Watcher in the Shadows (19 page)

It took me some time to find you. I should have guessed you were the type to save yourself by making friends with British Intelligence.”

“What did she look like?” I asked, ignoring this.

“She had long, dark hair,” he said. “Her skin was very pale and transparent even in health.”

The corners of his heavy, mobile mouth twitched twice. He glared at me across the table with eyes in which the obsession of blood-feud had long taken the place of sorrow.

I remembered. The hair had been cut short, but the transparency of the skin was unforgettable. They had housed her, I suppose, among the dregs of the camp in order that she should disappear from all human knowledge. God alone knew how they had drugged and broken her before she was ever interned in Ravensbr
ü
ck. When I saw her she did not seem to know where she was or to care. She was already dead, though physically in apparent good health.

“What had she done?”

“Done! What had she done? You scum, does the name of Savarin mean anything to you?”

I asked him peaceably if he were Savarin. I was.

Presumably some of the French knew to whom that cover name belonged. London never did, nor, I believe, did the enemy. A leader of the Resistance, incredibly astute and merciless, Savarin had carried on his own private war against the German occupiers. His every act of bloodshed and sabotage carried the stamp of his own temperament — a sardonic savagery which belonged to some sultan of the Arabian Nights.

“But those women,” I began, “were …”

I stopped. I was only making matters worse. And I found unbearable the thought of the revenge which the Gestapo had taken when they suspected that they had caught the wife of Savarin. Dessayes and Coronel could never have known of her presence in Ravensbrück since she was not interned among the politicals. If those two gallant women had guessed that she was in the bus, one of them would have insisted on her escape and given up her own life instead.

“Dickfuss and Sporn I can understand,” I said. “But why did you kill Hans Weber?”

“He went with you and drove the bus.”

Accurate again. Weber was the officer in charge of transport. I had persuaded him to drive for the sake of his quite remarkable stupidity. If a total of ten were repeated to him often enough he could be trusted to swear to it.

“You might as well have executed the man who made it!” I exclaimed.

I was overwhelmed by the cruelty and pity of the thing. I knew I could never kill Savarin in cold blood. To take revenge for acts of revenge was merely to extend the horror and call it justice.

I suppose no man who has given great love to a woman worthy of love could ever guarantee that he would not kill the devils who destroyed her. But on the spur of the moment. To wait ten years without losing, in spite of the wear and tear of sane daily life, the compulsion to avenge her must be rare. And yet not so rare a few centuries ago. I am no psychologist, but I think the true parallel is religious mania. In Savarin’s case the wrathful god was his own very real but perverted sense of honor. He felt that he ought to kill, that he was morally bound to kill and that he must never permit himself to fall into any backsliding. To that, of course, must be added a pleasure in killing. He must always have had a powerful streak of sadistic cruelty — perhaps sublimated in youth, but during the war magnificently released and justified by patriotism.

I was tempted to turn my back on him and ride away. That was how my father would have dismissed him, ignoring his existence at the possible expense of his own. A contemptuous and honorable way out of the dilemma. Pride, Benita would call it. The day before, I too might have turned my back. But the future was no longer my own to relinquish.

I told him that it was the end, and that he must surrender. I disclosed to him all I knew — how he had tried to poison me in my cottage, how he had watched me from the old air-raid shelter and left his horse with Fred Gorble, how I had so nearly trapped him before a witness at the badger sett.

His face hardly changed. I had the impression that he had considered all that over and over again, but rejected it as unlikely.

“Watching badgers down wind,” he said to himself more than to me. “I should have known that even the Gestapo could not be so stupid.”

So that was why he had instinctively suspected something wrong and avoided the obvious line of approach!

“You might have known, too,” I retorted, “that an authority on squirrels can spot the difference between the French and English varieties.”

That, I could see, at last disturbed him. The purchase of the squirrels which he had let loose in the Wen Acre Plantation was just the sort of evidence which police could trace.

“Do you understand now, Savarin,” I asked, “that if you force me to shoot I can plead self-defense?”

He understood all right, but he was beyond caring. This was the tiger I predicted, who would still come on even if a bullet had raked his body.

“I should be sorry not to be present at your trial,” he answered with a calm which was no less deadly for being artificial. “I am half English and was educated here. I know the English criminal law. No one will believe you, von Dennim, and my friends are influential enough to see that you are tried for murder. There will be several weeks — separated by a period in jail — while your past comes out. It will interest the charming girl to whom you were properly saying good-by. I should think you will have to change your name. A von Dennim in the Gestapo! The head of your distinguished family should kill you if I do not.”

