Codeword Golden Fleece (26 page)

He was three steps down when there was a sudden grinding noise, then a long loud creak, and the top flight gave way under his feet. For a moment it sank quite slowly, then in a flurry of splintered wood, dust and plaster it crashed into the hall below. As it fell de Richleau slid sideways from the wall and pitched into the already broken lower flight, which bore his weight for a second, then collapsed, sending up a great cloud of flying particles as its fall was abruptly arrested by the stone steps of the cellar.

Instinct coupled with the still present thought of his pursuers made the Duke scramble up at once. Coughing, spluttering and half blinded by the dust, he thrust aside the laths and splintered wood with which he was surrounded and crawled out on to the tiled floor. It was only as he got to his feet that he realised with amazement that he had suffered no serious injury. He was scratched and bruised in a dozen new places, but the double check in his fall had saved him from disaster.

Still coughing, and with more agonising pains than ever racking his lungs, he peered through the dust cloud in an endeavour to get his bearings. The wall through which he had come loomed dark and tall on his right, just in front of him a part of the hole over the cellar steps still gaped open, and to his left in the side wall of the hall he could discern a narrow archway, the lower part of which was filled with rubble.

Again the shouts of the hunters came from above him; they had now scaled the mound, and in another moment the foremost of them would be peering down through the doorway that now led nowhere, to see if their quarry had killed himself in his fall. The dust clouds gave the hunted Duke momentary cover as he forced himself to assess the respective merits of the half-blocked archway and the cellar steps as a means for further prolonging his precarious existence. The archway might be entirely blocked further up, whereas the cellar was much less likely to be obstructed; on the other hand, it might not have any other entrance. In either case he might be caught like a rat in a trap, so there seemed little to choose between them. His swift deliberation was decided by the thought that, if die he must, it was better to do so above ground than in some noisome hole, so, choking with the dust as though his lungs would burst, he staggered towards the archway.

Barking his shins and ankles afresh on the pile of bricks, he floundered over them into a long, dim passage, which, to his immense relief, was lit by faint daylight ahead.

At a shambling trot he ran along it, knowing that, although the fallen staircase would hold up his self-appointed executioners for a brief spell, they would soon find means to continue the pursuit by lowering themselves down the wall.

The passage ended in a half-open, nail-studded doorway. Beyond it lay a small stone-floored room with narrow, medieval windows set in thick stone walls. It was furnished only with a hideous pitch-pine cupboard, three wooden chairs and a deal washstand, from which most of the paint had flaked; but it showed no signs of bomb damage, except that most of the small panes in the leaded windows had been blown out. On a peg on a further door hung the black cassock and biretta of a Roman Catholic priest.

Crossing the room, the Duke cautiously pulled open the door, half-fearing that it might give on to another street, where he would find some of his enemies awaiting him; but on the further side of the door lay a burnt-out church. The walls were still standing, but the roof was gone, and its charred beams lay in blackened heaps on piles of ashes in the nave that must once have been rows of pews.

After one swift look de Richleau pulled the gown from the peg and slipped it over his torn and filthy clothes. As he snatched at the biretta and put it on his head he caught the first crunch
of brick on brick, and knew that some of his pursuers were already scrambling over the heap of débris at the far end of the passage.

Slipping through the door, he tiptoed to the charred steps, taking his spectacles from his pocket as he did so. One glass had cracked across, and the other had disappeared entirely, but he put them on, and crossing himself swiftly, knelt down before the high altar in an attitude of prayer.

He was so exhausted that he knew himself to be utterly incapable of further effort. His one chance now was that, on entering the church and finding a priest immersed in his devotions, the mob would assume that their intended victim had eluded them and taken another line of escape. If they questioned him his broken glasses, his face covered with dirt and sweat, and his lacerated hands would prove an immediate give-away. He could only trust in the widespread devoutness among the Polish people and hope that it would prevent them from disturbing a priest at his prayers. Running feet sounded in the little robing-room, the door was thrown open, and the mob dashed in.

