The Schirmer Inheritance

by Eric Ambler

  Then he felt the periodic agony of his arm returning and heard himself beginning to moan. He knew suddenly that there was nothing more he could do now to order the world outside his own body. He stumbled through the doorway and to his bed. The carbine he put on the ground under the cloak. Then he took off his helmet, unrolled his blankets, and lay down in the warm darkness to fight for his life.

  The woman’s name was Maria Dutka, and she was eighteen when Sergeant Schirmer first set eyes on her. Her mother had died when she was young and, as there were no other children and her father had failed to find a second wife, Maria had been brought up to do the work of a son and heir on the holding. Moreover, the chronic disease from which Dutka suffered was now of long standing and the periods of relief from it had become rarer. She was already accustomed to thinking and acting for herself.

  She was not headstrong, however. Although the idea of killing the Sergeant, in order to avoid having to share the dead horse with him, did occur to her, she discussed the matter with her father first. She was by nature deeply superstitious, and when he suggested that some supernatural agency might have had a hand in the Sergeant’s providential appearance, she saw the danger of her plan. She saw, too, that even if the Sergeant were to die of his wound-and he was very near to death in those first days-the supernatural powers might consider that her murderous thoughts about him had turned the scale.

  She nursed him, accordingly, with a kind of anxious devotion which it was easy for the grateful Sergeant to misunderstand. Later, however, she did something that appealed to him still more. When, during his convalescence, he made an attempt to thank her for so faithfully keeping her part of their bargain, she explained her motives to him with great simplicity and candour. At the time he was both amused and impressed. Afterwards, when he thought about what she had said and the fact that she had said it, he experienced rather more surprising sensations. As the food they shared restored her youthful appearance and vitality, he began to watch the movements of her body and to modify pleasurably his earlier plans for the future.

  He stayed in the Dutka house for eight months. Preserved under the snow, the carcass of the horse supplied them all with fresh meat until the thaw came, and then with the smoked and dried remains. By that time, too, the Sergeant was able to take his carbine into the woods and bring back deer. Vegetables began to grow. Then, for a few remarkable weeks, old Dutka rallied and, with the Sergeant and Maria doing a horse’s work in the traces, was even able in the end to plough his land.

  The Sergeant’s continued presence was taken as a matter of course now. Neither Maria nor her father ever referred to his military past. He was a victim of war, as they were. The returning neighbours found nothing strange in his presence. They themselves had spent the winter working for strangers. If old Dutka had found a strong, hard-working Prussian to help him set things to rights, so much the better. And should the curious wonder how old Dutka paid him or why a Prussian should trouble to work so poor a patch of land, there was always someone to remind them of Maria’s broad hips and strong legs and of the harvest to be reaped between them by such a lusty young fellow.

  The summer came. The battle of Friedland was fought. The Emperors of France and Russia met on a raft moored in the river Niemen. The Treaty of Tilsit was signed. Prussia was stripped of all her territories west of the Elbe and all her Polish provinces. Bialla, only a few miles south of the Dutkas’ holding, was suddenly on the Russian frontier, and Lyck had become a garrison town. Prussian infantry patrols came seeking recruits, and the Sergeant took to the woods with the other young men. He was away on one of these excursions when Maria’s father died.

  After the burial ceremonies he got out his leather money-pouch and sat down with Maria to count his savings. The proceeds of many looting forays and the peculations of four years as a non-commissioned officer, they were more than sufficient to match the small amount that Maria would get from the sale of her father’s holding to a neighbour. For there was no question now of their remaining to work the land. They had seen what could happen when the Russian armies came, and with this new frontier the Russians were no more than a day’s march away. To them this seemed a weightier argument for leaving the holding than the Sergeant’s precarious position as a deserter. The place for them to go was clearly somewhere where there were neither Russians nor Prussians, and where Maria, already pregnant, could bring up their children in the certainty of being able to feed them.

