Be Shot For Six Pence (14 page)

The darkness was more than absolute. It seemed to take on a positive quality of its own. If you shut out every scrap of light from a room, and then shut your eyes, and then put a black cloth over your head you would get a notion of it. When I looked down at my watch the figures were startlingly bright. We had been walking for ten minutes. It was at that moment that I knew that a train was coming.

At first I had thought it was my imagination. I had been hearing trains inside my head ever since I got into the tunnel. Then I found that I could see Franz. A faint glow of light was diffusing the absolute darkness. Then the rail began to shake beside my foot.

When Franz looked back over his shoulder it was light enough to make out the expression on his face, and I saw, with a sick start, that he was afraid. I realised suddenly that all his glib talk about the tunnel was second-hand. He had never been this way before; or else he had never been caught in it.

“Could we not run?” he said.

“Useless,” I said, sharply. “It’s travelling five times as fast as we are. We’ll do just what you said. And get down
now.
We don’t want to be spotted.”

I thought, privately, that being seen was the least of the dangers. The engine carried a single headlamp, slung rather high, and even if the driver had been looking down, the edge of the track must have been in bewildering shadow.

I was flat on my face, half of me pressed against the wall and half against the granite chips of the rail bed. I wished that I had had a few minutes to scratch out even the shallowest of graves.

Noise, and more noise. Light and the smell of hot metal.

Alphabet forward. Alphabet backwards. Kings and Queens of England.

Things I have said all my life, when waiting to be hurt.

I reached William and Mary before the engine got there.

The only thing I was not prepared for was the built up pressure wave, which hit me, and, I thought for a wild moment, actually lifted me, clear of the ground.

A hot iron finger passed up my back.

Then a roaring diminuendo; and comparative silence.

Shakily, we climbed to our feet. Ten minutes later we were in the open. My coat was hanging loose from my shoulders. Some projection from the engine had caught it and ripped it from hem to collar. I rolled it into a ball and hid it in the bushes.

“Now we climb,” said Franz.

It was a difficult little piece of work and it put us both back into humour with ourselves. We were climbing sideways out of the mouth of the tunnel – presumably to avoid a guard post in the opening of the valley. I could have done it alone by day. By night, I am not sure. The moon was a help but it would have taken time to make out the holds, and any sort of difficult climb is best done with a quick, smooth rhythm.

Following Franz was a pleasure. Once or twice, to start with, he looked back at me, but as soon as he saw that I could handle myself he went straight ahead. There was a piece of chimney work near the top that wouldn’t have been out of place on the Tiger’s route on Clogwyn d’ur Arddu. Then I could feel the summit ahead of me, and the soft breeze of dawn.

We rested for ten minutes. Without my coat it was too cold to stop longer. Then we started slowly down. First the bare rock, changing to undergrowth, and after that the dwarf pines of a nursery plantation. When we came out of the woods the dawn was on us. The sky lightened and a streak of red ran across the eastern horizon; then, with almost tropical speed, the sun was up, chasing the long, black shadows to the west.

Franz said, with a grin: “Ready for breakfast, Major?”

I noticed that we had come to the top of a man-made pasture. Lower down, peeping from a fold in the ground, was a chimney.

It was a log cabin, solidly but prettily built with its carved and painted shutters, standing on a shelf, one end cut back into the lee of the rock. A pocket handkerchief of flower garden spilled down from the open side.

I was so enchanted by the picture it made that I did not at once realise that Franz was worried.

“What is it?” I said.

“Why no smoke?”

“Perhaps they are not up. It’s very early.”

“There should be smoke,” said Franz.

We slithered down the stony path, and went up to the door. Franz knocked. There was complete silence.

He turned a very white face.

“There’s something wrong,” he said. “He has a dog. A wolf hound. He at least would have heard us.”

“Perhaps they are away.” I was whispering too.

Franz pushed on the door. It swung open. The main room was quite empty, the fire cold. For form’s sake we climbed into the attic, and then came down and looked into the lean-to. Then we came out again, and looked at each other.

