Above Suspicion

by Helen Macinnes

  When they left A. Fugger’s bookshop, Ottilie had again picked up her scissors and was bending over the table.

  “Charming wench,” said Richard. “One of the higher types, I suppose, of Nordic womanhood.”

  Frances had her own private joke. “No one told her to stop her work, and so she goes on. How long will it take before she realises that she is already out of a job? Richard, if ever a sailor needed grog, that sailor’s me.”

  They walked back to the old town at a medium pace. They didn’t see anyone following them, but probably someone would. Richard, continuing his role of the wandering scholar, discovered another small bookshop with much second-hand material. The assistant, a pleasant young man with really gentle manners—Frances sat on a chair and watched him with a mixture of pleasure and relief—promised to make inquiries for the book, after Richard had spent half an hour in the poetry section. He bade them good morning like a human being. In fact, thought Frances, he is the first really obviously human being I’ve met since I arrived here.

  When they got to their hotel, Frances went upstairs to change her gloves. Richard sat in the entrance hall and looked through a Nürnberg paper. It seemed as if the inhuman Poles and the wicked Jews were behaving with abominable, not-to-be-tolerated cruelty to the Germans who were living in Poland. The editorial worked itself up into a fine lather. It made crude reading. By the time Frances came downstairs, he was very bored. It was not only crude, it was an insult to intelligence.

  He looked at Frances, and was instantly aware that something had happened. The look she gave him was too intense. She surprised him by suddenly standing on her toes and kissing him; but it brought her close enough for him to hear the word “Searched,” spoken with motionless lips. So they had taken advantage of their slow return to the hotel, as he had hoped they might.

  He returned her kiss and said, “Good.”

  Frances saw the American, whose foot she had mutilated yesterday morning, halt in amazement. On an impulse, she smiled to him. He reddened as he raised his hat and turned hastily away. Perhaps he didn’t like to be found looking quite so amazed.

  “Let’s eat,” she suggested. “I’m ravenous. Only, not a sausage place.” She shuddered. Last night’s dinner had been at one of the sausage showplaces, small and amusing, except that the whole menu was devoted to sausage. It was strange how her mind, as well as her stomach, rebelled when the choice was sausage or sausage or sausage.

  “I’d like an omelette, and not one with apricot jam in it either, and fruit, and some hock, and coffee, such as it is,” she decided.

  “I must say that for someone who comes from England you are pretty snooty about coffee.”

  “Well, it is even worse than ours, and that’s something.”

  They found a restaurant near at hand, where they had their late lunch. They ate it leisurely, and sat smoking their cigarettes long after Richard had paid the bill. The room had emptied, much to the annoyance of two uniformed men who were seated in one corner. As Richard said, it made things look a bit too obvious. The men may have come to the same conclusion. At any rate, they rose at last with bad grace, and on their way out clumped past the table where Frances and Richard sat. Richard had a Baedeker opened in front of him—lying between his elbows as he leaned forward to light his fifth cigarette. As the men passed, he looked up and spoke. Would they be so good as to help him? He and his wife were strangers, and wondered if it were possible to explore the charms of Dutzendteich this afternoon, or would it be better to make a day’s excursion? The men were obviously at a loss for words. One said yes, the other said no, and then they both left the table.

  “Well, it might be better to see the Burg this afternoon, after all,” said Richard. Even if the men couldn’t understand any English, at least the clearly spoken Burg would stick.

  Frances watched their progress to the door. “They are ’phoning,” she reported.

  “Time to leave,” said Richard, and tucked the Baedeker prominently under his arm. They walked quickly to the door, past the man at the public telephone and his worried companion. Frances gave him a sweet smile. She felt suddenly generous.

  They entered a tramcar, at the Königstor, which carried them westwards and then northwards round the whole town. The heat was intense. Frances was glad of the open windows of the tram, which, as it moved, gave at least the impression of a breeze.

