Come into my Parlour (37 page)

The Marshal was, Gregory knew, an idealist, and no doubt he still believed in the principles for which he had fought so desperately when he was young; but even in Russia the theories were not working out. The Communist leaders had achieved great things, but to do so they had been forced to enslave the people. In theory they were cared for from the cradle to the grave, but free education, medical services and coffins were small compensation for the fact that they lived in conditions, and were made to work hours, that would have appalled the working classes of any other country. And now that they were at war they were being herded like cattle to the slaughter, without those they loved even being given the opportunity to learn if they were still alive, wounded or dead.

Gregory thought it curious that Voroshilov should know that, yet persist in his belief that all must come right in the end, and condemn Stefan for his lack of desire to remain in the service of such a State. However, his political convictions apart, he had treated them with a justice and humanity that commanded the greatest respect. And it was that respect which made Gregory feel that, having freely given his word to such a man, he could not possibly break it.

The cold of his cell was now worrying him again, and made him even more gloomy as he thought of the still greater cold he would inevitably be called upon to endure in distant Siberia. He realised too with almost physical pain that it would be a long time—a very long time—before he would again see Erika. That she would wait for him he did not doubt at all, but it was desperately hard on them both that they should be condemned to a separation which could hardly last less than several years. She would, he knew, worry about him terribly, once his disappearance had been reported to London by the British Embassy in Moscow and his return became seriously overdue. A merciful Providence spared him the knowledge that for nearly a month she had been a prisoner of the Gestapo, as, had he known, the thought would have driven him crazy.

In his cell, further down the line, Kuporovitch was still thinking about Madeleine. He wondered if, after the war, she would want to go back to Paris to live. He was not altogether certain that he wanted to
himself, now. When he had been brought before Voroshilov he had very sensibly refrained from producing his British passport and endeavouring to screen himself behind it, knowing that to do so would have been quite futile and might only have made matters worse; but that did not affect the fact that he was now a British citizen. True, he had accepted British nationality only for the purpose of this mission; but now he had it he did not think that they would take it away from him, except at his own request.

He still thought it a tragedy that there had been a revolution in Russia. There had been abuses of power before it, of course, but nothing like the abuses of power there had been since. The 1914–1916 war had already brought about a great change in the attitude of the Government and many reforms; practically the whole of the middle and upper classes had become convinced liberals and even the Grand Dukes had been for forcing a constitutional monarchy on the Czar. Had it not been that the weak-willed Czar was under the thumb of his German wife, and she, in turn, under the influence of the evil Monk Rasputin, Russia might have been spared those five years of bloodshed and anarchy; and by this time her liberal intellectuals would most probably have led her into a new era of individual liberty and prosperity.

He felt that Clim had behaved darned decently but, at the same time had his limitations. The Marshal did not know everything, and one thing that was a closed book to him was the pre-war way of life in the great democracies of the West; since he had never even visited them. Kuporovitch had taken his dressing-down in good part, but he reserved his right to his own opinion. One thing, however, was now quite clear. He had returned to Russia only in an endeavour to serve her when she appeared to be in peril, but from now on she had no use for him. Therefore he would stick to his new nationality. After all, if one could not be a Russian the next best thing was to be a Britisher. Perhaps Madeleine would want to live for part of each year in France. Well, that would be all right with him; but he would make his home in England, and settle down somewhere near Gregory and Erika. After all, things had not panned out so badly. The year or so in Siberia would soon pass. The simple but adequate food, the regular hours of prison routine and the enforced abstinence from drink would make him marvellously fit by the time he got out, and probably add ten years to his life. On this comforting thought he went to sleep.

