The Bells of Hell

by Michael Kurland

  ‘I see,’ Geoffrey said.

  ‘You are shocked?’

  Geoffrey laughed. ‘No, not at all. But I do wonder why you wish to deprive yourself of the lady’s, ah, services.’

  It was Von Schenkberg’s turn to smile. ‘You think, perhaps, that she has become inconvenient? That this is my way to rid myself of an embarrassment?’

  ‘I actually had not thought of that, but now that you mention it …’

  Von Schenkberg pulled out an oversized handkerchief and wiped his face. ‘No,’ he said. ‘You see … It has become dangerous for her to stay here. Dangerous for her, and dangerous for me.’

  Geoffrey raised an eyebrow.

  ‘She is, you see, a Jewess.’ He waited for Geoffrey to respond, and when Geoffrey said nothing he went on, ‘It is increasingly difficult, and has become actually hazardous for Jews in the Third Reich. They are deprived of citizenship, of employment, of all civil rights. They are rounded up and placed in concentration camps merely for being Jewish. You did not know this? It is so. I love Frau Fauth deeply, but what of that? I can only protect her up to a point. Our relationship has been of necessity kept secret, and if it becomes known that she and I are – involved – then I can do nothing for either of us. A German officer does not socialize with a Jew, and he certainly does not take a Jewess as his mistress and have children with her. Add to it that I am an adulterer, and my career is over.’

  ‘Then,’ Geoffrey said, trying to think out the details of this, ‘why don’t you leave the country with Frau Fauth?’

  Von Schenkberg shook his head. ‘Would it were that simple. I cannot leave my wife, she would certainly die. And I love my wife very dearly. You think that strange?’

  ‘I did not say so.’

  ‘It was my wife who insisted that I get a, ah, companion when it became clear that we could no longer have relations. She did not want me going with random women and risking disease, or worse, scandal.’

  ‘An unusual woman,’ Geoffrey commented.

  ‘Oh, yes.’ Von Schenkberg breathed a very deep breath, and then another. ‘Her only request was that she did not want to know who the woman was, and that it should not be one of our friends.’

  ‘So you found Frau Fauth?’

  ‘Yes. She was – is – a couturier with a studio in Berlin. Very fashionable clothes for very fashionable ladies. I met her at the opera, it is now eight years past. Otello. We fell to talking, and we arranged to see each other the next night. And by the end of that second night we were together.’

  ‘And her husband?’

  ‘A fiction. To her neighbors I am Herr Fauth, a traveling man who is only able to spend occasional days with her.’ He smiled. ‘This also could become troublesome; the Gestapo have developed a habit of stopping random people and asking to see their papers. I do have papers in the name of Fauth, for renting rooms and such, but they could not stand looking at by anyone who knows how to look at papers.’

  Geoffrey nodded and thought for a moment. This, he decided, was real. ‘When can Frau Fauth be ready to go?’ he asked.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ Von Schenkberg told him. ‘We have been preparing. But she has no passport, and her papers are marked “Jude”, so she wouldn’t get very far without many questions being asked.’

  ‘We’ll see what we can do,’ Geoffrey said.

  ‘I thought perhaps,’ von Schenkberg said, ‘that I could arrange to get her and the children to Spain on a Luftwaffe cargo flight. For money these things can be done. Then she would have to be taken across the Portuguese border and thence to Britain. Could this, perhaps, be arranged?’

  ‘I think I can manage something better than that,’ Geoffrey told him. ‘Perhaps not tomorrow, but soon. Does she speak English?’

  ‘Oh yes, and also French and Italian and Polish and Yiddish. All fluently. Or so she tells me, I am conversant only with French and English.’

  ‘Can you get me a picture of her?’

  ‘I have in my wallet …’

  ‘A passport picture?’

  ‘Oh. Yes. Certainly.’

  ‘And the children?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I will arrange to get her a UK passport, and she will leave here as a British tourist. If I remember correctly, mother and children can be on the same passport if the children are under sixteen.’ He considered. ‘I think “Mrs Mabel Bellant”. It sounds too plain to be an alias. I had a governess named Mrs Bellant. And the children – of what sex are they?’

