The Adventures of Hiram Holliday (21 page)

Trembling and sobbing, she watched him go. She secured from him a promise that he would communicate immediately with the American Embassy in the morning, that he would telephone
her....

Hiram let himself out through the Rauch Strasse exit. It was half-past three in the morning. The street was deserted. There was no cab in sight, but he knew that he could always find one cruising up or down the Tiergarten Strasse, so he turned to the left towards the Hitzig Strasse which would connect with it.

They must have been concealed all about the shadowed entrance of a grey stone house that he passed, because Hiram heard no footsteps, and then suddenly they were upon him, pulling him down from behind, at his throat, his legs, his arms, gagging him, tearing at his clothes. He was rolling on the ground, blinded by a cloth held over his eyes, struggling and gasping.... One thought raced through his mind: 'Would the fools murder an American in the street
...
?' He set himself for the supreme desperate struggle for his life, and then suddenly he was free, gasping, breathless and dizzy, half-choked, but unharmed. He heard footsteps retreating, but by the time he had cleared his head and swung himself around to look, he caught sight of no more than a shadowy figure or two disappearing around the corner behind him.

'Oh, nuts!' he said to
himself, and picked himself up
sheepishly. 'Hiram Holliday
, the great adventurer. Cleaned
out by footpads. There's
one
that won't go into the memoirs
'

Every pocket had been ransacked in the swift tussle, and turned inside out. He did not have a pfennig left. Even his handkerchiefs had been taken. His wallet was gone, and from his inside pocket, his passport and credentials.

'Oh, oh,' said Hiram to himself. 'But were they footpads ?' For a moment he considered walking to the home of one of the minor American Consuls he had met and rousing him. It was not good to be without papers in a foreign city. It gave him a terribly naked feeling. Then he thought of the ridiculous figure he would make disturbing the Consul, and discarded the idea.

Nor was there any use finding a policeman. He was not eager to be questioned as to what he was doing there at that hour. He arranged his clothes and set off at a brisk pace for the Hotel Adlon. He would telephone to the Embassy the first thing in the morning and report his loss. He reached the hotel without further incident and asked for his key at the desk. The clerk said: 'Good morning, Mr Holliday,' and handed him the key with the number '32' on the large metal disc attached to it.
'I
understand you are leaving for Paris today. Do you wish to leave a call?'

'Who?' said Hiram. 'Me? Not that I know of. You've probably got me mixed up with someone else.' The clerk
looked puzzled and shrugged. Hiram went up to his room. It was far around the corridor from the lift. He unlocked the outer door, hung the 'Don't Disturb' sign on it, closed it, opened the inner door, snapped on the light and froze there. There was something wrong about the room. And then he saw what it was. His bags were gone. There was other baggage distributed about the place. He examined his key. It was Number 32. He stepped out and looked at the number over the door. It corresponded. He went back into the room, leaving the door open, and inspected the battered brown handbag with the worn leather straps that replaced his own grip.

'Now what the hell goes on here ?' he said
aloud....

The door slammed. Men poured out from the bathroom. There were green-uniformed police, black-uniformed S.S. men, and men in plain clothes. All of them carried pistols in their hands. They surrounded him. One of the men in plain clothes said: 'Hermann Weide, Communist, you are under arrest for high treason. Surrender yourself!'

Hiram looked from one to the other and grinned. They looked so earnest and savage. He said: 'You birds are daffy. My name isn't Hermann Weide, and I'm not a Communist. My name is Hiram Holliday, and I am an American citizen....' His hand had half-stolen to his breast pocket before he remembered that his papers were gone. A terrible, warning flash of insight struck through
him....

