The Scarlet Impostor

by Dennis Wheatley

  ‘I don’t intend to, sir. The warrant would only be to give me the power to take her out of that nursing-home when she’s well enough—which should be in a day or two now—but I don’t propose to cart her off to prison. I shall take her instead to the biggest hospital in Paris to see the young men of France wounded and dying. She is a woman, mon Colonel, she will help us to stop the war after that.’

  The Colonel’s face was wrinkled by one of his rare, illuminating smiles. ‘Bon garçon! Bon garçon! How right I was to give you another chance!’

  It was nearly seven o’clock when Gregory got back once more to the Saint Regis. Having had only two hours’ sleep on the previous night he was feeling distinctly jaded, and as he wanted to be as fresh as possible for his all-important interview with Madame Dubois on the following day he decided to have something sent up to his room and get a long night’s rest by turning in very early. When he had ordered his meal he undressed and went to bed.

  The floor-waiter brought his dinner, with which he treated himself to a bottle of champagne as a good pick-me-up. Afterwards, relaxing between the cool sheets, he felt considerably better.

  The plan for his return into Germany was a good one. He would spend a dangerous hour in crossing no-man’s-land but he had been out on many a night-patrol in the last Great War and had no reason to suppose that conditions had altered very much. There would be the same old snags, such as barbed wire through which he would have to cut his way and Very lights which would reveal him to the enemy if he were not careful to conceal himself as he crept forward, but there would also be the same old muddy shell-holes and abandoned sectors of blown-in trench in which to hide.

  Once he was inside Germany the chance of meeting anyone who knew Grauber personally would be really very slender.

  About Madame Dubois he was now reasonably sanguine. By one means or another he felt certain that he would be able to persuade her to talk. But, of course, everything depended on that.

  At nine o’clock he put out his bed-side light and turned over to go to sleep. He was just dropping off when a gentle tapping on his bedroom door aroused him. Sitting up, he switched on the light again and called: ‘Entrez!’ The door opened and Ribaud walked in, carefully closing it behind him.

  ‘Hullo!’ said Gregory, ‘you’re looking a bit glum; what’s the matter?’

  The plump Frenchman nodded slowly. ‘I have reason to be, mon vieux. Colonel Lacroix has sent me to tell you that an explosion wrecked the nursing-home half an hour ago. Madame Dubois is dead.’

  24

  The Scarlet Impostor

  Gregory groaned. ‘Poor woman! That’s sunk us though; put paid to the whole caboodle. How did it happen?’

  Ribaud shrugged. ‘It is impossible to say for certain as yet, but I can give a good guess. Madame Dubois’ nurse was injured but when she recovered consciousness she was able to make a statement. It seems that a parcel arrived for Madame by the evening post. It was a long box bearing the name of a florist, and the nurse remembers that at the time she took it upstairs she thought it curious that a florist should send flowers through the post instead of delivering them. She gave the parcel to Madame and the moment she had left Madame’s room there was a violent explosion. She herself would have been killed had she not been on the far side of the door. It looks as though the parcel contained a bomb, concealed among the flowers, which was exploded by some mechanism or other as Madame opened it.’

  Picking up a cigarette Gregory threw the box down the bed to the Frenchman as he asked: ‘Have you any idea what time this parcel would have had to be posted to be delivered with the evening mail?’

  ‘Yes. Parcels take longer than letters, especially in war-time. Even if it was posted in Paris it must have been handed in before the post-offices closed last night.’

  ‘That would have been Grauber’s work then. If he’d learned about our being at the Crillon soon after a quarter-past four, which was about the time we arrived, he’d have had ample time to prepare and post the box before six. Does the nurse remember the name of the florist?’

  ‘Unfortunately, no. She noticed only that the address was in Clichy, but that gets us nowhere. I’d bet a cask of Bordeaux to a whisky-soda that the florist was an innocent party to the crime. As I reconstruct it, Grauber bought some flowers from the nearest florist directly he’d been warned and took them back to the apartment at which he had received the warning—which might be anywhere in the Clichy district. He inserted the bomb, then either went out himself to post the parcel or sent one of the occupants of the apartments, who must be his agents.’

