On the morning of Saturday, February the 24th, Erika was roused by a sharp double knock. She woke to find herself in pitch darkness and for a moment wondered where she was. In their Arctic home it had never been pitch-dark, as there was always the warm, gentle glow from the cracks of the stove. Then a door opened and a light clicked on.
The glare from the single unshaded bulb lit the worn and ancient furnishings of the bedroom in Kandalaksha Castle and memory returned to her. Apparently there were no women-servants in the castle, as one of the General’s shaven-headed orderlies had come into the room carrying a large can of hot water. As he put it down and laid one minute towel beside it she wondered why Gregory had not been in to see her on his way to bed the previous night.
In those hectic days they had spent in Munich and Berlin together early in November they had been the most passionate lovers. When they had met again in Helsinki his absence from her seemed only to have increased his eagerness; but their opportunities for love-making had been lamentably few. Then his injury at Petsamo had changed his mentality in that respect as in all others. On waking on their first morning in the trapper’s house he had accepted quite naturally the fact that he was in love with her, but it had been an entirely different kind of love. He was tender and thoughtful for her and followed her every movement with an almost dog-like devotion, but he did not seem to know even the first steps in physical love-making any more.
Erika had known the love of many men but to be treated as a saint and placed upon a pedestal was an entirely new experience to her and she had thoroughly enjoyed it. There was something wonderfully refreshing in Gregory’s shy, boyish attempts to hold her hand or steal a kiss on the back of her neck when the others were not looking; and she had known that at any moment she chose she could reawake his passions just as they could open up the cells of his memory upon other matters. But she had deliberately refrained from doing so; feeling that they had many weeks ahead of them and that it would be such a wonderful experience for them both if she allowed him to develop his full physical love for her quite unaided.
During those weeks she had grown to love him more than ever before; but she had been cheated of the consummation of her subtle plan by the sudden flooding back of his memory after his fall upon the ice-run. All his old desire for her had returned with renewed force. But within a few hours of that Freddie had solved his puzzle, Gregory had brought home to them the immense importance of it and they were on their way again in a desperate endeavour to get the German plan for world dominion back to London; so in the last five days there had been no opportunity for them to be alone together for more than a few moments.
It was for that reason that she had felt certain that he would come to her the previous night and kiss her into wakefulness directly he succeeded in getting away from General Kuporovitch. But she knew the reputation that Russian officers had for hard drinking and tried to console herself with the thought that their host must have plied Gregory with so much liquor after she had left them, which out of tactfulness he had felt bound to consume, that by the time he got away, hardheaded as he was, he had felt that he would spoil a very perfect moment if he roused her.
When the orderly had left the room she got up to wash and dress. As she looked at her clothes she sighed a little. Her one set of undies had had to do duty with constant washings for twelve weeks and they were in a shocking state. Perhaps she would have been wiser to have availed herself of some of the things belonging to the dead wife of the trapper, but she simply had not been able to bring herself to encase her lovely limbs in those unlovely garments. The tweeds in which she had left Helsinki had weathered their hard wear fairly well, but the soles of her snow-boots were wearing thin and the cold had driven her to make use of the Finnish woman’s great, thick, woollen stockings. Fortunately her golden hair had a natural wave so, although to her critical eye it badly needed the attention of a hairdresser, she knew that as far as other people were concerned it still passed muster; but powder, lipstick and face creams had all been abandoned in her dressing-case. Nevertheless, as she studied her face in a cracked Venetian mirror she had to admit that she was looking little worse for the lack of them.
She would have given a lot for a lipstick and some powder for her nose but she had managed to keep her face from chapping and the cold Arctic air had given her back a natural complexion which was better than anything she had had since she was a young girl.
On going out into the corridor she found the orderly there and Freddie standing beside him. He looked at her, blushed scarlet and looking quickly away again, said:
“Angela won’t be a minute.”
“Have you seen Gregory?” she asked.
He shook his head. “No. I went into his room a few minutes ago but he wasn’t there so I suppose he’s already with the General.”
