Night Journey (16 page)

Dwight knocked his pipe out on the wimdow-sill. His face for a moment was completely still, without expression.

“What does Mencken
really
think?” he asked. “He has a pacifist upbringing, but his father died in a concentration camp. What do you feel, Mencken? From what you say, would you entirely oppose it?”

It was an unfair question, to which I had already given a half answer. I glanced at Jane who was smoking furiously. The room was blue with smoke. Of course in my mind I knew this question was a hypothetical one: they would go ahead whatever I said. But what I said mattered something to two of them. And it mattered to me. I was on the brink of a change. Andrews was looking at me quizzically as if he enjoyed my discomfiture.

I said: “On principle I
must
oppose it. By doing this—even by trying to do it—you are proving the true corrosiveness, the true destructiveness of war.”

“Why?” said Dwight.

“To destroy a poisonous snake, do you have to become a poisonous snake? This is the crux—the moral crux of the whole thing.”

“But to preserve civilisation, dear doctor,” Andrews said, “ a poisonous snake has to be destroyed.”

“Yes, but in a civilised way, otherwise there is nothing left to preserve.”

“If Hitler were in this room and you could kill him, would you let him go?”

My fathers they said, had died of appendicitis.

“No.”

Dwight turned from the window and put his pipe in his pocket.

“We'll break now. You'll be called in the morning.”

I dozed fitfully and fretfully through the night, pursued by the shadows of monstrous moral choices. I was wakened at five. Jane too had been trying to sleep but the other two had been out and about all the time.

“We now know mostly what we want to know,” Andrews said, almost before we had collected our thoughts. “ Last evening Ferocchi, Brayda's secretary, publicly accused von Riehl of withholding information Brayda had passed on to him. Ferocchi was arrested for ‘insulting the representative of a brother nation in arms', but I guess the Italians are upset all the same. At any rate, I think this gives us good enough reason to suppose that Brayda's secret is lost to them. At present
they
certainly suppose it. Now von Riehl sent a code telegram to Berlin yesterday morning. I don't know what was in it, but he isn't likely to have given away enough to deprive himself of the kudos of a personal triumph when he arrives. And the industrial report is going along with him. Incidentally, according to one of our agents, von Riehl is going to recommend that Nazi
gauldeiters
shall be put in charge of all the principal North Italian factories.”

Jane said: “But that's practically taking them over!”

“It won't be represented as that, but it will be the first step.… To continue, we find that von Riehl is spending to-night at the Hotel Bologna with his two secretaries in attendance. To-morrow he is being entertained to lunch at the Palazzo Reals by the Fascist Council in Milan. They will find good food for that, no doubt. To-morrow evening, as we know, he will leave for Germany in a first-class reserved carriage, but it will not be a sleeper. It is probable that he intends to work through the night. He will travel as he came, privately, via Lucerne, Basle, Frankfurt——”

“Through Switzerland?” I said in surprise.

“Nearly all passenger traffic goes that way,” Dwight said, his legs astraddle a bentwood chair. “ It saves worse congestion on the Brenner line.” He began to cough.

“Well?” Jane said.

“Well,” said Andrews. “From now until he boards the train von Riehl will be surrounded by people or at public functions. But from the time the train leaves Milan he'll be relatively isolated. It won't be easy even then, because there'll be the two secretaries, and one of them is an armed S.S. guard. But he travels all night, and there's two hundred miles of Swiss territory to cover. Dwight and I are going to catch that train.

In silence Dwight's rapturing cough echoed round the little office. Listening to Andrews, I sometimes wondered if there were the seeds of a dictator within himself and that it was this which made him hate the successful dictators so much.

“What of Fräulein Volkmann?” Jane asked. “She'll be on the train, won't she?”

“That,” said Dwight between his cough, “ is where you come in.”

