The Bells of Hell

by Michael Kurland

  ‘Ah, men,’ she said. ‘It is a delicate and time-consuming process. Each pearl must be knotted in place so if the string breaks you only loose one pearl. And the knots must be tiny, so that all you see are the pearls.’ She demonstrated, sliding and knotting a pearl in place on the doubled silk thread, and then doing another.

  ‘Very deft,’ he said. ‘Now you must tell me how you avoided going to prison. I suppose it’s too much to hope that you decided not to burgle the ambassador’s safe.’

  Patricia grinned. ‘We did it,’ she told him. ‘And we were wildly successful. Although there were a few scary moments. And truthfully I’m not sure just what it is we got. And,’ she added, ‘I’ve acquired a useful new skill.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Really. I can tell your fortune with a deck of cards.’

  Ah!’ Geoffrey said. ‘I have an uncle who lost a fortune with a deck of cards, but I suppose that’s not the same thing. But do go on.’

  ‘You first. Tell me all.’

  ‘Fair enough.’ Geoffrey settled back and related the story of the past few days, emphasizing the scenery and the personalities of the people they had met. Patricia was especially interested in close descriptions of scenery and people. He found that he had difficulty in conveying his image of Herr Hitler. ‘He’s short,’ Geoffrey began, ‘and intense. He does not project a feeling of great intellect but one of great assurance. He walks as though,’ he fished for an image, ‘as though if he were to walk into the sea he would expect it to part around him. And those around him watch him as though they were waiting for him at any instant to turn water into wine. Although Herr Hitler, I am given to understand, is himself a teetotaler. Also a vegetarian.’

  ‘Really? Does he smoke? Or screw? Or does he prefer men?’

  ‘I understand, none of the above. And homosexuals are a disfavored class in the New Germany. I have heard some disturbing rumors about a niece, I believe, who apparently committed suicide under strange circumstances. But to be fair rumors are … rumors. One cannot put credence in them.’

  ‘So. Did you take to him?’

  ‘Take to him? No. He frightens the bloody hell out of me. Although HRH seemed quite taken with him. But then I think Der Führer was quite impressed that he was in a private conversation with a member of the Royal Family. He was on his best behavior.’

  ‘But he frightens you? Is it what he’s doing with Germany? Or the way he’s treating the Jews and Communists?’

  ‘Yes, all of that of course. But more. He personally frightens me. He leaves me with the feeling that if I were standing between Herr Hitler and the door he would walk right through me, were it not easier to go around.’

  ‘Well!’ she said.

  ‘Enough of that,’ he said. ‘Now your turn. Tell me all about how you didn’t get arrested for safecracking.’

  Patricia smiled and leaned back in her corner of the couch. She related her foray into l’Ambasciata d’Italia with Uncle Isaac and a deck of tarot cards, and had Geoffrey chuckling three times and only looking panic-stricken once, which she thought was about right. He was professionally interested in her description of Count Ciano and the two visiting Germans, and nicely restrained his curiosity about Isaac’s foray into the ambassador’s office until she reached the end of her story. ‘And,’ she said with a dramatic flourish, ‘and …’ she reached into her oversized Briani alligator purse with the gold fittings and fished around. ‘Shit!’

  ‘What?’ Geoffrey asked, looking startled. It had been a heartfelt Shit!

  ‘I thought they were – oh, I remember.’ She got up and left the room, coming back a minute later with a manila envelope in her hand. ‘I put them in my stocking drawer for safekeeping.’

  ‘What exactly?’

  She handed him the envelope. ‘I’m not sure. Isaac says they’re pads – well, pictures of pads. He has this camera, a Minox I think, kind of looks like a pocket cigarette lighter, all the rage with German spies, and he took pictures of pages of this pad he found in the safe. He says you’ll know what they are. He says they’ll either be of great value to you or of no use whatsoever, and he can’t tell which, but he rather hopes the former. He had to develop them himself because nobody knows how to do it in this country; the camera apparently isn’t for sale over here yet. And besides who could you ask to print pictures of secret Italian documents?’

