Dark Tales From the Secret War

by John Houlihan

  Buckle pulled on the book but Hess held fast and the two engaged in a curious game of push and shove, each with their arms wrapped around the prize, keen to wrench it from the other’s grasp without damaging it.

  “Let go, damn you!” Buckle commanded, and with a heave he yanked the book free sending Hess tumbling backwards onto the bed. Even then the German barely took his eyes from the volume and he still seemed to be mouthing the nonsense words he had been reciting.

  The guard clutching the attaché case came forward and together with Buckle they squirreled the book away out of sight. Only then did the spell seem to be broken. Hess slid from the bed, slumped to his knees on the plush carpet and buried his head in his hands. He was weeping gently, not out of any great distress, more out of sheer and overwhelming relief, as might a mother who has just been reunited with her missing child.

  “Take him away,” said Buckle and the other guard stepped forward and hooked Hess under the arms and lifted him upright. Buckle held open the door and the two guards left, one carrying Hess and the other carrying the attaché case containing the book.

  It had been an extraordinary few minutes. The moment they had gone Buckle poured himself another brandy and I found my voice.

  “Well, well,” I said. “Hitler’s Deputy Führer, in the Savoy. The management would have a fit.”

  He looked at me over the rim of his glass. Was he disappointed I had recognised Hess? If so, he did not seem to dwell on it for any great length of time.

  “Yes, yes, well, you should be thankful we got to him before he got to you. And be thankful we took that book off your hands.”

  “How so?” I could not see how Hess’s mission to forge a peace with the British had anything to do with me. Buckle looked over, debating whether or not to share any of the details. Perhaps the brandy had loosened his tongue for he came and sat on the edge of the bed and began to speak, secrets tumbling from him one after the other.

  “Forget what you read in the papers,” he said. “Hess didn’t fly from Germany to arrange a ceasefire. He flew here to get his hands on that book. That was the sole purpose of his mission. You saw how the thing affected him. He’d have killed you for it if he’d have found you.”

  It was an extraordinary claim, but after seeing Hess’s reaction, I had every reason to believe him.

  “He certainly seemed fond of the bloody thing,” I said. “You had to yank it from his hands. But tell me this: he has been safely held by the authorities since the moment he parachuted down into a field. What possible danger is there now?”

  “There will be others, charged with the same mission. And if we could find you, so could they. Now word will get out that the book is no longer in your possession and they’ll have no reason to pursue you. You’ll be safe.”

  “You talk as if this were all for my benefit, Buckle.”

  He tipped his head. “You might be a common criminal, Worth, but you’re still a British subject.”

  I felt touched. Could it be that I had Buckle wrong? Could he really have been acting in my best interests? It was unlikely, but then there was no doubt the book had a strange effect on Hess and if one mad Nazi were so reluctant to give it up, might others be as determined to claim it for themselves? Not that I believed the streets of London to be swarming with Nazis — but fifth-columnists, spies, collaborators and sympathisers were another matter. Whatever the truth, at that exact moment I felt grateful to Buckle and glad to have that blasted book out of my life.

  Buckle poured me a brandy and I took it from him and he sat on the other side of the bed. “There are but a handful of copies of that book in the entire world,” he said. “One was held by the British Museum, though never on display. There are two in American universities, another in Buenos Aires. A further was held in Paris at the Bibliothèque Nationale. It fell in to Nazi hands during the occupation.”

  “But it is just a book!” I protested. “I am sure they have their hands on thousands of books, and millions of more valuable items.”

  “It is not just a book. It is a very ancient book. This particular edition dates back to the thirteenth century. A translation of the original Al Azif. It is a…” he paused, swallowed, then spoke. “It is a grimoire. Purported to be a book of… magic, for want of a better word.”

  I could hardly believe what I was hearing. “Come now, Buckle. You don’t believe in all that nonsense, do you?”

