The Scarlet Impostor

by Dennis Wheatley

  ‘The Best Laid Plans O’ Mice and Men’

  Determined as the taximan was to earn the hundred francs even at the risk of his own and his passenger’s necks, and nobly though he succeeded, the agents from the Sûreté reached the Crillon before Gregory. As he entered the lounge of the hotel Ribaud broke away from a little group of men standing there and came up to him.

  ‘I have men on the other entrances, Monsieur,’ he said in a low voice, ‘so if he’s in the hotel we’ll have him within the next five minutes. Let us make an inquiry at the porter’s desk.’

  Ribaud flashed his card of authority in front of the hall porter and Gregory asked if a Mr Sallust was staying there. The porter replied that no-one of that name had registered, but Gregory was not at all surprised at this as in order to do so Grauber would have had to fake a British passport in his name. Evidently Grauber had used it only when getting in touch with Madame Dubois’ nursing-home and had told the hotel people that he was expecting a telephone message from a friend of that name who had not yet arrived.

  On Gregory’s describing Grauber the porter’s face brightened at once. ‘It is Monsieur van Zelden that you mean, sir? He is a Dutch gentleman and has been staying in the hotel for the past week.’

  ‘Is he in?’ asked Ribaud.

  ‘No, Monsieur. He went out just after lunch, and has not returned yet. I have not been off duty since then so I would have seen him if he had come in again, but I’ll ring his room if you wish to make quite certain.’

  ‘No, no.’ Ribaud promptly held up his hand. ‘Don’t do that. I wish to speak with a representative of the management. But first I must telephone.’

  He got on to the Sûreté, and in order that the frontiers could be watched if Grauber should slip through their fingers, Ribaud gave Gregory’s description of the German Grauber and the information that he was using a Dutch passport in the name of van Zelden.

  An under-manager was then fetched and the business in hand explained to him, upon which he produced a set of passkeys and at Ribaud’s request took the party up in the lift.

  Grauber, with the ample funds of the German Secret Service at his disposal was evidently doing himself well. He had a suite consisting, so the manager informed them, of a bedroom, a bathroom and a private sitting-room.

  On arriving at the sitting-room door Ribaud took the passkey from the manager, inserted it noiselessly in the lock, turned it with his left hand and, drawing his gun with his right, flung open the door. Beside him Gregory also had his gun ready in his hand, but for the moment he had no occasion to use it. The hall porter had been right; Grauber had not yet returned and the suite was empty.

  ‘To save the possibility of trouble down in the hall we will wait for him here,’ Ribaud told the manager, and swiftly began to place his men. One he sent to the pickets on the entrances of the hotel with Grauber’s description and instructions that they were to remain at their posts until further orders; he was then to wait outside the main entrance and stop the German if, having once come in, he should attempt to leave again that way. A second man was to join the first at the main hotel entrance. A third was to take up his position in the floor-waiter’s pantry further down the corridor so that he could cut off Grauber’s retreat if he should try to escape. A fourth was to be provided by the manager with some window-cleaning utensils and make a show of cleaning a window at the other end of the corridor so that he could cut off Grauber’s retreat in that direction, while Ribaud, his assistant Corbin and Gregory would remain in the suite to tackle Grauber when he appeared.

  As the others went off to take up their positions Ribaud, Corbin and Gregory began to make an examination of Grauber’s belongings. He had only one large suitcase, but practically every article of his in the suite showed the extraordinary care with which he had built up his identity as Heer van Zelden, a Dutch neutral.

  A two-days’-old Dutch newspaper and some Dutch magazines littered the table in the sitting-room, a box of Dutch cheroots lay on the writing-desk and in one of its drawers were several correspondence files containing letters and invoices, all evidently faked or stolen, which would at once have satisfied any curious person that Heer van Zelden was undoubtedly the prosperous Dutch business man he seemed. Several of Grauber’s ties had the tag of a haberdasher in Amsterdam and even his suitcase bore the mark of a Dutch manufacturer. There was nothing whatever to connect him with Germany or with his recent visit to England.

