Courtney's War

by Wilbur Smith

  A few minutes later, Saffron was standing in front of the bathroom mirror, naked from the waist up, with her newly bought pair of scissors in her hand. She had unpinned her hair, which hung in glossy black waves that fell to her shoulders and down her back. She ran her fingers through it and gave a shake of her head, to feel her mane against her bare skin.

  She said, “Oh well,” lifted her right hand, looked back at the mirror and started cutting.

  •••

  Hendrik Elias did not return directly to his home, or the VNV offices when he arrived back in Ghent. Instead, he and a couple of his closest associates went off for a leisurely lunch. They had important party matters to discuss, and he needed a stiff drink after putting up with the police delaying their departure for over an hour, followed by the Marais woman’s wailing all the way from The Hague to Antwerp.

  “This is what happens when one allows women to become involved in politics,” one of the other VNV men said, when the conversation turned to the Schröder business. “They are unable to control their emotions, they distract men from more important matters and they inflame sexual passions that have no place in our work. We have to get rid of her. I insist.”

  Elias’ second colleague took a more emollient tone. “Miss Marais seems a decent girl, and I’m sure she’s done good work with the women’s groups. But let’s be honest, they are an irrelevance, a sideshow at best. And she’s doing us more harm than good. It’s not right for people to see us being stopped at the station by the police. Even if we are innocent of any wrongdoing, the mud sticks. You must see that, old man.”

  Elias nodded. “I can’t argue with you, gentlemen. The events of the past two days have been most regrettable and I can see good reasons for letting Miss Marais go. But there is no need to make an immediate decision. I have sent Miss Marais away for a few days. I assure you that I will resolve the situation by the time she returns.”

  Elias had given his colleagues enough of a concession to keep them quiet for the time being. It was almost four in the afternoon before he returned to his office to find his secretary in a state of anxiety.

  “There’s . . . there’s someone waiting for you in your office—a German. He seems keen to speak to you. He’s been waiting for a while.”

  One look at the man told Elias that he was a Gestapo officer. After three years of occupation he had learned to spot the signs: the suit that was as clean and neatly pressed as a dress uniform, the short hair clipped high up the back of the neck and the side of the head, and above all the air of assurance that came from knowing that their power was absolute. This officer could have him arrested, interrogated, tortured and thrown into a prison camp, without any reference to a conventional legal system.

  The Gestapo man got to his feet as Elias entered the room. He was of medium height, thin, with gray eyes behind round, wire-framed glasses.

  “Good afternoon, Herr Elias,” he said. “My name is Feirstein. I am an officer in the Geheime Staatspolizei. Please, be seated.”

  Elias found himself saying, “Thank you,” as if it were a kindness to be allowed to sit in his own office. “How can I help you?” he asked.

  “Where is your employee, Marlize Marais? She is not here and her landlady, Fräu Akkerman has not seen her since she left her house on Saturday morning, to accompany you to The Hague. What has become of her?”

  “Ah . . .” Elias felt a prickle of fear beneath his armpits. Even though he had done nothing wrong, he felt guilty. “I don’t know . . . not exactly.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Well, she did not return with the rest of us to Ghent.”

  “Why not?”

  “She was feeling indisposed. To be frank with you, Feirstein, she was in a state of nervous hysteria. I put it down to the strain of her encounter with the SS officer Schröder, and then the police interviews this morning. She was weeping and making a scene. You know how it is when women become hysterical . . .”

  Elias was hoping for man-to-man sympathy, but Feirstein remained impassive.

  “Go on . . .” the German said.

  “I suggested she should take some time off. She mentioned a relative, a great-aunt, if I remember rightly, who lived near Antwerp.”

  “Did she give you the name of this great-aunt, or an address?”

  “Er . . . no, I’m afraid not.”

  “You did not ask her for these details?”

  “It didn’t occur to me. I was glad to be rid of her.”

  “She left the train at Antwerp?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And you saw no reason to think this was suspicious?”

