Hambledon folded the papers again with the map and the covering note—had Micklejohn written it? No means of telling—and put them all into the envelope. He sat looking at it for a moment and then, in clear block capitals, addressed it to himself and sealed it down. After a moment’s thought he carefully inked his right thumb and impressed a beautifully clear thumbprint upon the left-hand top corner.
He took his Luger from his locked suitcase, left the room and walked down to the Norddeutsche Bank in Fischmaker Strasse. There were plenty of people about; the cinemas were just closing. Hambledon pushed open the stiff flap of the bank’s night safe and dropped his bulging envelope through the slot.
“There,” said Hambledon inaudibly, “that will defeat you, I think.”
He turned away and strolled comfortably home.
12: Some Elementary Trigonometry
Hambledon undressed and went to bed but for some reason could not go to sleep. There was a party in progress in one of the ground-floor rooms. There was a piano and an accordion and choruses and the clock in the Jakobi-Kirche struck one. Eventually Hambledon cursed the noisemakers, got up and shut the window. Normally the Lays of Ancient Rome would send him to sleep but on this occasion they failed him; for one thing, the room was hot and stuffy. He got up again after a time and reopened the window. The party seemed to be petering out, the choruses were intermittent and not sustained by so many voices; also the pianist had gone home to bed. The last chorus died on the night air, the Jakobi-Kirche clock struck the three-quarters, and all was quiet, but still Hambledon could not go to sleep and he had nothing to read. He had, increasingly, a sense of waiting for something to happen.
He turned over, thumped his pillow, and started upon his second string, the Ballad of the Revenge. His mother used to read it to him when he was a little boy in the rectory garden, to keep him quiet when his father was writing his sermons. Bumblebees in the hollyhocks.
At Flores in the Azores Sir Richard Grenville lay,
And a pinnace, like a fluttered bird, came flying from far away:
“Spanish ships of war at sea! We have sighted fifty-three!”
Then there would have been a scramble. Look out, make haste, the enemy is coming——
The clock in the Jakobi-Kirche struck two.
Hambledon got out of bed, put on his soft bedroom slippers and his dressing gown, dropped his Luger in the pocket, and opened his bedroom door inaudibly. Outside in the passage the sense of tension was keener. He moved silently along the passage to the head of the stairs and the sound of a voice came faintly to his ears. It was followed by another voice speaking not louder but more sharply. “Hold your tongue!” it said peremptorily in German.
Tommy glided down the stairs and looked over the banisters at the turn. There was no one in the passage leading to the front hall; the speakers must be in the office which opened off the passage. The door of it was standing wide. He went on, down the stairs, along the passage, and looked in at the office door.
The porter was facing him with his hands above his head, a man in a mask was threatening him with an automatic. A second man, also masked, had the safe door open and was snatching out the contents.
Hambledon jabbed the muzzle of his Luger against the spine of the man nearest to him and said: “Drop that gun or I’ll kill you! Drop it. On the floor.”
Before he finished speaking the man at the safe was up on his feet, out through the further door into the front hall, out of the front door and away. The man with the gun dropped it obediently.
“Schatz,” said Hambledon to the porter, “pick up that gun and telephone the police. You—” prodding his captive—“hands up and walk forward.”
The man obeyed, walking forward till his nose bumped the opposite wall.
“Clasp your hands behind your head,” said Hambledon sharply. “That’s right. If you move your fingers I will shoot you, here,” and he prodded him again while Schatz at the telephone howled for the police, schnell, schnell, armed robbery, attempted murder, and then sat staring and shaking until the police car whirled up to the door.
When the man had been seized and handcuffed and the mask taken from his face, Hambledon looked at him and laughed.
“Banger,” he said. “I thought so. Your svelte curves, you know.”
* * *
Ludwig Kirsch lived in a small modern house a mile or more outside the city boundaries on the road to Oker. It was not his own house; he had rented it furnished because Goslar was not to him an abiding city. He had lived there a little over a year, having come from Hamburg. He was, by his own assertion, an author of books upon mathematics for the use and torment of boys in the upper-school age groups. He lived alone, being waited upon during certain hours of the day by the wife of a railway worker, a simple-minded hard-working woman who regarded with deep respect amounting to veneration anyone who could understand, let alone produce, such sheets of complicated trigonometrical calculations as those which could be seen, neatly sorted into piles under paperweights, upon the table in his study.
“Be very careful, Hanna,” he said, “in dusting my table, not to disturb my sheets of calculations in any way. If they got into the wrong order——”
“With respect,” said Hanna, turning pale at the bare idea, “would it not be better if I did not dust the table at all?”
“Perhaps it would, perhaps it would. My books also, if their place in my bookcases were altered it would seriously annoy me.”
“I had better not touch the books——”
“I agree. Do not touch the books. I have a stupid habit, Hanna, of putting odd notes behind the clock. If by ill chance they swirled into the fire——”
“May I, then, leave the mantelpiece untouched? If I were to confine my attention to the floor?”
Kirsch considered this.
“I think it might be better if the room were left for occasions when I have time to oversee your efforts. There will then be no danger of your disturbing my work.”
