The Big Book of Espionage

by The Big Book of Espionage (retail) (epub)

  “Oh God,” said the Countess. “I can’t help myself. What is it you have done to me?”

  Mr. Swinney held her in his arms and sought for the key to the barrier that was between them, the resolution of the mood that made her suddenly shake with sobs.

  She said, “I do not know what has happened to me. I cannot help myself. And now I am afraid.”

  “Afraid?”

  “For you, my dear—what they will do. A moment ago what you had done seemed the bravest, noblest deed in the world. And now—”

  She escaped him and he let her go. She went to the mantel and with her fingers touched the gilt frame, the burlap wrapping.

  Mr. Swinney said, “I love you, Amalie.”

  She turned to him. “Oh, I hate it—I hate it,” she burst out. “It will come between us. Can I help being a woman? There are too many of them—they are too strong. What can one man do against them? Don’t you understand? If they—”

  Mr. Swinney went to her, but not precipitately, because he did not wish to frighten her further. Not until she was in his arms again did he say, “My dear, what can we do—now?”

  “Give it up. We can’t fight them alone. I could not bear to lose you—now.”

  Mr. Swinney heaved a deep sigh. “Maybe I’m a fool, Amalie. It was different until you came here. Perhaps you are right.”

  “My dear—my dear….”

  There were no more barriers—so much so that at first Mr. Swinney had some little difficulty in extricating himself. Rage and cold distaste aided him. The Countess was facing him, her cat-eyes as wide open and mouse-wary as they would go. He took the feather-light chinchilla and dropped it around her shoulders.

  “All right,” said Mr. Swinney. “Get out.” He said, “Go back to the company you came from, the spying sluts of Stieber and Bismarck and all the rest of the master race, whose dirty work you do.”

  He said further, “Go back to the Middle Ages, where you belong. You are old-fashioned, outmoded. We are tired of you and we are tired of your Germans. The whole world is tired to death of you all. You smell of blood and money and the dead. When we finish with this world we are making today, there will be no room left in it for you or any other of their filthy works.”

  The Countess Amalie, who could recognize a closed book when she saw one, went quietly, without a word, and with only a hint of genuine regret in her wide, violet eyes.

  Mr. Swinney locked and chained the door and went out into the kitchen and heated himself some coffee. It was while he was drinking it that he remembered the look in her eyes. He said to himself, Swinney, you’re an idiot. Couldn’t you have been so damned noble a little later?

  Then he set himself to the task of remaining awake. But there were no further incidents of any kind that night.

  In the morning, while he was shaving, Mr. Swinney reviewed the debit and credit sides of his performance, and for the first time since he had insulted him he thought of Chester Allen Buskirk, the stuffy little Old World gentleman and art critic, and his conscience hurt him a little.

  The man was a product of a dead and bygone era. He had meant no harm; he had even been honest, according to his own lights. Mr. Swinney wished there were some way in which he might convey to him that he regretted his behavior toward him.

  The idea of how this might be done came to him with such suddenness that he cut himself shaving, which was hardly worth the salvaging of social amenities with a man he would never see again. But Mr. Swinney stanched the blood without regrets or rancor and went out to see that the time was after nine o’clock, which meant that his office would be available.

  He picked up the telephone and dialed his office number. There was a clicking on the line, which told him no more than he expected. The phone was tapped. He didn’t care; he got his secretary on the line and said, “I may not be in for a while—might be a week. If anything turns up, you can reach me at home.”

  Then he gave some business directions and concluded with: “Is Miguel there? Put him on.”

  Miguel was the refrigerator foreman. When he came on the line, Swinney said, “Hello, Miguel. Swinney speaking. Have we any of those special hams left? You know, the old ones?”

  “I am not sure, señor. Shall I look?”

  “I’ll wait. Take a look. Try locker nine. There were some there last month.”

  After a five-minute wait the foreman came back on the line. “Si, señor. I have found one.”

