Be Shot For Six Pence

by Michael Gilbert

  “The surly character with a bow tie?”

  “Yes. His name is Wachs.”

  “He can keep it.”

  “He is a bad hat. A racketeer.”

  “You have rackets here, too?”

  “Of course,” said Messelen. “Here above all.”

  “What sort of rackets?”

  “Well—there is a lot of traffic, over the frontiers, you understand. Into Yugoslavia, and into Hungary.”

  “Across the impregnable Iron Curtain?”

  “Of course the Russians know about it; and control most of it. It is as useful to them as to—anyone else.”

  “And Wachs is in it?”

  “He is what you would call a minor character.”

  “Even so,” I said, “it’s damned odd that he should be hanging round with the secretary to the Allied Consular Representative. I think this calls for action.”

  Messelen looked up.

  “What do you propose to do?”

  “For a start,” I said, “we could follow them when they leave here.”

  “I do not advise it.”

  “There’s no need for you to come.”

  It is one of my peculiarities that even whilst I am doing something silly the other half of me is able to stand back and criticise. Like Alice, I can even get sarcastic at my own expense.

  For instance, I could see now that I was partly drunk; that Messelen was not as drunk as I was (or had a better head); and that he seemed to be weighing up whether I was going to make a fool of myself, and, if so, whether he ought to cut adrift now or tag along and see that I didn’t get into too much trouble.

  “They’re off,” I said.

  Mitzi and her escort were fighting their way through the crowd.

  As he came past our table I took a good look at Wachs. He was a heavy man with that expression of fixed ill temper which derives either from the childhood repressions or permanent stomach troubles. He was pushing through the other drinkers with about as much finesse as a rhinoceros making his way through the crowd at a drinking pool.

  And he was steering Mitzi ahead of him, more as a battering ram than a gesture of courtesy. He looked a thoroughly ugly customer.

  I gave him ten yards and then followed. Messelen came along with me.

  It was all right on the Island. There were plenty of people about. As soon as we got into Steinbruck it was different. One or two couples were strolling back into town, but they were at long intervals. Without Messelen I should either have lost my quarry or made my pursuit obvious in the first hundred yards. Messelen seemed to guess where they were making for, and his knowledge of the lay-out did the rest. We dived down a side street, turned up a long back alley which was full of shadows and smells, stumbled up it, turned again, and began to move, more carefully now, up a flight of flat, cobbled, steps. At the top we paused. Silence reigned. We peered out.

  About ten yards up the road Wachs was standing, entwined with Mitzi. He was eating the back of her neck.

  After a pause for digestion they moved on. We allowed them to turn the corner and sprinted after them. Since Messelen, too, was wearing rubber soles, we made very little noise.

  It was when we reached the corner that I realised, for the first time, exactly where we were. We were looking at the Schneidermeister wine store, and above it were the offices of Major Piper.

  The street was in complete darkness. Municipal lighting in Steinbruck had got no further than the main streets and squares. A black cavern, with a grey ceiling. I think the same thought was in both our minds: that Wachs and the insatiable Mitzi were tucked into one of the doorways having a second course. In which case to go along the street was to invite discovery.

  I felt Messelen’s hand on my arm; and then saw for myself. A light was moving in Major Piper’s office. It looked like a torch. Then more light. Someone had turned on the desk light. A hand drew down the blind.

  “Cool,” said Messelen in my ear. “To use the office for love making whilst the boss is away.”

  We moved along the street until we were opposite the window. We could see nothing, not even a shadow on the blind.

  “I don’t believe it.” I said.

  “You think, perhaps, some funny business?”

  “I’m damned sure of it,” I said. “Why should they come all this way, at this time of night, for a little simple necking. She’s presumably got a flat somewhere. So has he.”

  “What do you propose?”

  The beer and the brandy were still in me.

  “Let’s knock them up, and see what transpires,” I said.

  “You and me and who else,” said Messelen. “That Wachs – I told you – he’s a nasty character.”

