The Second Seal

by Dennis Wheatley

  When they pulled up in the clearing, the Rolls could be seen through the open doors of the garage beside the house. Its presence indicated that Dimitriyevitch had already arrived; so, as the Duke got out of the Peugeot he braced himself, feeling that he would soon know his fate. With some uneasiness he noticed that, although it was only about eight o’clock, there was no servant in the hall, as usual, to take their hats. Ciganović opened the door of the big room and motioned him to go in. As he stepped over the threshold, he saw that the Colonel was seated at a small desk, going through some papers.

  Dimitriyevitch looked up and gave the prisoner a cold, penetrating glance; then, without a word, went on with what he was doing. Tankosić and Ciganović came in, closed the door, and stood just behind de Richleau. For nearly ten minutes there was no sound except the occasional rustle of the Colonel’s papers. The long silence was calculated to be most unnerving; but the Duke was rather glad of it, as it gave him an opportunity to look round the room for possible weapons that he might snatch at if, later, a situation arose which would give him a sporting chance of fighting his way out. On a nearby table there was a nine inch statuette of Napoleon in bronze, with a three inch square marble base. Used as a club it was easily heavy enough to kill a man at a blow; but he would have much preferred one of the Turkish scimitars which were arranged in a decorative fan against the wall over the mantelpiece.

  At length Dimitriyevitch, finished with his papers, fixed his piercing eyes on de Richleau, and said:

  “Well! What have you to say?”

  “Very little,” replied the Duke quietly. “I must apologise for the trouble and inconvenience to which I have put you. It was stupid of me to go off like that. I ought to have come to see you, and asked for a week’s leave of absence. The trouble was I feared you might refuse to grant it.”

  “Why should you wish to leave Belgrade?”

  De Richleau had had ample time to think things out. They had found his railway ticket to Užice on him. That did not definitely give it away that he had been heading for Sarajevo, but it was on the Bosnian frontier. He had thought for a moment of saying that he had gone there with a view to making a personal reconnaissance of the country, over which it was expected that they would be fighting in the next few weeks. But to have undertaken such a trip, without making any previous arrangements, or notifying anyone of his intention would, he decided, never be accepted as a plausible excuse. The only course was to disclose his knowledge of the plot and put all his hope in their taking his word for it that he had not intended to betray them.

  He shrugged his shoulders. “I should have thought you would have guessed that. In the past week I have naturally picked up quite a lot of information about your intentions. I could hardly do otherwise, while constantly mixing, as I have been, with officers ‘in the know’, who thought I was ‘in the know’, too.”

  “You’re lying!” cut in Ciganović. “You’ve been doing your damnedest to ferret things out. The night you took me out to dinner, you did your utmost to pump me.”

  “Oh, come!” protested de Richleau mildly, as he turned to look at the tall, light-eyed, albino. “In my position as Chief Military Liaison Officer with your Foreign Office, it was natural enough that I should want to get some idea of how you intended to rupture relations with Austria. I expected some diplomatic démarche over Bosnia, and saw no reason then why you should wish to conceal your opening move from me.”

  “I told you to mind your own business!” snapped Dimitriyevitch.

  “Whether I had or hadn’t would have made little difference. I received unsolicited hints of your intentions from several people; then, through just one more, all the rest fell into place. I am a professional soldier, and I was perfectly willing to kill as many Austrians as I possibly could for you in an orthodox manner. But it was no part of my contract to participate in an assassination.”

  “No one asked you to.”

  “Perhaps. But if it leaks out afterwards that the murder of the Archduke was plotted by officers of the Serbian General Staff, every member of it will be suspected of having known something of the plot.”

  “If it leaks out: but it will not—unless there are traitors among us.”

  De Richleau knew that his life might hang upon his tact, so he put the matter as inoffensively as he could. “Such things have a habit of doing so, sooner or later. And while you, Colonel, in your devotion to Serbia may be prepared to accept such obloquy for your country’s sake, I have no similar inducement.”