  “Good. Do it up. Attach one of my cards. Miss Diega will give you one. Have her write on it: ‘My compliments and apologies.’ Right? Jump into your car and take it out to the airport and deliver it to Mr. Chester Allen Buskirk. He is leaving on the eleven-o’clock plane. Let me know if he received it. That’s all.”

  Mr. Swinney looked out the window to see whether the new shift had come on yet. It had. Both the local police and the Nazi honor guard had been changed.

  He thought what he would do if he were in the enemy’s place, and the logic of what must be their reasoning struck him as simple as the adding of two and two. They were prepared to wait him out. Mr. Swinney’s problem was equally simple. It was to stay awake. He wondered just how long a man could go without sleep and still function.

  At one o’clock Miguel telephoned. “The señor received the ham, sir. He say to you thank you.”

  Now, that was nice of him, Mr. Swinney thought to himself.

  The second night without sleep was bad, but the third was plain hell, and Mr. Swinney did not know how he could go on.

  He had thought to devise a way to steal cat-naps by setting his alarm clock to ring after a half hour of sleep. But the second time he tried it, he woke up at the last faint tinkle of the bell to find the mechanism quite run down. Another moment and he would have slept on through.

  Twice there had been action on both nights, once at the front door and once at the back. He had gone there and called through the door, “Skip it, boys.” He heard them departing, and the last time he heard them laughing.

  Also, the second day his telephone was cut off. Mail and papers were no longer delivered. He lost track of time and dates, even though he marked the calendar, but his exhausted brain was playing him tricks. He learned all there was to know about the deadly and exquisite torture of sleeplessness, and several times he was on the verge of giving up.

  Then he would down more coffee, prod himself, force himself to pace the apartment, show himself at the window. He would become confused and look at the calendar to see the time instead of his watch.

  He had marked off the days—Tuesday, January 11—Wednesday, January 12. Thursday, January 13, took on the terrible aspects of a mountain peak he might never achieve. They, on the other hand, were fresh and strong. If he fell asleep…they would force the door….He fought on desperately….

  On Thursday, January 13, Mr. Augustus Swinney, having somehow survived the night, took an icy shower, shaved, put on clean linen and a fresh white suit, plucked a geranium from his window box and stuck it in his buttonhole, put on his Panama hat, and went out.

  As he closed the front door of his apartment he did not so much as throw a glance at the thing still resting on the chrome mantel, where it had been ever since he had put it there so long ago.

  * * *

  —

  The Baron von Schleuder answered his telephone. “He has gone out? Donnervetter! Kurt is following him? He is breakfasting at the Continental? Yes! At once. No—wait! I will come immediately.”

  Dr. José Calderriega also answered an insistent ringing of his private line.

  “What? Left? At the Continental? An officer is still there? No one else has come or gone? No, no! Do not enter until I arrive.”

  They made quite a party in the foyer of No. 17 Avenida Manuel Quintana, too many of them to crowd into the automatic elevator all at once, so Dr. José Calderriega and Baron von Schleuder, e
yeing each other warily, went up ahead, leaving the others to follow and taking only the police department expert with the skeleton keys.

  The keys, however, proved to be quite unnecessary, because, upon their trying the handle of the outer apartment door, it proved to be unlocked.

  Outside of hundreds of cigarette stubs and some empty coffee cups, the apartment was unchanged as the two men remembered it. There was even the burlap-wrapped affair on the mantel. Dr. Calderriega, in spite of his age, was the first to reach it, but the Baron helped him unwrap the protective sacking and reveal the empty frame and the note in the middle of it, which was brief and to the point.

  Dear Dr. Calderriega—or Von Schleuder:

  Will you oblige me by returning this frame to Señor de Paraná or whoever owns it, as it does not belong either to me or to Mynheer van Schouven.

  The Old Woman of Haarlem is now in New York City.

  I beg that you will believe me and refrain from ransacking my property. I shall be forced to present a bill for whatever damage is done to my premises.

  Very truly yours,

  Augustus A. Swinney.

  They did not believe him and tore the apartment to shreds, and later on Dr. Calderriega paid a large bill without a murmur. But they did not find the Old Woman of Haarlem, for a very simple reason. Mr. Swinney had told the truth.