  Geoffrey took the packet of photographs out of the envelope and riffled through them. There were thirty-two three-by-four-inch surprisingly clear prints, most of them showing pages of typewritten letters arranged in lines and columns, eight apparently random five-letter groups forming a line, and lines all the way down the page. The first one he looked at began like this:

  21 2367

  WEEDK GROBD QORPN YTMQZ PUMJK TDWWP ATNHD AHASW DQTHY AJTKO HQHOM GEULL WOEBT SOVTL DLEFE PBGIT

  And so on down the page.

  He stared at them blankly for a while and then comprehension came. ‘Son of a bitch!’

  ‘To which particular dog are you referring?’ Patricia asked.

  ‘What we have here,’ Geoffrey told her, ‘is a rum-ti-tum. Haven’t seen one since the War.’

  ‘A rum …?’

  ‘It’s what we called them. The proper name is, I believe, a one-time pad. They came into use late in the War for encrypting messages at brigade level and above. Ours didn’t look exactly like this – the layout was different – but I’ll wager that’s what it is.’

  Patricia took one of the photos and held it up to the light. ‘So this is a secret message?’

  ‘Not exactly, my love. This is the watchamacallit – the code that lets a message become secret.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Of course.’

  ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘the idea is very simple. You take your message and write it over the letters on the pad – one letter of your message on top of each printed letter. Then you add the two letters together to come up with your code letter.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Of course. You add two letters together.’

  ‘Look,’ he explained. ‘You give each letter a number value. A is one, B is two, C is three, and so on. Then you add together the message letter and the code letter – as numbers, if you see what I mean, and use the resulting number, ah, letter as your encrypted value. To decrypt it you do the reverse. If the number is larger than twenty-six, you subtract twenty-six and use the result. It’s very time-consuming but your secret messages stay secret. Provided you rip that sheet off the pad and never use it again.’

  ‘Twenty-six?’

  ‘That’s how many letters there are in our alphabet.’

  ‘Of course. So, will these be useful?’

  ‘Actually yes, I think. Traffic to the embassies, if it isn’t in the diplomatic pouches, is sent by radio, which is unreliable and may be intercepted, or by regular overseas cable, and then delivered by your faithful Western Union delivery boy. And why not? If it’s encoded by one-time pad, it’s unbreakable.’

  ‘Unless you have a copy of the pad,’ Patricia offered.

  ‘Unless,’ Geoffrey agreed. ‘We’ll need to turn them over to our American friends, if we have any. They will be ever so grateful.’

  ‘There’s more,’ she told him, looking smug. ‘Uncle Isaac overheard part of the conversation between Count Ciano and the two Germans.’

  ‘Really? And?’

  ‘There is something big getting set to happen in New York, apparently. Sometime soon. Something of great value to the Reich, which should please the Italians. Something that will displease the Communists.’

  ‘Why the Communists?’

  ‘He didn’t say.’

  ‘What sort of thing?’

  ‘Isaac didn’t hear. Apparently the German, whichever one was talking, was vague about it.’

  ‘New York?’

  ‘New York.’

  ‘We should tell someone.’

  ‘Yes, but what?’

  Geoffrey shrugged. ‘I don’t exactly know,’ he said.


  TWENTY-TWO

  All the world’s a stage,

  and all the men and women merely players:

  they have their exits and their entrances;

  and one man in his time plays many parts …

  – William Shakespeare

  Major Sir Henry Cardine did not expect to be back in Berlin so soon. Indeed, he had no plans to be back in Berlin ever again. But a mortal’s fate is oft thrust unwitting into the hands of the gods. The gods in this case being the wallahs at MI6 who spoke to him of Duty and Country and managed to work in references to Nelson and Wellington and, somehow, Robert Browning and Tennyson, until he would have proudly marched into the Valley of Death. Or even Berlin.

  So here he was: black bowler hat, regimental tie, briefcase, furled umbrella, and a growing sense of unease. Since he’d landed at Tempelhof Airport he’d had the feeling that he was being followed, but he imagined that all foreigners in Berlin these days felt they were being followed. And probably a lot of Berliners. His handlers in London had said he should not make any attempts to find out if it were so but to behave naturally, whatever that might be under the circumstances. Which made him feel like a goldfish trying not to see if anyone was peering into the bowl. But his was not to reason why, his was but to … he decided not to finish that quote even in his head.

