“I was saying, Mr. Cowhorn. Why have you put yourself into this business. It is not your business. Why do you intrude in it?”
“It would take a long time to explain.”
“We have the night in front of us.”
“I’ve been looking for a friend of mine.”
“Admirable. But of course. His name?”
“His name is Studd-Thompson.”
“And you came here expecting to find him.”
“I didn’t come here at all. I was brought.”
“But that name. Do I not remember him? A moment.”
The Colonel held up one finger, as if he was listening for the first cuckoo. His aides gaped. Turning on them, he shouted: “Studd-Thompson. Search. Search. In the cabinets. He may be here.” They leapt to their feet, hauled open a filing cabinet each, and began thumbing through folders. “Quicker. He may escape. Some search under S. Others under T. Leave no stone unturned. But no. There is nothing.” The Colonel sank back in his chair. He waved the others back to their seats. “It is no use. He has escaped us.”
I said, coldly, “If you have any serious questions to ask, perhaps you would be good enough to ask them.”
“But of course I am serious. I have asked you a question. Why do you interfere in this business? Our countries are not at war. We are friends.”
“Great big friends.”
“Exactly. All friends together. Then why do you violate our friendship?”
“I have done nothing—”
“Co-operation. That is what we ask. If we are friends, we co-operate. If we co-operate, then there is no trouble. Am I stupid?”
He shot me a sharp look from his sharp little eyes. It was almost a nudge in the ribs.
“Oh, yes,” I said. “I mean, certainly not.”
“Then that is what you should tell them at the castle. How are all the dear fellows, by the way. The General, and Gheorge?”
“They were all very well when I left them.”
“Fine, fine. And Lisa? And Trüe?”
“Fine,” I said. “Fine.”
“And Herr Lady?”
“Well, of course. I didn’t see a great deal of him,” I said, cautiously.
“A great man,” said Dru. “But he might have been greater still. Perhaps the greatest in all Hungary.”
I was surprised to detect a note of what sounded like genuine respect.
“I had no idea,” I said.
“He did not tell you? But certainly. For a year or two after the War, his star was in the ascendant. There was nothing he might not have achieved. Then he made one mistake. But one was enough.”
“And what was that?”
“He refused to sleep with the Minister of Transport.”
The bellow of laughter which greeted this was like a sudden attack by the wind instruments. I looked round. The orchestra had increased to six, an old man, and a thick, black haired, unfriendly character in the uniform of a major.
“She was, perhaps, past her first youth. But not unattractive. Imagine it. Throwing away a Cabinet post from mere fastidiousness. Eh, Becker?”
Major Becker agreed that he would sleep with the rear portion of a pantomime elephant if it would advance him professionally.
The Colonel plainly regarded this as an attempt to steal his audience, and quelled the laughter with a frown.
“You see,” he said to me. “We are frank with you. Why not be frank with us?”
“I hardly see what I can tell you. You know so much already. I presume that someone at Schloss Obersteinbruck is your informant.”
“Of course.”
“Which one?”
“You do not know?”
“No,” I said. “I’ve no idea.”
“Incredible. Quite incredible.” The conductor toyed with his baton for a moment whilst the orchestra watched him starry-eyed.
“No doubt from time to time Lady informed you of his plans?”
“He told me practically nothing. And much of what he did tell me was, I suspect, untrue.”
“At first, no doubt. But later on he confided in you?”
“No. Why should he?”
“Even after you had removed Major Messelen for him.”
A very faint twittering from the strings. I tried to keep my head.
“Who says I murdered Messelen?”
“My information is that you strangled him with your hands and then buried him.”
Major Becker said something, and Dru bounced round on him.
“You do not believe he could do it? That is because you cannot judge the finer points of a man. You would like a demonstration?”
Apparently everyone wanted a demonstration.
“Come here, then, Major.”
Becker got to his feet and I had a chance to examine him more closely. He was biggish and white and had a lot of black hair, some of it on the back of his hands. He smelt of flowers. I liked none of him.
“And you.”
I got up.
“Now, Major, you have strong hands and wrists? Yes. Good. Now see if you can break his grip.”
We held out our hands and stood there, for a moment, like embarrassed contestants who have been forced to make up their quarrel in public. Dru beamed at us.
Becker put on the pressure. He was strong but not exceptionally so. If you hold your hand in the right way an opponent can do you no harm by hard gripping. He wastes his strength. At the end of a minute I felt his pressure weakening and sharply increased mine. Becker winced. I tightened again. He gave a little grunt, and we broke away.
Dru glanced round the room and collected the applause. I had no attention to spare for them. I was trying to remember something. Just how many people had I told that I had strangled Messelen. Lady, of course. And possibly one other, certainly no more. It looked as if the field was thinning out as we got nearer to the post.
“And now that we have all had our fun, perhaps you will answer a few very simple questions.”
“You still haven’t explained,” I said, desperately, “by what right—”
“Have you any rights? Has a murderer any rights? Is he not outside the law?”
It was a nice point. But I suddenly felt tired of it all.
“What do you want?”
