A section of the roof formed a sort of vault too low to tip us over but high enough to catch the gentle northerly breeze blowing down the Adriatic. My two companions hoped to hit the coast of Greece and knowing nothing whatever of the sea were continually trying to steer with a loose plank. The only result was to turn our raft in semicircles and I did not interfere, satisfied that to judge by the sun we were drifting steadily south and would miss Greece by a hundred miles.
There was no reason to lose hope. We were close to the sea lane between Italy and Africa and three times caught sight of ships on the horizon. I was not altogether sorry that they missed seeing us, leaving us to be picked up by that improbable British vessel which my ignorance of the current state of war had conjured up. After forty-eight hours without water, I’d have been glad to be picked up by a shipload of Gestapo.
We were at last spotted by a convoy bound for Tripoli from Brindisi. An oil tanker lowered a boat and took us on board. Officers and crew were all triumphant. A few more days and the victorious Italian army would be in Alexandria. Herr Ludwig Weber was astonished that they managed to forget Rommel and the Afrika Corps but did not protest. When we were some hours from the African coast our ship was detached from the convoy with orders to make the port of Benghazi at night. Depressing news for me. However the enemy disposed of me, there could be no chance of resuming my personal war. This Middle East which had beckoned me on all the way from Stettin now presented itself as an invincible enemy camp with no sign of my own countrymen beyond a plane which flew high over us after the convoy had dispersed.
There was not a light to be seen on ship or shore. We drove steadily for Benghazi, while unknown to us the slim, black messenger of death was sliding through the darkness on a parallel course, no doubt using the skilful cover of the seaman as I had used the skills of the hunter on land. The torpedo struck amidships. The effect was not so merciless as to our poor little transport, and there was time to observe panic. Boats and men plunged into a water where the calm and spreading gloss of the oil unnaturally reflected light. I jumped with the rest, determined to reach the destroyer, a dim outline behind the searchlight now playing over the hull.
Where the boats were floating and men reaching them without too much difficulty, they were left to get on with it; where survivors were oiled and helpless, the destroyer itself lowered a boat to help. There was, I suppose, no danger from enemy ships or aircraft, and the captain, who may himself have struggled in that emulsion like an oiled gull, could afford to be merciful. I avoided the tanker’s boats, swimming directly to the destroyer and calling for help at last in my own dear language. I was home from my journey, or so I thought.
5
My passport in the name of Ludwig Weber had gone to the bottom with my boots, which saved me the trouble of destroying it. I was accepted on board as unquestionably British and gave my name as William Smith, a former resident of Italy who was being shifted from one internment camp to another. To have introduced myself under my true name might have resulted in being made free of the wardroom and overwhelmed with questions to which answers were better avoided until I reached land and the proper authorities. I had not forgotten memories of Sweden, which had remained dormant while week after week all my thoughts had been concentrated on vengeance and escape. It began to occur to me very vividly that now I should again be mercilessly hunted down by the hounds of wartime security and that in the end my only cover would be the truth, though unbelievable.
We were making for the port of Haifa. Why I did not know, and did not wish to be inquisitive. It may have been because enemy aircraft would expect us to run for Alexandria or because Haifa was convenient for disembarking enemy seamen. As soon as the destroyer docked, we were separated out on the quay. The Italians were loaded into army transport and removed. My companions, the Albanian and the Greek, were taken to the port offices and I was put up at a seamen’s hostel, told that I should be wanted for questioning and that meanwhile I was at liberty to wander about the town.
As I had no money there was not much I could do. But I needed none. It was satisfaction enough to walk among British troops, to observe Jews and their laughing children as carefree as in the London I left in 1938, and to exchange friendly greetings with Arabs to see how much of my Swahili could be understood. Then I walked up the winding road to the top of Mount Carmel and rejoiced in the view of this peaceful and prosperous land and of highlands which might well flow with milk and honey instead of the saw-toothed crags of Greece. Though neither Jew nor Arab, I was home again.
Home again. Had I any right to be? What home had she who should have been at my side? For more than three long years I had tried to avenge her, tried to play the part for which I was most fitted in the destruction of this evil as if I saw our tortured Europe in the image of her torn body. No, I had no right to peace. It was not here above the crystalline Mediterranean that I would find her. ‘Not until I am ready,’ she had seemed to tell me when I lay exposed and helpless on the brink of the Aliakmon. Not until she was ready had I any business with peace. Our union must come from some sacrifice in which her blood and mine were mingled, never to be separated.
On and on the trance wavered like a blown mist of the mind, but all I understood of it was that the mixing of the blood must be spiritual. How gladly I would have died if it could have been physical. Then I was startled back to reality. Someone had addressed me by name.
‘Raymond. My dear chap! You look a bit down on your luck.’
There he was. A colonel. Probably handing out pay to the army, for all he knew about was money. A snob who always had made a point of being seen at the bar at our club on intimate terms with me.
‘Nobody has set eyes on you for years. I was sure you’d have had your squadron by now. Where on earth have you been?’
‘Shooting,’ I replied.
He turned away in patriotic disgust, or more likely he was afraid I’d touch him for a loan.