  They skirted the thick walls and their broad dry moat, and at last reached the Castle. There was a number of visitors to the Burg. Frances and Richard mixed casually with them and made a leisurely tour of the grounds. They didn’t look back once. Richard said it would make whoever was following them in whatever uniform happier. It would have been discouraging for them really if Frances had insisted on carrying out her idea of looking back every hundred yards, smiling broadly and waving a cheery hand… And Richard didn’t really mind being followed in this way. They had nothing to hide…now. He added to himself, If A. Fugger made it, that is.

  Richard had left the Five-cornered Tower for the last. He had a feeling that Frances might discover another allergy there. It was full of frightfulness, he remembered.

  “Are you sure you really want to see this?” he asked as they reached the doorway. “It is rather monotonous, you know. There’s no law compelling us to go in.”

  Frances looked surprised. “Why not? It’s only an old prison tower with a torture chamber. I’ve been to the Tower of London, and the Conciergerie…”

  Richard shook his head doubtfully. “This one could teach those places a thing or two.” But he had only piqued her interest. Frances had already entered. Richard bought the tickets, and followed, with a shrug of his shoulders.

  He had been right, after all, but Frances wouldn’t admit it at first. Half-way through the tour of the long rooms, she began to move more quickly as the exhibits became more diabolic. Her eyes viewed unbelievingly the directions for extracting the greatest amount of pain which were hung on the wall above each instrument of torture. They were printed in black letter for the most part, and complete with diagrams, in case the minute detail of text wasn’t sufficiently clear to ensure the fullest effects.

  She suddenly spoke. “The cold-blooded beasts.” Her voice was a mixture of incredulity and disgust. A tall young man, standing morosely before an intricate object of spiked iron whose function had been to pierce and tear and burn all at the same time, turned as he heard her voice. There was an expression of fellow-feeling on his face, followed by a look of recognition. Frances, whose remarks had been for home consumption, stopped in embarrassment. The man looked as if he would speak, and then didn’t. Frances felt he was leaving it to her.

  “How’s your foot?” she asked. “I’m really sorry, and I assure you it isn’t a habit of mine.”

  “That’s all right.” His face relaxed, but he still didn’t smile with any enthusiasm. “Enjoying this?” he added, with just the right note in his voice.

  Richard grinned; he liked this man. “They made it quite an art, didn’t they? The pages from the Torturer’s Handbook are peculiarly thorough,” he said, and won a smile from the American. Something caught the man’s eye at the other end of the room, and a slight frown appeared; but it was gone so suddenly that Frances wondered if she was beginning to imagine things. She looked carelessly in the same direction. There were two uniformed men, who seemed to be interested in them rather than in the exhibits. She let her eyes pass through them, then over them, and then on to a German family who were arguing over one of the printed directions with naive interest.

  “Is there much more of this?” she asked.

  The man said, “Piles of the stuff. I’ve just taken a look into the tower place and gotten a cold welcome from the Iron Maiden. There are several models of her.”

  “She would seem mild after these. At least she would kill you, and not turn you into a piece of gibbering flesh,” said Frances. She turned to Richard. “You win. I thought I could manage historical objectivity. After all, I was br
ought up on Foxe’s Book of Martyrs… But where’s the way out?”

  The American smiled. “It’s past the tower dungeons. You can’t escape them.”

  Frances looked at him. “You are in league with my husband. Our name is Myles, by the way. Would you come and have something to drink? I’m parched.”

  The American gravely acknowledged that he was parched too, and he knew of a good beer place just down the hill. They left the Five-cornered Tower, to the amazement of the man on duty at the exit door, who pointed out to them that they had only seen half of the display. Outside, it was pleasant to feel the warm sunshine, and see the green trees and ordinary people looking neither efficient nor thorough. And then a detachment of troopers marched past them; actually they were only a group of men going to some meeting, but they had chosen to march in military formation. Their faces were expressionless under their uniform caps. Frances felt her depression return. Men who marched like that, who dressed like that, whose faces held the blankness of concentration and dedication, were a menace, a menace all the more desperate because of the hidden threat.

