The Alice Factor

by J. Robert Janes

  Arlette knew it wasn’t Willi. Repeatedly she let the waves suck her under. “Willi …” she began again. “Willi, why didn’t you come?”

  As she sank below the waves, her dark brown trench coat floated up and then her sweater. She’d be tearing at her things, trying to get free of them, until her arms and legs no longer of any use, the sea had taken her.

  “You fool!” seethed Krantz, swinging so hard he knocked Damas to the ground, opening the schoolmaster’s lips and breaking his nose. Not content, the Berliner gave the Belgian’s ribs a savage kick.

  The girl … the Huysmans girl. They’d been so close, the boat so near. She’d have had so much to tell them.

  Krantz flung a last desperate look out to sea, as a seaman signaled that it was all over.

  Richard was in her arms, warm, so warm and close to her. As Arlette sank, her hair floated out and she felt his kisses in it, felt his lips on hers and saw him smile, knew again how much he loved her. Richard … Richard … She wrapped her arms about him and sank.

  TO HAGEN RICHARD VILLA HUNTER MUNICH GERMANY

  FROM WINFIELD MRS LOIS ANNE INVERLIN COTTAGE BLACK DOWN HEATH PORTESHAM ROAD DORCHESTER ENGLAND

  DARLING IT WAS SO KIND OF YOU TO WRITE STOP CAN YOU MANAGE THIS SUMMER I WONDER STOP FRANK IS ALWAYS PLEASED WHEN YOU JOIN US STOP DO TAKE CARE STOP LOVE MOTHER

  Decoded, the message read:

  TO ALICE FROM THE CARPENTER

  OPERATION A FAILURE / WHITE RABBIT SENDS REGRETS

  Ten

  THE HOUR WAS LATE, the music hauntingly mellow. A few couples still clung to one another on the postage-stamp dance floor. Tobacco smoke hung in the air, and the talk, as if by mutual consent, was sporadic and muted.

  Cecile Verheyden made her way among the tables of her all but empty club. When she came to Richard’s table, she reached out to touch the evening shadow. “Why not come upstairs and tell me? Sometimes it helps.”

  “There’s nothing to tell.”

  “Look, I read about the drowning in the papers. Would it do any good to say I’m sorry? Arlette was lucky, you know. So lucky.”

  “Why? They killed her.”

  Her slender throat constricted. As she sat down opposite him, Cecile ran an uncertain caress over the table. Von Ribbentrop had been shuttling back and forth to Moscow at an alarming rate. Molotov had gone to Berlin. If the two of them should make an accord, there’d be war.

  “Cecile, I could use a little help.”

  “Are you asking me to take sides? If so, then I … What a stupid thing for me to say. Of course, I must choose, mustn’t I?”

  There was no warmth in Richard’s gaze, no memory of the good times they’d had together.

  “Let’s go upstairs then, to the office. We can talk better there.”

  Hagen shook his head. “I was followed, as I am everywhere I let them. When you close up, leave the lock off the back door.”

  When he returned, Cecile was waiting in the darkness of the kitchens. Hagen could hear the gentle swish of her nightgown as she led him through to the club and up the stairs. On the landing, she paused and felt the breath of him on her shoulder.

  “I don’t like what’s happening to you, Richard. You act as if you were in the jungle and it was your father speaking to you.”

  “He is, and I am.”

  She opened the door to the office, felt for the light switch, only to feel his hand close over hers. “What is it you want?” she asked.

  He moved away, and when she heard him opening a drawer, she understood.

  The gun had been her husband’s, a Browning FN 9 mm Parabellum pistol with a thirteen-shot magazine. Richard slid the breech back, removed the clip and made certain the thing was loaded.

  “Can I use your telephone?”

  “Richard, what the hell is this? Some kind of death wish?”

  He moved to her and she felt the chill of the gun in his hand. “Only that I don’t want you hurt. You’ve done enough already.”

