by Eric Ambler
Here, however, a baffling situation had awaited him. He had found that, although the church registers recorded marriages, baptisms, and burials as far back as the Thirty Years’ War, none of them covering the years 1807 and 1808 contained any reference to the name of Schneider.
Mr. Moreton had brooded on this disappointment for twenty-four hours; then he had had an idea. He had gone back to the registers.
This time he had turned to those for 1850, the year of Franz Schneider’s death. The facts of his death and burial had been recorded, and the location of the grave. Mr. Moreton had gone to inspect it. Now he had had a most disturbing surprise. A decaying memorial stone had supplied the confusing information that this was the resting place of Franz Schneider and his much beloved wife, Ruth. According to Hans’s Account, his mother’s name had been Maria.
Mr. Moreton had returned to the registers again. It had taken him a long time to work back from 1850 to 1815, but by the time he had done so, he had had the names of no less than ten of Franz Schneider’s children and the date of his marriage to Ruth Vogel. He had also learned to his dismay that none of the children’s names had been either Hans or Karl.
The idea that there must have been a previous marriage in some other city had soon occurred to him. But where could this earlier marriage have taken place? With what other towns had Franz Schneider been associated? From what town, for instance, had he been recruited into the Prussian army?
There had been only one place where that sort of question might be answered. Mr. Moreton and his interpreter had gone to Berlin.
It had taken Mr. Moreton until the end of March to cut through the swathes of Nazi red tape and dig far enough into the archives at Potsdam to get at the Napoleonic war diaries of the Ansbach Dragoons. It had taken him less than two hours to find out that between 1800 and 1850 the name of Schneider had figured only once in the nominal rolls of the regiment. A Wilhelm Schneider had been killed by a fall from his horse in 1803.
It had been a bitter blow. Mr. Moreton’s entry in his diary for that day ended with the despondent words: “So I guess it’s a wild-goose chase after all. Nevertheless I will make a check search tomorrow. If no result, will abandon inquiry as I consider inability to link Hans Schneider positively with Mulhausen family in records makes further efforts pointless.”
George turned the page and then stared blankly. The next entry in the diary consisted entirely of figures. They filled the page, line after line of them. The next page was the same, and the page after that. He flicked the pages over rapidly. With the exception of the date hadings, every entry in the diary from then on-and it continued for over three months-was in figures. Moreover, the figures were in groups of five. Not only had Mr. Moreton decided after all against abandoning his inquiries in Germany, but he had thought it necessary to record the results of them in cipher.
George abandoned the diary and glanced through the file of photographed documents. He did not read German with great confidence even when it was printed in roman type. German handwriting of the traditional kind defeated him completely. These were all handwritten. Careful scrutiny of two or three of them revealed the fact that they referred to the births and death of people named Schneider, but this was scarcely surprising. He put them aside and opened the sealed envelope.
The photograph “handed to R. L. M. by Father Weichs at Bad Schwennheim” proved to be a dog-eared, postcard-size portrait of a young man and a young woman sitting side by side on a professional photographer’s rustic bench. The woman had a certain fluffy prettiness and was possibly pregnant. The man was nondescript. Their clothes were of the early 1920’s. They looked like a prosperous working-class couple on their day off. There was a painted background of snow-covered pines behind them. Across the corner of it was written, in German script: “Johann und Ilse.” The photographer’s imprint on the mount showed that it had been taken in Zurich. There was nothing else in the envelope.
Charlie, the janitor, came in with a piece of adhesive plaster on his forehead and another load of parcels, and George got back to work on the claims. But that night he took the contents of the deed box back to his apartment and went through them carefully again.