But not so Gregory. He was pacing his cell like a lion in a cage and brooding miserably upon the incredibly depressing prospect that loomed ahead of him. Yet, whichever way he looked at it, there was no escape. He had been caught before and thrown into prison, but,
then, he had always been able to occupy his active wits in seeking a way out. There was no prison in existence from which escapes had not been made by men possessing courage, resource, patience and determination. Tunnels could be bored under floors, the iron bars of windows gradually sawn through, and guards coerced or bribed. But now, all such thoughts were futile. It was no consolation to think of the thousands of soldiers, sailors and airmen who had become prisoners of war for the duration. They, at least, could still make plans and attempt a getaway; he was out of the game for good.

Eventually the hunk of bread and mug of brownish liquid that constituted his breakfast were brought to him. He ate the bread and swallowed the muck with the appallingly grim thought that his food for years to come would consist only of such miserable fare. He would not have minded that so much if only there had been one ray of hope that he could devise a way of bringing about his release within a not unreasonable time. But there was no way. He had got himself into a trap and in it he must remain, like a live man in a grave, until, years hence, the ending of the war brought about his resurrection. At last, more depressed than he had ever been in his life before, he flung himself down on his bed and sank into a heavy sleep from sheer mental exhaustion.

The guards who brought his midday and evening meals set them down inside his cell, but did not disturb him. He was still sleeping when they came again, roused him, and roughly ordered him out. Glancing at his watch he saw that it was close on ten o'clock, and realised that he had slept all day. Grimly he thought that, where he was going, he would at least have plenty of time to sleep in, and that he must try to learn to sleep as long as he could, because sleep brought forgetfulness.

He greeted Stefan as cheerfully as he could in the corridor, and they were both taken upstairs and out into the courtyard. They no longer had the fear of it that they had had the night before, and obediently got into a Black Maria which was waiting there for them. The van had a row of six cells on each side and they were locked into two of these. The other cells appeared to be empty, but there was a tip-up seat for a guard at the rear end of the narrow passage that separated the two rows of cells, and when a soldier with a machine pistol had taken it he was locked in with them. With a jolt the van started off and drove out of the courtyard.

The prisoners assumed that they were being driven to an airfield somewhere outside Leningrad, from which they were to be flown to Siberia. It seemed that the Marshal had lost no time in arranging for their departure; but that was hardly surprising seeing how anxious he
had been that no mischance should occur which might possibly result in their capture by the Germans. Remote as such a possibility might be, he had ample justification for taking immediate steps to guard against it, as the capture of an Englishman in a Russian theatre of war would have been certain to lead to a particularly rigorous examination of the prisoner and, under torture, even Gregory himself could give no absolute assurance that he would not give away the vital secrets that he had learnt about Russia's future strategy.

During their three days in the basement cells of the Lubianka they had hardly been conscious of the unceasing battle that raged in a great arc round the city. On a few occasions they had heard a dull crump, as a bomb or heavy shell had landed in the vicinity of the prison, and twice the floors of the cells had seemed to rock slightly from a nearby concussion. But now, as the van drove smoothly through the almost deserted streets they could again hear the distant rumble of the bombardment, punctuated here and there by a louder explosion.

After about a quarter of an hour the Black Maria came jerkily to a halt. There came the sound of muffled voices. A moment or two passed, then the guard in the back of the van shouted a question. A shell burst in the near distance with a reverberating roar Another shout came in reply and they started to move again.

As the van ran on Gregory thought of the many types of blitz which he had heard during the past two years of war; the sporadic shelling across the Maginot Lines, the devastating bombardment by the Russians of Vipuri in the Finnish war, the spectacular but comparatively harmless demonstration by the Luftwaffe against Oslo on the first night the Germans had gone into Norway, the concentrated fury that had devastated Rotterdam; the tragically light fire of the British artillery as they retreated on Dunkirk; the roar of the first months' blitz on London and the thunder of the terrific anti-aircraft barrage that he had recently heard in Moscow.

And now he was leaving it all. Once the muffled booming was drowned by the drone of the engines in the aircraft that was to take him to Siberia, the odds were he would never hear another bomb or shell explode in his life. He disliked physical danger as much as any sane man, but his escape from it now was no consolation. He could not reconcile himself to the thought that he had been compelled to throw in his hand while the war was still unwon; but it was no good crying over spilt milk now, and he supposed that he would get used to a safe but monotonous existence in time.