“We have our prejudices,” Andrews said. “ Even I have my prejudices, and one of them is against making war on women. Particularly as this one would be very likely to get in the way anyhow. I want you to leave for Garda early this morning, Jane. I want you to see that the Volkmams woman stays is Garda long enough for her to miss the Milan express for Basle.”

Jane lit another cigarette. “ Suggestions?”

“We have none, my dear. You'll have to play it as it comes. Take Mencken with you. Two might contrive it better than one.”

I conld hardly believe my luck or that Andrews should so order it. I had been expecting every moment to be instructed back to Venice or to resume contact with Captain Bonini.

I do not know if Andrews read my expression but he said to me: “It'll do you no harm to lie low for a day or so. But whatever you do at Garda, be inconspicuous. I'd send you off home right away, but it's only sense to wait until this—mission is decided. It's no good letting you go and then needing you again.” He turned. “I rely on you, Jane, to see that he carries out orders.”

“Very well,” she said, and I thought she coloured.

Dwight had at last succeeded in stifling his cough. “It would be best if Mencken's papers ware changed now. It's pretty important that his private pack of Gestapo hounds don't pick up his scent again.”

Andrews nodded. “… A second identity was planned for you, Mencken, in case the first became too hot. Well, it has become too hot. Signor Catania if he ever reappeared, would be in for trouble. Jane, pass me the blue file on the top of the desk behind you.”

She did so. He said: “Everything's here except the passport photograph. Dwight will take that when you're all fixed up. I don't know what your memory's like, but you should spend the next hour reading this up. All the extra notes we've supplied have to be destroyed before you leave this warehouse.”

He handed me the file.

I learned that I was a Yugoslav citizen of Croat descent, born in Zagreb, March 4, 1899. My name was Peter Lansdorf. My eyes were grey, my hair dark brown, greying. I was still five feet ten inches in height, but I lived in Ljubljana and my profession was that of a timber merchant. I had been to Italy to confer with importers in Turin who, under orders, had turned over all their stock to the government and were pressing for a big increase in the export of oak wood from Yugoslavia. What I was doing spending a couple of nights is Garda was not clear, since the papers had not been prepared for this event.

… Nevertheless Peter Lansdorf caught the 7.20 a.m. train for Garda that sparkling October morning. His resemblance to Edmondo Catania would not have excited comment. His hair was the same coloor but worn shorter; he was grey at the temples and round the back of the neck. He wore spectacles which inclined inwards to give his eyes a look of being close-set. He evidently felt the nip in the morning air, for he wore a dark coat that was six inches too long. His hat was turned down and a site too large, to accommodate some sticking plaster, and he wore thick woollen gloves.

Though we travelled an the same train I did not sit with Jane on the journey. Orders were orders. At Garda I booked a room in a hotel overlooking the lake, and met Jane about eleven-thirty at a café just north of the walled village.

House of valuable discussion time had been lost while we crossed the plains of Lombardy. My own brain had dragged the net for ideas and drawn blank.

When Jane sat down at my table I ordered ersatz coffee and waited, knowing she had not been idle since she came, but savouring chiefly at this moment the pleasure of being alone with her again.

“Fräulein Volkmann,” she said, “leaves at two o'clock from the hotel. She's motoring into Verona because the Venice-Milan express doesn't stop at Peschiera. It reaches Verona at three and is due in Milan at five-thirty.”

“And the Basle express leaves Milan at what time: five-fifty? That gives her twenty minutes to change trains. Are they both from the same station?”

“Yes.”

I said: “If she were to miss the express at Verona there would be no chance of her catching the one for Basle.”

“Oh, no. If she misses it. But how is she to miss it?”

There's the car journey into Verona.”

“I know.”

“You have some idea?” I said.

“What makes you think that?”

“The expression in your eyes.”

She smiled. “So easy to read?”

“Only in that. Not in anything else at all.”

“… I have an idea. But one would have to be sure it would work.”

“What is it?”

“Tell me your ideas first.”

