They Used Dark Forces (34 page)

During this transaction Gregory kept the peak of his uniform cap pulled well down over his eyes and, the light from the headlamps by which it had been carried out having been well below the level of his face, he felt sure that the plump doctor, if ever called on to give a description of him, would be able to give only a very vague one. With an abrupt word of thanks, he set off again to go through Bydgoszcz.

By luck he found a bypass that took him round it to the entrance of an autobahn signposted ‘Berlin'. He roared along it for sixty miles. Then it joined the Danzig-Berlin highway with a signpost that said ‘Berlin 160 Kilometres'. Down it he continued to let the powerful machine rip, and when he had covered three-quarters of the distance he could see a glow in the sky ahead that was evidently over Berlin.

As he drew nearer he realised that an air-raid was in progress. The glow was from fires and the scores of searchlights that swept the sky. A myriad tiny sparks flickered at the extremities of the beams as hundreds of anti-aircraft shells exploded, and in the distance he caught the continuous rumble made by the crashing of the bombs. By the time he neared the end of the autobahn the raid was over and only a lurid glare from raging fires lit the sky.

By then it was half past one in the morning. Slowing down, he looked out for a suitable spot in which to abandon the motor-cycle. Not finding one he took a side turning to the north along which, interspersed among fields, back lots and orchards, there were small factories and short rows of small houses. A mile or so along it he came to a humpbacked bridge beneath which ran a railway culvert.

Pulling up at the side of the road he took a screwdriver from the tool kit, removed the number plates from the machine and put them in his pockets. Then, making certain that no-one was about, he wheeled the motor-cycle some distance off the road, unstrapped the hold-all and pushed the machine over the brick edge of the culvert, so that it crashed on to the railway line fifteen feet below. Pleased by the thought that the next train that passed would render Germany the poorer by one powerful motor-cycle and that, with luck, it might even derail itself, he picked up the hold-all and returned to the road. Five minutes later he threw the number plates into a deep ditch which was screened by a fine crop of nettles.

He now felt very tired and after half an hour's tramp through the blacked-out deserted streets of the suburb he was limping again. But about two o'clock he came upon the sort of place for which he was looking. It was an unpretentious inn, somewhat older than the majority of the buildings in the neighbourhood, with a tea garden beside it and large enough to have eight or ten bedrooms.

Several minutes of ringing and knocking roused and brought down the landlord, a very fat, elderly man with a patch over one eye, wearing a threadbare dressing gown. After giving him a Nazi salute and a loud ‘
Heil Hitler
', Gregory said in a disgruntled voice:

‘I'm on leave from Hamburg. My girl lives in this neighbourhood and I'd planned to spend my leave with her. But she left her digs two days ago and her letter telling me where she's moved to must have missed me. Her bloody landlady either doesn't know or won't tell me on account of a quarrel they had, and I've spent half the night trying to trace her without any luck. I'll find her tomorrow through mutual friends, but I've been up since five this morning, so I want a room to sleep in.'

The landlord shook his head. ‘I'm sorry,
Herr Reiter
, I'd be pleased to oblige you. But the bombing has destroyed so many people's homes that every room I've got is taken.'

‘
Teufel nochmal
!' Gregory groaned. ‘What hellish luck. Still, it can't be helped. As I'm nearly out on my feet I'll doss down on a sofa in your lounge.'

To that the landlord readily agreed, ushered him in and
locked up again. As they passed through the saloon bar Gregory noticed two glass covers with
Brötchen
under them and a jar of biscuits. Announcing that he would have a snack before going to sleep he asked the man to fix him a double brandy and Apollinaris.

While Gregory munched and drank they carried on a desultory conversation. The landlord asked how things were in Hamburg and Gregory told him that the bombing had been perfectly bloody. His companion replied that the bombing had been perfectly bloody in Berlin, too. Then, obviously for Gregory's benefit, he endeavoured, not very successfully, to say how convinced he was that the Allies would soon be driven out of France and the war brought to a victorious conclusion by the Führer's ‘Secret Weapons'.

