Codeword Golden Fleece
Page 39
There followed a long interrogation about his age and circumstances, his movements in Poland and during the four days which were all that he admitted to having spent in Rumania; about how he had received the bullet wound in his arm and about how he had been dressed when he was attacked. Finally, they asked if he had no business connections in Rumania who could speak for him.
‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘I’m sorry, but in Rumania I just don’t know a soul. You see, my firm’s a new one and as motor manufacturers go we’re not starting up in a very big way. My first trip was to include only Scandinavia, Poland and the Baltic States, then I’d figured to do a run round South-eastern Europe next spring, but naturally there was no point in making contacts in these parts until I was due to undertake the journey.’
‘What about Britain, France and Germany?’ enquired the Intelligence Officer. ‘I should have thought you would have gone for those big markets before bothering about Poland or the Baltic States.’
Rex gave a knowing grin. ‘I had a hunch that if I could place our automobiles in some of the smaller countries the bigger boys would be more prepared to listen to me when I tackled them. I figured they’d feel they were slipping a bit and getting behind the times if they weren’t stocking Stuyvesants when I could show them orders from Warsaw, Riga, Bucharest and Belgrade. Anyhow, that’s how I intended to play it.’
The Adjutant asked him to describe the new car, and Rex promptly launched into a spate of technologies. He had an extremely wide knowledge of both car and aeroplane engines, so it was easy for him to create in his imagination a sporting guttsey bus, somewhat on the lines of an M.G. and calculated to have a wide appeal to young men of moderate means, whatever their nationality.
This invitation to talk on a subject that he knew was the very thing for which Rex had been angling. It enabled him to speak so convincingly that his listeners now tended to gloss over in their minds a few hesitations in the replies to their previous questions.
When he had done the Adjutant asked him in an almost friendly way whether he objected to being photographed, and Rex replied at once:
‘Of course not. Just lead me to the camera. You can take my finger-prints, too, if you like. I’m just a plain American business man, and I haven’t a thing to hide.’
After the photographs had been taken, full physical particulars of Rex were noted down, then he was led along to the First Aid Room, where the jovial doctor re-dressed all his hurts. It was now midday, and back in his cell he was given a plain but quite eatable dinner.
During the afternoon and evening no one disturbed him, and when he turned in that night he felt that he had not had an altogether profitless day. By and large, the interrogation, which he had been rather dreading first thing that morning, had gone extremely well, and he felt that his captors were now inclined to believe him. The report, together with his photographs and measurements, would by now be on its way to Bucharest. These could not possibly be identified with any Nazi agent or German living in Rumania and listed as a suspect, that the Rumanian Secret Service might have on their books. In consequence, within another two days a clean bill on that score should come in. His captors had said that they meant to hold him until he could produce proof of his identity, but, once they had satisfied themselves that no dossier concerning him existed, it was reasonable to suppose that they would regard him as more probably unfortunate than dangerous and allow him a reasonable degree of liberty until his affair could be cleared up.
When the point was reached he meant to ask the Station Commander to give him the freedom of the camp, and, if necessary, he was even prepared to offer his parole in order to secure it. He would then put into operation the plan that he had thought of the night before. He would mingle with the officers, talk flying to them without disclosing his own prowess as an airman and, quite suddenly, on the first occasion that he saw one of them do a stunt, make a big bet that he could beat it. Once in the air he hoped to elude any pursuit, land in some lonely valley, hide the plane, go after Major Serzeski, retrieve the Golden Fleece, return to the hidden aircraft and fly out of the country.
It would be much more dangerous than his scheme to steal a Polish aircraft, as he was now on a military airport equipped with Ack-Ack, and fighter aircraft that would certainly go up after him, or even go up with him, as in this case he had the additional handicap of being a prisoner; but he put considerable faith in his great skill as a pilot to keep out of trouble if only he could get into the air.
The thought that he might have to break his parole had caused him a good deal of worry; but he had argued the matter out with himself and come to the decision that no individual should allow his own honour to weigh in the scales against the possibility of bringing victory for his country nearer by many months, if not years; and, as far as the war was concerned, Rex thought of Britain as his country.
It was now the evening of Tuesday, the 26th of September, and he reckoned that a clean bill on his case should arrive from the Secret Service Headquarters in Bucharest by the 28th. It might take him two or three days to become friendly with some of the Rumanian pilots, and the chances of any of them doing stunt flying would largely depend on the weather; but he thought that with luck he might be able to get away about the 2nd of October. The option would still have eighteen days to run; so, if only he could regain possession of it, there would still be plenty of time left to get it to London.
On the Wednesday morning he was sent for again at about ten o’clock, but this time it was only to see the doctor who re-dressed his wounds. After the business was finished, as the doctor could speak no French or German, Rex wrote out a message, which he handed to him, asking to be taken to see the Adjutant.