  “You forget your oath to the Brotherhood of Union or Death.”

  This was dangerous ground. The Duke was very far from having forgotten it, and again he honeyed his reply: “On the contrary, I considered it most carefully before I acted; and I came to the conclusion that by absenting myself from Belgrade for the next few days I could protect my reputation without in any way breaking my oath.”

  Suddenly Dimitriyevitch sprang to his feet, and pointed an accusing finger. “You lie! You intended to make your way to Sarajevo and betray us.”

  The Duke’s eyebrows shot up and his mouth fell open, as though in blank amazement; then he exclaimed angrily: “How dare you accuse me of such perfidy! Such a thought never entered my head.”

  “Explain then why you left Belgrade in disguise, and took so many precautions against your departure being discovered.”

  “Put yourself in my place. Had you held an appointment on the Turkish General Staff, and discovered that the Turks intended to do something with which you did not wish to be associated, would you have walked out openly? Of course not. You would have assumed, as I did, that if your associates learned of your departure they would have feared you meant to betray their secret, and immediately have taken steps to have you brought back.”

  “The argument is plausible,” Dimitriyevitch admitted with a grim smile, “but it does not explain why you took a ticket to Užice—the nearest point on the railway to Sarajevo.”

  “I selected it as the point which will become our most important railhead in the event of operations against Bosnia. I felt that, instead of wasting my time lying up in some market town, by putting in a week there I should be able to carry out a valuable reconnaissance of the frontier in person, before returning to Belgrade.”

  “Do you expect me to believe that you meant to return?” the Colonel asked acidly.

  De Richleau stiffened. “I regard the doubt you appear to entertain about that as in the highest degree offensive. The fact that you have planned a cold-blooded murder lies between you and your conscience. I consider I had every right to take such steps as I could to prevent my name being associated with it, by absenting myself from Headquarters during its final preparation and execution. But that does not affect the oath that I have taken, or my obligation to place my military ability at the disposal of Serbia. Naturally, I intended to return. Why, otherwise, should I have been on my way to a Serbian town, when instead, had I wished, I could have taken a main-line train and by now have been in Sofia or Budapest?”

  “There is something in that,” admitted the Colonel, “unless you really meant to go to Sarajevo. If I become convinced that was your intention, I shall have you shot out of hand. As things are, I must consider the matter further. At the moment my police are working on the case and may bring something fresh to light. In the meantime, I shall naturally continue to keep you under close arrest.”

  Dimitriyevitch signed to the other two, and added: “Take him down to the cellar. We’ll keep him there for the night.”

  Ciganović stepped forward and opened a narrow door in the wainscoting of the wall, which de Richleau had not previously noticed. Tankosić prodded him in the back with his pistol, and he walked through the opening. The light from the room was sufficient to show him, to his left, a short flight of steps and, dimly, as he went down them, stone flags that stretched away to bin-lined walls. When he was half-way down, the door slammed behind him, plunging him in darkness.

  Having reached the bottom, h
e paused there a moment. His matches had been taken from him at the prison, so he had no means of creating even a glimmer in the Stygian blackness. But, after a moment, he saw a faint, misty radiance to one side of him. Cautiously, with hands outstretched, he went forward. As he advanced, the radiance increased to the degree of pale moonlight, and took shape as an oblong about shoulder high. Then he saw that it came from an opening in the wall, and beyond that there was a small, square pit, the top of which was covered with a grille on a level with the ground outside. It was evidently the means by which the cellar was ventilated, but he soon found that it offered no prospect of escape. Across the oblong were thick iron bars concreted into the wall, and exerting all his strength on one failed to make the least impression on it. So he could not even get out into the little pit.

  The light was the last glow of evening and, now that his eyes were getting accustomed to the darkness, it was enough to illuminate faintly the cellar for a few feet round the opening, but no more. However, it at least gave him a fixed point to which he could glance back, and so keep his direction as he set out to explore the rest of the cellar.

