Smith whistled softly. ‘The dirty old man! Isn’t he married?’
‘Widower,’ McIntyre replied. ‘Anyway, let’s get on. Von Horn knows his routine exactly. We gave him the info because we thought von Horn might use it to pinpoint a time when he would strike. So far – no dice.’ He shrugged. ‘But we’re working on it. In the meantime, I want you and your chaps to tighten up security along the Rhine frontage of that damned villa of his. I’ve tried twice to get him to move to the Hotel Dom, but he won’t have it. Perhaps it’s on account of the lady of the night.’ He sighed like a man who is sorely tried.
‘Are you sure they’ll come over the Rhine?’ Smith asked.
‘Pretty sure. I don’t think they’d use a local to assassinate his nibs. The way I see it is this. Von Horn and Hitler will try to show that the people on this side of the Rhine are the poor oppressed, kept down by the brutal occupation powers. A true German from the unoccupied part of the damned country has taken it upon himself to strike the first blow for freedom by risking his life to come across the Rhine and assassinate the English tyrant.’
‘Yes,’ Smith said thoughtfully. ‘I’ll buy that. It would be the kind of dramatic action that this Hitler chap could capitalise on. It would be a very great coup for him and his party if he could claim that it was one of his followers who had done the dirty deed.’
‘Exactly,’ McIntyre agreed. ‘So what can we do in the meantime, until we find out more of von Horn’s intentions? I suggest you run a floating patrol the length of the river to a mile of each side of the villa. That should be cover enough. I’ll get a wireless set for that big Yorkshireman and you’ll keep in contact with him during the time of the patrol to warn him of anything untoward – suspicious. That’ll keep him on his toes.’ The other two nodded their agreement. McIntyre reached for his battered cap, stuck it on his hard head at a rakish angle, sayinglittle wearily, ‘Well I guess that’s about all we can do for the time being. Be seeing you.’ And with that he was gone once more.
The days passed. Now their guard duties had become routine and perhaps a little boring. As CPO Ferguson growled, watching the General and his groom disappearing down the towpath once again, ‘I dinna join the Royal to act as a wet nurse to some Sassenach general, who’s an awfie old fool.’
To which Ginger replied cheekily, ‘Now then Chiefie, we all know that before Nelson asked Hardy to give him a last kiss, he asked you for one.’ And he blew the redfaced old CPO a wet kiss.
But if they were bored by their task, all of them, even someone as insensitive to what was going on around him as easy-going Billy Bennett could sense the ever-rising tension. The Germans were getting nervous, touchy and ever bolder. There was a rash of slogans painted on walls in the centre of the old town proclaiming, ‘Tommies Go Home’. A company of young soldiers straight from home disembarking from their troop train at Cologne’s Hauptbahnhof were booed by a crowd of German travellers. Once, someone tried to pull down the Union Jack that flew in front of Army HQ in broad daylight. It was only when one of the sentries threatened to shoot him that he desisted. At night from over the other side of the Rhine men with loudspeakers shouted patriotic slogans in German, telling their fellow countrymen in occupied Cologne that the time ‘of liberation from the English yoke’ was not far away. ‘Germany for the Germans,’ they cried in the darkness. ‘Out with foreigners…’
At night now, crouched in the little wardroom before setting off on the nightly patrols, Smith and Bird listened to the taunts, each man wrapped in a cocoon of his own thoughts and apprehensions. They knew it couldn’t be long now. The situation had reached crisis level. If only they could act! This damned waiting was getting on all of their nerves.
But when it came, the news shocked them. It was the big hefty sergeant of the West Yorks who first brought the news to their attention. ‘Wanted… wanted on the blower tootsweet, sir,’ he gasped as if he had run all the way from the villa. ‘It’s that Canadian – Major McIntyre – wants you on the phone at once.’
Smith flashed Dickie a look. Instinctively, the two of them knew that this was the call to arms.
At the double they followed the panting sergeant to the little wooden guardroom outside the main villa. A sentry was holding the phone. Smith took it out of his hand and ordered him and the sergeant outside before he rasped, ‘Smith.’
