Beneath Gray Skies

by Hugh Ashton

  “Settling in all right, old boy? Making yourself at home? Dowling treating you well? Digs comfortable, work not overtaxing you, and grub edible, I trust?”

  “Yes, sir,” replied Christopher, hardly understanding half of what had just been said to him.

  “Good, good,” smiled C. “Now then, young Dowling,” picking up the piece of paper. “Your little jaunt to Germany.”

  “Yes, sir?” To Christopher’s ears, Dowling sounded somewhat nervous.

  “This business has not made me a happy man, Dowling. A bloody awful piece of work by your standards, if I may say so, in many respects. I’ve been waiting to talk with you about it for several days because we’ve been presented with several faits accomplis, and I’ve wanted to think what to do about it all. To the details, anyway. First, it took you three whole days to find out when the Robert E. Lee was due to dock at Bremen, and when you did find out, it was too damn’ late. Yes, yes, I’ve read your reasons,” as Dowling started to speak. “Not good enough, Dowling, not good enough.”

  “Sorry, sir.”

  “Anyway, you did get to Berlin in the end. I suppose you couldn’t be blamed for the speed that things happened, and there’s no way you could have stopped Herr Hitler’s coup single-handed. A word of our suspicions to the right authorities might have saved poor Rathenau’s life, though, and the lives of all the other poor beggars murdered by the Nazis. Do you know, we think two hundred and fifteen people were killed that day? That’s more people than we have working in the whole of this bloody building.”

  “Sorry again, sir. I’d like to remind you that all I had to go on were suspicions, and we all would have looked like proper charlies if I’d been the boy crying wolf all over again. If I might remind you of what happened then, sir, Lyttleton made a complete ass of all of us over the Luxemburg and Liebknecht business? He told us at the time that the Bolsheviks were coming close on their heels with snow on their boots.”

  “Point taken, Dowling.” C turned to Christopher. “Mr. Dowling is usually a very good officer indeed, Pole. One of the best. I want you to know that. On this last occasion, he was merely good and not very good. If it had been anyone else,” turning back to Dowling, “I would have been pleased with the work. As it is, this lapse from your usual impeccable standards is distressing to me. So,” turning to Christopher again, “please continue to listen and learn from him. My annoyance today is only minor.”

  “Thank you, sir,” said Dowling.

  “You’re not off the hook yet. Why the bloody hell did you and Bloody Brian go to Zurich, and why on earth did you leave him there? I told you to bring him back, dead or alive, and that wasn’t a figure of speech.”

  “Sir, it’s in the report.”

  “I have read it, Dowling. I understand that the man was in trouble. He’d snatched a Jewish girl from under the nose of this Goering feller, and shot him three times in the process.” He broke off and glared at Christopher, who had started giggling. “What’s so damned funny, Pole?”

  “I was thinking, sir, that Mr. Goering had been shot in the leg. Shooting him three times in the process sounds like it might be a sight more painful.”

  “Oh, I see. A joke. Ha ha,” without laughing. “Thank you, Pole.” A somewhat quizzical look over the top of his glasses. “To return to our muttons, Dowling. Our man shoots one of the top Nazis, runs away from the Confed army, and you take him on a little pleasure trip to Switzerland. I know you wrote about all this in your report, but now that you’ve had a little more time to think about all this, tell me again what happened, and most importantly, why it happened. And you,” turning to Christopher, “take notes on all of this.” Christopher opened his notebook and poised his pencil.

  “When I met Finch-Malloy in Berlin,” Dowling started.

  “Tell me again exactly how you ran him to earth,” interrupted C.

  “I had been by all the Ministries, sir and I saw this kerfuffle outside the Ministry of Finance. I saw that one of the Nazis looked as though he’d been pretty badly hurt, but there were no police or Reichswehr men around, and no sign of any Communists. So I passed some cigarettes round the Confed soldiers and asked what was going on. They told me that a tall Englishman who’d been in their army had run off with a girl and taken of their soldiers with him as a hostage, and had shot the German as he scarpered off. I finished my cigarette with them, and went off in the direction they told me the trio had gone. It had all happened quite recently—the ambulance was just pulling up for Goering when I left them, but the Confeds didn’t seem interested in chasing after Finch-Malloy and the other two.”

  ”Weren’t you frightened of attracting attention, wandering round Berlin?”

  “No, sir, I wasn’t. After all, they could tell I’m obviously not a German, just by looking at me, and I wasn’t wearing a swastika armband. If anyone asked me why I was asking, I just said I was an English reporter.”

  Christopher sat wide-eyed, listening to all of this. He had no idea that the usually prim and proper Dowling had been involved in anything so dramatic.

  “All right, go on.”

