The Scarlet Impostor

by Dennis Wheatley

  Farther along the street in both directions he could see other smaller patches of light on the road, which clearly indicated that similar groups were posted at intervals to watch the exits of the other houses.

  As all the houses in the street had semi-basements their first floor-windows were only about eight feet from the ground and Gregory saw that an easy drop from the window behind which he was crouching would bring him unharmed into the street below. But for how long could he hope to survive once he had gained it? The street had apparently been closed both to traffic and pedestrians, and it was very quiet; the stillness broken only by the occasional shouts of the Nazis as they called to one another.

  Swiftly Gregory weighed up his chances. As a tall man, his toes would just about touch the pavement if he hung from the window-sill at the full stretch of his arms. He would have at the most only an inch or two to drop, but the rattle of his buttons and equipment against the woodwork as he wriggled himself through backward and the scraping of his toes on the wall as he lowered himself would cause a commotion in the utter stillness of the street quite sufficient to put the nearest groups of watchers instantly on the qui vive. Even in the shadows he would be shot before he had gone twenty yards.

  He had already abandoned any idea of attempting an escape that way as absolutely suicidal when he suddenly heard someone speak in a low voice just below the window. Another voice answered with a monosyllable; then silence fell again, broken only by the faint, distant cries of men calling to each other while they still searched for him among the chimney-pots.

  More from curiosity than for any other reason, Gregory raised his head slightly so that he could look down at the men who were standing below him in the street. As he did so another beam of light caught his eyes. It came from the thin, horizontal aperture cut in the black-out shade of a motor-cycle headlamp. He could make out the silhouette of the machine where it stood propped up in the gutter just in front of the men, who wore the flat caps of Nazis, and evidently it belonged to one of them.

  Should he, or should he not? It would be a most desperate gamble, but any other exits from the house were sure to be equally well-guarded, and if only he could seize the bike and get it going its speed would at least give him some chance of breaking through the cordon before he could be shot down.

  ‘Nothing venture, nothing win!’ muttered Gregory. ‘Here goes!’ And coming up under the curtain he placed one foot on the low sill of the window.

  Drawing up his other foot, he balanced himself in a crouching position, then jumped; not outwards towards the motorcycle, but downwards, straight on top of the two Nazis.

  He landed as he had planned, right between them, so that both of them were bowled over as he pitched forward on to his knees. Scrambling to his feet, he grabbed the handlebars of the motor-bike, opened the throttle, jammed the gear-lever into low, and, exerting every ounce of his strength, ran forward with it.

  Time seemed to stand still as he forced the heavy, twin-cylinder B.M.W. along and waited for its engines to start firing. Both the men whom he had knocked over had begun to shout from the moment they had hit the pavement. The little blobs of light further down the street instantly began to move. Shouts, challenges and cries broke the stillness of the night as the waiting patrols sprang into action.

  At last, after what had seemed an eternity, there was a loud explosion as the cycle backfired. Gregory retarded the spark and dropped the decompression control. Another yard, and the powerful machine nearly jerked his arms from their sockets as it leaped forward, roaring suddenly into life.

  When he landed in the saddle with a desperate spring he was already halfway towards the nearest group of Nazis. The road was narrow, and by seeking to avoid them he would only have presented a better target. Lying flat along the tank he jerked the throttle wide open and charged straight at them, the engine screaming deafeningly in bottom gear. They scattered and had evidently only just drawn their guns without having time to aim as none of them fired until he had flashed by them and was roaring down the street towards the next group, which the light of the headlamp suddenly brought into view.

  Still crouching low over the handlebars, he set his teeth and risked a racing change into second gear. By a miracle it came off, and the machine hurtled forward at even greater speed. The pistols of the Nazis ahead flashed almost in his face, but he had swerved a split second before, and their shots went wide. Scraping one man with his elbow he bowled him over, and raced on just as a shot from the first group, now well behind him, whistled past his ear.

  Orders, counter-orders; cries of stop him, to shoot him, to cease fire or they would kill one another, rang out in guttural German.

  Behind him the darkness veiled a scene of consternation and confusion: before him at the end of the street, there waited yet another squad of Nazis, and although it was barely half a minute since he had thrown himself on the motor-cycle they had had that much more time in which to prepare for his reception.

  They blazed off as he came charging down the street, but, gripping the handle-bars with savage determination he wrenched the machine right up on to the low pavement, skimmed inside an unlighted lamp-standard, roared past the group of men and bumped down off the pavement beyond them. Swerving again he careered first to one side of the street and then to the other until he shot round the bend, miraculously immune from the hail of bullets that were now striking sparks from the roadway and whining loudly as they ricocheted from the walls of the houses.

  In his anxiety to get clear of Ems before a police cordon could be drawn across its exits he took a wrong turning, but he soon picked up his route again and striking the main Coblenz road slipped the B.M.W. into top gear. Regardless of all danger of a smash he streaked at over eighty m.p.h. past a police patrol which yelled at him to halt and two minutes later was clear of the town. At last he breathed a little more freely and eased up the speed of the machine. By the mercy of Providence and the use of his own quick wits he had escaped when escape had seemed next to impossible.

