Micklejohn snatched the pistol out of Lentov’s pocket, aimed it at Lentov about amidships and snapped: “Do what I tell you or I’ll kill you. Start the car and drive on. Start the car——”
Lentov obeyed.
“Now drive on and keep going.”
The car went off and left the private holding one tilted can with petrol running out of it on the road. He straightened it up, replaced the cap, and looked after the car till it was out of sight. He shook his head slowly, picked up the two cans, one empty, the other half full, and then went to sit on the bank at the side of the road until somebody should come and tell him what to do next. He lit a cigarette and leaned back. It was very pleasant to sit by the road and do nothing for a little while.
Lentov drove on. His face was a greenish-white and the sweat was running down his cheeks, for he was terrified, not so much of the Englishman, although he had suddenly turned into a demon, as of the Russians he had left behind. They would hear from the private that he, Lentov, had been alone with the Englishman for nearly half an hour and that as soon as there was petrol in the tank they had left the escort and driven off together, for the soldier could not see what had happened in front and would not have understood what had been said.
Lentov was under suspicion. He had been well educated and could speak several languages and his father was a man of some importance. Andrey had been appointed to the Soviet Embassy in London and the place had gone to his head.
Not the English way of life, for he thought that simply silly, nor the English people he met, whose politeness he mistook for servility and whose jokes he found incomprehensible. It was London which charmed him, the bustling colourful traffic—especially the scarlet omnibuses—the clean streets, the gracious houses, the bright flowers in Parliament Square, the busy shipping on London’s river, but most of all the things in the shops—ah, the things in the shops! He would moon up Bond Street, flattening his nose against the windowpanes, for he knew enough to realise that much of what he saw was priceless. And the gadgets; tin openers, electric razors, potato peelers, bathroom fittings——
His colleagues were at first amused, then dubious, and finally disgusted. Andrey Lentov found himself being lectured, scolded, and finally sent back to Russia with a black mark against him.
“You are tainted,” they said. “There is a weakness in your character which has yielded to the false glamour of the decadent and self-indulgent West. Potato peelers, huh! You are politically suspect.”
Then his father died and there was no one to back him. He obtained a dull post in the Civil Administration of Occupied Territory and was trying to re-establish himself, without much success.
Now it looked as though he had bolted with an Englishman.
“Keep going,” said Micklejohn. His reactions to this wild ride were much simpler and not nearly so well founded. He merely thought that if he were in a Russian military vehicle being driven by a Russian, he was not very likely to be stopped. A little luck and he would find himself near enough to the boundary line to be able to slip across. It ought not to be difficult to get away from this fellow who, judging by the colour of his face, was not much of a hero. Besides, he was not armed. He could be, though, there was the submachine gun in the back. Micklejohn, still pointing Lentov’s pistol at Lentov’s middle, put his left arm over the back of the seat and a long stretch possessed him of the private’s weapon. He brought it over with a steady swing and hurled it into a clump of bushes which they happened to be passing at the moment. That was that.
Now about finding the way. The zonal boundary runs approximately north and south, though it is anything but straight. On the map it is a series of unbelievable wriggles. However, generally speaking, it goes north and they were to the east of it, driving north. Let them, therefore, turn left and they would be going towards the line. Micklejohn, it will be remembered, knew nothing about Vopos.
Just ahead, the road forked.
“Take the left-hand road,” said Micklejohn, “and step on it. I mean, accelerate. Drive faster.”
There was a group of buildings up the right-hand road, with what looked like Army vehicles round them. They were Lentov’s last hope and George realised it.
“This pistol, you said, when fired in the stomach, it hurts. You probably know.”
Lentov took the left fork.
The road had deteriorated but was still passable; it did not appear to be much used, for there were no new tracks on the soft patches. Lentov became desperate. He would ditch the car and hope the Englishman would be flung out and hurt. Even, with luck, killed. But there was no ditch; the roadsides were low and soft. He drove on, two miles, three miles——
There was a dead tree lying by the side of the road. Lentov waited till he was almost upon it and then, without slackening speed, swung the car off the road and straight at the fallen trunk.
There was a hideous crash, the car stood on its head for a moment and then fell slowly over on its side in the soft ground.
When Micklejohn recovered consciousness he was first aware of gruff voices talking across him in a rather difficult brand of German. He opened his eyes and found two old men, one on either side of him; to his pleased surprise they spoke kindly to him, saying that the Herr was now feeling better, was he not?
Micklejohn agreed that he was, he sat up unsteadily and looked about him. Andrey Lentov was a few feet away, lying on the ground in a careless attitude which suggested that he was either unconscious or dead. He looked dead and Micklejohn said so.
The two old men looked at Lentov with deep distaste. One said that no, unfortunately the —— a dialect word unfamiliar to Micklejohn, was still alive and the other suggested that it would perhaps be a good opportunity to finish him off, nicht wahr? He lifted a very adequate felling axe with a five-inch blade and a four-foot haft and turned it so that the back of the axe-head was available for use as a hammer, but the other stopped him.
“No, Hans, no. There will only be reprisals, thou knowest.”