“It’s rather stange that he didn’t look in on me first, to say good morning,” she remarked; but her mind was distracted by Angela’s appearing at that moment.
Angela had not the good fortune to possess a natural wave so her dark hair was now neatly drawn back and pinned up in a small bun on the nape of her neck; but with her deep-blue eyes and milk-white skin she still looked extremely pretty and Erika, with a knowing eye, took in the fact that she looked prettier than ever this morning. She showed none of Freddie’s embarrassment but smiled gaily as she said:
“Wasn’t it fun to sleep in a proper bed again after all these weeks of dossing down on the top of the old brick oven? I wish they hadn’t got us up, as I should like to have stayed in bed all day.”
Erika took her arm affectionately. “Well, darling, let’s hope the time is soon coming when you’ll be able to, as perhaps Gregory has persuaded the General to release us. I’m sure he wouldn’t have sat up all night drinking unless he thought that he could get something out of him.”
The orderly beckoned to them and they followed him down the corridor to the room where they had fed the night before. The General was there, looking somewhat bleary-eyed, and his manner was abrupt as he addressed them:
“I regret that I shall have to make a change in your accommodation, since the Colonel-Baron has abused my hospitality.”
“Really?” Erika raised her eyebrows. “What has he done?”
“As he can’t be found, he must have left the castle in the early hours of the morning; although how he did it is not yet clear. If he had dropped from his window he could not get out that way, as all your rooms overlook interior courtyards; in any case, he couldn’t have made the drop without using his bedding as a rope; and his bed is undisturbed.”
Their first feeling on learning that Gregory had escaped was one of elation; but it was quickly crushed as the General went on: “I expect he will soon be brought back again. The fact that he cannot speak Russian, together with this godforsaken climate, will prevent him getting very far. In the meantime I intend to see that none of you others plays me any tricks. I am having you transferred to cells downstairs until I receive instructions about you from Moscow.”
While they remained silent for a moment Freddie struggled to compose a sentence in French, then said haltingly: “How long do you think that will be; and what sort of orders do you think you will receive about us when they do come in?”
The General frowned. “I should receive instructions about you in a week, or ten days at the most. What they will be I don’t know, but in view of what the Colonel-Baron told me last night after you went to bed, I should think that you will be sent to Moscow under guard and handed over to the German Embassy there for transfer to Berlin, as it appears that the Gestapo are most anxious to interview you.”
His words were a most frightful blow to them all. It seemed impossible to think that Gregory had betrayed them; yet, on the face of it, that appeared to be what he had done. He had escaped himself without endeavouring to take them with him or even letting them know his intentions, as he obviously could have done if he had gone to his room after leaving his host. Worse; before going, either because he was too drunk to know what he was saying or for some inexplicable reason, he had told the General that they were wanted by the Gestapo.
They had barely taken in this almost unbelievable and very frightening piece of news when the General went on: “You will be treated well while you are here and you have nothing to be afraid of; but in your own interests I advise you to stick to the story that you told me last night until you are out of my keeping. Nobody here speaks French, German or English except myself, so no-one else can question you; but I shall have to do so formally this morning in front of my Political Commissar and I shall naturally translate accurately any answers which you make to my questions. Follow the orderly, please, and he will take you to your new quarters.”
The orderly shepherded them downstairs to the ground-floor, where some of the stone-walled rooms of the old castle had been converted into cells. They were given one apiece, each of which was furnished with bare necessities and a stove; but the General had provided them with the additional amenity of a fourth cell in which to take their meals together and sit during the day. As soon as they had been shown their cells a plain but eatable breakfast was served for them in the sitting-room cell and they were locked in there.
At first they were almost too puzzled to discuss the situation. All of them felt that Gregory would never have acted as he had done without good reason; yet whether he had acted wisely was quite another matter. They had no doubt at all that, having escaped, his first concern would be to try to secure their release, but he would have to travel many hundreds of miles as a fugitive himself before he could get in touch with anybody who could possibly assist them, and by the end of the week they might all find themselves on their way to Moscow; after which they would very soon be beyond the aid of Gregory or anyone else.
