The Alice Factor

by J. Robert Janes

  The priest smiled and indicated the club. “She’s gone to the country. I was just about to see if the carpenters had started work.”

  Somehow Lev found his voice. “Do you know her then?”

  “But of course. Cecile, she is an old friend of my family. Me, I am also her priest, so”—he gave a priest’s shrug “—she and I share a few things. A cup of coffee now and then. She has asked me to keep an eye on the place while she’s away.”

  Crossing the lane, he went up to the back door and inserted the key. “Is there a message you’d like to leave? Was there something …”

  Wunsch shook his head. “No. No, there is nothing, Father. My firm was asked to quote on the roof. The eaves, you understand.”

  “The eaves? But she hasn’t mentioned this to me.”

  Worried now, he came back and stood there staring up at the roof. “The eaves look well enough.”

  “That’s what I was going to tell her but—” Wunsch asked for a cigarette “—one can’t really tell without the ladders, Father. These old places … always it’s the same thing. Lift a bit of flashing and … ah! a thousand francs’ worth of work.”

  “Would you like to see inside the place? I’m sure she wouldn’t mind. The attic’s easy enough to get at.”

  “No. No, that wouldn’t be proper. When will she be back?”

  Wunsch drew on the cigarette and filled his lungs. To hell with doctors. To hell with everything. They’d stop this “priest”!

  Lev heard the man say, “In two weeks. She always goes to her farm at this time of year, but usually leaves the club in Berke’s hands.”

  Berke was the woman who ran it for her. The padlock was on the garage.

  The “priest” slid a hand into the left pocket of his jacket. Lev said, “Bernard, there’s that other job we have to look at. Perhaps we should come back on Monday with the ladders?”

  “Monday … yes, yes, that would be best. Father, do you think that would be all right?”

  Damas glanced from one to the other and allowed himself a faint smile. “But of course. Monday would be perfect. I’ll tell her you were by.”

  The diamond, an octahedron from South Africa, was shot through with specks of ilmenite but ice clear otherwise and of about two carats in weight. One corner of the crystal had been broken off to create an extremely sharp edge.

  Hagen held the stone under the bedside lamp before slipping it away in a pocket of his jacket. Dieter Karl hadn’t seen him palm it. He was certain of this.

  There was only one way he could possibly escape. For a night, a day and on into the following night he had thought of little else. Somehow he had to get a warning out that they intended to seize the diamonds, that Dieter now had a squad of men in place and that he was in contact with them by wireless. Dieter was so anxious to get back to Antwerp, he could barely disguise his impatience.

  The only thing in his favor was that from the cook, the butler and Dieter’s adjutant right to Krantz and the SS guards, everyone expected him to try to escape. They were all watching for it.

  Again he glanced at the clock. The workers had left the villa at 7:00 p.m. At eight the guards had been changed. At eight-fifteen they had begun yet another patrol—forty-five minutes, no more. Twice around the building and then out into the grounds to the very edge of the park for a final sweep.

  Once done, they had returned to the guardhouse, which was just inside the gates. There they’d had a chat with the sergeant, a smoke perhaps or a cup of coffee. At nine-fifteen they had begun it all again, and at ten-fifteen.

  The dogs would be on the leash. Both of the guards would carry their rifles over a shoulder. Both would have flashlights they wouldn’t use unless necessary. But would they stop by the fountains and the fish ponds as they had before? Would they let the dogs drink?

  Hagen pulled off his shoes and socks. Stuffing the socks into the toes, he tied the laces together with a slipknot, then left the shoes on the bed.

  Easing the heavy chest of drawers against the door took time. Adding everything else he could to stop them from entering the room as long as possible took a little more.

  Again he watched the clock and practiced counting so as to time himself. Switching off the light, he slung his shoes around his neck and stood there in the darkness.

  At twenty minutes past midnight he crawled out of the window and clung to the narrow stone ledge high above the driveway.

  Krantz would be watching for him through binoculars. There’d be shades of darkness. The Berliner would be sure to see him climbing down the drainpipe and running out across the lawns to hide in the gardens. He’d give him a chance to get away and then close in.