“True,” said Hans, and put down the axe. “A pity, though.”
Micklejohn, who had shut his eyes, opened them again.
“But that is a very handsome bag he is carrying,” continued Hans. “Real leather and practically new.” He drew General Vedovitch’s brief case off Lentov’s arm and put it under his own. George Micklejohn, who had suffered many things in the last two hours, remembered the red-faced General and was seized with a fit of something very like giggles.
“The Herr is not yet himself,” observed the other old man. “We had better get him away.”
“You are right, Karl,” said Hans. “To the hut first and to your house after dark. You have a loft. Can the Herr stand?”
“Quite well,” said Micklejohn, and struggled to his feet. They supported him upon either hand, having gathered up their axes, and led him away through narrow twisting paths through a wood of mixed timber and thick undergrowth. After a little, Micklejohn could walk unaided and they went together into the depths of the wood at the deceptively slow forester’s pace which yet eats up the miles.
“We are nearly there,” said Karl. He turned round a clump of hazels and down a bank to a tiny shed so overgrown that it seemed impossible that anyone could ever find it. They went in. Hans threw down some not particularly clean sacks, and Micklejohn sank gratefully upon them. Karl drew out from a dark corner a black bottle and a chipped enamel mug, poured some of the contents of the bottle into the mug, and handed it to Micklejohn.
“Let the Herr drink, it will revive him.”
Micklejohn thanked him and, remembering his manners, added “Prosit!” He took a pull at the contents of the mug and thought that the roof of his mouth had exploded into his brain; then the rest of the liquid ran down his throat and set fire to his gullet. He choked and Hans kindly patted him on the back.
“Not too fast,” he said. “It is better drunk slowly. It is strong, eh?”
Micklejohn privately thought that this alarming liquid ought n
ot to be drunk at all. It would, he decided, be fine as a paint stripper or for curing warts, but as a drink, no. However, in some unexpected way it seemed to be doing him good and the explosive effects were not so marked if taken in small sips. His colour came back and his legs ceased to tremble.
“Tell me,” he said carefully, for his grasp of German seemed a little precarious, “you knew that fellow Lentov, did you?”
Karl spat, fortunately out through the doorway, and Hans answered the question.
“Ach, yes, we know the swine Lentov. The Herr also?”
Micklejohn gathered his thoughts, which seemed to be straying of their own accord.
“When you say ‘know him,’ I met him this afternoon. He was, I believe, taking me to prison or somewhere like that. What I wanted to ask was, why are you so kind to me when you didn’t like him? I mean, we were together in the jeep and you might have thought we were comrades.”
“Since the Herr was holding a pistol at that”—the dialect word again—“man’s head and even after you both fell out the Herr was trying to strangle him——”
“What? Oh, was I? I don’t remember that.”
“No, no. The Herr was unconscious but still vigorous. But when we touched the Herr, he collapsed,” explained Karl.
“Besides,” added Hans a little apologetically, “the Herr has letters from England in his pocket.”
“We looked at them,” said Karl, “because we thought the Herr was English by his clothes and we wanted to see if we were right.”
“Quite right,” said Micklejohn drowsily, for his eyelids were suddenly and inexplicably heavy, “I am English.”
“We were prisoners of war in England in the first war,” said Hans, “so we know the English, how they look and how they dress.”
“We are not ignorant men like those who have never travelled,” said Karl, but Micklejohn’s head fell back and instantly he was sound asleep. The two old woodcutters looked at him, at each other, and moved quietly out of the hut.
“He will sleep for eight hours,” said Karl. The door of the hut was off its hinges and leaning against the wall. They propped it up in the doorway.
“When he wakes,” said Hans, “he will be well again. Put that brushwood against the door.”
“He has been beaten by those Russians,” said Karl, “there are marks on his face.”
“God curse them,” said Hans mechanically, like a response in a litany. “If we look after him and help him, he will be grateful.” They turned away from the hut, picked up their axes, and walked off towards the place where they had been working.
“That is so,” agreed Karl. “He has plenty of money, good West marks. I am surprised They did not rob him.”
“There is no knowing what They will do.”
“What shall we do when we get back to the overturned car?”
“Nothing. We will work a little further off. We saw nothing, we heard nothing.”
“That is right,” agreed Karl. “Nothing at all.”
* * *
Some time after Micklejohn and his elderly friends had gone away, Lentov had returned painfully to consciousness. His head ached violently and bright flashes tormented his eyes whenever he moved, but he dragged himself up to his knees and looked about him.
The jeep was a wreck.
The brief case, containing the Smirnov Plan, had disappeared.
The Englishman had gone.
Therefore the Englishman had taken the Smirnov Plan.
Lentov struggled to his feet, tottered to the overturned jeep and leaned against it. He would certainly be accused of having helped the Englishman. He looked about him for the revolver, but that had gone too. He could not even blow his brains out.
He felt in his pockets, vaguely, with no particular purpose, and found Micklejohn’s passport and travellers cheques and with them an hotel card. Die Drei Bullochsen, Goslar-am-Harz, Room 32. Of course, of course, the Englishman had said that he was staying there. No doubt he was now on his way back there, taking the Smirnov Plan with him.
