Codeword Golden Fleece

by Dennis Wheatley

  The more he thought about it the more convinced he became that an aircraft was the answer to his problem. But how was he to get hold of one?

  The civil airport would certainly have its own police, and, if his description had been circulated, they would already be on the look-out for him there. Yet where else could he get an aircraft? On the outskirts of the more Western capitals there were numbers of private flying clubs, but Rumania was a backward country, as far as aviation was concerned, and from his wide knowledge of such matters Rex felt certain that he was most unlikely to find an aircraft of the range he needed on any Bucharest airfield, apart from the Military Aerodrome and the Civil Air Port.

  For a bit he racked his brains for any other place where aircraft of a fair size might be found, and suddenly an idea came to him. All that remained of the Polish Air Force was being flown out for internment in Rumania. Up in the north, just this side of the Polish border, there must be scores of aircraft lying idle, in any one of which he could make the trip out to Budapest or Belgrade. And the odds were that once the Poles had turned their machines in they were not heavily guarded.

  The only thing against the project was that it meant going right up to Cernauti in the Bukovina. That was almost the most distant part of Rumania from Bucharest, but on that count it had the advantage that it was the least likely place in which the police would look for him. He wondered if they, or the Iron Guard, would be watching the trains going to the north for Simon and himself, and thought it quite probable that they would not bother to do so. To be on the safe side, though, he decided to hitch-hike out to a station some miles to the north of the capital and take a slow train from there.

  Having made his plan, he stood up and finished the packing of the suitcase, putting Simon’s incriminating garments into it as well as his own bits and pieces. While he did so he was considering how best to let Simon know of his intentions.

  As the British and American Legations were ruled out, the only place where Simon, if he succeeded in getting out of the mess he was in, could hope to pick up Rex’s trail was here, at the Peppercorn; but Rex knew that any letter he might leave would go, via their officious landlord, straight into the hands of the police.

  It was with this in mind that he had tossed the option into the ugly wide-mouthed vase on the mantelpiece, and made his casual remark that he would not forget it because he had already put in it another letter of his own. Simon knew that he had written no other, so, if he were discharged with a fine the following morning, he would come straight back to the hotel and somehow gain access to their old room, probably on the excuse that he had left something there, in order to look into the vase to see if Rex had left in it a letter for himself.

  The snag was that in the interval the chambermaid might find the letter while doing the room and either throw it away as of no importance or give it to the landlord.

  Realising the necessity of disguising the meaning of any note that he left behind, Rex gave the matter quite a little thought and eventually wrote two notes, the first of which, scrawled on a plain piece of paper, simply read ‘Base over Apex’, and the second, written as small as he could on a strip of sticky-backed stamp paper, ran ‘Plenty of Jan’s Toys where your hat came from.’

  By Jan’s ‘toys’ Simon would know that he meant ‘aeroplanes’, and Simon’s fur-trimmed hat had come from the Cernauti district, so he would jump to it at once that Rex had gone there in the hope of getting out of the country by his favourite means of travel.

  Having taken the Golden Fleece out of the vase, Rex stuck the second message to its bottom and put the first one in it. If the chambermaid threw away the piece of paper with ‘Base over Apex’ on it, that would be no great loss, as, should Simon succeed in getting back to the room for the deliberate purpose of looking in the vase, he would pretty certainly look under it as well; but if the paper remained, then it would serve as a quick way of letting him know where to look should the landlord accompany him on his visit.

  Going downstairs, Rex settled the bill for his party and went out into the street. In order to disguise his height as much as possible, he adopted a slouching walk, and, as he knew that the taxi garages in most capitals were happy hunting-grounds for the police when they were trying to get on the track of foreigners, he took a bus as far as the Royal Palace, then changed into another which served the northern suburbs. He did not remain on it to the end of its run, again to avoid being remarked by the conductor and information later reaching the police about his movements, but got off when the vehicle reached the outskirts of the city and was still about a quarter full of passengers.

  He then walked for about three miles until a motorist on the now semi-deserted road, seeing him trudging along with his bag, slowed down and offered him a lift. As this good Samaritan did not speak anything but Rumanian, Rex was spared any embarrassing questions as to where he was going. The car took him on his way for another five miles, then pulled up in the square of a village, and the driver indicated that he was not going any further.

  On finding that the village had no railway station Rex set out north again. It was late afternoon now, and the country looked very lovely, although, owing to the great heats of summer, the ground was parched and the leaves of the trees already yellow. As he walked along, little traffic passed him, and he thought how strikingly different it was from any place within a similar radius of New York, London or Berlin. From all the great metropoli, modernity, with its hideous jerry-building, frequent petrol stations and advertisement hoardings, had stuck out its ugly tentacles twenty to thirty miles deep on every side. But here, although Bucharest itself was a fine city with many great modern buildings, less than twelve miles from its centre he was in the depths of utterly unspoiled country, where great fields of corn stretched unbroken by comfortless little houses, and the scattered farmsteads were great, picturesque, rambling places that appeared to have remained unaltered for many generations.

