They Used Dark Forces (35 page)

His mind moved on to those hectic weeks he had spent in Budapest in the summer of 1942; to how Sabine had saved him from his enemies and returned with him to England; to the way she had fooled him and, when in London, spied for the Nazis, got caught and been arrested.

When she was a prisoner in the Tower of London it had seemed near impossible to get her out. But by an intrigue with the Moldavian Military Attaché, Colonel Kasdar, Gregory had enabled her to escape and return to Germany. And he had done so without laying himself open to any charge for he, in his turn, had fooled and made use of her.

The convoys carrying the Allied troops for ‘Torch' were already on their way to North Africa. With the connivance of the Deception Planners he had sent her back to Ribbentrop with false information about the objective of the expedition. Later it had been learned through secret channels that the information she took back had duly reached Hitler, and had so fully corroborated all the other measures already taken to fool the Germans that the deception plan had proved a complete success.

Believing that the ‘Torch' convoys were making for the east coast of Sicily, so would have to pass through the narrow Straits of Bon on the afternoon of Sunday November 9th, Kesselring had grounded his air force the previous day, when the convoys were within range, intending to blitz them with maximum effect on the Sunday. But at midnight the convoys had turned back and at dawn on the 8th landed their troops in Oran and Algiers without the loss of a single ship.

As Gregory toyed with his champagne cocktail and thought of all this, he wondered what Sabine's reactions would be if she were in Berlin and he could find her.

Since the Nazis had shot so many W.A.A.F.s and other courageous women who had parachuted into German-occupied territory the British authorities had decided to put chivalrous scruples behind them and have Sabine shot. As he had got her out of the Tower she owed her life to him; while by having enabled him to escape from Budapest he owed his life to her. That cancelled out. But in order to save her he had had to deceive her so that she in turn would deceive Hitler; and how she had come out of that he had no idea.

It was quite probable that on discovering that he had been fooled Hitler had been furious with Ribbentrop and Ribbentrop furious with her for having led him to communicate false information to his Führer. The odds were, therefore,
that she had been through a very sticky time and if she realised that Gregory had deliberately lied to her there was a risk that her resentment might be so intense that she would hand him over to the Gestapo. As against that, in this great city filled with enemies she was the only person who might, for old times' sake, be persuaded to befriend him; so he decided to try to seek her out.

Finishing his drink, he went to the row of telephone booths and looked in a directory for the name Tuzolto. As he had feared, it was not in the book. The only other way of tracing her, if she was in Berlin, was through Ribbentrop; but to ring up the Minister was out of the question. All the same, Gregory looked up Ribbentrop's private number, found that he still lived in the suburb of Dahlem, and made a note of the address.

Leaving the Adlon he went back to the Tiergarten, sat down on a bench and made a scratch meal off some of the now mangled
Brötchen
and crumbled biscuits that he had hastily pushed into his pockets early that morning.

At about half past one he walked to the nearest tram halt and asked a woman standing near him if a tram went out to Dahlem.

‘No,' she replied, ‘you would have done better to go to the Potsdamer Bahenhoff and take an electric as far as the Grunewald; but these days there's always a chance that the line is blocked and they're not running. You'd best now take the next Potsdam tram and get off at the Round-point in the wood. The conductor will tell you.'

A few minutes later Gregory forced his way on to a crowded tram. It followed the main artery west towards Charlottenburg. As it clanged its way into the workers' quarter he was amazed to see on both sides of the highway the havoc that bombs had wrought. Whole rows of buildings had been rendered uninhabitable. Many had been reduced to piles of debris, others gaped open with tottering, shored-up walls rearing skyward. It seemed impossible that anyone could have survived in what must have been such a hell of explosions, flame and collapsing houses. Yet the pavements were swarming with ill-clad, glum-looking people.

