The Black Baroness (60 page)

Grauber had backed his car up to the front of the garage, where it was not visible from the house; then, getting out, he had gone to the front door where someone had let him in. Slipping over the wall and down into the roadway, Gregory opened the boot of the car, hunted round until he found a greasy leather tool-sack and took out a pair of pliers. Getting down on his hands and knees, he crawled under the car and partially cut through one of the wires of the steering gear. If Grauber did succeed in escaping a bullet he was not going to get very far on
that twisting coast road without having a nasty smash; and, with luck, he would go right over the precipice to meet his death on the rocks below.

Crawling out, Gregory replaced the pair of pliers, shut the boot, scrambled back over the low wall and through the shrubs at the side of the garage to its garden end. He paused for a moment to regain his breath, then once more crept with catlike step along to the terrace, his pistol drawn ready in his hand.

Very, very cautiously he knelt down by the open French window, then gave one swift glance Inside. Grauber was there, and Gregory’s heart thrilled again. A merciful God had at last delivered his enemy, bound, into his hands.

Evidently the Gestapo Chief had asked for the Baroness and had been shown into the big lounge-room to wait until she came downstairs, He was sitting in a low armchair, facing the door and with his back to the window. His fleshy pink neck, which protruded in ugly rolls above his collar, was on a level with Gregory’s head and only a few feet away.

There was not a second to be lost, At any moment the Baroness might appear, then Gregory would have lost his God-given opportunity. He had no scruples about what he was going to do. Grauber would have killed him or Erika without warning or compunction, just as he had already killed scores of other people. Reversing his pistol, Gregory took a firm grip of the barrel. Rising to his full height he took one step forward and brought the butt of the pistol crashing down on Grauber’s skull.

Grauber slumped forward without a sound. Not even a moan issued from his lips as the blood began to ooze up through the broken skin of his cranium. Jamming his pistol back in its holster, Gregory seized the Gestapo Chief by the back of the collar and, hauling him out of the chair, dragged his body behind a nearby sofa where it could not be seen from the door of the room. Then he pulled out his gun again and tiptoed across the parquet to take up his position behind the door.

His hand that held the pistol was steady but his heart was thumping. For once the big cards in the pack had been dealt to him. Not only bad he put one enemy out of the game already, but the coming of that enemy so unexpectedly had solved for him the tricky problem of getting the Baroness downstairs without her suspicions being aroused by the announcement that a stranger was asking to see her and without any of her servants
yet being aware of his presence there.

He had hardly placed himself when the door opened and the Baroness came in. From his post of vantage Gregory was immediately behind her as she walked into the room. With his free hand he gave her a swift push in the back; with his foot he kicked-to the door. She gave a little cry, stumbled and swung round to find herself looking down the barrel of his automatic.

Her dead-white face, framed in its bell of jet-black hair, could go no whiter but he saw shock and dismay dawn in her dark eyes.

‘I’ve got you now,’ he said quietly; ‘and don’t imagine that the
Herr Gruppenführer
will come to your assistance this time. I’ve already dealt with him.’

She stared at him like a small, ferocious, trapped animal for a moment, then she murmured: ‘I thought—I thought …’

‘Yes,’ Gregory went on for her, ‘you thought that I was dead, but I survived your hospitality and I’ve come back from the gates of Death to claim you.’

‘What—what d’you mean to do?’ she breathed. ‘Are you going to kill me?’

He nodded. ‘As the price of your treachery you no doubt anticipate great rewards from your
Führer,
but you’re not going to get them. You are the woman who sold France to her enemies, and for that you are going to die.’

A new expression came into her face, neither resignation nor fear, nor determination to fight for her life, but a strange spiritual flame that lit up her whole countenance, as she cried in ringing protest. ‘That’s a lie! I did not sell France; and I shall go down in history not as the woman who betrayed France but as the woman who saved her.’

Gregory was so taken aback by this extraordinary declaration that he could only stammer: ‘You—you’ve done your damnedest to ensure that France shall surrender and desert her Ally.’