Later in the morning they were taken upstairs again and questioned by the General in front of a small, fair, ferret-faced man who asked innumerable questions, for which the General acted as translator; but after an hour of this it was found that they were merely going over the same old ground in circles, so they were sent downstairs again.
When they were back in their sitting-room cell they discussed the situation further and decided that they did not at all like the look of it. From their long examination they gathered that the Political Commissar was greatly intrigued that such unusual fish as themselves should have swum into his isolated net and the General’s attitude puzzled them greatly. His questions had shown little intelligence, and during the interrogation he had frequently glowered or shouted at them, all of which was in surprising contrast to his behaviour the night before, when he had been extremely courteous and quite clearly a man of considerable astuteness.
Freddie put the change down to the General’s annoyance at Gregory’s escape, but Erika said she felt that there was more to it than that; otherwise, why should he have gone out of his way first thing that morning to warn them to stick to their original story and say as little as possible in front of his Political Commissar?
Angela agreed with her. She also had felt that Kuporovitch had been pretending to be thick-witted, when they knew him to be nothing of the kind, and that he was therefore hiding some secret of his own which might later prove to be to their advantage. In consequence they hoped that he might come down to see them, or send for them again when he was alone, so that they might talk to him without restraint and perhaps get a clearer view of his true feelings towards them. But the day passed without their seeing any more of him.
On the Sunday morning one of the jailers, who had now taken charge of them, indicated that they should put on their furs and led them out into one of the inner courtyards of the castle for an hour’s exercise; after which they were brought back and locked up again. The same thing happened on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. This single hour a day was all the respite they had from boredom, which after the first day or two began to outweigh their anxieties. The General neither sent for them nor came to see them; so they decided that a hangover had been responsible for the sudden deterioration in his wits and manners. They had no books, papers or games and, unlike the long spell of voluntary confinement which they had spent in the trapper’s house where they had had all sorts of jobs to occupy them, here they had not a stroke of work to do, apart from cleaning out their own cells which occupied only a few moments each morning.
They talked of this and that, but owing to the many weeks they had spent constantly in each other’s company each of them already knew the other’s views upon practically every subject, so they were reduced to useless speculation as to what had become of Gregory and their own possible fate.
It was on the Friday afternoon that Angela announced: “We shall have been here a week tonight, you know, so our time of grace is nearly up; and if you ask me, we’ve been counting without any justification at all on the idea that having got away himself Gregory will find some means of helping us.”
“I’m quite sure he would if he could,” said Erika swiftly.
“Naturally you feel that way, darling,” Angela replied, not unkindly, “because you love him; but you know the old saying, ‘Love in a man’s life is a thing apart; ’tis woman’s whole existence’. I believe that applies in this case. If you had escaped, the only thing you’d give a damn about would be trying to save Gregory; although, of course, I’m sure you’d try and get Freddie and me out too, if you could. But Gregory probably views things differently—not because he doesn’t love you, but because he’s a man; and so would put what he considers his duty before his personal feelings.”
Freddie nodded. “Yes. I know what you’re driving at. I didn’t want to depress either of you by saying so, but I’ve been thinking on those lines myself from the very beginning.”
“On account of the typescript he got from Goering’s safe?” said Erika.
“That’s it,” Angela agreed. “You know how immensely important he considered it was; so much so that he readily risked all our lives in an attempt to get it back to London. We should never have left our refuge in the forest until the spring if it hadn’t been for that. Well, the fact that we were arrested hasn’t made it less important. Gregory saw a chance to get out so he took it. He may have felt like hell at having to leave us in the lurch but the typescript was the thing that was uppermost in his mind. He’s probably resigned himself by now to the fact that we’re all as good as dead and is trying to console himself as well as he can with the knowledge that he couldn’t have helped us if he had remained a prisoner, whereas, once he was free, it was his definite duty to try to get through with those vitally important papers.”
Erika smiled. “I didn’t say anything about it either, but I made up my mind long ago that having once escaped that is just what he would have done; and I don’t think any of us can blame him.”
“Not a bit,” Freddie said quickly. “The only thing I don’t understand is why he should have given it away to the General that we’re wanted by the Gestapo.”
