The Whip Hand

by Victor Canning

  But two things I knew without needing cast-iron proof; the body in that case was not Hitler’s, and Alois was no son of Hitler. Some things in life you know by instinct. The mind computes and rejects and then closes firm against the alien touch of a too bizarre probability, like a sea anemone prodded with a stick. If the whole thing was not a fake, then grass was really blue and the sky green and no one had noticed it so far.

  Not that any of this mattered a damn. Professor Vadarci – it had to be him – had spared no expense to make the fake seem genuine, all the authentic proofs laid out in a row, and the body of some unknown, maybe one of Hitler’s old doubles, stretched out in uniform, and the whole package deal sold to Alois years and years ago when his voice began to break and the first hairs appeared on his chest. Alois believed. Watching him, listening to him made that clear. It really was a work of art – and Manston, by God, had said just that.

  Put this masterpiece on exhibition at the Munich rally and trouble would spread from it. People would believe what they wanted to believe – so long as you could give them an inflammatory rallying cry, sell them a phoney relic ... anything that would sanctify the course that in their hearts they wanted to follow. It was the biggest fake of all time, and Vadarci was going to get away with it if he could last out until he got his travelling circus to Munich.

  I took Katerina’s arm.

  “Come on,” I said. It was like getting a tight cork from a bottle. I had to tug to get her to move.

  And all the way back to the apartment, I was asking myself – if this thing had leaked, as it had to Sutcliffe, to Spiegel’s lot, and to the Jew Malacod, why hadn’t it got to Bonn? It wasn’t like them to miss the smell of drains in their own backyard.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  LOVE IS THE STRANGEST THING

  In the apartment, Katerina kept walking restlessly up and down, and there was a faint hysterical note in her voice, as she kept asking, “What does this mean?” and then not listening as I tried to explain. In the end I grabbed her by the arm and made her sit on the settee alongside of me.

  “Just stay here,” I said, “and listen. I told you this thing was too big for either of us to look for a profit in it. And so it is. Just let’s get the hell out of this.”

  “You think this thing will happen at Munich?”

  “Yes. All the men down there know it. They know what’s coming now, and they’ll begin to make their dispositions, to work out new alignments.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “A lot of people have suspected what was in the wind. All they want really is to suppress it. That’s what they’ve been after. To find this place and then grab Alois and the body and destroy both – and never a word of it ever leaking out. At least two of the men in that crowd, I know, are there for just that purpose. Now they’ve got some sort of a fix on this place, we’ve got to get out before the real action begins!”

  She looked at me intently for a moment, her violet eyes wide, excited.

  “You know this?”

  “Yes. And maybe Alois does. I’m sure he won’t take any chances. He’s too clever for that. The moment these men go, he’ll clear everything out of here to some new hiding-place. Anyway, we’ve got to go – and quickly. Lottie, you and me.”

  “But we can’t before tomorrow night.”

  “Let’s hope that’s soon enough. Here—” I pulled out Frau Spiegel’s little silver case and handed it to Katerina.

  “What is this?”

  “There are some pills inside. Tomorrow evening you make sure that Hesseltod offers you a drink. Can do?”

  She nodded, smiling, her eyes shining.

  “These knock him off?”

  “Out. Not off. One will fix him for an hour – and that’s all we need. Wait for him to keel over, take his key, and then come up here for me. And don’t explain anything to Lottie until Hesseltod goes under. Clear?”

  She nodded. “I think so. But my head, it goes round and round with all this.” Then she leaned forward and kissed me lightly on the lips. “You are a clever one. Always so clever. You saved me from marrying this Alois, from getting mixed up in this big business.”

  “It’s big. And I saved you.”

  “And now there’s nothing we can do until tomorrow night?”

  I stood up, and pulled her up to me. “I wouldn’t say that.”

  She smiled, then kissed me, and her arms went tightly around me. When she let go of me I nearly fell over.

  I said, “We’ve had a hard evening. Time for a nightcap and then bed.”

  “There is a bed here?”

  “In the other room. No sheets or blankets.”

  “What for we want those?”

