Come into my Parlour (54 page)

On the Monday morning Sir Pellinore introduced both Gregory and Stefan to a clever-looking little man wearing thick-lensed spectacles. He had at one time been a dentist but, owing to the war, had gravitated to certain highly specialised duties connected with sabotage operations. From a little box he produced some small squares of hardish, jelly-like substance each of which had a little lump in its middle. The lump was the cyanide of potassium and its coating so composed that, with a little pressure, it would stick to the side of a back tooth and, once stuck, would need a really hard thrust of the tongue to dislodge.

“If you—er—get into trouble,” he explained gently, “you simply rip it off with your tongue and bite through its centre. The result is very swift and, I believe, affects the user only by a sudden contraction, as though he were about to give a violent sneeze.

“You will see,” he went on, “that they are of two colours. The green ones are dummies for you to practise with; the red ones are the real thing. Both kinds can be kept permanently in the mouth for a considerable time without any likelihood of their dissolving and becoming dangerous. But, if necessary, I advise that you should replace a used one by a new one after a fortnight. Now, I'd like to look at your mouths to decide the most suitable places for you to wear them.”

Having asked on which side of their mouths they chewed by preference, he made a very careful examination of their teeth, and affixed two of the dummies. Then, wishing them good luck, he departed.

At first, both of them felt as though they had had plum stones stuck in the sides of their mouths. It was difficult for them to keep their tongues from worrying the capsules and they could not help thinking that the bulges in their cheeks must be obvious to anyone. But Sir Pellinore assured them that this was not so and, somewhat to their surprise, they found at lunch they could still eat without undue discomfort.

Sir Pellinore had told Gregory on the Sunday of Madeleine's presence in the house, and she joined them for the meal. Afterwards, Kuporovitch had half an hour to say good-bye to her, then Sir
Pellinore accompanied the two friends in his car out of London to the airport.

They met with none of the delays that had so irritated Erika and Piers four months before, as Sir Pellinore, who never did things by halves, once he had made up his mind on a matter, had laid on a special aircraft for them.

It was the 1st of December and a grey, depressing winter's day, but up to the very last moment he never ceased to joke with them and speak with bluff good humour of the great time they would all have at Gwaine Meads over Christmas. It was only as the ‘plane lifted into the air that his bright blue eyes grew misty. For once, he was really feeling his age. He loved Gregory as a son and, despite all his confidence in his courage and audacity, he doubted very much if he would ever see him again.

That evening Gregory and Stefan were safely landed in Switzerland. They spent the night at a quiet hotel and next morning went on to St. Gall. There, they put up at the Pension Julich on the very slender chance that Erika might have found means of sending out of Germany some message to the proprietor, which he, for some reason, had failed to relay to London. But this frail hope of a clue to her whereabouts proved abortive. The proprietor remembered the lady well, and produced the suit-case that she had left behind. Gregory was so moved at seeing her things that he could not bring himself to go through the case; so, instead, Kuporovitch did so with the proprietor; but there was nothing in it from which they could make fresh deductions.

On the Wednesday morning Gregory wanted to go straight down to Steinach, but Kuporovitch persuaded him that, since von Osterberg was supposedly still in hiding from the Gestapo, a visit by strangers to the Villa Offenbach would more suitably be made at night. In consequence, he waited until the evening before taking the little local train down through the bleak wintry weather to the lake-shore and, at Stefan's suggestion, he went alone, so that it should not yet emerge that he had brought a friend with him to Switzerland.

Although only seven o'clock it was already fully dark when he reached the Villa, as the moon had not yet risen to silver the snowcapped mountains and turn the landscape into a fairy scene.

He rang twice at the door, then Einholtz opened it.

“May I ask if I am addressing the
Hen Graf
von Osterberg?” Gregory enquired in German, although he knew that it must be Einholtz to whom he was speaking.

“I regret, but there is some mistake. This house is occupied by Dr. Fallstrom,” Einholtz replied, with a suspicious look.