“I am the Graf von Dennim,” I answered.

He jerked forward his body and spat in my face.

From that point on it was another person who took command. I neither approve nor disapprove of him. What he did is what I should do again in similar circumstances. But my normally quiet self recognizes him with difficulty.

I shook with self-control and heard myself saying:

“I have a right to know with whom I must deal. Your identity matters no longer.”

“The Vicomte de Saint Sabas.”

I knew the name — and on one point more intimately than the historians who watch down the centuries the inevitable and unruly appearance of a St. Sabas whenever the nobles of France are trumpeting defiance to the King of England or their own.

“You have a son?” I asked.

“I have.”

“My conscience is easier.”

“You are impertinent!”

“No, sir. The first St. Sabas was a steward of the Dennims and ennobled by us. So I did not wish to end the family. I cannot help the disgrace.”

“Disgrace?”

The word stung him a lot more than my medieval absurdity — which, anyway, he knew to be true. I explained it.

“You murdered an innocent postman, St. Sabas. Was that an execution too? Chicago style?”

“An accident!” he exploded. “How the devil could I foresee it?”

His right arm began to move. Slightly quicker the barrel of the Mauser was over the edge of the table. Both weapons returned to the lap.

I told him the true story of my war. It was fair that the man should be given a chance to believe. But the facts seemed to make no impression at all on those impatient and contemptuous eyes. How could they? If he had accepted them, he would have had to face his own guilt.

“My reply to that is that you are a liar and a coward,” he said. “Not even Dickfuss thought of claiming to be a British agent.”

I finished my drink and disregarded the minor insult. I remarked — though, as I say, it wasn’t a self I knew which was speaking — that it was difficult to arrange conditions between a liar and a madman, but that I would make a suggestion.

I was well aware of the suicidal folly of what this damned Graf von Dennim was about to propose. But I could see no other way out. I refused to kill St. Sabas in cold blood. And if I made the slightest move from that table towards the back door of the pub or towards Nur Jehan, St. Sabas would kill me. At least our ancestors could get us out of the stalemate when nothing else could.

“I give you no conditions,” he said.

“Then you may accept mine. You know the barn in its clump of trees. We will ride towards it together but out of pistol shot. We will halt three hundred yards from it.

“I shall stay where I am, giving you time to examine the barn thoroughly since I know it and you do not.

You will then retire to a distance of three hundred yards on the other side. We shall still be in sight of each other and can know if the terms are observed.”

“How do I know you will not ride off and hide in a police station?”

“How do I know you won’t vanish? Savarin has a lot of practice in changing his name and appearance.”

“You know it because I intend to kill you. I am impatient, von Dennim.”

His voice rose a little above its usual cold tone. He was savagely impatient.

That was my motive, too, I said. I did not intend to spend the rest of my life examining my food and parcels.

He still refused to accept. He had no fear of dying, only of dying before he could kill. I knew that, but I accused him of being afraid. He was quite unmoved.

“Yes,” he said. “I am afraid you will run.”

This was getting beyond endurance. I felt an appalling nervous desire to laugh. The Graf von Dennim and the zoologist were each finding the other ridiculous, with the result that both were near hysteria.

“You spat in my face,” I said. “Shall I put it this way for you? That even if a von Dennim is a Gestapo officer and a St. Sabas murders postmen, each has a tradition in spite of it.”

He looked at me with less assurance, or at any rate with less intensity of hatred. He was human again — the deliberate, discriminating judge of what his victim was likely to do.

“You are different from the rest,” he said. “I will agree to your conditions.”

I stood up with my back to the windows of the inn and slipped the Mauser into its holster. St. Sabas wavered, and I had a clear view of his weapon. It was a .45 automatic. The Dennim family held his eyes contemptuously for me while the familiar self disapproved in abject panic of this highly dangerous theater. He put on the safety catch and dropped the pistol into his outside pocket.

We walked side by side to our horses without a word. The atmosphere of formality seemed to be working. The few horsy villagers who watched us must, I am sure, have assumed that the two beautifully mounted middle-aged men were old friends who chose to be silent.

When we were alone and back on the green road which led to the hilltop, we separated. Each kept close to the fence on his own side with twenty yards of turf and ruts between the horses. Nur Jehan strongly objected.

“There is no reason to fight your horse,” St. Sabas said. “What little beauty is in this world has already suffered enough from you. I will give you my word of honor that you may safely ride by my side, and I will accept yours.”

I thanked him, and added:

“The light is going fast.”

