I marched down the landward side, conscientiously inspecting each booth. I even purchased a stud box with a dachshund head on the lid. Nothing sinister happened. So far as I could tell I was not being followed.
At the end I turned, and made my way along the outer side. These were the booths which backed on to the river. Quite the largest of them, in the middle, was a photographer’s. It had, on a board in front, the usual display of snapshots. Serious Austrian fathers in Tyrolean hats. Fat Austrian mothers on rustic seats. Young couples in trompe-l’œil poses behind mermaids and lorelei. And, bang in the middle of them all Colin Studd-Thompson, looking serious but satisfied, and wearing an old Harrovian tie.
It looked so incongruous, it was so unexpected, that I think I stood there for an appreciable time, mouth open, and staring. I knew what it was. It was a mousetrap with a bit of cheese in it. Cheese was what I wanted. I pushed through the curtain at the entrance of the booth and went in. I was in a sort of porch. A notice said: “Please to be careful that you entirely the outer curtain close before the inner one you open.”
I pushed through the inner one. The booth had more depth to it than I had imagined. In the half darkness at my end a small man was doing something with a camera. In the bright light at the far end a young man was sitting with a girl on a papier mâché sandcastle, against a background of the Rhine at Bonn.
“A smile if you please,” said the little man. The man and girl smiled. There was a click. More lights came on, and he added, “That will be fifteen schillings. You can pay when you collect the prints. In twenty minutes. And what can I do for you, sir?”
“I am interested in a photograph you have in the window.”
A blank look replaced the professional smile.
“I am afraid they are for display only sir. Not for sale.”
“I did not wish to buy. But I could not help noticing a photograph of a friend of mine. I could point it out to you.”
“There is no need. Perhaps if you describe it.”
“It is quite different from the others. Not a snapshot at all. A portrait photograph, of an Englishman. It is in the middle—”
“I think I know the one you mean. Yes.”
“How did it get there? Is it one of yours?”
He said, “I do not know. Perhaps it has been put there by mistake.”
“But surely you could tell me when it was taken. The man is a friend of mine. He has disappeared—”
That, I realised, was a false step. There was no mistaking the look in his eyes now. It was fear.
“I do not know anything about it sir,” he said. “I have many photographs. Some I take myself, but not necessarily all.”
I said: “I believe you are lying.” But he was not listening to me. I turned my head. Wachs was already through the inner curtain and the Margrave was close behind him. I had the impression that there were others in the outer lobby.
There was an opening in the curtains behind the studio stage and I went for it, fast. The little photographer made a bleating noise and grabbed at my jacket. It was a half hearted effort, and I had no difficulty in brushing him aside.
The man who was waiting for me behind the curtain had an easy job, but he put his heart into it. He was an enthusiast. The moment I got through he hit me with his fist, a tree-felling blow, on the bottom of my ribs.
I went back through the curtains like a tennis ball that has run into a smash at the net.
I think I should have fallen anyway, but the Margrave hooked my feet from under me, and the three men dropped on me. One of them was across my legs. Another held my arms, and the third – the Italian Tino, I think – picked up the photographer’s dusty, black satin camera cover and swathed it carefully round my head.
Through the soft cloth cruel fingers found my nose and mouth.
In the next few seconds I knew death. The torture of stopped breath. The agony of a pumping, bursting heart. The tearing pain of lungs that screamed for air and were denied; and blackness shot through with red.
Then the cloth was removed, and I lay, my lungs working desperately.
“He’s tame,” said Wachs, in German. I was rolled on to my side, and my hands were fastened. I was too busy breathing to do much else.
A pair of hands came down towards me. They were holding a bright metal contraption. I flinched as it went into my mouth; then I realised that it was a sort of dentist’s gag. It was operated by a thumbscrew. The screw turned. My mouth opened wide.
“Don’t break his jaw off,” said the Margrave.
“Why not?” said Wachs. He stopped turning, and got out a dentist’s hook. Then he gave my teeth a raking over. He found a loose stopping that seemed to interest him, but there was nothing underneath it, except tooth. He satisfied himself quite thoroughly about that.
“I’d pass him,” he said. “Nothing hidden.”
The metal contraption was removed.
“If you wouldn’t mind telling me,” I said.
A great, flat, palm of a hand came at me carrying a cut strip of adhesive plaster. It flapped across my mouth, pressed down on me. When it went away again my lips were sealed. Quite literally.
I waited for the next thing to happen. A tearing noise suggested that some more adhesive tape was being prepared.
“You put it straight over his eyes and they’ll never get it off again without taking his eyelids with it,” said Tino critically.
“Not a bad idea,” said Wachs. A moment later I was blind as well.
“What about plugging up his nose, as well.”
“You shouldn’t do that. They paid for him – in advance – in good condition.”
A foot rolled me over.
“He’s in prime condition.” The same foot kicked me. “Hardly a wriggle out of him, see?”
A new voice said something that I could not understand. It sounded like ‘net’. It felt like a net, too. A fishing net. I could smell the tar and feel the cords bite into me as I was lapped in it.
Then I was lifted.
As at a great distance I heard a voice say: “See that the way is clear, Franz.”