  They sat in the darkness, and when he got through to England, she heard him saying, “Mother, this is Richard. I’m sorry to be so late but could you …”

  When decoded, the message would read:

  TO THE CARPENTER FROM ALICE

  CONTACT MADE ANTWERP SD CELL DAMAS KARL CHRISTIAN SCHOOLMASTER ÉCOLE DE MAAGDENHUIS ANTWERP / DAMAS USES ALIAS FATHER LANNAY ADRIAN / HAS LOCATIONS SIZE ALL ANTWERP DIAMOND STOCKS QUESTIONS MEGADAN ROUTE RELAYS DIRECTLY TO KRANTZ THROUGH BRUSSELS EMBASSY ASKS DETAILS FINAL PLAN / REQUEST PERMISSION BRING KRANTZ OUT SILENCE ALL BEFORE TOO LATE / ALICE

  “So, what was that all about? Since when did you ever talk to that mother of yours about ‘oysters,’ Richard, and ‘quantities of sand’? My God, are you crazy? The Nazis—”

  “Cecile, I met one of the men who caused Arlette to drown herself. London can help me put an end to them.”

  “London … Is Duncan involved in this, too?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then I don’t think I’d better hear anymore. Would you like a drink before you go? Oh, I’m not tossing you out, Richard. We’re like lost lovers, you and I, cast adrift at a time of what could well be war.”

  They’d have that drink. Hagen followed her and when they were in the sitting room, he found the whisky and let her drink from his glass. “Get out now, Cecile. Run while there’s still time. Go to the States. You’d make a fortune. New York, Chicago …”

  “Not Antwerp and Chez Vous? No, I couldn’t do that. For me, each day I’m getting a little older. Besides, a man has come back into my life and I would like to seduce him for old times’ sake but know he would only think of the love he has lost.”

  She took the glass from him and finished the whisky.

  “Cecile …”

  “Come to bed. Just lie there with me. Nothing more. Look, I don’t expect anything. We’ve had all that and it was finished for us. But you need to be with someone, Richard, and I think I need to be with you.”

  He let her lead him by the hand. She lay down beside him. “Tell me about Dieter Karl.”

  Tell me, Richard. Tell me.

  They were choosing sides. Denmark, of course, had agreed to a nonaggression treaty with the Nazis. Danish eggs, butter and cheese in exchange for Hitler’s smiles. Norway, Finland and Sweden had turned the bastards down flat. Latvia, of course, and Estonia hated the Communists, so what could you expect but that they’d sweetheart Hitler.

  The Russians, though, were such a problem. If they agreed to an alliance with the democracies of the West there still might be some hope.

  “Ascher, it is like watching a traffic accident develop. One knows people will be maimed and killed. One sees it, ah, with such clarity, and yet one is powerless to stop it.”

  Lev squeezed the last of the lemon into his tea. Normally he didn’t take sugar but today … just the pleasure of being able to choose was enough.

  He set down the spoon and left the sugar untouched.

  Wunsch lit up, took in a drag and nodded grimly. “Yes, yes, I know what you’re going to say. Ship the stocks to London. Give those Belgians the letters of guarantee they want. Bah! You’d think the British would have the sense to agree. You’d think the king would insist we move the diamonds. But what do we find? They distrust each other and the king still tries to appease the Nazis. We’ll be caught with our trousers down, Lev. I know we will.”

  Lev asked the question they’d both avoided. “When will Richard go back?”

  Wunsch loosened his tie and tugged at the elastic bands that held his shirtsleeves up. Cigarette ash was all over the place. “Arlette … we miss her, Lev.”

  “I asked—”

  “Yes, yes, I know, but I am still the director here, and I have said he is not to go.”

  “Then I can drink my tea with pleasure, Bernard, and offer you a slice of my Rachel’s honey cake.”

  Wunsch tossed his head. “I’m getting to think your daughter can’t bake anything else! Ah, Ascher, forgive me. I just don’t know what the
hell to do with our diamonds if the Nazis come. Toss them in the sea, I suppose.”

  He snatched up the latest batch of orders. The August Thyssen Hütte in Duisburg was Germany’s largest steel mill. Hamburg, Bremen, Kiel held the major shipbuilding firms. All up and down the Ruhr and the Rhine, the industrial heartland of the Third Reich poured out its smoke. Siemens-Martin steel, ball bearings—Lorenz and Heliawatt, mammoth engineering works.

  Where hadn’t Richard been?

  “They are raising a hue and cry for him, Lev, and the Nazis are beginning to think he won’t be coming back.”

  “If I were him I’d go fishing in Scotland.”

  Bernard’s eyebrows lifted.

  Lev gave a brief smile. “Arlette … she had never been there before. Did she tell you that? We used to talk a little. That girl, Bernard. In many ways she was so like my Rachel.”

