The Schirmer Inheritance

by Eric Ambler

  The following day the Colonel’s Lieutenant arrived at their hotel in an army car and drove them out to the prison.

  It was a converted barracks built near the remains of an old Turkish fort on the western outskirts of the city. With its high surrounding wall and the Kalamara Heights across the bay as a background, it looked from the outside rather like a monastery. Inside, it smelt like a large and inadequately tended latrine.

  The Lieutenant had brought papers admitting them and they were taken to the administration block. Here they were introduced to a civilian official in a tight tussore suit, who apologized for the absence of the commandant on official business and offered coffee and cigarettes. He was a thin, anxious man, with a habit of picking his nose, of which he seemed to be trying, none too successfully, to break himself. When they had had their coffee, he took a heavy bunch of keys and led them through a series of passages with steel doors at both ends, which he unlocked and relocked as they went along. They were shown eventually into a room with whitewashed walls and a steel grille running down the middle from floor to ceiling. Through the grille they could see another door.

  The official looked apologetic and mumbled something in bad French.

  “Phengaros,” Miss Kolin translated, “is not a good prisoner and sometimes behaves violently. The commandant would not wish us to be exposed to any trouble. It is for that reason that the interview must take place in these uncomfortable surroundings. He apologizes for them.”

  George nodded. He was not at ease. He had spent a disagreeable and exhausting night, and the smell of the place was making it difficult for him to forget the fact. Moreover, he had never been inside a prison before, and, while he had not supposed the experience would be anything but depressing, he had been unprepared for the lively sense of personal guilt that it aroused.

  There was a sound from the door beyond the grille and he looked round. A Judas window had opened in it and a face was peering through. Then a key turned in the lock and the door opened. A man slowly entered the room.

  The prisoner was thin and sinewy, with dark, sunken eyes and a long beak of a nose. His skin was brown and leathery as if he worked a lot in the sun. His shaven head had a black stubble of growth on it. He wore a cotton singlet and canvas trousers tied in at the waist with a strip of rag. His feet were bare.

  He hesitated when he saw the faces on the other side of the grille, and the warder behind him prodded him with a club. He came forward into the light. The warder locked the door and stood with his back to it. The official nodded to George.

  “Ask him what his name is,” George said to Miss Kolin.

  She relayed the question. The prisoner licked his lips, his dark eyes looking beyond her at the three men, as if she were the bait in a trap of their devising. He looked from her to the official and muttered something.

  “What is the game?” Miss Kolin translated. “You know my name well enough. Who is this woman?”

  The official shouted something at him violently and the warder prodded him again with the club.

  George spoke quickly. “Miss Kolin, explain to him in as friendly a way as you can that I am an American lawyer and that my business has nothing to do with him personally. It is a private, a legal matter. Say we only want to question him about that ambush at Vodena. There is no political angle to it. Our only object in questioning him is to confirm the death of a German soldier reported missing in 1944. Make it good.”

  As she spoke, George watched the prisoner’s face. The dark eyes flickered suspiciously towards him as she went on. When she had finished, the prisoner thought for a moment. Then he answered.

  “He will listen to the questions and decide whether he will answer when he has heard them.”

  Behind George the Lieutenant was beginning to mutter angrily to the official. George took no notice.

  “O.K.,” he said, “ask him his name. He’s got to identify himself.”

  “Phengaros.”

  “Ask him if he remembers the ambush of the trucks.”

  “Yes, he remembers.”

  “He was in command of those particular andartes?”

  “Yes.”

  “What happened exactly?”

  “He does not know. He was not there.”

  “But he said-”

  “He was leading an attack on the gasoline dump at the time. It was his second-in-command who caught the trucks.”

  “Where is his second-in-command?”

  “Dead. He was shot a few months later by the fascist murder gangs in Athens.”

  “Oh. Well, ask him if he knows of any German prisoners taken from the trucks.”

  Phengaros thought for a moment, then nodded.

  “Yes. One.”

  “Did he see this prisoner?”