  He felt certain that there must be a door somewhere, other than the one by which he had entered, as it would hardly be convenient to have the servants always going through the main room to bin away, or bring up, the wine. So he struck out along it lengthwise, hoping to find a door at the far end, under the hall. When he had gone a few yards he tripped against a scantling, barked his shin badly, and swore. Moving crabwise a few paces, his hands felt a row of three casks, but beyond them nothing, so he cautiously moved forward again. Another half dozen shuffling steps brought him right up against the door he had expected.

  But five minutes’ fumbling over its surface convinced him that he could not get out that way. It was of heavy oak, with a stout lock, and was quite immovable.

  Shuffling sideways again, he felt his way right round the cellar. It was a large place and evidently the same size as the big room above it. Apart from the door, the ventilation aperture, and the flight of steps, its walls were solid tiers of bins from floor to ceiling, and there was no other exit. Making his way back to the scantling, he sat down upon it. He felt he might have known that Dimitriyevitch was not the sort of man to put a prisoner in a place from which there was much likelihood of his being able to escape.

  For a few moments his heart beat so fast that he felt quite suffocated with apprehension. Dimitriyevitch had said plainly that if he became convinced that his prisoner had intended to go to Sarajevo, he would have him shot out of hand. As that had been the Duke’s intention, he could not help a nightmare foreboding that some little thing he had overlooked would reveal it to his captors. And he had no doubt at all that, if ordered to, Tankosić and Ciganović would not hesitate about emptying the contents of their pistols into him. He wondered if they would take him outside to do it, or murder him down there in the cellar. He shivered at the thought of the bullets crashing their way through his flesh and bone. If they were content to fire at his body, that would not be quite so bad; but the idea of his face and head being smashed and rent to a hideous pulp horrified him. His mouth went dry and his hands became clammy.

  De Richleau was very far from being a coward. He had been shot at many times in battles and skirmishes and had, on occasion, deliberately exposed himself in order to encourage his men. He had been wounded too, and knew that the first effect was generally no more than a burning sensation, followed by numbness—the pain came later.

  After a bit he got a grip on himself and tried to regard his position objectively, as though he were entirely outside it and looking on at a situation in a thriller play. So far he had played his cards well. He had told a great many lies with all the conviction he could muster, and none of them had contradicted another. As he looked back, he was a little surprised to find how easily he had slipped into habitually lying since he had taken up this unpleasant game of espionage. But this evening, of course, he had had a special impetus to distort the truth with complete unscrupulousness. His life had hung, and still hung, on his ability to deceive his captors. No doubt that had lent an extra keenness to his wits and glibness of his tongue.

  Anyhow, black as the case had looked against him, he felt sure that he had succeeded in shaking Dimitriyevitch’s well-founded assumption of his guilt. So, unless some fresh and damning piece of evidence did turn up, why should the Colonel have him murdered? The scruples he had urged, about later having his name associated with the Sarajevo plot, were far from unreasonable. A temporary absence from Belgrade could not entirely have saved him from that, but would have gone a long way towards it, particularly as he was a foreigner in the service of Serbia. People would be inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt, or even think that the Serbians had deliberately got rid of him, so that he should not be aware of their complicity and they would be able to give free rein to their elation when the news of their abominable coup came through. Dimitriyevitch was no fool, and would realise all that. Besides, he was no use to the Serbians dead; whereas he could be of very considerable value to them alive.

  In a slightly more cheerful frame of mind, he decided that the odds were that Dimitriyevitch would send him back to the State Prison next morning, keep him there as a precaution until the blow had been struck, then let him out and expect him to resume his duties. But what of the Archduke?

