The Alice Factor

by J. Robert Janes

  Stringing the aerial between the chimney pots, she leaned over the edge of the roof, trying to find the window of the flat. Nothing doing! Damn!

  She got up and pulled off her coat, lest the gun fall out of her pocket.

  Each sheet of roofing copper was flanged where it joined the next one. Gripping two of these flanges, Arlette pulled herself out over the edge of the roof and down.

  Glancing along the darkened street as the sound of a patrol came up to her, she waited, straining now, the blood pounding into her head.

  Where … where was the window? Two over—at least two. Three? she wondered.

  Working her way back up onto the roof, she gave herself a moment. She had to be sure. There wasn’t all that much wire left.

  At 0310 hours London time she sent the briefest signal: ENEMY CLOSING IN / WILL TRY TODAY

  In the morning there was soot on the cuffs of the girl’s trench coat, and this, Horst Reugen could not understand.

  Krantz rested his throbbing arm on the table and reached for the cup of coffee. The cafe, much frequented by dockworkers, was almost directly across the road from the Red Cross depot.

  The Huysmans girl still hadn’t shown up. Had the baron’s hunch been wrong?

  He found his cigarette case and pried it open. So many cigarettes, so much coffee—still no morphia. Heydrich wanted Hagen and the girl. Heydrich …

  He’d be lucky if he didn’t lose his arm.

  The whole area was sealed off. They’d let the girl through, then watch for Hagen.

  With luck, he’d get them both, but had luck turned against him?

  Blood and pus still leaked through the bandages. The splinters of bone made their ridges. He couldn’t move his fingers, couldn’t move his wrist, either. Felt only constant pain.

  He touched his brow and rubbed it a little, took another sip of coffee.

  Outside, the day was warm. The door to the Red Cross depot was open. The girl at the desk was looking through the Venetian blinds.

  Several blocks away from where the control should have been, Arlette stopped at the curbside to look questioningly down the long length of the street toward the docks. It was all so like before the war, she had to wonder about it.

  A woman with a baby in a carriage went past, an old couple—there were shops here, the whole complex of the port of Antwerp opening out before her at the far end of the street.

  The Café Nordique caught her eye, the Restaurant de Paris. There was a milliner’s … Should she continue down the street? Should she?

  Everything in her said to turn away.

  At the Club Chez Vous the blackout curtains were still drawn, and the place had that closed-up, deserted look about it. No one seemed to be watching the club. There were German soldiers on leave. One tried the front door only to find it locked.

  The man tried to look in through a gap in the curtains but soon gave up.

  Arlette turned the corner and went around the back so as to pass the service entrance. Some garbage bins lay on their sides. Two cats were worrying over a bit of refuse. The garage doors were closed. There wasn’t a sign of anyone.

  From a café, this time, she called the place but there was no answer.

  Unsettled, she crossed the street and started up the back lane. Here it was hot, the sounds of the street soon muffled.

  She stopped to peer into the garage through one of the small triangular panes of glass that were set in the doors. Puzzled that Cecile’s car was there, she glanced apprehensively toward the back door of the club and then up to the windows.

  Cecile couldn’t help her. Cecile had been in trouble herself. “Don’t do this,” she said, a whisper. “Just try to get out of the city.”

  Leaning the bicycle against the wall, she gave the lane and the street beyond it a last glance before sliding her hand into her pocket and over the butt of the Browning.

  Someone had placed a red silk rose on the lower step that led to the door. A shred of boiled cabbage lay nearby; not far from this, the overturned casserole from a pot roast of some kind.

  The door was slightly ajar.

  “Arlette, Cecile’s dead. Come away from there.”

  Unable to move, she waited. It couldn’t be. Not Richard. Not him.

  “Richard, is it really you?” she asked, not turning. He’d be in the garage. He could quite possibly have seen her looking into it.

  “Dieter Karl Hunter is in the club. Take the bicycle and walk slowly back down the lane but do so against the inner wall.”

  Hunter would call the Gestapo if she left. At least this way Richard might escape.