  But how long would he be able to retain his liberty? He had no illusions about the odds that he was up against. How far could he get before he was challenged and either halted or shot down?

  He began to get out a mental balance-sheet and to start counting his bag, but that consoled him little since he had now hopelessly bungled his mission.

  What were eight Nazis when Hitler had a million of the brutes? If only Wachmuller had been able to give him the name of the General at the head of the conspiracy before he had been shot! Then there would have been at least a hope of getting that priceless information out of the country before he was captured. But Wachmuller was dead, and with him the trail had ended. More: Gregory felt certain in his own mind that he had been the unwitting cause of the unfortunate Pastor’s murder.

  He could not tell for certain how the Nazis had come to know of his presence in Ems, but he had evidently been recognised through the circulated description of ‘General von Let-tow’ either by some police spy at the Kursaal café while he had been getting the Pastor’s address from the barmaid or, more probably, by one of the women at the war workers’ meeting in the Church Hall. Whoever it had been, they must have telephoned Party Headquarters that he was seeking or actually with Pastor Wachmuller thus enabling a squad of Storm-Troopers to get to the house before he and the Pastor had returned there. The housekeeper had doubtless been either gagged or removed; the leader of the Nazis had hidden in the room adjoining Wachmuller’s library, and the others, having sent for reinforcements, had then quietly surrounded the whole block while he had been talking to the Pastor.

  All that would never have happened had he not been indiscreet enough to determine on seeing Wachmuller when he was himself wanted by the police on account of the previous night’s affair in Coblenz.

  It occurred to him that a second visit to Herr Rheinhardt might elicit further information and a fresh lead to another of the conspirators if he could escape, lie hidden until the present hue and cry ha
d died down, and make his way to Traben-Trabach, but he suddenly recalled that he had made an irretrievable blunder at the very start by commandeering the car of a Nazi Party Chief for his first visit there. Fräulein Schultz would certainly have been questioned as to where she had driven the self-styled General von Lettow. She had no reason whatever to conceal such information, and even if she had, the unscrupulous blackguards whom he was up against would have wrung it from her by threats or torture. The unfortunate Herr Rheinhardt had probably been a prisoner for the greater part of the last twenty-four hours and pehaps was even now whimpering under the blows of the Nazis’ rubber truncheons in some sound-proof cell; if not already dead.

  All that Gregory had accomplished, therefore, was the inadvertent betrayal of two fine Germans who had been his only leads to further information.

  And here he was, hatless, wounded, upon a stolen police motor-cycle, a fugitive himself knowing that in all probability death was waiting round one of the dark bends in the road to claim him. His only asset was the speed at which he could now travel. Any attempt to go into hiding in Germany was clearly useless now that all hope of pursuing his mission had been terminated through his having given away both Wachmuller and Rheinhardt to their enemies. The only remaining course was to try to get out of the country and sneak home with his tail between his legs.

  If he could get as far as the Belgian or Dutch border he knew that there were plenty of underground channels from the frontier villages by which he could cross into safety without going through the frontier posts. In peace-time a huge, illicit business in the smuggling of contraband through them was carried on which provided a prosperous livelihood for many thousands of peasants on both sides of the line.

  Now that war had come the frontiers would be much more strictly guarded, but even so many such secret methods of evading the guards would still be in operation. All sorts of goods were very badly needed by the Germans, who would probably now be closing their eyes to illicit cargoes coming in from Belgium and Holland, and where goods could come in men could go out.

  Gregory still had a large sum of money on him, mainly concealed in his boots, and he had little doubt that if only he could reach the frontier in safety he would soon be able to find some avaricious peasant who, for a suitable remuneration, would smuggle him over into the security of a neutral country.

  This thought cheered him a little but he knew that he was faced with many hours of desperate anxiety, if not worse, before he could attempt to put any such plan into practice. Besides being nearly a hundred miles by road from the Belgian frontier he was, in addition, on the wrong side of the broad waters of the Rhine. Unless he had himself ferried over he would have to cross a bridge before getting on to a road to the frontier, and both bridges and ferries were certain to be watched by the police.

  Gregory’s thoughts had been racing as swiftly as the speeding motor-cycle, and he was little more than three miles from Ems when he struck a fork of the road which branched away up into the dark hills upon his right. Having already decided that he dared not pass through Coblenz but must endeavour instead to find some side-road cutting inland behind the town he swerved uphill along the right fork.

  It was not much better than a cart-track, and loose stones skidded from beneath his wheels as he leaned first to one side, then to the other, in negotiating steep bends. A few miles further on the road levelled out and ran across high, grassy, treeless country and Gregory realised suddenly that he was on a plateau behind Coblenz.

  The knowledge that he had found a road which would take him past the city without entering it put fresh heart into him, and when the plateau ended he rode almost gaily, despite the pain of his wounded thigh, down the twisting road beyond its further edge. At the bottom of the slope the road levelled out again, and suddenly he emerged from it to find himself on the wide Autobahn which ran from Coblenz to Cologne along the banks of the Rhine.