The van seemed to be taking them further out of the city than the airfield lay at which they had arrived, but Voroshilov still held a dozen or more airfields within the wide perimeter of his defences, and there
was no particular reason to suppose that they would be taken to the one which was used by aircraft going to and from Moscow.

They had been on their way for over three-quarters of an hour and must have covered, Gregory thought, well over twenty miles, when the van slowed down and pulled up.

Both he and Kuporovitch heard the rear door unlocked, then a sharp plop, as though a cork had been drawn from a bottle of champagne. There followed a curse, the sound of stumbling, a fall and more hearty cursing. Evidently the guard must have missed his footing in the darkness as he opened the door, and taken a tumble. He, or someone else, scrambled in; there was a jangling of keys and the two cells were unlocked. The man with the keys snapped a handcuff on Gregory's right wrist and linked him to Kuporovitch by snapping the other bracelet on the left wrist of the Russian. Then he gave them a push towards the open doors of the van.

A little awkwardly they scrambled out of the back of the Black Maria. There was no moon but snow was falling gently, and by its faint light they realised at once that they had not been taken to an airfield. The van had pulled up at the far end of a mean back street, or, rather, a
cul-de-sac
, since it terminated abruptly in a tumbledown wharf, beyond which could be seen the glimmer of lapping water.

Facing them, as they jumped down, was a burly, fur-clad figure, with a big automatic clutched in one hand and a lightless torch in the other.

It was not until their feet were on the ground that either of them noticed another fur-clad figure, but this one lay face downwards in the snow, quite still, a few feet away where it had rolled into the gutter.

The man with the torch suddenly flicked it on and shone it in their faces.

“It's them all right!” he said. “Quick now, and we'll get them down to the boat!”

Every muscle in Gregory's body stiffened. The light was too dim for him to make out the big man's features, half-hidden as they were by the fur hood he wore, but he had spoken in German.

Gregory would have known that voice anywhere in the world. They had been rescued, if one could call it that, but only to fall, manacled, into the hands of his bitterest enemy—
Herr Gruppenführer
Grauber.

For a moment it seemed to Gregory that he must be dreaming—or the victim of some nightmare aftermath from the strange drug he had recently taken. Yet the height and the great hulking shoulders of the figure that faced him tallied exactly with his vivid memories of the Chief of Gestapo Department, U.A.-l.

Next moment the voice came again: “Schuster!
Kommen Sie her! Schnell!
”

That high-pitched voice was Grauber's without a doubt; and now Gregory's eyes were more accustomed to the half-light he could just make out the heavy jowl, cruel mouth, and sharp nose of his old antagonist.

The impulse to make a dash for it had seized him at the first sound of Grauber's voice, but the second he moved he felt the pull of the handcuff that attached him to Kuporovitch, and realised the futility of such an attempt. Shackled together as they were they could neither fight nor run with any hope of succeeding in either. Grauber loomed in front of them with his big automatic at the ready, the man who had released them from the cells had just jumped down behind them from the van, and a third man, Schuster, no doubt, came hurrying round from its front.

Gregory's eyes fell on the cylindrical attachment that stuck out from the muzzle of Grauber's pistol. It was a silencer, and it explained the noise as though a bottle of champagne had been opened, that they had heard just after the van door had been unlocked. He now recollected hearing a short succession of similar sounds just after the Black Maria had halted some half-hour before. They must then have been somewhere on the edge of the city. Evidently at some lonely spot Grauber's two men had held up the van, shot the driver and the N.C.O. carrying its keys, taken their places, and brought the van to this waterside slum. Grauber must have been waiting there and, immediately his man now impersonating the N.C.O. had unlocked the door at the back of the van, shot the remaining guard as he was about to get out.