Next morning he strolled through the village. The Garde Champêtre was lounging against a tree. As Vivien appeared he smiled.
‘ ’Allo, Tommy, you shoot well, yes? I make you a match? Four shots each at zat old bottle on ze rubble-’eap and ze winner get five cigarette. Hein?’
Vivien accepted the challenge, and with his fourth shot the Frenchman smashed the target to smithereens. ‘And look,’ he laughed complacently, ‘I put one in ze old bathtub out zere. Listen an’ you ’ear ’im ping.’
‘No you don’t!’ Before the astonished Frenchman had time to protest Vivien seized his rifle and extracted the cartridge clip with its one remaining bullet.
‘Mort de diable!’ screamed the Garde. ‘Laissez-moi ça immédiatement!’
Ignoring him, Vivien dropped the weapon and broke the bullet from its brass case. It came away easily, as it had been hollowed out; rammed home into the empty space was a screw of paper.
‘I wondered what the Boche were doing so close to our lines last night. They were out to collect your dud bullets from the bath-tub. It was always the fifth in your clip, wasn’t it?’ Vivien unslung his own rifle. ‘Come on, quick march, or you’ll give me my last chance to use this thing before I go home.’
STORY XVI
IN MY introduction to the previous story I stated that I am not a member of the Secret Service, although in the last war I had many dealings with officers who were, because my job entailed making use of the information they obtained. Neither was it a part of my job to interrogate prisoners-of-war and suspects—except on one occasion when, in a tunic made splendid by several rows of ribbons lent to me by an R.A.F. officer of high rank, I questioned some Norwegian seamen. I hope they were suitably impressed. But this story does give a picture of the sort of thing that went on night and day in a certain establishment in west London. It also may, I hope, arouse some interesting memories in the minds of readers of my own generation who served in the First World War.
THE SUSPECT
IT WAS three o’clock in the morning, and the ‘All Clear’ had just gone. Squadron-Leader Quert’s duties had no connection with the raid, but at the signal he decided to knock off and get a few hours’ sleep. He was tired, angry, and frustrated; but in his job it was important never to show one’s real emotions, so his voice was quite pleasant as he pressed the buzzer on his table and said:
‘That will be all for now, Herman.’
The big raw-boned man opposite to him got slowly to his feet. His lean face and rather nice blue eyes were also impassive. He even managed a faint smile, and when he spoke it was with hardly a trace of German accent.
‘Everything I can, I have already told. To go over the same ground again and again like this is very boring. Surely by now we have done it often enough for you to have satisfied yourself about me?’
The Squadron Leader nodded. ‘I’m satisfied myself. It’s only that my boss is still pressing for a bit more information about that unauthorised visit you paid to London. Still, pretty soon now I think I’ll be able to persuade him to give you a clean bill.’ Then he signed to the soldier who had come in to remove the prisoner.
Alan Quert was not one of the original staff at the big, cheerless building in west London in which suspected spies were held for questioning. He had served as a fighter pilot in the First World War and, on rejoining for the Second, had been sent to France as a security officer, so it was not until after Dunkirk that he had been given his present job. By then Hitler’s victorious advance into Holland, Belgium, and France had driven thousands of refugees to England, and as every one of them had had to be screened before he could be allowed his liberty, in recent months the pressure of work had become appalling. In consequence, having walked down a gloomy corridor to the small Mess, despite the hour he was not surprised to find his Chief there.
‘Hello, Alan!’ the red-tabbed Colonel greeted him. ‘Been burning the midnight oil again?’
‘Yes, sir. It’s ten days now since I started working on that fellow Herman Schultz, so tonight I thought I’d try the old stunt of yanking him out of bed; but I can’t get a darn thing on him.’
‘I still think you may. Bill Belloc swears that he is the image of Hauptman Breukner, and he was in charge of the P.o.W. cage in which Breukner was held for three weeks after being shot down.’
‘That was in 1917,’ Alan replied, as he mixed himself a nightcap. ‘And even a memory as good as old B.B.’s might be at fault after a lapse of twenty-three years.’