  Having examined everything with considerable care they sat down to wait, but it was a dreary business. At five o’clock they were all keyed up in anticipation of his arrival. By six they had settled down, realising that he might not be back until dinner time. By seven they were anxious to get the job over. By eight they were keyed up again, but by nine they realised with irritation that he must be dining out.

  Gregory and his companions were now both hungry and thirsty, so Ribaud telephoned down to the manager and asked him if he would be good enough to bring them up some sandwiches and a bottle of wine himself, as he did not want a waiter to know that there were detectives in Grauber’s room or possibly to run into Grauber himself in the corridor, having just deposited the tray.

  The manager appeared shortly afterwards with a good snack meal which whiled away the time until ten. They expected that Grauber might appear shortly after this hour owing to the curfew, but eleven came without his having done so and they decided that he must be visiting somebody in a private apartment.

  By midnight they were thoroughly tired of waiting, but nevertheless had not the least intention of leaving without getting their man. At half-past twelve the manager appeared again, this time of his own volition, with a fresh supply of drinks. One o’clock came and two, but still no Grauber, so they began to think that he had succumbed to the attractions of Paris and having acquired a girl-friend had gone off to spend the night with her at her flat.

  It seemed pointless for all three of them to spend sleepless nights, so they divided the remaining hours of darkness into watches, two of them remaining ready and alert in case Grauber should come in while the third snatched a couple of hours’ sleep on Grauber’s bed.

  Corbin was given the first spell of sleep and Gregory the second. When they aroused him to relieve Ribaud it occurred to him to pass the time by making a more thorough examination of Grauber’s belongings. He knew that every item would be scrutinised with microscopic care when it arrived at the Sûreté in case it might conceal a list of telephone numbers or addresses or possibly the key to a cipher, but he saw no reason why he should not anticipate this scientific examination by a few hours.

  Corbin agreed with him that it would be a good idea, so they set to work. The detective began to look through the Dutch newspaper and magazines for any advertisement or small paragraph amongst their letterpress referring to van Zelden or to the firm for which he was supposed to work, and any such item would be certain to contain some hidden meaning.

  In the meantime Gregory took Grauber’s razor and carefully cut in half each of the long Dutch cheroots in case one of them contained something written on a tissue-paper spill. Having cut Grauber’s shaving-stick in pieces without result, he then ran the razor along the seams of the stiffer parts of Grauber’s clothes, such as the collar of a spare lounge-suit, and took out the buckram, afterwards removing the soles of the German’s bedroom slippers, but in every case he drew a blank. His next procedure was to examine each item of Grauber’s clothing to see whether it was evenly stitched throughout, as it is possible to conceal the key to a cipher in the irregularities of the stitching of some specially-sewn garment such as a tie, but here again he could find nothing out of the ordinary.

  Corbin was still carefully scrutinising the pages of the magazines in the hope of finding some message which one of Grauber’s colleagues in Holland might have inserted in the guise of an advertisement when Gregory began to tackle the big suitcase. When he had ripped out the lining of its bottom he found that beneath it, instead of leather, was a thin sheet o
f steel at one side of which there was a small nick. Inserting his nail in the nick, he pulled, and a portion of the plate slid back to reveal a shallow recess. This was only about an eighth of an inch in depth, but quite deep enough to hold the several sheets of paper which, to his joy, he found concealed there.

  Corbin came over to help him to examine them, but the papers contained only long lists of numbers which conveyed nothing at all to them. They were considerably elated by their find, however, as they had every reason to hope that they had found the key to one of the Gestapo’s secret codes which the deciphering office of the Deuxième Bureau would be able to apply with valuable results.

  There was one other item in the false bottom of the suitcase: an oblong of cardboard, waistcoat-pocket size in a cellophane cover. It had a certain similarity to the warrant of authority which Ribaud had flashed under Gregory’s nose when he had arrested him, and Gregory saw that it was Grauber’s identity-card as Chief of the Gestapo Foreign Department U.A.-1, giving him absolute power over every German and German agent outside Germany and powers almost as great in the Reich itself.

