The Black Baroness (5 page)

‘What has that to do with it?’

‘Just this. We’ve told you how we met
Fräulein
von Steinmetz and what she’s up to here. Erika and I are two of the considerable number of people in this world who have made up their minds that Hitler has got to be slogged for ten and counted out for keeps, and we don’t particularly mind if we lose our own lives in helping along the process. You probably don’t feel so strongly that way—or you may even admire the Nazis, for all I know, although I suppose the real fact is that you don’t give a hoot for any of us. What I really want to get at is if you would be prepared to pass on to us any information you may be able to get out of Paula should you succeed in making the running with her.’

Kuporovitch showed his even white teeth in a wide smile. ‘You are right; I am now a man of no country and no allegiances. My own poor land is ruined beyond repair and I have no interest in Germany or Britain. All the same, I have certain convictions about how people should be governed. I did not like living under an Autocracy where some rascally favourite of the Tsar might say “Off with his head!” about any person he didn’t like, at any minute, and promotion could be achieved only by influence or bribery. Equally, I should not like to live under a Democracy. I despise leaders who are afraid to lead because they must pander to every whim of an ill-informed mob for fear that if they do not they will be thrown out of office at the next election; but even under these two muddle-headed systems something of man’s independence and creative spirit is allowed to survive.

‘On the other hand, in a Totalitarian state that is not so. People lose all their individuality and become only pieces of the state machine which they are compelled to serve from birth to death. I know that, because I have lived under such a régime for nearly a quarter of a century. There is no more colour in life, no more joy; only one eternal fear of being reported, which forces one to curb every ambition or desire to express oneself and, instead, to take the protective colouring of the great illiterate mass.

‘I am an old-fashioned person animated by entirely selfish
motives. Quite frankly, I am not in the least interested in the betterment of the masses, but I am extremely interested in gratifying the tastes which I acquired when I was young. I like good food and good wine, beautiful women to make love to, fine horses to ride, freedom to travel and meet many people, music, painting and books which will enable me to explore every type of mind and discuss it without restraint. No Totalitarian world-order would permit me to enjoy more than a fraction of these things—and then only surreptitiously. Since, therefore, this is not a war of nations but a world-wide civil war, I am neither for the British nor for the Germans but I am one hundred per cent against the Nazis.’

‘Good man!’ cried Gregory. ‘We can rely on you, then, to secure all the dope you possibly can through the beautiful Paula?’

Kuporovitch nodded and his lazy blue eyes took on a thoughtful look. ‘Leave her to me. Unless I have lost my cunning I have rather a way with young women and, if you have described her type accurately, she will take like a duck to water to some of the little Russian tricks that I can show her. What is it that you particularly want me to find out?’

Gregory’s reply came without hesitation. ‘The date on which Hitler proposes to invade Norway.’

Paula’s French was not excellent but adequate, and love—if you can call it love in such a case—has its own language. At the dinner-party that Erika gave the following night she did not place Kuporovitch next to Paula but next to herself, and she quite obviously cold-shouldered Gregory for him. Erika and Gregory had given out that they had spent the last few months in Finland but nothing had been said of their having been in Russia with Kuporovitch, so the impression was created that he was a new acquaintance who happened to be staying in the same hotel.

When at last, in the lounge afterwards, he did get a word alone with Paula, Erika gave them only a few minutes together,
then, feigning ill-concealed jealousy, intervened to reclaim him. Paula was, therefore, all the more tickled the following morning when he rang her up to say that he had succeeded in obtaining her address from one of the other guests at the party and that he was so impatient to see her again that he absolutely demanded that she should lunch with him.

From that point matters developed rapidly. Erika pretended to be peeved and Paula became all the nicer to her as she could not resist the temptation to patronise the lovely rival over whom it had given her such a kick to triumph. In consequence, she showered Erika with gifts and secured invitations for her and Gregory to every party that any member of her set was giving.