  There were now very few motors on the road, but occasional farm carts trundled by, and when he was tired of walking he got a lift in one for a couple of miles. Just as he left it and was thanking the farm-hand with a pantomime of smiles, a petrol wagon pulled up outside the gate of the farm they had arrived at, and its driver came into the yard to ask for a fill-up of water. After some difficulty Rex learnt that the man was taking his wagon back to Ploesti, the centre of the Rumanian oil industry, and as that was directly on his way he asked to be taken there, to which the driver agreed readily enough.

  Soon after they left the farm the landscape began to change; the rich cornlands and orchards gave way to a more desolate part of the Wallachian plain. There were no trees, and coarse grass covered the great open sweeps of land that ran unbroken to the horizon, until they came in view of the first oil wells. When they had covered another mile or so the square, tapering wooden shafts above the wells rose up out of the black earth to either side of them like clusters of lighthouses, but lacking their grandeur, strength and beauty. Here and there among them were ugly wooden sheds, and the atmosphere was polluted with the unpleasant stench of petroleum. It was a dreary and depressing scene, and Rex was heartily glad when about six o’clock the driver reached his journey’s end in the equally dreary and depressing little town that provides such a big proportion of the revenues of Rumania.

  He was now the best part of thirty-five miles from the centre of Bucharest and felt that he should be safe in continuing his journey by train. Ten minutes after he had been dropped he was making enquiries at the station and, with the aid of a German-speaking commercial traveller, learned that the night train from Bucharest to Cernauti stopped to pick up passengers at Ploesti at twelve-forty-five.

  Going out again, he made himself as comfortable as he could in the bleak-looking lounge of the station hotel, where he drank four tuicăs at reasonable intervals to while away the time. At ten o’clock, the earliest he could get it, he went into dinner and found the food of surprising excellence for such a place. But he ate only because
he thought he ought to and to get through another hour of his wait, being still too burdened with sorrow about de Richleau to take the least interest in his food or the bottle of Odobesti wine that he was drinking.

  At twelve-thirty he went back to the station and bought a second-class ticket for Cernauti, feeling that if he travelled first he was much more likely to be drawn into conversation with people who spoke a language he could understand, and have to give an account of himself; and, in any case, that second class was much more suitable to the clothes he was wearing.

  When the train came in the first-class compartments were comparatively empty, so that Rex could have got a sleeper had he wished, whereas the seconds were fairly full and not even a corner seat was available; so he had to sit up practically straight all night, but he tried to console himself with the thought that as a second-class traveller he was much less likely to arouse anyone’s interest and be remembered afterwards.

  When he and his fellow passengers roused themselves from their uneasy dozing the grey light of morning showed that the train was running through a country of rugged mountains, great forests and picturesque waterfalls. But they had some hours to go yet in one another’s company, as the run from Bucharest to Cernauti takes the best part of twelve hours and they were not due in until shortly before mid-day.

  Just before they pulled in to Cernauti, Rex took down his bag and went along to the rear end of the train with the intention of slipping off the last coach and getting out of the station by one of the entrances to its goods yard, just as he had done with the Duke and Simon two days previously at Giurgevo; but this time he was unlucky. He ran into a friendly, but in this case most unwelcome, train conductor, who, finding him to be a foreigner, insisted on taking his bag from him.

  In consequence, during the next ten minutes Rex suffered acute apprehension. He tried to restrain himself from looking about too anxiously, but he knew that if a check-up had been made the previous evening on Simon, linking him with the assault on von Geisenheim and the theft of the option for which the Germans had paid so much good hard cash, his own description, in full detail and much more accurate than any the Germans’ chauffeur could have supplied, would have been obtained from the little detective who had carried Simon off, and circulated during the night to all railway police.

  But no one challenged him, and outside the station he found a German-speaking droshky driver who took him, on his request, to a small, inexpensive hotel, called the Roebuck.

  The hotel was run by a family of Jews named Levinsky who had relatives in the United States and spoke a little English, as they were learning it in the hope of migrating to that Mecca of golden promise to all their race. They were hard-working, kindly people, and, although their hotel was packed with Polish refugees, they could not do enough for Rex. They provided him at once with a hot bath, although it was the middle of the day and most of their usual guests bathed only on Friday nights, the eve of the Jewish Sabbath, and while he was having it they specially prepared for him a good hot meal.

  Feeling much restored after this, he made a determined effort to throw off his crushing sorrow about the Duke and his anxiety about Simon as he sallied forth into the town to learn what he could about the evacuation of the Polish Air Force.

  He found Cernauti as unlike Bucharest as any town could be. The capital of the Bukovina had none of the spaciousness and splendour of the capital of the State. It was a congested, shabby place that yet had bright garish spots in its cinemas, theatres and dance halls. To his surprise he heard little Rumanian spoken in the streets, but quite a lot of German and considerably more of a language he guessed to be Yiddish from the appearance of its speakers.

