Kingdoms Fall - The Laxenburg Message (23 page)

           
“What can I do for you, Captain?” she asked pointedly, and Gresham could sense
she had little patience for pleasantries at such a late hour.

           
“I am going to Serbia tomorrow, Miss Sandes. If you would like, I will take you
to Prilep. I understand you are quite eager to go, even if your fellow
delegates are not.”

           
“Captain,” she said with a great smile, “I am astonished and most grateful to
you. I would very much like to go to Prilep and I happily accept your
proposal.”

           
“Are you quite certain you wish to go, Miss, even without the doctors?”

           
“Yes, I am. Doctor Killington and the others are actually seeking passage back
to England now. The threat of war has terrified them. But I must confess, I
also have personal reasons to return to Serbia.”

           
 “Of course, Miss Sandes, the decision is entirely yours. But Griffith
told me he would seek to stay and work for the Red Cross here in Salonika. Have
his plans changed?”

           
“There is no Red Cross in Salonika, Captain.”

           
“I’d been told the Hellenic Red Cross opened an office here.”

“We visited that office this afternoon.
Whatever is going on in that office has nothing to do with the Red Cross, I
assure you, and the gentleman running the office is most certainly not Greek.
German war profiteer, perhaps. We were told our services are not desired.”

“I am very sorry to hear that. And what of Miss
Häberlin? Will she return to Switzerland?”

“Yes, she told me she intends to return to her
home as soon as passage could be found to Genoa. It may take some days.”

“Very well, then I will arrange our
transportation to Serbia. Be prepared to depart for Serbia before mid-day
tomorrow. And, Miss Sandes, please do not tell anyone that we are going. Can
you do that for me?”

“Yes, if you wish, Captain. Thank you.”

Gresham next went to Häberlin’s room. He
couldn’t really see how he could explain not going to her room. It would only
alarm her, and perhaps give her reason to warn her associate. He was also
curious to see if she had any more tales to tell about the Red Cross. It was
now all too plain to Gresham that she had misled him about her contacts with
the Germans in Salonika, that the Hellenic Red Cross office was a false front,
that there would be no refugee hospital, that Häberlin herself had conspired
with the man running the false office, and that that man was likely the very
German agent that Gresham was seeking.

He knocked on her door. “It’s David,” he said
calmly.

She opened the door for him and kissed him
passionately. Even knowing that she had been so duplicitous, Gresham nonetheless
had to admit that he very much enjoyed kissing her. She was truly lovely, and
interesting, and strong. He had never met a woman like her. Yes, he loved her,
he admitted to himself. They made love passionately that night, and then he
held her tightly to his chest as she fell asleep with her soft blonde hair
against his cheek.

Gresham couldn’t sleep at all. He rose when the
sun was rising. As he dressed, Häberlin stirred.

“I must be off early today,” he told her. “I am
hoping to join one of the regiments here in Salonika, and I must meet with the
General this morning. Will you be working at the hospital today?”

“Yes, at least, the Red Cross hospital will be
set up and I will be working there all day,” she said.

“Perhaps we will both be in Salonika a long
time,” he said. “We might find a house to live in together, if my duties
permit. Would you like that?”

“Oh yes, yes, I would like that, my darling.”

“I’ll see you tonight, then,” he said, and left
the room. He went down the back stairs to the kitchens and out the back of the
hotel. Gresham felt terrible, his chest was tight and he had difficulty
swallowing. He didn’t want to see or speak with anyone from the British Red
Cross delegation. A block from his hotel, he hid in a doorway to wait and
watch.

Häberlin came out a few minutes later.