  He checked in to the Kaiserhof, where he was given a room on a lower floor overlooking the loading dock, thus showing the management’s appraisal of his current status. After an overnight stay and a brief meeting with the departing manager of Wannesfrei Grammophon, which served to explain his presence to any unseen watchers, he was scheduled to meet his newly created sister Mabel Bellant and her two children Bruce and Priscilla in the Kaiserhof lobby at two. They would be accompanied by the man he knew as Felix. He had a brief message for Felix. And then he would give Mabel her passport, and escort her and her progeny out of the country as rapidly as possible while avoiding the appearance of haste. They had – what was the word the MI6 bloke was so fond of … notionally? That was it – notionally been in Switzerland until a few days ago when she had decided to visit Berlin and travel home with her brother. The passport had all the required visas and border stamps to support the story.

  He re-entered the hotel at quarter to two and repaired to a corner table in the bar to indulge in a fortifying Scotch and water – no ice, thank you – before the gathering up of his new clan. He was on his second Scotch half an hour later, at quarter past two, when Felix slid onto the chair across the table and nodded. ‘Hello again,’ he said.

  ‘Hello,’ Sir Henry said. ‘Good to see you.’

  ‘So,’ Felix said, ‘you are not of the Military Intelligence? And I almost believed you.’

  ‘I was, ah, recruited for this one task,’ Sir Henry told him. ‘Because we knew each other. Believe me, this is not my chosen profession.’

  Felix nodded his understanding. ‘All the sneaking around and lying,’ he said, ‘seems rather ungentlemanly, eh?’

  Sir Henry allowed himself a slight smile. ‘Rather unsporting,’ he agreed. ‘But necessities of war and all that.’

  ‘We are sometimes not given the choice,’ said Felix. ‘Now, to the present business.’

  ‘I am ready,’ Sir Henry said, reaching into his jacket pocket for his notional sister’s new passport.

  ‘There’s a problem,’ Felix said.

  Of course, Sir Henry thought, there’s a problem. What would life be if there wasn’t a problem? ‘What sort of problem?’

  ‘I should say rather, there’s a delay. At least if we are fortunate that’s all it is.’

  ‘How long a delay?’

  ‘Well,’ Felix said, ‘it’s hard to say. Apparently the Gestapo came by to arrest Madeleine just as she was preparing to leave.’ He waved at the waitress. ‘Steinhäger, bitte.’

  Sir Henry frowned. ‘Madeleine?’

  ‘Oh yes, sorry,’ Felix said. ‘Your Mabel Bellant.’

  ‘I see,’ Sir Henry said. ‘The Gestapo? So she’s under arrest? That sounds as if it could engender rather a long delay.’

  ‘It’s actually a rather amusing story,’ Felix said, ‘which we may be able to laugh at in ten or twenty years. It seems that just as the Gestapo were ready to enter her studio a staff car pulled up in front – with a motorcycle escort no less. Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring emerged and strode through the door and up the stairs. He had dropped by on his way to someplace important to pick up a gown that Madeleine had been fitting for his wife. But the Gestapo agents, not knowing why the Reichsmarschall had come by, retreated in temporary confusion. The possibilities, you see, were, let us say, interesting. They fell back and set to watching the building while waiting for someone higher up to decide what to do.’

  The waitress set a small glass in front of Felix and he stared down at it.

  ‘How did you find out all this?’

  ‘Madeleine’s studio is on the first floor of a commercial building,’ Felix explained. ‘The proprietor of the cheese store on the ground floor, who is a friend, observed what was happening and ran upstairs to tell her, passing the Reichsmarschall, who was on his way back down. Madeleine grabbed her suitcase and hurried back downstairs with the cheese-store proprietor. She slid the suitcase under the counter, put on an apron, and began selling cheese. When the Gestapo entered the building twenty minutes later, they found a sign pinned to the studio door saying closed for the day, back tomorrow at ten. They broke down the door anyway and tossed things about before they left. A couple of them are watching the building in case she returns while the others go to her apartment to pick her up, or so I would assume. They will be disappointed.’

  ‘I still don’t see—’ Sir Henry began.