  ‘Then it looks as though my trip to Germany is off.’

  ‘I fear so. There’s no sense in risking your neck to no purpose, and that’s what you would be doing if you went with nothing to work on.’

  ‘All right; there it is. I’ve had some narrow escapes in this affair so I mustn’t grumble at Fate, but she’s certainly played some dirty tricks on us so far as the business itself is concerned. One way and another we’ve had filthy luck. Will you thank Colonel Lacroix for letting me know so promptly and say that I’m entirely at his disposal if he can spare time to see me and thinks there’s anything else I can do? Frankly, though, I can’t see any possible opening at the moment.’

  ‘Certainement. I’ll give the Colonel your message. At all events it looks as though you’ll have a more comfortable time tonight than we did last night. I’m just going off duty and I’ll be glad to get to bed myself.’

  ‘Well, a jolly good night to you! You’ve earned it.’

  Gregory managed to raise a smile and Ribaud smiled back as he left the room.

  Though Gregory lay awake for some time puzzling his wits to find some fresh way in which to tackle his problem he could not for the life of him think of one, so his elation of half an hour before having sadly evaporated he put out the light once more and went to sleep.

  By late the following afternoon he had heard nothing from Colonel Lacroix so he began to ring the numbers of a few of his old friends who normally lived in Paris. It was a forlorn hope to try his best friend, the debonair Jean de Brissac, but all the same he rang up the Invalides and found as he had expected that Captain de Brissac was away with his Regiment.

  Gregory soon found that nearly all the people he knew were out of Paris employed on some form of war work or other but he managed to locate Paul Desvoeux, a prominent journalist who was also an expert on foreign affairs, and arranged to lunch with him on the following day. Later that evening he ran into a Royal Flying Corps officer in the Ritz bar who was a friend of his and the two of them spent as hectic an evening together as war-time Paris could provide.

  No word came from Colonel Lacroix either on the Wednesday or Thursday, so Gregory killed time as well as he could, but on the Friday morning he received a telephone message asking him to call at the Sûreté-Générale at six o’clock.

  When he was shown into the Colonel’s room the little man said: ‘I regret that I’ve had to keep you doing nothing for these last few days when you probably wished to return to England, but I have had many other affairs to attend to and I wished to see you again for a last talk before you left France. I also have a telegram for you.’

  ‘The original one, I suppose?’ Gregory smiled ruefully.

  ‘No, another. It came in yesterday.’

  Taking the flimsy, Gregory read:

  ‘RUDD SAFE HOME BUT YOU STILL GALLIVANTING WITH THE GIRLS IN PARIS I SUPPOSE STOP WONDER IF HAVE ANY MONEY LEFT AFTER WHAT YOU MUST HAVE HAD TO SPEND ON WREATHS STOP HAVE THROWN KUMMEL BOTTLE IN DUSTBIN STOP CANCELLED ALLOTMENT AND BESPOKE PADDED CELL FOR YOU INSTEAD STOP GWAINE-CUST.’

  ‘Evidently he has heard about Madame Dubois’ death,’ supplemented the Colonel. ‘That’s about it, and I’m afraid I’ve let the old chap down badly.’

  ‘No fresh line of attack has occurred to you since our last talk?’

  Gregory shook his head. ‘I’m sorry, sir; I’ve puzzled my wits with the problem until the
y’re half-silly but now Madame Dubois is dead I’m afraid we’re up against a blank wall once more.’

  ‘That is regrettable, because if only you could have succeeded in your mission you might have performed a great service to humanity. An internal revolution in Germany might well have put an end to the conflict in its early stages, whereas there is now a grave danger of its spreading.’

  Gregory shook his head. ‘I think it is most unlikely that the Turko-Russian friendship will be broken, and the Turks are a very brave people. Surely Stalin will only be playing our game if he has any idea of expanding his native Georgia and coming down from the Caucasian Mountains into the Turkish plain?’

