by Pirate Irwin
There was something vaguely familiar about the brutish face, which had a jowly look to it as if the fellow had taken to the drink and not much else. The cheap cut of his suit did not do him any favours either but there was a menacing look about him, which should have made him make haste for the door, but once again Sebastian let his natural instinct for inviting danger get the better of him.
“Do you want something?” asked Sebastian calmly.
The man smiled knowingly back.
“You do not recognize me, do you, Herr Murat?” the man replied in German and smiled again, but this time with a triumphant look on his peasant-looking features.
Sebastian shrugged and shook his head, feverishly trying to place a name to the thuglike presence in front of him.
“Let me freshen your fading memory, shall I?”
Sebastian nodded.
“The day you interrupted me and my fellow Gestapo agent, Gruber’s, interrogation of the Baron in Dahlem. That surely jogs your memory, no?”
Sebastian took a step back, stunned that yet again a ghost from the past had re-entered his life and such an insignificant one at that, though one who had murdered his adopted father. He felt anger rising to the surface at this sudden intrusion into his life and gestured for him to go.
“I can’t do that, I am afraid, Herr Murat. You see, we have waited for this opportunity for nearly thirteen years and now it has come. We have come for you,” smiled Hildebrandt slyly.
“We? Who is we, and what do you mean, you have come for me?” asked Sebastian, the anger subsiding and fear replacing it, as he glanced across the street and prayed that some car or other would drive past so he could alert them to the danger he was in. None came; instead an eerie silence hung over them. As for the ‘we’, he could not make out any figure behind him or in the vicinity.
“You see, Herr Murat, or should I say Mr Stuart, I work for different masters now but they are just as interested in you as the Nazis were,” said Hildebrandt, who then waved his arms in a come hither gesture, not at Sebastian, but to something further down the street.
Sebastian heard an engine rev up, and try as he might, he could not make a move to the door as his legs felt like lead, and instead he stood transfixed to the spot. It was clear to him what masters the rent-a-thug was now in the employ of, and he could just imagine the laugh that Steiner would be having if he knew his bête noire was on the point of beating him to the pearly gates or to Hell. The car drew up alongside the two of them and the driver jumped out and opened the back door, ushering in Sebastian, who surrendered limply. While I am still breathing I have a chance, was his motto. It had been a truism all his life and he wasn’t going to go against it now. He slipped in and moved along to the far side of the backseat.
Hildebrandt got in alongside him, the driver got back into the car, and as they drove off, the last thing Sebastian felt was a prick in his neck and then darkness descended, just as dawn rose and Steiner received the Rabbi to prepare himself for his last walk. The Rabbi was later to report, in a rather bemused state, that Steiner’s last words were taken from a Red Indian account of the death of General George Armstrong Custer at the Little Big Horn.
“He laughed and then he died.”
EPILOGUE
Rab Butler was never to achieve his ambition of becoming Prime Minister, let alone leader of the Tory Party. Macmillan was eventually replaced, by the so-called Tory grandees in grey suits, by Douglas-Home but even that did not stop them from losing power in the 1963 election to Harold Wilson and the Labour Party. Von Schlabrendorff was to go on to become a judge in the West German Constitutional Court and died in 1980 aged 73. Goering cheated the hangman, after being found guilty of war crimes and several other charges at the Nuremberg Trials, by committing suicide, having charmed in his usual manner one of the American officers in charge of the prisoners and procured a cyanide capsule. Von Kluge or “Clever Hans” also committed suicide but under entirely different circumstances. He wrote a typical letter of devotion to Hitler before swallowing poison following the collapse of the July 20 plot, where if he had been more decisive and sided his Western Army with the conspirators then at least France and Germany would have been relieved without too much bloodshed. Von Tresckow’s body was never found, though it is strongly believed that he meandered out into no-man’s land and took his own life with a grenade. Amery was hanged after a trial back in England, where even his father Leo’s enormous influence in the political world could not save his son. His disgrace did not stop his brother Julian from going on and becoming a leading Tory MP.
Johns died peacefully in his bed in a hospice in East Germany without ever being brought to trial for his crimes. Victoria von Preetz met an altogether different and tawdry end as even at the age of 60 she used her corporal charms on the opposite sex. However, her naked body was discovered, stabbed to death in an attic of a boarding house with the words “Nazi Whore” engraved on her chest. The perpetrator was never found and she was buried, without one attendee, in a nondescript grave in West Berlin, a long way from the leafy affluent suburb of Dahlem where she had enjoyed her most favoured days. Herzog enjoyed a successful business career in West Germany, preferring not to follow the majority of his brethren to the state of Israel, judging them to be perpetrating the same non-mortal crimes on the resident Palestinian population as had been inflicted on them by the Nazis. He is still alive to this day and carries a photo of Murat/Sebastian in his pocket all the time. Nebe, by contrast, is believed to have been executed by the Nazis following his arrest in a farm outbuilding, though there are other reports that he was a mole inside the conspiracy and in fact escaped to South America, given free passage on one of the many submarines that made their way there in the last months of the war. Gisevius escaped to Switzerland but returned after the war to testify at the Nuremberg Trials. He died aged 70 in 1974. Oates retired to the country, but was often employed by the intelligence services for his knowledge of the Germans and used as both an expert witness, and from time to time as a spy, where his handicap helped him avoid suspicion back in West Germany. He retired and was awarded a knighthood, dying aged 92 in 2002. Mirabelle is still alive, the proud grandmother of three grandchildren, all of whom bear the family name of Stuart and are called Rupert, Sebastian and Mirabelle, with the middle name of Murat.
Sebastian’s body was never found, though nobody to this day has ever heard another word from the Twisted Patriot.