  “He interrogated him.”

  “What rank was he?”

  “A private, he thinks. The man was the driver of the truck that hit the mine. He was wounded.”

  “Is he sure that there was no other prisoner?”

  “Yes.”

  “Tell him we have information that there were two men in that first truck who did not return and whose bodies were not found by the German party that came on the scene later. One was the driver of the truck, whom he says he interrogated. The other was the Sergeant in charge of the detachment. We want to know what happened to the Sergeant.”

  Phengaros began gesturing emphatically as he talked.

  “He says that he was not there, but that if there had been a German sergeant alive his men would certainly have taken him prisoner for questioning. A sergeant would have more information to give than a driver.”

  “What happened to the driver?”

  “He died.”

  “How?”

  There was a hesitation. “Of his wounds.”

  “O.K., we’ll skip that. When he served in the army of General Markos, did he come across any Germans fighting with it?”

  “A few.”

  “Any whose names he can remember?”

  “No.”

  “Ask him if he knows of anyone who actually took part in the truck ambush who’s still alive.”

  “He knows of nobody.”

  “Surely they can’t all be dead. Ask him to try and remember.”

  “He knows of nobody.”

  Phengaros was no longer looking at Miss Kolin now, but staring straight ahead.

  There was a pause. George felt a touch on his arm. The Lieutenant drew him aside.

  “Mr. Carey, this man does not wish to give information that might compromise his friends,” he said in English.

  “Oh, I see. Of course.”

  “Excuse me a moment, please.”

  The Lieutenant went to the official and held a whispered conversation with him. Then he returned to George.

  “The information might be obtained for you, Mr. Carey,” he murmured, “but it would take time to do so.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “This Phengaros is a difficult man to persuade, it seems, but, if you wish, some disciplinary pressure might be applied-”

  “No, no.” George spoke hastily; his knees were beginning to tremble. “Unless he gives the information quite voluntarily it can have no legal value as evidence.” It was a dishonest excuse. Phengaros’s evidence had no legal value anyway; it was the evidence of eyewitnesses (if any) that would be important. But George could think of nothing better.

  “As you please. Is there anything else you wish to ask?” The Lieutenant’s manner was bored now. He had seen through George. If the inquiry could be pursued with such lily-livered timidity, it could not be of very great importance.

  “I don’t think so, thanks.” George turned to Miss Kolin. “Ask this prison man if it’s against the rules to give the prisoner some cigarettes.”

  The official stopped picking his nose when he heard the question. Then he shrugged. If the American wished to waste cigarettes on such an un-co-operative type he might do so; but they must be examined first.
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br />   George took out a packet of cigarettes and handed it to him. The official glanced inside, pinched the packet, and handed it back. George held it through the grille.

  Phengaros had been standing there with a faint smile on his face. His eyes met George’s. With an ironic bow he took the cigarettes. As he did so be began to speak.

  “I understand the feelings of embarrassment that prompt you to offer this gift, sir,” translated Miss Kolin. “If I were a criminal, I would gladly accept them. But the fate of my comrades at the hands of the fascist reactionaries already rests too lightly on the conscience of the world. If your own conscience is troubling you, sir, that is to your credit. But I am not yet so corrupted here as to allow you to ease it for the price of a packet of cigarettes. No. Much as I should have enjoyed smoking them, sir, I think that their destination must be that of all other American aid.”

  With a flick of his wrist he tossed the cigarettes to the warder behind him.

  They fell on the floor. As the warder snatched them up, the official began shouting to him angrily through the grille and he hastened to unlock the door.

  Phengaros nodded curtly and went out.

  The official stopped shouting and turned apologetically to George. “Une espece de fausse-couche,” he said; “je vous demande pardon, monsieur.”

  “What for?” said George. “If he thinks I’m a lousy crypto-fascist-imperialist lackey, he’s quite right in refusing to smoke my cigarettes.”

  “Pardon?”

  “He also had the good manners not to heave the cigarettes right back in my face. In his place, I might have done just that.”