After traversing two miles of this nightmare area the tram
turned south-west and entered a slightly more prosperous neighbourhood. Here, too, there was much evidence of the air-raids and at one point the passengers had to leave the tram because the road was blocked. But after walking a few hundred yards they boarded another tram which carried them into better suburbs on the edge of the Spandau Forest. In due course they reached the Round-point. The woman conductor told Gregory to take the road to the east and that there was no tramway to Dahlem, but he might get a ‘bus if he waited long enough.

Deciding to walk, he set off along a road lined with houses standing in their own gardens. Half an hour later he arrived in the leafy side road he was seeking and another two hundred paces brought him to the gate to Ribbentrop's villa.

It was a commodious monstrosity typical of those built by wealthy industrialists in Victorian times. That Ribbentrop had not left it after his rise to power for some more spacious and imposing mansion showed that he had neither the taste nor ostentation of Goering; but he would naturally do his public entertaining at the Foreign Office and, Gregory suspected, probably continued to make the villa his home for sentimental reasons, as it had been the scene of many momentous meetings during the rise of the Nazi Party.

Gregory regarded it with interest, recalling what he had heard about the place. Ribbentrop had been one of the very few of Hitler's early adherents who had money; or, rather, his wife had, for he had married Anneliese Henkel, the heiress of the great German Sparkling Wine House, of which he had been an employee. Hitler had often stayed with the couple in this Dahlem villa and as he understood no language other than German, Ribbentrop, who was fluent in both French and English, habitually read out to him translations of the political articles in the leading foreign Press. It was their long discussions after having read these articles that had convinced Hitler that Ribbentrop was another Bismarck, and later led to his appointment as Ambassador to Britain, then as Foreign Minister of the Third Reich.

As Gregory stood there he thought how differently things might have gone had those intimate talks never taken place. It
was Ribbentrop who had convinced Hitler, in spite of the strenuous, contrary opinions expressed by the professional diplomats and by Goering and the General Staff, that the British people had become entirely decadent and that there was not the least likelihood of their Government going to war on behalf of Poland. That he had proved completely wrong had not shaken Hitler's faith in him; for, even to himself, the egomaniacal Dictator would never admit that his judgement had been at fault; so it was the vain, self-opinionated, ex-wine-salesman who had been mainly responsible for bringing about the war, and who continued to lord it at the Foreign Office.

Pushing open the side gate, Gregory walked up a path that led to the back entrance of the villa and rang the bell. It was answered by a kitchen maid, of whom he asked if he could have a word with the Herr Reichsaussenminister's valet. She told him to wait and after a few minutes an elderly fat-faced man came to the door. Departing a little from his normally impeccable German, Gregory said to him:

‘Forgive me for troubling you,
mein Herr
, but I am a Hungarian, recently arrived from Budapest. My mother was the nurse of the Frau Baronin Tuzolto and I have messages for her. But I have not her address and she is not in the telephone book. My mother told me that she is a close friend of the Herr Reichsaussenminister; so it occurred to me that someone in his household might be able to help me.'

The fat-faced man grinned. ‘Yes, she was a friend of his and as lush a piece as anyone could find to go to bed with; but I don't think he sees much of her now. She never comes here, of course. The missus wouldn't have stood for that. The boss installed her in a nice little villa he owns on Schlachten Insel, just at the entrance to the Wannsee. Used to use it for boating parties when times were better. For all I know she's still there. Anyway, you could go there and enquire. That's the best I can do for you.'

Having learned that the place was called the Villa Seeaussicht and the best way to get to it, Gregory thanked the man profusely and turned away. From Dahlem he walked back to the Round-point, from there he took a tram a further two
miles along the road to Potsdam, then walked again down a side road through the woods to the Havel.

At that point the fifteen-mile-long lake was a good mile and a half wide and he saw that Schlachten Island projected from near the shore on which he stood, about three-quarters of a mile into it. Crossing a short causeway to the island, he found that there were several properties on it and that the Villa Seeaussicht was on the south shore; so evidently derived its name from having a splendid view right down the broad arm of the Havel known as the Wannsee.

