The Alice Factor

by J. Robert Janes

  Hunter ducked. The Berliner swung again and lifted the bandages. “So, you’re to blame. Dachau for him. Bugger the diamonds, Baron. Bugger you! When Heydrich finds Hagen has flown the coop with his files, he’ll cut your heart out!”

  Blood trickled from a split lip. Hunter straightened himself. “Then use your head. Richard will try to reach Antwerp.”

  The abandoned school was back from the river up a narrow street whose cobblestones glistened in the early-morning rain. People were about—housewives at their shopping, seamen coming from ships that had docked in the harbor, others going off to work. Children … always there were children, the boys scruffy in their school uniforms, the girls often tidy but so sleepy-eyed.

  There was the usual pub and on the corner, a tobacconist’s, a cafe, a greengrocer’s, a milliner’s … the village was self-contained, the street itself.

  Arlette paused to look in the window of the tobacconist’s. She longed for a cigarette, a thing she had never done before Ostend. She’d come to date everything in her new life from that awful day she had had to run into the sea and had so very nearly drowned.

  And now she was back, and the city … the Central Station, the Pelikaanstraat and the diamond district, the Meir and its tramcars, the Cathedral of Our Lady, the Grote Markt … all had brought so many memories. Richard had been in each of them. She mustn’t think of him. He was gone from her. Gone, and she had a job to do.

  Nicholas Pijner looked up from the cash drawer where he’d been ruefully puzzling over a handful of crisp new German marks. The girl had finally made up her mind and had come into the shop. Pretty, with short-cut deep chestnut hair whose wisps stuck out from beneath a dark brown beret. About twenty-five years of age, he thought, giving her a generous smile and forgetting all about the marks, which hadn’t had the look of real currency about them.

  “Good morning,” he said, the accent thick. “Can I help you?”

  Arlette set the faded brown leather briefcase she’d bought in a secondhand shop in Brussels on the edge of the counter between them. “Yes. Have you any English cigarettes? Everything in your window is Dutch, and I … I’m not yet used to anything other than the English ones.”

  “Tobacco is tobacco, and these—” he reached for a package “—are extra mild.”

  She had the money ready, knew exactly how much they’d be.

  “That school at the end of the street …” she began. “Is it still in use? Someone has said it …”

  “Is it that you’re in search of a position?” he asked. The young—she was so earnest.

  The blush the girl gave was emphasized by the shyness of incredible bedroom eyes that ducked away, then came back to gaze quite frankly at him. “I had hoped there’d be something for me in the fall perhaps. Languages … I have my certificates. Girls … I would prefer to teach only girls.”

  The languages would explain the English cigarettes. Pijner hated to tell her the truth. “That old place has been closed for years.”

  “Is there a watchman?” she asked, dismayed by the news.

  “A watchman? No … no, the place went bust and they simply bolted the doors and left. But the boys … the drunks …” he gave a shrug. “It’s not a place I’d go if I were you.”

  Arlette broke open the package of cigarettes. Offering them, she took one herself and he lit it for her, watched as she gratefully sucked the smoke into her lungs like a trooper. My God, had she been playing around with him?

  “That school … has anyone been interested in it lately?” she asked.

  Within the past two days, perhaps?

  Pijner thought of the fistful of German marks the priest had given him. He thought to tell the girl that the bills could quite possibly be counterfeit.

  The priest had bought more than enough cigarettes for one man. Mevrouw Oudkirk had said that her youngest son had thought he’d seen someone in the place.

  Gruffly Pijner said, “The school’s closed, Juffrouw. It’s no place for you.”

  Again she filled her lungs before stubbing out her cigarette in the cup of the sawed-off mortar shell he used as an ashtray.

  Keeping to the inner side of the street, Arlette went along until she saw a chance to cross over to a bakery. From there, using the windows as a mirror, she could see the school well enough. Steps led up to the front door. Windows, high and streaked with grime or broken, gave out onto the street.