  Here there was much more likelihood of his meeting trouble but as there was no other road he had to take the risk; the greater the distance he could put between the Ems-Coblenz area and himself the better. In any case, he was now running north-east, towards the Dutch frontier, and when he had left the scenes of his recent activities further behind he would have to devise some means of crossing the river.

  Suddenly the engine of his motor-cycle started to stutter and backfire.

  ‘Damn, blast and hell!’ he exclaimed aloud, as the bike began to slow down. He knew enough of motors to recognise that particular noise when it came without warning after a machine had been running perfectly.

  A moment later the engine petered out altogether. He had run out of petrol, and he was still no more than five miles from Coblenz.

  11

  The Lady of the Limousine

  The now silent motor-cycle ran on for a hundred yards. Gregory steered it to the side of the road, halted it, got off and jerked it up on its stand. Feeling for the petrol leads, he unscrewed and examined them. His surmise had been correct, the tank was as dry as a bone.

  Although petrol was rationed he might ordinarily have walked to the nearest filling-station and have succeeded in bribing a garage-hand with a hundred-mark note to sell him a couple of six-litre cans; but he positively dared not do so now that he was a hunted man and still only just outside Coblenz, where the hunt for him was at its hottest. By this time, too, as he had stolen the motor-cycle from a Nazi, every garage for a hundred miles around would have been ordered by telephone not to supply him with petrol even if he produced a Party or Army permit, but to hold him until the police arrived.

  It was accursed luck that such a thing should happen when, after so many close shaves during the night, it really seemed that there was a reasonably good prospect of his getting clear of the area in which he had got himself into such hot water; but without petrol the bike was not only useless but actually dangerous. If he left it by the roadside it would be discovered either that night or early the following morning, and would give away to the police the road he had taken.

  Turning towards the river he kicked back the motor-cycle’s stand and pushed it up on to the edge of the grass which ran down to meet a sloping wall of stones set into the bank to prevent the river eating it away. The slope of the grass was the same as that of the stones, and together they formed a fairly smooth surface that rose steeply from the gurgling water.

  Balancing the bike carefully, and holding its handlebars so that the front wheel pointed down the slope, he gave it a push and let it career down into the river; then scrambled down after it to make sure that it was entirely submerged. The momentum of the weighty machine had carried it some ten feet out from the river-wall, and peering down at the darkly flowing water Gregory could see no trace of it. By daylight it might be visible if the water was shallow, but he had to chance that.

  As he had had nothing to drink all day except a few mouthfuls of brandy-and-water from his flask, which was now almost empty, he leaned down, bathed his face in the cool river water, and cupping his hands drank his fill.

  He was tired now, and despondent. Even his powers of recuperation from hard knocks and the strain of danger were beginning to fail him. It seemed quite certain that he must be caught early the following morning. His only remaining chance of evading capture for any length of time lay in reaching some big town or city where he might elude the Nazis by mingling with hundreds of other people in busy streets, but apart from Coblenz, now definitely barred to him, Cologne was the only city of any size in that part of Germany, and Cologne lay nearly fifty miles away.

  On the way to it there were only little places like Königswinter, where a stranger’s presence would soon be noticed, and the university town of Bonn, which was nearly as far away as Cologne. Moreover, he was still in his General’s uniform, which was about the most easily identifiable thing that he could possibly wear. To make matters worse he had lost his cap when swinging himself in at the dormer window, a fact which the Nazis would know and circulate; as if it had not already been
found it certainly would be when the dawn revealed it, lying in the street, to the men left in charge of the Pastor’s house.

  There seemed nevertheless to be absolutely no alternative but to walk in the direction of Cologne with the intention of putting as great a distance between Coblenz and himself as he could manage while darkness lasted. Before dawn broke he would have to endeavour to find another haystack or similar hide-out in which to lie concealed during the coming day.

  He had not gone a hundred yards before his leg began to pain him. In the excitement of the fight on the roof-tops and his subsequent escape he had hardly noticed his wound, and had paid no attention to it, but now the pain in his thigh began to stab him angrily with every step he took, and he could feel the warm blood trickling down his leg inside his trousers.

  Turning off the road he climbed down the river-bank again, removed his trousers, tore off the tail of his shirt, staunched the flow of blood as well as he could and carefully bathed the wound in the river water. He then made a rough bandage of the wet rag, adjusted it, pulled his trousers on again and washed the blood from his hands.

  By careful prodding he had assured himself that the bullet was not in the wound, and he considered himself lucky to have got off so lightly. In his already difficult position the wound was yet another handicap, but he knew from experience that if only he could find some place in which to lie up for a few days he would soon be none the worse, as such flesh-wounds soon heal in a healthy body. A wet patch on his trousers just above the wound told him that they were stained with blood that had seeped through, but as he was still wearing his overcoat that would conceal the bloodstains from any casual observer.

  Regaining the road he set off once more. The wound still hurt him, but not so badly as it had, and the bathing with cold water had lessened its tendency to become inflamed.