  From the last of the fish ponds a tiny stream ran on to join one of those in the park. Irmgard and he had once followed it. He knew he had to reach that stream. There were footbridges and paths, even a small lake in the park, surrounded by roads except where a branch of the stream rejoined the Isar.

  Talking softly, the guards passed below him.

  He began to count. When he judged the guards had turned the corner, he worked his way along the ledge until he reached the balcony.

  Clinging to the corner by the drainpipe, Hagen hid his shoes between the bars of the railing. The guards came back and headed out into the gardens. They would now go from pond to pond, from clump of cedar, boxwood hedge and arbor to beech, linden and fir. They would make a careful circuit of the edge of the park where it adjoined the garden, and then they’d come back.

  He was lying in the last of the ponds, all but submerged behind its central fountain, when the guards returned and paused to let the dogs drink.

  “We are not to shoot him, Bruno. He is to be caught.”

  “And if he gets away?”

  “The Oberstgruppenführer Heydrich will have our balls and if not him, the Gestapo Krantz.”

  The one called Bruno broke wind. The dogs threw up their snouts. “He won’t escape. The searchlights will pin him down.”

  Their voices faded. From pond to pond the guards cut across the lawns and gardens, heading for the far corner of the villa.

  Staying well clear of the stream, Hagen ran at a crouch for the edge of the park. He was in among some trees when he smelled stale cigarette smoke.

  Krantz had men everywhere. Time … there was so little time.

  Stealthily crawling away from the man, he forced himself not to bolt and run. When he reached the edge of a broad grassy swale, he went cautiously down into it and quickly up the other side.

  More shrubs and trees followed, then more open grassland. The stream would be off to the right. Making for it, he stopped suddenly.

  When he found the man, he was so close to him he could hear him breathing.

  The man moved off. Hagen stepped into his place. There was a path. Stone chips were underfoot.

  Reluctantly he followed.

  The path wound down through a scattering of trees to a footbridge. Beyond this there was a narrow strip of parkland and then a road.

  The man reached the bridge and spoke quietly to someone. Hagen turned away downstream of them and crossed, recrossed and again crossed the stream.

  When he waded back upstream to the bridge, the men were still there.

  How much time was left? A minute? Five minutes? Could he really do it?

  Crawling under the bridge, hearing the sound of their boots softly scuffing the boards above him, he moved silently away.

  When a light rain began to fall, he had reached the first of the fish ponds. Then he went from pond to pond across the gardens, picked out as best he could the route he had taken on leaving the villa.

  The shoes were there where he had left them. Pausing only long enough to slip them about his neck, he tugged on the drainpipe once more and looked up at the eaves.

  He was on the roof of the villa when the searchlights came on and the dogs began to bark.

  The building in which Dillingham’s had their offices and shop was in darkness, as indeed were a
ll the buildings on the street.

  Damas signaled to the two men who had come with him. One would watch the street, while the other came into the building with him.

  Bernard Wunsch was working late—very late. The heavy drapes had been pulled across the windows of his office. The city was quiet.

  Using the keys he’d had made, Damas unlocked the outer door and reached in to switch off the alarm system. Walking quickly, they went along to the stairs. The musty odor of closed rooms, dust, ink, carbon paper and stale coffee and tobacco smoke came to them, and at last the sound of muffled voices behind the dim and rippled glass of the office door.

  Wunsch had someone with him.

  Troubled at the thought, Damas strained to listen, then slid the key into the lock and softly opened that door as well.

  Turning to the man who’d come with him, he said “Wait here. Shoot only if you have to.”

  The door to Wunsch’s office was partly closed, the green of the lampshade showing at once the worried frown, the cigarette and the back of the man who sat before him.

  “Cecile wouldn’t work for the Nazis, Mr. Wunsch. Och, I met the woman when she and Richard were engaged.”

  “But I am telling you something has happened. Lev and I went to the army for help. We tried to get them to believe us—my God, won’t you? That empty cartridge for a Very light—isn’t that evidence enough?”

