Watcher in the Shadows Read online

  All the same it was safe to assume that he would keep clear of my house and street for the next few weeks. The danger, if there really was any, would be outside. I took the precaution of moving about by unusual routes at unexpected times and avoiding the edge of Underground platforms.

  Meanwhile I wrote to an old friend in the Ministry of Justice at Vienna. We had lost sight of each other since 1943, but the bond was close. We were both Austrians with a tradition behind us which made us loathe Hitler and every one of his crazed fanatics. I came directly under his orders in the private war which we carried on under instructions from London. The English are too inclined to think of Germans and Austrians as one people. They forget – if they ever knew – that thousands of us were executed for sabotage.

  His reply was immensely cordial. He looked back on that period with enjoyment. Well, perhaps we did enjoy it – for the first year. Death at the hands of the Gestapo had never been, in a sense, more than a day away and we gambled with it. We avoided the thought that if we were caught death would certainly be several months away, and that when it came we should be without nails, teeth, sleep or sanity.

  He seemed surprised at my question. He thought the murders would have been reported in British papers. I don’t think they ever were. The only foreign murders which interest the British are French.

  There have been no known cases of revenge [he wrote] except upon the former staff of Buchenwald. A certain Gustav Sporn, Major, was shot dead outside his home two days after his release from prison. The assassin left no clue to his identity, and nobody greatly cared. Sporn seems to have been an unspeakable brute, and German opinion (though of course, being what they are, they would never admit it) was that the allies should have hanged him instead of letting him off with a ten-year sentence.

  A month later Captain Walter Dickfuss came out. He was decoyed to a ruined factory where, according to the medical evidence, he was kept alive with great ingenuity for three days. The medico-legal authorities were so shocked by the appearance of his corpse that investigation was and is most thorough.

  Obviously the criminal is some poor devil who survived the horrors of Buchenwald. But all possible suspects have been checked. Nothing fits.

  The third to go was a fellow called Harts Weber against whom there seems to be nothing at all except that he served in the Gestapo and was a guard at Buchenwald – if one can call that nothing. German police believe that Dickfuss implicated him by some confession, possibly false, during torture.

  His was an interesting case, for he was killed in spite of – one might almost say because of – police protection. He was stabbed in a crowd, recovered from a very nasty wound and was then well watched day and night.

  The watch began to slack off after a couple of months, as it always does, but the executioner was more patient. All the police know of him – and they are certain of it – is that he must have plenty of money and unlimited time at his disposal.

  He pretended to be a cop, frightened Weber out of his life, rushed him round a corner for safety, gave him a drink from his hip-flask. And that was that. The hip flask is conjecture. The rest is the evidence of Weber’s wife. She says that the man was above average height. Otherwise her description of him is worthless. She heard the quick conversation at the front door of the flat but only caught a glimpse of the man’s back as he and Weber rushed out. He must have watched the flat until he was sure of the hour when she put the children to bed.

  We learned in a hard school not to ask unnecessary questions, old friend, but I am bursting with curiosity. If you are on the trail of the murderer – or shall we call him an executioner? – take it up with Scotland Yard. They will presumably have details of all three cases from Interpol.

  There was only one man in whom I felt able to confide. Even him I had avoided for years. I called him up at his farm near Buckingham and asked him to meet me urgently in London at some spot where we could not possibly be seen together. My plan was vaguely forming – clear enough to foresee that there should be no observable connexion between us. He told me that he had the use of a friend’s flat and made an appointment for the following day.

  Singleton Court was a huge, red-brick block of small flats, built in the middle nineteen-thirties – a regular warren of holes for respectable rabbits without young. As I wandered along the heavily carpeted passages looking for Number 66, I wished we had had something of the sort in central Vienna. Not even a continental concierge could have reported accurately the movements, political tastes, and professions behind such an architect’s fever-dream of white-painted, closed front doors. If I had been followed by my enemy – and I reckoned he had experience of how and how not to follow – he could never discover on whom I had called.

  The door of 66 opened at once when I rang the bell. At the sight of Ian Parrow I felt a curious mixture of affection and resentment. He carried me back eleven years into a life which had become mercifully unreal to the zoologist. And yet that strained, thin face which smiled in the doorway – a face which used to give the impression of lank, black hair, and office-white skin as marked as a waiter’s uniform – had meant to me such personal safety as I could have, and safety, still more important, for my honour and reputation. Its black and white were now muddled by grey hair and suntan. The thin mouth which had been too tense for a soldier had relaxed.

  And now I must confess my secret. Even today I hate to put it on paper. Yet I suppose every one of us, whatever the nationality, who fought without a uniform or, worse still, in the enemy’s, must have memories which defile him and from which he shudders away. Perhaps the aristocratic tradition of my family made it harder for me than most. But the two thousand years of Christianity behind a proud and self-respecting boiler-maker are just as powerful.

  My father used to say that the claim of the von Dennims to any Empire of Germans was rather better than that of the Hapsburgs. So it is, if you conveniently ignore – as he did – that our direct descent from the House of Hohenstaufen began with a daughter. However, by 1922 when I was ten, orphaned, and collecting cheese-rinds from other people’s garbage cans, the point was of minor importance.