  Shaking her head, Arlette nudged the door open and stepped into the club. At once the silence of the place hit her. A short entrance hall soon led to the kitchens. A faucet dripped. A mouse scurried along a shelf above the central counters.

  The warm, greasy odor of curried lamb came to her. “Cecile, it’s me. Where is everybody?” she called out suddenly.

  The swinging doors were closed. Beyond them the postage stamp of the dance floor, stage, bar and tables lay in the half-light from the ceiling.

  Where once there’d been a plaster rose above the dance floor, there was now the darkness of a stain. Water dripped from the center of this stain but, like the faucet in the kitchens, it made no sound. The plaster rose was fast becoming a mush of ruins.

  Furtively Arlette glanced at the staircase, then swept her eyes over the place again. The bar had been looted—the Gestapo hadn’t been able to resist that. The till drawer was open.

  Step by step she climbed the stairs. The Browning was in her hand, but for how long had it been there? She had no memory of having taken it from her pocket. Where … where would this Dieter Karl Hunter be?

  The door to the office was open. Cecile’s accounts ledger would be at the side of the desk. She’d been such a good businesswoman, so meticulous, so very beautiful Richard had …

  Darting up the remaining steps, Arlette flung her back to the inner wall. Pressing the muzzle of the pistol against the door, she nudged it more fully open.

  The office was empty. Half a battle of Scotch whisky and an empty glass were by the chair next the window.

  Arlette turned suddenly at a sound, but when she went back out into the hall he wasn’t there. The door to the sitting room was open, that to the bedroom closed.

  Richard would come after her—she knew this, had known it all along. But would he stop to cut the telephone wires? Would there be time to save him?

  “Cecile, what has happened?” she asked, her voice too loud.

  There was no answer, but now they both would know where she was.

  The door to the bathroom at the far end of the hall was also closed. The German would wait for her to open it. Timing would be everything.

  Otto Krantz glanced at his watch. Winding the thing was almost an impossibility. He’d liked to have it on his left wrist. That, too, was an impossibility.

  It was almost 0900 hours and still there’d been no sign of the girl.

  “Send a car round to the Club Chez Vous and ask the baron to join us. Better still, give him a call.”

  Though the flat above the club was warm, the door to Cecile’s bathroom felt like ice.

  Arlette turned the doorknob slowly, so slowly.

  As the door swung gently open, the sound of trickling water came to her.

  Hunter saw the girl hesitate. Had she changed her mind? Did she suspect what awaited her in there?

  Where was Richard? Where? To have caught them both, to have killed the one and wounded the other … that would be so good, that would satisfy Heydrich. All would be forgiven.

  The door to the bathroom opened a little more. There was water on the tiles, threads of sickness, the smell …

  A foot, her ankles—the thighs, the seat … Cecile …

  Hagen crossed the hall and moved along it swiftly. Arlette saw the body. Water still flowed over the rim of the tub in a thin sheet that found its way to the floor.

&n
bsp; Cecile’s arms had floated out. Her head … she was facedown in the water.

  “Arlette!”

  She spun round and fired, cried out in anguish, “Richard!” and emptied the gun.

  Dusk had settled over the city. Haunted by doubt, Horst Reugen left the car at the curb and went up the stone steps to the apartment block. The Gestapo were out in force. He’d seen their cars parked at several of the nearby corners. By the National Bank there’d been a truck full of SS troops, another at the Church of St. George. Guard dogs had been tethered to a tree.

  He’d made a little survey of the area, then had driven down the Volkstraat to the Arts Museum only to find a truck there. More dogs, more men …

  The Gestapo were going to cordon off the area and do a house-to-house search. What a fool he’d been! Even as he went into the building, he knew that the girl who had called herself Odette Latour could not possibly have been of that name. The “typewriter” in her suitcase would have been something else.

  He waited for the lift, a stuffy, somewhat overweight man, with sad brown eyes.

  The cage came down. Like an automaton he got in. Was there no one else in the building? At the last moment the front door opened and a Belgian girl cried out, “Wait, please.”

  He held the lift door for her. She smiled, had such excitement in her eyes.

