Mr. Calder & Mr. Behrens

by Michael Gilbert

  Mr. Behrens bent his head to look at the satchel which stood on the floor between them. It was then that the full shock hit him. It was not the satchel he had prepared.

  It was very like it but it was not the same. He had worked on it too long to be deceived. The stitching was different and the colour was a shade lighter.

  As he thought wildly, turning over various permutations of treachery in his mind, the car swung to the right, over a dry ditch and on to the perimeter of the airfield.

  The driver jammed on his brakes so hard that the car behind them nearly ran into them. He shouted something and pointed out of the car window, as a pandemonium of noise erupted.

  Six Russian fighter planes, coming low out of the sun, dived at the convoy, their cannons blazing.

  Mr. Behrens jerked the nearside door open and rolled into the ditch. The driver landed on top of him. Round the airstrip, after a moment of paralysed silence, the German anti-aircraft guns opened up, but they were firing into an empty sky. The six planes, hedgehopping, had swung right with the precision of well-trained chorus girls and disappeared in the direction of their own lines.

  In thirty seconds it was all over. As the firing died away, Mr. Behrens cautiously raised his head.

  Most of the occupants of the rear three cars had reached the ditch. The people in the front four cars, having nowhere to go, had either jumped out on the far side of the cars and lain flat, or had simply stayed put. Most of the actual casualties had occurred in the thick lines of black-shirted troops surrounding the perimeter, and field ambulances were already on the move.

  Colonel Mulbach was standing beside their car. He pointed. Whatever Major Mendel’s troubles had been, they were over. He was sprawled across the back seat. A bullet had gone through the back of his skull. The satchel was still on the floor of the car. The Major’s blood was dripping on to it from a pool which had formed on the edge of the seat.

  Mr. Behrens took the satchel, feeling as he did so for the catch under the handle. His guess had been wrong. His fingers found the catch, and it was not yet set.

  Footsteps approached the car. Mr. Behrens looked up and saw an SS colonel, unknown to him, approaching. The colonel took a quick disinterested look at Major Mendel, took the satchel, swung on his heel and walked back towards the head of the convoy where interest seemed to be centring round the front two cars. Mr. Behrens followed cautiously.

  Every instinct told him that something had gone badly wrong and that he ought to keep clear. It was professional pride alone which took him forward.

  A dozen Russian bullets had whipped through the back of Hitler’s car, apparently without hitting anyone. The car itself was empty. Of Hitler there was no sign at all.

  In front of the car stood SS General Pohl, squat and self- possessed, backed by a semi-circle of staff officers and guards. General Busche had got out of his car and was approaching with Major Nachtigal on one side and Captain Heimroth on the other. Approaching was the wrong word. They were being driven forward by SS guards behind them.

  The scene reminded Mr. Behrens of something, but for a second he could not put a finger on it. Then everything clicked into place. What he was witnessing was a field court-martial.

  General Pohl said, “As you observe, General Busche, the Fuehrer changed his plans at the last moment. He decided to leave from Airfield South, and should by now—” Pohl made play of consulting his watch “—be well on his way back to Rastenburg.”

  General Busche examined the bullet-riddled car and said, “It was fortunate for him that he changed his mind.”

  “Very fortunate, and a demonstration that Providence intends that he should live and fulfil his glorious destiny. Yes?”

  “No doubt about it,” said General Busche.

  “He instructs me, however, to add,” said General Pohl, and the sneer in his voice was no longer concealed, “that the bag of despatches which was to have been placed in the plane, is of such importance that he insists they be taken to Rastenburg at once.”

  “I see.”

  “And since there are a number of matters, General Busche, urgent and important matters, which he desires to discuss with you, he has decided that you should yourself fly back to Rastenburg with the despatches. Major Nachtigal and Captain Heimroth will accompany you. The plane will be flown by Luftwaffe Major Lecke. He is already at the controls.”