‘McIntyre. The balloon’s about to go up,’ the Canadian said, hard and direct. ‘Our tame Fritz had been ordered to alert his comrades to monitor his nibs’s villa on the Saturday after next. They are to report everything that happens on that day. As soon as it happens,’ McIntyre emphasised the word, ‘they are to cross the Rhine and report at once. You can guess what “it” is?’
‘Yes. The murder of Sir Alexander.’
‘Exactly. So now we know,’ McIntyre added, his voice suddenly reflective. ‘Now it’s up to us to outguess the murderous bastards. I’ll be in touch.’
The phone went dead. A sudden cold finger of fear traced its way down Smith’s spine.
The stage was set, the actors were in place, the drama could begin…
Book Three
End Run
‘Sin, thy name is Woman.’
Old German Saying
One
Von Horn sat at his desk, sucking at the end of the inevitable thin black cheroot. Outside, a fat sailor, with his beribboned cap stuck at the back of his head, was lazily pushing a broom down a path in a weak attempt to brush away some leaves, his vest hanging out of his slacks, contrary to Navy regulations. Von Horn sighed faintly. Before the war, a sailor dressed like that and lazing in that kind of manner would have been heading straight for the guardroom before his idle feet could have touched the deck. What a devil of a mess the Fatherland was in in this year of 1923! Those Reds and Jews in Berlin had ruined the country. He sighed again.
Outside, a small group of recruits, heads shaven, totally naked save for their boots and caps, were marching to the swimming pool for their training. He looked at them closely, eyes fixed on their tight white rumps, bouncing delightfully. How beautiful they look, he said to himself, feeling that old familiar stirring in his loins, his heart beating a little faster with lust.
The sight cheered him up. In the new Germany promised by Hitler, all young men would look like that. Clean and tremendously fit, contemptuous of the soft, effete life of the cities with their degenerate women and the decadent sex practices that always ruined young men. He took a determined puff at his cheroot and pressed the bell on his desk.
Bartels, big, brutal and broken-nosed, appeared at once, as if he had been listening behind the door all the time. ‘Herr Kapitanleutnant?’ he rasped, in a voice weakened by years of cheap cigars and even cheaper gin.
‘Has the creature arrived?’
Tough as he was, the big petty officer looked a little frightened. ‘Jawohl, Herr Kapitanleutnant. I’ve put him in the side room—’
‘Did you lock the door?’ von Horn asked anxiously.
‘Jawohl. The fewer people who see him the better, I thought.’
Von Horn didn’t believe in petty officers thinking. In this case, he did. He said, ‘You did quite right, Bartels. All right, you can show him in. But first get a pistol – and Bartels—’
‘Sir?’ the petty officer paused at the door.
‘Stay with me all the time he’s present in this office, please.’
‘I will, sir.’
He went out and swiftly von Horn stubbed out his cheroot. He opened the drawer to his desk. His service pistol lay there. He cocked it hurriedly, clicked off the safety catch and replaced it, leaving the drawer slightly open for quick access. You never knew with the ‘Beast’, as he was called in the service. He was totally unpredictable. More than once a very frightened von Horn had seen him dragged away in a strait-jacket and even then it had taken half a dozen burly men to restrain him.
He knew little of the ‘Beast’s’ history. He knew the creature had been badly wounded in the face by a shell a
t Verdun in 1916, where he had won the ‘Pour Le Merite’ for bravery. It was on account of the medal that the Kaiser himself had ordered that the hopelessly wounded young lieutenant should receive the best medical treatment available in the Fatherland. For two and a half years Germany’s top surgeons had worked on repairing his face.They had given him a new chin and had made an attempt at replacing his non-existent nose. It had been slow, painful work, with the ‘Beast’, half drugged most of the time, passing in a dream through the flight of the Kaiser, the establishment of the new republic, the various revolutions, while surgeons came and went.
They had first realised that he was mad in 1920. He had asked for a woman that summer. The doctors had considered the request quite seriously in a three-hour-long conference attended by Berlin hospital La Charité’s most senior medics. Finally, the majority agreed that a woman should be found for him among the city’s prostitutes. She had been selected with care: an elderly woman thought to be unshockable, who, in the past, had ‘serviced’ other patients who had suffered mutilation during the war. But it hadn’t worked. She had backed off, crying, ‘No, I can’t do it! Even if you paid me all the gold in the world.’