“You two are not,” replied Erika quietly—“at least, Freddie may be, for that affair in Helsinki, but even that is doubtful; and Angela certainly isn’t.”
“No,” Angela admitted uneasily. “It’s you and Gregory they are really after, darling.”
“Yes; I realise that, and, of course, once we get to Moscow there is no-one to whom I can appeal, whereas both of you can demand the protection of the British Ambassador.”
Freddie laughed, a little uncertainly. “I’ve been keeping that up my sleeve, because I didn’t want Angela to count on it. You know what these Bolshies are—they may not allow us to appeal to anybody. I’m afraid all we can do for the moment is to stick together and hope for the best.”
That conversation was the last which they were fated to hold on the subject of Gregory’s escape and their own gloomy prospects but, afterwards, Erika was glad that they had had it. In the past six days she had been gradually veering towards the opinion that Gregory would not return, and this talk fully confirmed her in it.
For some inexplicable reason he had given away to General Kuporovitch the fact that they were wanted by the Gestapo, so sooner or later she would be handed over to the Nazis and taken back to Berlin to be executed. They were well guarded in the castle and, even if they could have escaped, their inability to speak Russian and the climatic conditions would have made it utterly impossible for them to get away from the Arctic town. She had never shirked facing anything except poverty and dirt in her brilliant but hazardous career. Whatever hopes Freddie and Angela might pin on being allowed to communicate with their own Embassy when they reached Moscow it was better that she should no longer buoy herself up with day-dreams of Gregory’s accomplishing her rescue by some brilliant trick or great feat of daring; but make up her mind to endure, with as much dignity and courage as she could muster, the ignominy and death which were in store for her.
It was as well that she made this resolution on the Friday night, because in the middle of Saturday morning two guards came and beckoned to Freddie and Angela; but when Erika made to follow them the soldiers pushed her back and relocking the door left her alone in the cell. Half an hour later the furs and few belongings of the other two, which they had brought from the trapper’s house, were collected. Afternoon drew into evening and as they did not come back Erika slowly began to realise that in all probability they had been separated from her for good.
No message was brought to her from them, so evidently they had not been allowed to communicate with her, and she had no means of asking the guards what had happened to them. When breakfast-time came on Sunday morning and they still had not returned, she made up her mind that she must nerve herself to even greater courage, as she would now have to face future eventualities quite alone.
By Wednesday four days’ solitary confinement had begun to tell upon her, as with nothing to occupy her the hours in the silent, gloomy fortress seemed to crawl by; but she knew that the period the General had mentioned was already up. At any time now instructions about her might be arriving from Moscow, and on the Thursday, just after she had eaten her midday meal she was sent for.
With the General, upstairs in his room, were the little ferret-faced Political Commissar and two black-uniformed S.S. men. Erika’s footsteps faltered as she saw them. She had expected at least the further respite of the journey to Moscow and, although she had tried very hard to put it away from her, there had lingered in her mind the small but persistent hope that even if Gregory could not get her out of the castle he might be planning some attempt to rescue her on her way south. Now, she felt, that hope, too, was shattered. She knew the methods of the Gestapo. They never wasted time or put themselves to unnecessary expense in eliminating their enemies. Evidently, as these two Nazis had come all the way to Kandalaksha, permission had been obtained from their Russian friends for them to execute her there; so her life could now be measured in hours—or perhaps minutes.
One of the S.S. men, a big, fleshy, red-faced young brute, stepped forward and looked at her curiously. “So you’re the celebrated Erika von Epp? I’ve often heard of you.”
It was pointless for her to deny it as he was holding her passport, which the General had given him, in his hand. Inclining her head she walked, with that regal carriage which Gregory loved so much, to a chair and calmly sat down.
The General, the Commissar and the S.S. men had a short discussion in Russian. The Germans signed some papers, the General bowed politely and said to her in French:
“The courage which you show in such a situation has all my admiration, Countess. I deeply regret that my duty prevents my being of any assistance to you, but I must hand you over to these gentlemen”; and, having thanked him courteously, she was led from the room.