  She got off at the third floor and suddenly the loneliness and the fear swept in on him again. What was he to do?

  The girl called Odette Latour wasn’t in the flat. It didn’t look as if she’d been there all day. The place had that empty feeling about it. Quickly he went through the apartment.

  There was no sign of her, only a pair of stockings and a blouse in the bathroom.

  He began to search for her suitcase. It wasn’t on the chair by the couch, nor over by the wall.

  In panic, he swept her laundry from the bathroom and wondered how best to hide it. The Gestapo mustn’t discover he’d had the girl staying with him. He must deny all knowledge of her.

  Hurrying into the kitchen, he thought to stuff her things into the garbage, then thought they’d be sure to look there. Struck by the futility of what he was trying to do, Reugen put the things into a jacket pocket.

  She’d hidden the suitcase under his bed. She was planning to come back after all!

  Lugging the thing over to the window, he set it on the radiator, but would the Gestapo not see him opening it here? He took it into the sitting room and set it on the chair where she’d placed it before. The catches were stiff, the leather quite good but made so as to appear a little shabby.

  Some underwear, another blouse … it was all so neatly packed he was afraid to touch a thing.

  A portable typewriter, one of the latest Underwood models, lay beneath the clothing.

  The girl had been telling the truth. Hating himself for having doubted her, Reugen wondered where she was.

  The light across the moors was deepening. Through the hush came the endless turning of the windmill.

  There were three wooden bridges, three drainage canals that crossed the road near Cecile’s farmhouse, and this was the last of them.

  When Richard was done, he would fix Heydrich’s briefcase of documents, then they would decide what to do with the rest of the dynamite.

  Dieter Karl Hunter had died instantly. Richard and she had almost been out of the club when she’d told him about the wireless set.

  Cecile had had a typewriter and Richard had said they must go back for it. They had taken her car and had driven to Herr Reugen’s flat to make the switch and recover the wireless set.

  Standing in the shallow water beneath the bridge, Richard fitted a bundle of three sticks up among the timbers.

  Satisfied, he took it down. Without a crimper, he had had to bite on the ends of the blasting caps to hold the fuse he’d inserted into each of them.

  Again, as he did so, he looked up at her, but this time there was more than sadness in his eyes. “We could kill ourselves this way,” he said, indicating the blasting cap. “Arlette, I really wish you’d let me cover for you. Alone, you might stand a chance.”

  Behind the farmhouse, the light touched the tops of the sand hills. Cradling the Schmeisser under her right arm, she again searched the empty road.

  A windmill turned. The wind brushed the tops of distant reeds. “I wish we could have had a child, Richard. I wish we could have had a house of our own, a flat, a farm like this. I don’t want to die. I want to live.”

  The charge in place, Hagen climbed out of the canal to put an arm about her. She leaned her head against him. Suddenly neither of them could speak, and in silence, they walked back to the farmhouse.

  KEMPEN AREA BELGIUM

  TO THE CARPENTER

  BLUFF CHECK INCLUDED

  2047 HOURS JUNE 28, 1940

  FROM XAVIER

  TRUE CHECK INCLUDED

  LOCATION TRANSMITTER MOVED FROM ANTWERP AREA TO THE EAST NEAR THE DUTCH BORDER

  MESSAGE READS:

  ALICE CONFIRMS CONGO DIAMONDS GETTING PAST BLOCKADE RED CROSS RELIEF PARCELS LEOPOLDVILLE ADDRESSES AUGIER MLLE GEORGETTE / OORST PIETER VAN DEN / ARNOLD HENRI / KLOOS JOHANN …

  Some other names followed and then, HUNTER DIETER KARL DEAD / AWAITING NAZIS

  Krantz spread out the map on the hood of the car. Direction-finding centers at Antwerp, Brussels and Eindhoven intersected in a thin triangle well to the east of the city near the farm of Cecile Verheyden.