‘True, but I can’t help feeling that special weight should be given to this chance claim to recognition, owing to Schultz having been caught snooping in an aircraft factory. The ace airmen of the old war were nearly all expert amateur mechanics, you know.’
‘There’s not a thing to connect Schultz with any form of flying, sir, and his story is about as water-tight as they make ’em.’
‘Let’s go through it again.’
‘He says he is the son of Pastor Schultz and a Social Democrat. When the Pastor was popped into Dachau by the Nazis in 1936, Herman saw the red light and got out to Brussels. We know quite a bit about the Pastor, and everything that Herman says about him ties up with what we know. For a time he worked on a Brussels paper. We’ve checked that too, and the Belgians say that while there he displayed great bitterness against the Nazis. In 1937 he came to England, settled in Southampton, and earned his living as a freelance journalist.’
The Colonel grunted. ‘What better cover could an agent choose for securing every sort of information?’
‘Yes, sir. But if he is Breukner one would have expected him to attend flying displays, motor racing, naval events in the Solent, and that sort of thing. Instead, he confined himself to reporting police court cases. In September ’39 he was pulled in as an enemy alien, but by then the local police knew him well, so after the usual formalities they gave him his ticket. A few months later, owing to shortage of staff, the Southampton Gazette gave him a permanent job, and since then, apart from his one trip to London without a permit, he’s done nothing in the least suspicious.’
‘He lied to you at first about that trip to London, didn’t he?’
Alan nodded. ‘He said he stayed the night at the Strand Palace. When their records showed that he hadn’t, he said he had picked up a girl and gone home with her, but had been ashamed to admit it to start with.’
‘I wonder.’ The Colonel’s eyes narrowed. ‘He may have sold you that one deliberately. The really clever agent often lets his interrogator catch him out on some small point, then explains it away by admitting something slightly discreditable to himself. It’s a good trick for building up belief in the rest of the story. I take it he hasn’t volunteered anything you can check on?’
‘No. The description he gave of her would fit hundreds of popsies, and he says he can’t remember the street to which she took him—only that it was somewhere in Maida Vale.’
‘Tell me again his version of how he got into the factory.’
‘It is that by chance he heard that a big-wig from the Ministry of Aircraft Production was coming down to carry out an inspection. He bet one of his sub-editors that in spite of newspaper men being barred he would manage to cover the visit. The sub told him that even if he succeeded they couldn’t use it, but took the bet for fun. We have checked on that, of course. Schultz simply muscled in on the party as it left the railway station. The great man’s staff thought he was one of the deputation sent to meet them from the factory, and the factory people took him for one of the great man’s staff; so he was given a seat in one of the cars and driven straight through the security cordon. If he hadn’t lingered behind the rest of the party asking questions in the draughtsmen’s room he would have got away with it; but his doing so aroused the suspicions of a bright young woman copyist. She had him challenged and ten minutes later he was in the lockup.’
‘His choice of a place to linger makes it pretty hot. Even if he is only an honest alien on permit, that little frolic is quite
enough for us to keep him behind bars. But if he is Breukner, this is a case of an enemy agent being caught red-handed. To date, it looks as if the odds are that we shall have to give him a return ticket for a prolonged holiday in the Isle of Man, but I’m far from convinced that it ought not to be a one-way ride to face a firing-squad in the moat at the Tower of London.’
‘The devil of it is, sir, that we’ve no sort of link-up we can spring upon him. The most thorough examination of his effects has failed to produce the usual few cryptic notes, or an address that can’t be explained away; and after hours of questioning there is not so much as the sniff of an oil rag to imply that he knows anything about aircraft.’
The Colonel stood up. ‘All the same, Alan, I’d like you to stick to it a bit longer. To break a really first-class agent is always difficult; but the more watertight their story the more vulnerable they become if one part of it is proved false. Once they have been badly caught out it is all up with them. The strain of endeavouring at a moment’s notice to refashion the jig-saw they have built up about themselves proves too great; they start to flounder, then crumple. Good night, and good hunting.’