  ‘One of each,’ the Oberst said.

  ‘Then Bruce and Gertrude, I think.’

  ‘Gertrude is a very common name in Germany,’ Von Schenkberg said. ‘It sounds German to my ears.’

  ‘So? All right then, Priscilla, called “Prissy”. Bruce and Priscilla.’

  ‘That will do. I can have the photo – a group photo yes? – by the end of the week.’

  ‘Good. Someone will contact you, and we’ll have her on a train within a few days of that. Perhaps traveling with a British consular official, if I can manage it.’

  ‘You have my thanks,’ Von Schenkberg said.

  ‘I think you will earn their passage,’ Geoffrey told him.

  ‘Indeed,’ Von Schenkberg said. He looked around. ‘There is one other thing that I would request of you.’

  ‘Ah?’

  ‘And that is that as few people as possible know who I am. If it can be arranged, no one but you. Certainly no one but whomever you must turn my, ah, case over to, and I would greatly prefer it if you could keep it to yourself.’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘There are people in your country – and in your government – who are perhaps too enamored of the National Socialist system to be trusted.’

  ‘I’m afraid you’re right.’

  ‘Any agents of yours in Germany must not know even of my existence. Your MI6 obviously must know that you have a highly placed source here, but they should not be told who I am. My information must go through you.’

  ‘I cannot keep coming back to Germany,’ Geoffrey objected. ‘It would be noticed.’

  ‘We will arrange dead drops – I have three picked out already in Berlin – where your people can retrieve messages, but they must not know who left them. And the life span of these drops is, of necessity, limited. Also we will use post-forwarding services, perhaps classified ads in the London Times. I have set up an accommodation address in Berlin that cannot be traced back to me, but, again, I dare not use it too often. Perhaps a short-wave radio, if I can obtain one without attracting attention. The receiver is, of course, not a problem. But the transmitter – there is already a watch on purchasers of transmitters and elektronenröhren – the radio tubes needed to construct such an apparatus. If one can somehow be obtained the transmissions will have to be short and infrequent. Luckily the Forschungsamt, our radio location people, are not yet too efficient. Although I’m sure that will change.’

  ‘I will adhere as closely to these suggestions as I can,’ Geoffrey agreed. ‘But I’m now stationed in the United States.’

  ‘Even better!’ Von Schenkberg said. ‘I can get letters into the diplomatic bag to be mailed from our embassy in Washington. You can arrange an accommodation address?’

  ‘I can. I will.’

  ‘And we will set up a system of codewords to reassure each of us that the messages are truly coming from the other.’

  ‘I’m pretty good at that sort of game,’ Geoffrey told him.

  ‘Good.’

  ‘And perhaps I might be able to acquire a radio transmitter for you. I will look into it.’

  ‘That would be useful.’ The German officer turned to look Geoffrey in the eye. ‘We must be careful and prudent or one of us will die sooner than necessary, and I fear that one will be me.’

  ‘I will strive to assure that doesn’t happen.’

  Von Schenkberg reached into his pocket and pulled out a silver cigarette case and held it out for Geoffrey. ‘Please,’ he said. ‘They are made spec
ially for me of the same tobacco used by the Kaiser.’

  ‘Ah!’ Geoffrey said, taking one. ‘Are you a secret monarchist?’

  ‘No, no,’ von Schenkberg assured him. ‘We just both like the same tobacco.’

  Geoffrey examined the engraved crest on the cover. ‘Your coat of arms?’ he asked.

  ‘Indeed. Framed with a gryphon on the left and a unicorn on the right. Symbolizing, or so my father would have it, fidelity in war and peace. Or at times, truth and honor, or strength and nobility; it varied with the times. The shield with the four chevrons was awarded to my great-great- and so forth grandfather by Frederick the Second after the battle of Hohenfriedeberg or possibly the battle of Soor – they were only a few weeks apart. And our family motto, honore supra omnes, was chosen by the same relative at around the same time. They took great stock in such things.’

  ‘And you don’t?’