  As soon as the inflation which followed the First World War was over and the Austrian Republic securely established, enough was recovered from the utter wreck of the family estate to give me comfort and a good education. I specialized in Forestry and Ecology. Even as a child I was a keen naturalist – too passionately fond of the gun, of course, but that was the fashion of the time.

  In 1935 the Government sent me to the United States to study some new forestry techniques and report. I was over there when Hitler marched into Vienna. I did not make any secret of my opinion. Normally that would have been recorded against me; but there were no Nazi spies in the forests of the State of Washington.

  Our Canadian colleagues across the border were very friendly, and I used occasionally to meet distinguished visitors from London. It must have been one of those who recommended me as a useful man, but I really do not know through what grape-vine I was tested and recruited.

  In 1939 I was cut off by the blockade without a chance of returning to Europe till the end of the war. But I did return. I was flown to London secretly and trained for a year. My chief was Colonel Ian Parrow.

  At the end of my training I was returned to the United States – there was no evidence of any sort that I had ever left it – and told how to make my way to Vienna across the Pacific to Vladivostock and on by the Trans-Siberian railway. I managed it, arriving in the spring of 1941 just before Hitler’s attack on Russia.

  I was not suspect. My story was carefully prepared and unshakeable. I had completed a long and difficult journey to fight for Hitler, and I was held up as an example of the penniless aristocrat who had made good. God, the nonsense I had to talk!

  The channel through which I reported and received my orders was that friend, now in the Ministry of Justice, to whom I had written. H
e had influence and was trusted by the Nazis. He suggested that I was just the fellow to train security units for operation in dense forest. Though the German armies in Russia had complete control of the main routes, they were bothered by the infiltration of agents and partisans. They wanted police patrols which could operate and maintain themselves out in the thick country on the flanks.

  I knew more about trees themselves than playing Red Indians, but I quickly became an authority. It was worth the trouble. The continual posting of personnel to and away from the depot gave me a very good picture of troop movements, and I could pass on the information through my cell for transmission to London.

  Then I myself was given command of a unit; but instead of sending us to the Russian forests – all armies are alike – we were stationed in the Apennines where a good tree was a rarity.

  In Italy there was little I could do beyond letting the organization know I was there. That was a pity, for I had two other patriotic, anti-Nazi Austrians in my command. Our chance came when Italy surrendered. We organized the escape of an entire prisoner-of-war camp – routes, stolen transport, and all.

  Owing to long boredom we were careless and came under suspicion. Even so it could only be proved that we had been slack and inefficient. My two collaborators were punished by being drafted to grave-digging, and continued accurate reports of troop movements though they had ceased to move. I, since in a sense I was a policeman, was posted to the Gestapo and soon afterwards sent as an officer to the concentration camp at Buchenwald. It was a studied humiliation of my name. Even Hitler despised the Gestapo.

  They may have thought that I would commit suicide. Perhaps I should have done so. Day after day I forced myself to resist the temptation to dig myself in with a machine-gun and kill the swine till I was killed. But Ian Parrow’s cold-blooded training counted. I was in charge of records and could read committal orders and abstracts of interrogation. Sometimes the documents showed me what the enemy most wanted to know. It was my duty to get the information out.

  Since I was hopelessly out of touch with the Austrian organization, it took me months to reopen some channel of communication. When I did, it was direct to London – usually by secret radio, but surprisingly often by what was practically airmail. Chaos in Germany was beginning, and the night sky was so full of activity that an occasional aircraft could land and take off unnoticed.

  As soon as the war was over and the Buchenwald guards arrested, I was spirited away. I was not asked to give evidence at the war trials – partly because I was too valuable to be exposed, partly because Ian understood that I had had enough and that my whole soul was rotted by disgust. It was he who obtained for me British nationality – easily, for there was already a distinguished branch of the Dennims in England which had long since dropped the ‘von’ and the title – and he who arranged a future career for me as soon as I had come out of hospital and could bear human society without washing myself continually.

  For nine years I had not seen him.

  ‘My dear Charles!’ he exclaimed. ‘You haven’t changed a bit! And what a good little book that was on the squirrel! Obviously they took you for one of themselves!’

  He always said in the old days that I reminded him of some confident squirrel flashing a swift look at the intruder before vanishing into the blackness of trees. My russetty colour of hair and skin, I suppose, plus a pointed nose and the angular bones of cheek and jaw. But I cannot see any mischief in my face when I look at it. I am more like a tall, thin, battered monkey than a squirrel.

  When we had had a drink together and sung the praises of old friends, I told him the story.

  ‘So it’s obvious that someone who was a prisoner in Buchenwald has waited all these years for his revenge. And I am next on his list.’

  ‘But you can’t be!’ he insisted. ‘You weren’t a gaoler. You weren’t involved in any of the brutality and executions. You were a sort of adjutant, always in the office. Why you? And why now?’

  Why me, I could not answer. Why now rather than long ago was pretty plain. Walter Dickfuss had screamed out some accusation during those three days of torture.