  “So am I.”

  “If you go in, you go alone.”

  But I was wrong. Neither of us went in.

  Lights had appeared at the top of the street. Head lights. As the car turned the corner we were caught by their bright and impersonal gaze. As if embarrassed by sighting us the lights blinked and dipped, and then the car drew slowly up to stop beside us.

  Major Piper looked out of the driving seat.

  “Well,” he said, “fancy finding you here. And how are you, Major?”

  “I’m fine,” said Messelen.

  “Can I give you a lift anywhere?”

  “Me,” said Messelen. “I live two streets from here. I’m sure Philip would be pleased.”

  Major Piper had got out and he must have seen the light in his own office. There seemed to be nothing left for me to say except, “It’s very good of you.”

  “Not at all,” said Major Piper. “Not at all. Anything to oblige a compatriot.”

  Chapter VI

  BARON MILO AND THE FRAU BARONIN

  Next morning I woke late, feeling bad. I had a suspicion that I had not only drunk too much the night before, but that in some way I had made a fool of myself. However, before I could get into a complicated state about it, I went to sleep again, and didn’t wake up this time until two o’clock in the afternoon.

  Me, the Sleeping Beauty.

  I got up, shaved, dressed, and wandered down. The place was as lively as a boarding school in holiday time.

  I tugged on the bell rope and when the bearded lady appeared demanded black coffee. She seemed unsurprised. Schloss Obersteinbruck was the sort of place where black coffee was drunk at all hours, I suspect.

  Afterwards I annexed a rug from my bed, retired to the woods behind the castle and slept some more.

  I dreamed that I was playing water polo for England and came to the surface with a struggle to find my face being licked by a mastiff. Attached to the mastiff by a steel chain was Trüe. She was laughing at me.

  “It was a shame to wake you,” she said. “For you looked sweet in your sleep.”

  “All right. You needn’t tell me. Mouth open, and dribbling lightly.”

  “Certainly not. You mouth was tightly compressed like a typical reticent Englishman.”

  “How did you find me here?”

  “Lippi found you. He is an industrious tracker. We train him every day on offal.”

  “That makes it quite perfect,” I said, sleepily. From where I lay she looked wonderful. She looked all right from almost any angle, but all the cameras in Hollywood would have sung together like the morning stars for joy if they could have caught her just at that moment, with one hand on the big dog’s head and the rays of the dying sun making gold out of her hair.

  “Trüe,” I said. “How old are you?”

  “What a funny question to ask. Why do you wish to know?”

  “I’ve no idea,” I said. “It’s just one of those things we always ask girls when we meet them in England.”

  “Ah, yes. I know. In England, you have a law. You must not rape any girl until she is sixteen.”

  “It’s time you went home,” I said.

  When we got back Lisa met us in the hall. She gave us a quick, sharp, look, under those dark eyebrows, and said to Trüe: “We ha
ve been looking for you.”

  “You ought to have sent out Tutti to hunt for Lippi,” I said.

  “What has happened, Lisa?” said Trüe.

  “He has had to go to London. He caught the four o’clock train to Klagenfurt. From there he can fly.”

  “Curiously urgent,” I said. They both looked at me. “The problems of ethnography, I mean,” I explained. “Klagenfurt today. London tomorrow. Has he mislaid a valuable Croat, or stumbled on the missing Slovene link?”

  True laughed.

  Lisa said, rather sharply, “I do not enquire where he goes or why.”

  “That’s the girl,” I said. “You and the Light Brigade.” I went up to change for dinner.

  Dinner that evening proved rather good fun. Everyone was more themselves with Lady away. And when I realised that, I realised a little of the grip he had on these people. Trüe, of course, was only a child, but Lisa and Gheorge and the General were considerable personalities in their own right. Yet it was only when the sun went in that you could see the lesser lights.