I returned to my hostel and found an army sergeant waiting for me.
‘Would you mind giving my commanding officer a little of your time?’ he said.
The first approach of the British Gestapo. It was so comic that I couldn’t help laughing and said I would be delighted.
I was driven down to a billet not far from the port where I was left waiting in a general office with cheerful NCOs coming and going and the occasional roar of a motorcycle beneath the window. Accommodation seemed rather more spartan than that of the Gestapo. I caught a glimpse of straw-filled palliasses on the floor of the next room, indicating that these special troops had no extra privileges, and of a neat little bar which suggested that the unit was civilized enough to be trusted with it.
I was led into the major’s office. He sat behind a trestle table covered with an army blanket with two basket chairs opposite. The atmosphere was in no way threatening. I felt almost as if I had called to ask for a job with some tanned and travelled foreign correspondent. He had that sort of face, genial but politely sceptical.
‘Don’t they fix up distressed seamen with a new outfit?’ was his first question.
‘Perhaps I don’t count as one, sir.’
‘Well, I don’t know their rules. There are so many kinds of distress in our world. I will see what I can do. Now, about your two companions – are they harmless?’
‘Perfectly, neither are pro-Italian enough to work for them.’
‘Oh, I wasn’t thinking of that. But my obvious course is to hand them over to the Greek Brigade, and I want to be sure they won’t meet with an unfortunate accident. That Albanian fellow – what are his politics?’
‘Independence for Albania on Mondays and Tuesdays. Union with Greece for the rest of the week and when convenient.’
‘I see. Just as you are Bill Smith on Mondays and Tuesdays but Ludwig Weber when convenient, or so I am told by your two companions.’
‘A passport in that name wa
s given to me by the German consulate in Istanbul.’
‘And what is your true name?’ he asked, accepting my reply without comment.
It was no good prevaricating if I wished to be accepted into one of the British services.
‘Raymond Ingelram.’
‘Borrowed perhaps?’
‘Christened in St George’s Chapel, October 1909.’
‘Related to the royal family?’
‘Not near enough to count. My mother was Austrian.’
‘Why do you tell me that?’
‘Because you will find it out anyway. I am also known to the enemy as Hauptmann Haase of the Sicherheitsdienst and Ernesto Menendez Peraza, citizen of Nicaragua.’
‘Are you employed by any of our private armies? You can safely tell me.’
‘Only by my own. I have fought the enemy for three years.’
He sat back, much more relaxed. He said that would be all for the present and suggested that I might like a check-up in hospital after my adventures. I replied that it was unnecessary. I had been short of food in Greece before I was deported to Italy, but I was still physically very fit.
‘Greece? You were left behind when the army got away?’
‘I reached Greece through Poland, Romania and Turkey.’
‘You said your mother was Austrian. I suppose it was natural that she had some sympathy for Hitler.’
‘My mother is dead. She was descended from Kings of Bohemia. Is it likely that she would have even spoken to that scum?’
My anger must have impressed him as sane and genuine, for he gave up the idea of getting rid of me on to a psychiatrist.
‘Who financed you in Germany?’
‘I used my own money – what was left of it.’
‘So you are well off?’
‘No. I gave everything away in trust for my tenants before I left England.’
‘Why did you do that?’
‘Because I intended to assassinate Hitler.’
I could see that his doubts of my sanity returned.
‘As an Englishman in Germany during the war?’ he asked incredulously.
‘Before the war. If I had succeeded and been caught, think of the repercussions!’
‘But you seem to have returned and stayed on?’
‘Yes, as a Nicaraguan. I was exposed but managed to escape.’
‘Can you supply any evidence at all of your movements?’
I told him of my attempt in April to get home by way of Denmark to Sweden and how they accepted that I was British but suspected me of being an enemy agent, in which they were justified.
‘I suppose the Foreign Office will have some record of that,’ he said, ‘but it will take months to get it out of them. Anything else?’
‘Have you any Poles here?’
‘A whole brigade in training.’
‘Ask their intelligence officer if he can get in touch with a guerilla leader known as the Voevod operating in the Carpathians. There is another in the villages east of Cracow known as Casimir. And there could be a Jew named Moshe Shapir who was a racehorse trainer in Germany and may have reached Palestine overland.’
‘I will make inquiries. If your Shapir exists he probably arrived illegally, but that’s a matter for civil police not for me. The Jewish Agency will tell me. Their intelligence service is remarkably efficient.’
‘And today I ran into a Colonel Tracy who knew me well in London. But I would like him kept out of it if it is possible.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I have kept my true name secret. I do not want it disgraced.’
‘It won’t be if you have told the truth.’
‘I must assume that nobody will believe I have told the truth.’
‘Very well. For the time being I will ask the colonel to identify you and no more.’
‘That is very kind.’
‘We like to avoid publicity, Mr Bill Smith, until we have made up our minds what to do with you.’
‘Deportation or the bug-house?’
‘And you’ll be bloody lucky if that’s all, as a traitor to your country.’
‘You know I am not.’