He was in a difficulty. He had been asked to check on the claims to the estate received by the former administrator; nothing else. If the deed box had not fallen and cut the janitor’s head, he would probably not have noticed it. It would have been moved out of the way of the parcels of claims files and then left in the vault. He would have worked his way through the claims and then, no doubt, simply reported to Mr. Budd what Mr. Budd wanted to hear: that there were no outstanding claims worth discussing and that the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania could go ahead. Then he, George, would have been free of the whole wretched business and ready to be rewarded with an assignment more suited to his abilities. Now it looked as if he had a choice of two ways of making a fool of himself. One was by forgetting about the contents of the deed box and so running the risk of allowing Mr. Sistrom to make a serious blunder; the other was by plaguing Mr. Budd with idle fancies.
High political office and the presidencies of railroads seemed very far away that night. It was not until the early hours of the morning that he thought of a tactful way of putting the thing to Mr. Budd.
Mr. Budd received George’s report with impatience.
“I don’t even know if Bob Moreton’s still alive,” he said irritably. “In any case, all that this cipher stuff suggests to me is that the man was in an advanced stage of paranoia.”
“Did he seem O.K. when you saw him in ’44, sir?”
“He may have seemed O.K., but from what you show me it looks very much as if he wasn’t.”
“But he did go on with the inquiry, sir.”
“What if he did?” Mr. Budd sighed. “Look, George, we don’t want any complications in this business. We just want to get rid of the thing, and the sooner the better. I appreciate that you want to be thorough, but I should have thought it was very simple, really. You just get a German translator on these photographed documents, find out what they’re all about, then check through the claims from people named Schneider and see if the documents refer in any way. That’s straightforward enough, isn’t it?”
George decided that the time for tactful handling had arrived. “Yes, sir. But what I had in mind was a way of speeding up the whole thing. You see, I haven’t got through to the Schneider claims yet, but, judging by the volume of paper in the vault, there must be at least three thousand of them. Now, it’s taken me nearly four weeks to check through that number of ordinary claims. The Schneider files are certain to take longer. But I’ve been looking into things and I have a hunch that if I can check with Mr. Moreton it may save a lot of time.”
“Why? How do you mean?”
“Well, sir, I checked through some of the reports on that case he fought against the Rudolph Schneider claim and the German government. It seemed to me quite clear that Moreton, Greener and Cleek had a whole lot of facts at their disposal that the other side didn’t have. I think they had very definite information that there was no Schneider heir alive.”
Mr. Budd looked at him shrewdly. “Are you suggesting, George, that Moreton as administrator went on and established beyond doubt that there was no heir, and that he and his partners then kept quiet about the fact so that they could go on drawing fees from the estate?”
“It could be, sir, couldn’t it?”
“Terrible minds some of you young men have!” Mr. Budd suddenly became jovial again. “All right, what’s your point?”
“If we could have the results of Moreton’s confidential inquiries, we might have enough information to make any further examination of all these claims unnecessary.”
Mr. Budd stroked his chin. “I see. Yes, not bad, George.” He nodded briskly. “O.K. If the old chap’s alive and in his right mind, see what you can do. The quicker we can get out from under the whole thing, the better.”
“Yes, sir,” said George.
That afternoon he had a call from Mr. Budd’s secretary to say that a check with Mr. Moreton’s former club had disclosed that he was now living in retirement at Montclair, New Jersey. Mr. Budd had written to the old man asking him if he would see George.
Two days later a reply came from Mrs. Moreton. She said that her husband had been bedridden for some months, but that in view of former associations, and providing that Mr. Carey’s visit was brief, Mr. Moreton would be glad to put his memory at Mr. Carey’s disposal. Mr. Moreton slept afternoons. Perhaps Friday morning at eleven o’clock would be convenient to Mr. Carey.
“That must be his second wife,” said Mr. Budd.
On the Friday morning, George put the deed box and all its original contents into the back of his car and drove out to Montclair.
3
The house was a comfortable-looking place surrounded by several acres of well-kept garden, and it occurred to George that the financial fate of Messrs. Moreton, Greener and Cleek had not been quite as disastrous as Mr. Budd had implied. The second Mrs. Moreton proved to be a lean, neat woman in her late forties. She had a straight back, a brisk manner, and a patronizing smile. It seemed probable that she had been Mr. Moreton’s nurse.