Next morning Alan went to his bleak interrogation room and again sent for Schultz. The German greeted him politely and seated himself as usual, in accordance with a routine arrangement by which he had to look slightly upward at his questioner.
The interrogation had long since passed the stage of simple question and answer. They had talked on scores of subjects started by Alan at random, in the hope that the prisoner would make some remark that might lead to the beginnings of a case against him. Now, for some ten minutes, Alan took him over the same old ground about his trip to London; then, apropos of nothing in particular, he asked:
‘Do you ever have dreams?’
‘Sometimes,’ replied the German.
‘I had an extraordinary one last night,’ Alan remarked reminiscently. ‘It was remarkably coherent, and rather funny, really. I was back in France motoring along a road just behind the battle zone. I sensed that at once from the long line of poplars on either side, its emptiness and the way it seemed to cock right up into the air not leading to anywhere in particular. My impression was soon confirmed by the occasional sounds of a distant explosion and shells whining overhead. When we—I should have mentioned that I was driving with a friend beside me, although I still have no idea who he was—when we had gone some way we met a column of lorries with flat square bonnets that struck me as a little out of place. Then we entered a partially ruined village. Some of our troops were lounging about there, but they were not in battle-dress and a few of them were wearing spurs. It was only then that I realised that my dream was not about the early months of this war, but that I was once more living as a young man in the old one. Outside the village there was an airfield—just a few Nissen huts and a dozen or so aircraft pegged down to keep them from being blown away. I noticed that they were Snipe single-seaters, and Sopwith Camels. Further on there was an orchard with some of the old Mark V tanks parked under the trees in it. We passed a General and his staff sedately riding their well-groomed horses at a walk, and even the junior officers were wearing red hats with shiny peaks. Next we came to a big marquee with a board lettered N.A.C.B. Of course, I knew that stood for Navy and Army Canteen Board—the predecessor of the N.A.A.F.I.—so we pulled up to go in and have a drink. The barman was rather a sinister type, but with hardly a second glance at him I ordered two Haig and Haig’s. He poured the whisky from the square bottle, then what do you think he did?’
Schultz smiled and shook his head. ‘I can have no idea.’
‘He leant forward, leered at me and said: “Ten shillings, please. And this is the one thing in your dream that was not in the First World War” ’
‘He was wrong, though!’ declared the prisoner with a laugh. ‘The British did not bring the Snipe into service until 1919.’
For a moment the two men stared at one another in silence. Slowly the blood drained from the German’s face. Then Alan Quert quietly administered the coup de grâce.
‘Of course, we’ve known for a long time that you are really Herr Jauptman Kurt von Breukner.’
STORY XVII
HERE again is a story from the era when I was still wrapping wet towels round my head in an effort to produce life-like dialect—in this case an Irish brogue.
Perhaps this is the place where I should pay tribute to my masters, for, like every author, I owe much to those who have preceded me.
Alexander Dumas, the elder, was my first love as a boy, and my zest for his great historical romances has never waned; his influence upon my story-telling has certainly been more profound than any other.
John Buchan I count as the master of us all. His Green-mantle and Mr. Standfast are perfect examples of the adventure story at its best. But owing to some intangible essence in his writing and its high quality, strive as I may, I should never succeed in reached his standard if I lived to be a hundred.
Many reviewers have done me the honour to compare my work to that of Edgar Wallace, but even in my very early days I was not flattered. On the Spot and certain of his other stage productions prove him to have been a most gifted playwright, but his books, despite their brilliant intricacy of plot, leave me completely indifferent.
On the other hand, E. Phillips Oppenheim has given me many hours of tense enjoyment. Perhaps, since I compare the two, if Mr. Oppenheim will forgive me, that is because I have always been thrilled by tales of diplomatic intrigue where princes, ambassadors, and millionaires play their parts against a background of luxury surroundings; whereas plain murder and crime investigation carried out mainly in the East End of London fail to accelerate my pulse by a single beat.