‘I know nothing of the sort. But you don’t seem the type to be a British fascist or a German agent. Now I shall arrange for you to stay on at the hostel and have a little pocket money. Keep your mouth shut, don’t draw attention to yourself in any way, and report to my sergeant-major daily!’
So that was British interrogation. There were several essential questions which he had never put to me. For example: what was I doing in Istanbul and why had I gone off to Greece when I could have reached the British army overland? When the cheerful racket in my hostel dormitory had begun to die down and it was possible to think, I came to the conclusion that he had deliberately avoided questions which could be answered by a simple lie. They would be asked at a second, more ruthless interview after he had a general picture of the man and his movements which could found a sound basis for attack.
I then remembered that I had a very useful witness to my entry into Greece if he could be contacted; so when next day I reported to the sergeant-major I left a note for his commanding officer asking if it was possible through some Turkish representative to get in touch with Major-General Kurtbek, once assistant military attaché in London, who could state how Ludwig Weber entered Greece.
I was left alone for a week or more, my only contact outside the hostel being the sergeant-major, who knew of course that Bill Smith was highly suspect but found him a refreshing change from the daily routine of Jews, Arabs and straightforward breaches of security. He was the son of a Gloucestershire cattle dealer and had carried into the army the family gift for summing up a stranger at a glance. When he decided that, whatever I was now, I had been an honest West Countryman at some time, we could indulge in mutual homesickness and I was invited to take a drink at the bar. Kindliness or to loosen my tongue? A bit of both, I think.
‘Men aren’t what they were. Too many of them. That’s the trouble.’ And he yarned away about the eccentric characters of his county loved by everyone who knew them.
This was a heaven-sent chance to find out what my world thought of me. I said I believed that at the other end of the county the Ingelrams owned a lot of land and were his sort of people.
‘Ralph Ingelram! Now he was a wonderful fellow. I often heard my father speak of him. Killed on the Somme, he was. The best always go first, it’s said. Married a foreign lady as if there weren’t any beauties in London good enough for him. I reckon their only son took after her. Supposed to be the finest shot in Europe and always abroad. Now I’ll tell you a funny thing about him. Just before the war he gave away all his possessions and disappeared. Some say he’s in gaol with a long sentence and they let him use a false name. And there’s a rumour that he’s in Africa, but I don’t believe it. He’d have beaten it back home to serve his country. Soldiers, most of them. One of them was at the taking of Jerusalem, and we know that’s true because there’s a tomb in the village church with his arms crossed like a crusader in his coat of mail and his sword at his side. Agincourt, too, they say. And the son fought for the Parliament while the father fought for King Charles.’
Pretty accurate. He left out my great-great-grandfather killed at Waterloo and the last of the line about to be disgraced as a traitor. Ah God! What sons my dark and lovely lioness might have given me!
On my next visit I was called in to see Major North – the skipper, as they called him. He was sterner than before and warned me that my only hope was to answer all questions frankly.
‘Headquarters say that they have no facilities for dealing with you,’ he said. ‘And that as I have gone so far I might as well complete the preliminary inquiry. In the end you will have to be taken down to Cairo for the final word. You may go there now if you wish.’
I replied that I was very glad that he was to be in charge.
‘Thank you. But we have a long way to go before you can be. Meanwhile here is some good news for you. General Kurtbek has given us a statement. He seems to be an admirer of yours. So is my sergeant-major. He’s lost when it comes to foreigners. No languages. But I have a great respect for his snap judgement on any Englishman. Now I am going to take a most unusual course with an enemy agent,’ he added smiling. ‘Will you dine with me this evening?’
‘As I am?’
‘I can lend you a very natty civilian coat. We are about the same size.’
Himself in civilian clothes, Major North picked me up at the hostel and drove out along the coast to a little seaside town where we sat under a spreading Judas tree at a dimly lit table obviously meant for a loving couple.
Finding that my knowledge of current affairs had gaps, he put me at ease explaining the campaign in the Western Desert. He was certain that the enemy had got as near to Alexandria as they were ever going to, and would have the hell of a difficult retreat just as we had. His summary was very clear and I asked if he was a regular soldier.
‘No, an amateur. I was a businessman in England. They picked me for a security officer because I spoke Arabic and German.’
He called for another bottle and I remarked that I had not been so well entertained since Berlin.
‘Don’t rush it! We’ll come to that later. My impression is that Hauptmann Haase would be a good start. Tell me the whole story. I shall take a few notes but I am not going to interrupt.’
I gave him the bare bones of my personal war from Sweden and Rostock down to my surrender to the Italians in Greece.
‘This burning hatred – it comes through. You never fired a shot without it. That makes the three years very hard to explain. Now let’s go back to Berlin.’
I replied that it was easy to explain, provided he accepted that I had one idea: to kill Hitler. I failed, was caught, bestially interrogated, but managed to crawl back to England. I told him how they sent an assassin after me and how when I had killed him I took his Nicaraguan passport, which enabled me to return to Germany and try again. I was trapped in Berlin by the outbreak of war which I could have sworn our government was too timorous to declare. Then I conceived the idea of being a known and trusted Nazi propagandist in order to get near my victim. But I became sick of my own parodies and tried to get home. The rest he knew.
Rogue Justice Page 17