  “You are looking very solemn,” said the American.

  “I was thinking of icebergs. You know, one-tenth above to impress you, and the rest beneath to terrify you.”

  “If you know the peculiarity of icebergs,” said the American, with a quick glance at Frances. “There are still plenty of people who think there’s very little of them under the water. But why did you come to Germany this year? I haven’t met any English here so far. At first I thought you might be here to worship at the shrine, but you seem to have the wrong reactions for that.”

  Richard answered that. “Oh, the usual inquisitiveness. We wanted to see for ourselves. We haven’t been in Germany proper since the new era got well under way. We thought this might be our last chance.”

  They had reached the Rathaus-Keller, and the American hadn’t any opportunity for further questions until they were settled at a table, and beer was ordered for the men—Frances insisted on tea. She noted that her order gave the American some delight, although he really was very polite about trying to hide his amusement. I suppose I ought to play true to form, she thought, to keep up the national character. She had begun well with the big-footed note when she had trampled on him yesterday, and tea in the afternoon was another authentic touch; tonight, she really ought to ask him to dine with them, and wear a dinner dress. Only Richard and she never travelled with dinner clothes; it would be such a pity to disappoint him. However, the American seemed less amused and more convinced when two hot cups of tea had produced more visible coolness than his two steins of beer. Frances caught his eye.

  “There’s method in our madness,” she suggested, and noticed he looked a little disturbed, as if he had been found impolite. It was difficult talking to someone who didn’t know you, especially when you both had a common language and thought that that made everything easy. There was always the chance that your words would be taken to mean too little, or too much. That was what made all the English-speaking peoples so damned touchy with each other. Someone who spoke a foreign language had more allowances made for him.

  “By the way, we don’t know your name, yet,” Frances said. “We can’t go on just calling you ‘the American’.” The man smiled. Thank goodness, thought Frances, he’s given up the idea that I was trying to reprimand him. He was searching in his pocket-book for a card.

  “This makes it easier,” he said. He was, they read, Henry M. van Cortlandt from High Tor, New York. He told them he was a newspaperman, originally working in New York City, but now on an assignment in Europe looking for symptoms.

  “War?” asked Richard.

  “Well, perhaps that. What do you think?”

  Frances looked at the well-cut features opposite her, and the well-brushed fair hair. The jaw was determined; the slightly drawn eyebrows gave a certain intensity. You would hardly notice the colour of his eyes; it was as if the other features of his face overshadowed them. His skin was tanned—if it hadn’t been tanned it might have seemed pale, even sallow. He had gone on talking without waiting for Richard’s reply, and he talked well, with a fluency which showed he had either thought about his subject a lot or had already argued it carefully into a neat pattern. As he talked, he smiled a good deal, showing very white, even teeth; but in repose, his mouth looked firm, even tight-lipped. Frances watched him as she listened to the neatly tailored phrases. A very direct, a very controlled and a very impulsive young man.

  “But surely you never took Munich seriously?” he was asking Richard.

  And a rather disbelieving one, too, it seemed.

  Frances spoke.

  “We were still at the stage of taking anything seriously or at the least hoping we could take it seriously, as long as the magic word of peace could be spoken. Until this spring. The march into Prague ended that coma.”

  Van Cortlandt shook his head. “Well, we never thought that in America.”

  “You mean you think we have been playing a kind of game? That we shall go on playing it, as long as we can keep ourselves out of war?”

  “Well, if you put it so frankly, yes.”

  Frances leaned forward on her elbows. “Your President doesn’t think so. I hear you’ve been calling him a war-monger because he really knows what’s going on in Europe.”

  “Nice weather we’ve been having,” suggested Richard. “Warm, though.”

  The American went on: “But Britain’s policy for the last years…”

  “I know,” said Frances. “In America it is called Isolationism, freedom from foreign entanglements, unwillingness to die on foreign fields. We’ve been trying all that. It hasn’t worked. We admit it…we’ve come out of the ether…”

  “And you’re telling me that Britain is going to take off its nice clean coat and get its nose all blooded up in defending Poland? What would you get out of it anyway?”

