Codeword Golden Fleece (43 page)

‘How would the Great White Chief have played it?’ he asked himself. ‘Now the river steamer’s a washout and the police are even more on their toes about us than they were when he planned that line for our get-away. Maybe he’d go to earth right here in Bucharest for a while; adopt a masterly policy of inactivity, as he used to say himself. It would certainly be up his street to remain in the thick of things when the enemy were wasting their shoe-leather looking for us all along the Bulgarian frontier; and that sure is where they’ll have turned on the heat, seeing that it’s the quickest way out.’

The thought gave him another idea. As the Bulgarian frontier was by far the nearest to Bucharest, de Richleau would probably have chosen another route for their attempt to get out of the country. Yugoslavia, Hungary, Poland and Russia also had frontiers bordering on Rumania, but all of them were at a much greater distance from Bucharest than Bulgaria, and, even when reached, were in the opposite direction to that in which Rex wanted to go;

Russia and Russo-German-occupied Poland he ruled out at once, as, if he arrived in either without a passport, he might have great difficulty in getting any further and would probably be clapped into prison right away. Hungary and Yugoslavia offered better prospects, and there was no great river to cross into either, so the odds were against his being caught trying to enter and turned back at once. If only he could get twenty miles or so into one of them he might still be arrested, but it was hardly likely that the authorities would then return him to Rumania before he had had a chance to get in touch with his Legation, and once he had done that he could count on the protection of the American Minister.

But how to reach either still remained a problem; and there was, too, the unpleasant prospect that, lacking a passport, he might be held while enquiries were being made about him for days or even weeks in the gaol of some little mountain town. And time mattered.

If only he could have got hold of an aeroplane the whole thing would have been so simple. Aircraft were to Rex what horseflesh had been to the hunting squires of Georgian England. When he was at home in the United States hardly a day passed without
his going up in a plane. He had flown everything from a Tiger-Moth to a Pan-American Air Liner and possessed four planes of his own. If, by hook or by crook, he could obtain one now, the crossing of the desolate mountain chains to the west would hold no terrors for him. He could fly straight out to Belgrade, or even Rome if the aircraft had sufficient range and fuel. Once he reached one of these capitals, being arrested on his arrival would not matter. Within twenty-four hours American diplomatic representatives on the spot would have vouched for him, and he would then only have to get the Golden Fleece despatched by fast bag.

The more he thought about it the more convinced he became that an aircraft was the answer to his problem. But how was he to get hold of one?

The civil airport would certainly have its own police, and, if his description had been circulated, they would already be on the look-out for him there. Yet where else could he get an aircraft? On the outskirts of the more Western capitals there were numbers of private flying clubs, but Rumania was a backward country, as far as aviation was concerned, and from his wide knowledge of such matters Rex felt certain that he was most unlikely to find an aircraft of the range he needed on any Bucharest airfield, apart from the Military Aerodrome and the Civil Air Port.

For a bit he racked his brains for any other place where aircraft of a fair size might be found, and suddenly an idea came to him. All that remained of the Polish Air Force was being flown out for internment in Rumania. Up in the north, just this side of the Polish border, there must be scores of aircraft lying idle, in any one of which he could make the trip out to Budapest or Belgrade. And the odds were that once the Poles had turned their machines in they were not heavily guarded.

The only thing against the project was that it meant going right up to Cernauti in the Bukovina. That was almost the most distant part of Rumania from Bucharest, but on that count it had the advantage that it was the least likely place in which the police would look for him. He wondered if they, or the Iron Guard, would be watching the trains going to the north for Simon and himself, and thought it quite probable that they would not bother to do so. To be on the safe side, though, he decided to hitch-hike out to a station some miles to the north of the capital and take a slow train from there.

Having made his plan, he stood up and finished the packing of the suitcase, putting Simon’s incriminating garments into it as well as his own bits and pieces. While he did so he was considering how best to let Simon know of his intentions.