  “Of course not, but our enemies do. Top ranking Nazis have the most outrageous beliefs — hidden worlds inside our own, ancient civilizations deep beneath the earth capable of reading your mind and controlling your thoughts. Do you know what they have been trying to do? Tap in to these so-called ancient powers in order to raise the dead. Bring back their slaughtered soldiers. We have had reports of rituals being conducted on the battlefield, incantations over the corpses of the dead, attempts to summon up something ghastly from all that muck and filth. Imagine that. Imagine you could bring back an army of slaughtered soldiers, have them fight for you all over again.”

  My head filled with frightful images of the dead rising from their muddy graves and being shot down only to rise again and again. I thought immediately of my father, not in truth a conjurer from America, but a man who had gone to fight at the Somme and never returned home. Better that than to be resurrected a ghoul.

  “What a horrible thought.”

  “Frightful isn’t it?” said Buckle. “Hess confessed everything, told us his mission. When their own copy of the book, the one they acquired when they occupied Paris, was destroyed by fire — he claims the thing combusted during a particularly fraught ritual — Hess was sent out to find another. Rumour had it the Duke of Hamilton was a Nazi sympathiser, hence the flight to Scotland in the hope the edition from the British Museum could be secured and taken back to Germany so these wicked experiments might resume. Other men were sent to America and Buenos Aires for the same purpose. They thought the book could help them win the war you see.”

  “Bloody Nazis,” I said. “They’re insane.”

  “Oh, they aren’t the only ones. These are strange times, wouldn’t you say?”

  There was a comment I found it impossible to disagree with.

  “Anyway,” he continued, “our intelligence service want the thing safely out of harm’s way. Whether there is an iota of truth in these things or not won’t matter one bit once we have the thing destroyed.”

  It seemed drastic to me, to destroy an object of such age for the effect it had on one man, who was clearly mad, but if there was no curing someone like that, and if others were likely to have been sent with the same mission, I supposed there was little else that could be done.

  “Oh,” said Buckle, and he rubbed his chest as the brandy began to backfire on him. “I have said too much, far too much.”

  “I hardly think it will matter, Buckle,” I said. “It is all bloody nonsense.” I burst out laughing, could not help myself and after a moment the thin grey man joined me.

  “Here’s to that,” he said, and he raised his glass, and I mine, and we both drank.

  PART TWO

  By now you will no doubt have a clear picture of this War Office fellow, Mr Buckle, in your mind, with his neat hat resting on his head, his drab attire and monotonous tone, his fine long nose a perch for his round spectacles. A straight-laced type for certain, with the look of a tax-collector or bank manager about him. Well, scratch this from your mind. Picture a different Mr Buckle from the War Office, one with a thick roll of fat under his chin and a gut straining at the buttons of his shirt. See his filthy shoes, in such a state of disrepair they’re all but falling off his feet, and no homburg on his head but a brown felt porkpie with tufts of unruly hair poking out from under its crown. And his nose, not a long fine blade but a broad burst tomato threaded with veins sitting above a gigantic wiry ginger and silver moustache.

  If you are confused now, imagine how I felt, four days after I had handed over the Al Azif — or whatever the blasted book was c
alled — when this man shook my hand in his small spotlessly clean office down a series of winding corridors on the fourth floor of the War Office building, on Horse Guards Avenue in Whitehall.

  “That’s right,” he said. “I’m Buckle.” He gestured for me to take a seat with one of his plump paws and positioned himself behind a desk that held little more than a daily tear-off calendar that told the wrong date — having been left unattended for a total of five days — and a half full ash-tray.

  “I’m afraid you have met my impostor,” he explained. “He must have thought it best to use a real War Office employee’s name, in case anyone put a call in to check. I’m afraid he has been up to no good all about town, ruining my good name,” he paused for comic effect, then added, “that’s my privilege, yes?”

  “So he is not from the War Office? Not called Buckle?” The real Buckle shook his head and he opened the desk draw immediately to his left, pulled out a thin folder with his papers inside it and I checked them over. Archibald Hamilton Buckle, Special Operations Department, War Office. Age forty-seven, with a height of five-foot and eight-inches and a weight of two-hundred-and-seventy-pounds. There was even a photograph of him paper-clipped to the top left corner.