  ‘Perhaps. But Iraq and the oil-wells must be a temptation to him, and Afghanistan is in no position to resist Russian aggression. The British are confident that they could hold the north-west frontier, but a war in India would automatically divert a considerable portion of their main war effort from Germany, and as a certain section of the Indian population has been clamouring for self-determination for many years they might seize the opportunity to stage another Indian mutiny.’

  ‘To sum up, you will see that although there is a lull at the moment the whole world is now a tinder-box, and sparks may cause it to burst into flame at any moment in a dozen new directions. It has therefore become more vitally important than ever that the war in the West shall be brought to a successful conclusion before that happened. Once Germany’s out of the ring there’ll be little likelihood of Russia’s moving, or the drawing in of Holland, Belgium, Switzerland, Hungary, the Balkans, Finland, Turkey, India, Japan and half a dozen other nations. That is why I felt that I had to talk to you again to find out if there was any conceivable way in which you could endeavour to make a new start on your mission.’

  ‘The only thing I can suggest, sir, is that since I’ve got nowhere with the subversive elements, I should attempt to get right to the heart of the matter by tackling somebody high up in the German Army. But whom to tackle? That’s the question. If you can give me the name of a really important Army leader whose past history leads you to suppose that he may be involved in this affair, I’m willing to go back into Germany and take the big gamble of going direct to him and laying my cards on the table.’

  The Colonel nodded. ‘That is a very gallant offer, Monsieur Sallust, as to do as you propose would be tantamount to walking blindfold to your own death. If the General you approached were not involved in the conspiracy you would be led straight out and shot, while, even if he were, and you could not persuade him of your bona fides, he might have you executed for his own protection.’

  ‘The risk isn’t really greater, sir, than those which thousands of our own men are facing every day at the Front, or that which the British pilots took when they dived flat out to within a hundred feet of the mastheads of the German battleship they bombed at Kiel.’

  Colonel Lacroix shrugged noncommittally. ‘If only General Baron von Fritsch had not been murdered I’d have let you go to him. Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria would also have been a worthwhile bet, but I hear that he, too, has been assassinated by the Gestapo on Hitler’s orders because it was feared that in the event of a rising he might proclaim himself Regent of Bavaria. Field-Marshal von Blomberg, who had the confidence of the Army before his disastrous marriage, is now a prisoner in the fortress of Landsberg. With him are Generals Pogrell, Niehot and Lang, all good men, but rendered powerless. Then there was a new purge only last week. Von Hammerstein, a former Chief of the General Staff, and von Stulprangel, with several others, were all removed from their commands because they were suspected of Monarchist tendencies. They were all probably involved in this conspiracy, but it is useless to think of them now.

  ‘Of those who remain, von Brauchitsch is an unknown quantity and von Keitel is so very anti-British that I think he is almost certainly hand-in-glove with von Ribbentrop.’

  ‘What about a really bold stroke?’ Gregory suggested. ‘Say I went to Goering?’

  The Colonel did not say that Gregory was mad, but considered for a moment before replying. ‘I see how your mind is working. Evidently you appreciate, as I do, that Goering is in a class apart from the other Nazis. He is no soap-box orator, but an ace airman of the last War, with many powerful connections. He owes his rise almost entirely to that, and to his really magnificent organising ability. It was he who won over the Reichswehr for Hitler, who still uses him as his main go-between with the Army leaders. The other Nazis would have pulled him down long ago if it hadn’t been that Hitler is the master of them all, and knows very well that Goering is really more important to him than any of his other supporters because he is respected by the Army and is the one Nazi in whom the upper classes have any faith.

  ‘How the Allied Governments would view a new German Government purged of the Nazis and headed by “Iron Hermann” I can’t say, but Goering keeps his word and the one thing that they would demand of any new German Government is trustworthiness. I have no doubt at all, though, that the Army chiefs would follow him if he decided to throw Hitler and the rest overboard.’

  ‘Well, I’m prepared to have a shot at getting to him if you wish it, sir.’

  ‘No, I’m afraid I can’t allow that. You see, we have as yet not one atom of proof that Goering is disloyal to Hitler or that he could be tempted to become so, and I’m not going to send you on a mission which has so fantastically small a chance of success.’

