The Scarlet Impostor

by Dennis Wheatley

  ‘Nor I,’ murmured Gregory, taking her hand and carrying it to his lips. ‘You’ve done something for me that no woman has done for years. I’d walk through fire for you. Nothing that you could tell me about your past could make one iota of difference to the present. Tell me about Hugo.’

  ‘He had the soul of an artist, the brain of a great statesman and the generosity of an Emperor. He was an extraordinary mixture. I’ve never known a man who was at the same time so kind, so considerate, so thoughtful for his friends, yet so utterly ruthless with his enemies. He saw at once that I was not just a beautiful doll to be kept in a luxury flat for the amusement of his leisure hours but that I was his equal intellectually, and we formed an amazing partnership. Sometimes we travelled together, sometimes he sent me alone as his ambassador to negotiate with diplomats and Ministers. I travelled all over Europe and several times to America. He wanted me to marry him, but I wouldn’t, as that would have altered my status and made me less useful to him.

  ‘It’s a curious psychological fact that if I’d become Frau Falkenstein, the wife of a Jew, many of my old friends among the best families would have ceased to receive me; while as long as I remained Erika von Epp—although most of them knew of my association with Hugo—my position was rarely brought into question.’

  Gregory nodded. ‘Yes. I understand that. By refraining from marrying him you enabled them to keep face.’

  ‘Exactly. And during those years brains, blood and guts had begun to count again, the remnants of the German nobility were gradually struggling back to positions of importance. Captains and Majors who had had their epaulettes torn from their shoulders by the Reds after the war had become Colonels and Generals in the reconstituted Reichswehr. Some of their women were a little difficult to start with, but with the men I had no trouble at all. In my house here in Munich and in my apartment in Berlin all the most promising elements of the new Army began to congregate, and as soon as they began to appreciate the power that I wielded even the most sticky of their women came too.

  ‘With Goering I had an excellent understanding and I was often able to be of great assistance to him on matters concerning my Army friends. Europe has given Germany a rotten deal, and in those days many of us thought that the Nazis would not only prevent Germany from going Communist but would also make her strong and respected again.

  ‘Then the Jewish persecutions began. At first I was able to protect Hugo and many of his friends, although I could do nothing for the masses. Hugo might have saved himself. He was too important a man for the Nazis to quarrel with if they could possibly avoid it, but he refused to stand by and see the poorer people of his race robbed and maltreated. Goering tried to persuade him to leave Germany and even promised to protect his interests, but he would not go.

  ‘As the persecutions got worse and worse the gulf widened. Eventually Hugo wrote to Hitler pleading for the reasonable treatment of his race, and threatening that if the Führer remained adamant in his refusal to change his policy he would withdraw his financial support from the Government. The reply was his arrest, and he died six months later from the brutalities inflicted on him in the concentration-camp at Dachau.’

  ‘So that’s why you’re so bitterly anti-Nazi,’ Gregory said softly. ‘If you loved him, I can understand just how you must have felt. But why did you marry von Osterberg?’

  She shrugged. ‘That was to please my father. He was of the old school and had very high moral principles. The life I was leading nearly broke his heart. He tried not to show how glad he was when Hugo died, but in spite of all my faults he was always terribly fond of me and his one craving was to see me respectably married into one of the good old German families before he died himself.

  ‘Last winter he became very ill and it was obvious that he couldn’t last more than a few weeks. I could have married a dozen different men, but Kurt von Osterberg suited me best because I wished to please my father and yet remain my own mistress.

  ‘Kurt is a scientist, but he was always short of money to carry out his experiments. He’s a charming fellow, already in the early fifties, and although he is devoted to me, he’s not in the least possessive. He’s very proud to be known as my husband, content to remain my friend and more than grateful that I’m able to keep him in funds for the scientific experiments which mean so much to him. In that way I managed to retain my personal freedom and make my father’s last hours happy. But since Hugo died, although I’ve tried hard to interest myself in one or two nice men like Jimmy, I have been like a dead person until …’

  ‘Yes, until …’ Gregory prompted her.

  She laughed. ‘Oh, until one night in September when a lean-faced ruffian held up my car, very nearly lost his life in taking my pistol from me and then made me kiss him. But it’s your turn to tell me about yourself now.’

  Slowly Gregory shook his head. ‘I think I’ve been dead too, or half-dead anyway, for a long-time until that night in September. My own career of crime hasn’t been half so spectacular, but I’ll tell you later about some of the high spots which might amuse you. In the meantime, what in the world were you doing this evening in the company of that swine, Grauber?’

  She sat forward quickly. ‘You know him then?’

  ‘Do I not, my dear!’ Gregory produced Grauber’s Gestapo card and showed it to her. ‘I pinched this off him in Paris ten days ago, and for the last forty-eight hours I’ve been posing as Herr Gruppenführer Grauber myself.’

  ‘Lieber Gott! What rashness! He’s such a big shot that the Gestapo know of his presence in every town he visits. If he is here and you turn up in Frankfurt or Cologne as him, it’s quite certain that your imposture will be discovered within a few hours.’