  She walked across the room to the bedroom door and opened it and looked in. I went to the cupboard and fixed us both a brandy.

  She came back to me. I stood there with a glass in each hand and she came close up to me and touched my lips with hers. Then she laughed and took the drinks from me and said, “You go first.”

  I went into the bedroom, flopped on to the bed, and kept my eyes on the open doorway which was lighted from the small lamp in the room beyond.

  I heard her kick off her shoes, and I imagined I could hear the fall of her dress. After a few seconds, she came to the doorway. Her loose hair fell, glistening and smooth, about her neck, and she was naked, the light behind her touching the silhouette of her hips and arms and the long run of her firm legs with a faint silvery outline, and my throat was suddenly dry and parched.

  She came over to the bed, holding the two glasses in her hand, and I said, “For God’s sake, give me a drink.”

  She laughed, keeping her distance from me, and handed me a glass, and she said, “I am beautiful. You see me in the doorway?”

  “I see you in the doorway. I’ll see you like that all my life. Pack up the sun, the moon and the stars and put them in cold storage. I don’t need them. You’re all I want now and for ever.” I raised the glass and drank deeply to her, and she raised her glass and drank to me.

  She said, “It is nice, the thing you say. You always say such things to me?”

  “Always.”

  This was no moment for a man to waste valuable time in drinking. I drained the glass hurriedly. “Come here.”

  She put her glass down on the bedside table. I don’t know what I did with mine. It went overboard somewhere. I put out my hands and she came down to me, smooth and cool, like a dream coming true. She lay, naked and eager, in my arms, and her lips were suddenly hard and hungry against my own, and my hands on the freedom of her body were burning and impatient so that she broke from me after a moment and said softly, “We don’t rush, no? There is so much of the night left. So many hours.... Darling....”

  She raised herself on one elbow and bent and kissed me with a warm, soft passion. I felt her fingers slip the buttons of my shirt and then her hand moving across my breast. All I could see was the outline of her blonde hair haloed against the far door light – and then the halo broke and shimmered, became blurred, and danced in a crazy way before my eyes. I put one hand up to caress the proud, firm curve of her breasts. Suddenly, my hand floated away from me, a million miles away, and my senses began to rock and swim, darting in and out of consciousness like a trout in a mountain stream, out of light into shadow....

  She slipped off the bed and stood at its side looking down at me, and I was powerless to move. But as my mind slid across a sunlit stretch of shallow water, I was calling myself all the names under the sun. Knocked out by my own pills.... No, by Spiegel pills.... Spiegel pills.... Why hadn’t I worked it out properly? This was her whole philosophy. Wait and see where the profit lies. Maybe she had meant to go away with me, but an hour’s teutonic peep-show had changed her. She was German ... German, blonde, beautiful, chosen to be the bride of Alois Hitler.... The myth had taken her, possessed her, her eyes were dazzled with the golden future ... and it would be the same for thousands of others.

  I struggled to ge
t off the bed, but nothing would work. I went in and out of consciousness, each time going deeper and taking longer to come back. Once she was in the room, then gone, and then back again; and this time she held her dress in her hand and began to slip it on and she was speaking from far away....

  “I am sorry, darling.... Sorry for you. You are so nice and exciting ... but not enough for Katerina....”

  I tried to speak, just to call her a bastard, but all I managed was a grunt. She leaned over me and kissed me on the forehead and then was gone ... and I went too, but some hazy, crazy dream carried on, mixing me up and playing ducks and drakes with reality. I was back again, watching through the dome grille, listening to Alois talking away, explaining those last days in the Bunker ... telling how the body was taken away ... names, names, that meant little to me but would to others ... of Johannmeier, Lorenz, Zander, and Hummerich, and others, making their way to the Havel lake ... of a Junkers 52 seaplane that didn’t pick them up, and then of another ... of the body being shipped aboard, of men being abandoned, killed ... the trail obscured, and the long flight over a disorganized Europe to the Adriatic, to some Vadarci retreat, long established ... of embalming, secrecy, men being killed to iron-clad the secrecy ... and the questions, hard, probing, coming from the men assembled under the unearthly blue light of the dome ... lies and deceit and even then, so many years back, the planning beginning for this moment.... Then, the whole dream did a sickening whirl-about. I heard myself gasping and choking as I began to take the long back slide down into unconsciousness, fighting against the slippery slope. My eyes opened for a moment, and the last craziness came upon me – for I could have sworn that Howard Johnson stood at the bedside and said, “Bad luck, lover-boy – you really bought it. King-sized and gift-wrapped....”