As the British and American Legations were ruled out, the only place where Simon, if he succeeded in getting out of the mess he was in, could hope to pick up Rex’s trail was here, at the Peppercorn; but Rex knew that any letter he might leave would go, via their officious landlord, straight into the hands of the police.

It was with this in mind that he had tossed the option into the ugly wide-mouthed vase on the mantelpiece, and made his casual remark that he would not forget it because he had already put in it another letter of his own. Simon knew that he had written no other, so, if he were discharged with a fine the following morning, he would come straight back to the hotel and somehow gain access to their old room, probably on the excuse that he had left something there, in order to look into the vase to see if Rex had left in it a letter for himself.

The snag was that in the interval the chambermaid might find the letter while doing the room and either throw it away as of no importance or give it to the landlord.

Realising the necessity of disguising the meaning of any note that he left behind, Rex gave the matter quite a little thought and eventually wrote two notes, the first of which, scrawled on a plain piece of paper, simply read ‘Base over Apex’, and the second, written as small as he could on a strip of sticky-backed stamp paper, ran ‘Plenty of Jan’s Toys where your hat came from.’

By Jan’s ‘toys’ Simon would know that he meant ‘aeroplanes’, and Simon’s fur-trimmed hat had come from the Cernauti district, so he would jump to it at once that Rex had gone there in the hope of getting out of the country by his favourite means of travel.

Having taken the Golden Fleece out of the vase, Rex stuck the second message to its bottom and put the first one in it. If the chambermaid threw away the piece of paper with ‘Base over Apex’ on it, that would be no great loss, as, should Simon succeed in getting back to the room for the deliberate purpose of looking in the vase, he would pretty certainly look under it as well; but if the paper remained, then it would serve as a quick way of
letting him know where to look should the landlord accompany him on his visit.

Going downstairs, Rex settled the bill for his party and went out into the street. In order to disguise his height as much as possible, he adopted a slouching walk, and, as he knew that the taxi garages in most capitals were happy hunting-grounds for the police when they were trying to get on the track of foreigners, he took a bus as far as the Royal Palace, then changed into another which served the northern suburbs. He did not remain on it to the end of its run, again to avoid being remarked by the conductor and information later reaching the police about his movements, but got off when the vehicle reached the outskirts of the city and was still about a quarter full of passengers.

He then walked for about three miles until a motorist on the now semi-deserted road, seeing him trudging along with his bag, slowed down and offered him a lift. As this good Samaritan did not speak anything but Rumanian, Rex was spared any embarrassing questions as to where he was going. The car took him on his way for another five miles, then pulled up in the square of a village, and the driver indicated that he was not going any further.

On finding that the village had no railway station Rex set out north again. It was late afternoon now, and the country looked very lovely, although, owing to the great heats of summer, the ground was parched and the leaves of the trees already yellow. As he walked along, little traffic passed him, and he thought how strikingly different it was from any place within a similar radius of New York, London or Berlin. From all the great metropoli, modernity, with its hideous jerry-building, frequent petrol stations and advertisement hoardings, had stuck out its ugly tentacles twenty to thirty miles deep on every side. But here, although Bucharest itself was a fine city with many great modern buildings, less than twelve miles from its centre he was in the depths of utterly unspoiled country, where great fields of corn stretched unbroken by comfortless little houses, and the scattered farmsteads were great, picturesque, rambling places that appeared to have remained unaltered for many generations.

There were now very few motors on the road, but occasional farm carts trundled by, and when he was tired of walking he got a lift in one for a couple of miles. Just as he left it and was thanking the farm-hand with a pantomime of smiles, a petrol wagon pulled up outside the gate of the farm they had arrived
at, and its driver came into the yard to ask for a fill-up of water. After some difficulty Rex learnt that the man was taking his wagon back to Ploesti, the centre of the Rumanian oil industry, and as that was directly on his way he asked to be taken there, to which the driver agreed readily enough.

