No one spoke. Dwight passed a hand over his hair. His face had not lost its unpleasant expression.
“There’s one solution,” he said.
Andrews grunted. “I’m glad you feel that way too.”
“We should have to check our facts very carefully,” Dwight said, as if he had not wanted to commit himself to a decision and was annoyed at having been forced to do so. “ We’ve got to check on the total destruction of the laboratory——”
“I can vouch for that,” I said. “ It was a smouldering ruin.”
He frowned. “—and check on whether any duplicate notes have been found. It may be impossible to be sure, but we have sources. In the next few hours we’ve got to squeeze our sources till they squeak. It would be crazy to take on a job like this unless we were certain not only that it was imperative but that it would achieve its object if successful.”
“Job?” I said. “What job?”
Andrews sat perfectly still with his fat shoulders slightly hunched like a plump green parrot on its perch.
“On the lowest level, Dwight. On the lowest level it might be worth doing anyway.”
“I wouldn’t consider moving on the lowest level at all,’ said Dwight. “ There’s only one motive would justify it.”
“You know what the last report said.”
“What last report?” I asked in exasperation.
Jane said: “Reports are issued sometimes, summing up the political aspects of the war. They come from various sources, but they’re usually reliable. Aren’t they, Vernon?”
“To hell with the last report,” said Dwight vigorously.
“We’ve got to check on the destruction of the laboratory and whether other people know what von Riehl knows. This is the absolute minimum, before I’m prepared to move at all.”
They seemed to be talking in riddles, or as if there was some empathy between them that I could not share. I glanced at Jane, and thought from her expression that somehow she had followed their reasoning part way.
“What do you figure on doing?” she asked.
Dwight said: “ You’ll not be in this hunt, Jane—nor Mencken. You’ve both done your part. This is between Andrews and me.”
“But what can you do? How can you do it?”
“Lay off. You’ll get your instructions, such as they are.”
I had been thinking. “ You mean in some way you are going to try to destroy the information von Riehl carries?”
Andrews laughed. “ Trust our half-German friend to put it in such polite language.”
I was so angry that for a minute I could not speak. I watched him lighting one of his endless cheroots; his big fleshy face appeared and disappeared through the smoke like that of a djinn in a fairy tale. He seemed to be all grease and discoloration and pitted skis.
“Old man,” said Dwight putting his hand on my shoulder nad gripping tight. “ Old man, the solution is all too obvious—that’s what Andrews means. The difficulty is to face the solution—that’s all.”
“What did the last report say?” Jane asked.
“I’ve told you, that can’t be decisive.”
“But it might help us to know. It can’t matter now if we all know, can it?”
Dwight hesitated. “ Italy is shortly going to move in the Balkans, probably against Greece—as a prestige action, justifying her partnership in the Axis. and she may move east too, from Cyrenaics towards Egypt, at the same time. God help her if she does, I say; but that’s not the point. By the end of this month Britain will have five more divisions in the Middle East. We’re still desperately short of armour, and might even be called on to help Greece. Our instructions—I mean our personal instructions here—naturally covet any action which might cause disorganisation or delay in Italy’s war machine.… Well, as you know, von Riehl has been in Italy two weeks preparing a report on her supply position. Her supply and production rates are anything but good, and they must be improved. Well, I suppose if anything were to happen to von Riehl and his report were to be destroyed, that of itself would be as potent a single act of disorganisation as could be accomplished.
That’s what Andrews is arguing—that you can justify a killing on two grounds.”
So now it was out.
As a man unused to the Imperatives of espionage, I was separate from them at this moment—seperated even from Jane, though I did not suppose that this had ever happened before in her life.
After what seemed a long time I said: “When does killing cease to be murder?”
Andrews smiled. “ When war is declared.”
I watched Jane lighting a cigarette from the stub of an old one. I stared at a flying beetle that had come in through the open window and was banging against the light-shade. I stared at my neatly bandaged hands.
“It is impossible.”
“On what grounds? Andrews asked evenly. “ Morally or literally impossible?”
“Literally anyway,” I said with sudden relief. “ It could not be done. There is no way to do it.”
“There might be.”
“Then there is no one—on our side—who would do it?”
“You’ve worked in a laboratory, Mencken?”
I stared. “ Most of my life.”
“The routine work, the small jobs, the checking and filing of details; you might leave such work to your assistants?”
“If I had them, yes.”
“And the dangerous experiment, the crucial trial of a theory; to whom would you leave that?”
“I should do it …” I stopped before the word “ myself.”
“I,” said Andrews, “have long held a theory which has been held up for lack of the materials to experiment. My theory is that highly-placed Nazis are as mortal as other men. There is a strong feeling in some quarters to the contrary; you may have noticed that few of them develop the diseases ordinary men die of. I shall be interested to put my theory to the test.”
“Our orders visualised nothing like this,” Dwight said bitterly.
I thought he was prepared to go through with this thing, but unlike Andrews he could not rationalise it, make it a part of his own self-approval.
“Our orders are capable of wide interpretation.”
“Not this wide. Von Riehl is a prominent man. What we do is bound to be misunderstood.”