“It was too clear this evening. It looks like rain.”

“Not before midnight, I should say.”

“It has certainly been a remarkable June.”

“Yes. We have both been fortunate in our weather.”

“It would interest me to know one thing. All along you invited this meeting, von Dennim?”

“I did.”

“No police at all in it?”

There was a limit to confidence. I was not going to tell him that.

“What they are doing you probably know as well as I do, St. Sabas.”

“My French blood tells,” he said with a harsh laugh. “At one moment I am overwhelmed by the cunning of the British. At the next I am certain that all the cunning is invented by myself.”

The hilltop was now bare and dismal under the overcast sky. There was just enough wind to sing faintly in the telephone wires which marched up the hill along with us and ended at the last house. The barn and the wide clump of trees were no longer sinister as they had been in sunlight. Set in the greater loneliness of the uplands, they suggested shelter and a roof.

“I doubt if we shall be able to see each other at six hundred yards,” I said.

“I will signal to you with a torch when I am in position.”

“Mine, I am afraid, is in my rucksack at the barn.”

“It works?” he asked.

“Yes, very well.”

“Take this, then! I will pick up yours when I examine the barn.”

St. Sabas handed over his torch, and with a slight inclination of the head, rode forward to the clump of trees.

I returned his bow. It is possible that the exchange of torches was as near as he could bring himself to a salute. Religious maniacs — if I am right in my fanciful explanation of him — can be very pleasant people so long as the subject of damnation does not come up. But at the time I was divided between admiration of his manners and suspicion that he intended to tamper with my rucksack. I dismissed it. Whatever century we were in, both of us were in it. And in any case the time for assassination by drugs or explosives had passed.

Dusk and the trees swallowed up St. Sabas. I dismounted and thought over what my tactics were going to be. There could be no more doubts whether I had a moral right to kill him. I had not a dog’s chance of living if I didn’t, and it was pointless even to worry about my legal position. I was empty of anger and mercy alike. If it had just been a question of losing my own life, I might still have had some trouble with conscience; but it was my future with Benita which was at stake, and that was a very different matter from my future with squirrels. The first shot must deliver us from any more fear, and no damned nonsense about it.

Fieldcraft and silent feet were all I had to put against his speed and desperation. Savarin must have had as much battle experience as any long-lived infantry platoon sergeant, while I myself, though I had been under fire, had no experience of attack. His other overwhelming advantage was that he did not care whether he died or not so long as I did. The game was up for him. Too many people had seen him with me. The most he could ever hope for was the life of a fugitive if he were able to get out of England before my body was found.

The obvious first move was to get into the thick belt of trees around the barn and let the other fellow do the attacking: in fact, to hold the interior lines. St. Sabas would not see any objection, for he knew nothing whatever of my history. Right up to that evening he had assumed that I was just a discreditable member of the Dennim family; there were plenty to choose from, especially among the Bavarian branch, and some of them had been Nazis. So he had no reason to suspect that under the trees I was likely to be his master.

Very well. I could reckon on his riding hard and straight for the windbreak and then lying up in cover, rather than taking advantage of his well-trained mare and attacking me in the open.

Far away across the empty plateau I saw the torch winking at me. I mounted Nur Jehan and answered. St. Sabas charged into sight along the line I expected, and I, instead of racing him for the trees and getting the whole width of the cover between us, galloped off on a tangent to the right of the windbreak. The range closed to a hundred yards as he held his course, but the light was more deceptive than I anticipated. I dropped to the ground, fired and grazed — for the shadowy figure raised a hand to his neck or ear —fired again and missed. Horse and man vanished into the trees.

That was that. At the cost of some slight loss of blood he had won the interior lines, and my plan of dropping him clean in the open had landed me in the worst possible position. It was unlikely that I would ever have another chance to use my longer range and greater accuracy unless St. Sabas were caught on the move by the sudden appearance of the moon. It was up, showing faintly through the drifting clouds and occasionally unobscured.

I was out of the effective range of his .45 automatic. It was a better weapon than mine, however, for hand-to-hand fighting in semidarkness, and I now had to close with it. The only safe move was to crawl away quickly until I was part of the hillside and then enter the windbreak wherever shadows and ground permitted approach. He could not guard all his perimeter.

But couldn’t he? I reckoned that I could guard the perimeter very easily when I myself chose for my night’s lodging the isolated copse. I did not fancy stalking that inscrutable wall of twilight from any direction whatever. The ground sloped gently away from the trees and was bare turf.