  At eight o’clock they aroused Ribaud and told him of their find, which consoled him considerably for the otherwise fruitless night that they had spent. All three of them were unshaven, tired and irritable after their long vigil, but now that morning had come they began to hope once more that Grauber would put in an appearance. It was possible that he was breakfasting in bed with some young woman or had passed the night at the apartment of a friend, but as his baggage was still at the Crillon it was certain that he would return there during the course of the morning unless he had somehow learned of their presence in the hotel.

  The manager brought them a petit déjeuner of rolls and welcome hot coffee, together with the morning’s papers. As Ribaud’s men had been on duty all night he telephoned the Sûreté and had them relieved, but as the morning wore on the three watchers began to feel despondent again.

  It was possible that Grauber had an associate upon the hotel staff who had seen Ribaud and his men take up their positions and had promptly telephoned a warning. As Grauber was such a big shot there was good reason to suppose that he would employ subordinate agents to watch his quarters for his own protection. It was quite certain that he would not have left Paris without collecting his luggage and paying his hotel bill unless he had had some extremely good reason for doing so, and by midday the conviction had grown upon Gregory and Ribaud that the German had been warned in time and had slipped through their fingers.

  As there was still a faint hope that he might return to the hotel round about lunch-time they sat doggedly until two o’clock, but they then finally decided that it would be useless to remain there any longer.

  Ribaud left three of the relief men downstairs in the Manager’s office so that if Grauber should chance to come back that afternoon two of them could close the corridor to his room, once he was in it, and see that he should not get out again until the third man had telephoned the Sûreté. He then went off to report to his chief while Gregory returned to the Saint Regis.

  He ordered a luncheon-tray to be sent up to his room and ate a snack meal while bathing, shaving and changing, after which he went straight out again and took a taxi to the nursing home.

  Directly he sent up his name Madame Dubois said that she would see him, but he found her in an irritable mood which he knew would not be improved by the news he had to give her.

  ‘Well?’ she inquired sharply as soon as they had greeted each other. ‘Why did you not telephone as you promised?’

  ‘I had no news to give you. Ever since I left you yesterday I’ve been with the Sûreté people in Grauber’s suite waiting for him to return to the hotel. His baggage is still there but he hasn’t turned up, so it now looks certain that somebody tipped him off and that he’s given us the slip.’

  A long sigh of relief escaped her. ‘You say that his baggage was still in the hotel when you got there at half-past four yesterday afternoon. That means he was still in Paris then, and could not have received any warning of your presence until later. Unless he left France by plane from some secret landing-ground he will not yet have got back to Germany. Therefore the warning I have sent to the Comrades there will arrive in time.’

  ‘You’ve managed to get to work very quickly.’

  ‘That was not difficult; such emergencies are arranged for. Immediately you left me I sent birthday greetings by telegram to friends in Belgium who will dispatch similar telegrams to my friends in Germany.’

  ‘You think, then, that they will be able to evade the Gestapo even when Grauber returns? Everything possible is being done to stop him on the French frontier, but he probably has a dozen aliases with passports to match and may succeed in getting through via Belgium or Switzerland.’

  Madame Dubois took out a compact and began to powder her beaky nose as she replied: ‘It would normally be very difficult for Germans to disappear from their ordinary occupations and move to other towns without the Gestapo’s getting to hear of it, but the war has made a big difference. Quite early in the war the Saar area was evacuated and a fortnight ago the Germans evacuated the whole of their civilian population for a depth of sixteen miles behind the Siegfried Line. The evacuations were carried out very hurriedly and they have lost trace of thousands of evacuees. They gave special broadcasts issuing the names of over ten thousand people on whom they were trying to check up. In such a state of confusion my friends stand a reasonable chance of moving from their homes to other parts of the country and passing themselves off as evacuees without arousing suspicion.’

  ‘That’s good,’ said Gregory, ‘but what about the Army officers? They can’t disappear like that.’