  Damn the Belgian army for not listening. “How many men do you think they have?”

  That was better. “Thirty—at least that many. Lev and I believe they are hiding in the club of this woman and that they know we are to use the Megadan.”

  “The Club Chez Vous.”

  “Yes, yes, that is the name of the place. This priest—”

  “Karl Christian Damas.”

  “Yes, yes, that’s the name. This man, he has so many others. We know they have infiltrated the premises of the Mercantile Company. Five of his men have jobs there as drivers. Five, Mr. McPherson. Hence, it was so easy for them to find the trucks to move these parachutists from the farm.”

  “And Cecile?” asked McPherson.

  Wunsch drew on his cigarette. The woman had obviously had a change of heart and had shown her true colors. “Working for them. In bed with the baron. Of this we are certain.”

  McPherson couldn’t tell him that Cecile had taken it upon herself to contact him through Richard’s mother. He couldn’t say, You’re wrong. She’s one of us.

  Instead he said, “What’s happened to her?”

  “Gone to Munich, I should think. Left the country perhaps.”

  Wunsch kept glancing at the shade of his lamp and then flicking a quick look past him to the door of the office.

  “Another cigarette?” said McPherson, offering the package he’d brought over. Their fingers touched, the Belgian quickly tapping out an SOS.

  McPherson reached for the telephone. Wunsch grimaced and madly shook his head.

  The Scotsman glanced at his wristwatch. “The men I brought with me should have been here by now, Mr. Wunsch. It’s gone half two already.”

  When they went to check the building, they found it empty.

  “I thought someone was listening to us,” said Wunsch. “I must have been mistaken. Nerves … it was just my nerves.”

  As darkness came again, Hagen stretched out on the slates. For the remainder of the previous night and throughout the day armed SS and Gestapo men had come and gone and never once had they thought to look for him on the roof of the Villa Laumannfeld.

  Coiled into the base of one of the statues that lined the eaves, he had kept out of sight and had tried to ease his cramped limbs.

  The slates were treacherous. More than once he slipped. When he reached the main part of the roof, he lay there too exhausted to move.

  The cars and trucks of the SS and the Gestapo still lined the Prinzregentenstrasse. Across the way there was a row of tall houses; beyond these, a maze of old and fashionable streets. If only his luck would hold. They must have already done a house-to-house search of those streets.

  The crown of the roof was flat. Hagen wormed his way across it and went down the far side. A pigeon flew off, startling him. Then the sound of the rain came to him and he felt it on his hands and face.

  Clinging to the wall, he reached the window at last and took out the diamond. First he’d need a small hole up in one corner …

  The glass cut easily. He pressed a thumb against the corner and the piece broke free.

  Now he cut the pane, outlining a large enough area so that he could lift the glass away and open the window.

  The blackout curtains were heavy. The room was off one of the bedrooms. By degrees he picked out a sewing machine, basket of mending, some cloth—material for a dress perhaps—a pair of scissors.

  Frau Gerda Meyer, the cook, was reading in bed. The satin nightgown was pink and frilly, her shoulders rounded, the tired blond hair unpinned.

  She adjusted her glasses and looked up and across the bedroom toward him. Hagen didn’t move from the crack in the door. She shivered once, twice, plucked at the nightgown and settled down.

  None of them would sleep until this business was over. For once she’d managed a decent situation and now some pig of an Englishman or was he a Belgian?—no, he was an American, ja—had come to spoil things for her.

  This war was no good. Now more and more the Gestapo and the Sicherheitsdienst were asking things about the baron, and she was having to make them up just to show she was loyal to the fatherland.

  Far better one should read detective novels and let the world go by.

  She turned a page and heaved a sigh, but the cold, damp air had gotten to her. Hagen knew it had. She’d give him away. She’d cry out and sound the alarm.

  From the sitting room windows of Bernard Wunsch’s comfortable flat, McPherson looked out over the lights of Antwerp. The Club Chez Vous hadn’t contained a soul, the farmhouse had been empty.