  Pohl indicated the Junkers 52 standing on the airstrip. He added, “You will be in no danger from the Russians, General. A fighter escort will accompany you for the first hour of your flight. After that you should be in need of no further assistance.”

  There was a long silence. Then General Pohl said, in tones of elaborate surprise, “You are not hesitating, General, to obey the direct orders of our Fuehrer?”

  General Busche glanced for a moment at the group which surrounded him; at the massed ranks of the SS beyond, and up at the clear sky above him. Then he gestured to Heimroth and Nachtigal and they walked forward and climbed into the plane. The SS colonel followed him and handed in the blood-stained satchel. The door shut, the props turned, the Junkers 52 taxied down the runway and took off into the light breeze, turned slowly and headed west. From the nearby Luftwaffe airfield came the roar of fighters as they followed the Junkers 52 up into the air. The men on the ground watched as the planes flew steadily westward, diminished in size, became specks in the deep blue Russian sky, and disappeared at last.

  Mr. Behrens remembered little of the drive back to headquarters, or of the rest of that day. No-one took any particular interest in him and he was not sure whether this was a good sign or a bad one. After dark that evening there was a quiet knock on his door. He opened it with one hand deep in his jacket pocket. Colonel Mulbach came in, walking softly like a doctor visiting a very sick man, and closed the door carefully behind him.

  Mr. Behrens went to the cupboard and took out a bottle of schnapps and two glasses and brought them across to the stove. He said, “What went wrong? Or don’t you know? And what is going to happen next? Or don’t you know that either?”

  “What went wrong,” said Mulbach, “is that Major Mendel changed his mind. He decided that Hitler’s daemon would preserve him, just as it has in the past, in many such attempts, and that the SS would prevail over the army. Having come to this conclusion he behaved perfectly logically. He went to General Pohl and exposed the whole plot to him.”

  “The whole of it? You and me as well?”

  “Rest assured that he did not mention you or me. If he had done so we should not still have our teeth and fingernails.” Mulbach poured the schnapps down his throat with a quick twist of his wrist and held the glass out to be refilled. “He told what he knew. No more. That General Busche and his three staff officers were planning to kill the Fuehrer with a bomb which he, Mendel, was to place on the plane. The satchel was to be given him by General Busche personally. He knew no more. Whereupon Pohl – he is an able man; now that Heydrich has gone he might aspire one day to Himmler’s job – Pohl devised the pantomime you saw this morning. It would have been too great a shock to morale if a popular commander like Busche had been relieved of his command and placed under arrest on the very eve of the offensive. So he and his three fellow conspirators were offered an easy alternative to the Gestapo torture cells and death on the hooks. A clean and sudden death in the air.”

  “It wasn’t the bomb I made,” said Mr. Behrens. “I noticed that in the car.”

  “It was a replica. They would keep the original for examination.”

  “But since it wasn’t mine they’d have no means of knowing when it was going to explode. It might have been half an hour. It might have been three hours.”

  “That was why they threw it out of the plane soon after they were airborne. They had no desire to sit about waiting for death. They then flew the plane straight into the ground.”

  Mr. Behrens poured himself out a second glass of schnapps, rotated it slowly in the crimson glow from the stove and said, “How on earth do y
ou know all this? About Mendel, I mean, and the SS counterplan, and that sort of thing?”

  “General Pohl told me. I am his confidant, naturally. I arrange his communications with the Russians. He does not know that I had any connection with the bomb plot. I think the only man who may dimly have suspected that particular tie-up was our late friend, Major Mendel.”

  “I suppose that was why you shot him?”

  “You saw me?”

  “I saw nothing. I was too busy rolling into the ditch like everyone else, but I noticed that the bullet had gone through the back of his neck and come out at the top of his head. It seemed an odd sort of trajectory for a bullet fired from an aircraft. Incidentally, you were very lucky that the raid gave you the opportunity to do it.”

  “I arranged it on the wireless last night.”

