‘Ah!’ Geoffrey said.
‘It’s got some sort of tamper thing, so if you pull the wires you’ll set off the bomb. Or so the man – Weiss – said. He was here. He is the one who grabbed me and tied me up. Weiss. So I got loose, thanks to Professor Mavini, and I’m holding the clock so the hands won’t move. If they move, I think, the bomb’s going to go off.’
‘Oh dear,’ Geoffrey said. ‘We’d better do something.’
‘We’ve got Weiss,’ Welker said. ‘We could bring him down here, let him disarm the thing himself.’
Geoffrey thought about that for a second, and then shook his head. ‘Perhaps not,’ he said. ‘He might have a death wish, fancy himself a hero or something. What do you know about bombs?’
‘In theory, quite a bit,’ Welker said. ‘In practice – let me get a look at the thing.’
‘Please, be careful,’ Patricia said as Welker came over.
‘Extra-special careful,’ he assured her. He peered down into the satchel. ‘I can’t see down in there,’ he said. ‘I can see the clock, but I can’t see past it. Can you move your hands?’
‘No,’ she told him. ‘I daren’t.’
‘OK,’ he said. ‘We’ll do it by touch.’ He slid one hand in gingerly alongside Patricia’s and felt around under the clock.
‘Do you have any idea what you’re doing?’ Geoffrey asked him.
‘Strangely enough,’ Welker said, ‘I think I do. This design for an infernal device seems like one that I showed these guys while I was being a bomb expert.’ He closed his eyes to concentrate on his sense of touch. ‘The idea was to be able to construct it from parts easily obtainable in any hardware store.’
‘So you taught them how to make this thing?’ Geoffrey asked, sounding aggrieved.
‘Be grateful,’ Welker told him. ‘If they’d picked up a copy of the US Army’s Field Demolitions Manual, they could have done some really nasty stuff.’ After a pause he said, ‘Ah!’ And then he added, ‘I think …’ And then, after another pause, ‘Yes! That’s done it. You can let go.’
Patricia slowly opened her fingers from around the clock and pulled her hand away from the satchel.
Brrrrrring!!!
The three of them froze – waiting. But nothing happened.
‘It seems that you’ve done it,’ Geoffrey said.
Patricia fell sideways onto the floor, and found that she couldn’t stop shaking. ‘So close,’ she said.
Welker knelt and wrapped his arms around her, pulling her up so she was sitting, a bit lopsided, next to him. ‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘Congratulations, you have probably saved the life of the President of the United States.’
Geoffrey came and put his own arms around them both. He found that he was crying. ‘Patricia,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what I would have done if you …’
Patricia giggled and leaned against his warm shoulder in its wonderful, scratchy wool jacket. As if her senses were fine-tuned, she could smell the subtle scent of his favorite soap. And another scent: Welker’s cologne? She could grow to like the scent of Welker’s cologne. She reached up and hugged them both. ‘Don’t be silly,’ she said. ‘You couldn’t have done anything. You would have been killed too.’
Welker stood up. ‘I’d better go tell the others,’ he said.
FORTY-THREE
Now this is not the end.
It is not even the beginning of the end.
But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.
– Winston Churchill
‘President Roosevelt regrets,’ Welker told them, ‘that he cannot give you a medal. The official word will be that this never happened. But he has informed your Prime Minister that you, each and collectively, have performed a great and heroic service to the, ah, “cause of freedom”, is I believe the way he worded it.’
‘Perhaps Neville will see that we’re on the next honors list,’ Geoffrey said. He turned to Patricia. ‘How would you like to be a Dame of the British Empire?’
Welker laughed. ‘Is that a real thing?’ he asked. ‘It sounds somehow smutty.’
‘We take our awards very seriously,’ Geoffrey told him. ‘Even the smutty-sounding ones.’
‘I don’t think I’d like being a “Dame”,’ Patricia decided. ‘It seems all corset and button shoes-y.’
‘You’re not at all button shoes-y,’ Geoffrey assured her.
‘I should say not,’ Welker agreed. ‘You’re a genuine hero!’
Patricia laughed. ‘And so are you,’ she told him. ‘And so are we all.’
It was three days after the attempted bombing and they were meeting for lunch in the Sert Room in the Waldorf. Welker was having the lamb chops, Geoffrey, a crab omelet, and Patricia, as seemed appropriate, a Waldorf salad.
‘How is that little fellow, ah, Blake?’ Geoffrey asked.
‘He is doing well,’ Welker told him. ‘It turns out a rib was cracked, but he should recover completely in a week or two. He isn’t as little as he seems,’ he added. ‘There’s just something about him.’
Geoffrey grinned. ‘Little but vicious,’ he said.
‘Usually very meek,’ Welker said. ‘He just saw red or green or something when he got close to Weiss. He had watched Weiss perform a particularly nasty killing.’
‘What about those men I was sharing the floor with in that room?’ Patricia asked. ‘Have they recovered?’
‘Three have, and are in Federal custody. The fourth is still in the hospital and hasn’t regained consciousness. He must have drunk more of whatever the stuff in that bottle was. Weiss and his partner certainly didn’t mean to kill them; he was going to let the bomb do that.’
‘Speaking of the partner,’ Geoffrey said. ‘Have you got him?’
‘Lehman. Yes. Picked him up as he was boarding the Rotterdam. He started talking even before they got him off the boat. Insisted the idea was not to kill the President but to make it look like the Communists were trying to. Like that makes it OK. We’re looking for Gerard, the local Bund leader, who apparently was also in on it. We haven’t got him yet, but we will. By “we” I mean the FBI, who seem to be coming around to the notion that the Nazis may be almost as dangerous as the Commies.’
‘Well, good,’ Patricia said. ‘I’m certainly glad that this is over.’
‘Over?’ Geoffrey shook his head. ‘I have a feeling that it’s just beginning.’
Declaration as to Content, Style, and Population
This is a work of fiction leavened with a smattering of truth set in a remarkable period of human history. The characters in here are my creations, no matter what names they bear, and it is not fair to their historical counterparts to take anything I have said about them as what they actually may have believed, thought, or said. In some cases I have alluded to what it is reported they said and reproduced what it is asserted they thought, but as I was not present and do not claim to be a mind-reader, I can only say that I write in good faith and have not deliberately attempted to misrepresent the actions or beliefs of any historical characters.
Many of the plans, schemes, or actions described here, including some of the more unbelievable ones, are based on events that actually happened at the time, although perhaps not precisely when or how they are portrayed.
The quoted lines beginning ‘the Llama’ in chapter twenty-one are from Hilaire Belloc’s poem ‘The Llama’.
The quoted lines beginning ‘While I am I’ in chapter thirty-one are from ‘Life In A Love’, a poem by Robert Browning.
The Bells of Hell Page 29