  “A country fights for two main things, either for loot or for survival. We’ll fight along with our friends for survival. The Axis is after loot. If Poland, or any other country, is attacked, then it is the signal for any nation who doesn’t want to become a part of Germany to rouse itself. It may be the last chance.”

  Van Cortlandt smiled, comfortingly. “Don’t worry. I don’t think you’ll find your country at war. Your politicians will always see plenty of other chances.”

  “That’s my main point. The politicians won’t dare. The people are aroused now.”

  Van Cortlandt still looked unconvinced. “Well, that’s a new one on me. We have some pretty swell news-hounds, and they nearly all scent out more appeasement.”

  “Their sense of smell has led them to the wrong lamp post this time. They will look very funny there, when the trouble starts.”

  “I tried the weather,” said Richard, “and that wasn’t much good. I think we’d be better talking about something else, for neither of you is convincing each other in the slightest, and we’ll know soon enough which of you was nearer the truth. As Count Smorltork said to Mr. Pickwick, ‘The word poltic surprises by himself.’ Anyway, I have the unpleasant but increasing conviction that all of us who argue so much would be wiser if we learned to make aeroplanes or shoot a machine-gun. That’s only my academic point of view, of course. But that seems the only answer for certain people.”

  He nodded to a group of men in brown shirts at another table. “Now what about dinner?” he added.

  Van Cortlandt rose. “Sorry, I’ve got to see a man.”

  Richard rose too. “We are sorry too. We shall see you again soon, I hope.”

  “Yes.” The American’s voice didn’t seem overjoyed at the prospect. “Thanks for the beer. Goodbye.”

  Frances looked after him sadly. “He really was so nice, you know, before he got caught up in his theories. I suppose if your country is three thousand or whatever it is miles away you can afford the luxury of pros and cons. I think you punctured him, some place, Richard. He’s probably saying we are one of
the ‘ bloody English’ at this moment.”

  “Nonsense. He handed criticism out. If you do that you have also got to expect to take it. Anyway, hairsplittings are really becoming so very out of date. The time for theories is really past. But keep off politics after this, Frances, even if you feel you have got something approaching an answer. What do you say about something to eat, and then a movie, and then bed?”

  Frances nodded her approval. There was much she wanted to know about A. Fugger. She stopped worrying about van Cortlandt and began thinking of the little man who had walked with quick short steps into that back room. Had he got away? Could it be that the Nazis were already picking out each agent in the chain, or was A. Fugger wanted on another charge? They would find out, one way or another, but it would be unpleasant waiting.

  Richard had looked round the large room. At a discreet distance, the two men who had visited the Five-cornered Tower that afternoon were sitting at a table. They had become hungry, it seemed, and had just ordered food. Richard waited until the steaming plates were put in front of them, until they had taken their first mouthful.

  “Now’s the time, Frances.” She abandoned A. Fugger, and followed her husband quickly to the door. He seemed amused about something. As they left the room he turned back to see the two men rising angrily to their feet.

  “Would you mind, Frances, if we went to the flicks first of all and then ate when we came out? I think that would be an idea.” Frances saw the gleam in his eye. There was a joke somewhere.

  So they went to a picture house. After fifteen minutes Richard decided he couldn’t see through the large woman in front of them, so they moved quietly to different seats behind their original places. Richard’s joke seemed to be getting better and better.

  As he explained to Frances in bed that night, “They were hungry, and when we landed in the cinema they might have gone out in relays for their dinner. Then we moved our seats, and they didn’t notice it at first. It was pretty dark, you know. We were just sitting down behind them when they noticed we were no longer in our first seats. That was really funny. It was easy for them to find us again, as the place was almost empty, but for five minutes they had quite a bad time of it. That probably decided them to stay together, standing at the back of the theatre in case we changed our minds again. I could feel them getting hungrier.”