  Early in the November of 1807 they set out, with a handcart contrived from Dutka’s old wagon, to walk towards the west. It was a hard, dangerous journey, for their road lay through Prussia and they dared travel only at night. But they did not go hungry. They had brought their food with them in the cart and it lasted until they reached Wittenberg. That was the first town they entered in broad daylight, too. They were free of Prussian soil at last.

  They did not remain in Wittenberg, however. To the Sergeant it seemed uncomfortably near the Prussian border. Towards the middle of December they arrived in Muhlhausen, newly incorporated into the Kingdom of Westphalia. There, Maria’s first son, Karl, was born; and there, Maria and the Sergeant were married. For a time, the Sergeant worked as an ostler; but later, when he had added to their savings, he set up in business as a horse-coper.

  He prospered. The tides of the Napoleonic wars washed gently in the harbour that he and Maria had found. For several years it seemed as though the evil days were over. Then, the disease from which her father had suffered attacked Maria herself. Two years after the birth of her second son, Hans, she died.

  Eventually Sergeant Schirmer married again and had ten more children by his second wife. He died in 1850, a respected and successful man.

  Only once during all those happy years in Muhlhausen was Franz Schirmer disturbed by memories of the military crime he had committed. In 1815, by the Treaty of Paris, Muhlhausen became a Prussian city.

  It was the year of the Sergeant’s second marriage, and while he did not think it likely that church records would be combed for the names of deserters, there was always a chance that they might be used in checking mobilization lists. He could not bring himself to be fatalistic about the risk. After so many years’ immunity from arrest he had lost the habit of living for the moment. The prospect of death before a firing-squad, however remote it might be, could never be endured with the old fortitude.

  Then what was to be done? He gave the matter careful thought. In the past, he reminded himself, he had trusted in God; and in times of great danger God had been good to him. But could he still simply trust in God? And was this, he asked himself critically, a time of great danger? After all, there were plenty of other Schirmers in the Prussian army records; and some of them, no doubt, were men named Franz. Was it really necessary to call upon God to insure against the possibility of the list of those citizens who had purchased army exemptions in Muhlhausen being compared with the list of army deserters in Potsdam? Or really wise to do so? Might not God, who had done so much for His servant, be displeased at having this minor responsibility thrust upon Him and so neglect it? Was there not, therefore, something that His servant could do for himself in the matter, without invoking the aid of the Almighty?

  Yes indeed, there was!

  He decided to change his name to Schneider.

  He encountered only one slight difficulty. It was simple to change his own surname and that of the baby, Hans. He had good friends in the mayor’s office, and his excuse that there was another horse-dealer of the same name in a near-by town was readily accepted. But the first son, Karl, presented a problem. The boy, now seven years old, had just been classified for future conscription by the Prussian military authorities, and the Sergeant neither had nor wanted friends in Prussian military circles. Moreover, any official move to change the boy’s name might easily invite the very inquiries into origins which he most dreaded. In the end he did nothing about Karl’s name. So it was that, although the sons of Franz and Maria were baptized in the name of Schirmer
, they grew up with different surnames. Karl remained Karl Schirmer; Hans became Hans Schneider.

  The Sergeant’s change of name never caused him a moment’s anxiety or inconvenience in his lifetime. The anxiety and inconvenience resulting from it descended, over a hundred years later, on the head of Mr. George L. Carey.

  1

  George Carey came from a Delaware family that looked like an illustration for an advertisement of an expensive make of car. His father was a prosperous doctor with snow-white hair. His mother came from an old Philadelphia family and was an important member of the garden club. His brothers were tall, solid, and handsome. His sisters were slim, strong, and vivacious. All had fine regular teeth, which showed when they smiled. The whole family, indeed, looked so happy, so secure, and so successful that it was difficult not to suspect that the truth about them might be different. But no, they actually were happy, secure, and successful. They were also exceedingly smug.