  When the wine came round I remembered what the Baron had told me and took a quick look at the young lady who was serving it. And I saw what he meant. She had black hair, sloe-black eyes, clear skin and a pouting mouth; and everything else that God ever gave woman.

  The Baron called her something or other. It sounded like “Dim-Wits”. She walked away from me with a petulant waggle, picking up a fairly hot glance from the Baron as she went by.

  “Yugoslav,” said Lisa in my ear.

  “If I was Tito,” I said, “I should put her on a list of forbidden exports.””I don’t think she came through the customs.”

  I was still digesting this thought when the party broke up. Trüe said something about filing and disappeared, like a good girl, who works even when the boss isn’t there, in the direction of the headquarters office. Gheorge Ossudsky went with her. The rest of us took our coffee into the small drawing-room.

  (The more I saw of Schloss Obersteinbruck the more did Colin’s description seem just. It was a most peculiar sort of fairy palace. It came to life at dusk. Then lights were kindled; fires sprang up in the grates; servants appeared who had not even existed before. From then until dawn the whole place hummed with suppressed, self-satisfied, life.)

  “I understand,” said the Baron, in careful English, “that all your great houses have now been turned into museums.”

  “A lot of them have,” I said. “Some of the best of them are used as schools for delinquent children.”

  The Baron then translated his own observation and my comment to the Baronin, who gave out a sharp cackle. The conversation continued in this way for some time until the Baronin dropped off to sleep. The Baron then refilled my glass, and his own, with brandy and said, in a somewhat challenging voice: “You noticed Dmwitza then?”

  “The young lady who handed round the Tokay?”

  “The maid servant.”

  “Yes. I noticed her.”

  “What was your reaction to her?”

  “A striking girl,” I said.

  “The girls of northern Yugoslavia,” said the Baron, speaking in the dispassionate voice proper to an ethnographer, “are constructed for love. They are all of the same mould. It is depth of body, you understand, that gives pleasure to love. They are as deep in body as—as they are shallow in wit. They have only one fault, to my mind. They are quite insatiable.”

  “Who are quite insatiable?” demanded the Baronin, waking up sharply.

  “We were discussing the English Income Tax system, my dear.”

  “Ah, the English Income Tax system,” said the Baronin. “In Austria we have the best system. We have no income tax.” She disposed herself for sleep again, but the interruption had thrown the Baron out of his stride. He turned to politics.

  “Here we are well placed,” he said, “to watch the Soviet System in operation. We have, you might say, a dress circle view of one of her most unmanageable satellites. Hungary.”

  “According to the newspapers, they seem to stage a purge or a re-shuffle every six months. I fancied, however, that they had been a little more stable recently.”

  “For the last year, yes. That is David Szormeny. He is a strong man. Too strong, perhaps. There is danger, you understand, in inserting a steel component into a machine which is otherwise constructed entirely of soft iron.”

  I tried to summon up my recollection of Szormeny. A few photographs had been allowed to filter across to the Western world. I remembered one of him at a Farm Worker’s Congress. A tall man with an ugly, superficially pleasant face who reminded me of someone – I couldn’t place it – one of our own public characters, perhaps.

  “Since the War,” said the Baron, “the fate of the popular leaders of Hungary has not been encouraging, you will agree. You remember Rakosi.”

  “Who died in a sanatorium in Moscow.”

  “Regretted,” said the Baron. “Deeply regretted. He was given a Senior Hero’s funeral with a procession exactly a mile long. Then there was Szakasits – he is still working out a comparatively lenient sentence of twenty years hard labour. And Laslo Rajk. Well, possibly he was the most fortunate. They hanged him after a public trial.”

  “They were only puppets,” I said. “The real leader was the Communist Secretary.”

  “Until last year, yes. But Szormeny is Secretary General of the Communist Party. As well as President of the Republic.”

  “Quite a boy,” I said. “But I expect they’ll execute him, for all that, next time the harvest fails.”

  The Baron elected to take this suggestion seriously.