  I came over quite dizzy. Had I not just taken a seat, I would have certainly needed to.

  “Mr Worth? Mr Worth, are you all right?” Buckle was shaking my arm. “Quite a shock, I understand. I was rather taken aback myself. The scoundrel has been at it for weeks.”

  It was not finding out that the Buckle I had known was an impostor that had so unsettled me. I had not liked the man, had cared nought for him, but this was just the latest revelation of many, and the previous evening revelations had come one after the other, in quick succession, so quick that I had been brought to the very brink of madness. Now the real Buckle stepped outside of his office, returned with a glass of water, and once I had drank it down I felt more like myself, the world no longer canting this way and that, although my hands shook involuntarily and I was finding it tricky to take my eyes off the large man, could not quite take in the deception I had been victim to.

  “I can only apologise,” he said. “I have been doing my utmost to track him down, without much luck to date.”

  “You may not have to worry about him any longer,” I told him, and he all but gasped. “Do you at least know this other fellow’s true name?” I asked. “Only it might be confusing, with the two of you…”

  “Ah, I’m afraid not,” Buckle said. “I suppose it might become… complicated. How about you call me Hamilton? It is my middle name and some call me by it anyway. The other fellow can go by Buckle, for the purposes of your story. Then you can curse him all you like without feeling awkward about it. Does that sound fair?”

  If it appears this new Buckle was being overly kind, then you must bear in mind the state I was in. I was frantic, having arrived at the War Office that morning insisting I must be seen. I would not sit still, could not stop myself from shaking and when, after a three hour wait in the lobby, the desk-clerk had finally called my name to let me know someone would now see me, I had let out an involuntary cry and all but jumped out of my chair. I was grateful to this Buckle — Hamilton rather — for his gentle approach. Despite his heaviness, he had a lightness of touch about him. I watched him now as he moved slowly across the room, his footfalls prompting creaks of sympathy from the floorboards. He pulled out a chair nearer the window, as if to give me more room — room to think, room to talk.

  I began my story with the abrupt awakening in my cell four days earlier. I recounted my meeting with the impostor Buckle in the Governor’s office back at the Ville, our arrival at the Savoy, the hand over of the book and that curious meeting with the mad Nazi, Rudolf Hess.

  “And you’re quite sure it was him?” said Hamilton.

  “I was fairly certain. His picture was all over the papers, after all. Besides which, Buckle admitted as much once the others had left. It was him all right.”

  “Very well. And what happened next? You drank together, he told you about the origins of the book and then told you it was to be destroyed, and then what?”

  I paused, wanting to preface the rest of my story with a disclaimer of sorts. I’m not mad, I wanted to say, however it sounds, I am not mad. Hamilton must have sensed my reluctance for he leaned forward in his chair and laced his fingers together and he gave me a kindly smile, a bravura show of patience.

  “Just tell it how it was, old boy,” he said. “Look around you. It is just you and me here. I bet I could tell you a dozen things I have seen that would have you thinking me completely insane.” he spread his arms. “I just want to know the truth, as you see it, then I can get the details down in my report. And I want to help.”

  Such kindness. I was pleased to find the real Buckle was nothing like his impostor and I was pleased to finally have someone to tell my story to.

  I breathed in deeply, trying to calm myself, and began: “Buckle had one more drink, then he thanked me, put his neat hat back on his head and left. I was tired. I went straight to bed and the following morning, after a blissful night’s sleep between clean cotton sheets, I determined, as if no other option were open to me, that I would — that I must — take that blasted book back.”