“No secret service man ever has the approval of his govenrment. You ought to know that.”
Dwight shook his head obstinately. “I wish there wasn’t this second reason for acting. That’s the only one—if any–that’ll get to the world.”
“Well, what of it?”
“Our only real reason for acting is our belief that von Riehl has knowledge about a poison gas that might otherwise have died with its inventor. If it were not for that we should never have thought of taking any action at all!”
“That’s reason enough.”
“Of course that’s reason enough! But it should be the only one! If it comes out, as it will, as a political murder, it may set a fuse for a whole train of assassinations and counter-assassinations.”
“D’you think I care?” said Andrews, opening his eyes wide. “D’you think I care? This Queensberry Rule stuff makes me want to sick up. The age of chivalry died two hundred years ago, old man, old man. Ask the refugees being machine-gunned and dive-bombed on the roads. Ask them in Rotterdam! Ask them in Prague! Ask them in Warsaw! Grow up, Dwight! Grow up!”
Dwight knocked his pipe out on the wimdow-sill. His face for a moment was completely still, without expression.
“What does Mencken really think?” he asked. “He has a pacifist upbringing, but his father died in a concentration camp. What do you feel, Mencken? From what you say, would you entirely oppose it?”
It was an unfair question, to which I had already given a half answer. I glanced at Jane who was smoking furiously. The room was blue with smoke. Of course in my mind I knew this question was a hypothetical one: they would go ahead whatever I said. But what I said mattered som
ething to two of them. And it mattered to me. I was on the brink of a change. Andrews was looking at me quizzically as if he enjoyed my discomfiture.
I said: “On principle I must oppose it. By doing this—even by trying to do it—you are proving the true corrosiveness, the true destructiveness of war.”
“Why?” said Dwight.
“To destroy a poisonous snake, do you have to become a poisonous snake? This is the crux—the moral crux of the whole thing.”
“But to preserve civilisation, dear doctor,” Andrews said, “ a poisonous snake has to be destroyed.”
“Yes, but in a civilised way, otherwise there is nothing left to preserve.”
“If Hitler were in this room and you could kill him, would you let him go?”
My fathers they said, had died of appendicitis.
“No.”
Dwight turned from the window and put his pipe in his pocket.
“We’ll break now. You’ll be called in the morning.”
Chapter Fifteen
I dozed fitfully and fretfully through the night, pursued by the shadows of monstrous moral choices. I was wakened at five. Jane too had been trying to sleep but the other two had been out and about all the time.
“We now know mostly what we want to know,” Andrews said, almost before we had collected our thoughts. “ Last evening Ferocchi, Brayda’s secretary, publicly accused von Riehl of withholding information Brayda had passed on to him. Ferocchi was arrested for ‘insulting the representative of a brother nation in arms’, but I guess the Italians are upset all the same. At any rate, I think this gives us good enough reason to suppose that Brayda’s secret is lost to them. At present they certainly suppose it. Now von Riehl sent a code telegram to Berlin yesterday morning. I don’t know what was in it, but he isn’t likely to have given away enough to deprive himself of the kudos of a personal triumph when he arrives. And the industrial report is going along with him. Incidentally, according to one of our agents, von Riehl is going to recommend that Nazi gauldeiters shall be put in charge of all the principal North Italian factories.”
Jane said: “But that’s practically taking them over!”
“It won’t be represented as that, but it will be the first step.… To continue, we find that von Riehl is spending to-night at the Hotel Bologna with his two secretaries in attendance. To-morrow he is being entertained to lunch at the Palazzo Reals by the Fascist Council in Milan. They will find good food for that, no doubt. To-morrow evening, as we know, he will leave for Germany in a first-class reserved carriage, but it will not be a sleeper. It is probable that he intends to work through the night. He will travel as he came, privately, via Lucerne, Basle, Frankfurt——”
“Through Switzerland?” I said in surprise.
“Nearly all passenger traffic goes that way,” Dwight said, his legs astraddle a bentwood chair. “ It saves worse congestion on the Brenner line.” He began to cough.
“Well?” Jane said.
“Well,” said Andrews. “From now until he boards the train von Riehl will be surrounded by people or at public functions. But from the time the train leaves Milan he’ll be relatively isolated. It won’t be easy even then, because there’ll be the two secretaries, and one of them is an armed S.S. guard. But he travels all night, and there’s two hundred miles of Swiss territory to cover. Dwight and I are going to catch that train.
In silence Dwight’s rapturing cough echoed round the little office. Listening to Andrews, I sometimes wondered if there were the seeds of a dictator within himself and that it was this which made him hate the successful dictators so much.
“What of Fräulein Volkmann?” Jane asked. “She’ll be on the train, won’t she?”
“That,” said Dwight between his cough, “ is where you come in.”
“We have our prejudices,” Andrews said. “ Even I have my prejudices, and one of them is against making war on women. Particularly as this one would be very likely to get in the way anyhow. I want you to leave for Garda early this morning, Jane. I want you to see that the Volkmams woman stays is Garda long enough for her to miss the Milan express for Basle.”