She looked around carefully, but Gresham was
well-hidden. He followed her as she walked several blocks to the north, then
east, then north again, before turning south towards the port. There was no
doubt she was seeking to avoid being followed. She finally entered an office
with a sign in the front window. Gresham could not read the Greek letters, but
he recognized the Red Cross. He waited, and before long, Gresham saw a man
enter the office. He was young, tall, very strong, and certainly looked like a
soldier but for his civilian clothes. He had deep scratches on his left hand

Gresham snuck into a doorway across the street
and watched through the office window. The man was speaking to Häberlin without
looking at her. She was very friendly. She touched the man’s face
affectionately. The man kept looking at his hands, examining the scratches,
picking at them. One scratch began to bleed slightly. He licked the blood off
the back of his hand, and then Häberlin took his hand in hers and held it.
Gresham strode across the street enraged, drew his handgun, and entered the
office.

“Hello, Fritz.”

The man spun around and glared at Gresham with
hatred and shook his head in disgust. Häberlin was in shock. Her face turned
red and her eyes welled with tears.

“
Nein, nein
,” she said, collapsing into
a chair.

“
Dreckige hure, schliessen sie den mund
dismal
,” the man said bitterly to Häberlin. She was sobbing, her face in
her hands. Gresham held his handgun tightly. He struggled to keep his hand
still as he pointed the gun directly at the man’s chest.

“Why did you kill the boy, Fritz? He wouldn’t
tell me a thing.”

“He would have talked eventually, he was a
Greek and they are all pigs. So, now you arrest us? Send us back to Germany,
yes?”

“No.”

Gresham fired. One round. The bullet entered
the man’s chest, pierced his heart, and blood sprayed out across the room. He
choked and fell to his knees, then onto his back. Blood pooled on the wood
floor around him. Häberlin’s hands stifled her scream. She looked up at
Gresham, her face wet with tears, splotchy red and sprinkled with drops of
blood. She was shaking. “David, please,” she pleaded.

He was furious, but he didn’t want to hurt her.
He stepped carefully around the man’s body and drew a knife from his belt.
Gresham reached down to the man’s face and pulled out his tongue. With a grunt,
Gresham viciously yanked and cut off the tongue with his knife, and threw the
chunk of flesh into the corner. He glared at Häberlin. If he let her live,
every enemy in Europe would know who he was. All hope of dissemblance would be
lost and with it any further opportunity to serve his country.

“I’m so sorry, Reta,” he said, and suddenly
tears were racing down his own cheeks. “I’m so sorry.”

He fired again. Her head snapped back, and her
blood and bone and bits of her brain streaked across the wall.

I
t was a cold day and a
light rain had been falling for hours. The road to Prilep was rutted and muddy
and choked with civilian refugees traveling south by foot, on horseback, and in
carts and sedans loaded with their portable possessions: mirrors and chairs and
books and Bibles. Atop the carts sat old women and little children unable to
walk. Some led herds of oxen or goats. Wilkins and Gresham, however, were
headed north, towards the city of Prilep.

Wilkins had commandeered a converted Rolls
Royce ambulance from the Irish Regiment at Salonika; it was a significant
improvement over the horse-drawn cart that Gresham expected, but on the
terrible muddy roads they had been forced to proceed slowly. Gresham, lying on
a stretcher in the back of the ambulance, had been very quiet since late that
morning when they had met at the hotel in Salonika. And Wilkins, who had never
driven anything larger than a sedan, was still trying to learn how to manage
the unwieldy ambulance. Miss Sandes sat beside him. She was good company for
Wilkins, who was pleased to have the energetic British nurse along with them on
the journey to Prilep: She was enthusiastic to return to Serbia after waiting
so long and chattered away about her experiences in Valjevo and Salonika (she
even suggested that Gresham had become enamored of another of the nurses
there). But as they traveled north and spoke to some of the refugees, Sandes
had grown worried and quiet. Belgrade, they heard, had been captured by the
Austrians with the help of two German Divisions, and together their armies were
pushing south towards Kragujevac. There were rumors that Austrian troops had
been ordered to kill Serbians on sight, both soldiers and civilians, and that
whole towns were being put to death and forests of gallows had been erected in
some villages. The Bulgarians had invaded across the eastern border of Serbia,
one division advancing almost unopposed towards Nish in the north and a second
division advancing quickly south towards Skoplje. There were
Comitadjes
– irregular Bulgarian soldiers who were no better than brigands – raiding
farms, killing and raping, and robbing travelers at gunpoint. The Serbian army,
which had been battered and its troops scattered across the north, was
attempting to fall back to the west of Nish to organize for a counter-attack,
and the Serbian
Chetniks
– guerilla fighters encamped in the mountains –
were attacking the enemy wherever they could be found, so that fierce battles
might break out anywhere at any time. Serbia had suddenly fallen into chaos,
and there was little time to locate Premier Pashitch and King Peter and ensure
their escape.