  It was the 23rd of September, a Saturday, and the Jewish Sabbath was obviously being observed by a high proportion of Cernauti’s inhabitants. The main street and principal square might in some respects have been a section of the Jewish quarter of New York or of Whitechapel. The more prosperous of the population, all of whom seemed to be Jews, were wearing the bright, flashy clothes that pass for smartness with the middle classes of their race wherever it is to be found. Nine tenths of the shops, all bearing Jewish names, were shut, and these children of Israel were taking their leisure, the older people strolling along here and there, greeting their friends with grave courtesy, the younger ones chi-iking each other and shouting rowdy witticisms as the groups intermingled in the roadway.

  How these myriads of Jews had come to settle there he had no idea, but as he thought about it he remembered that Cernauti lay in the very heart of Middle Europe. It was almost equidistant from the Baltic and the Black Sea and occupied a position where four frontiers, those of Russia, Poland, Hungary and Rumania, very nearly met, and with that of a fifth, Czechoslovakia, only a little distance to the west. Perhaps the Jews had chosen it so that, whenever the Governments of any of those countries were affected by a wave of abit-Semitism, there were still others into which their surplus population could overflow without meeting such rigorous persecution.

  The only Christians to be seen were a sprinkling of peasants, attending the Saturday cattle market in the square, and the Polish refugees, who, in the main, were easily distinguishable by their appearance. Somewhat to Rex’s surprise, however, nearly all the Poles were civilians, and he saw very few men in Polish uniforms.

  Those that he did see were hurrying through the crowd, evidently intent on their own business; so, finding no groups of Polish officers idling and at a loose end, with some of whom he had hoped to get into conversation, he returned to the hotel and, sitting down in its small lounge, began to talk to some of the refugees who were its principal occupants.

  All of them had tales to tell, varying in their excitement and hairbreadth escapes from death or capture, but all ended in the same pathetic refrain—gnawing anxiety about the fate of loved ones left behind, destruction of homes and things held dear; the loss of businesses and the savings of a lifetime, the terrible uncertainties of the future.

  Rex listened in sympathy to those who could tell him of their tragic flight in English, French or German, and gradually obtained the information he wanted, without appearing to enquire for it. The Rumanians had shown great humanity to their suffering neighbours, but naturally they had to abide by established international procedure. Under the laws of war any defeated force might seek sanctuary in a neutral country, instead of surrendering to the enemy, but a neutral was under an obligation to intern any such force for the duration of hostilities.

  The Polish officers that Rex had seen in the streets were representatives of the Commandature of the interned Polish Forces, who had been released on parole for the purpose of making arrangements about quarters and supplies or their companions. A state of emergency still existed on the frontier, owing to the continued influx of Poles, and the Rumanian authorities were occupied in making encampments for them. These had not yet been completed, but the main body of Polish servicemen who had escaped over the frontier were already behind barbed wire some miles to the north of Cernauti near a little town called Grodek.

  It was now well on in the afternoon, and, seeing that only three out of the thirty days for which the option was good had so far elapsed, Rex decided not to go out to Grodek until the next morning. His wound, the terrible shock he had sustained the previous day and his uneasy night in the train had all combined to take it out of him, so he got the Jewish owners of the hotel to fix him up a high tea at six o’clock and went upstairs immediately afterwards.

  As he hung his jacket on the back of a chair he took the packet from his pocket for the first time since Simon had passed it on to him, and wondered where it would be best to put it for the night. After a moment he decided that until he could get it out of the country it would be safest in the money-belt that he always wore round his middle when travelling abroad. Opening the envelope, he refolded the sheets lengthwise and slid them into the longest pocket of the belt. To do so he removed the banker’s draft that he had been carrying there since Teleuescu had
refused to accept it two nights before, and, as its purpose had now been fulfilled by other means, burnt it. Within five minutes of his getting into bed he was sound asleep.

  Next morning, although his wound was doing well and the clean punctures in his healthy flesh already beginning to heal, he thought he ought to have it dressed again, so he consulted Mr. Levinsky, who sent him to a Jewish doctor.

  On his way there he saw that the town had now taken on a completely different appearance. Quite a number of true Bukovinians were strolling up and down resplendent in the peasant finery that they wore only on Sundays; but practically every shop in the place was open and the streets were packed with thousands of Jews shrilly driving their Sunday morning bargains.

  The Jewish doctor impressed Rex as cleverer than the man he had seen in Bucharest, and warned him when he was leaving that, although neither of the punctures was any longer discharging, he ought to keep his arm in the sling for another ten days at least. As Rex hoped to be flying an aeroplane long before that he did not expect to follow this advice, but he had every intention of taking as much care of his arm as he could.

  Anticipating that as Grodek was right on the frontier it would be even more crowded than Cernauti, he decided to leave his bag with Levinsky—at all events until he had made a preliminary investigation of the frontier town. The next problem was to get out there.