  Well, there again, perhaps the picture was not so black. Full particulars of the plot had been sent out in three directions. The only real danger was that it might be found impossible to locate him while on manœuvres. But surely, with the wires buzzing from three directions, someone would be certain to find and warn him in time. The urge to set out for Sarajevo had seized the Duke owing to his realisation that such an infinity of woe, destruction, misery and death, might follow the assassination that, quite apart from any desire to save Franz Ferdinand’s life, no possible chance must be neglected which might add to the certainty of preventing the crime. But he saw, now that he had more time to think over the matter, that the warnings he had sent out must prove sufficient; that his attempt to supplement them had been quite redundant, and had, quite needlessly, landed him in this grim personal mess.

  The faint light filtering down the ventilating shaft had now almost entirely disappeared, and he could not even see the outline of his hand, when he held it up in front of him. He supposed that the three men upstairs were now having dinner, but did not think it likely that they would bring him any, so he was glad now that he had not turned up his nose at the prison stew. However, he hoped that, before they went to bed, they would throw him down some cushions and rugs to sleep on, as otherwise he was in for an extremely uncomfortable night. It then occurred to him that, even if they were so ungracious as to forget that he might not have dined, they could not prevent his consoling himself with a good bottle of wine.

  Going over to a row of bins he felt about among them till he found one containing champagne. As he opened a bottle, he wondered if it would be the sort of muck the French sent to the Balkans, of which during the past week he had had to drink far more than was good for his head or his stomach at Le Can-Can. At first, drinking out of the bottle, it was difficult to get the flavour, but after a moment he knew that it was a premiere cuvée that had been prepared either for England or Russia.

  As the dry, yet full bodied, wine tickled his palate, he was reminded of the last time he had drunk champagne of that quality. It had been at Ilona’s birthday ball. That had been thirteen nights ago, but it now seemed so remote that it might have been thirteen months. In fact, seen in restrospect and by contrast with the present, it might have been in a different lifetime.

  In his mental vision he saw again the constant quiet movement and blending of the innumerable colours that had made up that living kaleidoscope. No one dress or uniform stood out from the others, but in a shimmering, iridescent sea, sable and yellow satin, black lace and pastel coloured silks, patent, leather and paradise plumes, blue, green and scarlet clo
th, gold braid and silver trimmings—the whole twinkling and winking with a hundred thousand gems—mingled like the million water globules of some vast fountain seen against the summer sun. Yet it had been composed of human beings; the flower of an ancient Empire gathered at the most brilliant court in Europe—gathered there to do honour to the woman he loved, and who loved him.

  Seated there, a prisoner in that now pitch-black cellar, while three assassins, who held his fate in their hands, dined in the room above, it seemed utterly impossible that he could be the same man who, less than a fortnight before, had worn that dashing sky-blue uniform trimmed with silver braid and grey astrakhan, and had seen an Archduchess fight back her tears because he must leave her.

  Slowly, he finished the bottle of champagne. He had only just drained it of the last mouthful, when he heard a car drive up outside. He wondered, vaguely at first, what that portended. Judging by the total disappearance of the light from the ventilating shaft, he knew that it must be after ten o’clock. But perhaps some of the other conspirators had driven out from Belgrade for an after-dinner conference with their Chief.

  A few minutes later the noise of the engine reached him again, and he heard the car drive off. That seemed to invalidate his first explanation of its arrival. The odds were, then, that it had brought a dispatch out to Dimitriyevitch. If so, it must contain news of some urgency, to have been sent out so late at night. Uneasily, he began to wonder whether it had been a messenger who had brought some fresh information about himself.

  Again, he swiftly reviewed his position, but could think of nothing that might have given him away. All the same, his sixth sense gave him an uneasy feeling that the arrival of the car spelt danger for him. Instinctively, he began to visualise being called up to the room above, re-questioned, found guilty: then being taken out into the woods and shot. He did not mean to die tamely. He would seize the first chance to break away if he possibly could; or, in the worst case, fight to the last gasp. But he knew that he would stand little chance without a weapon.