  “Lev, listen to me. If the worst should come, we will take the diamonds we have here and leave.”

  “The Belgian police would only impound them at the border. We’re trapped, Bernard. Why not just walk out the door and leave everything?”

  When Hagen joined them, Lev had just finished making a fresh pot of tea and Bernard had switched to coffee. The wireless set was on and Hitler was screaming invective at the Poles.

  “It’s his lungs,” said Lev. “I think he’s got a cold.”

  The moths seemed not to care about themselves. If on the first fall they didn’t hit the water in the fish pond, they would struggle back up through the air to scurry madly about the glowing paper lantern. It was as though, in seeking the light, they had become drunk with its power and would throw their lives away.

  Irmgard watched them for a while. No telephone calls could get through to Antwerp. No civilian cables were being allowed out. In the warmth of June 1939, the Wehrmacht had closed all the filling stations in Munich even though there were tourists everywhere. Poland was very much on everyone’s mind. Daily there were great flights of fighter planes and bombers, and at night they had heard them, too.

  She couldn’t warn Richard not to come back, not to try to save them.

  Dipping a hand into the fish pond, she rescued a moth and took it toward the house where she set it in the branches of a cedar.

  She could, of course, extinguish the paper lanterns—there was no reason why she couldn’t do so. The party was over for them. Soon there’d be no light at all.

  When Irmgard went upstairs, Dee Dee heard her scream. Naked and shivering in the bathroom at the far end of the hall, she was staring at the tub.

  Rushing past her, Dee Dee turned off the tap.

  Irmgard couldn’t look at her. Aware of what had happened, she hung her head in shame, and when Dee Dee threw a towel over her shoulders and hugged her tightly, Irmgard’s voice was empty. “Don’t let Richard tell me anything. Don’t ever let him trust me again. They will ask me what he’s said, and I will have to tell them everything. They’ll drown me if I don’t.”

  She had gone upstairs to have a bath—such a simple thing—but had filled the tub with ice-cold water.

  “Will you come with me to the mountains?”

  “Heydrich has said I can’t.”

  They were above the tree line now, and as they threaded their way along the crest of the moraine, Dee Dee no longer had any doubts as to what Heydrich intended.

  At Bludenz, just before the border with tiny Liechtenstein, they had turned off onto a side road to leave the car and begin to climb. Three Wehrmacht corporals, with rucksacks and slung rifles, were ahead of her, then the sergeant and the colonel. The men carried her suitcases and Erika, the Feldwebel a Schmeisser and rucksack, the Oberst his pistol in its holster. All of them were from the army. There hadn’t been a sign of the SS, but who could tell where loyalties lay?

  High above the valley, caught in a small amphitheater, they stood out against sky and earth. To the east, at their backs, an ice-capped crag gave veils of meltwater that dropped some three hundred meters to angular talus. Then the water disappeared among the rocks and issued far down the slope as a rushing brook.

  All around the shelf the moraine curved in a steep horseshoe-shaped embankment. Somehow she would have to warn Richard. Somehow she would have to stop him from trying to save them.

  Beyond the moraine a scree slope rose to a tiny patch of alpine meadow, which culminated in a naked spur and ridge. The Feldwebel, an experienced mountain guide, indicated that they were to go over the ridge. From time to time the colonel looked back at her. Impatiently he pointed to the clouds and shouted, “We must have time to return to base before dark,” as if it was the only important thing and he was as fearful of the place as she.

  The echo of his voice rang in the silence. A boulder clattered away, and when the sound of it had finally faded to nothing, Dee Dee started up the final slope. Richard would try to bring the rocks down on the men. He’d take a look at that talus and think, It wants to fall.

  But he wouldn’t know Irmgard wasn’t with her.

  The moment passed. She began to climb again. The ache in her chest was now making her pause every second step. Hooking her thumbs into the straps of her rucksack, she tried to get her breath.

  The scree was too steep. Behind them it fell away to the ledge on which the moraine huddled. From there, the valley’s amphitheater opened outward to drop down into the forest far below.

  At last she reached the crest of the ridge. Now the land before her fell away in a meadow bright with sky-blue lupines, cotton grass, the tiny yellow flowers of the mountain avens and the soft pink bells of the heath.