Hanna looked relieved.
“If the Herr will tell me when he wishes me to clean the room, I will come at once.”
Kirsch nodded approvingly.
“And at other times——”
“I will not enter without the Herr’s permission.”
“Thank you, Hanna. That will be best.”
“Schön,” said Hanna, and scuttled away. Kirsch, to make doubly sure that there was no mistake, made a habit of keeping the study door locked and the key in his pocket. The study was only a small room opening off the main sitting room. It would not matter if it were sometimes a little dusty. It would matter much more if a thoroughly industrious cleaner turned out cupboards and drawers, or even wondered why they were all kept locked.
On the evening when Hambledon went to the Zwinger and Petersen fell in the lake Kirsch was in his sitting room waiting for two men to come and report. It was late in the evening and Kirsch was alone in the house.
Presently two sets of footsteps sounded on the gravel path and someone knocked at the front door. Kirsch opened it to admit two men whom Hambledon would instantly have recognised. The tall lean one whom he called Bacon entered first, followed by the short rotund Banger, and both were plainly pleased with themselves.
“Come in, Dittmar,” said Kirsch, “and you, Tosen, also.”
They came in, grinning. Even the lean saturnine Dittmar laughed as he spoke. “We have good news for the Herr.”
“We have a little something to show the Herr,” said fat laughing Tosen, undoing his raincoat to take a flat parcel from a pocket inside it. “The missing papers. They were passed to the Englander this evening at the Zwinger. Dittmar here saw what was inside the parcel when it was opened, so we waited until the Englander left, sprang upon him in the dark, took this package, and threw him in the lake.”
“We have been watching the Englander for days, ever since the Herr told us that the papers would probably come across this side and that someone like that Englander would have been
sent here to receive them,” said Dittmar.
“As soon as I saw him,” exulted Tosen, “I said to myself that here was the type of man the English would send.”
“Aided in your perspicacity by the fact that I pointed him out to you myself,” said Kirsch sarcastically, and Dittmar was mildly annoyed. He and Tosen, after all, had done all the work while Kirsch had done nothing but sit in a comfortable armchair and pretend to write sums for boys.
“The Herr,” said Dittmar, with excessive meekness, “was quite inspired when he drew the right conclusion from the facts that this Englander had Micklejohn’s room, spent days examining and asking questions about the frontier, and was openly in league with the police.”
Tosen looked a little nervous, for he feared Kirsch’s explosive temper, but the mathematician merely tapped the Karstadt box affectionately and said quite mildly that there were also other factors involved. “Anyone might have had Micklejohn’s room, the English are always nosy about the frontier, and as for the police, any man would call them in who found a dead man in his bedroom and you know what I think about that.” He treated Dittmar to a long cold stare and added: “Wait here while I check these papers against the list. You may sit down.” He went into his study, leaving the door ajar, and Dittmar muttered: “Sez you,” under his breath, for he was a cinema addict.
“There are two spare glasses on the table,” said Tosen in a soothing voice, “and I am thirsty after hurrying all this way. Do you think——”
He was interrupted by a roar of rage from the further room and Kirsch charged out, spluttering and quite incoherent with fury; he was trailing crumpled white streamers behind him. “Look—look—look,” he stammered, “you—you——”
He gathered up the toilet paper, seized Dittmar by the collar, and made frantic attempts to cram it into his mouth and down his neck, finishing by scrubbing his face with it. Tosen dodged round the table and went to ground behind Kirsch’s big armchair. Dittmar made feeble attempts to push off the attack, but Kirsch in a rage had the strength of madness. He ended by slapping Dittmar savagely across the face and then dropped into a chair as one exhausted. There was a long silence and Tosen rose carefully to his feet.
Eventually Kirsch lifted his head.
“You see what happened—where is Tosen?”
“Here, mein Herr,” said Tosen, and walked round the chair into view.
“This Englander made a fool of you—it would not be difficult. Sakrament da lekts mir, what it is to have to make use of woodenheads like you!”
Kirsch swept his hands through his hair and struggled for self-control.
“You——Let me think. He took the papers out of the box so he still has them. He——”
“With respect, mein Herr,” said Tosen nervously, “it may be that he is drowned.”
“What, in that duckpond? Fool, hold your tongue. Or did you kill him before he went in?”
“No—the Herr was so angry when Dittmar shot the Russian, Lentov, in the hotel——”
“I did not shoot him,” stormed Dittmar, exploding suddenly. “You did!”
Kirsch cursed them both into silence.
“The Herr said,” persisted Tosen, “ ‘no more killing.’ ”
Kirsch looked at him and he backed away.
“I am trying to put myself in his place,” said Kirsch, as though talking to himself. “I should take them back to the hotel. I should not keep them in my bedroom even for a single night; that bedroom has been visited before. I should put them in the hotel safe, of course. It is in the office and there is a night porter on duty with a telephone at his elbow. Yes, that is what I should do.”
He sat up with a jerk.