He had followed her from the little room they had provided for the encounter, completely naked and still erect, hissing in that strange reconstructed voice of his, ‘I want a mirror… Get me a mirror!’
A terrified nurse had run to fetch him one and, for the very first time since he had been wounded four years before, he had seen his face. The impact had been horrific. He rushed to the nearest wall and had begun to beat his head against it. When one of his surgeons had run up and tried to stop him, he had croaked, ‘What have you done to me? Oh my God, what have you done?’ He had seized the doctor by the throat and had begun to choke the very life out of him. It had been the quick thinking of another doctor that had saved the surgeon’s life. He had happened to have a hypodermic filled with a powerful sedative in his pocket. Without hesitation, he had shot the full dose into the ‘Beast’s’ naked rump. He had gone out like a light, but he had been restrained in a strait-jacket for forty-eight hours until he had promised to behave himself.
He had first come to von Horn’s attention a year before when there had been a series of horrific murders in the capital: attacks on women, whose faces had been shattered or virtually ripped off with frenzied, almost demoniacal violence.
It had been the ‘Beast’ of course. One of his doctors had explained the reason, as he saw it, to von Horn. ‘He believes women don’t like him because of his shattered face. But he also believes it isn’t the wound he received at Verdun that caused his terrible disfigurement, it’s the women themselves. So he takes, I think that’s the only word that can describe his action, their faces from them in an act of revenge.’ The doctor had sighed and added, ‘Naturally, he should be in a home for the criminally insane, but who would have the nerve to do that to a man with his war record and in the light of the terrible suffering he has gone through?’
‘Who indeed,’ von Horn had echoed, realising that this was the very man he needed. The ‘Beast’ had the strength of an ox; he had nothing to lose but his life; and his hatred could be manipulated to make him kill anyone the manipulator wanted.
Von Horn had become that manipulator. First, he had found a woman for the ‘Beast’: one who could not be shocked by his looks, simply because she could not see them. ‘Blind Klara’, as the little middle-aged whore had been called in Hamburg’s red light district, had thought her number had come up in the Prussian State Lottery when he had offered her a small flat, a fixed income and as much Korn as she could drink if she looked kindly on a badly wounded young officer who had been decorated with the country’s highest war medal by the Kaiser himself. She had accepted with alacrity, and in this manner, von Horn had managed to tame the ‘Beast’. To a certain degree at least.
Then, von Horn had worked on him, turning his terrible rage against women to one directed against those who had betrayed the Fatherland and himself, for hadn’t he suffered terribly for Germany?
Once that had been achieved, von Horn gave him his first mission: the murder of a leading socialist politician who was beginning to investigate the secret funds which allowed von Horn’s illegal intelligence organisation to operate. Like all the politicos, the socialist had surrounded himself with bodyguards. That hadn’t worried the Beast one bit. He had thrown open the fellow’s door, shot one bodyguard in the knee and before the other could draw his revolver, he had blasted another shot into his face. The shattered face had dripped on to his dying chest like molten red wax.
He had taken his time. He had made the fat socialist swine go down on his knees, begging for mercy, wringing his hands together, tears streaming down his ashen face. Then, after he had had his pleasure with the politician, he had placed his pistol at the back of his skull and blown his head off.
Thereafter, there had been at least half a dozen murders. The ‘Beast’ had drowned a rich Jewish publisher of left-wing books and newspapers in his own bath, holding him under water until he had perished, while down below in his palatial mansion the servants came and went. In a frenzied attack, he had virtually ripped the head off the Bolshevik mistress of a high-ranking Reichswehr officer who was selling military secrets to the Reds… Whenever von Horn had given him a mission he had carried it out without question, his mood before and after the killings bordering near to madness. It was then that Blind Klara had to use all the tricks of her profession to soothe him down, so that there would be no need to bring in the doctors and their strait-jackets.