‘Her Ally!’ she sneered. ‘For nearly a thousand years England was our hereditary enemy, and the
Entente Cordiale
is a thing of yesterday, based on false premises. That unnatural alliance will pass as swiftly as it came and will soon be forgotten. Deep down in you the truth is as plain to you as it is to me. The French and the English neither like nor understand each other and their paths lie in opposite directions. For a few decades Britain has used France as the weaker partner to be her bulwark against
Germany. France suffered inconceivably more than Britain in the last war and, once again, she is being martyred in this one, while the English sit at home in their cities, safe and secure. But that is finished. Henceforth Britain must fight her own battles and France will go back as an integral part of the Continent to which she belongs.’

‘I see,’ snapped Gregory. ‘It’s not, after all, that you’re pro-Hitler but that you’re anti-British. Yet you worked on Leopold, who was just as much France’s Ally as Britain’s, to make him throw his hand in; and you helped to persuade Mussolini to stab France in the back. Your hatred of the English must have unbalanced your brain if just for the sake of making things difficult for us you’ve gone to the length of betraying France to the Nazis. Damn it, you must be crazy!’

‘You fool!’ she spat at him. ‘I tell you I have saved France—saved her from herself—and if you knew the things that I know you would realise it.’

A sudden spate of words poured from her scarlet lips. ‘France in our time has become decadent, vile, rotten to the core. Look at our great families—the aristocrats and the intelligentsia who should think for and lead the nation—how do they spend their lives? Money-grabbing at the expense of the workers so that Communism has become rife throughout the land. At all times in history the ruling caste has had its own code of morals, yet used a cloak of some decency to screen its love affairs. But not these people. They are not even content to sleep with one another openly, like dogs and bitches rutting in a field. Half of them are perverts, homosexuals, Lesbians, and they have so little shame that they proclaim their vices from the housetops. The other half are so degraded that they marry only as a matter of convenience, and their idea of amusement is to take their own wives to a brothel to witness every vile practice that the mind can conceive. A desire for children, the home, real love, have become things to snigger at. Dope, gambling, and the private cinema at which even bestiality is shown, have taken their place as the occupations of the rich. And what the rich do today the masses do tomorrow. That is why the ruling caste of France must die the death. It is to bring about their downfall that men like Weygand and Baudouin have striven with me. France must be purged for ever of this scum in order that the spirit of France which lives on in the common people may revivify her and make her once again a great nation.’

Hardly pausing for beath, she raced on: ‘Communism could not do that; but National Socialism could. And however much you English may hate Hitler, I know him to be a great man. For a year—two years, perhaps—France will be occupied by a conqueror, but what is such a period in the hundreds of years of her history? Hitler will know how to deal with the real traitors; the wealthy parasites who have battened on the resources of the nation and paved the way for her downfall by the vile example they have set to her other classes. He will know, too, how to deal with the Communists and dangerous visionaries who preach their unworkable theories that all men are equal, which is fundamentally untrue.

‘Out of chaos will come order. Under National Socialism we shall re-establish the ideal of the Family and reorganise our industrial resources so that the greatest good comes to the greatest number. For a time France must know the weight of a captive’s chains in order that she may know how to utilise her freedom when she regains it once more. The people may suffer bitterness, humiliation, misery, but these things will pass, and when the time is ripe a new France will arise, reborn from the ashes of the old—a France clean in mind, strong in spirit and conscious of her glorious destiny.

‘It is for this that I have lied and tricked and soiled my hands with blood, but you know that I speak the truth and you dare not call me a traitor now.’

For a moment Gregory did not reply. Her torrent of words had come crashing on to his brain, revealing her to be an utterly different personality from what he had thought her. Right or wrong, according to her own lights this small dark woman was a great patriot.

He knew that what she had said of the
Entente Cordiale
being an unnatural alliance was true. He knew that what she had said of the degeneracy of French society was true. He knew that any German occupation of France could not last indefinitely; and, however appalling it might sound, the Baroness’s plan was, perhaps, the one and only way of restoring health and a new vitality to the moribund French nation. Yet he also knew that she had made one vital miscalculation.

‘Do you realise,’ he asked, ‘that your vision of a new France will remain only a vision unless Hitler can secure Peace? For without Peace it will be impossible for him to reorganise Europe.’

She shrugged. ‘With Hitler as master of Europe from northern Norway to the Pyrenees, Britain will not be able to carry on the war alone.’