  With its steeply pitched roof and darkly timbered eaves, the alpine hut clung to the shores of a tiny ice-fed tarn. From the hut, a trail wound past the woodshed and down the mountainside.

  Switzerland lay before her, and Dee Dee knew she would have to look at freedom each day knowing she would never be allowed to reach it.

  “Mijnheer Lietermann, it’s kind of you to see us.”

  “Not at all, Richard. Please come in. Bernard, it’s good to see you. Ascher, you should come to work for me. How many times must I ask? Loyalty, Bernard. Such loyalty.”

  They went upstairs to the main drawing room. “The walls, gentlemen. I apologize but I’ve taken Richard’s advice and leased a modest country house in the Lake District of England.”

  The place looked positively barren. An uncomfortable silence settled on them. Lietermann offered coffee, which was politely refused.

  “So, we will sit the four of us and talk. And you, Lev, will not think, There I told you so, Bernard. The brass always save their own asses first.”

  Lev’s eyes were watering. He had difficulty swallowing.

  “Ascher, I’m not—I repeat—not pulling out on you or anyone else. My wife and I will stay to see it through. The paintings … My God, they are priceless. Now, please, what have you come to tell me? Is it about Isaac and his secret plan to use the trucks of the Mercantile Company?”

  Wunsch reached for his cigarettes, then thought better of it. “Jacob, Richard is …”

  Hagen took over. “What Bernard wants to say, Mijnheer Lietermann, is that although I’m not guilty of it, the SS are blackmailing me over the death of de Heer Klees. I’ve had to tell them certain things but not the plan you and I agreed to. What is essential is that we stick to the Megadan and that you tell me exactly what de Heer Hond has in mind for those trucks. Believe me, mijnheer, the SS know everything about it, but if I’m to mislead them, then I must know everything, too.”

  A sadness came to Lietermann’s dark eyes. “Is it that you intend to go back into the Reich in spite of everything?” This could not be.

  It was Lev who said, “What else has he to lose but his life?”

  Lietermann acknowledged the loss of Arlette and briefly sketched the plan for him. Hagen told him about Irmgard and Dee Dee. Though the risk was there, he had no other choice.

  “Will you try to save them?”

  “If I can, though not at th
e expense of the diamonds. What I need is your absolute guarantee we’ll use the Megadan. Mr. Churchill will take care of things from his end. The dummy strongboxes must be placed in those trucks, and I’d go so far as to suggest some of them be filled with diamonds. Sacrifice if we must, for the greater objective of keeping the stocks out of their hands.”

  “There are collaborators, Belgians who will help the Nazis seize those trucks,” said Bernard gruffly. “For me, I wish we could mine them somehow, Richard. A simple switch—the ignition perhaps—explosives in among the boxes.”

  “Bernard, Bernard, these new American films …” began Lev. “Gone with the Wind … Gone with the Blast! It sounds as if you want to go to war.”

  “It sounds as if I am angry, Lev.”

  “Then leave the thinking to Richard. He’s the spy.”

  The tension in Berlin was everywhere—in the news vendors around the Potsdamer Platz, in the man who had sold Irmgard a handful of roasted chestnuts, which she had bought not to eat but to feel the warmth of them.

  All the headlines were the same: Berlin-Moscow Nonaggression Pact Signed.

  For days—weeks—the crisis over Poland had intensified. Every wireless broadcast had poured out the invective. Every newspaper had shrieked the same. The Poles would not listen. They would not peacefully settle their differences with the Reich. Peace could only be bought at the price of blood.

  As the car pulled in to the curb in front of the Hotel Adlon, Irmgard looked down at the newspaper packet of chestnuts. Their warmth had all but gone.

  Leaving the bag on the seat of the car, she took a moment to compose herself, then got out and walked steadily up the steps and into the hotel.

  Here, too, especially, there was tension. The bar was crowded with foreign correspondents who clamored for news.

  She stood alone before the lift.

  Richard was waiting for her in his room. Suddenly nothing else mattered but that she be held by him.

  He felt her tears, felt her lips pressed against his cheek.

  Shaking, she clung to him and bit a knuckle to stop herself from breaking down completely. They’d drown her if she didn’t tell him what they wanted. “Richard … Richard, you must get us out! Please! Before they kill us. Dieter won’t do anything! Dee Dee’s got tuberculosis. Heydrich’s sent her to the mountains. I’m to go there, too.”