“I am from London,” Gregory persisted. “A letter that the Count
wrote to a friend of mine there has recently been passed on to me: and in it he expressed a wish to see me. My name is Gregory Sallust, and—”

“
Ach so!
” Einholtz broke in. “I am so sorry, but we have to take precautions here. The Count is far from well. His experiences have unnerved him, and at times you will find his manner strange; but, all the same, I am sure he will be delighted to see you. Please to come in,
Herr
Sallust.”

As he stood aside for Gregory to enter, and closed the door after him, Einholtz went on: “Let me introduce myself. I am Fritz Einholtz and I know all about poor Kurt's affairs. You see, I, too, am a scientist, although a very minor one compared to him. I was his assistant and we escaped together from the Nazis. Then I accompanied him and his wife back into Germany, last August.
Ach!
that was a terrible experience. We became separated from the Countess and we have been distraught with anxiety on her account ever since. But we still hope that she is hiding with friends. We had to hide, ourselves, for two months before we dared to attempt the return trip. This way,
Herr
Sallust. Please to come in.”

As Gregory listened to these eager confidences it occurred to him that, after all, Kuporovitch might be right. One of the points that had seemed most suspicious about von Osterberg's letter had been his omission to make any mention of Einholtz, yet here was the man himself filling in the gap quite spontaneously about the subsidiary part in the affair that he, apparently, had played.

On entering the sitting-room of the house Gregory saw a rather frail-looking man, considerably older than himself, and with two small scars from student duels on his right cheek, sitting by a log fire reading a book. In spite of the fact that it was quite warm in there his knees were covered with a blanket.

As he looked up Einholtz said cheerfully: “Kurt, this is
Herr
Sallust. You know how anxious you have been at not hearing from him, but now he has arrived in person. Is not that splendid!”

Von Osterberg stood up, brought his heels together, bowed, and said with formal politeness, “Mr. Sallust, you are very welcome.”

Gregory smiled. “I'm sorry that I've been so long in getting here, Count, but now I have, I do hope that we may succeed in tracing Erika and getting her out of Germany.”

“Erika,” von Osterberg repeated. “Yes, yes, poor little Erika. I dare not think what they may be doing to her.”

“Now, don't be silly, Kurt,” Einholtz said sharply. “You keep on imagining things that have not the least foundation. She may not be very comfortable, living in some barn, perhaps, but there is no reason
at all to suppose that she has been caught. In fact, if she had, we should have been certain to have heard of it before we left Germany.”

While speaking he had rearranged the chairs and now held one for Gregory, opposite the fire. As they all sat down Gregory said:

“I know only the bare facts that you put in your letter, Count, and in view of your state of health I can well understand your feeling that this thing is too much for you to take on alone; bat if I'm to pull my weight I ought to know the full details of all that has happened up to now.”

With hesitations here and there von Osterberg gave the outline of the story. The hesitations were easily ascribable to his highly nervous condition, and Einholtz helped him out with fuller accounts at all points where Gregory put in a question.

They told how they had crossed the lake to
Freiherr
von Lottingen's summer villa, borrowed a car there and reached Niederfels without accident a few hours later. The Count's mother had given them a late supper and the old lady had been so pleased to see him that they had allowed her to persuade them to stay for twenty-four hours, instead of returning that night, as had originally been intended. The only people who were aware of their presence there, as far as they knew, were old servants whose loyalty was beyond question. The sleepy castle, surrounded by its forest-clad heights, had seemed, as Einholtz put it, a thousand years and a million miles from modern war and totalitarian politics. The
Frau Gräfin
Bertha was getting on in years and might never see her son again. How could they refuse to take what seemed an almost negligible risk of remaining with her till the following night?

