Rogue Justice

by Geoffrey Household

  ‘Yes, with the help of two men. And one of them must know how to use it because I don’t.’

  ‘You astonish me!’

  ‘Simple. I have been a hunter but never a soldier.’

  ‘How long will it take you to get up there?’

  ‘Twenty minutes at a guess.’

  ‘Well, we can only hope we have that long.’

  Our climb was out of sight of the enemy all the way, up a gully and then up the back of the crag which was pitted and jagged and safe enough if one avoided rotten stone. I went up first, found the nest disused and cleared away some of it which was occupying too much of the top. The remainder, an untidy mass of sticks and dead roots, speckled with white droppings, was perfect cover. I looked through it and was startled at what I saw. I saw above the machine-gun posts on both sides of the scree and above the even heathland behind it, where the enemy’s front line was lying down in dead ground. The rest of the small but powerful force was idling and smoking a little way back, satisfied spectators of the destruction of this pestilent scourge of the Tatra frontiers. I was equally satisfied. They were all Germans. The ravens would not be hungry.

  With aid of knotted reins, we pulled and pushed our machine-gun up and set it level. When he looked down, my able assistant could not believe his eyes any more than I. His first burst of plunging fire took out the gunners on both sides of the scree. The men lying on the edge jumped up and bolted back to the shelter of the scrubby woodland behind. Not many of them reached it, but those who did were not going to give in so lightly. They had spotted the raven’s nest and shots splintered the crag below us or whined overhead. They then tried a move which I had never thought of, but was probably obvious to any professional. They broke out of the scrub and came bobbing along the top of the escarpment in order to get above us. We caused them some trouble but not enough since the angle of fire was difficult. It seemed to be an occasion for Lady Mannlicher, so I crawled to the back of the buttress and up the broken line of cliff behind it. There were six of these intruders, bold and clever but hopelessly exposed. Only two of them managed to crawl away. I was thankful the move had failed, for I was at last and finally out of ammunition.

  We were clear of the trap which we had scurried into and at once struck north to the green forests and dark pines which were the natural home of the band. No time, thank God, could be wasted in stripping the wounded and shooting prisoners. We had to be far away when the force advancing along the rugged bottom of the valley climbed up to the scene where the ravens were already wheeling overhead. Our retreat could be tracked easily enough, but neither troop-carriers nor armour could ever get at us. I suspect that a follow-up by well-armed alpine infantry could have destroyed or dispersed us, but from the enemy point of view was such an operation worth the butcher’s bill?

  After nightfall we were safe and the survivors of our right-hand column were drifting in. They were all infinitely grateful to me and presented me with a decoration: the bottom of a can of tomatoes within a circle of oak leaves. There were roars of laughter – the relief from thirty hours of tension – when I replied that I accepted it not for valour but for an excellent memory.

  They pressed me to stay with them, but understood that I wanted to reach the army of the Middle East. Although I thought it very unlikely that I should ever again have such an opportunity for personal vengeance, I knew – which I did not tell them – that I should soon find the barbarities of guerilla warfare unendurable. When I was alone with the Voevod, I did touch distantly on the question. He replied at once, ‘No need for such tact, friend. What do you suggest I do with prisoners?’

  There was no possible answer. One could, I suppose, drag them around from mountain to mountain at a horse’s tail, or exchange them under a flag of truce, but the SD would have ensured that there was no one alive to exchange them for.

  ‘I would have taken you nearer to Romania, if we hadn’t been caught in those damned fields,’ he said, ‘but now we shall have to fall back into Poland and re-form. If you and your good Jew wish to go on alone, I can let you have a Romanian from the Bucovina who has business across the frontier and can be your guide. He speaks German; his name is Vasile Cantescu.’

  I asked if he were trustworthy, for I thought it likely he would be anti-Russian rather than anti-German.

  ‘Trustworthy, yes. I know he was condemned to death.’

  ‘And he dares to go back?’