  “Good God!” Mr. Behrens swallowed his schnapps. “Wasn’t that rather dangerous?”

  “Not so dangerous as leaving Mendel alive.”

  “I suppose not. What happens now?”

  “What will happen next is that the team of experts who are being specially flown here from Berlin will examine the real bomb. They will do their work with great thoroughness. Each piece of material used in it will be subjected to microscopic analysis. Sooner or later they will conclude, without doubt, that it must have been made in your workshop.”

  “And then?” said Mr. Behrens.

  “You are a very brave man,” said Colonel Mulbach, “but are you sure that under the special methods of interrogation which they will surely employ, you might not weaken and implicate me?”

  “A remedy has been provided for that.”

  “A cyanide pill? But that is a defeatist solution.”

  “Can you think of any other?”

  “Certainly. I have arranged to have you captured by the Russians. I think that will be the best way of ensuring your safety.”

  “But what about you?”

  “Oh, I have been very discreet,” said Colonel Mulbach. “You will have noticed that my visits to you have been made after dark. My driver, Lorenz, knows of them, of course. I think you had better take him with you.”

  “I think you’d better come too.”

  Colonel Mulbach considered the matter, then he said, “No. With Mendel gone and Pohl perforce on my side, I shall be safe enough. The game is not yet over. I’ll stay and see it out.”

  “You’re a braver man than I,” said Mr. Behrens.

  The commander of the tank squadron looked doubtful. He said, “That village is almost no-man’s-land, Dr. Brancos. Could you not get observation from here?”

  “Of a sort,” said Mr. Behrens, “but not flank observation.”

  “Then I shall have to send a troop to protect you. And for that I should have to have instructions from higher-up. In view of the coming offensive we have been particularly ordered not to take risks with our tanks.”

  “That I appreciate, but there is nothing to prevent me going forward on foot. My driver can carry the wire and telephone. Your signaller will pay out the reel carefully and stand by to take down my messages at this end. You will be in no danger.”

  “I was not thinking of the danger,” said the officer stiffly, “but of my orders. However, if you insist on risking your own life, that is entirely a matter for you.”

  He watched Mr. Behrens and his driver crawl forward up a ditch, reappear briefly at the far end and finally disappear into the rubble of what had once been a Russian village.

  The wire on the reel snaked out steadily. The signaller, who was watching it, said,” He is going very far forward. He is a brave man.”

  “He is a bloody fool,” said the officer.

  From the far side of the village came a shot, more shots, then the beat of heavy Russian machine gun.

  The officer swore. “Now we shall have to try to rescue him,” he said, “and we’ll lose a couple of tanks in doing it.”

  In fact, he ran into a very carefully prepared ambush and lost six.

  Two hours later Mr. Behrens was seated in the headquarters of the 143rd Russian Infantry Assault Brigade. His knowledge of Russian was sufficient to enable him to carry on a limited conversation with the youthful brigadier and his much older brigade intelligence officer who had turned out, disconcertingly, to be a woman.

  “We have informed Moscow of your arrival,” said the brigadier, “and they will be sending a plane for you tomorrow. Meanwhile, we have been told to make you as comfortable as possible. We are a little primitive here, I am afraid.”

  “It looks just like home to me,” said Mr. Behrens.

  The woman, who held the rank of major, said something and the brigadier smiled. He said, “Yes. Play it back to us on the loudspeaker.” And to Mr. Behrens, “You will be interested in a message we monitored and recorded this morning. It appears to have originated from an aircraft radio.”

  The loudspeaker in the corner clicked and cleared its throat; and then, out of the ether, General Busche spoke.

  “With only a few minutes to live,” he said, “I should like to speak to anyone who can hear me. Our country is in great peril. Unless we can come to our senses, awake out of sleep and throw off the gang of criminals and perverts, headed by the maniac who calls himself our Fuehrer—”

  Here the message got buried in an outburst of static. “They are trying to jam the wavelength,” said the major.