If it were possible to follow him and take the plan from him——
Lentov straightened himself, glanced up at the sun to get his bearings, and staggered off into the woods.
When Karl and Hans returned to the spot, there was nothing there but the overturned jeep slowly spreading an iridescent oily film upon the ground.
6: In the Attic
“But I must get back,” said Micklejohn. “My family must be getting worried.”
He was sitting on a mattress on the floor of the loft under the roof of Karl’s house; it was twenty-four hours since the jeep had turned over. Apart from a loose tooth, cut and swollen lips, a stiff and painful knee, and a wonderful collection of ink-black bruises on various parts of his body, he was himself again and no worse than he had often been after a hard game of Rugby.
Otto Neumann looked at him mournfully and shook his head, a bald head with a fringe of grey hair round its perimeter and an intricately wrinkled scalp. These wrinkles fascinated Micklejohn because they reminded him of railway lines spreading and subdividing at the approach to a mainline terminus: Waterloo, for example. When Heir Neumann’s expression changed, the wrinkles altered like points being reset on a railway, the Portsmouth line switched to Platform 5 while the Southampton line temporarily vanished. Micklejohn had to make continuous efforts not to watch them.
The two men were sitting on the floor because the loft was merely the space under Karl’s roof, triangular in section and only high enough in the middle to allow the short figure of Neumann to stand upright. Micklejohn, who was five feet eleven in his socks, could not stand upright at all.
“I regret,” said Neumann. “The anxiety of the Herr’s relatives is never sufficiently to be deplored but, at the moment, impossible to be relieved.” He spoke an educated German and Micklejohn found him very easy to understand.
“But why? It’s only to slip back through the woods, avoiding the police, and——”
“Listen. I do not know what the Herr managed to do in the course of his passage over the frontier, but I tell you——”
“All I did was to walk straight on. You talk about The Wire; all I can say is that I never saw any.”
“No. We know about that. There was a stretch of wire down that day while posts were being replaced and the Herr has to pick that one short length for his promenade, and by pure luck the Vopos were not looking his way. That is literally true, for the Herr passed behind their backs while they were watching the workers. The workers saw the Herr pass and said nothing.”
“But why didn’t they call to me and tell me I was trespassing? Then I could have apologised and gone back.”
“They are decent men and they did not wish to see the Herr shot before their eyes. Nobody likes Vopos.”
“Shot? For inadvertently crossing an unmarked frontier? But that’s ridiculous, nobody would do a thing like that. Even the Russians let people into Russia itself now, ordinary tourists, you know, and you tell me the Vopos are Germans.”
Neumann sighed. “The Herr must try to grasp this simple fact. Ever since the workers’ rising over here, in the Soviet Zone four years ago, this frontier has been closed, closed, closed. Shut. Shut dead. Increasingly so. At one time refugees used to stream across that frontier in thousands; now, if seven try to go, three or four may succeed. The rest are shot. There used to be a number of official crossing places; at Eckertal, at Walkenried, and other places, now there is one only, at Helmstedt.”
Micklejohn ran his hands through his hair.
“The Russian soldiers used to guard this frontier, but after a time they trained a special corps of the Volkspolizei to do the work under their supervision,” continued Neumann. “Does the Herr now begin to understand?”
“But why shoot? If they arrested people——”
“Hear the Communist creed. Anyone trying to escape to the West is a traitor and therefore deserves to be shot. Anyone coming in from the West must be a spy and there
fore deserves to be shot. Understood at last?”
“Perfectly. There is no difficulty in understanding your very clear explanation, Herr Neumann. It is the believing it which I find so difficult—please understand me. I do not doubt your word for a moment, it is just that—that it all sounds so completely mad! It’s like a frightening fairy story.”
“It is mad,” said Otto Neumann soberly. “That is why it is frightening.” There was a short pause and then the German went on: “All that is, however, normal now with us, we are becoming used to it. What is not normal is the extraordinary activity—upheaval—uproar—in the Russian Army along the frontier just now, which seems to date from the Herr’s arrival. I said that we do not, now, see Russian troops on the frontier, but this last twenty-four hours there are thousands of them searching the woods and the houses and questioning people.”
“You don’t mean to tell me that the Russians have turned out a couple of regiments to hunt for me?”
“Not only the Herr. It seems that there is also a Russian missing, the man Lentov, who was also in the jeep.”
“Oh? I don’t know what has happened to him, then. The last time I saw him he was unconscious and Karl told me that when they went back to the wreck he had gone. I assumed that somebody had found him and taken him away.”
“The Russians and their friends did not, for they are hunting for him. We true Germans would not, for he is hated. He is in charge of the Civil Administration in this sector, he sees to it that the civil authorities here carry out their orders and he is much more harsh and cruel than is necessary. It is said that he is in some sort of disgrace in Russia so I suppose that he is trying to earn his pardon.”
“The General certainly did not like him,” said Micklejohn thoughtfully. “Ordered him about like a dog. Go! Come back! Go! Come back!”
Otto Neumann smiled slowly and said that in all countries, so he had read, Army men despised the mere civilian.
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