  ‘He will cross the frontier as a poor farmer from the Bucovina who was stripped by the Russians of everything he possessed. Such refugees are welcome if their birth certificates show they are pure Romanian. He won’t stay long – just to see a friend, he says.’

  ‘How far is it to the frontier?’

  ‘About seventy miles. Say, four days. I can spare you food, and is there anything else I can do for you?’

  I told him there were two things. One was any old horse for Moshe; the other was to return the Mannlicher to Casimir whenever he had a chance, telling him that it had served well till the last round. That he promised to do.

  ‘And never forget that Romania is Hitler’s loyal ally,’ he added, ‘stuffed with troops and SD. If you surface at all, you’ll be interned or worse. So what will you do for money?’

  ‘I have enough German marks for a few days. As an outlaw I’ve needed no money. A rare advantage. Perhaps I can reach the Danube.’

  ‘Not unless you have local help. Somewhere there exists an underground, but I suspect it will be more use to Shapir than to you.’

  There is little to tell of our journey. It was the same old story: up and down from forest to forest, plodding along over grass and moorland and always trying to keep some breast of the hills between ourselves and other travellers. Moshe and I were indistinguishable from peasants, filthy, bearded, wrapped in rags and sheepskins. Only Haase’s excellent boots remained, under their coating of mud, fit for human society. Cantescu was rather more respectable. In an emergency he was to ride the horse and we should follow behind, thus giving a picture of a poor farmer and two of his men.

  Once, we nearly ran into the Hungarian frontier by mistake and hastily retreated – at least I thought it was by mistake, till Cantescu cheerfully admitted that he wanted to find out exactly where he was.

  In time of peace and mutual jealousies such a journey would have been most difficult but, as it was, Germans and Russians were slogging it out on the other side of the Black Sea and token forces from Hitler’s New European Order were with them. Except in Poland, frontiers were largely nominal and garrisons reduced.

  We aimed to enter Romania at Sighet, leaving behind the vast German-occupied mess. On the night before we came down from the watershed we went into committee to decide on a plan if controls were hostile and too inquisitive. Cantescu was all right. He had his birth certificate showing him to be a Romanian citizen from the Bucovina. That would give him entry. It looked as if Moshe Shapir, recognizable as a Jew and with no papers at all, would have to cross the frontier illegally. As I was much more likely to succeed in that than he, I was prepared to lend him the passport of Don Ernesto, who was making his way from Poland to the sea in the hope of getting home.

  ‘What a pity you speak only German!’ I exclaimed.

  ‘And of course my native language.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Spanish.’

  I should have guessed it. Those keen, aristocratic features were of course those of a Sephardic Jew.

  I examined him closely as if I myself were a customs officer. Cleaned up, with his owl’s nest of a beard neatly trimmed and preserving Don Ernesto’s moustache, he could perfectly well be a descendant of the Spanish conquerors. But still there were difficulties in fitting his description to the passport which had served both me and von Lauen. He was not tall enough. His eyes were brown, not grey. His hair was dark, not fair.

  Cantescu said cheerfully that we sh
ould leave it to him. He admitted that he was always inclined to blind ahead. A Romanian, he said, should not bother planning for trouble but talk his way out of it when it came. He thought I ought to stick to Don Ernesto’s passport and that Moshe should be my faithful servant who had had money and passport stolen. He was sure he could fix it. We must remember that Romanians were a Latin people, isolated at the back end of Europe and specially obliging to other Latins. All we needed was a pair of scissors and a good wash. Failing scissors, he would sharpen his hunting knife and do his best.

  Hairdressing with a knife is a process I could recommend to the Gestapo, especially when one has only the flames of a fire to give light. Stretching fingerful after fingerful, he took off my beard, leaving me with the wreck of a moustache and a bleeding lip. He then started on Moshe, giving him a pointed Velasquez beard and a rather better moustache than mine. We came out horridly unshaven, as was natural enough for travellers, but obviously gentlemen down on their luck. We had to promote the distinguished Moshe from servant to secretary.