Having eaten his fill Gregory asked the man what he owed him, then took out his wallet and paid. As he did so he fixed the landlord with a steady stare, silently daring him to ask for a ration slip. To ignore regulations of that kind would, he knew, be in keeping with his role as an S.D. trooper, and the man accepted his abuse of his uniform without comment. Eager to please, he offered to find a rug for Gregory to wrap himself in, but the night was warm, so Gregory told him not to bother. Five minutes later he had stretched out on a sofa in the inn parlour and the landlord was on his way back to bed.

As an old soldier Gregory possessed the ability to wake near any hour on which he had set his mind and before he dropped off he set his mental alarm clock for half past five. Rousing at that hour he felt stale and shivery, but he found the cloakroom and a wash revived him. In there he also shaved in cold water and changed from the uniform into his own clothes, packing the uniform into the hold-all; but he stowed the shaving kit into one of his pockets.

In the bar, on the old principle that when in enemy territory one should live off the land, he helped himself to a pint flagon of
Branntwein
and stuffed his pockets with as many
Brötchen
and biscuits as he could get into them. Then, shortly before six o'clock, still carrying the hold-all, he quietly let himself out of the front door.

He had entered the capital from the north-east, and although
he knew the centre of the city well his knowledge of the metropolitan area was only rudimentary. He was aware that its equivalent to London's East End lay in Moabit and Charlottenburg, and that the rich lived further out to the south and west, mainly in the exclusive suburb of Dahlem or on pleasant properties along the east bank of a long stretch of water known as the Havel, at the extremity of which lay Potsdam. But of Berlin north of the River Spree he knew nothing so, taking the sun for a guide, he headed south.

Now that daylight had come he found his surroundings more than ever depressing. Unlike the English and the Dutch, the Germans have never been keen gardeners so, although it was high summer, there was hardly a flower to be seen in front of the long rows of small houses and blocks of workers' flats. Here and there along the road there was a factory, to which men and women were now cycling up in droves to start on the day shift, or a line of still-closed shops. Every few hundred yards buildings had been reduced to rubble by the bombing, and several times he had to turn down a side street because the main road was closed owing to time bombs dropped in a recent raid.

Whenever he had to turn off course he veered to the west and, after a time, found himself in the broad Friedrichstrasse. Proceeding down it, he reached the bridge over the Spree. In the middle of the bridge he halted, put his hold-all on the stone coping and stood there for a while looking down at the river. As is always the case on a city bridge, several other loungers were doing the same thing. Having stood there for a few minutes, he made a gesture as though to take up the hold-all, but knocked it off the parapet. As it hurtled downwards and splashed into the river there came excited cries from the nearest bystanders. Gregory leaned over and stared down in apparent consternation. A few people moved up and commiserated with him. But there was nothing to be done. The holdall had already sunk, and there was no possibility of its recovery.

With a glum face, which concealed his inward satisfaction, he turned away. He had now disposed of everything which could connect him with the affair at Malacou's cottage.

So far, so good. But he was still faced with two far more difficult problems—how to reach and cross a neutral frontier and, more difficult still, how to acquire the money to reach one.

Walking on, he came to the Unter den Linden, with its imposing blocks and three lines of fine trees. He found it sadly altered since he had last seen it in the winter of 1939. Bomb blast had torn great gaps in the trees, every few hundred yards there were railed-off craters, and during four and a half years of war the paint had peeled from the handsome buildings that lined it. Many of them had collapsed as a result of the air-raids, or had been burnt out.

Turning west, he decided to make a short tour of the principal streets in order to refresh his memory of the geography of the city. Strolling down the Wilhelmstrasse, he saw that Goebbels' Ministry, the Reich Chancellery and the huge block formed by Goering's Air Ministry all had chunks out of their upper storeys due to bombs. Had he still been wearing his stolen S.D. uniform he would never have dared to turn into the Albrecht Strasse, as in it was the H.Q. of the Gestapo, and from it officers were constantly coming and going, one of whom might have challenged him. But now that he was again in civilian clothes, with nothing to distinguish him from other ordinary Berliners, he passed the building with impunity, wondering only where his old enemy Gruppenführer Grauber was at that moment.