  In New York City, Mr. Curtis Henry pounded on the door of the third-floor room of Jan van Schouven, shouting:

  “Van Schouven! Van Schouven! Open at once! I must see you!”

  The little Dutchman emerged looking pale and worn and more childlike than ever.

  Curtis Henry said, “Van Schouven! You must come at once. I—I am so excited I can hardly speak. I have not yet got it straight. It is about the Old Woman of Haarlem. That ass Buskirk telephoned me. He was in a state himself. Something about a ham from South America and the Rembrandt painting. He has just returned from Buenos Aires and discovered the canvas wrapped around a ham that was given him. He is frightened to death of scandal, realizes the picture was stolen from you, and insists you come at once. If it is true—”

  “If it is true,” said Mynheer Jan van Schouven, “God is merciful in answering the prayers of those who love Him.”

  * * *

  —

  Off Avellaneda, a score or so of miles south of Buenos Aires on the Rio de la Plata, the muddy brown waters of the river gurgled and stirred some two days later and finally healed the breach that had been made in its viscous surface by the disappearance of a steel conning tower.

  The U-Boat commander was in a wretched temper for reasons beyond the discomfort of already cramped quarters, further narrowed by carefully wrapped and buttressed packages, packages that if divested of their straw and canvas coverings might reveal a carved Gothic eleventh-century saint, a Botticelli Madonna, or a Florentine chalice.

  The second-in-command looked in. “At least we are going home, no? Cleared at 13:05.”

  The U-boat commander regarded his junior with distaste and delivered himself quietly of the German equivalent of “That’s a hell of a way to run a war.”

  In Munich, Professor Kunstverwaltungsrat Bressar entered his littered office in the Pinakothek at nine o’clock in the morning in an irritable mood, which was not improved by the spectacle of his assistant, Herr Reinecke, standing at his desk pale and greasy and licking his lips.

  “Good morning, Reinecke.”

  “G-Good morning, Herr Kunstverwaltungsrat.”

  “Na! What are you standing there like that for? What is the matter with you?”

  “Herr Professor—a—a cable has come. It is not good. Buenos Aires has refused to permit the—shipment to land. It is being returned.”

  And in Buenos Aires, at the far other end of the hypotenuse of the triangle with Munich and New York, Mr. Augustus A. Swinney was having a cocktail.

  But this time he was having it all by himself in the fashionable Boston Bar in the Calle Florida.

  He was feeling considerably refreshed after twenty-nine hours of solid sleep. He was also further refreshed by a brief item in La Prensa. He had the paper folded to it and could not refrain from reading it over and over again.

  It was a New York Associated Press dateline, headed: Negotiations for Old Master, and read: Negotiations were completed today for the acquisition by the Metropolitan Museum of Art of Rembrandt’s famous canvas, Old Woman of Haarlem, from its owner, Jan van Schouven, Dutch refugee and former wealthy tobacco merchant, for a price reputed to be between $350,000 and $400,000.

  Mr. Swinney would have given much to have seen Buskirk’s expression when he cut away the outer wrappings of his special ham and found himself looking into the wonderful, warm old face of the Old Woman of Haarlem.

  Mr. Swinney knew it had been sheer panic that had caused him to cut the portrait from the frame that evening when he had fled with the picture to his office, and wrap it around an old smoked ham to hide it. The idea had come to him when he had noticed how much the back of the canvas resembled the age and smoke-stained wrappings of these delicacies. Cellophane inside to protect the surface of the canvas, and a few “Swift & Co., Buenos Aires, S.A.” packer’s rubber stamps had completed the job.

  But Mr. Swinney would have been quite as willing to admit that the idea of palming it off on Chester Allen Buskirk and letting him take it to New York was nothing less than sheer inspiration.

  Mr. Swinney was conscious of a troublesome, stimulating perfume and the feeling that someone was looking over his shoulder. He turned and looked up into the cat-face of the Countess Amalie Czernok, who had just finished reading the A.P. item.