'Schweigenl Com
munistischer Kriminalverbrechev’
shouted the man who had first spoken, and then gave some sort of a signal. Hiram's cry and thrust came too late. His voice was choked off by a strip of adhesive tape over his mouth from behind. The police and S.S. men were all over him, punching and kicking, but they stopped when he was on the floor, his hands and legs manacled, and suddenly burst open the baggage, r
ansacking it. The Gestapo plain
clothes leader discovered a passport. It was a German one made out to a Hermann Weide. He opened it to the photograph and held it to Hiram's face for comparison. Hiram, his mind fighting for sanity and escape, saw that it was
his
picture. From another bag that seemed to have a false bottom they unearthed pamphlets and tracts, and a series of plans of what seemed to be a radio hook-up. The men handed them about to one another and spoke rapidly in German. The plain-clothes agent gave another signal. The door opened, and two S.S. men came in with a pink-faced, elderly woman between them. They brought her over to where Hiram was sitting on the floor and held her there facing him.
'Na ?'
said the Gestapo man, savagely.

The woman began to beat her palms together and moan: 'Oh!
...
oh!
...
Oh, Gott, oh, Gott! Ja, das ist mein Neffe, Hermann Weide.... Oh, Gott
...
!' Then she said to Hiram in bad English:
^‘
Ach,
Hermann, Hermann. Vy do you alvays bring trouble to us ? Vy don't you in America stay und not come here und make trouble?'

The S.S. guards took her out. Hiram heard her lamentations fading down the hall-way. Another man entered, and when he was in the room, Hiram was yanked to his feet and held there for a moment. The newcomer was Hiram's build and size, and suddenly Hiram saw that he resembled him a great deal. He gazed at him silently for two or three minutes and then turned and walked out. More S.S. men came in. They helped hold Hiram while the others stripped
him
of every shred of his clothing and then dressed him in a new set. And then they did a very curious thing. Out of a small bag they produced some rolls of wide bandages and pro
ceeded to bandage his head com
pletely down to his neck, over spectacles and all, leaving only his nose free for breathing. Then he felt some moisture seep through the bandaging and his feet were kicked out from under him.

Trussed like a mummy, the person of Hermann Weide, the dangerous Communist, who had been severely injured in the struggle to arrest him, as attested by the blood-stained emergency bandages that covered his head and face, was carried out of the rear entrance of the Hotel Adlon, dumped into a military car, and driven to Moabit prison, where he was placed in a deep cell to await trial for high treason. And at nine o'clock the same morning a Mr Hiram Holliday departed on the nine-thirty plane for Paris.

How Hiram Holliday Was No Longer Anywhere

For the thousandth time Hiram Holliday walked the narrow stone cell and racked his tired brain for a thought, a glimmer, a hope of escape. It was the night of November 22. On the morning of November 23, less than twelve hours away, Hermann Weide, Communist, German citizen convicted of high treason, was to be executed. And
he
was Hermann Weide. His identity as Hiram Holliday had been taken from him. What had become of it he did not know for certain, but he half-suspected the truth. There was not the slightest chance of regaining it. Once he had tried to remove the bandages from his head, and men had come and beaten him with sections of rubber hose. Since then the wrappings had remained in place. It was obvious what they were for, Dr Grunze was taking no chances that anyone might recognize him. They would still be on his head when it rolled on to the ground of the prison yard in the morning.

He did not cry out or beat his hands against the steel door. Sometimes he was so soul-sick that he could not even walk. One name beat through his head - Grunze
...
Grunze.... The charming, expansive little hunchback. How long had he known ? Probably from the very f
irst. The servants in the house
were all his spies. Every detail of the plot had been worked out for days. A candid camera could have secured his picture for the false passport any time, any place, at a restaurant, in a
bar....
The woman had been paid to identify him as her nephew. He had walked into it. He had disregarded Irmgarde's terror. Not even the robbery that had deprived him of his papers had warned him. He should have walked the streets that morning until the embassies opened, and gone there immediately. But the tremendous brain that had engineered the conspiracy had known that he would not, had correctly gauged him for what he was, reckless, heedless.

And he knew why he was to die. Even the game of international politics is played with some caution and regard to the
a
rights of nations and the protection of their nationals, particularly a country as powerful as the United States. Had they merely discovered that he had written the pogrom story that appeared in the
Sentinel,
he would have been escorted over the border. But he had been caught tampering with the woman belonging to one of the keenest and most malicious brains in all Central Europe. And he had believed that he could get away with it.