  “Qu’est ce que Monsieur a dit?”

  The official was looking desperately at Miss Kolin.

  George shook his head. “Don’t bother to translate, Miss Kolin. He won’t get it. You understand me, though, don’t you, Lieutenant? Yes, I thought so. Now, if you don’t mind, I’d like to get the hell out of here before something very in-inconvenient happens inside my stomach.”

  When they got back to the hotel, there was a note from Colonel Chrysantos awaiting them. It contained the information that a search of all the relevant lists had failed to discover anybody named Schirmer who had been either killed or captured in the Markos campaign; nor had an amnesty been granted to anyone of that name.

  “Miss Kolin,” George said, “what can you drink when you have this stomach thing?”

  “Cognac is best.”

  “Then we’d better have some.”

  Later, when the experiment had been tried, he said: “When we were in Cologne my office gave me permission to go on with the investigation for three more weeks if I thought we were making progress. One of them’s gone, and all we’ve found out is that Franz Schirmer most likely didn’t get taken prisoner by the people who shot up the trucks.”

  “Surely, that is something.”

  “It’s mildly interesting at best. It doesn’t get us anywhere. I’m giving it one more week. If we’re no nearer the truth by then, we go home. O.K.?”

  “Perfectly. What will you do with the week?”

  “Do what I have an idea I should have done before. Go to Vodena and look for his grave.”

  8

  Vodena, which used to be called Edessa and was once the seat of the kings of Macedon, is some fifty miles west of Salonika. It hangs, amid lush growth of vine and wild pomegranate, fig, and mulberry trees, in the foothills of Mount Chakirka six hundred feet above the Yiannitsa plain. Sparkling mountain streams cascade lyrically down the hillsides into Nisia Voda, the tributary of the Vadar which flows swiftly past the town on its way to the parent river. The old tiled houses glow in the sun. There are no tourist hotels.

  George and Miss Kolin were driven there in a car hired in Salonika. It was not an enjoyable trip. The day was hot and the road bad. The condition of their stomachs denied them even the consolations of a good lunch and a bottle of wine at their destination. While the chauffeur went off heartily in search of food and wine, they went into a cafe, fought the flies for long enough to drink some brandy, and then dragged themselves off dispiritedly in search of information.

  Almost immediately luck was with them. A sweetmeat pedlar in the market not only remembered the ambush well, but had actually been working in a near-by vineyard at the time. He had been warned to keep clear by the andartes, who had arrived an hour before the German trucks came.

  When the chauffeur returned they persuaded the pedlar to leave his tray of flyblown titbits with a friend and guide them to the scene.

  The fuel dump had been near a railway siding about three miles out of Vodena, on the side road to Apsalos. The trucks had been caught about two miles along this stretch of road.

  It was an ideal place for an ambush. The road was climbing steadily and at that point made a hairpin turn below a hillside with plenty of cover for the attackers among its trees and thickets. Below and beyond the road there was no cover at all. The mines had been placed well past the turn so that, when the first truck hit, it would block the road for those following at a point where they could neither turn their vehicles nor find cover from which to reply to the fire from above. For the andartes concealed on the hillside the business must have been easy. The remarkable thing was that as many as two of the eleven Germans in the trucks had managed to get back down the road alive. They must have been exceptionally nimble or the fire from the hillside very wild.

  Those who had died had been buried lower down the hill in a patch of level ground just off the road. According to the pedlar, the ground had been damp with rain at the time. The neat row of graves was still discernible in the undergrowth. Lieutenant Leubner and his men had piled stones in a small cairn on each. George had seen wayside German graves in France and Italy and guessed that originally each grave had also borne its occupant’s steel helmet, and perhaps a wooden stake with his number, name, and rank. It depended on how much time there had been to spare for such refinements. He looked for the stakes, but if they had ever existed, there was now no sign of them. Under a near-by bush he found a rusty German helmet; that was all.