But the next afternoon while they had been sitting in the sunshine on the battlements they had seen two cars coming up the winding road that led to the Schloss. They were full of police and in the back of one of them had been sitting the
Frau Gräfin's
personal maid. The old lady knew that when the girl was in Berlin she had had a S.S. trooper as a lover, but the man was now far away on the Russian front, and the old Countess was so out of the world at Niederfels that it had never even occurred to her that men or women once infected with the Nazi virus could never again be trusted. Yet here was her maid in the very act of betraying them.

Only Kurt and Einholtz had been with the old lady at the time. Erika was resting on her bed to fit herself for the exhausting night that lay before her. The
Frau Gräfin
had insisted that the two men should take to the woods at once while she went to warn Erika. They had already arranged that in the event of any unforeseen visitation they would rendezvous at a place in the forest some two miles away, where they had hidden the car.

They had reached it without being spotted, and they had waited there all night, but Erika had not come. In the dawn they had driven to the house of an old bachelor tenant-farmer whom the Count had felt confident was to be trusted. He had agreed to take them in, hidden them in a loft and concealed their car in the middle of a hayrick. They felt certain that Erika had not been caught because the whole district had been placarded with notices offering a reward for her capture as well as theirs, and they thought it even possible that she was still at the Castle, having been hidden by the
Gräfin
in one of its many secret rooms. After remaining concealed for two months they had decided to try to recross the frontier. No one suspected that they had been using the
Freiherr
von Lottingen's car, and when they returned in it to his villa they found their launch still in the boathouse, and got away in her.

The whole story was so circumstantial that Gregory found difficulty in disbelieving it. Of one thing he was certain. Von Osterberg was no conspirator. His mind was too obviously unbalanced by his experiences for him to be capable of trapping anybody. About Einholtz, Gregory was not so certain. He thought the Count's tall, semi-bald companion just a little bit too glib and ready with explanations; but it appeared that he was more or less a dependent of von Osterberg's, so the way in which he so often spoke on his behalf might be no more than a desire to save him fatigue and, at the same time, ingratiate himself with their visitor. Gregory found the swathe of thin hair pasted across his scalp rather unattractive and the flashy amethyst ring that he wore on his left hand suggested that he might be a pansy; but, even if that were so, it would be no indication of his secret political convictions, as for several generations past a high proportion of German males had begot children from their women while seeking their pleasure in perversion.

With a view to testing the situation further Gregory asked them about their first escape from Germany.

“We were transferred from Krupps to a new experimental station in the north——” Einholtz began.

“At Peenemünde on the Baltic?” Gregory put in quietly.

They both started, and stared at him, but he simply laughed and said: “There's no reason to be surprised at my knowing about that. My work as a journalist often takes me to the Air Ministry and sometimes the people there show me their most recent photographs. A few days before I left London I saw one of this new place there, that's all.”

“Well, yes. That's where we were,” Einholtz admitted. “Does your Air Ministry know about the work that is being carried on there?”

“I shouldn't think so,” Gregory shrugged. “It's hardly likely they
would be able to deduce that simply from a few photographs of a lot of camouflaged buildings, and, even if they did, they certainly wouldn't tell anyone so unimportant as myself about it.”

He hoped that future air reconnaisances would not meet with stiffer opposition owing to his deliberate indiscretion, but that was, to some extent, offset by Einholtz having confirmed that the buildings at Peenemünde were, in fact, a scientific experimental station; and his having done so quite readily seemed further evidence of his own honesty.

Von Osterberg seemed a little more at ease now that they were no longer talking of Erika, and he related the story of their escape from Peenemünde and journey south with comparatively little aid from Einholtz. When he had done, Gregory said:

“I take it that you never succeeded in recovering your notes from Schloss Niederfels, after all, or you would have said something about them in your letter?”

“No,” replied the Count, “we didn't get the notes.”

“We had our chance, but most stupidly lost it,” Einholtz added. “You see, we didn't expect to leave till midnight and Kurt was so occupied with his
Frau Mutter
that he had not even visited his laboratory before we saw the police speeding up the road. And then, of course, we had to run for our lives.”