Come into my Parlour (3 page)

“Since there is nothing in it which redounds to the credit of the Service to which we both have the honour to belong, I would not dream of doing so,
Herr Admiral,
” Grauber said pompously. “But tell me, was that your only meeting with him?”

“By no means; and I am quite certain that he would not have returned the money but for the fact that we were old friends and had had many good times together when we were young. In those days he was a subaltern in a crack cavalry regiment, and he won a particularly well-deserved V.C. in the Boer War. I used to stay with him at his lovely old home, Gwaine Meads, in Shropshire. There have been Gwaine-Custs living there ever since the Romans gave up their attempts to subdue the more savage tribes of Britons on reaching the Welsh Border; and I don't doubt that the place is still maintained in almost feudal state, since he's as rich as Crœsus.”

“Yet he had to resign his commission on account of his debts,” put
in Grauber. “It's very remarkable that a hunting and shooting squire, of all people, should have succeeded in amassing such a vast fortune.”

“He is a very remarkable man. But in his young days titles and connections counted. When he left the Army he got himself taken on to the board of a few not-too-sound companies in the City. Before they were much older his co-directors found that they had given a seat to a wolf in guinea-pig's clothing. But they had no cause to regret it. With that hearty innocent laugh of his he did them out of half their profits, but the half he let them keep was ten times as great a sum as they had ever made before. They used to send him to Turkey, Egypt and India. He could twist Orientals round his little finger, enable his companies to pay twenty per cent dividends and keep the rest himself, for ‘man's time', as he used to call it.”

Grauber shook his head in puzzled wonder. “These English, they are incredible,” he murmured, as the Admiral went on:

“Yet for over half a century he has managed to maintain his extraordinary fiction that he is just a lucky fool. I've heard him say a score of times in that booming voice of his: I've an eye for a horse or a pretty woman, but no brains—no brains at all,' and he's said it so often that people have really come to believe him.”

“To get back to Sallust,
Herr Admiral
, you were telling me how these two first became associates?”

“So I was. Well, Sir Pellinore must, I think, have read some of Sallust's articles in the more serious weeklies and realised his extraordinary flair for getting to the bottom of complex political situations. In any case, he began to employ him on a series of special missions to assess commercial possibilities in hitherto unexploited markets and in the more dangerous business of finding out the truth about the ramifications of certain cartels. But Gwaine-Cust, as you must be aware, is far from being only a money-spinner. For the past twenty-five years, at least, he has been the friend and confidant of practically every British statesman who has shown any aggressive or Imperialistic spirit. He has got all sorts of ‘off the record' jobs done for them that would have endangered their positions if they had done them themselves. Today his name is still hardly known outside the West End clubs and the city, and he holds no official position of any kind—he is not even chairman of any of his companies—yet I believe him to be the most dangerous enemy we have and the most powerful man in Britain after the Members of the War Cabinet.”

Grauber nodded agreement. “That is my view, too; and it follows that as soon as war broke out Sir Pellinore naturally switched his ace private investigator on to war problems. I will not bother you for an
account of Sallust's war activities as those are well known to me; but I should be interested if you would give me your views on his woman.”

“Which woman?” asked the Admiral blandly. “He is quite a Don Juan, and has had affairs with many.”

“I know; and that makes the present one all the more interesting to us, as there is some reason to suppose that after the best part of two years he is still in love with her. I only knew her slightly as I—er—never moved very much in
Reichmarshal
Goering's circle, but you must have known her quite well. I refer, of course, to the Countess von Osterberg—or, if you prefer her maiden name by which she was more widely known—Erika von Epp.”

“
Ach die liebe Erika,
” sighed the Admiral. “Yes, I knew her intimately.”

Grauber bridled: “The
Herr Admiral
seems to have forgotten that the
Frau Gräfin
betrayed her country to run away with this accursed Englishman and, in her absence, has been condemed to be executed as a traitress immediately she is caught.”

“I forget nothing, my dear
Gruppenführer;
but a beautiful woman remains beautiful whatever she may do, and no laws ever made have been strong enough to control a woman's heart. Your torture chambers must often have revealed to you that a woman's love is stronger than pain, stronger than death and often stronger than the ties of country too. As we sit here many thousands of girls—French, Dutch, Norwegian, Belgian—have fallen in love with fine young German soldiers, who a few months ago they regarded as the hated conquerors of their race; and many thousands of pretty German girls have fallen in love with the foreign workers we have brought into the Reich, although we regard them as little better than slaves. Even the Gestapo cannot prevent that, and although we may sometimes have to harden our hearts in such cases for the protection of the State, it is absurd to hold the simple fact of anyone falling in love with a foreigner as a crime. Besides, as far as I am aware, Erika did not betray her country, she only gave her lover certain useful information about an organisation which had for its object the overthrow of the Nazi Party.”

“The Nazi Party
is
the country!” bellowed Grauber, striking his desk.

“Of course,” purred the Admiral, “none of
us
would dream of questioning that. I am only pointing out to you a purely academic difference which may have become overstressed in poor Erika's obviously unbalanced mind. Moreover, as I was about to add, she did not run away. She was seriously wounded and evacuated from Dunkirk.”

“You defend this woman?”

“Ethically, yes, but for all practical purposes, no. She has offended against the laws of our country and been condemned; therefore if she is caught she must die, and if I were given an opportunity to catch her it would certainly be my duty to do so. I may add that if your dictaphone is working this morning and you are taking a record of this conversation it will be time enough to hand it over to Herr Himmler when you can prove that I have at any time failed to do my duty.”