Gregory shook his head. ‘You’re wrong there. Every man, woman and child in Britain knows that we dare not make a patched-up peace. Now that the war is on we are determined to fight it to a finish, because if we gave Hitler even a few months’ breathing-space we should be completely at his mercy later on. You’re much too clever a woman, Baroness, not to realise the truth of that.’

She shrugged again. ‘Yes. You may fight on for a little, but what chance have you got? With the whole coast of France in his hands Hitler will be able to wear you down with intensive bombings until you are so weak that you will not be able to resist an invasion.’

‘No, Baroness; there you’re wrong again. He can bomb our cities but we shall stand up to the bombing somehow, even if we have to live in holes in the ground; and as long as the British Navy is paramount upon the seas he will never be able to land an invading force of sufficient strength to quell us. No threats, no terror, will be great enough to break the heart of Britain. And the worse things get the more determined we shall become to see matters through.’

As she stared at him he went on, speaking out of an unshakable conviction that radiated from him. I do not seek to belittle the gallantry of
your
people when I remind you that great areas of France have been conquered many times by the English and the Spaniards as well as by the Germans, and this would not be the first time if France is now compelled to accept the humiliation of a complete surrender; but in all their long history my people have never been conquered and have never surrendered. We broke the might of Spain; we fought your own King, Louis XIV, to a standstill. A Dutch fleet once entered the Thames, but we threw the Dutch out of the New World and broke their Sea Power for ever. Even when Britain stood alone against Napoleon she did not despair; she fought on until a British frigate took the former master of Europe into lonely exile.’

For the first time he saw a shadow of doubt enter the Baroness’s dark eyes even as she protested. ‘But this time it will be different. The English are effete; they’ve been pampered too long. They ran at Dunkirk. They’ll give in—they’ll give in.’

He smiled then, and he did not mean his smile to be patronsing,
but there was something in it which drives all foreigners into a frenzy.

‘Oh, no, they won’t,’ he said quietly. ‘As a race we haven’t altered, You mustn’t allow yourself to be misled by what happened in Norway and Belgium. We’re born niuddkrs, and in every war it takes us a little time to find our feet. You see, we’re not like Continental countries; we’re not organised for war, so our peace-time leaders are never any good when it comes to a scrap. But sooner or later we sift out the people at the top and things begin to happen. Last time we had Asquith, but he was replaced by Lloyd George, who, whatever may be said against him, was a great war leader. This time we had Chamberlain, but now Churchill has taken his place, and later on among the younger men we’ll find some real live Generals.’

‘Churchill!’ she cried bitterly, ‘Yes; he would still wish to fight if London were in ruins. But the people are not of the same metal; they’ll revolt, throw Churchill overboard and sue for peace.’

‘Don’t you believe it!’ His smile became a pitying grin. ‘Churchill
is
England. He typifies the spirit of the Empire more than any other living man. He is what all of us would
like
to be, and ninety-nine per cent, of us are ready to fight with him to the last ditch. Yet even if a bomb or a bullet robbed us of him it would make no difference to the final outcome of the war, because other leaders would arise and we should fight on just the same. It was your own Napoleon who said that the British don’t know when they’re beaten; and that’s the truth. It will be a long, hard road, but in the end the triumph of Britain is as certain as the rising of tomorrow’s sun.’

‘I don’t believe it.’ She nervously clasped and unclasped her hands, now openly doubting, but striving to resist any acceptance of the belief that he was forcing home on her.

‘Oh, yes, you do,’ he contradicted her. ‘We’ve won the last battle in every war. That may be a cliché, but ifs a fact; and it’s going to be just the same this time. That is where you have made a terrible miscalculation, and, if you think for a moment, you will see how by Britain’s refusal to accept a patched-up peace all your dreams must fall to pieces. Hitler may make himself lord of Europe; Goering may send his bombers to destroy our homes; Goebbels may lie and rage and threaten; but all the time the Blockade will go on, and sooner or later the Nazis will not know which way to turn for war materials and food. Then
all those who have aided Hitler, and millions of innocent people as well, must pay the price of his damnable ambitions. And as long as France is Hitler’s vassal she, too, must pay.’