  ‘D’you think it’s any good my trying those Generals whose names begin with “Gra …”? The ones Sir Pellinore Gwaine. Cust turned up, I mean. They were Generals Grabenhoff, Grauwitz, and Gröner.’

  ‘No. None of them is of sufficient importance to be the man we’re after. But wait a minute! Tell me again exactly what Pastor Wachmuller said just before he was shot.’

  ‘He said, “When you see General Gra …”’

  ‘Ha! Then I don’t believe he meant that “Gra …” as the first syllable of any surname at all. I believe he was going to say “General Graf von something-or-other.” There are many Counts in the German Army, and that would have been much more likely.’

  ‘By Jove, you’re right!’ Gregory exclaimed. ‘Now, who is there that’s both a General and a Count and might be our man?’

  The Colonel pressed a bell-push and had a German Army list brought. They went through it very carefully, but it conveyed little to them; so many of the high officers of the German Army had come from noble families and had succeeded to their titles by the time they had reached the rank of General. There were General Count von Arnhem, General Count von Blauwitz, General Count von Braunberg, General Count von Busfeld and dozens of others. Most of them held comparatively unimportant posts, and though a few were on the Great General Staff commanding Army Corps it was utterly impossible to decide which of these titled Generals might be the head of the conspiracy.

  In the end Gregory realised that the search was hopeless. ‘What filthy luck it was,’ he murmured, ‘that we lost the best lead of all before I had a chance to use it.’

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘Why, the woman who was the mistress of Hugo Falkenstein, the armaments millionaire; the beautiful aristocrat who holds in her hands the threads of every Army intrigue and has known all the German Generals since she was in her cradle—Erika von Epp.’

  ‘Erika von Epp! What has she to do with this?’

  ‘I thought I’d told you. It was she to whom that little reversed swastika belonged, and when she was in London just before the war she drank to the time when her own friends would be back again at the head of affairs in Germany. Unfortunately, she was on the high seas on her way to New York when war was declared, and none of our people have been able to trace her in the United States, so it looks as though she’s gone down to Mexico or South America on some mission for the Germans.’

  ‘Parbleu! You’re wrong there,’ exclaimed the Colonel, ‘she was back in Germany a week after war was declared. The day the Nazis marched into Poland she changed ships
in mid-Atlantic, presumably on instructions from her Government. The ship to which she transferred was one of those which eluded the British Navy in the first days of the war by sailing round the North Cape; it landed her at the Russian White Sea port of Murmansk, and she flew home from there.’

  ‘Your agents serve you well, mon Colonel,’ said Gregory with rising excitement.

  ‘Erika von Epp has always been worth watching. She is one of the most dangerous, as well as one of the most beautiful women in Europe.’

  ‘And I haven’t a doubt that it’s she who holds the key to this riddle. I’d never have dreamed of wasting my time on people like Rheinhardt and Archer if I’d thought there was the least chance of getting in touch with her. And she’s back in Germany, eh? D’you happen to know where she is at the present time?’

  ‘That I cannot say, as she moves about the country a great deal. She has an apartment in Berlin, but her home is in Munich. You knew, of course, that she married about a year ago? She’s now the Countess von Osterberg.’

  Gregory smiled. ‘Her conduct in London just before the war didn’t indicate that she took her marriage very seriously. She takes it so lightly, in fact, that she doesn’t even use her title, but continues to be known by her maiden name.’

  ‘She’s a mysterious woman, if ever there was one: rich, beautiful, clever and with a finger in every international pie. If you were willing to gamble your life there’d be some real justification for risking it on the chance of opening communications with the German Army leaders through her.’

  ‘I’ll start for Germany just as soon as that S.S. uniform you were going to have made for me is ready.’

  ‘Good boy! Good boy!’ said the Colonel, with a smile. ‘I don’t think the order for it was cancelled, so find out from Ribaud about a fitting. The uniform will take a few days to complete, but I’ll get in touch with our Military Intelligence people at once and discuss with them which will be the best sector in which to operate when you make your attempt to cross no-man’s-land. Have you any personal preference? If you know one sector of the Front better than the rest you may have less difficulty in finding your bearings when you arrive behind the German lines.’