Game Without Rules, page 20
By teatime, they were running into the southern part of the Black Forest, a region of dumpy hills, thick woodland and occasional lakes. They passed through empty holiday resorts. By August they would be packed with stout fathers in lederhosen, white-faced hausfraus, and a Pied Piper’s horde of flaxen-haired children.
At six o’clock, they stopped at one of those lakeside villages and found a café open. They were the only customers.
“Where do you plan to spend the night?” asked Nichol.
“It is a Gasthaus in the forest, near Adelsheim. We shall have no company. It is not yet open for the season.”
Now that they had left France behind, she seemed more relaxed, a little more sure of herself, a little readier to talk.
“You know the proprietor then? He allows you to stay there out of season?”
“Certainly. His name is Bauer. He was a member of Goering’s personal bodyguard. The Reichsmarschall was an interesting man. Did you know that he was fond of birds?”
“Yes,” said Nichol, cautiously. “So I had heard.”
“Each of his country retreats was named after a different bird.”
“A romantic idea.”
“He was highly romantic,” agreed Shura. “This one was the retreat of the nightingale. Die Nachtigall.”
It took them two hours, by tortuous roads which zigzagged up hills, twisted into hidden valleys, crossed streams brown with the local iron-ore and climbed again through pine forest cut into geometrical patterns. It was too dark to read the map and some of the roads they used would not, he felt certain, have been marked on any map at all. The last fifteen minutes were spent bumping along a sandy track.
“It is a private road,” said Shura.
“It feels like one,” agreed Nichol.
The Gasthaus der Nachtigall was a three-story, shingle-roofed building, with a deep balcony along the second-floor frontage, and a wide door leading under the balcony into an interior courtyard. There were no lights in the windows, but Shura drove confidently into the courtyard and sounded her horn.
A door serving the kitchen quarters opened and a man came out.
“Good evening, Herr Bauer,” said Shura, in German.
“Good evening, Fraulein. You have made good time.”
Horn-rimmed glasses set on a long, thin nose. The hair grey, running back from the brown, seamed expanse of the forehead. The mouth prim.
He said, “My boy will take your things up to your room. A fire has been lit in the Gastzimmer. Come.”
He led the way into the front room. It was panelled in pitch pine, and from the walls the creatures of the Schwartzwald looked down at them: squirrels, badgers, roebuck, blue hare, and ruffed capercaillie.
Herr Bauer had brought them, unasked, a tall bottle of white wine and a squat bottle of brandy. He filled two large glasses with wine and two small ones with brandy.
“After a journey,” he said, “it is kinder to the stomach to take a small amount of fortified spirits before you drink a natural wine.”
Nichol swallowed the brandy. It was aromatic. The glass of wine followed it more slowly. Herr Bauer refilled the wine glasses, said, “Dinner in half an hour,” and withdrew.
Nichol said, “He doesn’t look much like an SS man, does he?”
Shura said shortly, “I imagine that even in SS units there must have been administrative people – clerks, and quarter-masters.”
She seemed to be regretting her earlier confidence.
Nichol nodded. The warmth from the tiled stove was welcome. Being locked away alone with Shura in this house in the middle of a forest gave him a delusive feeling of security. Tomorrow there would be trouble. Tonight was tonight.
“The luggage will be in our room by now,” she said. “I will go and change. Give me a quarter of an hour.
Nichol sipped the second glass of wine. Somewhere at the back of his consciousness, a very faint alarm had sounded. He took a moment to track it down. Two days before, when they had first met, the girl had shown no embarrassment when he had stripped to the skin in front of her. Why should she mind taking off all her clothes in front of him. And above all, why had she said something so entirely out of character, so missish, as “I’ll go and change. Give me a quarter of an hour.” It made no sense.
Nichol put down his wine glass, got up and went across to the door. The place was quiet as a tomb.