For a moment my mishandled body hung suspended. A salmon in the landing net. Hooked, gaffed, winded. Near to merciful death.
Then we started to move. I sensed that we were in the open air. It was a very short journey. I was lowered on to boards; boards which yielded under my weight.
The soft sounds of water a few inches from my ears. The puttering of a motor. Everything sounded slow and distant and unactual. As sense departed, I thought of the watchers on the gates; of the patrols on the roads and the guards on the frontier. They were wasting their time. They were ignoring the lessons of geography. They should have grasped one simple fact. That the Raab ran into the Feistritz. And that the Feistritz ran into the Danube.
Part III
THE END GAME
“Each warrior picks himself a stake
To try if he the Great Beast’s neck can break Lord! What vile creatures Fortitude doth make!”
Battle of the Beasts.
Chapter XIII
THE PIGS’ ORCHESTRA
I must, I think, have been unconscious for the greater part of the next three hours. Perhaps I was at no time quite unaware of what was happening but there is a numbness of the mind, equivalent to paralysis of the body.
Two impressions only remain of that time. First, I am certain that the boat which I was in pulled up at some sort of jetty; that the motor was switched off, and, in the silence, voices spoke. There was no alarm in them. They spoke quite softly. And a torch shone on the cocoon of netting in which I lay swathed. How I knew that, with my eyes bandaged, I should be hard put to it to say.
Then there was the moment when I realised that I had changed captors. It was when I felt fingers parting the netting over my face, and feeling down towards me.
Very gently the fingers came to rest under my jaw bone, against the side of my windpipe. I suffered a moment of blind terror. I could feel the pulse in
my throat hammering. Then the fingers withdrew and I realised what they were doing. The man squatting over me had not been sure whether I was alive or dead.
After that, I think I slept.
When I woke again, I knew that dawn had come. I could still see nothing, but I could hear the birds tuning up for their morning overture. Everything was very quiet, and there was a feeling of wet white mist in the air. I had woken up just so many times, on camping holidays on the Broads. Then I heard another sound. A car of some sort was approaching. Not a car, a light truck, or van.
The hands fumbled under me and I was lifted. Out of the boat on to the landing stage of planks; rolled over until I was clear of that net and all its knotted, corded, tarry confinement; lifted again into the back of the truck. Two men climbed in with me, the tailboard was slammed into place, and we started off.
There are degrees of discomfort, as the prisoner in the dungeon knows. I should not normally have described my position as easy, but freedom from that net, combined with unrestricted, if petrol-smelling air, was luxury; and I think I slept again. So deeply this time, that I have only the dimmest recollection of the truck stopping and of being raised out of it.
What jerked me back to full consciousness was the strip of plaster being pulled off my eyes. Tino’s genial prediction that my eyelids would go with it was not, in fact fulfilled, but it was a close thing.
I lay, blinking up, blinded for a moment by my own tears.
There was a further jerk, as the plaster came off my mouth and then, comparatively painlessly, off my wrists too. I was hoisted up into a sort of wicker chair. My feet remained hobbled.
As I lay there, like a sack, only moving my head, quite slowly, from side to side, I realised where I was. I had been in many such places before. It was a hiker’s shelter-hut, of the sort that you find all over the mountains of Central Europe. Not a high altitude one, or it would have had double windows and a big stove. Just an ordinary, forest-walkers’ shelter. Usually they were only opened when the snow came.
I heard a noise of crackling sticks and turned my head again. There were two men in the room, solid men, wearing workmen’s overalls, but wearing also, and more unmistakeably, the air of heavy authority which officialdom stamps on her children.
So, for better or worse, I was now in the hands of the State.
The immediate change was undoubtedly for the better. The results of the efforts at the fire turned out to be a bowl of hot soup and a pot of thin coffee. I wolfed down the soup, with chunks of bread, and swallowed the coffee; and then went to sleep again, but properly this time.
When I woke up the sun was looking in at the western window, and a second meal was in process of being cookedI had time to observe, and began to notice things. The first thing that struck me was the confident, unworried bearing of my gaolers. It was evident that we were waiting for dusk before we went on our way, and to that extent secrecy was thought to be desirable. But they weren’t worrying about it. Every move they made proclaimed that they were following through a well-worn routine. How many other recumbent bodies had polished the wicker chair in which I lay? For how many previous unwilling passengers on this curious underground railway had they heated soup and boiled coffee?
As my will climbed back into control of my body a less comfortable set of impressions began to assert themselves. The firmness, the consideration, the judicious sympathy. I had observed nurses in charge of a patient who is due for a dangerous operation. I had once, for my pains, to watch over the last twelve hours of a man before he went to the scaffold. I had also seen cattle going to the slaughter house.
What would happen if I tried to make a break for it ?
The plain answer was that nothing would happen. My feet were hobbled. I was lying back in a chair that protested my every move. There were two very wide awake gentlemen in the room. And the door, I suspected, was locked.
For our supper we ate half a dozen fried eggs. (One of the men must have been out foraging whilst I slept.) And drank some wine.