  George was the youngest son and, although his shoulders were not so broad as those of his brothers nor his smile as self-satisfied, he was the most talented and intelligent member of the family. When the glories of their football-playing days had departed, his brothers had made their ways aimlessly into business. George’s plans for the future had been clear-cut from the moment he left high school. Despite his father’s hope for a successor in his practice, George had declined to pretend to an interest in medicine which he did not feel. What he wanted to go in for was law; and not the criminal, courtroom kind, but the kind that led in early middle age to the presidencies of railroads and steel corporations or to high political office. But while the war, which came just after he had been graduated from Princeton, had removed much of his solemnity and smugness and had had beneficial effects upon his sense of humour, it had done nothing to change his mind about his chosen profession. After four and a half years as a bomber pilot, he went to Harvard Law School. He graduated, cum laude, early in 1949. Then, having spent a useful year as secretary to a learned and famous judge, he joined Lavater, Powell and Sistrom.

  The firm of Lavater, Powell and Sistrom of Philadelphia is one of the really important law offices of the eastern United States, and the long list of partners reads like a selection of promising candidates for a vacancy on the Supreme Court. No doubt its massive reputation still derives to some extent from memories of the vast utilities manipulations with which it was concerned in the twenties; but there have been few corporation cases of any magnitude during the last thirty years in which the firm has not held an important brief. It remains a virile, forward-looking concern, and to be invited to join it is a mark of approbation most flattering to a young lawyer.

  Thus, as he arranged his belongings in one of Lavater’s comfortably furnished offices, George had reason to feel satisfied with the progress of his career. Admittedly, he was a little old for the somewhat junior position he occupied, but he was shrewd enough to realize that his four years in the Air Corps had not been wholly wasted from a professional point of view, and that the distinction of his war record had had quite as much to do with his presence at the Lavater firm as his work at law school or the warm recommendations of the learned judge. Now, if all went well (and why shouldn’t it?), he could look forward to rapid advancement, valuable contacts, and an expanding personal reputation. He felt that he had arrived.

  The news that he was to do some work on the Schneider Johnson case came, then, as a disagreeable blow. It was also a surprise of another kind. The sort of business that Lavater, Powell and Sistrom normally handled was the sort that made reputations as surely as it made money. From what George remembered of the Schneider Johnson case, it was just the sort of slapstick affair that a corporation lawyer with a thought for his reputation would pay to stay clear of.

  It had been one of the notorious missing-heir-to-a-fortune absurdities of the pre-war years.

  In 1938, Amelia Schneider Johnson, a senile old woman of eighty-one, had died in Lamport, Pennyslvania. She had lived alone in the decrepit frame house which had been the late Mr. Johnson’s wedding present to her, and her declining years had been passed in an atmosphere of genteel poverty. When she had died, however, it had been found that her estate included three million dollars in bonds which she had inherited in the twenties from her brother, Martin Schneider, a soft-drink tycoon. She had had an eccentric distrust of banks and safe-deposit boxes and had kept the bonds in a tin trunk under her bed. She had also distrusted lawyers and had made no will. In Pennsylvania, at the time, the law governing intestacy had been determined by an act of 1917 which said, in effect, that anyone with even a remote blood-relationship to the deceased might be entitled to a share in the estate. Amelia Schneider Johnson’s only known relative had been an elderly spinster, Miss Clothilde Johnson; but she had been a sister-in-law and therefore had not qualified under the act. With the enthusiastic and disastrous co-operation of the newspapers, a search for Amelia’s blood-relations had begun.

  It was, George thought, all too easy to understand the newspapers’ eagerness. They had scented another Garrett case. Old Mrs. Garrett had died in 1930, leaving seventeen million dollars and no will, and here was the case eight years later, still going strong, with three thousand lawyers still chiselling away, twenty-six thousand claimants to the money, and a fine smell of corruption over all. The Schneider Johnson thing could last as long. True, it was smaller, but size wasn’t everything. It had plenty of human angles-a fortune at stake, the romantic isolation of the old lady’s declining years (she had lost her only son in the Argonne), the lonely death without a relative at the bedside, the fruitless search for the will-there was no reason why it should not have staying-power, too. The name Schneider and its American modifications were widely distributed. The old girl must have had blood-relatives somewhere even if she hadn’t known them. Or him! Or her! Yes, there might even turn out to be a one hundred per cent non-sharing heir! All right, then, where was he? Or she? On a farm in Wisconsin? In a real-estate office in California? Behind the counter of a drugstore in Texas? Which of the thousands of Schneiders, Snyders, and Sniders in America was going to be the luck one? Who was the unsuspecting millionaire? Corn? Well, maybe, but always good for a follow-up, and of nation-wide interest.