He went out. There was a staircase ahead of him, leading to a landing running the length of the buildings. He guessed that the main bedrooms would face south.
There was a light under the door of one of them, and after a moment’s hesitation he turned the handle and went in.
It was their room. Shura’s suitcase was on one side of the double bed, open, and her windcheater, sweater and trousers were lying beside it. Evidently she had changed, but she had done so very quickly.
There was a newish suitcase on the other side of the bed. Nichol opened it and found shirts and underclothes, a pair of flannel trousers, a dark blue pullover and a jacket, all new and neatly packed. He took off his shirt and tie, ran some hot water into the basin and started to clean himself up.
Herr Bauer said, “A car has just come into the southwest driveway. It has pulled off the road.”
He and Shura were in a basement room. They were watching a map of the estate on the watt, covered by glass. In the bottom left-hand corner two pinpoints of light glared red. “It could be a casual trespasser, a pair of lovers in a car. But if you are being followed—”
“I think we are being followed,” said Shura. “There was a man in a dark blue Saab who came into camp after us last night. He left before we got up, and I have not seen him at all today.”
“Martin is patrolling now. If there is a dark blue Saab, we should take no risks. The driver will have to be attended to.”
As he spoke, the lights on the panel flicked and changed pattern.
“Possibly I was wrong,” said Herr Bauer. “The car is going. Nevertheless, I think we will take all precautions tonight. If there should be trouble – I hope your passenger is a sound sleeper?”
“I will make certain,” said Shura, seriously, “that he sleeps very well indeed.”
It was, in fact, Mr. Behrens who had driven his car into the edge of the Nachtigall domain. He had backed out again in answer to a call on the wireless from Mr. Calder, who had come to a halt half a mile farther down the road. It was the first time they had set eyes on each other since leaving England.
Mr. Behrens pulled up, walked across and climbed into the back of Mr. Calder’s car. In the darkness beside him, something stirred.
He put out his hand and a cold nose was pushed into it.
“I didn’t know you were bringing Rasselas with you,” he said.
“He refused to be left behind.”
When Mr. Calder spoke, the great dog turned his head, and his amber eyes reflected the light from the dashboard.
“How are you going to get him back again?”
“We’ll think about that when the time comes,” said Mr. Calder. “I want to hear about your adventures last night. Tell me more about that chap at the camp.”
“He called himself Major Horton. Leathery skin, baldish, with a halo of reddish hair, thick gingery eyebrows, poached-egg eyes.”
“Sounds an unpleasant character. Do you think he rumbled you?”
“I wondered,” said Mr. Behrens. “He did seem to accept me rather easily. If I really had been a modern Romany, or whatever it was he called me, presumably I’d have had some sort of card or papers. And if he did suspect me, that would account for the trouble I had near Altkirch.”
He told Mr. Calder about it.
Mr. Calder said, “We shall have to sort that out with the Department when we get back. The important point at the moment is, were you followed?”
“I’m quite certain I wasn’t.”
“Did it occur to you that they might have put a midget transmitter in your car, during the night?”
“Certainly it occurred to me,” said Mr. Behrens coldly. “I spent half an hour after breakfast turning my car out. Nothing had been tampered with.”
“In that case,” said Mr. Calder, “I wonder why we have already aroused such interest.”
“Interest?”
“Before you arrived, a man walked up to the edge of the trees over there and kept me under observation for several minutes. He has gone now.”
“You saw him?”
“No. But Rasselas told me about him. Never mind. The first thing is to find somewhere to eat. I passed a nice little place in the outskirts of Ringheim.”
They were finishing dinner when Mr. Calder suddenly said, “Got it.”
“Got what?”
“Nachtigall – the nightingale. It was one of Goering’s hide outs. He had five or six of them, all in remote areas, all top secret. When life at the centre got too much for him, he used to lie up in one of them. He called them his ‘nests.’ They were all named after birds, you see. The lark’s nest, the heron’s nest, the nightingale’s nest.”