Inside a week they knew a hundred people, all of whom appeared entirely unconcerned with the grim struggle that was being waged outside Norway’s borders. They lunched and chattered; cocktailed and flirted; dined, danced and drank far into each night. Oslo was throwing off its winter furs and coming out to enjoy the spring sunshine. All Paula’s friends seemed to have plenty of money and nearly all of them were indulging in some illicit love-affair which provided gossip and speculation for the rest. It was a grand life for those who liked it, and the Norwegians, who formed far the greatest proportion of the men in this interesting set, were quite obviously having the time of their lives. Norway is not a rich country and her official classes cannot normally afford the same extravagances as their opposite numbers in London, Paris or New York, but Gregory noted with cynical interest that this group of soldiers, politicians, diplomats and Civil Servants always had ample funds and nice new cars in which to take their little German girlfriends about.

Since many of them were middle-aged men, heavily married and in responsible positions, a certain amount of circumspection was observed, but, as Erika and Gregory soon discovered, the ‘goings-on’ in the apartments of the
Fräulein, gnädige Frauen, Baroninnen
and
Gräfinnen
concerned were just nobody’s business.

‘It’s just the age of the men that makes the whole thing so simple,’ Gregory said to Erika one day. ‘If they were handsome young fellow-me-lads they would be wrapped up in girlfriends of their own nationality or their young wives, and Hitler’s secret weapon might find it a bit difficult to muscle in; but it’s
a dozen years or more since these middle-aged gentry have had the chance of a cut at a good-looking young woman except by picking something up late at night, on the sly, and paying for it. Paula and Co. are giving them back their lost youth; without any risk of blackmail, no nasty scares about divorce, and a good time to be had by all.’

Although Kuporovitch was no younger than the average Norwegian in whom Paula and her friends were compelled to interest themselves he was infinitely more virile. Moreover, never having been burdened with a conscience or a wife, and the ethics of the Soviet Union being extremely elastic, he had kept his hand in with the prettiest young women he could find in every town where he had been stationed, so his advances had none of the nervous fumbling of the Norwegians who had lived as respectable married men for a number of years. He just bit Paula hard on the first occasion that they were alone together—so hard, in fact, that she had to wear a chiffon scarf round her neck for some days afterwards. She had, of course, hit him and flown into a fearful rage but he had flung himself on his knees and, embracing her in a bear-like hug, vowed that he had been driven crazy by her beauty; upon which her anger had given place to bewildered curiosity and a violent urge to discover what other excitements this tempestuous wooer would provide for her. In consequence, a few days later Erika remarked to Gregory, not very kindly, that to see Paula with Stefan was like watching a bird fascinated by a snake.

He was clever enough not to interfere with her ‘duty’ affair with the elderly Norwegian Major, neither did he overdo it and make a nuisance of himself, but he saw to it that she never had a moment of spare time and thoroughly enjoyed himself in the process. Apparently he had no other object whatever in life and while he never showed the least curiosity about the course of the war he appeared to delight in scandal as much as any old woman, so Paula produced every titbit she had for his amusement and in this way he was able to secure a mass of data about her girlfriends and the occupations of the various Norwegians they had in tow.

Gregory was delighted with Stefan’s success, and although he knew that by remaining in Oslo he and Erika were as good as sitting on a powder barrel which might blow up at any moment, he felt that they were doing really useful work. Except for those forebodings of trouble to come they were able to abandon
themselves to the joys of what amounted to an unofficial honeymoon while gathering much important information about the machinations of the enemy and transmitting it to Sir Pellinore Gwaine-Cust in London.

Gregory dared not go near the British Legation or be seen with any of its officials, for fear of arousing suspicion among Paula’s set, so he could not put anything through in the Legation Bag, but as Norway was still at peace there was no censorship of mail leaving the country and he was able to communicate by the ordinary post. There was the risk that his letters might be opened or stopped by people in the Norwegian post-office who were in the pay of the Nazis, but that had to be taken, and in order to minimise such a risk he sent a duplicate of each letter that he wrote, on the following day, and used the utmost discretion in his communications.