Down in the main hall her furs were brought to her and she was taken out to a large sleigh in which the Gestapo men placed themselves on either side of her. The sleigh drove through the gates and down into the little square of the town, but the driver did not turn towards the railway-station. Instead, he took the opposite direction and after a quarter of an hour, when they had passed beyond the last scattered buildings, it pulled up on a long, flat expanse of snow where a black German plane was waiting.
Owing to newly-fallen snow they had great difficulty in getting off the ground, but after three unsuccessful attempts the pilot made them all crowd themselves into the tail of the machine and managed to get into the air. It was ‘Molotov weather’ again, and as the plane roared southwards they could see the frozen lakes and vast forests spread below them. For the first two-thirds of the journey they were well to the east of the Finnish border but the country was very much the same as Eastern Finland.
As Erika watched the countless millions of trees sliding away below them she remembered how Gregory had said that unless the Allies and the Scandinavian countries came to Finland’s assistance, making an advance into Russia possible and giving the Finns air superiority, the war must be over by the spring. All Finland’s wealth lay in such endless forests, and newly-planted trees took forty years to reach maturity. Once the snow which was protecting them through the long winter had melted, the Russians would be able to start huge forest fires by scattering incendiary bombs. The Finns might hold the Mannerheim Line but they would have to surrender if faced with the destruction of the entire potential wealth of their country for two generations to come.
At last the forests ended and just when dusk was falling a great, white expanse lay before them which Erika knew must be the Gulf of Finland. Far away in the distance there was a streak of colour. It was March the 7th and further south the thaw had already set in; the ice in the Baltic was breaking up and giving place to blue-green water.
Before they reached the coast-line the plane circled and came down on a big military airfield where many Soviet planes were in evidence. At first Erika thought that they had descended only to refuel, but she was told to get out, and was led between the hangars to a car; so she guessed that they were to break their journey here for the night.
The car took them a few miles through the area where the battles of January had raged, until it entered a deep wood in which there were many hutments; to pull up before a block that had bars across each of its long line of windows and a Russian sentry on guard outside it. The Gestapo men got out and shepherded Erika across some duck-boards to the entrance, an N.C.O. was summoned and she was taken inside to one of the row of rooms. It had a stove to warm it but only a palliasse and blankets on the floor. Leaving her there they locked her in.
Twenty minutes later a Russian soldier brought her a meal of stew, rye bread and coffee substitute. It was still quite early—only a little after seven o’clock—but she felt so tired and dispirited that, after eating what she could, she tried to settle down for the night.
She had not been lying still for long before she discovered, to her horror, that the straw of the mattress was alive with bedbugs and that the blankets held a colony of lice. Abandoning the palliasse in disgust she curled up on the floor, near the stove, but its hardness, together with the irritation of the vermin which had now got under her clothes and were biting her in a score of places, made sleep impossible; all through the long hours of the night she tossed and squirmed in abject misery.
In the morning she attempted to delouse herself but the vermin were so numerous that her slaughter of them seemed hardly to decrease their numbers and, after a time, the job made her physically sick. She expected the Nazis to come for her to continue their journey but, to her surprise, they did not appear, and except for the soldier, who brought her more food, she was left alone until the afternoon.
She had just switched on the electric light when the door was unlocked and Grauber came in. It was a moment before she recognised him. One bandage swathed his head, covering his empty eye socket, another covered his chin and the whole of the lower portion of his face, but his remaining eye glinted at her with evil satisfaction.
“Guten Tag, Frau Gräfin” he said in his thin, piping voice. “So we have run you to earth at last.”
Erika did not reply, so he went on with evident enjoyment: “Jawohl; we’ve got you now, and I had you brought here because long ago I promised myself the pleasure of breaking that aristocratic pride of yours. It will be fun to see you scream and whimper before all that I intend to leave of you is dragged out to the execution yard. And don’t imagine that your English boy-friend, Mr. Gregory Sallust, will be able to come to your assistance. We’ve got him too.”
At that Erika was stunned into retort. “You swine!—you filthy swine!” she whispered between closed teeth.