About a quarter of an hour later he was marched to the Adjutant’s office, and the dapper little man received him with a non-committal courtesy.
Rex asked at once if he could have some books to read, preferably in French.
‘Certainly,’ was the prompt reply. ‘It must be very boring for you sitting in that cell all day simply waiting to hear if we find you to be a perfectly innocent American or a case for incaceration in a fortress. What kind of books would you like?’
‘I’d be very grateful if you could lend me some on flying.’
The Adjutant looked up with sudden interest. ‘Are you a flying man, then?’
‘Well,’ Rex answered modestly, ‘I wouldn’t exactly say that. I’ve flown a bit, of course. Just amateur stuff off Club Airfields back home. But motor engines are my job and I know quite a lot about their innards, so naturally I’ve always been keen to witness their performance either on the road or in the air. I’m no great pilot myself, but just love being in the air, and I’ve done hundreds of hours as a passenger in all sorts of aircraft.’
‘Really!’ The Rumanian’s dark eyes lit with enthusiasm, and Rex felt the most awful cad as he saw that ‘Brotherhood of the Air’ which knows no bars of language or nationality function so spontaneously, and heard the little man go on: ‘In that case, if the people in Bucharest don’t identify you as a suspect and you have to hang around for a while until you can produce proof from abroad about your bona fides, I’ll take you up with me some time.’
‘Thanks, I’d like that a lot,’ Rex grinned.
Twenty minutes later, back in his cell, while he was still congratulating himself on the success of his first move, an orderly arrived with a stack of a dozen volumes on aeronautics.
He had read several of them in the original English, but a selection of the others served to while away the time for him quite pleasantly during the rest of the day.
It was about eight o’clock when his cell door was opened and he was taken along to the Adjutant’s office again.
The black-eyed little fellow did not look so cheerful as he had done that morning, and he seemed to be preoccupied with some other business when Rex was brought in. Having excused himself, he continued to shuffle through the papers on his desk for some moments. Then he said abruptly:
Rex realised at once that it was utterly futile to protest. As far as the Adjutant was concerned, an order was an order, and in this case there was not even the remotest reason for questioning it. He had already turned back to the papers over which he was worrying and merely nodded as Rex muttered a good-night before he was marched from the room.
It seemed that instructions had already been given regarding his transfer, as he was taken straight out of the building and put into an Air Force box-van with an armed escort of a sergeant and two airmen. Almost before he had time to realise the full import of the blow he was sitting on the narrow bench between his guards, and the van was in motion.
With a wave of sick despair he forced himself to accept the fact, that the plan he had been cherishing and elaborating for the past forty-eight hours now lay in ruins. He had been so pleased with the groundwork for its development that he had laid that morning, and now, without a moment’s warning, the whole basis of his plot to escape had been swept from beneath his feet.
It was quite certain that there would be no easygoing fraternity of airmen, or aircraft, at the military prison in Cernauti, and both were absolutely essential to the getaway on which he had been counting almost as much as if its success were beyond question.
To attempt to escape from the box-van while it was in motion and he had an escort of three armed men with him was quite hopeless, and the journey passed without incident. Threequarters of an hour after leaving the Air Force Station the van pulled up, and when Rex got out he found himself in a high-walled prison courtyard.
His escort marched him into a grim old-fashioned building of grimy nineteenth-century brick and duly handed him over. A truculent-looking warder took him up to a cell on the second floor and locked him in.
The cell was considerably roomier than the one he had occupied at the Air Force Station and better furnished, having a small marble-topped washstand, a deal table, a chest of drawers, two chairs and a brass bedstead. It did not look like convict accommodation, and he formed the impression that it had probably been used to house several generations of political prisoners in the days when Cernauti was Czernowitz and the easternmost city of the old Austrian Empire.
The prison certainly seemed to date from the days when the authorities relied more upon the strength of stone and iron than carefully worked-out technique to prevent prisoners from escaping. As Rex thought of the open cages in modern American prisons he was grateful for the privacy and comparative comfort of the room into which he had been put, but as he noted the wrist-thick iron bars across the windows and the double lock on the heavy door he knew that, without friends outside to aid him, escape from such a place would be virtually impossible.
His transfer had, apparently, cost him his supper, as, although he sat about for an hour, no one brought him any, and he did not think it good policy to start his sojourn there by kicking up a row and banging on the door. So he undressed and got into bed.
Next morning another tough-looking warder brought him his breakfast and a jug of water to wash with, so it seemed that he was to be given no opportunity to communicate with any of the other prisoners; a point that depressed him as it lessened still further any prospect of escape.
Just after ten o’clock his cell door was unlocked, and two men came in. The first was a pale-faced officer of slim build, with thin sandy hair and pince-nez, who did not look like a Rumanian; the other, who carried a writing-board and paper, was obviously a clerk.