“I think I have no aptitude for this sort of thing. I did consider a bogus telegram making other amngeinents, but …”

“It has the disadvantage that Fräulein Volkmann might telephone to check or ask why. If some suspicion were roused in his mind he might change his plans and that would upset everything.”

I looked at my watch. “There's no more than two hours to go. They have given us a tall order.”

“Yes. It's the most I've had to do. I'm flattered—and stimulated …”

I had not seen it at all that way. “ Is it a hired car she is using?”

“That was the one thing I couldn't find out. It looks as if someone she is friendly with at the hotel is driving her. Probably some official if he has gas to spare.”

“If we found the car and tampered with the tank.… Lack of petrol …”

“I guess that would be all right on a deserted road. But the road to Verona is busy. She'd be picked up and catch the train just the same. Anyway, if they leave at two they'll have an hour to cover twenty miles.”

I watched her for a moment. My personal feelings were all the time breaking in on the dark business of the day. She had her idea but was deliberately holding it back for her own pleasure. It was like a guessing game; and just now and then one could ignore the grimness of the objective.

I said: “An accident?”

“It might work … But it would be difficult to do enough without doing too much, wouldn't it? If she wasn't injured she could still get a lift. And part of the purpose of this is that we're not trying to kill her.”

“I give in,” I said. “ Tell me.”

“What we want is something that'll look like a natural mishap—no contrivance about it.”

I smiled at her and she smiled back. “ I give in,” I said again.

She was suddenly mischievous. “Well, I guess it seems to me that instead of delaying the car it would be easier to delay the train.”

A peaceful oasis of two hours in all the stress and the danger.

A remarkable two hours. It is, I suppose, one of the rewards of the man who lives dangerously: his days are floodlit in this artificial light of impermanence; the present becomes everything and the future nothing.

I shall always associate that short time with apricots. We had apricot jam with our rolls and coffee, and there was some fragrant climbing plant round the pillars of the café garden which gave off a sweet, warm apricot smell.

The day was brilliant now. When we had reached Peschiera the lake was still shrouded in haze, and only the peaks of the distant Dolomites showed here and there, looking much less substantial than the mountains of cloud. But now it had cleared, and the foothills at she opposite side of the lake looked as if they had been painted there by Tintoretto.

There was much to discuss in Jane's scheme, but once we had talked it out, then it was natural to let it drop—as something decided for better or worse—and turn to ourselves. Almost everything that passed between us I remember, word for word, because in loneliness I have gone over it so often since.

We talked of hills and lakes, of Austria and England and Italy and Australia. She told me more of her married life, which, after the quarrel and the break away in Paris, had settled into a cool, tolerant friendship.

“Maybe we should never have married,” she said; “ maybe it's a good argument for free love: we should have been lovers for a few months and then parted. But we—took to each other; he seemed to have such charm, to know so much; I was twenty-one, impressionable maybe; we married. There's nothing wrong with him: I don't think there's anything wrong with me. There was nobody else involved either way. It just didn't work out. So we live together now for the convenience of war, and go our separate ways.”

“And your separate way leads you into great danger.”

She shrugged. “ Just being alive is dangerous.”

I wanted to speak about Andrews but did not know how.

“You're in it all too deep,” I said. “I wish you would leave this task to me this afternoon.”

She played a little tune with her fingers on the table-cloth. “I obey orders.”

“Andrews should never have given them.”

“You don't like Andrews much, do you.”

So it was coming. “ No. How can I?”

“Why not? He's brilliant at his job.”

“I wish——” I said.

“What do you wish?”

“It is not my business. I have no right.

“Robert, what's the matter with you?”

“I wish you weren't involved with him.”

“But why me? We all are. We all take orders from him.”

I said: “What upsets me is that you take more than orders …”

She stared at me. “ More than orders? …”

“Of course. Do you think I can forget how we met?”

Her eyes widened. “How we … But you don't mean …”