When we had finished eating, and everything had been meticulously cleaned, and the fire raked out, and knapsacks repacked, the bigger of the two men, whom I took to be the leader, came over and stood, for a moment, looking at me.
I was his payload. He was weighing me up.
Then he said in his clipped, colloquial Hungarian, that I could understand with an effort, “He looks a lot fresher now.”
“So long as he doesn’t get too fresh.”
The big man produced from his pocket a pair of handcuffs, and fastened my hands behind my back with a quick precise, gesture. They were American type handcuffs which get tighter if you struggle. I didn’t struggle.
Then he cut the rope hobble off my feet and said, in his best English, “Now we go.”
It was, I imagine, the same vehicle that had brought me; the small, canvas backed, type of lorry that you see in hundreds on the roads in Europe. The driver was already in his seat. The two guards manhandled me up into the back and we started off.
They took it in turns to watch me. One would sit on the edge of the seat, his eyes on me. The other would relax and smoke. After ten minutes they changed roles. It was as professional as that.
When I was certain that I had no chance of escape I concentrated on trying to make out my whereabouts. The back of the tilt was up, and I could see the stars. As soon as I had placed Orion I knew where I was. We were going almost due north, with a touch of east in it.
This gave me food for thought. If, as I surmised, my entry into Hungary had been via the Raab and the Feistritz, and I was now travelling north, this should bring me back roughly to the place I had started from; but on the Hungarian side of the frontier.
At one point the road looped so that, for a moment, we were travelling almost south and I glimpsed the Plough and the Pole Star. I saw something else as well. It was the characteristic peak of the Radkersberg, the same that I had pointed out to the Baronin from her conservatory window. I was right then. The place we were making for was not very far on the Hungarian side of the Austrian border. I thought of Schloss Obersteinbruck, standing sentinel the other side of the mountains. It seemed very distant, in time and in place. As though at the reverse end of a huge telescope I saw the pigmy, gesticulating, figures of Gheorge and Lisa and the General and Trüe and Ferenc Lady. Lady, I am sure, was smiling.
The tyres hummed and the white road unrolled behind me like the used film off a spool. My head nodded down on to my shirt, rose with a start, and sank again.
It was the slowing of the vehicle that jerked me back into the present. We were turning off the road, into a gateway. There was a murmur of words, and we went on, still slowly, and climbing. Then we stopped altogether.
Both my guards were very much on the alert, now. Headquarters, I guessed.
Came the sound of a heavy door opening. We backed, made a half turn, and ran under an archway, and through it, into a courtyard. The same heavy door was shut. My guards relaxed. Their job was over. The mouse was in the trap.
One of them fumbled at my wrists, and the handcuffs came off. I climbed out awkwardly.
The size of the courtyard suggested that it was a very large house indeed. Something of the type of those monstrous German Spa-Hotels, which we copied from them and erected in the closing years of the last century, to the desecration of our countryside. A big, heavy, functional, soulless lump of brick and slate. The middle-class villa inflated to a castle.
As soon as I got inside I knew that I was in a Police Headquarters. From start to finish I hardly saw anyone in it wearing uniform, but when you’ve been in one or two you get to know them by the smell. I was signed for in a book (“accepted unexamined, without prejudice to damage discovered subsequently”), and my original guards disappeared still unsmiling and unmoved. I wondered what sort of lives they led off duty. I was invited to sit down and I sat, and waited. For a long time. One man sat at a desk, copying entries from one book into another. A second man sat by the door. He ha
d nothing to do. A clock ticked.
Quietly in the distance a bell trilled.
The man by the door came out of his chair as smartly as if a sergeant major had shouted at him, and seized my arm. Another man appeared from nowhere. I was hustled along a passage. There was a door at the end of the passage which said “Colonel Dru”. This was opened and I was pushed inside
It was a huge room, something between a study and an office. There were two smallish desks behind each of which sat a serious looking young man. And a very large desk indeed, which was unoccupied. The owner of this desk was filling out a leather armchair beside the open fire.
Colonel Dru, I supposed.
He was the perfect pig-man. So perfect that you looked round for the make-up. But, no. On closer inspection you could see that this was something that nature had conceived, thought out, and executed without assistance. The skin pink but tough enough to turn a carving knife, the bristle of hair, the overflowing jowl, the little tusks of teeth and the tiny, deep set, twinkling, vicious eyes.
“Offer our friend a chair,” said Dru,”and stay if you wish.”
This increased the audience to four. I got the impression that the Colonel was a man who liked an audience when he performed.
“I must protest,” I said, “against this treatment of a British subject.”
“But of course.” Dru swivelled round in his chair, placed his elbows on the arm, and his chin on his hands, like some parody of a benevolent judge. “Make your protest.”
“I have made it.”
“But is that all?” f
“I have nothing more to say.”
Dru closed his eyes, opened them again, and stared at each of his four assistants in turn. They tittered. I sat back in my chair and determined that, come what may, I would keep my temper.
“Really now, Mr. Cowhorn—”
I must have looked puzzled.
“I have your pronunciation?”
“Oh, you were trying to pronounce my name. Well, I suppose that’s not bad for a first shot.”
Be Shot For Six Pence Page 16