  A gabled crown would be above it all. There were four floors and they’d be in the top one. From there, the roofs offered not only a means of escape but also of defense.

  The bakeshop was busy. Waiting at the counter to be served brought no comfort. Somehow she’d have to get into the school. She had to be certain they were there.

  “An almond croissant and a coffee, please. No cream. Just black.”

  She found a table in the window where she could watch the place.

  No one paid it the slightest attention. It simply looked what it was supposed to be, a derelict. The front door would be bolted. There must be a lane behind the school. A window … ? Another door? A fire escape? Would such a thing be required by law? It would be so much better if there was a fire escape, so much easier for her.

  The back door opened at a hesitant touch. At once the smell of the place came to her, that of the damp, the dust, the chalk, the drains that were plugged … so many things. Rags lay about—bundles of them, heaps, one of which stirred in its drunken stupor, too tired and sodden to open his eyes.

  Still clutching the briefcase, Arlette picked her way through to the front entrance. The rooms were huge, the ceilings high. The staircase that led up to her left was wide.

  She slid a hand in over the butt of the Browning in her coat pocket and released the safety catch. Clumps of dust filled the corners of the steps, whose brown linoleum runners were torn in places and worn through in others. Rubbish was everywhere, graffiti on the walls whose plaster had been broken open in fist-sized holes.

  Upstairs, in the first of the classrooms she came to, someone had cleared a place for sleeping. The blackboard was a mass of scribblings, some of which had been carved by nails that had been pulled out of baseboards and moldings that had been removed.

  She drew the gun and, still clutching the briefcase, which contained nothing but two newspapers, made her way through into the next room only to stop suddenly at some sound.

  A scraping … ? Yes … yes, that’s what it was. A boot against the floor? A haversack?

  No, neither of these.

  Anxiously Arlette gazed up at the ceiling above her. Had she heard enough? Could she be sure?

  Would Damas recognize her? And why should he be here at all? Why wouldn’t he have gone out to watch the place as she’d watched it, knowing someone might come?

  She wished Mr. Churchill had said she could call in help. To do this alone … it was crazy of her.

  Routine took over, and she slid the gun away, willing herself to be calm.

  She was studying one of the blackboards when the scraping started up again. Concentrating on the writing, she waited but no steps came.

  And soon the scraping stopped.

  When she found the cause, Arlette turned quickly away, then bravely stepped forward into the room to put her foot down hard on the thing.

  It was a rat whose hind legs and tail had been cut off, and whose right front leg had also been removed. The poor creature had gone round and round in agony, leaving a thin trail of blood wherever it went.

  There was no other evidence of anyone having been on the second floor, none at all on the third floor. Then on the fourth and last floor she found the butt of a cigarillo in the chalk tray of one of the blackboards.

  The smell of sweat and men, close on the air, was added to the others.

  Arlette went over to the windows to look down at the street. A squad of thirty men … a schoolmaster. Where would they have gone?

  Back to the port of Antwerp, now that it had been searched?

  Determined to
quit the place, Arlette crossed the floor only to stop suddenly as she passed the blackboard.

  Though hastily erased, there were traces of something … of the river … ? Yes … yes, there was the Steen Castle, and upstream of it the pedestrian tunnel she’d taken, the Tunnel voor Voetgangers.

  Downstream a kilometer from the tunnel, at the head of the old port of Antwerp, there was the outline of the Tunnel voor Voertuigen, the one for cars and trucks that was so much longer. The Willemdok Oude showed vaguely, the outlines of the Kempischdok and the Kattendijksluis, the maze of the modern port opening to the north and east of these.

  Where had they gone? Time … would there still be time?

  From a vent in the roof of the warehouse loft there was an excellent view of the Kattendijkdok, which here ran straight away at a right angle to the north from the Willemdok Oude. The freighter Megadan was still moored to its quay halfway along the dock. The tracks of the electrical railway that serviced the docks ran past the freighter as did the cobbled surface of the access road.