  ‘I know,’ Gregory agreed with a rueful smile. ‘And for that reason my impersonation of him ceased from the second I set eyes on him this evening. But I was under the impression he was tucked away in prison in Holland and that I should be reasonably safe in using his name anywhere in Germany as long as he was out of the country.’

  ‘He was a prisoner in Holland. He returned to Germany only last night.’

  ‘I wonder how the devil he managed to do that. He slipped through our fingers in Paris, but we warned the Dutch that he might be coming through Holland and they arrested him—dressed in women’s clothes—for using a forged passport. I was informed that they’d given him six months.’

  ‘They did, but Grauber is too big a fish for the Nazis to resign themselves to losing his services for that length of time. As soon as he could let Himmler know where he was the Nazis made a deal with the Dutch Government.’

  ‘How could they do that without causing the Dutch to contravene international law?’

  ‘Quite simply. Grauber was not in the same situation as a German airman or a soldier who had penetrated into Holland in uniform during wartime. He had done nothing to infringe Dutch neutrality, but was simply arrested on a civil charge for using a forged passport—just as a Jewish refugee or anybody else might have been. A few weeks ago an ace Dutch press photographer, Hendrik Brederode, blotted his copybook very badly on the Polish front. He managed to get away from a bunch of pressmen who were being shepherded round the battlefields. With a telescopic lens he took some photographs of Hitler looking at the mutilated bodies of the Polish women and children his airmen had killed. The photographs were discovered, so Brederode was arrested and imprisoned. When the Nazis wanted to get Grauber back they simply arranged with the Dutch Government to exchange Grauber for Brederode.’

  ‘I’ see.’ Gregory nodded. ‘So that’s the way it was. But what on earth induced you to spend the evening with a brute like that?’

  She yawned, showing her even white teeth and the tip of a little red tongue. She looked much younger than she was but rather tired, which made Gregory feel a positive ache to take her in his arms and kiss her. With a shrug of her shoulders she replied: ‘I’ve often spent evenings with people that I have disliked intensely if I thought that I could get something out of t
hem that I wanted very badly.’

  ‘I suppose the swine’s in love with you, and you’re playing him for what he’s worth to you. God! What a horrible business! The very thought of his laying a finger on you makes me go all funny inside.’

  ‘You foolish darling!’ She laughed indulgently. ‘I thought you considered yourself hardboiled. Surely you know that when a woman like myself uses her best weapons she expunges such episodes from her mind immediately afterwards, and that they don’t really mean a thing to her.’

  ‘All the same, it makes me more eager than ever to get my hands round Grauber’s fat neck. It’s as though he had added sacrilege to his other crimes.’

  She rested a hand on his shoulder for a moment. ‘It’s nice that you should feel like that about me, but in this case you’ve no cause to worry. Grauber is not interested in women. Like a lot of his colleagues, he is a pervert.’

  ‘I thought he might be, but in that case what was he after with you?’

  ‘I’m not quite certain, but I think that he’s now playing a double game. For a long time he cultivated my acquaintance solely to find out all he could about my friends in the Army, and he was too important a man for me to refuse to have anything to do with him. He was then made chief of the Foreign Department of the Gestapo, U.A.-1. Other work occupied him, I suppose, and he ceased to bother me, so for many months I never saw him except through chance meetings. But immediately after von Ribbentrop signed the death-warrant of the Nazi Party this summer by making the pact with Russia, Grauber began to interest himself in me again.

  ‘Many of the Nazi leaders—men like Hess and Deutsch—are incredibly stupid; just strong-arm men, thugs out of the gutter who have managed to elbow their way to high positions through having attached themselves to Hitler in the old days. But not all the Nazis are fools, and the more intelligent of them are shrewd enough to realise that Hitler stabbed his strongest champions—the German lower middle classes—in the back when he consented to an alliance with the Bolsheviks. It was the German “little man’s” fear and hatred of Communism that brought Hitler to power, and his deliberate betrayal of the anti-Comintern front has robbed him of millions of supporters.’

  Gregory was craving to make love to her, yet he knew that if he once started he would never be able to stop, and it was absolutely essential that he should learn exactly where Grauber stood in this affair. With an enormous effort he resisted the temptation to take this poem of graceful curves crowned by the delicate, aristocratic face and burnished golden hair into his arms as she stood up. ‘… Gregory caught a whiff of her perfume as she paced up and down, and drew in a sharp breath. ‘Let’s get back to Grauber.

  ‘Grauber and people like him are now asking themselves what will happen after Hitler’s fall,’ she replied, with an understanding smile, ‘and they see a Communist revolution sweeping Germany which would mean a certain and probably extremely painful death for everyone of them. Is there any way in which that could be prevented? Yes; one way, and one way only. We Germans are fundamentally a law-abiding people. We proved that by emerging from our last revolution instead of going Bolshevik. A new revolution could be prevented if the Army took over in time, because the great majority of the people would prefer to accept an Army dictatorship rather than allow their cities to be looted by criminal mobs and permit their country to plunge headlong into a state of anarchy.’