“I wonder if he had one called the cuckoo’s nest.”
“I remember being shown round one of them by an American Intelligence officer in 1945. It had a very elaborate approach warning system, operated by crossing beams of infrared light. And one or two rather nasty booby traps for the benefit of unwanted visitors.”
“A highly suitable staging point for our friends.”
“Just what I thought,” said Mr. Calder. “A bit later on I’ll go and take a look at it. You’d better stop here and catch up on the sleep you didn’t have last night.”
“Are you sure you’ll be all right by yourself?”
“I shan’t be by myself,” said Mr. Calder.
A tail thumped against the floorboards.
It was past midnight when Mr. Calder switched off the engine of his car, let it coast quietly down the last hundred yards of road and came to a halt under a clump of trees. It was a clear night, with a full moon marbling the sky. He had been driving without lights.
Now he climbed out, of the car and stood for a moment. Rasselas sat beside him, head cocked, the tip of his right ear an inch from Mr. Calder’s left shoulder. His nose gave a thrust, as if to say, “Go on – what are we waiting for?” Mr. Calder crossed the road and climbed through the boundary wire.
It was tidy woodland with most of the undergrowth cleared, and man and dog advanced steadily on a long slant toward the house.
They were halfway across one of the open glades when Rasselas stopped. He had heard something, away to the right. There was a thick patch of bushes on the far side of the glade, with a slight depression in the middle, which made an admirable hiding-place.
From watching Rasselas, Mr. Calder could chart, with great exactness, the progress of his enemies. He saw the ears prick, the amber eyes swivel slowly as they followed something invisible to him. Then the lip lifted in a silent snarl as two men stepped out into the glade.
They were dressed in foresters’ uniform with leather leggings, and both carried, slung across their backs, short, double-barrelled rifles. Mr. Calder recognised them as the weapons issued during the war to guards in charge of working parties. They threw a spread of heavy buckshot, and were weapons for stopping and crippling, rather than for killing. One of the men carried a stick, which seemed to have some sort of spike on the end of it. The other had a heavy leather whip.
Mr. Calder slid his right hand gently inside his coat, until his fingers rested on the warm butt of his automatic.
The men walked slowly across the glade, heads turning to right and left, passed within six paces of where Mr. Calder was lying, seemed to hesitate for an instant and then were gone.
It was fully ten minutes before Rasselas stirred. Then he edged his way, silently, out of the thicket. Mr. Calder followed even more slowly. He was a professional himself and he recognised professional opposition when he saw it.
He moved slowly forward, Rasselas drifting beside him like a grey shadow. Now there was only a single line of trees between him and the house, since he was approaching it from the southwest corner and had a clear view of the long southern frontage. He noticed that a light still showed in one of the bedroom windows.
The space between the tree-line and the house was dotted with bushes and shrubs, and Mr. Calder reckoned that if he went on his stomach, commando fashion, it would be an easy matter to keep out of sight until he reached the house. If he could find a window open, he had a mind to explore further. As he started to move forward, Rasselas gave out a very soft rumbling growl. Mr. Calder paused. When nothing happened, he moved again. Rasselas caught his ankle in his teeth.
At that moment the ground under Mr. Calder’s hands gave way. At one moment he had his palms on solid earth. The next, his fingers were slithering over the lip of a cavity which had opened in front of him. If he had been moving forward, nothing could have stopped him falling into it.
It was a deep trench, with sheer walls cut into the chalk soil. It had been masked by a thin net of Hessian, on which sand and leaves had been sprinkled.
Mr. Calder extracted the pencil torch from his pocket, and directed its pinhead of light downward. Set into balks of timber at the bottom of the trench was a treble row of steel spikes, needle-thin, needle-sharp and fully twelve inches long.
He thought about an intruder, animal or human, falling on to them. The weight of his fall would drive the spikes through an arm or a leg.