  In the early morning we went down into the foothills and on towards the fast and shining river beyond which was Romania. I was in no mood to welcome it, nervously assuring myself of the long odds against Romanian security officers being warned that Don Ernesto Menendez Peraza, killed in the bombing attack of Rostock, was very much alive, and that there was still nothing to connect Don Ernesto with the SD officer at Stettin, Auschwitz and Cracow. All the same, I nearly turned back when I spotted a couple of black German uniforms among the greys and blues of the Romanian army and officials.

  At the barrier we presented ourselves, our horse and our papers. Moshe and I had agreed that he spoke only Spanish and I Spanish and German; so we stood by looking bewildered and as dignified as our dirty sheepskins permitted while Cantescu told our story. On his way back to his dear homeland he had come across us on foot in the Tatra, our car waylaid and stolen by Slovakian bandits when we were driving down to Romania. As we were obviously persons of some importance, he had taken pity on us and guided us to the frontier.

  It was then my turn. Since the visas on my passport showed that I had resided in Berlin and had legally entered Denmark and Sweden I could not invent a better story than the truth. I said that I had hoped to get home to Nicaragua from Sweden but could not. My secretary and I therefore decided to try and reach neutral Turkey and see what chance we had there.

  The officer returned my passport after taking longish notes and told me that he would have to refer the matter to other authorities – which, I feared, meant those hangers-on of the Gestapo. He would not accept poor Moshe at all.

  Cantescu protested, but the conversation was courteous and appeared to be leading somewhere.

  ‘He wants to know where you got the horse,’ he said. ‘I told him you had bought it from a gypsy.’

  There was more cordial conversation.

  ‘He says that horses are scarce in this part of the country. The Germans collected all they could and the Russians took the lot from the Bucovina when they retreated. He would allow me to take it in if it belonged to me.’

  ‘It can belong to the devil for all I care.’

  ‘Patience! Would you like to give it to me as a reward for saving your lives? And it had better be in writing.’

  I scribbled a sort of deed of gift, and Cantescu and I shook hands on it while the immigration officer beamed at us.

  ‘I am now going through with the horse and you will not see any more of me till perhaps this evening. For the present, you and Moshe will have to wait, but when you are allowed into Sighet you will find that I have booked you a room at the hotel.’

  I still did not understand. I said goodbye to Cantescu warmly but suspected he was talking us into trouble, not out of it. Then Moshe and I sat down on a melancholy bench in the waiting room, where at least we were brought a slab of sausage and a carafe of plum brandy. We were there till mid-afternoon, when the officer returned, saluted me, put an arm across Moshe’s shoulders and told us we were free to leave. A grubby one-horse cab awaited us and took us to the small hotel, white and with little welcoming windows. The Middle East was that much nearer but there was still a nagging fear in my mind of those apparently idle black uniforms and the notes that the grey uniform had taken.

  A barber’s shop was still open. Afterwards we sat down to an excellent meal, Moshe resembling the Velasquez at which Cantescu’s hunting knife had aimed, I once more Don Ernesto. Rather to my surprise, Cantescu turned up to help us with our bottle. I congratulated him on his country’s officials, who seemed most reasonable.

  ‘His brother has a farm,’ he explained, ‘but not a horse in sight and he is nearly ruined. When I heard that, I felt so sorry for him that I offered him ours. And, as soon as I had quietly stabled the horse where he instructed me, he kept his word and let you pass. A reasonable arrangement between two honest men.’

  He told me that I could safely stay in the hotel for the night, having been cleared by frontier controls. Next day I must move. He would tell me where. My passport should be good enough for hotels and railways.

  ‘In a few minutes Shapir and I will go for a stroll in the dusk. Don’t say goodbye and look as if you were expecting him back. One never knows what eyes are watching.’

  I had told Moshe that I would never leave him until he was in safety or dead. We had not mentioned the promise since, but I knew well that it had kept him going when he should have collapsed. So I said to Cantescu that I would only hand him over to his own people.