  “Seven graves,” remarked Miss Kolin as they walked up the hill again; “that is what one would expect from the Lieutenant’s letter to Frau Schirmer. Ten men and the Sergeant went. Two men return. The bodies of the Sergeant and the driver of the first truck are missing. Seven are buried.”

  “Yes, but Phengaros said that there was only one prisoner-the driver. So where was the Sergeant? Look! The driver was wounded when the truck hit the mine, but not killed. Most likely the Sergeant was in the cab beside him. Probably he was wounded too. Lieutenant Leubner said he wasn’t a man to surrender without a fight. Supposing he managed somehow to get clear of the road and was hunted down and killed some distance from it.”

  “But how, Mr. Carey? How could he get clear?”

  They had reached the place of thte ambush again. George walked along the edge of the road away from the hillside and looked down.

  The bare rocky ground fell away precipitously to the valley below. It was absurd to suppose that even an unwounded man would attempt to scramble down it under fire from the hillside and the road above. The two men who had escaped had been able to do so because they were in the last truck and unwounded. The Sergeant had been a full two hundred yards farther away from cover. He had had no chance at all of getting clear.

  George climbed a short way up the hillside to look at the scene from the attackers’ point of view. From there, the plight of the men in the trucks seemed even more hopeless. He could imagine the scene: the trucks grinding up the hill, the ear-splitting detonation of the mine, the rattle of machine-gun and rifle fire, the thudding explosions of grenades lobbed on to the road, the hoarse shouts, the screams of the dying.

  He clambered down to the car again.

  “All right, Miss Kolin,” he said; “what do you think happened?”

  “I think that he was taken prisoner with the driver and that both were wounded. I think that the Sergeant died
of his wounds or was killed trying to escape on the way to the andartes’ rendezvous with Phengaros. Naturally Phengaros would think that only one prisoner had been taken.”

  “What about the Sergeant’s papers? They would have been taken to Phengaros.”

  “They would also take the papers of those they had killed here.”

  George considered. “Yes, you may be right. At least it’s a reasonable explanation. There’s still only one way we can find out for certain though, and that’s by getting hold of someone who was there.”

  Miss Kolin nodded towards the pedlar. “I have been talking to this man. He says that the andartes who did this were from Florina. That agrees with the Colonel’s information.”

  “Did he know any of them by name?”

  “No. They just said they were from Florina.”

  “Another dead end. All right, we’ll go there tomorrow. We’d better start back now. How much money do you think I should give this old man?”

  It was early evening when they arrived back in Salonika. Something unusual seemed to have happened while they had been away. There were extra police on duty in the streets and shopkeepers stood in the roadway conferring volubly with their neighbours. The cafes were crowded.

  At the hotel they heard the news.

  Just before three o’clock that afternoon a closed army truck had driven up to the entrance of the Eurasian Credit Bank in the rue Egnatie. It had waited there for a moment or so. Then, suddenly, the covers at the back had been flung open and six men had jumped out. They had been armed with machine-pistols and grenades. Three of them had immediately stationed themselves in the entrance portico. The other three had gone inside. Within little more than two minutes they had been out again with several hundred thousand dollars’ worth of foreign currency in American dollars, escudos, and Swiss francs. Ten seconds later, and almost before the passers-by had noticed that anything was wrong, they had been back in the truck and away.

  The affair had been perfectly organized. The raiders had known exactly which safe the money was kept in and exactly how to get to it. No one had been shot. A clerk, who had courageously tried to set off an alarm bell, had received no more than a blow in the face from a gun butt for his audacity. The alarm bell had not sounded for the simple reason, discovered later, that the wires to it had been disconnected. The raiders had saluted with the clenched fist. Quite clearly they had had a Communist confederate inside the bank. Quite clearly the robbery was yet another in a series organized to replenish the Communist Party funds. Quite naturally suspicion as to the identity of the confederate had fallen upon the courageous clerk. Would he have dared to do what he did unless he had known in advance that he was running no risk? Of course not! The police were questioning him.