  Damas studied the maze of cranes and ships before him, picking out the movement of a trawler that had been in for repairs. As always, the port of Antwerp never stopped, always there was something moving.

  The overhead sheet-iron roofs of the quays would offer places for sniper fire, but better still, the roofs of the warehouses themselves.

  It had been good to have overheard Wunsch say they’d be using the Megadan.

  Squeezing aside, he let the SS Untersturmführer Gerhard Theissen join him. Blond, blue-eyed, rawboned and incredibly fit, Theissen had about him a decisive air of command. No matter that the Baron Dieter Karl Hunter had not yet been able to join them. He had his orders.

  Theissen noted the rooftops of the warehouses, in particular one that lay close to the much smaller Kempischdok which ran parallel to the Kattendijkdok and lay just to the east of it. “That one,” he said, his voice a whisper, “has a small shed on top to house its lift machinery. Two of my men up there would do nicely.”

  The shed was almost in line with the freighter. An iron access ladder ran up the near side of the warehouse. “The trucks? Can they approach from the far end of the dock?” he asked.

  Two Belgian army trucks had been stolen and were being kept in readiness at a warehouse across the river.

  Damas nodded. Had they thought of everything? The steel girders that supported the roofs over the quays left the areas beneath open and exposed. The Megadan lay on the other side of its quay. That, too, was good. Three freighters were berthed beyond her, then a passenger ship of the Norden Line that had found haven here.

  A tugboat entered the Kattendijkdok and began to make for one of the other freighters. The boom of a hydraulic crane swung near another, unloading lumber.

  “For now we must wait,” he whispered tensely, cursing the delays, cursing the continual need to move the men.

  No one spoke. All talking in the loft was forbidden. They weren’t even allowed cigarettes until after hours when the shop below them finally closed and the men on the evening shift went home.

  As so many times since their arrival in the dead of night at the farm, Cecile Verheyden anxiously swept her eyes over the assembled men. They were tough and well disciplined, wore Belgian army uniforms over their own.

  They all had their weapons—Schmeissers, she’d heard one say at the farm, Bergmanns another. Two machine guns, even an 80 mm mortar, lots of stick grenades and boxes of explosives and ammunition.

  A short-wave transmitter whose operator had definite times for making contact with Berlin or wherever. These times were late at night, in the small hours, but still the wireless operator stood by on the hour during the day.

  Damas looked at the woman. Always watched by one or two of the men, she had not as yet tried to give them away. He should have killed her at the farm, but Krantz would want to question her. And the baron? he asked himself.

  The baron might also wish to do this.

  One of the men tugged at his trouser leg. Turning, Damas saw Theissen motioning him to the vent.

  A girl was walking along the Kattendijkdok toward the Megadan. Stevedores paused, seamen paused to whistle, to grin and to leer at her. She fought off their stares, carried a briefcase and walked more quickly.

  Theissen raised questioning eyebrows. It was not usual for a girl to walk along the docks.

  She passed the freighter, and when she reached the warehouse of the Norden Line, turned in at their office.

  The girl soon reappeared, the manager pointing eastward and indicating that she was to go two docks over. “The Asiadok,” breathed Damas. “Help me onto the roof. I must see what she’s after.”

  “Is that wise?” asked Theissen.

  Damas knew there was a good chance he’d be seen. “That girl … there’s something about the way she walks.”

  “Like a soldier, ja,” said Theissen, grinning.

  “A soldier?” blurted Damas. “No … no, as if she knew someone might be following her.”

  Arlette reached the railway line that would lead her to the Asiadok. The dikes along the riverbank were not far to the west of her, perhaps a little more than a kilometer of warehouses, channels and quays.

  Dillingham’s fabricating shop was to her right, down the long length of the dock. She thought of de Heer Wunsch and how worried he’d been that time they’d checked the shipments for the Krupp. She thought of how he had strolled along the Kattendijkdok and hadn’t even given the freighter a glance. But that had been a long time ago, and now things were so very different.