  “So I tracked him down to a run-down factory district about two miles from the Reichstag. There was a place there that we’d used just after the War when we were trying to get to the bottom of that Liebknecht business. I knew that Finch-Malloy knew about it, and it was probably the place that he’d aim for if he had to go to earth. When I got there, I looked down a side-street towards the canal, and there was this skinny little urchin with a rifle who somehow didn’t look German to me. I looked closer and I saw that he had a swastika armband on, so I went down to see him. He gave me a proper sentry challenge in English, and then sure enough, Bloody Brian turned up. The soldier was his friend, the chess prodigy, you know, and the Jewish girl was there too. Anyway, we sent the boy and the girl off together, the boy to return to the Confeds, and the girl to make her way back to her home, and I got Brian back to the hotel where I was staying. Smuggled him in while the porter’s back was turned. We talked for a while. He had all kinds of facts and figures about the coup which he’d gathered from the company papers. The chess-player was the company orderly, and so Finch-Malloy had got a good look at all kinds of things he had no right to see. I put all of them in my report to you, sir.”

  “You did. We won’t need to go over them again, at this point. You said that he looked like a tramp?”

  “Yes, sir. Smelled like one, too. All the Confeds were in hand-me-down mufti. So then I had to find him some clothes. When I went downstairs later that afternoon to go out to find something for him, I saw the evening newspapers, and saw that the Nazis had actually grabbed power, and Finch-Malloy was probably for the high jump if we weren’t careful. I thought the best thing was to get him to Switzerland. Booking tickets direct to England would have looked too suspicious. So I raced outside and grabbed some things which looked roughly his size, and went to the station to get two seats for Zurich.”

  “And what were you going to use for passports? You never put that in your report,” asked C. “I know you had one in your real name, and one in another name, but with the greatest goodwill in the world, my dear chap, no-one could take you for Bloody Brian. Could they?” appealing to Christopher.

  “No, sir. They do look very different,” replied Christopher, dutifully.

  Dowling flushed. “I have to admit that it didn’t go into my report because it’s something I’m not very proud of. In the hotel, while I was looking at the newspapers, I saw a Canadian standing in front of me, and blow me, sir, if he wasn’t just like Finch-Malloy. They could have been brothers.”

  “How on earth do you know he was Canadian?”

  “Well, sir,” his face turned even redder. “His passport fell out of his pocket into mine, sir.”

  C chuckled. “I take it you provided a helping hand there? Make sure nothing’s missing from your pockets, Pole, after you’ve finished talking with Mr. Dowling. Well, I knew you had those skills, Dowling, dealing the second card
, and dealing off the bottom and pulling rabbits out of hats and all that, but using them like that … Full marks for initiative there, if not for honesty. Go on.”

  “The clothes I bought fitted Finch-Malloy quite well, and we arrived at the station separately, but within sight, so we could cover each other, and carrying one of my cases apiece. Made us look a bit more natural, and I’d made out a label for his case with Mr. Ferguson’s name on it, this being the name of our colonial cousin whose passport was temporarily in the service of His Majesty’s Government. I had reserved seats in first class, and we sat in the same compartment, but on different sides, and not speaking to each other.”

  “And no trouble at the border?”

  “No, sir. First class on that line hardly ever has trouble. In any case, if they had been looking for anyone in particular, they were looking for a tall healthy active Englishman, not a stooping Canadian with a limp.”

  “Stooping?” enquired C.

  “Yes sir. A stick of mine that was far too short for him provided the stoop. Finch-Malloy added a convincing limp and looked at least twenty years older somehow while he was doing it. And the tie took attention away from the face.”

  “The tie? Dammit, man, explain.”

  Dowling chuckled. “It was particularly gaudy and tasteless. Just the sort of horrible thing you might expect from an American or Canadian. Sorry, Pole, nothing personal. Everyone was too busy looking at the tie to pay much attention to the face above it.”

  C nodded. “I told you, Pole, to listen and learn when Mr. Dowling speaks. Never underestimate the power of misdirection, Pole. Go on, Dowling. This is where your report starts to get a bit vague.”

  “Sorry, sir. We booked into the Hotel zum Storchen in Zurich, near the station. I talked to Bloody Brian, and told him he had to come back with me. He refused, and I pulled my gun on him. He laughed.”

  “He laughed?”

  “He told me that he’d emptied the gun while I was shopping in Berlin and left the gun in the hotel with him. I’m afraid I hadn’t checked it since then.”

  “You bloody fool, Dowling. You can still keep on listening to him, Pole, but learn from his mistakes this time.”

  “He refused to come back to London with me, and quite frankly, sir, I’m no match for him. There’s no way I could have persuaded him by force. Anyway, sir, he said that he was going to go back to the Confederacy. Pulled his own gun on me, and walked out of the room. There was no way I could see where he’d gone. I had to pay his bill as well as my own, sir.”

  “He’s going to go where?” asked C, somewhat incredulously. “Why didn’t you say this in your report?”

  “Go to the Confederacy, sir. I wanted to discuss this with you personally, sir. Better if nothing’s put in writing?” C nodded wordlessly. “He said it’s a rotten little state and must be eliminated as soon as possible. He’s going as Mr. Ferguson, I suppose, sir, but God alone knows what he’s going to use for money. I have already told the Foreign Office about a missing passport, sir, so they can stop him if he turns up anywhere they have jurisdiction, but it’s a long shot, and anyway, you know what they’re like.”