His thoughts turned again to Irmgarde. Somehow he had clung to her as a last hope, but now even that had faded. She might know that a Hermann Weide, a Communist, had been condemned to death, but it would mean nothing to her. And Grunze was not the man to neglect anything. If she knew of his terrible plight, the Doctor would have seen to it that she could not use her knowledge. He wondered whether she had called the American Embassy the morning of his arrest, or the hotel. There were many gaps in Hiram's knowledge of the snare into which he had walked. But he felt them. He had not understood the testimony at the trial. But from the number of times the word 'Paris' had been mentioned, he had an idea of how impregnable and immovable were the jaws of the trap. And he had remembered suddenly that the clerk had questioned him about bis intention to leave for Paris in the morning. Grunze had overlooked nothing. There was no loophole. In the morning they would come for him, lead him out, kill him and bury him. The death notice of Hermann Weide would be splashed on Berlin's bulletin boards. And what had become of Hiram Holliday, no one would ever know.

He wondered how he would die ? He knew that another was scheduled to die with him, a Fritz Gorner, convicted of selling military secrets to a foreign Power. Gorner was to be executed first. He would watch him die. Already he felt the pressure upon his arms as they pushed him forward to the block. A crack on the back of the legs to
bend his knees, a push from the
rear to grind his face into the block He would feel the
swift, powerful movement of the executioner, even if he did not see him swing his axe, hear him suck in his breath from the effort of raising it and
then....
Hiram's hands went to his throat again for the h
undredth time, and then as it ha
d, hour after hour, his mind swung around like a cyclorama on hinges, groping, reaching, probing, grasping, searching for a hope, an idea. And inevitably the cyclorama swung back again to the bitter contemplation of his blindness and his folly, his misjudgement of the polite and pleasant Doctor, his blind, headlong plunge into disaster with Irmgarde, and his vainglorious belief that he would be able to deliver to his country as well as to his paper, the details of the Machiavellian designs upon the United States as told him by Grunze - Grunze, who already knew that he was telling them to a dead man. The cyclorama swung again. And again, and again.

There were footsteps down the stone corridor outside, but Hiram paid no attention. They stopped at his door. Keys rattled. The door swung open. It was the turnkey and a deputy governor of the prison. Behind them was another figure hidden in the shadows of the poorly lighted dungeon block.

The deputy governor said:
'Hermann Weide!
Durch Spezial-verordmtng des Minister Doktor Grunze werden Sie von der Griffin Irmgarde von Helm besucht. Halbe Stunde Sprechzeit gestattet.'

Hiram did not understand him. All he knew was that the cell door clanged shut, the foot
steps retreated. And the Grafin
Irmgarde was in his arms, sobbing, and pressing him, and whispering.... She was dressed in a long black velvet cloak with a Capuchin hood, and around her throat and face were wound yards and yards of the white tulle she affected. She continued to sob until the footsteps had died away completely. Then she sprang back and dropped her hood, and Hiram saw that she was not crying at all. Her face had life and colour, there was an excited cunning on her mouth, and her eyes were gleaming and sparkling with excitement. And she began to speak at once in a low voice, rapidly, cutting off his questions to save
time....

' Grunze told me,' she began.' Tonight. He could not resist
to boast. I know everything. They told me at the embassy and the hotel that you had left for Paris. At first I thought you were safe. And then Grunze told me what had been done. Quiet. Listen to me, Hiram. Every second counts. You do not exist any more. Your papers were taken by a man who went to Paris with them under your name. He went to a Paris hotel, the St Regis, and registered in your name. He even sent several cables to your office. Then he simply returned to Germany under his own passport. So you have disappeared from a Paris hotel. Your papers were found in your room there. They are now in the hands of your representative there. Only Grunze could think of something so clever. But he had to boast because it would hurt me. He couldn't wait. And so we defeat him.
I
made him give an order that I could see you alone to say goodbye to you
...
wait
...
don't interrupt
...
that I could do because
...
because of what I can withhold from
him....
Now! You must do exactly as I say instantly. We will change clothes. I had the highest possible pass to come here, Grunze's own. You will not be disturbed when you leave, if
...'