Though I had been telling myself again and again that I must not let him break contact, I should have been very glad at the moment if some belated shepherd or gamekeeper had come up the hill and frightened him off. But there was little chance of that. The nearest cottages were half a mile away and sheltered from direct sound by the contours of the hill. Even if the two cracks of the Mauser were carried sharply on the wind they need not necessarily attract attention. Somewhere to the east on lower ground, perhaps belonging to the lady with the dogs, three or four guns had been out after wood pigeon coming in to roost. There were also cherry orchards, well down on the Worcestershire side, banging away all night with their bird alarms. Those damned charges had once made me dive for cover near Chipping Marton, when fortunately Benita was not with me. Farmers set them to go off at intervals during the twenty-four hours and had —or said they had —no means of putting them out of action after dark.

I heard St. Sabas cantering on through the windbreak. He was now presumably tying his mare to a tree. I had nothing to which I could tether Nur Jehan. He stayed close, but was thoroughly uneasy and restless. He was not grazing. At any rate — and that was a blessing — he was not in the affectionate mood to follow his rider about.

There was probably time to run boldly for the trees, but I had learned to take no gambles in a hurry against Savarin. I remained cuddling the butt of the Mauser and thinking out the end game of this blind chess which we had played for the last three weeks. As soon as he was at the edge of the windbreak — and he might well have turned his mare loose and be there already — he should be able to see Nur Jehan close to the point where I had flung myself off and fired. He would not expect me, too, still to be close. But I would be. The ground helped.

A slight fold led obliquely to the clump of trees. It was hardly visible as a depression at all, but on the rim were nine-inch stems of seeding grass, just tall enough in that light to be a screen rather than a guide to my movements. I rolled over into it.

Hoping that he was now straining his eyes in the wrong direction, I slowly followed the fold closer and closer to the trees. When I had reached a point fifteen yards out, there was nothing for it but to rush the rest across the open. But I was not much afraid of that. Thick cloud was blowing.

I started to leave my cover. I had already drawn a leg under me ready for the spring and raised my head when I was fairly caught by the erratic moon. I lay still, praying that St. Sabas was not on my side of the trees at all and well aware that, if he was, the dark blotch of my body could be made out. His shot — a carefully aimed shot to judge by the infernal delay — plunged into the turf alongside my ribs. I cried out, kicked myself straight and rolled back into the fold of ground I had just left.

His years as Savarin had probably taught him the difference of sound between a bullet in turf and a bullet in flesh. But at that range I doubted if he could have heard the strike at all; the report would cover it. There was a good chance, if my cry had been convincing enough, that he would come up cautiously to administer the coup de grace.

Silence went on and on for what seemed all of half an hour. I did not dare stir. At last I heard him on the move. He was somewhere in the middle of the trees near the barn. That indicated a doubt in his mind. He was not going to leave cover opposite my body; he was going to approach from some unexpected angle. I still felt, however, that he could approach from any angle he liked. If he meant to fire a last shot into the corpse I had him.

St. Sabas mounted his mare. I heard the creak of leather and the jingle of the bit. Was he so convinced of the effect of his shot that he intended to ride off? But that was out of character. So I decided that he was bluffing. If he could persuade me he had gone, I should get pretty tired of lying still to no purpose and soon show whether I was alive or not.

Distances were short and it was all very quick. He seemed to be cantering round the windbreak towards me. I assumed that he meant to come into sight just out of easy range and ride away. He came closer still, now just inside the trees offering a possible shot; but I had had enough of moving targets in the dusk and it was not worthwhile to raise my head and look at him. There would be time enough for action when the sound of the hooves stopped or passed on.

They did neither. Man and horse burst out of the copse and charged me, St. Sabas leaning low over the mane. I had not a hope. I was cringing to my tiny fold of ground as if I had been flattened into it by a roller. There was no chance to fire. By the time I had changed position and begun to elevate the barrel they were on me.

Shot on the ground or trampled into it. I chose the latter. But the good mare of course put her feet where I was not. And that was all the more to her credit since St. Sabas must have been already reining her in. When I was half up he had already wheeled her round and was on me again.

I jinked like a snipe. My only cover was the mare herself. I cannot explain in any detail what happened. At one moment I was under her chest and hanging on to the martingale with one hand while trying to thrust the Mauser into a pocket with the other. I had released the awkward holster butt. I don’t know how or when.

Looking back at it in cold blood, I think I should have shot the mare. That I didn’t was not due to any compunction. I repeat —she was the only cover I had. She was precious. As I saw it then, he could kill me as she fell to her knees or while he was coming off.