  Hagen had chosen well. The wind was down; the moors were flat; the trajectory of a Lee Enfield rifle would zero in at one thousand meters, no problem. Not with Hagen or with his father, only the rifle wasn’t British. It was a Mauser 98K, the German Landser’s standby. Five rounds in the box clip, one in the breech and the desolation of Flanders through the sights. Fog, mud, shit, death, shattered tree trunks, wrecked gun carriages, tattered bits of cloth and shell holes—everywhere there’d been the shell holes. Which one had the father been in? A cigarette? Could he risk it? A hand to his pocket, a movement so slight the force of the impact had carried him back.

  “Hagen’s crazy. He must know we are aware the Verheyden woman had a farm out here and that this is where he’d hole up.”

  They crowded around the map. A Feldwebel named Jorgen, who was tough and experienced; the Hauptmann Ernst Kunzler, ruthless and desirous of proving himself to Berlin. Others: Gestapo in plainclothes, the two trucks with Armed-SS contingents, the Wehrmacht with one of theirs.

  “It’s the drainage canals I don’t like,” said Krantz. “Hagen will try to kill me.”

  “Then stay in the car and let us go in and finish him off.”

  This had come from the Hauptmann. Krantz sized up the man in one look. He should be tolerant but had no patience, was in too much pain for that. “No matter what Herr Heydrich has told you, my friend, Hagen is far too smart for that. He’ll have planned a retreat into those sand hills behind the house and barns. From there he can pin your men down all by himself.”

  The Hauptmann returned the look. Old battles were best forgotten. War was different now. The Oberstgruppenführer Heydrich had commanded that Hagen and the girl be killed at once.

  “I have my orders, Major.”

  “Fuck your orders. Send men along the road to check the bridges for explosives. Otherwise Hagen will make you walk, Herr Hauptmann, and then he’ll shoot you down.”

  The smell of gasoline, coal tar and kerosene filled the barn in which they’d hidden Cecile’s car. Arlette watched as Richard stuffed a rag wick into the last of the wine bottles.

  “How’s the road?” he asked.

  She slung the Schmeisser over a shoulder. “Still clear but I don’t like it. What if they’ve surrounded us and are waiting until dark?”

  Hagen cleaned off his hands and came over to her. “Then we’ll leave and make our way through them on foot.”

  Together they went out to watch the road, which ran almost due north and south past the farmhouse and was some five hundred meters
from them.

  A kilometer to the north there was a drainage canal that cut across the road at one of the little bridges. South of this, the lane from the house met the road just before another of the bridges. Here one of the canals angled off to the northwest. Then, a kilometer to the south, there was another canal and bridge. The ground between the canals and the road was exceedingly flat. Only behind the house and barns was there any relief.

  “Richard, let me come with you. What happens if you should get …”

  “Nervous? I’ve slit the ends of the fuses. All I need to do is light them.”

  “Please, I … I would rather be with you. The two of us together. Me to give you cover, while you …”

  He shook his head. “Go while there’s still time. Please, for my sake.”

  Arlette threw her arms around him and kissed him one last time.

  The Germans came so suddenly both of them felt sick. One moment there was nothing on the horizon, the next, a smudge of gray that grew rapidly and then a car and two trucks to the north of them, another car and a truck to the south.

  “Love me, Richard, as I’ll love you always.”

  He gripped her hand, then ran to the barn. The lead car to the north of them came to a stop some distance from the bridge. At once two soldiers leaped out of the truck behind and began to walk forward along the edges of the road. They looked so angular in their helmets with their weapons at the ready. Richard would never reach that bridge. He’d never be able to throw those bottles or light the fuses …

  Hagen swung the car in beside her. “Arlette, don’t even think of trying. Promise me you won’t.”

  “I cannot watch you die!”

  Even as he drove Cecile’s car down the lane, Hagen knew Arlette was running across the flats, trying to reach the most southerly of the canals.

  The soldiers stopped. In two arcs their Schmeissers came to bear on the car. Hagen jammed the throttle down. They began to fire, shattering the windscreen and showering him with glass …

  As Krantz watched, the girl pitched herself into the nearest canal and Hagen drove the car straight at the Hauptmann only to leap out at the last moment. The two cars collided in a burst of flame that shot over the truck behind.