He drew back slowly from the lip of the trench. It extended, so far as he could see, right along the front edge of the tree belt. As he was looking, the single light in the Gasthaus went out.
“There might have been some way round,” he said to Mr. Behrens next morning. “But quite frankly, I didn’t try. I could feel those spikes, all the way home.”
“They were expecting you?”
“I think they must have been,” said Mr. Calder. “It would take some time to uncover that trench. They daren’t leave it open. I could feel a sort of ledge cut inside the lip, so I imagine it’s boarded over by day and covered with loose sand. It’s the sort of job that’d take a couple of hours to do properly. And whatever the size of the staff, I don’t see that they could afford to keep two men patrolling all night, and every night.”
Mr. Behrens considered the matter.
“The girl might have been suspicious,” he said, “when I practically bumped into her at the camp site. But surely – after a full day’s drive – with no glimpse of a pursuer—”
“What about the trouble you had near Altkirch? It must have been a pretty definite tip-off to get the French police moving so quickly.”
“I had the impression it was my car they were looking for,” agreed Mr. Behrens. “The first thing the man spotted was the wireless. But it was only when he saw the number plate that he started to get excited. But if they were tipped off, who do you suggest did it? That man at the camp? Or the girl?”
“Or Nichol,” said Mr. Calder.
Mr. Behrens did not sound surprised or horrified at the suggestion. He said, “It’s a possibility that has to be borne in mind, of course. I hope it’s not true. It suggests one precaution to me, however. The only car they know about is mine. The sensible thing now will be for me to keep close behind him. You keep right out on the wing.”
Mr. Calder thought about this for a bit, and then grunted. “Yes,” he said. “That seems right.”
It was half-past six that morning when Shura slipped quietly out of bed. She put a raincoat over her pyjamas, and tiptoed from the room.
Herr Bauer was in the control room talking to two men. He looked up as she came in. He said, “We had a visitor last night.”
“What have you done with him?”
“We have done nothing with him. He came, looked at us and went away.” Herr Bauer glanced sourly at the two men, who shuffled and look at their feet.
“There are traces, too, of a car having driven in. It might all be nothing. It might be something.”
Shura said, “If the car was a dark blue Saab, then we have been followed across Europe. And I have not the least idea how.”
Herr Bauer said, “There are not more than four ways out of the Odenwald. I can have them watched. When you stop for your midday meal, telephone back to me here. I shall be able to tell you then . . .”
Nichol woke up at eight o’clock. He stretched out an arm, found the bed empty and sat up.
Shura was outside, on the balcony.
“I overslept,” he said. “Are we late?”
“No hurry this morning. We need not start before eleven. Breakfast is being brought up to us here.”
They took the morning’s run at a much slower pace. Nichol had the impression that the clock had become more important than the map. They skirted Wurzburg and Bamberg to the south and stopped for their lunch in a tiny village called Plankenfels, ten miles short of Bayreuth.
Shura slipped away while the food was being cooked. When she came back Nichol thought he detected a change in her manner. It was very slight, and if he had not got to know her so well in the three days he had been with her, he might not have noticed it. Something seemed to have put her on her mettle.
During the afternoon Shura did the driving, while Nichol kept his eye on the map. They avoided Bayreuth, making a detour to the south, and climbed into the Fichtelgebirge. Gradually the country became more desolate, the farms fewer, the houses farther apart. Ahead of them, on the map, right across their track and slowly drawing nearer, sprawled the irregular green line which marked the farthest advance of the Russian Army in 1945 and now formed the boundary between the Eastern and Western worlds.
At this particular point the line joined the national boundary of Czechoslovakia, and ran almost due west, forming a right angle with it. It was into the neck of this sack that they were driving. They had been avoiding main roads for some time and Nichol was hard put to it to map their twisting progress, but in the fading light he glimpsed a board with the name quellenreuth, and knew they were not more than ten kilometres from the frontier.