The Duke had only just got over his violent fit of coughing, brought on by the dust, and his lungs were still paining him terribly. Desperately he sought to control his heavy breathing. His head was aching as though a hammer were rhythmically pounding on the brain inside it, and his body was so bruised that it seemed to throb all over. He would have given all the treasures of his Curzon Street flat at that moment for it to be safe for him to take the-weight off his battered knees and lie down unmolested on the cold stone. But his only hope of safety lay in maintaining his present attitude with absolute stillness.

The trampling ceased. The leading members of the crowd halted. There were cries and questions from those still jammed in the little room behind, and gruff calls for silence from those in front who could see the kneeling figure.

For what seemed an eternity to de Richleau he knelt before the altar, as utterly still as if he had been turned to stone. Vaguely he endeavoured to pray, but he needed every ounce of his willpower to keep himself from slumping down in a faint. In an agony of suspense he waited until the trampling of feet on the stone floor of the blitzed church sounded again. The footsteps receded, and the church became deadly still, but even then he dared not relax his pose for some moments for fear that a few of the crowd had remained behind and were still watching him. At
last he turned his head very slightly and peered between his fingers; there was no one there. With a groan he slid forward on to his face.

At least five minutes elapsed before he moved again. He was only semi-conscious, but he had fought a great silent battle to prevent himself from passing out, and he had won. Exhausted and shaken by pain as he was, he still had a job to do—a job not only of the utmost urgency, but one which would require sound, skilful planning at short notice and all the clear-headed initiative that he could bring to it.

Loss of breath was the one thing which caused the Duke’s capable brain to cease functioning. As long as he was gasping for air it positively refused to work, except on matters concerned with his immediate safety. During the less exacting moments of his flight a dozen questions had flashed into his mind. What was Mack doing in Warsaw? Was he still a member of the Polish Government? Had he really wished to secure his persecutor’s arrest, or had he been sharp enough to appreciate that by raising the cry of ‘Spy!’ the mob would secure him his revenge without his having to concern himself in the matter further? Was his return to Warsaw only a flying visit on some official business, or did he intend to remain there? Had he, perhaps, never left the capital? How was his presence likely to affect the plans and safety of his recent captors?

While he remained breathless and with his heart hammering as though it would burst, de Richleau had been utterly unable to assess any of these possibilities, and he was still in no state to do so. On the few previous occasions on which he had placed a similar, if lesser, strain upon himself he had found himself incapable of coherent thought for at least an hour afterwards. But he did know one thing. He had got to get back to the Lubieszow mansion and warn his friends there of Mack’s presence in Warsaw with the least possible delay.

With an effort he sat up, and slowly got to his feet. Swaying slightly, he looked first round the roofless church, then down at his newly acquired habit. The priest who owned the cassock must have been a tall man, as it came well down past the Duke’s ankles and partially hid his scraped and dusty shoes; a circumstance for which he was devoutly grateful. With the black biretta he was wearing on his head this clerical disguise could hardly have been improved upon, but the spectacles had served their purpose by their side-pieces showing as he had knelt with his
hands covering his face in prayer, and the fact that one of the lenses was broken and the other missing would only attract unwelcome attention; so he took the spectacles off and put them in his pocket.

Crunching his way through the piles of ashes and charred wood, he went down the nave to the west end of the church, where he found one of the side doors unobstructed. With his lacerated hands thrust into the ample sleeves of the cassock, and his head bowed as though in pious meditation, he walked out into the street. Evidently the mob had not come this way and were still hunting for him in the cellars under the fallen staircase, as the Sunday-afternoon quiet here remained unbroken. In his first glance around he caught sight of a clock on a still undamaged building. Its hands stood at twenty past three. At first he thought that it had stopped, as it seemed impossible to him that barely a quarter of an hour had elapsed since Mack had shouted to the police and he had had to run for his life; but as he advanced towards the big dial he saw that the clock was going.