  ‘How I know all this?’ Felix picked up the glass of Steinhäger and downed it in one continuous gesture. It did not seem to have any effect on him. He gestured at the waitress and she brought him another. ‘She called me,’ he told Sir Henry. ‘After the Gestapo men left she snuck back up to her studio and called me. She didn’t want to use the cheese man’s phone to keep him from being implicated in our problems.’

  ‘But if they can trace her call back to you?’

  ‘It is a phone that will be disconnected tomorrow in an apartment that I will never go back to.’ He sighed. ‘Oh, what a tangled web we weave …’

  ‘Why, at this time—’ Sir Henry started.

  ‘Ah! You have touched the important question. Why indeed? There is a general and gradual roundup of Jews, but they don’t usually send a contingent of Gestapo after one unimportant Jewess. I’m afraid it has to do with Herr Fauth.’

  ‘Herr …?’

  ‘Herr Fauth – the lady’s husband. He is, of necessity, a somewhat shadowy figure.’

  ‘Shadowy?’

  ‘Yes. You see I am Herr Fauth, and since I can only occupy that, ah, personality part of the time, he is a vague and partial presence in Madeleine’s life. Quite possibly the Gestapo have become curious about Herr Fauth and have decided to see what his response will be when they arrest his wife.’

  ‘So what now?’ Sir Henry asked.

  ‘So I have to get her away from the cheese shop before six o’clock, which is when it closes. She cannot remain behind after the shop closes. Even the Gestapo are not that stupid. Luckily the children are already out of the house, and I have had them sent ahead to Tempelhof, so all we have to do is somehow get Madeleine out of the cheese shop before six.’

  Sir Henry frowned. ‘We?’

  ‘If you have nothing better to do.’

  ‘This is not the sort of thing I’m good at,’ Sir Henry said.

  ‘Few of us are,’ said Felix. ‘And there is no time for me to engage one of that few. I regret having to ask you to assist me in this, an action you are neither prepared nor equipped to do, but I have little choice.’

  ‘Equipped?’ Sir Henry asked.

  ‘Mentally, I meant. If you are indeed not an agent of Military Intelligence then you have not r
eceived the training for such clandestine operations.’

  ‘That is true,’ Sir Henry admitted. ‘I have not. I could not successfully disguise myself as, say, a German businessman well enough to fool a schoolchild.’

  ‘Ah, but a German Army officer you could probably manage,’ Felix said. ‘Certainly well enough to fool a civilian.’

  ‘Is that what you want?’

  Felix patted the air with his hand. ‘No, no,’ he said. ‘It was just a random thought. Army officers are one large fraternity the world over, although occasionally we have to fight each other.’

  Two SS officers in their black and silver uniforms entered and strutted up to the bar. Sir Henry gestured toward them. ‘What of those, ah, gentlemen?’ he asked. ‘Are they part of our fraternity?’

  ‘I would say not,’ Felix admitted, glancing at them, his face impassive.

  ‘You don’t think they would actually fight?’

  ‘Oh, no,’ Felix said. ‘It’s not that. They will most assuredly fight. Some of them, I understand, are fighting in Spain, and doing very well. Weasels, I understand, fight very well. But there is some essential level of humanity that the Schutzstaffel seem to have absented from their makeup.’ Felix downed his second glass and stood up. ‘Come,’ he said. ‘If you are willing to help me, come.’

  Sir Henry found himself standing before he had actually decided what he was going to do. Then he mentally shrugged. In for a penny … ‘What do you need me to do?’ he asked.

  The plan was alarmingly simple: lure the Gestapo watchers away and then pick up the lady and run – or preferably walk calmly – around the corner before they returned. A taxi would be waiting to take them to the airport, where if the gods had smiled upon them the lady’s two children would be waiting. Felix was to do the luring whilst Sir Henry and his notional sister did the calm walking.

  ‘And if we are stopped?’ Sir Henry asked.

  ‘Madeleine – Mabel – will have her passport, and you will be escorting your sister back home. If they press you, you will allow your annoyance to turn into indignation – you British are quite good at indignation. They are looking for a single Jewish woman, not a British lady traveling with her brother. And she does not look like what they believe a Jewess to look like. You should have no trouble blustering your way through.’