Soon after they left the farm the landscape began to change; the rich cornlands and orchards gave way to a more desolate part of the Wallachian plain. There were no trees, and coarse grass covered the great open sweeps of land that ran unbroken to the horizon, until they came in view of the first oil wells. When they had covered another mile or so the square, tapering wooden shafts above the wells rose up out of the black earth to either side of them like clusters of lighthouses, but lacking their grandeur, strength and beauty. Here and there among them were ugly wooden sheds, and the atmosphere was polluted with the unpleasant stench of petroleum. It was a dreary and depressing scene, and Rex was heartily glad when about six o’clock the driver reached his journey’s end in the equally dreary and depressing little town that provides such a big proportion of the revenues of Rumania.

He was now the best part of thirty-five miles from the centre of Bucharest and felt that he should be safe in continuing his journey by train. Ten minutes after he had been dropped he was making enquiries at the station and, with the aid of a German-speaking commercial traveller, learned that the night train from Bucharest to Cernauti stopped to pick up passengers at Ploesti at twelve-forty-five.

Going out again, he made himself as comfortable as he could in the bleak-looking lounge of the station hotel, where he drank four
tuicăs
at reasonable intervals to while away the time. At ten o’clock, the earliest he could get it, he went into dinner and found the food of surprising excellence for such a place. But he ate only because he thought he ought to and to get through another hour of his wait, being still too burdened with sorrow about de Richleau to take the least interest in his food or the bottle of Odobesti wine that he was drinking.

At twelve-thirty he went back to the station and bought a second-class ticket for Cernauti, feeling that if he travelled first he was much more likely to be drawn into conversation with people who spoke a language he could understand, and have to give an account of himself; and, in any case, that second class was much more suitable to the clothes he was wearing.

When the train came in the first-class compartments were comparatively empty, so that Rex could have got a sleeper had he wished, whereas the seconds were fairly full and not even a corner seat was available; so he had to sit up practically straight all night, but he tried to console himself with the thought that as a second-class traveller he was much less likely to arouse anyone’s interest and be remembered afterwards.

When he and his fellow passengers roused themselves from their uneasy dozing the grey light of morning showed that the train was running through a country of rugged mountains, great forests and picturesque waterfalls. But they had some hours to go yet in one another’s company, as the run from Bucharest to Cernauti takes the best part of twelve hours and they were not due in until shortly before mid-day.

Just before they pulled in to Cernauti, Rex took down his bag and went along to the rear end of the train with the intention of slipping off the last coach and getting out of the station by one of the entrances to its goods yard, just as he had done with the Duke and Simon two days previously at Giurgevo; but this time he was unlucky. He ran into a friendly, but in this case most unwelcome, train conductor, who, finding him to be a foreigner, insisted on taking his bag from him.

In consequence, during the next ten minutes Rex suffered acute apprehension. He tried to restrain himself from looking about too anxiously, but he knew that if a check-up had been made the previous evening on Simon, linking him with the assault on von Geisenheim and the theft of the option for which the Germans had paid so much good hard cash, his own description, in full detail and much more accurate than any the Germans’ chauffeur could have supplied, would have been obtained from the little detective who had carried Simon off, and circulated during the night to all railway police.

But no one challenged him, and outside the station he found a German-speaking
droshky
driver who took him, on his request, to a small, inexpensive hotel, called the Roebuck.

The hotel was run by a family of Jews named Levinsky who had relatives in the United States and spoke a little English, as they were learning it in the hope of migrating to that Mecca of golden promise to all their race. They were hard-working, kindly people, and, although their hotel was packed with Polish refugees, they could not do enough for Rex. They provided him at once with a hot bath, although it was the middle of the day and most
of their usual guests bathed only on Friday nights, the eve of the Jewish Sabbath, and while he was having it they specially prepared for him a good hot meal.