  Then, for a moment, the interference died down and Mr. Behrens heard General Busche say, “I, who am about to die, salute you, my country. You will survive this foul tyranny and you will rise again, purer, stronger and greater.”

  Dominating the sound track now was the aeroplane note of the engine as it went into a power dive, a high shuddering scream of ill-treated machinery, rising to a crescendo. Then, at the last moment, silence.

  The major got up and switched off the loudspeaker. “You don’t hear the actual crash,” she said. “The transmitter must have disintegrated at the moment when the plane hit the hill side.”

  Mr. Behrens was not interested in these technicalities. He was thinking, “One warring God gone to Valhalla. How long before the others join him, and peace comes into this grey, embattled world?”

  2

  Emergency Exit

  It was six o’clock, on as foul a morning as could be imagined.

  In Warsaw it was raining, in the way it rained just before the rain turned to sleet and the sleet to the first snow of winter. The wind from the east lifted the rain and blew it, in a fine spray, down the Grodsky Boulevarde and into Katerina Square. In the far corner of the square, the electric sign of the Hotel Polanska was fighting a losing battle with the early morning light.

  A man, dressed in an overcoat which hung nearly to his heels and armed with a long broom, was sweeping down the pavement which fronted the three cafes on the south side of the square; he looked up from his task. Something was happening at the Hotel Polanska across the way.

  The front door jerked open and two uniformed policemen came out. They were half carrying, half dragging a man who looked as if he had been pulled out of bed and had not been allowed to put on all his clothes. A police officer raised a gloved hand. A car slid up. The four of them bundled in. The car drove off.

  A fresh gust of misty rain blew across the square. It was as though a motion-picture director had said “Dissolve” and the scene had been wiped out. The square was once more quiet and empty.

  The sweeper rubbed a frayed cuff over his eyes, and bent to his work. He was paid by all three cafés, and if he swept for one better than the others, there would be complaints.

  When he had finished, he shouldered his broom and shambled off. His course took him past one of the kiosks which sold newspapers and cigarettes. He stopped to have a word with the bearded stall keeper who was taking down the shutters. The man listened, nodding occasionally. Later that morning he himself did some talking, into a telephone.

  The news reached an office in Whitehall with the afternoon tea trays and was passed
on to Mr. Fortescue, the Manager of the Westminster Branch of the London and Home Counties Bank, as he was getting ready to catch his train home that evening. The message said, “They’ve taken Rufus Oldroyd.”

  Mr. Fortescue considered the matter, standing in front of the fireplace, with its hideous chocolate-coloured porcelain mantel. From the expression on his face you might have judged that the account of one of his most trusted customers had gone suddenly into the red.

  Nine o’clock, on an autumn morning straight from paradise. The sun, clear of the mist, was full and golden, but not yet giving out much heat. In the drawing room of Craysfoot House, a log fire was crackling in the grate, and the smell of percolating coffee was scenting the air.

  “Damn the girl,” said Admiral Lefroy, “how many times have I told her that I like my eggs boiled for four minutes!”

  “I’ve told her a dozen times,” said his wife.

  “By the feel of this one it’s been boiled for fourteen minutes.”

  “Give it to Sultan.”

  “I’ll do nothing of the sort. The quickest way to ruin a dog’s manners is to feed him at table. You’ll have him begging next. Balancing lumps of sugar on his nose.”

  “When you were in command of a ship, I’m sure you were horrid to all the little midshipmen.”

  “It isn’t a captain’s job to be horrid to midshipmen.” The Admiral glared at the official letter he had just opened.’’ Damn!”

  “What’s up now?”

  “Got to go to town. The First Sea Lord’s called a conference. It’s wonderful how busy they manage to keep us, considering we haven’t got a Navy.”

  “I’ll go with you. We can come back together on Friday afternoon.”

  “Who have we got this weekend?”