  ‘Oh yes, I do. But I recognize how essentially silly they are.’ He shrugged. ‘Such are the contradictions of life.’ He closed the case and thrust it back in his pocket. ‘I have a few matters to impart to you before you leave,’ he went on. ‘The idiocy of Our Leader is about to begin, and I can give your government a few extra days to prepare a response. Not that there is anything useful they can do, I think.’ He stood up. ‘But I believe, perhaps, we have been long enough at this for now. Let us go our separate ways.’

  Lord Geoffrey rose. ‘Of course,’ he said.

  ‘We will continue this delightful conversation after dinner, nicht wahr? I will continue to convince you of the wonders of National Socialism, nicht wahr?’

  ‘I can feel the urge to goose-step coming upon me,’ Geoffrey said, ‘but I will resist.’

  TWELVE

  [The Jews’] greatest danger to this country lies in their

  large ownership and influence in our motion pictures,

  our press, our radio, and our government.

  – Charles A. Lindbergh

  Frank Gerard, Gauleiter of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, and Senior Colonel in the German-American Bund for the Eastern United States north of Washington DC, was a short man with too much belly, prominent ears, and black hair parted in the middle, slicked back and pasted down on both sides. He was striding back and forth on the narrow dais in front of his audience of three hundred or so assembled members or potential members of the Bund, growling about the evils of Communism and Jewish bankers. It was a little after nine, the speeches had been going on for almost three hours, and the audience was getting impatient to hear from the Guest of Honor, Manny Dietz, who had just come back from having a discussion with Der Führer – Der real Führer Adolf himself in Germany, not one of your local führers. Dietz had just been spotted coming in through a side door when the fight broke out at the back of the rented ballroom.

  Andrew Blake was at a table in the back hawking various antisemitic and pro-Nazi books and pamphlets. It had been three weeks since he started his job at the print shop and he was, he thought, beginning to be accepted. No, better than accepted, he was becoming invisible, just the guy in back of the shop setting type and the guy at the back of the hall during meetings selling stuff and yelling, ‘Yeah, right, you said it!’ at random moments during the harangue from whichever speaker and volunteering to clean up after the meeting.

  A short, nondescript man in a gray overcoat and crushed gray fedora was standing in front of Blake’s table looking over a copy of Father Caughlin’s weekly newspaper Social Justice, a best-seller with this crowd, when, just as Gerard was winding down with: ‘It is well known that all the major newspapers in New York are owned by Jews,’ one of Gerard’s black-shirted thugs came over and poked the man.

  ‘You a Jew?’ the Blackshirt asked.

  ‘What?’ The man looked up, startled.

  ‘You heard me, Jew – what are you doing in here?’

  ‘Excuse me,’ the man said, flinching as the thug swished a clenched fist in front of his nose, ‘but I’m not …’

  From the dais Gerard stopped talking and stared out into the room. ‘Look,’ he cried suddenly, pointing toward the back, ‘there’s one of them now!’

  Everyone turned to look.

  The man, obviously confused, put down the newspaper and backed away from the table. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I don’t want any trouble. I’m a reporter from the Weekly …’

  ‘A snoop!’ the Blackshirt yelled. ‘A kike snoop!’

  The audience was starting to murmur and a few stood up to see what was happening, which caused yet others to join them in standing. The murmuring got louder.

  The thug used both hands to push the reporter back, then took a step forward and shoved him again.

  ‘Keep your hands off me,’ the man shouted, knocking the offending arms aside. ‘What the hell do you think—’

  The thug shoved again, this time knocking the man into the edge of a table and upsetting a stack of Christian Front pamphlets. By now two other Blackshirts had joined in and they took turns pushing the man, who was starting to look thoroughly frightened, back and forth between them. Then one of them balled his fist and punched the man in the stomach and he grunted with the sudden pain and doubled over. Blake retreated to the far side of the table next to the wall and tried to decide whether he should just stay there quietly or dive under the table until the noise stopped. Once again he was watching someone get beat up and he could do nothing about it. First of all it would blow his cover and second, anyway, he was too scared to move.