“Information.”
“According to you I have no information. You know everything already. Far more than I do.”
“Not everything. And in any event corroboration is always useful.”
“And what makes you think I shall tell you anything?”
There was a pause of pained surprise.
“But of course you will tell me,” said Colonel Dru. “When I ask for information I obtain it. Do I ever fail?” He glanced round. There now seemed to be nine people in the room. “No, Colonel,” they said. “You never fail.”
“Are not my successes well known?”
About half of them said, “Well known” and the other half, “Yes, indeed”. At a less solemn moment I might have found the folk-song effect entertaining. As it was, I could only say, with a dry mouth: “Go on.”
“I expect,” said Dru, courteously, “that it is ignorance that is at the back of your refusal. It is often so. You do not understand modern methods. You are thinking of the Spanish Inquisition. Yes? And dungeons and racks?” Titter from the first violins. Nothing from me. “And of ingenious Chinese gentlemen who tie their victims beneath a single drop of water which falls upon their foreheads until they go mad. Ha ha.”
“Ha ha,” said the wind instruments, obediently.
“Put such ideas out of your head. They are old fashioned.
Too slow. Too uncertain. Too complicated. They give the victim too much time to be sorry for himself. Once let a man be sorry for himself and he becomes a martyr. A resistance is built up. You see, I am quite frank with you.”
Although the Colonel retained his academic manner perfectly, his audience were not so restrained. Some of the younger ones were beginning to dribble already.
“What we aim at nowadays is simplicity, speed, and certainty. Have you ever considered how a performing dog is trained? A hoop is placed in front of him. He does not move. He is touched with a red-hot iron. He moves, through the hoop. A second time. The same thing. Perhaps a third time, too. After all, dogs are not as intelligent as human beings. After that there is no trouble at all. When he sees a hoop he jumps through it. If he does not, he knows he will be burnt. It is as simple as that.”
I managed a yawn.
The Colonel said, “Quite right. I must not let my enthusiasms run away with me. Now to your case. I think of a question. Something quite simple. What shall it be? Something simple enough to be answered by “Yes” or “No”. Let me see. We will take this question. “Is it Lady’s intention to provoke a General Strike?”
I hope I preserved my composure. If the roof had fallen on me I could hardly have been more shocked.
I was aware that a cold, piggy eye was gleaming at me.
“All right,” I said. “You ask me a question.”
“I then give you ten seconds. If you do not answer me in ten seconds I will boil off your right hand.”
“You will what?”
“Place it in a saucepan of water and bring it to the boil.”
“You—”
“But remember. The essence of this is certainty. You will have only ten seconds to answer, and to answer quite truthfully. After that time, nothing that you say or do will have any effect at all; until the treatment is complete. Then we can start again.”
“But—”
“Is it Lady’s intention to provoke a General Strike?”
There was a clock on the wall with a big second hand. I watched it up to four. Then, for an agonising moment, I thought I had miscounted and I found myself shouting.
“Yes.”
“There was no hurry,” said Dru. “You had all of ten seconds. Now we will start again. When is the strike to be?”
“I don’t know,” I said at once. “He wouldn’t tell me.”
Then we sat in silence as the second hand moved through its allotted span, and I felt the sweat start out all over my body, like water from a wrung cloth.
“Five,” said Dru, after what seemed an age. And then, “Ten.”
“So, he did not tell you. A pity.”
One of the telephones on the desk rang discreetly. It must have been a special telephone, because Dru went straight to it, picked it up, and said, “Colonel Dru speaking.” Then he said, “I see. If you would kindly wait a moment.”
He placed his hand over the mouthpiece and said to Major Becker, “Take him away. You know where to put him. I will speak to him again in the morning.”
The crowd was melting quietly out of the room. Becker took me, professionally holding my arm just above the elbow, and two of the men fell in behind me.
As we went I heard the Colonel say into the telephone. “I was having the room cleared. Now please, if you will go on.”
The room had not been particularly hot but as we came out into the passage I felt as if I was coming out of a Turkish bath.
Chapter XIV
IN WHICH I CATCH UP
We climbed, in all, six flights of stairs. After the third we had to stop for Becker to get his breath back. He was in no sort of condition.
The final flight was narrow, steep and uncarpeted. It ended at the junction of an L-shaped corridor out of each arm of which opened two doors.
We must have been on the top storey of one of the corner turrets (the north-eastern one, I calculated). In the original scheme of things the rooms would have served as box-rooms, perhaps, or servants’ bedrooms. Now it seemed to be a special sort of prison block.
The original doors had been taken out and much stronger ones put in their place. Doors of planks, pierced by one small square spyhole, and fastened on the outside by two long bolts. We went into the end room.
“I regret,” said Becker, with ponderous sarcasm, “it is not luxurious.”
I took no notice of the fat Major. After Dru he was just a long drink of water.
The room was bare. Bare wooden floor, bare walls, a single window, a high ceiling, from which swung a single light. In the middle of the floor stood the only piece of furniture, a big, old fashioned bedstead, a bed of the unyielding sort, with plenty of scrollwork and four brass knobs, one at each corner. On it lay a thin and lumpy mattress and one single small, extremely tattered blanket.