Jane lit another cigarette. “ Suggestions?”
“We have none, my dear. You’ll have to play it as it comes. Take Mencken with you. Two might contrive it better than one.”
I conld hardly believe my luck or that Andrews should so order it. I had been expecting every moment to be instructed back to Venice or to resume contact with Captain Bonini.
I do not know if Andrews read my expression but he said to me: “It’ll do you no harm to lie low for a day or so. But whatever you do at Garda, be inconspicuous. I’d send you off home right away, but it’s only sense to wait until this—mission is decided. It’s no good letting you go and then needing you again.” He turned. “I rely on you, Jane, to see that he carries out orders.”
“Very well,” she said, and I thought she coloured.
Dwight had at last succeeded in stifling his cough. “It would be best if Mencken’s papers ware changed now. It’s pretty important that his private pack of Gestapo hounds don’t pick up his scent again.”
Andrews nodded. “… A second identity was planned for you, Mencken, in case the first became too hot. Well, it has become too hot. Signor Catania if he ever reappeared, would be in for trouble. Jane, pass me the blue file on the top of the desk behind you.”
She did so. He said: “Everything’s here except the passport photograph. Dwight will take that when you’re all fixed up. I don’t know what your memory’s like, but you should spend the next hour reading this up. All the extra notes we’ve supplied have to be destroyed before you leave this warehouse.”
He handed me the file.
I learned that I was a Yugoslav citizen of Croat descent, born in Zagreb, March 4, 1899. My name was Peter Lansdorf. My eyes were grey, my hair dark brown, greying. I was still five feet ten inches in height, but I lived in Ljubljana and my profession was that of a timber merchant. I had been to Italy to confer with importers in Turin who, under orders, had turned over all their stock to the government and were pressing for a big increase in the export of oak wood from Yugoslavia. What I was doing spending a couple of nights is Garda was not clear, since the papers had not been prepared for this event.
… Nevertheless Peter Lansdorf caught the 7.20 a.m. train for Garda that sparkling October morning. His resemblance to Edmondo Catania would not have excited comment. His hair was the same coloor but worn shorter; he was grey at the temples and round the back of the neck. He wore spectacles which inclined inwards to give his eyes a look of being close-set. He evidently felt the nip in the morning air, for he wore a dark coat that was six inches too long. His hat was turned down and a site too large, to accommodate some sticking plaster, and he wore thick woollen gloves.
Though we travelled an the same train I did not sit with Jane on the journey. Orders were orders. At Garda I booked a room in a hotel overlooking the lake, and met Jane about eleven-thirty at a café just north of the walled village.
House of valuable discussion time had been lost while we crossed the plains of Lombardy. My own brain had dragged the net for ideas and drawn blank.
When Jane sat down at my table I ordered ersatz coffee and waited, knowing she had not been idle since she came, but savouring chiefly at this moment the pleasure of being alone with her again.
“Fräulein Volkmann,” she said, “leaves at two o’clock from the hotel. She’s motoring into Verona because the Venice-Milan express doesn’t stop at Peschiera. It reaches Verona at three and is due in Milan at five-thirty.”
“And the Basle express leaves Milan at what time: five-fifty? That gives her twenty minutes to change trains. Are they both from the same station?”
“Yes.”
I said: “If she were to miss the express at Verona there would be no chance of her catching the one for Basle.”
“Oh, no. If she misses it. But how is she to miss it?”
There’s the car
journey into Verona.”
“I know.”
“You have some idea?” I said.
“What makes you think that?”
“The expression in your eyes.”
She smiled. “So easy to read?”
“Only in that. Not in anything else at all.”
“… I have an idea. But one would have to be sure it would work.”
“What is it?”
“Tell me your ideas first.”
“I think I have no aptitude for this sort of thing. I did consider a bogus telegram making other amngeinents, but …”
“It has the disadvantage that Fräulein Volkmann might telephone to check or ask why. If some suspicion were roused in his mind he might change his plans and that would upset everything.”
I looked at my watch. “There’s no more than two hours to go. They have given us a tall order.”
“Yes. It’s the most I’ve had to do. I’m flattered—and stimulated …”
I had not seen it at all that way. “ Is it a hired car she is using?”
“That was the one thing I couldn’t find out. It looks as if someone she is friendly with at the hotel is driving her. Probably some official if he has gas to spare.”
“If we found the car and tampered with the tank.… Lack of petrol …”
“I guess that would be all right on a deserted road. But the road to Verona is busy. She’d be picked up and catch the train just the same. Anyway, if they leave at two they’ll have an hour to cover twenty miles.”
I watched her for a moment. My personal feelings were all the time breaking in on the dark business of the day. She had her idea but was deliberately holding it back for her own pleasure. It was like a guessing game; and just now and then one could ignore the grimness of the objective.
I said: “An accident?”
“It might work … But it would be difficult to do enough without doing too much, wouldn’t it? If she wasn’t injured she could still get a lift. And part of the purpose of this is that we’re not trying to kill her.”
“I give in,” I said. “ Tell me.”