  Most of the audience stayed where they were, but some came out into the aisles and started stomping and yelling. What the words were Blake couldn’t tell, but he imagined it must have been something like what the Romans yelled in the Colosseum when some early Christian was being fed to the lions. Blake closed his eyes. After a few minutes the yelling died down. Gerard had turned up the sound system and was barking soothing things into the microphone to the effect that they had to keep it quiet or they would not be able to rent the hall again. Blake opened his eyes. The reporter was lying on the floor, bloody and twisted. Two of the men were kicking him, but after a minute they stopped and picked him up and carried him out towards the stairs. Blake concentrated hard and succeeded in not throwing up.

  It took about ten minutes for the excitement to calm down enough for the meeting to continue, but then Manny Dietz took the dais and told them about meeting Herr Hitler and how he could see New Hope for the World in Hitler’s penetrating gaze and how the people of Germany idolized their Führer and about the New World Order that had come to Germany and would soon come to all Europe and, after that, who knows, and what it would mean.

  The meeting finally broke up a little after eleven, but with putting the books and pamphlets back into the little cupboard and straightening the chairs and such, it was almost eleven thirty when Blake trotted down the two flights of wooden stairs and pushed through the door onto 56th Street. He decided to walk the mile and a half or so back to his furnished room on West 28th Street. There was a slight drizzle falling, but he had a raincoat and a hat and a bunch of stuff to think about.

  He seemed to have struck just the right attitude toward the Bund and its enthusiasms. If he came on too strongly, too much the Roosevelt-hater and Jew-baiter, it could ring false. It would certainly sound false in his ears, and that somehow might show. But as just a working stiff who had never thought these things out before, and was slowly becoming convinced, he was winning the trust of Frank Gerard. A few days before, Gerard had spent most of an hour explaining to Blake how the Jewish bankers and newspaper owners and movie makers were controlling the country, and giving the good jobs to the spics and the niggers while Good Christian Americans couldn’t feed their families.

  The important thing, Gerard insisted, was not to let Roosevelt – who was secretly a Jew, real name Rosenfeld – get America involved in the affairs of Europe. It was time to let Germany take the lead in European affairs. As any honest analysis of history showed, the Aryan race was meant to lead, to per
haps control the destiny of the whole world. It was being held back by the mongrel races and by the Jews. Gerard got a fanatical gleam in his eye after talking about Aryan superiority for a few minutes, his face frozen into a grimace, and his voice too loud for the room. Blake had found that he could more easily tolerate his job if he pictured his associates as a pack of nasty children. But now, after watching that man get beat up, Blake wasn’t sure that he could tolerate his job at all. He could see that these people needed watching, but he wasn’t sure that he wanted to be the man to do it.

  As he was crossing 38th Street Blake suddenly got the feeling he was being followed. He paused for a moment to stare in the window of a trimmings and buttons store while he sorted out where the feeling was coming from. Interesting buttons, who knew that … Footsteps. That was it. There were people coming and going, passing and falling behind, even at eleven thirty. This was, after all, New York. But one set of footsteps wasn’t going faster or slower, it was keeping pace with him, moving when he moved, stopping when he stopped, perhaps half a block behind.

  The drizzle was turning into a real rain now, and he pulled up his coat collar and started walking again, and again there were the footsteps following. The sound that he had barely been conscious of a few scant minutes ago: tap … tap … on the sidewalk behind – never closer, never further – now filled his ears. It took a conscious effort not to turn around to see who it was, to walk back and challenge his stalker, or to just start running and see if his unseen follower kept up. But until he understood what was happening it would be better not to let on that he knew. So he walked and walked and thought it out. It couldn’t be a mugging – you can’t mug anyone from half a block behind. It must be one of his new friends. But why? Obviously to see where he was going. But where would he be going at quarter to midnight? Home? Did they want to see if he lived where he said he lived? Luckily he had moved into the boarding house, breakfast and dinner – no lunch – the day before he had applied for the job. Perhaps they thought it would be interesting to see if he didn’t go home but went – where? To a police station? To a newspaper? What destination would most trouble them, and what would they do about it? Probably, he decided, something quick and drastic.