  Elias frowned. “No . . . why should I?”

  “Because a man is dead and Fräulein Marais was the last person to see him alive. That, in itself, is enough to arouse suspicion. But when she engineers a reason to leave the train and disappear—does that strike you as the behavior of an innocent person?”

  “How do you mean, ‘engineer’? The woman was having hysterics. I saw it for myself.”

  “And you are sure her tears were genuine?”

  “Well, they seemed . . .” Elias stopped mid-sentence. “Oh dear God . . . you aren’t suggesting . . . Has she been fooling us all along?”

  Feirstein said nothing. His look of contempt was enough. He walked to the telephone on Elias’ desk, dialed the operator and gave the number to which he wanted to be connected.

  “None of the VNV idiots know where the Marais woman is. She left their train at Antwerp, claiming that she wanted to visit a relative who lived near there. No, she did not provide a name or address. Listen carefully, I don’t want our colleagues in Holland thinking we can’t manage our business down here in Belgium. Get everyone in Antwerp working this case. Start at the station. Talk to anyone who might have seen Marais. She is twenty-three years old. Height, one meter seventy-three, slender build. She had blue eyes, long black hair, thick and glossy, said to be very striking. Wait . . .”

  Feirstein looked across at Elias, asked, “What is she wearing?” and then passed the description of her clothes and suitcase onto the man on the other end of the line. “Get onto Antwerp and tell them to work fast. I can stall Holland for a couple of hours, but they’re getting it in the ear from Rauter. I need something to tell them. Two hours, maximum, that’s all I can wait.”

  Feirstein put down the phone and walked to the door without another word. Only when he had opened it and was about to leave did he turn to Elias and say, “You will be seeing me again.”

  •••

  The Security Police office in Antwerp threw every available man at the task of tracking down Marlize Marais. A combination of Gestapo, Criminal Police and uniformed SS personnel flooded the station and spoke to members of the station staff, shopkeepers, waitresses in the cafeteria, flower- and newspaper-sellers. By half past five they had established that the suspect had been seen getting off the train from The Hague, purchasing a ticket for Liège and boarding the outbound train.

  There was a gap of between ten and fifteen minutes between the times given by the ticket-office clerk who had sold Marais her ticket and the waitress who had taken her order for food and drink. This seemed odd, since it would only take two minutes at most to walk from one location to the other. But the officer collating all the evidence concluded that the discrepancy was most simply explained by one or both of the witnesses getting their timing wrong. In any case, it was not important. They had established that Marais was no longer in Antwerp.

  She was someone else’s problem now.

  •••

  Shortly before five, Rauter, De Vries, Lüdtke and Weimann met again in the police mortuary and this time it was Weimann who did the talking. “I am going to take you through the injuries in the order in which I believe they were inflicted. Let me direct you first to the area of the victim’s genitalia. I have shaved the pubic region to enable you to see the traces of bruising above the genitalia, consistent with a blow, most probably with a
knee.

  “A man who has been hit in that vulnerable region instinctively doubles up. His head descends, leaving him open to a blow to the face. This is significant if the victim is taller than his assailant. Note the contusions to the lower left jaw, close to the chin. They are not particularly vivid, suggesting that the blow was not a punch with the fist, but a slap with the palm or heel of the hand.

  “The effect of such a blow is dramatic. It spins the head on the neck, causing severe ligament damage. As the head turns it takes the body with it, so that even a large man can be knocked to the ground. And the motion causes the brain to knock repeatedly against the inside of the skull. This concusses the victim.

  “Everything that I have described so far has taken place in a matter of a few seconds: five, maybe ten at most. The victim has been taken by surprise. He has not landed a single blow: his knuckles show no sign of bruising. Now he is on the ground, lying on his back, and the third blow is struck. Look at the upper torso. Note the two vivid contusions side by side. Two identical objects have hit this man simultaneously. Tell me, Chief Inspector De Vries, when you interviewed Fräulein Marais, what kind of shoes was she wearing?”