  “The devil of it is, you know, Dowling, he’s perfectly right. The Confederacy is a perfectly rotten little state, in all senses of the word.” He turned to Christopher. “Glad to be out of there, Pole?”

  “Yes, sir. Excepting the weather, that is.”

  C smiled. “Sorry, old boy. That’s one trick neither Dowling nor myself has mastered just yet. Just have to grin and bear it, what?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “All right, thank you, Dowling. That’s cleared all the facts up in my mind. Now the question remains as to what we’re going to do about things.”

  Dowling nodded.

  “We’ll turn to the Confederacy for now, since we’re lucky to have an expert with us today, in the form of Pole here. Now, Pole, it seems to me from what I know that your mistress was good to you.”

  “Yes sir, she certainly was that, sir.”

  “Is that common? That owners of slaves treat their slaves well?”

  “No sir, I must say that they don’t. My Miss Justin, she always felt kind of guilty that she had slaves.”

  “So why didn’t she let you all go?”

  “She couldn’t afford to do that, sir.” C frowned. “You see, sir, there’s a new manumission law came in one or two years back that says you have to pay the freedman or woman a fair sum of money equal to a year’s wages all in one go, and then they doubled the tax to the government as well every time you free a slave.”

  “That’s the first I’ve heard about the tax and the other business. Maybe Bertie reported it, but I haven’t seen anything about it. Thank you, Pole. Dowling, you must get our other Confederacy people talking to Pole here about this kind of thing. Make a note of it.”

  “I heard tell, sir,” added Christopher, “it was because there was too many folks talking about selling their slaves and then the white folks are frightened they’ll have no jobs, because we people will work for cheaper than they will. Then they’ll hate us and kill us all. They did that in one town in Texas, three years back, I hear. Some of the white folks set fire to a church where there was more than three hundred and twenty of our people. All of them free, not slaves. Women and children as well as men. Any of them tried to come out of that burning church, they shot them down. The rest all burned to death.”

  “My God!” said Dowling. “What a horrible place.”

  “Which is why they can’t end slavery,” said C. “Some of these economist fellers seem to think that because slavery’s not an economic way of doing things, it will just disappear in a free market. Trouble is that the Confederacy’s not a free market. The Confederacy doesn’t welcome strangers, even if strangers wanted to get in there, upsetting their closed little world. They’ve got that tinpot excuse for a religion there. I don’t want to tread on any toes here, Pole, but it’s certainly not Church of England. Do you know, they don’t even allow evolution to be taught in their universities? They insist the world was created in seven days 5,000 years ago.” He turned to Christopher again. “How many people from outside the Confederacy did you ever meet?”

  “Except that Brian? I’d have to say I don’t recall that many. Two, maybe three in my whole life, sir.”

  “And if you look at the map, Dowling, you’ll see that Pole’s town of Cordele is a very busy railway junction. You’d expect to see a lot of people from out of town there.”

  “Yes, sir,” Christopher agreed. “Lots of businesses in Cordele for the folks passing through. Hotels and the like.”

  “But no foreigners. And precious little in the way of goods going into and out of the Confederacy. Officially the Union border is sealed in both directions, but there’s quite a flourishing trade in raw cotton and tobacco into the Union. But not so much for things going the other way. Union laws are stricter for smugglers out of the Union than into the Union. Which makes a strange sort of sense when you think about it.” C paused. “And then we have oil to consider. From what we can guess, there’s probably a lot of oil under Texas and Oklahoma. More than in California, but that’s one thing that the Union won’t allow to be smuggled across the border. And with no European nations trading with the Confederacy, officially, at any rate, there’s no point in getting it out of the ground.”

  “Sir,” pointed out Dowling. “Finland and Estonia both have trade agreements, don’t they?”

  C sighed. “Let me restate my last, Dowling. No major European nations trade with the Confederacy. But—returning to Germany for a moment—Hitler’s chaps want a modern army and navy. They’ll want all the latest toys, and that doesn’t mean lines of marching soldiers. It means tanks, and lorries, and cars, and airplanes, and submarines. and fast long-range battle cruisers.”

  “Sir,” interrupted Christopher. “All those things need oil, don’t they?”

  C beamed. “They do indeed, Pole. I think you see for yourself the terrible axis w
ith which Herr Hitler might want to link these two wheels of evil and keep them turning together. Of course, to get the oil out of the ground to grease this axis, they’re going to need some money, and that’s something else that the Confederate government is short of right now.”

  “Do you think they’re expecting the Germans to give them any money, sir?” asked Dowling. “Because if they are, I think they’re going find that cupboard is bare as well. It’s going to be a strange sort of alliance.”

  “Your job, Dowling, is more to concentrate on these links, this axis, whatever we call it, and to break it wherever the links are weakest. You know the Germans well enough. And you, Pole, you’re to help Mr. Dowling in this. Your views and first-hand experience of the Confederacy will be most valuable. I’m delighted you’re on our side.”

  “And Finch-Malloy, sir? Is he on our side?” asked Dowling.