  She tapped him gently on the shoulder and said, “You are a devil!”

  Mr. Swinney rose to his feet. He said, “Amalie! You ought to be pretty angry with me.”

  “I—I am not sure that I am not.”

  Mr. Swinney had had much time to rest and think. He said, “As to a woman, I want to apologize to you for the things I said to you.”

  The Countess reflected for a moment and her tongue showed for an instant, red like a kitten’s at the gates of her teeth. She replied, “As a woman, there is no need to apologize. At no time did you say—that I was unattractive.”

  She smiled her slow cat-smile and went on, but her look remained with Mr. Swinney for quite some time and kept his thoughts from dwelling too much and exclusively on the Old Woman of Haarlem. After all, she had been dead several hundred years, while Amalie was very much alive. He reflected that only a fool bore a grudge against a beautiful woman.

  FRAULEIN JUDAS

  C. P. DONNEL JR.

  CORNELIUS PETER DONNEL JR. (1906–1977) was a professional writer who began his career as a police reporter for various publications. As was commonplace for working writers in an earlier era, he had a wide range of skills that ranged from light verse, published in The Saturday Evening Post, to pulp crime fiction for the top magazines in the field, including Black Mask, Dime Detective Magazine, and Argosy. He also wrote for such slick magazines as Esquire.

  As was true for most pulp writers, Donnel created several series characters. For Black Mask, he wrote sixteen stories about Walter “Doc” Rennie, beginning with “The Man Who Knew Fear” in the January 1941 issue. Rennie had been a brain surgeon but switched to psychiatry; his small-town friends were convinced that he could read minds. With World War II looming, Rennie joined the United States Army Medical Corps as a colonel and frequently found himself involved in counterespionage adventures.

  Even more dedicated to spying was Colonel Stephen Kaspir, who appeared in fifteen stories in Dime Detective Magazine, beginning with “Fraulein Judas” in the August 1941 issue. Although his name appears in large type at the top of the story (Colonel Kaspir on Pressure Island or some such heading), he is not always the major character in a story, being called upon when other agents are unable
to satisfactorily complete an assignment. Apart from his enormous girth, he has few distinguishing characteristics and is less colorful than many other pulp heroes.

  Donnel’s writing career does not appear to have been a long one, as nearly all the pulp stories were published in the 1940s, and his only book, Murder-Go-Round, was issued in 1945. It is a World War II espionage thriller featuring a Swedish industrialist and an obscure haberdasher in a little shop in Stockholm who displays ties in his show window according to certain patterns that can indicate secret messages. Donnel’s short story “Recipe for Murder,” published in the January 1947 issue of The American Legion Magazine, was selected for The 50 Greatest Mysteries of All Time (1998).

  “Fraulein Judas” was originally published in the August 1941 issue of Dime Detective Magazine.

  FRAULEIN JUDAS

  C. P. DONNEL JR.

  CAMP GREENWOOD is for people who like to rough it in log cabins with French windows and tiled baths. It occupies a lush clearing halfway up Apple Orchard Mountain in the soft, purple Blue Ridge range northwest of Lynchburg, and the fried chicken served in its pine-paneled dining-hall is not a dish, but an experience, like love at first sight.

  Over a platter of this unrivaled chicken, Martin Rice scowled at me. Not a personal scowl. Simply an expression of his attitude toward the human race, of which I happened to be the nearest unit.

  I countered with a smile. Rice and I had every reason to be gay. The Rhys-Eccles Report, offspring of Martin Rice’s peculiar brain and my own crudely efficient typing—born paragraph by paragraph over three days and nights of paralyzing mental labor—reposed in my inside pocket and crackled reassuringly as I speared another chicken breast.

  Tomorrow—Monday—we would leave Camp Greenwood for Washington. There I would deliver Martin Rice and the Rhys-Eccles Report into the hands of Colonel Stephen Kaspir, chief of Section Five, who would start them on their way to Great Britain. In Britain the Rhys-Eccles Report would undoubtedly start something.