  There were four of them in the room. It was a little study affair, book-lined, cosy, deep leather armchairs, and on a marble mantel-shelf an elegant French ormolu clock that said half-past two. That had to be in the morning because the curtains were drawn and the lights were on. I’d been out about two hours. I was sitting in a swivel chair behind a low, walnut-veneered desk. There was a big bowl of gladioli on the desk. My head was pulsating like a chrysalis about to let out the biggest butterfly ever seen by man.

  Madame Vadarci was there, fan waving, and – always something new from that source – smoking a cigar, probably to steady her nerves. Katerina was there in her yellow dress and gold shoes. I glared at her. Professor Vadarci was there, his face screwed up, as though he was sucking on a sour sweet, and he had a gun in his hand which I recognized as my Le Chasseur. And Alois was there black shirted and breeched, dagger still stuck in the top of his belt. He had a whip in his hand, and I’d seen the whip before, in Paris, a fancy affair with an ivory-banded gold grip. Greek key pattern on the leather stock and a long, four foot thong.

  I was sitting, unbound, free as air, behind the desk, and for the third time I said, “There must be some aspirin in this place somewhere.”

  And for the third time Alois pulled his fancy trick. The whip flicked in his hand and the long thong curled out and took a bloom from a gladioli spike four inches from my nose. He was no flower lover.

  He said, “Answer the question.”

  I said, “I can’t remember what it was. Headache, you know.”

  Alois looked at Professor Vadarci and the old boy scratched his chin, and then said, “All right. We will come to an understanding with you. All the visitors are still here. You just name the two you know. After that you stay here for a few days and then we let you go. You and Fräulein Lottie Bemans. We give our word for this.”

  “I want aspirin, not promises.”

  Alois was angry then. I saw his mouth tighten and this time the whip snaked and the tip of the thong took me across the side of the neck. There was a heavy silver cigarette lighter on the desk. I picked it up and slung it at him, hard. He was some number, reflexes and eyesight A1 at Lloyd’s. He must have moved, because I was dead on target. His hand came up – left, too – and caught the lighter at baseball speed. It came back, not at me, but at the vase which shattered like a bomb going off. Cold water surged across the desk and swamped my knees, and my arms held a couple of flower spikes so that I must have looked like some pantomime sprite arising from a pond. Alois smiled then.

  He said, “All right, we do it the hard way.”

  I said, “You can do it any way you like. But don’t expect me to take anything on promise. You don’t mean to let anyone go, me, Lottie, or anyone else.”

  “I’m sure he would.”

  It was Katerina.

  I gave her a hard look. It didn’t ruffle her, so I decided to try something that might.

  I said, “Katerina, here, sees herself as Frau Katerina Hitler. You know, of course, that her whole pedigree has been faked? You’re not getting yourself a pure Aryan bride. Take my advice, drop Katerina in the lake and hitch up with Lottie.”

  It was all right saying it, but the ache for her was still there, an ache that no aspirin would ever touch. You can’t escape it. You can try and kill it with words, but you hate yourself for it, and your stupid little heart and mind always long for a second chance.

  Alois said, “She has proved herself tonight. That is all the pedigree I need.”

  If I couldn’t make a dent in Katerina, maybe, I thought, I could in him. A little family trouble might take some attention away from me.

  I said, “Pedigrees in this establishment are cheap enough. Professor Vadarci sold you a phoney one years ago after he’d picked you from some orphanage or refugee camp. You’re no more the son of Hitler than I’m the son of Tarzan.”

