away. At Giorgi’s he sat down and let Giovanni order his lunch for him while he sipped another Martini, and eyed the others lunching there, most of them were those he had not long left at the Snake Pit.

  Then it was time for siesta. The sun was beating down and the shops all closed and the streets deserted and the heat glancing off the shimmering walls, as he took a cab to the apartment he shared with Carla in a large, decaying old palace in the Piazza del Gesu, a barracks of a place, with entrances round the courtyard, and long winding corridors, marble staircases with lofty windows to the innumerable landings. Carla liked to lie in bed all day, and to get up in the evening after siesta-time, which would be followed by making love with Johnny.

  He had discovered she was a genuine countess all right, aged twenty-two, and already beginning to run to fat.

  That evening Johnny took the cool air with Carla on the sidewalk in front of Doney’s, where the crowds milled along slowly, exchanging stares with those sat in the cane-bottomed chairs. Lovers out for a stroll, fathers and mothers with their families out for a stroll, and men in pairs, hunting girls, and girls in pairs, hunting men.

  Some of the chichi set still wore their dark glasses, even though night had fallen and the lights winked and glimmered all around the beautiful old city, and the scent of the cool grass crushed by the footsteps of the strolling throngs and multitudinous flowers drifted down from the sprawling Borghese Gardens.

  Johnny found himself with Carla inside the Excelsior, everywhere fogged with cigar-smoke and discordant with chatter, so that the place might have been an aviary filled with starlings. The same mob met his pale eyes. The same languorous women, decked out for the evening, were drifting amongst the people who packed round the bar.

  Presently after a drink or two each, they moved on to Capriccio’s for the eats. They took their time over the anti-pasto, the cacciatore and the sweet, the fruit and the cheese. By the time Johnny and Carla had finished then-brandy, it was pushing midnight. They made their way leisurely along to Bricktop’s, just down the hill from the Excelsior. They went through a milk-bar and past a florists to the club, run by Bricktop, a middle-aged, plump American negress with rusty hair scraped up high on her head, and rusty freckles across her broad nose.

  Her place was a softly-lit, spacious room, with mirrored walls above comfortable seats, and flowers on th
e piano. There was no floor-show. Brick sang songs from the 20’s and 30’s, old Cole Porter numbers, Irving Berlin and Gershwin. She reminded Johnny of New York before the war when he was a new boy in from the Coast, a natty dresser with his grey fedora and light-coloured tie.

  It was 3 a.m. when Johnny and Carla went out into the prostitute-haunted streets, the rapacious-eyed women working sometimes singly, sometimes in pairs, and he got a cab and took Carla, back to the Piazza del Gesu apartment. Then he went over to the American Club, just for a nightcap and the walk.

  In the bar, which was empty except for a tall blonde with grotesquely false eyelashes and a long amber cigarette-holder just like an international spy, who was arguing in a maudlin way with the bartender, whose weary, chocolate-pouched eyes had seen it all, and whose small ears tight against his dark skull had heard it all, and then some, the big idea came to Johnny.

  The notion, it came to him out of nowhere.

  Up till then Johnny’s ostensible line of business which he had set up in Rome had been import-export, a front which covered a multitude of sins. Peddling nylons, Swiss watches, the old diamond racket, all the usual small-time stuff. Small-time stuff, yes, but together with keeping his ear to the ground and with the tip-off’s Carla’s contacts had supplied him, he had got enough information into his skull which subconsciously had been the forcing-bed for this new project.

  Johnny Destiny came out of the American Club, his brain afire. He hurried past a fat man in dark glasses, chatting to a bunch of early-morning drunks who were too tired and too sad to go home. The canned music from a juke-box in some dive followed Johnny past a crowd of long-haired men and short-haired women and the shabby artistic types, past a slim man whom he knew was on his way from the cabaret he had just left to another club to pick up some cocaine from a guitarist who kept his junk in his guitar.

  Johnny went on past the Open Gate dancing-spot, past the Hostaria dell’Orso, where from the Blue Room on the first floor dimly-lit the sounds of a plaintive piano, and a melancholy songstress reached the street; and a slightly more flashy spot, the Boite Pigalle. He hurried past a restaurant called the Piccolo Budapest, where they drowned you with fiddles and balalaikas, and past La Biblioteca, a cellar-restaurant, whose walls were composed entirely of dusty wine-bottles, full, and where there was dancing to a trio which sang blue Napolitano ballads as they drifted from table to table.