“It is an apartment we keep for special guests,” said the Major. “Those we are anxious to keep with us. It has every modern convenience—” he indicated the bed—”and plenty of fresh air.” He walked over to the window and opened it and stared out pointedly. He seemed to be waiting for me, so I walked across and looked out too.
Eighty feet below us, lighted by arc lamps, was the courtyard. There was something else too. For a moment I could not make it out. Then I saw. Set into the concrete surface of the yard were a number of steel spikes. They were, I think, pieces of angle-iron, which had been cut to an acute point at the top; and they were arranged in a cheval-de-frise immediately under my window.
“We have sometimes found our guests curiously anxious to leave us,” said the Major with a smirk. “We might, of course, have fastened up the window, but that would have been contrary, would it not, to all the rules of hygiene? We therefore thought it best to discourage any unorthodox exit. One must admit, of course, that if you were really determined, the presence of our little pincushion would not prevent you from throwing yourself out. However, of the fifty or more guests we have entertained, no one has yet made the attempt.”
I walked over to the bed, sat down on it, and yawned as rudely as I could.
“Quite right,” said the Major, with a sneer. “Quite right. We must not keep you from your bed. The best of dreams. If you are cold, you can always run round the room. Should you need anything, just ring the bell. No one will come.”
“Stop behaving like a clown,” I said.
He stood for a moment, looking down at me. I thought he was going to hit me, and did not greatly care. Then he said: “Curious that you should be so truculent now. You did not seem to be truculent a short time ago, ha ha! Or was I mistaken?”
I said nothing, and he went out. I heard the bolts shot home and I heard the Major posting one of his men at the far end of the corridor, and giving him some instructions. He was too far off for me to hear what was said to him, but his job was pretty simple. All he had to do was to put himself where he could watch all four doors, and see that none of the prisoners tried to lean out and fiddle with the bolts (which were out of reach, anyway, and fastened home with a patent lock that needed a special key to open it).
I turned out the light, and sat down on the edge of the bed.
It was there that fear got hold of me. It came with the sudden silence. It filtered in with the half-light, from the open window. It laid its fingers upon me and loosed my reins and sinews. At that moment if I had been forced to stand I think my knees would have betrayed me.
Will-power is a tricky thing. It has unimaginable reserves and unexpected limitations. A climber has more occasion to think about it than most people for any difficult climb is a three cornered fight between will, body and the rock face. By hard experience I had found out a certain amount about my own equipment. And one thing I was certain about was that I could not afford to compromise.
Dru had broken me once; and that meant that in future battles, the odds were heavily in his favour.
There were other considerations, but they were of lesser importance. It was becoming clear to me, for instance, that I had been made a fool of. Twice bitten by Lady, I had a third time proffered my hand. He had, of course, concurred in my kidnapping. He may even have known of the exact method and route that were to be used. I do not mean that he had arranged it; that would have been an unnecessary refinement. All he had to ensure was that the guards were posted in the wrong places.
He had allowed me, then, t
o be kidnapped. So that I might be tortured into revealing the half-truths that he had pumped into me. It added insult to injury that he had carefully put me on my guard by explaining to me, in advance, the rules by which he worked.
My mind refused to contemplate just what was going to happen to me when I had been sounded by Dru and his assistants and found to be empty; or what I was likely to suffer in the process.
A cold and comfortless self-contempt had got hold of me. This was the moment of truth, which comes to a climber when he finally realises that he can do no more. He can go neither forward nor back, neither up nor down. Whether he holds on or drops off is between him and his Maker. It concerns no one else in the wide world.
It was my anger with Lady that saved the day. Anger can be as warming as alcohol. And much more permanent in its effects. I sat up, quite suddenly, on that ludicrous iron bedstead, and swore that I would twist Lady’s neck for what he had done to me.
I had not until that moment considered my position objectively at all. But now I did two things which in retrospect seem to me significant. I kicked off my shoes and padded across to the door. The guard was sitting on a chair at the end of the passage. He looked about as mobile as the Tower of London. Then I glanced at my watch. It was almost exactly eleven o’clock.
As an abstract problem, what I had to do did not merit any great expenditure of thought. The room I was in was built to hold. It was beyond imagination that I could make any impression on the woodwork of the walls or floor or ceiling. Certainly I could do nothing effective without attracting the instant attention of my guard. He might be resting on the base of his spine, but he wasn’t as fast asleep as all that. And anyway, I had no semblance of a tool to cut or hack my way out with. Not a blade, not a pin, not a nail.
Which left the window.
This was not guarded with shutters or bars. My captors had insolently relied on an older and stronger barrier.
(I suppose that a desperate man might have wrought himself up to the pitch where he would have cast himself on the bare stones of the courtyard. But I do not believe that of any man born of woman would deliberately have impaled himself alive on those steel spikes which winked up so hopefully at him from the abyss.)
Be Shot For Six Pence Page 17