By way of the Potsdamer Platz and the Hermann Goering Strasse he made his way back to the Linden where it ended at the Brandenburg Gate. Beyond it to the east lay the Tiergarten. That, too, was pockmarked by bomb craters with, between them, a veritable forest of long-barrelled ack-ack guns and batteries of searchlights. In a part of it in which the public were still allowed to walk, he sat down on a bench to consider his extremely worrying situation.

In Berlin every man and woman was an enemy. There was no-one from whom he could borrow money or secure any other form of help, and however carefully he endeavoured to conserve the small store of marks he had taken from the S.D. men's wallets they must be exhausted in the course of a few days. It therefore seemed that his only means of obtaining
funds was by robbery. Although he was armed he decided that to attempt a bank hold-up would be too risky, while if he tried burgling a private house it was very unlikely that he would find in it the sort of sum he needed in ready money.

It then occurred to him that the cash desk in a smart restaurant such as Horcher's, or in the dining room of a big hotel, would be certain to contain a fat wad of notes, particularly after dinner; and that he would have a much better chance of getting away with it than by trying to rob a bank. The Adlon was not far off, so he stood up with the intention of paying it a visit and spying out the land.

The buildings on either side of the great luxury hotel had been blitzed, but it appeared to have escaped damage. He felt a little dubious about going into this famous haunt of Germany's aristocracy and millionaires, dressed in old country clothes; but the war had brought about as great a deterioration in Berlin's social life as the Allies' bombs had on the appearance of the city. Prostitutes and profiteers now rubbed shoulders with the old
haut monde
and many people who had been bombed out, having lost their wardrobes, were reduced to wearing any clothes they could pick up on the Black Market. So, as he entered the big foyer, he was pleased to find that among the motley throng moving about its business there he was not at all conspicuous.

By then it was the pre-lunch hour so dozens of people were arriving to join friends for cocktails. Walking through to the entrance to the restaurant he saw that a woman was seated at the cash desk and that it consisted of a wooden box the upper part of which was enclosed by plate-glass screens. That did not look very promising as it would be far from easy to grab the money through the low aperture in the front of the box. However, there were many hours yet to go before nightfall, so plenty of time for him to reconnoitre other places in one of which it seemed certain a snatch and run would prove easier, and it occurred to him that might be the case in the bar.

On entering it he felt that he deserved a drink and that to have it in these pleasant surroundings would be worth the extra cost so, damning the expense, he ordered a large champagne cocktail. Sitting up at the bar, he turned on his stool and ran
his eye over the many pretty women and their escorts who were having drinks at the little tables on the other side of the room. Suddenly his heart gave a bound. A slim young woman seated with her back to him had her hair dressed high, with a few delicious little dark curls on the nape of the neck, and he had many times kissed just such curls on the neck of Sabine Tuzolto.

Could it be? She looked the right height. If so … Quickly, he picked up his drink and carried it to a place further along the bar. From his new position he could see the girl's face in one of the big gilt-framed mirrors on the opposite wall. At a glance he saw that her features bore no resemblance to Sabine's, and he was conscious of a sharp stab of disappointment. But her having called Sabine to mind gave him an idea.

Although Sabine was Hungarian and her home was in Budapest, since she had become Ribbentrop's girl friend she had spent a great part of her time with him in Berlin. If she was still the Nazi Foreign Minister's mistress it was possible that she was in Berlin now. Yet, even should she be, Gregory was by no means certain that he could count her a friend.

As he drank his cocktail, his mind shuttled back and forth recalling episodes from the two periods in which they had been lovers, and speculating on what her present feelings towards him might be.

He had first seen her one night in 1936 at the Casino in Deauville, a supremely beautiful girl just turned twenty. Her companion had been the head of an international smuggling ring and he had been making use of Sabine in his nefarious activities. She would have been arrested and sent to prison with others of the gang had not Gregory later got her out of England. He had taken her back to Budapest and there, for several joyous weeks, she had willingly rewarded him by becoming his mistress.