“Mr. Carey is it? You won’t tire him, will you? He’s allowed to sit up in the mornings at present, but we have to be careful. Coronary thrombosis.” She led the way through to a glass-enclosed porch at the rear of the house.
Mr. Moreton was big and pink and flabby, like an athlete gone to seed. He had short white hair and very blue eyes, and there was still a trace of boyish good looks visible in the slack, puffy face. He was lying, propped up by cushions and swathed in a blanket, on a day-bed fitted with a book-rest. He greeted George eagerly, thrusting the book-rest aside and struggling into a sitting posture in order to shake hands. He had a soft, pleasant voice and smelled faintly of lavender water.
For a minute or two he asked after the people at George’s office whom he had known, and then about a number of men in Philadelphia of whom George had never even heard. At last he sat back with a smile.
“Don’t ever let anyone persuade you to retire, Mr. Carey,” he said. “You live in the past and become a bore. A dishonest bore, too. I ask you how Harry Budd is. You tell me he’s fine. What I really want to know is whether he’s gone bald.”
“He has,” George said.
“And whether, in spite of all that studied bonhomie, he’s got ulcers yet, or high blood-pressure.”
George laughed.
“Because if he has,” continued Mr. Moreton amiably, “that’s fine. He’s one son of a bitch I don’t have to envy.”
“Now, Bob!” his wife said reproachfully.
He spoke without looking at her. “Mr. Carey and I are going to talk a little business now, Kathy,” he said.
“Very well. Don’t overtire yourself.”
Mr. Moreton did not reply. When she had gone, he smiled. “Drink, my boy?”
“No, thank you, sir. I think Mr. Budd explained why I wanted to see you.”
“Sure. The Schneider Johnson matter. I could have guessed anyway.” He looked sideways at George. “So you found it, did you?”
“Found what, sir?”
“The diary and the photographs and all Hans Schneider’s stuff. You found it, eh?”
“It’s outside in the car, sir, with some of your personal belongings that got put in the box with it.”
Mr. Moreton nodded. “I know. I put them there myself-on top. I figured that, with any luck, a person opening the box would think that it was all just my personal junk.”
“I’m afraid I don’t quite follow you, sir.”
“Of course you don’t. I’ll explain. As administrator I was ethically bound to hand over everything, lock, stock, and barrel. Well, that confidential stuff was something I didn’t want to hand over. I wanted to destroy it, but Greener and Cleek wouldn’t let me. They said that if anything came up afterwards and John J. found out, I’d be in trouble.”
George said: “Oh.” He had not really believed in his suggestion that Moreton, Greener and Cleek had concealed important information. It had merely occurred to him as a means of beguiling Mr. Budd. Now he was a trifle shocked.
Mr. Moreton shrugged. “So all I could do was to try and camouflage it. Well, I didn’t succeed.” He stared out gloomily at the garden for a moment, then turned to George briskly as if to dismiss an ugly memory. “I suppose the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania’s after the loot again, eh?”
“Yes. They want to know if Mr. Sistrom’s going to fight them on it.”
“And Harry Budd, who doesn’t like soiling his dainty fingers with such things, can’t wait to get the thing out of the office, eh? No, you don’t have to answer that, my boy. Let’s get down to business.”
“Would you like me to get the papers out of the car, sir?”
“We won’t need them,” said Mr. Moreton. “I know what’s in that box as well as I know my own name. Did you read that little book Hans Schnieder wrote for his children?”
“Yes.”
“What did you think of it?”
George smiled. “After reading it I made a resolution. If I have children, I’m never going to tell them a thing about my war experiences.”
The old man chuckled. “They’ll get it out of you. The thing you want to watch out for is having a drip of a son like Hans who writes down what you say. That’s dangerous.”
“How do you mean?”