  And of nation-wide interest it had proved. By the beginning of 1939, the administrator of the estate had been notified of over eight thousand claims to be the missing heir, an army of disreputable lawyers had moved in to exploit the claimants, and the whole case had begun to soar rapidly into the cloud-cuckoo land of high fantasy, skullduggery, and courtroom farce in which it was to remain until, on the outbreak of war, it had fallen suddenly into oblivion.

  What business Lavater, Powell and Sistrom could have with the resurrection of so unsavoury a corpse, George could not imagine.

  It was Mr. Budd, one of the senior partners, who enlightened him.

  The main burden of the Schneider Johnson estate had been borne by Messrs. Moreton, Greener and Cleek, an old-fashioned Philadelphia law firm of great respectability. They had been Miss Clothilde Johnson’s attorneys and had conducted the formal search for a will on her instructions. The intestacy duly established, the matter had come before the Orphans’ Court in Philadelphia, and the Register of Wills had appointed Robert L. Moreton as administrator of the estate. He had remained the administrator until the end of 1944.

  “And very nice too,” said Mr. Budd. “If only he’d had the sense to leave it at that, I wouldn’t have blamed him. But no, the cockle-brained old coot retained his own firm as attorneys for the administrator. Jeepers, in a case like that it was suicidal!”

  Mr. Budd was a pigeon-chested man with a long head, a neat, clipped moustache, and bifocal glasses. He had a ready smile, a habit of using out-of-date colloqualisms, and an air of careless good-humour of which George was deeply suspicious.

  “The combined fees,” George said carefully, “must have been pretty big on an estate of that size.”

  “No fees,” declared Mr Budd, “are big enou
gh to make it worth while for a decent law office to get mixed up with a lot of ambulance-chasers and crooks. There are dozens of these inheritance cases hanging fire all over the world. Look at the Abdul Hamid estate! The British got tied up in that one and it’s been going on for thirty years or more. That’ll probably never be settled. Look at the Garrett case! Think how many reputations that’s damaged. Shucks! It’s always the same. Is A an imposter? Is B out of his mind? Who died before whom? Is the old photograph Aunt Sarah or Aunt Flossie? Has a forger been at work with faded ink?” He waved his arms disparagingly. “I tell you, George, in my opinion the Schneider Johnson case pretty well finished Moreton, Greener and Cleek as a regular law firm. And when Bob Moreton got sick in ’44 and had to retire, that was the end. They dissolved.”

  “Couldn’t Greener or Cleek have taken over as administrator?”

  Mr. Budd pretended to look shocked. “My dear George, you don’t take over an appointment like that. It’s a reward for good and faithful service. In this case, our learned, highly respected, and revered John J. Sistrom was the lucky man.”

  “Oh. I see.”

  “The investments do the work, George, our John J. takes the fees as administrator. However,” Mr. Budd continued with a trace of satisfaction in his voice, “it doesn’t look as if he’s going to do so much longer. You’ll see why in a moment. From what old Bob Moreton told me at the time, the position was originally this. Amelia’s father was named Hans Schneider. He was a German who’d immigrated in 1849. Bob Moreton and his partners were pretty well convinced in the end that, if there were anybody at all entitled to take the estate, it was one of the old man’s relatives back in Germany. But the whole thing was complicated by the representation question. Do you know anything about that, George?”

  “Bregy, discussing the 1947 act, gives a very clear summary of the former rules.”