  De Vries closed his eyes to conjure a picture of the women in his mind and said, “Perfectly ordinary, lace-up walking shoes, I think.”

  “And did her toes and heels click on the floor as she walked?”

  “I think so. I wouldn’t have thought anything of it. Everyone’s feet click. People reinforce their soles to prevent wear and tear.”

  “Quite so. And it is unfortunate that you do not have those shoes in your possession because if you did, my guess is that the heels would match the marks on the victim’s chest.”

  “A ‘bronco-kick,’” said Rauter, saying the phrase in English.

  “I’m sorry, sir, what do you mean?” De Vries asked.

  “As we know from our interrogation of enemy agents, the ‘bronco-kick’ is the British term for a two-footed, jumping kick, which the handbook used to train agents in unarmed combat recommends, rather than a single blow from the toe of a boot. The same handbook also shows trainee agents how to attack a man by striking him first in the testicles and then in the face, with the flat of the hand, as Dr. Weimann has described.”

  “You mean, Miss Marais is a British agent?” Lüdtke asked.

  “Yes . . . but that is impossible. Schröder told the truth. We have control of all communications between London and Holland. They could not have landed an agent in Holland without us knowing about it.”

  “Perhaps that explains why they sent her to South Africa and then Portugal, and let us bring her to Belgium, without letting anyone in the Low Countries know she was coming. My guess is that Marais, or whoever she is, has been sent in to find out what has gone wrong with their previous agents. And now she knows the situation in both Belgium and the Netherlands, from the mouths of German officers.”

  Rauter’s face paled. “My God . . . how could they have been so stupid? We have to stop her.”

  Weimann coughed to attract the other men’s attention. “Before you do, sir, there is one thing you should know. None of the injuries I have so far described were fatal. Schröder would have been badly injured, but he would have made a full recovery. But Marais could not allow that. She took a hatpin, or a brooch with a long pin, and inserted it in the corner of the eye while Schröder was lying helpless on the ground. Then she pushed it through the back of the orbital bone into the brain, where she manipulated the tip of the pin to cause the greatest possible internal damage to the brain.

  “SS-Hauptsturmführer Schröder died of a cerebral hemorrhage. And he died slowly, which explains the other mystery of this case, from a pathology perspective. The body was arranged beneath the tree so that people would take it for a resting man. But the victim was still alive when it happened: blood was circulating in his system. I can assure you, the internal appearance would have been very different had he been dead when he was moved.

  “But how could the killer move and then arrange a large, fit, strong man who was still alive? Answer: because he was already dying and did not have the power to resist. Whoever committed this crime is a highly trained fighter, capable of violent action and then an act of slow, calculated homicide. The murderer then covered their tracks, buying time to get away.”

  “She will not get away, Herr Doktor, you have my word on that,” said Rauter. “Within the hour, every SS man and local police officer in the Low Countries will be searching for Marlize Marais.”

  “You’d better tell them to be careful,” said Kommissar Lüdtke. “I have dealt with a great many killers in my time. But few of them have been as dangerous as this.”

  •••

  Saffron grinned as Jean Burgers’s eyes widened in disbelief. “What do you think?” she asked coquettishly, tilting her head to one side and then the other. Her long black hair was now a short, fringed blonde bob.

  “I honestly would not recognize you. If you had been sitting in the café as I walked in, I would have walked right past you.”

  “Good. I’ve changed my clothes, too, since this morning.”

  “So . . . Claude told me what you had done. Do you think the Boches know it was you that killed that man?”

  “We have to assume that.”

  “Then we must also assume that they will go crazy trying to find you. The first thing to do is to get you out of Liège. There are bound to be roadblocks on every road out of the city, so we have to get past them on foot. Once we are beyond them, I will get us a car and then we will be able to drive across country.”

  “Won’t the Germans be watching the roads outside the city?”

  “Not all of them. There are too many. Don’t worry, I know my way around all the country lanes.”