Now, as he waited there for the ‘Beast’, von Horn felt that old sense of foreboding and downright fear. The ‘Beast’ was too unpredictable. The madness that possessed him and gave him his enormous strength could break through – permanently – at any moment. Then the ‘Beast’, carried away by his dementia, would kill regardless of purpose or person. He slipped his fingers into the drawer and felt again the reassuring hard gunmetal of the pistol. If it ever came to that, he told himself, he would shoot the ‘Beast’ himself like the mad dog he was.
‘Sir,’ it was Bartels at the door. ‘Your visitor—’
Bartels never finished his introduction. A great hairy paw, the nails chewed to the quick, was thrust in front of him. With one swipe the paw knocked the petty officer to one side.
The ‘Beast’ lurched drunkenly. He swayed in front of von Horn’s desk, while the latter forced a smile, though he had never felt less like smiling; he was too afraid. He stared up at the other man. The man’s face was a nightmare. The shell had struck from the side in the centre of the face, taking away his nose, most of his jaw and one eye. Now, after years of operations and plastic surgery, the medics had managed to repair the worst of the damage. But that martyred face was still a bright lobster-red, contrasting with the pallor of the rest of the skin, cracked and fissured here and there like charred timber, with a roll of flesh that acted as a nose visibly held to the forehead by two silver wires. Once again von Horn realised why that first whore had panicked and had started screaming when she had seen that ruined face. Even a hardened pavement-pounder, he thought, could not have lain close to that hideous monstrosity.
‘Won’t you please be seated, Herr Leutnant?’ he addressed the ‘Beast’ with his old rank.
Clumsily, for he had lost all normal co-ordination, the ‘Beast’ sat his bulk on the chair, dwarfing it with his size, his great legs spread, his two hairy paws hanging loosely between them.
‘I have a task for you,’ von Horn said, willing himself with great effort to look at the ‘Beast’s’ face.
The ‘Beast’ grunted, but showed no emotion or interest.
‘A foreigner – very important foreigner,’ von Horn tempted him.
‘Frenchman?’ the ‘Beast’ growled, showing some interest at last. ‘I’ve killed French before this—’ he pointed one hairy finger at his face. ‘Lots of them. Like to kill another one.’
‘No, not French, but English �
�� a very important Englishman, in fact. A general… the commander of an English army.’
The ‘Beast’s’ slack mouth started to drool saliva from the left side. It was almost as if he were a real animal, already savouring the taste of the kill to come. ‘A general,’ he echoed. ‘Hm, a general.’
Von Horn paused. He knew he had to allow the ‘Beast’ time for the information to sink in. When he was in action, the ‘Beast’ moved with lightning speed. But otherwise his thought processes were extremely slow. Again he was like a predatory animal harbouring his strength before a kill. Outside all was silent save for the steady pacing of the sentry on the gravel path. Von Horn felt his fear of this horror grow even more. He flashed a glance at the half-open door. A white-faced, tense Bartels stood there in the shadows, pistol in his hand. He, too, it was obvious, was scared stiff of the monster squatting in the chair in front of von Horn’s desk.
Slowly, the ‘Beast’ squeezed his glass eye out of its pit. He tossed it up and down in the palm of his hairy paw like a marble. Von Horn had seen him do it before. It was a sign that he was thinking. He swallowed hard, fighting back the bitter bile that threatened to make him retch.
Finally, after what seemed an age, the ‘Beast’ screwed up his face and pressed the glass eye back into its socket. Von Horn gave a barely disguised sigh of relief and waited.
‘I’ll do it,’ the ‘Beast’ said ponderously, as if he had difficulty in stringing too many words together. ‘When… where?’
‘Next Saturday. Cologne. Now listen…’
Two
Sir Alexander sat on his saddle-chair, one hand dug deep in the pocket of his riding breeches, the other holding the phone. The little doxy at the other end spoke excellent English and it gave him a great deal of sexual pleasure to talk daily with her like this. He was nearly sixty now and not as virile as he had once been. As a divisional commander during the war, every second night he had bedded a French prostitute in that splendid four-poster he slept in at his chateau HQ. Now he needed to work up his appetite for his weekly Saturday-night encounter.
Death on the Rhine Page 13