  Had Damas murdered Cecile Verheyden?

  Somehow the schoolmaster had managed to get his men away. The Belgian army had done the searches, including a warehouse-to-warehouse scrutiny that had, for the available time and men, been quite thorough.

  Yet still, there were so many warehouses in the port of Antwerp. It hadn’t been easy convincing the powers that be to sidestep their own government and do the necessary.

  Still gazing out over the city, he said, “We’ll be ready for them. Just you see that your army holds them off long enough for us to get up the estuary.”

  The Belgians would throw an armed guard around the Megadan and the diamonds if—and this was the fly in the ointment—if, for bloody sakes, there was the need!

  An invasion …

  “There’ll be planes—fighters and bombers,” said a grim-faced Bernard Wunsch. “Tin fish, hawks in the sky and eighty kilometers of estuary to negotiate.”

  “Small arms and grenades before that. Mortars,” said McPherson.

  “We will do what we can. Me, I have my revolver.”

  Damas hadn’t been picked up, though the police and the Belgian security service had a countrywide bulletin out on him. McPherson wished he had someone in Antwerp to replace Cecile, someone to keep a watch on things independent of Wunsch and his diamond cutter.

  Arlette? he wondered. With his eye steadfastly on the future, Churchill had said the girl was to stay in Scotland.

  Yet could they not use her now? Could they not send her over? The girl could handle herself well enough, could shoot with the best, knew Damas, knew the ropes, the city.

  Would only be killed, as she would in any case if the worst came as it surely would, and the Germans overran the country.

  As yet he’d not told Wunsch and his wife the girl was alive, though he now knew how much the news would mean to them.

  Reaching for his coat, he gruffly said, “We’ll keep in touch. Do what you can to hold them off and I’ll be here with the destroyers as soon as I can.

  Frau Gerda Meyer had
read for a good hour. Now her snoring came softly. Hagen eased the sewing room door shut behind him. She stirred, murmured in her sleep and turned over with a sigh.

  Feeling his way cautiously across the room, he soon came to the bed and felt for something to cover her face. But did she really have to die? Was it right of him?

  He left her alone and went out into the hall. Dieter was still up. The voice of a young woman came and then that of Dieter. “I should be in Antwerp, Hilde. Heydrich should never have agreed to let Krantz release Richard to me. Now the Gestapo will hold me responsible for his escape, and we may well lose the Antwerp diamond stocks.”

  The girl spoke soothingly to him. “Don’t worry so much. My God, they’ll catch him, those guys. Darling, come to bed.”

  “In a while. Richard knows we’re getting diamonds through from the Congo, Hilde. It won’t take him long to figure out how. This we cannot have.”

  “Come back to bed. Bitte, Dieter. I’m ready for it.”

  “Go to sleep. My men are all in place, but I’m not there to be with them.”

  Dieter went into the sitting room to switch on the wireless, but all he could get from the Propaganda Ministry was an interlude of Bach.

  Along the hall from him Hagen clutched the brandy decanter and a box of matches. The lift was just big enough for the laundry or a breakfast tray, but it ran from the second floor down into the cellars.

  Easing himself into the thing, he tried the switch but nothing happened. The girl came along and went into the washroom. The music grew louder. Hagen tried the switch again.

  Dieter … Dieter was so close.

  The water closet flushed. The girl began to run a bath. Hagen slid the lift door closed, and at once the thing began to move. Would Dieter hear the sound of it? There were dogs loose on the first floor. Did they have the run of the cellars as well?

  Hilde Meissner tossed her nightgown into the sink and turned on the taps. Heydrich had ordered her to get to know the Baron Dieter Karl Hunter. At twenty-one years of age she had the body of a goddess, had ridden naked at some of the Munich festivals. The startling blue eyes and blond, blond hair were those of a pure Aryan. The baron had money and power but not so much of the latter as she would have liked. And he had a mistress in Antwerp that the Oberstgruppenführer of the SS wished to know more about.