  ‘Army officers?’ Madame Dubois repeated, looking at him in surprise. ‘What have they to do with this?’

  ‘Surely you are aware,’ Gregory replied, ‘that the anti-Nazi politicals, the Intellectuals and certain high officers of the Army have sunk their differences, temporarily at all events, with the idea of taking concerted measures to overthrow Hitler?’

  ‘I have heard rumours of that,’ she admitted, ‘and I hope that it is so, since one prominent Army chief would be worth a thousand poor, helpless working-people in any revolt against the Nazi régime. My friends, however, are the leaders of the German Freedom Movement which, as you know, consists almost entirely of the most resolute among the anti-Nazi working classes.’

  ‘Would you mind telling me,’ Gregory requested, ‘just what took place when you saw this man Grauber who impersonated me?’

  ‘He said that he came from Tom Archer who is a good friend of mine, and from the way he spoke of Archer he convinced me that he knew him well. He then went on to talk of the work we are doing, and he mentioned the names of a number of German refugees who are assisting to direct the Movement from Paris. I was naturally suspicious of him at first, but he produced a letter from a German who is still in Germany, speaking of him as entirely to be trusted. That convinced me of his bona fides, so I spoke openly of the Movement, and while he gave me what appeared to be a lot of information as to what was going on underground inside Germany I also mentioned the work that various other Comrades were doing.’

  ‘It was this letter he produced which persuaded you to talk, I suppose?’

  ‘Yes. Without that he would have got nothing from me. It was an introduction from a well-known winegrower whom I had known for years and whom I trust implicitly.’

  ‘Was it by any chance from Julius Rheinhardt?’ Gregory asked quietly.

  She gave him a sharp glance. ‘Yes; how did you know?’

  ‘I guessed it because Rheinhardt was arrested over five weeks ago. I thought they would have killed him long since, but evidently they decided to put him in a concentration-camp and make use of him instead. I’m afraid that letter must have been extracted from poor Rheinhardt under torture.’

  ‘Mon Dieu! These fiends!’ With a violent gesture Madame Dubois stubbed out the cigarette which sh
e was smoking. ‘Is there nothing they will stop at?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Gregory. ‘I suppose you don’t know that poor Archer is dead and that he died from shock or a heart-attack after Grauber had had him kidnapped and had played the devil’s game on him?’

  She closed her eyes for a moment. ‘Poor Tom, poor Tom. So that’s how Grauber got to know so much about me and the Movement here in Paris.’

  Gregory nodded. ‘It is clear, Madame, that you feel as I do about these people. I’m going to ask you now to give me all the help in your power.’

  ‘To what end?’ she inquired.

  ‘So that I may go to Germany and take certain steps which will be of enormous assistance to the anti-Nazis.’

  ‘How can I help you in that?’

  ‘By giving me the names of the people you mentioned to Grauber so that I can get in touch with them when I arrive in Germany,’

  ‘But they will have had my warning by this time and will have left their homes to conceal themselves from the Gestapo, so even if I were willing to do so I could not now tell you where you would be able to find any of them.’

  ‘I see that,’ Gregory agreed, ‘but there must be others whom you know and whose names you didn’t mention to Grauber?’

  She gave him a swift, suspicious glance. ‘That is true, but I’m afraid that I cannot give them to you either.’

  ‘Why? We are working for the same cause.’

  ‘As far as the overthrow of the Nazi régime is concerned, yes, but upon other matters we find ourselves in opposite camps. Grauber represented himself to me as a friend of Rheinhardt’s, who is a capitalist but a man of very liberal views. He also represented himself as a friend of Archer, and as a man who shared the same political views as those held by Archer and myself. Those ideals are shared by most of my friends in Germany, but they are by no means the ideals of the French and British Governments. In fact, as you’ve no doubt heard, the French Government recently dissolved the French Communist Party. You are an Englishman of good class and you are also associated with the Sûreté-Générale. I have therefore every reason to regard you as a political enemy.’