Framed in trees, the villa stood about fifty yards back from the road. To one side there was a separate building, obviously a big garage with rooms for a chauffeur above, but it was shut and no car stood outside it. The villa itself had three storeys and its size suggested that it was about a ten-room house. Muslin curtains in the upper windows implied that it was occupied, but in the drowsy heat of the summer afternoon no-one was about; so Gregory felt that he could carry out a reconnaissance without much fear of being seen.

Being so doubtful about the sort of reception Sabine would accord him—if, indeed, she was still living there—he was most anxious to avoid presenting himself in circumstances which might prejudice the results of their meeting. For that it was essential that he should come upon her unannounced and alone, so that should she prove willing to help him there would be a chance for her to hide him there temporarily without any servant being aware of his presence or, should she at first prove hostile, he would at least have a chance of talking her round before she gave him away in front of any third party.

Entering a side gate he stepped into a shrubbery, then made his way along a narrow passage behind the garage to a small yard. Beyond the yard there was another shrubbery, under cover of which he continued to advance. From between the bushes he could now see that the back of the villa looked out on to a pleasant lawn that ran down to the water and that at one side of its extremity there stood a low boat house. He saw, too, that about half-way down the lawn, on his side of it, there was a swing hammock with a striped canopy. As the hammock was end on to him he could not see if anyone was in it; but a
book lying on the ground and a garden table nearby, with a glass on it, suggested there might be. Treading with great caution he reached the back of the deep hammock and, holding his breath, peered over the edge. His heart gave a bound. Sabine was lying there asleep.

So his luck was in. He had sought and found her. But was finding her really good luck, he wondered, as he gazed down at this lovely wanton creature who had been the mistress of both himself and Ribbentrop. From what the fat-faced valet in Dahlem had said it seemed that Ribbentrop had cast her off. If that had been due to the false information with which he, Gregory, had sent her back to Germany, she might seize eagerly on the chance to revenge herself. And there was another thing. If he could succeed in explaining away his having lied to her, and she ranked the safety of her old lover above her duty as a Nazi, her welcome might prove almost as dangerous as her enmity. He knew her amorous nature too well to suppose that, should she agree to hide him, she would not expect him to go to bed with her again. And he was most loath to be unfaithful to Erika. Yet in Sabine lay his only hope of getting safely out of Germany.

Sabine was dressed in a light summer frock, and for a few moments Gregory stood there admiring her slim figure and the perfection of her features. She was now about twenty-eight and had changed little since he had first known her. A few tiny laughter wrinkles showed at the corners of her mouth and her hips and bust were slightly larger, but her magnolia-petal skin remained unblemished and a splendid foil to the dark hair that grew down so attractively into her smooth forehead as a widow's peak. Her mouth was a little open and showed a glimpse of her small, even teeth; her lips had always been a bright red, which he knew owed little to lipstick, and her dark eyelashes curled up making delightful fans on her cheeks.

Stepping back out of sight, in a clear voice he spoke one of the few sentences in Hungarian that he knew: ‘Holy Virgin, we believe that without sin thou didst conceive.' It was the first line of a couplet he had heard her say a score of times before they had gone to bed together.

Suddenly there was a stir in the hammock. As Sabine sat up he ducked down behind it. With a low laugh she completed the couplet, ‘And now we pray, in thee believing, that we may sin without conceiving.' Then she cried, ‘Come out from behind there, whoever you are.'

Putting his head up above the back edge of the hammock, he grinned at her.

‘Gregory!' she exclaimed, her black eyes going round with amazement.

‘Then I'm not the only one who has heard you say your little prayer,' he laughed.

‘Goodness, no,' she laughed back. ‘But I thought you must
be one of my old Hungarian boy friends. What in the world are you doing here?'

‘Oh, I'm in Berlin to destroy the Third Reich and put an end to the war,' he replied lightly.

‘I wish to God you could,' she said with sudden seriousness. ‘The air-raids have become simply ghastly. Every night I go to bed expecting to be blown to pieces before morning. But, honestly; how do you come to be in Berlin?'