His first effort was to buy an English edition of Ibsen’s play,
The Rats
, on the blank front page of which he wrote:
With best wishes for a happy birthday, from Gregory
. Underneath his signature he put
Oslo
and the date. That would be quite sufficient to inform Sir Pellinore that he had got safely out of Russia and had arrived in Norway, but the astute old gentleman would naturally speculate on the meaning of this strange present, and, having looked through it to see that no passages were specially marked, he would undoubtedly concentrate upon the title.

By the same air-mail Gregory sent a postcard to his faithful henchman, Rudd, on which he wrote the laconic message:
Having a grand time here, except for the fact that the whole place is overrun with vermin
, knowing quite well that Rudd would immediately take the postcard to Sir Pellinore, who, linking rats and vermin, would guess that Gregory referred to the human variety.

A few days later he wrote a long, chatty letter to his nonexistent half-brother, Otto Mentzendorff, an entirely bogus personality who was supposed to be Sir Pellinore’s foreign valet. In it he said that he had succeeded in obtaining a situation as butler to a German Countess, although he omitted to mention the Countess’s name. He then went on to describe life as the Countess’s servant and the parties she gave, disclosing the fact that all her German women acquaintances had Norwegian men-friends who held positions of some importance. There was not a word of harm or slander in the letter; it was just the sort of screed that one gossip-minded servant with a sense of
humour might have sent to another, and a good half of it was devoted to a description of a mythical young woman who was supposed to be the Countess’s lady’s-maid upon whose virtue the writer had very definite designs.

By the time he had been in Norway a fortnight the details about his commerce with this buxom young Norwegian had reached such heights of both temperament and temperature that if anyone was following the correspondence the reader would have paid scant attention to the rest of the letter but waited for the next instalment with the utmost anxiety.

Had the writer’s plan for getting into the girl’s room succeeded or not?
No time for more; they’re calling for drinks
.

Yes, it had, but he feared that their mistress had seen him slip through the door. Was he discovered?
No time for more. That accursed front-door bell again!

No, he had not been discovered, but the girl had been so scared that she had turned him out immediately and forced him to leave by the window. There followed the night on which they had had the house to themselves—a godsent opportunity; supper; the girl well primed with cherry brandy. Then:
No time for more. The Countess will wear the legs off me! I am late in taking her filthy poodle for its evening outing
.

So the hectic saga continued, and Sir Pellinore was kept well posted as to who was taking an interest in whom in Oslo. The man who featured most prominently in these reports was the Air Attaché at the German Legation, a Captain Kurt von Ziegler. He was a lean, fair-haired man with a long, pointed nose and rather a pleasant smile, and he played a considerable part in directing the activities of the women; so he was evidently a secret member of the Gestapo. There was a distinct dash of the adventurer about him which appealed to Gregory, and he would have liked to cultivate the Captain further, but he did not dare to do so as every time he met him he feared that his assumed name of
Oberst-Baron
von Lutz might feature in one of the Captain’s reports to Berlin. However casually the mention was made it would be quite enough to imperil the lives of Erika and himself.

The war was still meandering on, but Gregory was conscious of a growing tension. In Oslo he was able to listen to the English, French and German broadcasts as well as seeing the more detailed accounts of events in the newspapers of the three countries a few days later. It had been strongly suggested that
the real reason for the Hitler-Mussolini meeting on the Brenner had been to persuade the Italians to adopt a less antagonistic attitude towards Russia and consent to a three-power Axis; but that had been offset by Molotov’s making a speech which was equally offensive to Germany and the Allies.

A few days after Gregory’s arrival in Oslo the R.A.F. had bombed Sylt; that being the first attack on a land-target. The British Press loudly proclaimed that the operation had been a huge success while the Germans declared with equal force that no damage of any consequence had been done and that a number of the raiders had been shot down. As Gregory was in a situation to hear neutral reports of the affair he knew the truth, and it made him almost sick with rage.