  ‘Good – if he can find any.’

  ‘It’s as bad as that?’

  ‘Worse.’

  ‘But all I know is what the Voevod told me: that you are not and never were a farmer from the Bucovina and that you were condemned to death.’

  ‘That is all you need to know. But if I was to be shot I must have escaped and I must have had helpers. Never mind who they were. I have reason to believe they might set Shapir on his road to Palestine, though God knows if he’ll get there. Fake Nicaraguan passports call for different treatment.’

  ‘This man is a Jew in heart,’ Moshe gallantly declared.

  ‘He may be in heart but not in other places. Don’t worry about him, dear Shapir. There are many of us who admire the British, and not all roads lead to Jerusalem.’

  ‘But I must know which road he will take.’

  ‘And he would like to know what road you will take. I will only tell you both what you already know: that death is close behind you. Trust me to make him keep his distance.’

  We had been together long enough for me to recognize a man of tenacity and finesse, though the days were only an interval between his unknown future. So far as I was concerned, I was ready to trust him, but Moshe must decide for himself. I felt that if he left with Cantescu it would be because he considered he was a hindrance to me, and I reminded him that twice he had probably saved my life – once by common sense, and once by sheer courage.

  He answered me by getting up to go with Cantescu, and our eyes had to speak for us since we were allowed no show of emotion and no goodbyes.

  In the morning I paid my bill and found that my store of marks would still be enough for second-class travel, food and bed for a couple of nights. I explained with a smutty wink that my secretary, after long privation, had found other accommodation for the night. That done, I waited in the bar for something to happen. If nothing happened, the innocent landowner from Nicaragua would take a train to Bucharest or the mouth of the Danube. Meanwhile I just waited like any commercial traveller stranded in the third-rate hotel of some provincial town. I regretted the forests of the Tatra and the comforting Mannlicher slung on my back.

  Life began again when the hotel porter handed me an envelope addressed to Don Ernesto. It contained nothing but a third-class ticket to Bucharest by the evening train. At the station I found my way on to the train with a crowd of peasant
s and settled down on a slatted wooden seat, of which I occupied eighteen inches between some underpaid clerk who reeked of pickled cucumber and a variety of coarse perfumes from – at a guess – the local whore house, and on the other side a hearty, drunken yeoman of the Bucovina who continually farted, laughed and apologized. It occurred to me, however, that my clothes were possibly an equal offence to the company, though my body was well washed, and that the donor of my ticket had been right to choose the third class.

  We travelled all night with both my neighbours dozing on my shoulders. Intimacy without speech. Romanian I recognized as a Latin language, but it was incomprehensible. At eleven in the morning we piled out on to Bucharest station. My papers were inspected and my ticket collected, and I set out into a busy city of low white houses and trees and tram-lines and poverty, already in the pleasant heat of early summer. I presumed that since I had been given a ticket someone must be observing my movements, and when I came to a café sat down at an outside table where I could easily be seen and discreetly contacted if the someone chose to come closer.

  Before long a taxi drew up alongside the café and the driver reported to me exactly as if I had ordered it. I got in and we drove across a handsome boulevard and away to a suburb of small houses and yards which looked unchanged since Bucharest was a large village. Here were no arrogant German military to be seen, though in the main streets they had been scattered about like spots on a sufferer from measles. The car stopped in a small square with an onion-domed church in the centre, and the driver signalled to me to get out. As I made as if to pay him, he gave me in French some such directions as: first right, second left, No. 11, go straight in.

  I went straight in and found myself in a simple room with a bed made up and a dressing gown lying on it, a comfortable chair, a table set with coffee, rolls and a carafe of plum brandy and, best of all, a civilized lavatory and shower. So I was expected and my probable needs foreseen. White-washed walls were decorated with Romanian rugs, giving a somewhat oriental effect. I might have been in some one-room annexe to the house of a Christian Arab.