  Alois didn’t even look towards Vadarci. His whip hand went back and I got the full blast across the side of my neck, followed by the single word, “Swine!”

  I bit my lip, and then I gave him the second barrel. “You’re nobody’s son. Strictly nobody’s from nowhere. And that poor old mummy out in the hall, pumped full of embalming juice, never came within a hundred miles of being your ever-loving daddy. Why don’t you grow up fast, give up the amateur theatricals, and get yourself a job as a P.T. instructor? A good honest job.”

  He heard me through, every word, and I could see Professor Vadarci smiling faintly, confident, because he knew that he had only to show the boy a hoop for him to jump through it like one of Pavlov’s dogs, and Madame Vadarci looking bored, and then I got the whip again in the same place, but this time he said nothing.

  As I jerked back in my chair from the blow, Madame Vadarci took her cigar from her mouth and flicked ash on to the floor.

  She said, “I am bored with these playactings, and this foolish talk. It will be light soon and our guests must go, or be kept for another day. That would be unwise. Also, Alois, after this, we must move quickly. So ...”

  She put the cigar back and gave it a hearty suck, puffed smoke, and fanned it away with her ostrich plumes.

  I said, “Fat Mamma’s got a point there.”

  The whip flashed out and I took it on the other side of the neck.

  “Be respectful, please,” said Alois.

  I noticed then that Katerina’s eyes were shining. Not the way I had ever seen them shine before for me. Usually, for me, they were misted, and soft. Now they glittered, hard, bright amethysts; and she was breathing a little quickly so that I could see the press of her breasts against her dress. She was enjoying the whip work, enjoying the whole situation. All this was for her, this excitement, this precipice walking, the promise of a rich future ... and it was really bringing her alive, every sensation double-edged.

  Alois said, “All right. We make him speak.” He looked at me. “Move!”

  The whip thong half curled itself around my shoulders, biting through the thinness of my shirt. I moved, not too fast, but I moved. It was common sense.

  As I went out of the door after Alois, Katerina stood aside for me to pass. For a moment we were very close together. I could have slapped at her, found some words to tr
y and wound her, but I didn’t. She looked at me, through me, and I knew that already I had ceased to exist for her. The shine was still in her eyes and she was deep in the trance that had come upon her at some moment as we had crouched together behind the grille.

  They were all in the great domed hallway still. They all turned as I was led in and it was obvious that they had already been alerted that something had gone wrong. Not a word was said by anyone as the two guards took me by the arms and led me to one of the pillars that supported the low sort of cloistered walk that ran right around the hall. I was pushed against the outer side of the pillar. My wrists and ankles were tied, and the ropes taken round the column and fastened. I stood there, my head free and to one side, so that I looked into the centre of the hall where the catafalque was still on its dais, lights blazing. All I could see of its occupant were the soles of a pair of brand new military boots, yellow, unsoiled.

  In a ragged half circle to one side of the gilt chairs stood the guests. Manston and the man with the tin leg were at one end, and Manston was watching me with a little frown on his forehead and I knew that already he must have made up his mind. Nothing would come from him. I might crack and name him, but he would do nothing first to save me. That I might name him he must already have accepted as a possibility. He would be concerned now with his own moves. I had no quarrel with that. He had a job to do – and I had been dismissed, told to keep out of the way, and I had broken the rules. I always broke them somewhere, and then paid. But this time I was setting up a record.

  Alois and his group stood a few yards from me, and Alois, when I was bound, turned to the men and said in a calm flat voice—

  “This man was discovered in the house. He has worked, or is still working, for the British Secret Service. On his own admission he has stated that there are two men amongst you who work for the same or comparable organizations of other governments. These men – unlike the rest of you – are here in bad faith, planning to destroy me and all I work for. I do not intend either of these men to leave here alive. This man is going to be whipped until he names them.” He smiled for a moment. “I don’t expect any chivalry, but since, in the end, he will speak, and no one leaves here until he does, it would save time and unpleasantness if the two men revealed themselves.” He paused, looking at them, and then when there was nothing but silence, he said, “No? Well, then we must do it the hard way.”