  “Not the harvest,” he said. “In Bulgaria, yes. The Bulgars live like animals, by the soil. They know no better. But Hungary is an industrial country. They have skilled workers, and the workers have their own leaders. They were all Socialists until the Socialist Party was abolished.”

  “How easy you make it sound,” I said. “’The Socialist Party was abolished.’ Just like that. Do you know there are people in England who would give their right hand to learn the trick?”

  “To abolish a workers’ party does not entirely solve the problem of the workers,” said the Baron. “There were Unions; a relic of 1944. These too, were abolished or absorbed. But it did not terminate the resistance. If a hundred thousand workers decide to work badly, you would need a hundred thousand overseers to prevent it. A Peyer can be imprisoned and a Kellemen executed but that will not make a single mechanic turn a screw or drive a rivet faster than he wishes.”

  “I see,” I said, thoughtfully. “And is there much unrest?”

  “There was,” said the Baron, “until Szormeny doubled the industrial workers’ ration and gave them certain privileges. Now they are quiet again.”

  At this point, to my annoyance, the Baronin fell out of her chair, and when we had picked her up and sorted her out the Baron decided that he had better take her off to bed.

  Lisa had gone off to join Trüe and Gheorge in the office and I had decided to make for my own room and the prospect of an early bed when a cough from the deep armchair beside the fire reminded me that I was not, after all, alone.

  It occurred to me that General Milo had somewhere acquired the art of sitting still. Now his head turned slowly and as his great glasses swivelled in my direction I felt like an enemy aeroplane caught by twin searchlights.

  “I fear,” he said, “that my father rides his hobby horse. You must stop him if you are bored.”

  “On the contrary,” I said, sincerely. “I find him most interesting. And he seems, if I may say so, well informed.”

  The General turned this one over in his mind for a few seconds and then said, with all the deliberation of a chess player offering a gambit, “So he should be well informed.”

  I moved a pawn forward myself, and said “Why?”

  The General did not answer this directly. He nodded his head at an oil painting above the fire. I saw it was Honneger’s ‘Duelling Students’. “My f
ather lives in the past. He was at Heidelberg, you know. He is still absurdly proud of a scar down the side of his chin. It was long a matter of anxious debate with him whether he should cultivate those Franz Joseph side whiskers. They suit him admirably, but they hide the scar.”

  I moved another pawn.

  “Not a man who would take kindly to the restrictions of the modern world?”

  “Far from it. He has been, you know, a great smuggler.”

  The outline became clearer.

  “He is well placed for it here,” I agreed. “I suppose he gets his Tokay from Hungary, and his girls from Yugoslavia. And pays no duty on either of them.”

  The General frowned very slightly. “You put the matter somewhat crudely,” he said. “You will remember that my father is nearly eighty.”

  “I meant no disrespect. We could do with more individualists in our world today.”

  “Well,” said the General. “That may be so. I will wish you good night.”

  I was unable to detect whether he was really annoyed with me or not. A face trained in the fleshing sheds of Nazi politics was unlikely to give away much to a stranger.

  It was after breakfast next morning that I happened to stroll along the terrace and turn into the long, dim conservatory which hung along the south wall of the Schloss.

  The smell of any glasshouse, the wet earth and the greenery and the central heating, takes me straight back to my youth. Sunday morning, between my father and the head gardener, tremulously picking a flower for my mother.

  “Nip it with your nails, Master Philip,” and, “Long stalk, Philip,” from my father.

  This one was narrow and dim and full of hanging baskets of feathery Cycas and Cyathea. As I picked my way along the duck boards on the floor I realised that it was more extensive than I had thought, opening out finally into a balloon-shaped annexe at the corner. I also realised that the General had sadly underestimated his father’s prowess. One of the long wicker chairs was occupied by the Baron. Another pulled up alongside it, by little Dim-Wits. He seemed to be engaged in tickling the front of her bodice with a palm frond. How she was reacting to this I was unable to observe as she had her back to me.