  “But where will we go?”

  “The radio operator you met . . .”

  “The one you wouldn’t introduce me to?”

  “Yes . . . His name is André Deforge. His parents have a farm about forty kilometers from here, between Malmédy and Spa. They feel the same way we do about the Germans. They will let us hide you there for a few days, but no longer. It would be too dangerous. They would never give you up, you understand. But if a neighbor hears cars driving by in the night, or strange people in the fields . . . It’s very sad, but a lot of people are willing to help the Gestapo. They think things will go better for them if they do.”

  “Will André be able to bring his radio out to us? I need to get in touch with London.”

  “No . . . that would be too dangerous. Like I said, he has been crazy about radios since he was a boy. He has all his old equipment hidden away in a barn. Are you ready to go?”

  “Yes, but I need to get rid of my suitcase.”

  “Give it to me. Claude has a furnace in the basement. It provides all the hot water for the café and the apartment and heat in the winter time.”

  Saffron handed it over.

  “Are you sure you have taken everything from here that you need?”

  “Yes. It’s all in my handbag.”

  “Then I will give this to Claude now. It will be ashes by dinnertime.”

  •••

  The moment he received the news from Antwerp, Feirstein had contacted his opposite number in Liège, Inspector Fritz Krankl, explained the situation and told him that locating and apprehending Marlize Marais was now his number one priority.

  “Is she the main suspect in the Schröder case?” Krankl asked.

  “I don’t know for sure. But let it be known that she is a killer on the loose. That will frighten people and make them more eager to report her.”

  “That makes sense. But I worked with Karsten Schröder in Mainz before the war. He was a mountain of a man. A real bastard, too. Always happier using his fists than his brains. Hard to believe a woman could kill him.”

  “Any man can be killed if his guard is down. All that matters is that we have lost one of our own and this woman is the only suspect. Let’s find
her first, then concern ourselves with the finer details.”

  “Don’t worry, Feirstein, my men are hard workers. We’ll get this woman, you can be sure about that.” He determined to immediately contact the handler looking after Prosper Dezitter, “the man with the missing finger,” the Nazi’s chief informer in Belgium.

  •••

  As they left the Café Royal Standard, a black Mercedes with speakers mounted on the roof drove by. A harsh metallic voice announced: “Achtung! Achtung! A killer is on the run in your city. She is a young woman. She is tall, with long black hair and blue eyes, last seen wearing a dark blue dress and a maroon coat, carrying a suitcase. She is wanted for the murder of a German officer. If you see her, report it at once to the authorities. The sooner she is caught, the better it will be for everyone . . . Achtung! Achtung!”

  Saffron shivered as the Mercedes drove away and the voice from the speakers faded. She clutched Jean Burgers’s arm tighter and they walked down the road in the same direction that the speaker-car had taken. Saffron felt every eye on the street was looking at her and they could see through her pathetic disguise.

  They passed a group of workmen, standing outside a bar with beer glasses in their hands, and one of them called out, “Cheer up, blondie!” and another shouted, “I’ll make you happy if he won’t!” And as the laughter and wolf whistles subsided, Saffron realized that the looks were due to her tarty blonde hair.

  Burgers paid no attention. He was trying to walk as quickly as possible without drawing attention to themselves. “We have to get across the river,” he said. “Without that we can’t get anywhere.”

  They pressed on, breaking into a run down a couple of quiet, deserted side-streets, then emerged onto the Quai de Rome, the main road along the bank of the River Meuse. On the far side of the road, closest to the water, there was a broad path and Burgers led her onto it. He turned right. In front of them, no more than a few hundred meters away, the three cast-iron arches of a magnificent old bridge stretched across the river. There were two German army trucks parked in front of it. Soldiers were unloading poles, boards, sandbags and rolls of barbed wire from a truck under an officer’s supervision. Saffron spotted a pair of plainclothes policemen, either detectives or Gestapo, scanning the people passing by them.