  She wished she could have used the loft above the fabricating shop. It would have been ideal for her purposes. No problem with stringing the wireless aerial. No one need ever have known.

  Not the distance to Brussels—at least a good hour and ten minutes by train. A loss of valuable time. Oh for sure, it was far better security for her, but here was where the problem lay, and it was going to take her days to find Damas and his men. Days!

  That night she sent the briefest possible message from the flat on the Boulevard Anspach in Brussels. GROUP HAS MOVED FROM SCHOOL / AM SEARCHING PORT OF ANTWERP

  The night watchman at the fabricating shop was a creature of habit. As soon as the evening shift had given their last shouts of departure, he would lock all the doors, then walk to the foot of the loft stairs to switch on the lights above and sit down on the lower steps to have a cigarette.

  Outside the building, he made a circuit of the place, only to reenter to switch off all the lights and scare the hell out of them each time, for they never did know if he’d take a notion to check the loft.

  Then this crusty old Fleming would retire to his shed in the shipping yard behind the place, to read his newspaper yet again perhaps, to have his coffee and another smoke.

  When he was certain the man had left, Damas stepped out into the night and went quickly along the Willemdok Oude and across the tracks that separated it from the Kattendijkdok. Fog had rolled up the estuary. Lights above the warehouse doors glowed dimly, those of the ships, dimmer still.

  The girl had continued to haunt him. Why a briefcase, why here today, why now? Was she an assistant of some kind? Had she merely been sent to deliver some papers?

  East, along the Kempischdok, there were warehouses for steel girders, bearings, rubber and bananas … more of the same along the Asiadok.

  None of them would have been interesting to a girl of that age. Tall and with such a good figure. Where … where had he seen her before?

  When he found the warehouse Theissen had pointed out, he found the iron ladder that ran up the side of the building. From the roof of its lift shed there’d be excellent views of the Megadan. Two snipers could easily pin everyone down, letting the trucks get closer.

  But still he’d have to use the suitcase. They’d need that, too. Thirty kilos of high explosive and a timer.

  The ever-present sounds of the harbor came to him, the winching of cargo, the distant shouts of stevedore
s. Hammers on a sheet-iron hull, the trains as they rumbled alongside the docks.

  Chancing a cigarette, Damas stood motionless on the roof of the lift shed, feeling how close they were to the diamonds and yet how far.

  He’d have to watch for the girl with the briefcase. If she came back tomorrow, he’d have to kill her.

  * Later to be called the Waffen SS

  Thirteen

  THE SHATTERING CRUMP OF the bomb threw stones and plaster dust into the street. The mournful wail of air-raid sirens and the steady thump of antiaircraft guns were broken by the cries of a child.

  Bernard Wunsch didn’t know what to do. The child was standing in the middle of the street beside the body of its mother. Behind it, the walls of the house were ready to collapse. Flames leaped from the roof and poured from the windows.

  He ran. The pain in his chest hit him like a sledgehammer. Baffled, he dropped to his knees to frantically claw at his chest.

  Lev caught him up and grabbed the child. Somehow they got across but not without the scream of another Stuka.

  At dawn on May 10 the greatest army the world had ever seen had invaded Holland, Belgium and tiny Luxembourg. A mass of over 2,500,000 fighting men, legions of motorized armor.

  Not content with bombing and strafing all of the airfields, the Germans had turned on the cities and towns. People were fleeing from homes they’d known for years. The roads were clogged, both hampering the rush of reinforcements to the front and leading to the air of general panic.

  Lev propped Wunsch against a wall and tried to stop the child’s crying. Was it a heart attack? Must it happen at a time like this?

  The eyes rolled up. Lev slapped him gently. “Don’t panic, Bernard. We must get through. They’re bombing the docks. We may have to use the trucks.”

  “Never! The message from Duncan McPherson has said …” Wunsch gasped and held his chest. “Lev, listen to me. The British are sending two destroyers. We are to take the diamonds to the Megadan.”

  “And that squad of men?” asked Lev.