“I hope,” said Franz. “I hope—” He stopped, and added quickly. “There was a little girl, you see.”

I had known, for some minutes. Now I was coldly certain.

(It was evening, and I was back, in a forest in south Poland, peering from the undergrowth at a ravaged farm.)

The beast had placed his foot down on that upland clearing. I could almost smell the fresh spilt blood.

It took us an hour to find them. They were in a shallow grave, under the turf at the bottom of the garden, the child and the dog with them. They cannot have been more than twelve hours dead. They looked very peaceful.

We put the turf back and let them lie. It was a pleasant place, and they were together.

In the early afternoon we started back.

This time we took no chances. We lay up in the bushes overlooking the tunnel mouth until the train had gone through. Then we followed after it. I knew it must be all right but even so I was sweating before we started. There was no point in making a big detour on the way back, so as soon as we got out we went straight down the hillside. Just under the escarpment I spotted a small white stone, which may have been a frontier mark.

It was scrambling more than climbing and an hour of it brought us out of the woods, to a vantage point.

Far below us, artificially small, Steinbruck huddled against the river. On our upland shoulder the sun still warmed us but the shadows had already reached out to envelop the town.

A violent spasm of shivering took hold of my whole body. I could keep no part of me still and the sweat was running in a cold stream off my face.

Franz said: “It is nothing. A night’s sleep will cure it. If you do not fancy the castle, I can lend you a bed.”

“Lead me to it,” I said, between chattering teeth.

We turned off the path a mile or so, I judged, above the castle. A few yards inside the wood stood a cottage which might have come straight out of Hans Andersen. An old lady opened the door to us and cackled at the sight of Franz.

He said something to her in dialect and I found myself sitting in front of a fire with a bowl of hot milk.

Ten minutes later I was in bed, and dropping down. Down a’down the deeps of thought. I seemed to turn, three times, right over in the air as I fell; into a pit of unconsciousness that was deeper than any sleep.

When I woke up the next morning and went downstairs, the cottage was empty. I waited round a bit, but nothing happened except that a black cat walked into the room, sneered at me, and walked out again. Probably my hostess of the night before.

I left the cottage, and found my way back to the path and, after one or two false casts, struck the main path down to the castle.

When I got there it, too, was practically deserted. I went up to my room and shaved and changed my shirt. I took two looks at my own bed, but Franz was quite right. One good night had done the trick. As a matter of fact, apart from a pricking behind the eyes I felt rather fit.

I made for the Operations Room. The ante-room was empty but I heard a voice speaking from the sanctuary, and went in. It was Gheorge, sitting at Lady’s desk and looking a bit like the office boy who has been left in charge whilst all the bosses were on holiday. He grinned quickly when he saw me, and then went on talking.

Someone at the other end of the line seemed to be worried. It was one of those booming telephones and I heard a good round German voice saying that something “must be stopped. If it wasn’t stopped at once there would be trouble.” Gheorge said, “Certainly, certainly. Herr Lady is down right now talking to the Chief of Police.”

Then he rang off.

“What’s the trouble?” I said.

“There’s always trouble,” said Gheorge. He looked almighty serious behind those horn-rimmed glasses, and very young. “It’s the Werkebund.”

“Come again.”

“They were Nazis. Now they call themselves the Workers’ Friends. They do nothing but make trouble.”

“Workers’ Friends are like that all the world over,” I assured him. “What particular trouble?”

“Last night they had a meeting in the Sportzplatz. There was a fight. Windows got broken.”

“Doesn’t sound a great deal to get excited about.”

“No. But when it was over there was a dead man.”

“Dead how?”

“He did not die of excitement. His head had been knocked in.”

“And you think the row was staged to cover his killing?”

“We are sure of it. He was one of Schneidermeister’s men. The second to go in a week.”

“Let’s be plain about this,” I said. “Schneidermeister and his boys are smugglers. Right?”

“Yes, that is right.”

“And when you want to pass a messenger over the frontier – into Yugoslavia or Hungary – you use their services. They act as sort of couriers.”

“Yes.”