           
Wilkins, Gresham and Sandes reached a village just within the Serbian border
late in the evening and were only able to find a loaf of stale bread for their
supper, as food was becoming terribly scarce. Wilkins drove the ambulance to a
relatively dry field, and they slept briefly on the stretchers in the back. The
next morning, under skies grey and cloudy, they traveled on to Prilep and found
the small city in a state of complete anarchy. The streets were flooded with
starving refugees and wounded Serbian soldiers. They stopped at the small brick
hospital near the ancient Roman walls.

The hospital was dark and smelled terribly. The
administrators had evacuated; the wards were being run entirely by handful of
Red Cross volunteers. Even the hallways were overcrowded with sick and wounded
Serbian soldiers. Serbian women dressed in spare summer military uniforms
brought around mugs of thin, meatless gruel and hard biscuits. Filthy linens
had been thrown into the corners and the floors were wet and slippery.
Soldiers, even some who had already died, lay wrapped in dirty blankets on the
iron-framed beds. Many more lay on straw-filled mattresses on the floors and in
the aisles. The ward was cold and very dark and smelled terribly of human
waste. Sandes was visibly distressed. The only doctor, she was told, was an
American named Costa, and he was at the Serbian army encampment just north of
the city.

The ambulance was almost out of fuel, and there
was none to be had in Prilep, so they walked the few miles to where the Serbian
Second and Fourteenth Regiments were encamped to the north at Lake Prilep.
Along the way, there was a steady stream of sick and wounded soldiers walking
back past them into the city, and a chilly rain began to fall again. They could
hear far to the east the sound of heavy artillery fire.

           
Gresham, Wilkins and Sandes were directed to a small farmhouse near the lake
where the Serbian regimental commander was billeted. A few dozen soldiers
camped beside it, some in uniform but most just in plain clothes. They had
raised small canvass tents in the muddy field and were gathered around a
handful of fires roasting wild goose and trying to keep warm. Some were
attempting to shoot more birds with ancient rifles, and some were drinking
liquor, shouting and singing. It seemed more a madhouse than an army camp.
Gresham also noted there was no artillery of any kind, only a handful of
horses, and no motorized vehicles at all. It was an army terribly ill-prepared
to resist the Bulgarians, who were undoubtedly well equipped by Germany. At the
farmhouse, a soldier in suspiciously expensive leather shoes ran off through
the thick mud to fetch the commander.

The one-room farmhouse had a large fire in the
hearth but the room was smoky and uncomfortably hot.  A short, portly man
in a stained brown overcoat, with a shock of wild grey hair and a large bald
spot on top was quietly tending to a shrapnel shell wound on a Serbian soldier
passed out on the dirty wooden plank floor.

“Are you Doctor Costa?” Sandes asked quietly.

 “Yeah, that’s me, what do you want?” he
snapped back in a gravelly American voice, as he finished bandaging the
soldier’s wound.

“My name is Flora Sandes, sir. I’m a nurse with
the British Red Cross, and I am returning to Valjevo, where I have served the
past two years.”

“You sure chose the wrong time to return,
Miss.”

“Be that as it may, have you had any word from
the British delegation in Valjevo? Are they quite safe?”

“There’s no British Red Cross delegation that far
north anymore,” said Costa as he turned at last to face Sandes and eyed the two
British officers. “A couple of those folks passed through here on their way to
Athens, but as for the rest of them, I don’t know. They may have gone to
Albania. The Austrians are very close to Valjevo already, so you can’t go back
there.”