The officer introduced himself as Captain Ferari and mentioned at once that his mother had been an American of Swedish extraction, and that it was owing to his knowledge of English that he had been given Rex’s case. He added that he was not actually on the prison staff but attached to the Headquarters of an Infantry Division stationed at Cernauti.
The clerk sat down at the table, Captain Ferari took the other chair, while Rex made himself comfortable on the bed and submitted with the best grace he could muster to another long and searching interrogation.
Ferari spoke English with great fluency and only a slight accent, but as his words tumbled out he sometimes misplaced them and frequently muddled his tenses. His manner was mild and pleasant, but Rex soon saw that he was much too sharp to be easily fooled and so told his story with considerable circumspection.
When the examination was over Ferari asked the same old question as to whether Rex could not possibly think of anyone in Rumania who would come forward and identify him, or at least substantiate the fact that a Mr. Mackintosh was the European agent for Stuyvesant cars.
On Rex replying in the negative the Rumanian said: ‘Well, I will be most frank with you. Your photographs and descriptions bear no likeness to any agent or suspected agent in the Bucharest files. But you were taken in circumstances most suspicious. Nothing convinced me that you did not bandage your face for purposes of redress. Why then should you slink in? To make this approach normally you would have ask at the guardhouse, “Please take me to the office, I wish to make complaint to the Commandant.” The theft of our defence plan by the man called Kilec is a matter most serious—especially at this time when there is war. If the Germans go into Hungary they will be then our neighbours. That they should now have the location of our airfields in the north is bad. The Poles are convinced that you are associate with Kilec. Of Nazi agents there are great numbers, and comparatively few of them are known to us. How can we tell if the Poles are right or not? Why should we take a risk? If there were not war things would be different; but Rumania may become involved. For our own protections we must keep you locked up until you can provide the proofs that you are who you say.’
‘Sure,’ Rex agreed. ‘I see your point of view all right; but I’m mighty anxious to get out of here. Have you any ideas on how we could set about securing these proofs you want?’
‘We could send photographs of you to the Police Chief in your home town in America and if he okayed them that would be proof sufficient enough.’
Rex had foreseen that, if they really meant to hold him until they were a hundred per cent satisfied that he was not a Nazi spy, this was the sort of line they might suggest; and it was for that reason he had purposely made the information he had given about himself very broad. Plenty of people to whom photographs of him might be sent could identify them as of Rex van Ryn, but very few would be prepared to say that they were of Mr. Rex Mackintosh. He was therefore now able to reply:
‘As I said in my statement, my home town’s little old New York; and that burg’s a bit too big for the Police Chief to be on christian-name terms with everyone in it.’
‘I meant the town you came from before you live in New York,’ said Captain Ferari.
‘Sorry,’ Rex grinned. ‘But I can’t claim to be one of those village kids that made good. I was born right in the heart of Manhattan and I’ve been kicking around there most of my life. No. I’m afraid the police angle’s no good. I guess I never thought the day would come when I’d be sorry I’ve no criminal record, but I haven’t; so we can’t ask for any check-up on that either.’
‘Where was your passport issued?’
‘New York.’
‘We could send your photograph to the Passport office and ask them to make a check of it.’
‘Sure!’ Rex replied casually, hiding his sudden concern. ‘But unfortunately I’ve forgotten its number, and without that they’ll take the whale of a time to trace it up. You know what Government Departments are, and I don’t want to be stuck here till Christmas.
’
‘Naturally not, if it can be avoided. Your Bank then?’
‘They’d certainly give us what we want quicker.’
Rex was prepared to use his Bank in an extremity, as he could see to it that the enquiry was made direct to his father, and he felt confident that old Channock would read between the lines and play up; but that meant the letter would be addressed to Mr. van Ryn, and he did not wish to bring his own name into the matter if it could possibly be avoided; so he added: ‘Wouldn’t my firm do as well, though?’
‘I think your firm would do,’ Ferari nodded. ‘If they replied that the photograph we send is of Mr. Mackintosh, their European representative, that makes sufficient enough for us.’
‘Okay. Better address your enquiry to F. V. Stuyvesant, Stuyvesant Motors Inc., 1062, Park Avenue, then.’
Actually F. V. stood for Florence Venetia, and the lady of that name who occupied a charming penthouse on the top of 1062, Park Avenue was Rex’s aunt. It was for that reason he had chosen the name Stuyvesant for his imaginary make of car. The old lady would be a bit puzzled when she received a letter addressed to her as a man and inferring that she was the head of a motor manufacturing firm, but Rex knew that on seeing his photograph she would have the sense to take it to his father before answering the enquiry, and Channock would handle the reply. In his mind’s eye Rex saw the old man’s slightly twisted grin as he ordered some suitable note heading to be specially run off for the job.