“The other side probably know that, and don’t like it much. So they hit back – through the Nazis.”

“You make it sound splendidly simple,” said Gheorge, with a tired smile.

“If there is more to it,” I said angrily, “why not tell me about it? If you insist on treating everyone round here like ten-year-old boy scouts, you’ll only get the sort of help ten-year-old boy scouts would be likely to give you.”

The telephone saved Gheorge the embarrassment of answering. This time it was Lady.

Gheorge told him that I was back. I thought Lady sounded a little surprised, but it may have been the telephone. He asked to speak to me.

“I’m glad you are back,” he said. “Will you please tell Gheorge everything that happened. Good or bad.”

“Most of it was bad,” I said. Lady ignored this.

“Tell it to him slowly,” he said, “and see that he makes notes. When you have finished, come down to Steinbruck. I am at the Gasthof Hirsch. I have a job for you. Are you willing?”

“I’m a little worn,” I said. “As long as it isn’t too energetic, I expect I’ll make out.”

“Very well,” said Lady. “In one hour, then.”

Then Gheorge got out his notebook, and I talked to him. He had some shorthand system of his own. We didn’t waste much time over the journey. He seemed to think our adventures in the tunnel funny. “When I went that way I had no trouble,” he said. “Perhaps I am thinner than you.”

One thing struck me as odd – not perhaps at the time, but when I was thinking it over afterwards. The scene at the cabin did not seem to shock Gheorge at all. I had thought myself hardened, but to me there was something inexplicably horrible about it. The little family, stamped out, buried, obliterated. All because a message had reached them which they might have passed on. Gheorge seemed to find nothing in it. Nothing extraordinary, nothing nauseating, nothing pathetic. And once again I looked curiously at him and wondered just what lay behind his youngish white face and his thick-rimmed glasses.

He was interested in detail. How had they been buried? Did I know how they had been killed?

“There was no struggle,” I said. “My guess would be that two or three men came to the cabin the evening before, enough to kill the dog and man and woman without trouble, then I suppose they went up and killed the little girl. In her sleep, perhaps.”

“Yes, that would be the way it would be done, I expect,” said Gheorge.

When I couldn’t take any more of this interrogation I said goodbye to Gheorge. As soon as I was gone, he would start to type it all out neatly, in triplicate. One for the files of the Equipe Lady, copy to Washington, copy to London.

I found Lady in the foyer of the Hirsch. He was talking to a tall, grey man with a face like a tall grey horse.

“That was the mayor,” said Lady, and I thought this was so funny that I started to laugh; and when I had started I found it hard to stop.

“It’s all right,” I said at last. “Very difficult to explain. An English pun. Let’s skip it.”

“I’m glad you preserve your sense of humour,” said Lady, sourly. “Now, if you are able to attend to me, perhaps I could explain.”

“All right,” I said. “Explain away. Anything I can do, count on me. Philip the Reliable.”

“You know we have been having trouble here.”

“Gheorge told me something about it.”

“Good. Do you know a man called Wachs?”

“I’ve seen him.”

“Has he seen you?”

I reflected. “I don’t think so. I’ve no reason to think so; no. “

“Could you make friends with him?”

“Make friends with him,” I said, doubtfully. “I don’t think he’s a very friendly character.”

“If you exerted your charm?”

“Quite frankly,” I said, “I should think he’d be as easy to charm as a warthog with piles. If it will help the cause I’ll try. But there is one person who already knows him quite well. Mitzi. I don’t know her real name. Major Piper’s secretary.”

“Yes,” said Lady. “I fear she would not be of much assistance to us. She is not reliable.”

“You mean she has been seduced by the enemy.”

“I do not think it was a question of seduction. She has worked for them from the beginning. That was why they procured her a job in Major Piper’s office. And instructed her to make herself available to him.”

“Does he know?”

“Of course.”

I felt that I was being stupid.

“If he knows, why hasn’t he got rid of her?”

“Why should he. They would only attempt to place another one. That one he might not know about. He would be worse off then. Surely that is obvious.”