  ‘It’s more likely,’ Ian said, ‘that some crazy ex-Nazi who has just been let out of gaol is taking revenge on you for spying on him or Hitler or what-have-you.’

  I pointed out that my cover had never been broken. Also I doubted if former enemies ever took revenge on each other when war was long over. It was out of character. They were too tired of it all.

  ‘Yes. I am. Well, we’ll go to Scotland Yard straight away. Somebody there ought to remember who I was. You’ll be guarded as if you were the Prime Minister.’

  ‘So was Hans Weber,’ I said.

  ‘But, damn it, you shall be!’

  I reminded him that no private citizen could be efficiently guarded for ever. An assassin ready to wait ten years would be perfectly ready to wait a few months more, taking a look at the set-up from time to time to see how careless the victim and the man in the turned-down hat and mackintosh were getting. I wasn’t going to have policemen on my walks, testing my meals, sitting outside the Museum. I hated policemen. I’d had enough of them. And I should be executed just the same – not tomorrow or next week but as soon as we were all convinced that the danger was over.

  ‘Suppose we have your whole story published?’ he suggested. ‘I should think any Sunday paper would jump at it.’

  ‘I am still not prepared, Ian, to look any person in the eyes who knows I was a captain in the Gestapo at Buchenwald. And what is half the world going to say? The blighter betrayed his country to save his neck, and they gave him British nationality for it.’

  ‘Nonsense! Of course they wouldn’t! And what about your Scarlet Pimpernel stuff? There’s no trouble in proving that!’

  Perhaps. But I then doubted it. It was true that I had planned escapes – could have planned a lot more of them if the wretched inmates of the camp had been lunatics enough to trust a Gestapo captain. The most spectacular was the rescue of Catherine Dessayes and Olga Coronel from Ravensbruck when they were due for the gas chamber. They knew that Hauptmann von Dennim was responsible but they couldn’t know that he was not just adding corruption to corruption – a Gestapo swine heavily bribed by the enemy.

  ‘I told you at the time you were a fool not to accept your George Cross,’ Ian said.

  ‘One does not defile a decoration.’

  ‘Take ’em a bit seriously, don’t you? And anyway it isn’t fair to your assassin. It would surely make him think twice if he knew you as Graf Karl von Dennim, g.c.’

  ‘Another very good reason why Charles Dennim should handle him gently and deal with him personally, Ian.’

  ‘Oh, my God, you would say that!’

  I calmed him down. What I had to propose was really very sensible. I did not want to die in the least – or at least I hadn’t wanted to until all these memories were forced back on me – and I did not believe that month after month any police guard could be effective against a man who was patient and implacable, with leisure and money and no criminal record.

  But if I could recognize him or describe him, the German police would do the rest. I might even be able to reason with him. At the very worst I could kill him provided self-defence was evident.

  ‘And what I want from you, Ian,’ I said, ‘is to be my secret agent after all the years I was yours, plus a cottage to live in and an excuse for being in it.’

  ‘A neighbour of mine has got two badger setts on his land,’ he replied doubtfully. ‘You could be studying their diet. He says they kill his chickens.’

  ‘Well, you can tell him from me they don’t. If it isn’t a fox – and I suppose he knows – it’s probably a polecat gone wild.’

  ‘Jim Melton turned some of his polecat ferrets loose after myxomatosis killed off the rabbits,’ he said. ‘You could watch the blasted things. Or badgers. The cottage I ca
n manage, though it’s some way from my place. But that is all the better. How are you going to persuade him to follow you?’

  ‘By making it easy. As soon as he sees that the house is shut up he can get my forwarding address from half a dozen different places.’

  ‘That will puzzle him,’ Ian objected. ‘It should be much harder to get your address. If one is going to tie out a fat goat for a tiger, it is essential to let the tiger think he has found it for himself.’

  I did not care for the metaphor, though I have since adopted it. But at that first hearing it offended me. It was too typically and heartily English.

  ‘It won’t take him long to decide that I am carrying on my normal life and have no police protection,’ I said.

  Ian thought it most improbable that his tiger would believe me so unimaginative, especially after the pamphlet with the cross on the officers’ mess. And if he had me under observation, as he presumably did, he must have seen that I had changed my habits and was offering no easy chances. The right move, Ian suggested, was to appear to have bolted from home in a panic and to leave a trail which could be picked up.

  ‘But what about that admirable aunt of yours?’

  ‘I’ve fixed that. She’ll be staying with a dear old friend of hers who lives near Badminton. All she knows is that I am shortly off on a squirrel-watching expedition.’

  ‘Well, it may work,’ he said, showing a first spark of enthusiasm, ‘though nothing on earth would persuade me to tackle the former Graf von Dennim on ground of his own choosing. All right. First, cottage. Second, a scratch organization to tell you when there is a stranger and what his movements are. But I reserve the right to call in the police when you are certain of your man – and you’ll be ninety per cent certain if you see a Buchenwald face which you recognize. Is there anything else?’

  ‘An arm. I have only a sixteen-bore, and that’s no good. Nor is a rifle. I must have an automatic.’