I should also mention that wonderful woman, Baroness Orzcy, and the late Sir Anthony Hope, since each produced a tale that I would have given my right hand to have written—the one the Scarlet Pimpernel and the other the Prisoner of Zenda. Re-read after a period of years these books are found to be very short, and may appear light in content. Yet each contains a central idea which was new when it first appeared. What thousands of others must have appeared since based on those remarkable originals! Both the words ‘Pimpernel’ and ‘Ruritania’ have passed into the English language, and to achieve that crowns both authors with genuine immortality.
Henty and Guy Boothby I read when I was very young, but they were never more than prep, school reading. Scott bored me to tears, and in my personal view was a pathetic figure as an historical novelist compared with Harrison Ainsworth or Stanley Weyman. Conan Doyle and Rider Haggard were both good story-tellers, although I doubt if I derived much from either. William Le Queux did nothing that Oppenheim could not have done better.
The works of a hundred other authors doubtless contributed something to my writing, but there is one more that deserves special mention. I have always thought that the American, Louis Joseph Vance, wrote magnificent adventure stories. Sad to relate, he died in circumstances which rivalled any mystery that he ever penned. He was found one morning with his arms bound behind his back and face downwards in the then cold fire of his own sitting-room with his face charred away. So far as I know the mystery of his terrible death still remains unsolved.
Perhaps the greatest of his characters was an Irish adventurer called Terrence O’Rorke, and I recommend to anyone who can get them two books in which Terrence was the central character, called The Pool of Flame and The Emperor of the Sahara.
In any case, I must have still been very much under Louis Joseph Vance’s influence when I wrote the present tale, since its hero is a pale imitation of Terrence O’Rorke.
THESE WOMEN
‘I’M TELLIN’ ye, Mr. Macgregor, niver thrust a woman—ye’ll rue it if ye do.’ The lean, long-limbed Irishman thumped the proprietor’s desk in the little hotel in Oran.
‘Ah nevair do,’ said Mr. Macgregor.
‘But returnin’ now to more profitable subjects,’ the Irishman went on, ‘ ’tis the las
t dozen cases av this foine whiskey that I’m offerin’ yer, an’ a bargain it is at the proice. I couldn’t do it at all if it weren’t the last av the consoignment I took fer the thrip.’
Mr. Macgregor knew Ruin O’Flaherty far too well to be taken in by his ready tongue. Hadn’t the Irishman been trading in Northern Africa these fifteen years, making his way from port to port, and often far into the interior—a freelance of commerce hawking safety razor-blades, tin kettles, bead necklaces, and top-hats, not to mention a thousand other likely and unlikely wares? Now it was a new brand of whiskey he was peddling—at least so the gaudy label on the bottle declared in flamboyant characters to a trusting world.
The Scotsman was not of the trusting kind, his wrinkled face showed only doubt and disbelief.
‘Faith now, take just tin cases and I’ll increase the discount to sevin per cent,’ O’Flaherty went on persuasively. ‘There’s not another man east of Gib. to whom I’d be making this same advantageous offer!’
Macgregor shook his sandy head; the price was getting attractive, but he hoped, by seeming uninterested, to lower it still further.
‘ ’Tis a great concession now that I’m offerin’ yer, an’ ’tis only out av consideration that bein’ a Scotsman ye’ll dhrink most av it yerself.’
‘That I’ll not,’ said Macgregor, stung into speech. ‘It’s whiskey I drink—and a wee bairn could see that it’s poison ye’re selling by the label.’
The Irishman closed one bright blue eye. ‘An’ phwat’ll be stoppin’ ye pourin’ the same into the empty bottles o’ Buchanan and J. Walker, now—ye ould divil?’
A smile lit the face of the dry old Scot. There was silence—broken only by the buzzing of the weary flies dancing a perpetual jig in the little office. The sultry heat of the late afternoon pervaded the place, and both men were tired of haggling. ‘If ye give me the seven per cent on sax cases, I’ll take ’em,’ he said at last.
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