As he turned into the next street and with returning strength began to increase his pace, his ear caught a sound now all to familiar to him at night, but not at that hour of the day. It was the deep, heavy throb of bombers, and a second later the air-raid sirens began to wail.

Evidently, now the Germans had overcome the last vestige of Polish resistance in the air, they had decided to step up their attacks on the doomed city by daylight raids as well as nightly ones. The Duke’s first reaction was to curse the Germans as he had done a hundred times in the past four weeks; but on second thoughts it entered his still dull brain that an air raid at this moment might prove to his advantage. During it Mack would certainly remain under cover, and that might give the time now so desperately needed to take precautions against him. The air raid, too, was an adequate excuse to any passerby for a priest to be seen running through the streets, and while carefully husbanding his renewed resources de Richleau broke into a gentle, loping trot.

The sirens ceased, the distant throbbing increased to a steady roar. Bombs began to crash somewhere across the river in the Praga district. De Richleau dropped back into a walk. The explosions grew nearer. An air-raid warden yelled at him to take cover, but he ignored the man’s shouts and began to run again. The bombs were now falling near the Zamek, and, fearing
that one might fall on Jan’s mansion, the Duke reverted to his fluent cursing of the Nazis.

As he crossed the square he could see the Heinkels and Dorniers overhead. They were flying quite low, and some of them, having already unloaded their bombs, suddenly dived to machine-gun the roofs and streets.

The wicked rat-a-tat-tat was followed almost instantly by the sharp click of the bullets on stone and their whine as they ricocheted in all directions. A burst narrowly missed the Duke, sending up little puffs of dust and stony splinters all round him. his chest was hurting again, but he fought down the pain and ran on, until he reached the back entrance to the mansion’s courtyard, which he had been using since he had assumed a dual personality. Panting and grey-faced, he fumbled for a key to a little side door with which Borki had provided him.

As he got the door open another stick of bombs came whistling down near by, so that the whole house seemed to rock to its foundations; but it proved the last in this attack, and the roar of the raiders’ engines was already growing fainter in the distance.

Making for the back stairs, which he now always used on his nightly visits, the Duke floundered up them. They proved almost the last straw, and by the time he reached the landing he was choking for breath again.

Staggering to the door of Richard’s room, he threw it open just as the ‘All Clear’ sounded. Richard was sitting up in bed, and, as de Richleau had expected, Marie Lou was with him. Both of them stared in amazement at the dirty, haggard face and the priestly garments of the figure that had so suddenly burst in upon them; then Marie Lou jumped to her feet and cried:

‘Greyeyes! For a moment I didn’t know you. Why are you dressed like that? What on earth has happened?’

The Duke practically fell into a chair and lay there, panting. After three deep breaths he gasped:

‘Mack is after us! Now the air raid is over he may be here at any moment! We’ve got to get away from here immediately!’

‘We can’t,’ replied Marie Lou promptly. ‘You know Richard can’t be moved yet.’

‘He’s got to be!’ panted the Duke, still sobbing for breath.

‘But it’s impossible.’

‘Nothing is impossible—if—if life depends on it.’

‘Yours may; so you must leave us again at once, darling; now you’ve warned us of this new danger. But his depends on his staying where he is.’

De Richleau feebly shook his head. ‘You don’t understand. The risk of moving him is nothing like as great as it was a fortnight, or even a week ago; and if Mack gets him God alone knows if he’ll ever again be a free man.’

‘But, dearest,’ Marie Lou protested, ‘we agreed ages ago that, even if the Germans captured the city, they were unlikely to interfere with a bed-ridden invalid and his wife who was looking after him. Your case is different, and you’ve already made all your arrangements for going to earth in Professor Kucharski’s flat—or has that cover been blown this afternoon?’

‘No, the Professor is not involved in this, thank God,’

‘Then what’s been the point of your spending all that time in the museum and only sneaking in here at nights, during the past week, if you can’t make use of your hide-out now you need it?’