  ‘I see,’ said Gregory. ‘So friend Grauber is planning to rat on his boss and the more stupid of his colleagues?’

  She shook her head. ‘I don’t say that, but I think he’s preparing the ground for such a move should it become necessary. As I’ve already said, he’s playing a double game at the moment, trying to get anything he can from me which he can use for the benefit of the Nazis as long as they look like remaining in power and there is some chance that Hitler may get himself out of the mess he’s in. Personally I’m convinced that the Allies can’t be bought off at any price now, but Hitler has brought off some absolutely staggering diplomatic coups in his time. One must give him that, and Grauber and Co. believe that he may still succeed in securing a settlement by holding up Stalin as a bogey, playing on the fears of the neutrals and persuading President Roosevelt, on humanitarian grounds, to lend himself to negotiations. Hitler would come out of it, of course, with lowered prestige, but without entire loss of face, He would still be the master, and as diplomacy is his long suit he’d probably scrap von Ribbentrop, throw over Russia and re-establish himself by fresh diplomatic triumphs.

  ‘As long as there is any hope of that, Grauber will continue to do his job with complete ruthlessness. He could never hope to achieve such a high position as he has at present under any other Government, so he’ll do everything he can to keep Hitler in power until he is quite certain that Hitler’s goose is cooked. On the other hand, he would like to keep on good terms with me so that he could use me as a bridge over which to escape if need be, and he thinks that I could save his neck with the Army leaders should they decide to take over.’

  ‘And what do you get out of all this?’ Gregory inquired.

  ‘Nothing so far, except the added security from Nazi interference which I derive through his colleagues knowing that I’m on good terms with him. But when the time is ripe Grauber may prove a key man to the whole situation. Before he was appointed chief of Gestapo Department U.A.-1 he was on other work which placed him in possession of very jealously guarded Nazi secrets.

  ‘The Army leaders dare not act until they’re much better informed where they stand than they are at present. It’s vital that they should know whom they can trust and which among the officers around them are Gestapo spies that must first be eliminated. Grauber could tell me that if he chose to do so. When the danger-signals begin to flash Grauber will come to me. He will say that he has always been my friend and ask me to put in a good word for him with my friends among the Army people. He and I will then have a show-down, and I shall say “Give me what I require and your life shall be spared. I could do without it, but it would make things easier for us. You know what is about to happen, so talk or I will throw you to the dogs. Take your choice about it, and be quick now!” ’

  Gregory poured himself out another glass of wine and beamed with satisfaction. ‘That’s grand! We’ll go now to my end of the business. We’ve each learned where the other stands, by pure chance and without any need for fencing. We’ve both been playing the same game for weeks past, and the only pity is that we didn’t realise it sooner.

  ‘As far as Grauber is concerned, I don’t think it will be necessary for you to offer him his life, because I believe I can give you the thing you’ve been hoping to get from him. It is the list of the Inner Gestapo who are all Army officers that have been placed in positions where they can keep a constant watch on the Generals. Am I right?’

  ‘So!’ she breathed, ‘you have that? You can really give me absolutely trustworthy information as to who they are?’

  ‘Yes. The list was secured by a British agent just before the war, and is at present in safe keeping in Berlin. With it there is a letter, signed by responsible Allied statesmen, stating that if the German Generals will depose the Nazis the Democracies will guarantee a round-table conference and a new deal for Germany. The whole object of my mission is to secure those two documents and place them in the hands of the General who is the secret head of the anti-Nazi movement.’

  ‘But this is marvellous—kolossal!’ She clasped her hands and her eyes were shining. ‘And how glad I am now that I decided to leave that trail in London just on the chance that I might be used if it were desired to open communications with the Generals.’

  ‘It was a grave risk you took. If your words to Jimmy whatever-his-name-is had been reported to a Nazi agent you would have been for it.’

  ‘Perhaps. But I felt reasonably sure that if Jimmy passed on my apparent indiscretion at all it would be to your Intelligence people and to no one else.’

  ‘If it was your intention, why didn’t you s
peak more plainly—give him something more definite and impress upon him the importance of turning it in?’

  ‘I had no authority to do so; and as I didn’t know the war would break out so soon I had planned a short trip to America. If the Gestapo had learned of my remarks and questioned any members of the General Staff about me, there was nothing concrete in what I had said and they could have laughed it off as the tipsy blathering of a reactionary Hochwohlgeborene. Then they would have let me know in secret that I had better remain in the States.’

  ‘Then as long as the Nazis were in power you’d never have been able to return to Germany.’

  ‘True; but what was that in comparison with even the slenderest chance of becoming the channel for setting in motion the one plan that may save Germany from untold suffering?’

  ‘What is even more marvellous is that you should be the one person who can ensure my carrying out my mission successfully.’

  ‘Yes. Now you can no longer go about as Grauber you’ll need help to get to Berlin, other clothes and a new personality so that when Grauber discovers that somebody has been impersonating him here, his impersonator will have disappeared from Munich without a trace. Naturally I will help you. Before morning we will make a plan, and between us it should be a good one.’