“Now I tell you what you will do. You will wait until all the lights are out in the hotel except the hall light, you understand? Sometimes there are parties there and it is late before they finish. When all the ground-floor windows are dark and the bedroom windows also, you will walk quietly but quickly up the street and turn without hesitation in at the door of the hotel. If you are seen to go in, you are belated guests, that is all. Open the door quietly; it may be that the porter is asleep in his chair. Seize him, hold a gun to his head, and he will give you the key of the safe. Tosen, you will continue to hold a gun at the porter’s head while you, Dittmar, search the safe for these papers. Take them out, stun the porter but do not kill him, and bring the papers back here. I shall be waiting.”
Dittmar looked at the clock, the time was half-past midnight.
“You are right,” said Kirsch, answering the unspoken thought, “it is too early yet. I should think, about two o'clock, but you must use your discretion, if you have any. If you cannot tell the time, you can listen for the chimes from the Jakobi-Kirche. Any questions?”
They shook their heads and turned to go.
“Stop,” said Kirsch. “How do you propose to prevent the porter from giving your descriptions to the police, since I have told you not to kill him?”
“Scarves round our faces,” said Dittmar.
“Scarves slip,” said Kirsch. He got up and went into the study, returning at once with something black in his hands. “Here are two masks, you will put them on the moment before you enter the hotel. Now go, and remember that if you fail me this time I will throw you over into the Soviet Zone. You know what they do to failures there, don’t you? Now go.”
“Since we are such fools,” said Dittmar, “would it not be better if the Herr did this errand himself?”
“It would. Much better. It would at least be properly done. But you are perfectly well aware that the whole strength of my position here depends upon the fact that I am seldom seen out and that only in the mornings with a shopping basket. I am never seen out at night and I never will be. I am too important to risk, whereas you are expendable. Now go.”
He closed the front door after them, took up a book, and sat down to read and wait. When the clock struck two he laid down his book to look up at the dial for a moment before taking up the book again.
He was still waiting when the dawn broke and when the sun rose he was still there, waiting.
When the daily woman let herself in at seven, Kirsch was in bed, but he had not been to sleep.
* * *
The police squad who arrested Tosen at the hotel were led by an inspector who knew Hambledon and had seen him with the Chief of Police. Hambledon drew him aside.
“A word in your ear, Inspector.”
“Certainly, mein Herr.”
“This affair here is not a mere matter of robbery for gain. In the words of a great English poet,” said Hambledon, who was rather enjoying himself, “ ‘Things are seldom what they seem.’ ”
“I imagine—if I may say so without presumption—that where the Herr is concerned they seldom are.”
“Thank you. Your chief knows that the purpose of my visit here is not entirely to take a holiday. That dangerous-looking criminal there is somehow involved in that purpose.”
The Inspector looked across at Tosen, who was wilting in a corner. His fair hair was standing in tufts like the crest of a cockatoo; his normally red complexion was pale and the corners of his curiously small mouth were turned down like a baby about to howl. Even his fat face looked flabby and drooping and his fat hands plucked aimlessly at the handcuffs.
“He does not look particularly dangerous,” said the Inspector, “but if he is really concerned in the purpose to which the Herr refers, appearances are no doubt deceptive. I have seen killers who looked like that.”
“So have I.”
“Excuse me one moment,” said the Inspector. “A little adjustment, perhaps.”
He called up one of his men and handcuffed Tosen to him with a word of warning.
“His interrogation——” began Hambledon when the Inspector returned.
“Will begin at once. My chief will himself wish to interrogate him in the morning, but in the meantime we can worry him a little. The Herr would not wish to be present?”
/> “Heaven forbid that I should intrude upon your communings with any prisoner. Besides, I want to go to bed. This man, by the way, is one of the two who have been shadowing me for the past week or more. The other one was going through the safe here but I could not hold him, he ran too fast. Never mind, I have a feeling that we shall meet again.”
“Did he get away with anything from the safe, did the Herr see?”
“I have reason to think not. My compliments to your chief and if he can spare me a few moments in the morning, I have something to tell him. Good night.”
“The Herr’s message shall be delivered,” said the Inspector.
Hambledon went back to bed and fell asleep at once with no assistance from Tennyson or Macaulay. In the morning he was finishing his last cup of coffee when he was called to the telephone. The Chief of Police would be delighted to see him as soon as was reasonably convenient.
“I come at once,” said Hambledon.
He was shown into the Chief’s office and found him going through his correspondence. At sight of Hambledon he dropped the whole pile into a tray and said: “That fellow won’t talk.”
“Dear me. Did you ask him what they hoped to find in the safe?”
“He says money. What do you think he was looking for?”
“You remember the story we heard,” said Hambledon, “about some papers having been stolen from the Russians at the time when Micklejohn disappeared? That fellow Lentov was supposed to have had a hand in it.”
“I heard that from various sources,” said the Chief of Police. “I suppose there was some truth in it.”
“Certainly there was. It was those papers which were being looked for in the hotel safe.”
“Himmel! Why?”
“Because I had them,” said Hambledon, and told the whole story of what had happened at the Zwinger the night before. “This fellow, whom I called Banger, not knowing his name——”
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