With a growl, Grauber sat back. “I suggest that we are wasting time,
Herr Admiral
. Will you be good enough to tell me what you know of this woman?'

The Admiral drew slowly on his cigar and his mild eyes hardened as he recalled the sufferings that had been endured by his cast after the last war, then he said slowly:

“Like so many of the
Hochwohlgeboren
, Erika's family was completely ruined by the revolution and inflation that followed Germany's collapse in nineteen eighteen. I suppose it was not unnatural that the people should blame the officer class for having led them to defeat instead of victory, but for several years they took it out of us by every means in their power. The financial policy of the Socialist Government reduced our investments to so much worthless paper. Fifty-nine out of every sixty officers who had served in the war were turned off on to the streets and they were the last people to whom anyone would give employment. The Jews are paying today for what they did to us then. We were forced to sell our houses, farms, jewels, furs and cellars to them for a miserable pittance in order to save ourselves from dying of starvation. Thousands of well-bred German women then had to haunt the big hotels and night clubs as prostitutes, as the only possible means of supporting their fathers, husbands and brothers—often gallant officers who were still incapacitated by wounds received in the war. That was the grim background against which Erika was brought up.

“As a child she had known every luxury; by the time she was old enough to go to school she was living with her parents and elder sister in a tiny flat in Munich that was little better than a tenement. I have heard her say that during those winters she used to lie in her little truckle bed so cold that she could not sleep and that by the time she was seventeen she had forgotten what it was like not to be hungry. She got herself a job in a Munich department store and became the mistress of some little floorwalker there in order to get herself a square meal every evening. Who can blame her?”

Canaris shrugged, and went on: “But Erika was made for better things than that, and she knew it. She soon left the shopwalker for a director of the company, and by then the natural ability of the
officer class was bringing it back into prominent positions again. By the time she was twenty she had had a dozen lovers, each richer and more powerful than his predecessor. She had an apartment in Berlin, servants, furs, jewels, and it was already recognised that she and Marlene Dietrich were the two most beautiful women in Germany.”

“It would be about then that she tied up with Hugo Falkenstein,” Grauber commented.

“Yes, did you know him?”

Grauber shook his head.

“Hugo was one of the comparatively rare exceptions that justify the existence of the Jewish race. He had the soul of an artist, the brain of a great statesman and the generosity of an emperor. He could be utterly ruthless to his enemies, but I have never known a man who was kinder, more considerate or more gentle, not only to his friends but to all who came to him in trouble. It was not surprising that Erika fell in love with him.”

“Did she? I've always supposed that she was out for his money.”

“No. Before she met him she was already one of the intimates of
Reichmarshal
Goering's brilliant circle. She could have her pick of a score of wealthy men, and married them too, had she wished. She would have liked to marry Hugo, and he begged her to, but she wouldn't do it because she knew that she could be more useful to him as his mistress than his wife. As long as she remained Erika von Epp she was a German aristocrat; people closed their eyes to her private life, and all doors remained open to her, but if she had become Frau Falkenstein no one who mattered would have received her any more.”

“Nevertheless, she made a great fortune out of her association with Falkenstein.”

“True, but she earned every
Pfennig
of it by her own fine brain. He soon realised that she was not just a beautiful plaything, and he employed her in the most secret negotiations of his great armaments concern. She became his principal ambassador and he sent her many times to Britain and France, and on several trips to the United States.”

“Yes, I know that. And then Falkenstein was idiotic enough to quarrel with the
Führer
and withdraw the financial support he had been giving to the Government. What insolent folly on the part of a Jew who might have continued to enjoy our protection as long as he was any use to us.”

“He was a fool as far as his own interests were concerned, but one must admire his courage. He simply refused to accept protection for himself if the persecution of the poorer people of his race was to continue. You know the result. He was sent to Dachau, where your
people tortured him for six months and drove him insane before they killed him. Can you wonder that Erika swore that she would devote the rest of her life to a vendetta against the Nazi Party?”

Grauber shrugged his great shoulders. “You say that she would have liked to marry Falkenstein; are you sure of that?”

“Yes. She once told me so herself. That was a year or so after his death. She said that although it would have made her much less useful to him at the time, she regretted having so persistently refused him. She was tired of being a successful adventuress and would have liked to have left the merry whirl of Berlin for a quiet home in the country with children to bring up. I asked her why she didn't marry, and she replied that it was too late now; she would never find another man like Hugo, to give her the sort of children that she wanted born out of real love between two good-looking and gifted people.”

“I wonder if time has changed her views and she now loves Sallust enough to want him to be the father of her children.”

“I should think it highly probable,” the Admiral said meditatively. “She must be about twenty-nine and the urge to settle down and start a family will almost certainly have increased since she first met Sallust. From what little information I have it appears that they are still devoted to each other, so the odds are that they would get married if they could. But the snag is that she would first have to get a divorce from von Osterberg.”

“Yes. But why, after all you've said, did she marry him? In nineteen thirty-eight she could have married pretty well anybody, so why the devil pick on such a colourless fellow; and there were no children of the marriage?”

“She did it to please her old father, who was practically on his death-bed at the time. His one wish was to see her respectably married into some good old family before he died. I suppose she had given up all hope of really falling in love again, so in order that the old man might die happy she permitted the most easily manageable of all her many suitors to make an honest woman of her. But the marriage was purely one of convenience. Von Osterberg was always hard up for money to carry on his scientific experiments and she could well afford to give him a princely allowance. He is, too, rather weak, a vain type of man, and he admired her beauty so much that he agreed from the beginning that if she would become his Countess he would leave her completely free to amuse herself in any way she liked.”