  * * *

  You will now know me to be a thief and a rogue and I admit as much, so you may not be surprised to hear that I was determined to take back what I had just given up. The puzzle is why it became so crucial for me to do so. I had money, hidden in the city ready for me to reclaim, so it was not the value of the thing that had me intrigued, and it would be a difficult task. It was not as if I could simply break into an office and take it. I would first have to find it and to do that I would have to find Buckle. Added to this, there were dangerous men on the streets, black-market rogues with my name on their lips and flick-knives in their pockets. If I were seen, it would not end well. The whole thing sounded like rather a lot of effort to go to. I had my new suit, my new shoes and a full stomach. Why not just enjoy my week in comfort at the Savoy, then leave town? It was the common-sense thing to do. Would that I had any common sense, or that I had been a better man, an honest man.

  It was not so much that I could not help go down the wrong path. You must understand, I have never paused to question the implications of my actions. I relished the challenge of breaking into one place or another, of working out how to take what is not mine. I considered my work my art, and where is the right and wrong when it comes to art? As I say, I awoke, and simply knew that I must take the book back. Where this certainty came from, I can not say. I had not given the blasted thing more than a second’s thought back at the Ville, but now I felt its absence keenly. It was as if… as if I had seen a former lover in the arms of someone new and had switched, in an instant, from not caring for her at all, to wanting her back in my arms more than I had ever wanted anything in my life.

  There was another element here I did not like to dwell on, for my mind kept returning to Hess, his eyes wild with some sort of madness, reciting his odd little rhymes and looking for all the world as if he’d been hypnotised. Perhaps the book had started to have a similar effect on me? After all, according to Buckle, it was a magic book, or at least a book of magic.

  “So,” I told Hamilton. “I needed to track him down and retrieve the book before it could be destroyed. First I set about arming myself with the tools of my trade.”

  “And what tools might these be?”

  “My lock-picks, my pistol, some money in case I needed to pay for information — the book was not the only package I had hidden around the city. Also, I changed out of my Saville Row suit into something less conspicuous. Then I turned myself to the matter of how to track down Mr Buckle.”

  I reasoned it should be just like finding anything else you have lost — your first step should be to return to the last place you saw it. Back at the Savoy I spoke to the receptionist, bemoaning some confusion or other as to whether the account had been settle
d in advance or not. She pulled out the paperwork and there was Buckle’s name and the address of the War Office building in Whitehall. I went there right away and found myself a bench to sit on at a fair distance with a good view of the main entrance, and there I sat for hour upon hour. That evening my patience was rewarded. Buckle emerged, dressed in a charcoal greatcoat and his spotless homburg, carrying a little attaché case. I could hardly believe it had been so easy to find my man. I followed him to Charing Cross Underground Station, through the barriers and down the escalator and he took a turn for the Bakerloo Line. It was late evening, not yet dark, and there were plenty of people around, but Buckle was a tall fellow and I locked my eyes on his hat as he moved through the crowds.

  “At the end of the escalator there is a short tunnel that terminates in a T-junction. You go left for the northbound Bakerloo Line and right for southbound.” Hamilton nodded, no doubt the station was as familiar to him as it is to most Londoners. “I was but a short way behind Buckle, close enough to keep an eye on him but not so close that he might see me or feel my presence. I watched him turn left for the northbound platform. He was out of sight for barely ten seconds but when I reached the platform he was nowhere to be seen.”

  “The train had been and gone?”

  I shook my head. “The train had not yet arrived. I reasoned my eyes had deceived me. Someone must have crossed my line of sight that looked similar — another tall fellow in a similar hat, perhaps. So, I backtracked, raced to the southbound platform to find it almost empty. He had given me the slip, and I could not for the life of me work out how he had done it. And what frustrated me most of all was that, the following day, exactly the same thing happened.”

  “Twice in a row? In the same manner?”

  “The very same.”

  Both times I watched Buckle head down the escalator at Charing Cross and make for the Bakerloo Line and both times I followed quickly behind him only to find him vanished by the time I reached the platform. I went back to the Savoy each night and racked my brains. How could it have been that he was so easy to track down and yet now he was vanishing in a ten foot long tube tunnel, almost before my eyes?