“I’ll tell you. I was administrator all right, but I went to Germany because my partners sent me. Tail wagging the dog. The case had been in our hair too long and they wanted to have done with it. My instructions were to confirm what we already believed-that there was no legitimate heir to the estate. Well, when I found that Hans was probably a son of Franz Schneider’s first marriage, I had to know about that marriage in order to complete the picture. As you know, I went to Potsdam to see if I could trace him through the regimental archives. To begin with, I failed.”
“But next day you went back for another check through.”
“Yes, but I’d had a night to think. And I’d thought again about what Hans had written. If there was any truth in the thing at all, Sergeant Schneider had become a casualty at the Battle of Eylau and been lost in the retreat. Surely the war diary would record that fact in a casualty list. So that next day, instead of going all over the nominal rolls again, I got the interpreter to translate the regimental account of the battle for me.” He sighed reminiscently. “There are some moments in life, my boy, that always feel good no matter how many times you go over them again in your mind. That was one of them. It was late in the morning and getting very warm. The interpreter was having trouble with that old writing and was stumbling over the translation of it. Then he began on the account of the long march from Eylau to Insterburg. I was only half listening. As a matter of fact, I was thinking about a bad march I’d done in Cuba during the Spanish-American War. And then something the interpreter had said made me jump right out of my skin.”
He paused.
“What was that?” George asked.
Mr. Moreton smiled. “I remember the words exactly. ‘During this night’-I quote from the war diary-‘Franz Schirmer, a Sergeant, left the detachment under his command, saying that he was going to succour a Dragoon who had lagged behind because of a lame horse. When morning came, Sergeant Schirmer had not rejoined his detachment. There was found to be no other man missing from it, nor any who had lagged behind. Accordingly, the name of Franz Schirmer was posted in the list of deserters.’ ”
For a moment or two there was silence. “Well?” added Mr. Moreton. “What do you think of that?”
“Schirmer, did you say?”
“That’s right. Sergeant Franz Schirmer, S-c-h-i-r-m-e-r.”
George laughed. “The old bastard,” he said.
“Exactly.”
“So all that stuff he told his son Hans about the cowardly Prussians leaving him for dead was-”
“Bull,” said Mr. Moreton dryly. “But you see the implications.”
“Yes. What did you do?” George asked.
“The first thing I did was to take security precautions. We’d already had trouble enough with the newspapers’ finding out stuff about the case and printing it, and before I went to Germany I’d agreed on a policy with my partners. I was to keep what I was doing as secret as possible; and to make sure that I didn’t get an interpreter with German newspaper contacts, I was to engage him in Paris. The other thing we’d agreed on was a cipher for confidential matters. It may sound funny to you, but if you’ve ever had experience of-”
“I know,” George said. “I saw the newspaper clippings.”
“Ah. Well, I’d been sending my partners progress reports in diary form. When I found out about Schirmer, I began to use the cipher. It was a simple key-word affair, but good enough for our purpose. You see, I had visions of the newspapers’ getting hold of the Schirmer name and starting another flood of claims from Schirmers, Shermans, and the rest. The final thing I did was to fire the interpreter. I said I was abandoning the inquiry and paid him off.”
“Why was that?”
“Because I was going on with it and I didn’t want anyone outside the firm to have a complete picture. It was just as well I did fire him, too, because later on, when the Nazis were after the estate and France was occupied, the Gestapo pulled in the second man I used, for questioning. If he’d known what the first one knew, we’d have been in a spot. I got the second one through our Paris Embassy. By the time he arrived, I’d had the war-diary entry photographed-you’ll find it in the file-and was ready to move on.”
“To Ansbach?”
“Yes. There I found the record of Franz Schirmer’s baptism. Back in Muhlhausen again, I found the register entries for the marriage of Franz and Maria Dutka, the births of Karl and Hans, and the death of Maria. But the really important thing I found was when I went back to Munster. The boy Karl was down in the recruits’ muster-roll for 1824 as Karl Schirmer. Franz had changed his own name but not his eldest boy’s.”