“That makes you sit up, doesn’t it?” he laughed in his high falsetto. “He was here two nights ago, posing as von Lutz again, and he had succeeded in wangling an order for your release with which he left for Kandalaksha; but I got on to his game in time and the men whom I sent to fetch you in the plane also took an order to the Governor there to arrest him directly he turns up.”
Erika’s heart was thudding. Dear Gregory—dear Gregory. So he had risked everything to try to save her, after all; but he was caught this time and—worse—those all-important papers would never get to England now.
“I shall proceed about your extermination slowly, Frau Gräfin” Grauber went on with studied malice. “We have none of the usual aids to questioning prisoners or even an—er—examination room, but I don’t need accessories to make little traitors like you go on their knees and beg for death.”
Suddenly he struck her a violent blow in the face with his clenched fist. Reeling backwards she fell upon the filthy palliasse, with her mouth cut and bleeding. Having watched her for a moment as she lay there moaning he kicked her twice and, turning away, left the room.
The Russian soldier who brought her evening meal looked at her with round, pitying eyes when he saw the blood on her face and brought her a little lukewarm water with which to bathe her mouth; but that night it seemed to her that she had descended into the depths of hell.
In attempting to save her Gregory had been caught himself. At the very moment of his triumph, after heaven knew what superhuman scheming and endeavour during the last twelve days, he had walked straight into a trap; and been re-arrested the instant he produced the order which was to free her. They would make very certain, too, that he did not escape again. It was the end for him, and the end for her. In a torment of misery she sobbed herself into an exhausted doze which was constantly broken by the biting of the vermin and nightmare thoughts of Grauber.
He came again the following afternoon, bringing with him a thin, flexible riding switch, and he spent an hour in her cell. Perhaps he did not wish the Russians to hear her screaming, or it may have been that he delighted to start her torment very gently, since he did not apply the switch savagely but struck her on the hands, the hips, the upper arms and the calves of the legs, little stinging blows every few minutes, while he taunted her and told her some of the things that he had in mind to do to Gregory.
On Sunday and Monday he came again and plied his switch each time with increasing vigour until the tender flesh of her whole body was criss-crossed with thin, aching red weals. On the Sunday she fought him, driving her nails deep into his cheek above the bandage and burying her teeth in his hand; but he hit her a blow in the stomach that drove the breath from her body and doubled her up in a writhing heap on the floor. On Monday, with the intention of rousing the guard, she deliberately began to scream the moment her tormentor entered the room; but the soldier who came in response to her screams was not the wide-eyed young peasant who had brought her the water three nights before. He was a sullen-looking lout who, on a sharp word from Grauber, shrugged his shoulders and slammed the door. After that she could only moan and submit to each further vicious little flick which was never hard enough to harm her seriously but which in succession were fraying her nerves to tatters.
The remainder of each twenty-three hours, when Grauber was not with her and she was not drowsing in torpid nightmare-ridden sleep, she spent in an agony of dread anticipating his next visit. She no longer even noticed the lice and bed-bugs that were now swarming on her or cared about her filthy, unwashed condition; and thought only of the fresh torments that were in store for her. But on the the Tuesday afternoon when she shuddered with apprehension at hearing the key turn in the lock of her cell a new figure entered; a tall, thin-faced man in the uniform of a German General.
Scrambling to her feet she ran towards him stretching out her bruised hands and stammering a plea for his protection, but he gently pushed her back and closed the door carefully behind him.
“You don’t remember me, Frau Gräfin?” he said in a low voice.
“Why, yes!” she exclaimed. “You’re Rupprecht von Geisenheim.”
He nodded. “Yes. I’m the head of the German Military Mission to the Soviet and I don’t know if you know it, but this camp is Marshal Voroshilov’s Headquarters.”
The tears sprang to her eyes as she muttered: “Oh, take me away from that fiend Grauber, he—he’s killing me by inches.”
Von Geisenheim shook his head sadly. “I can’t possibly express how sorry I am for you, but you know the power of these Gestapo chiefs. It’s more than my life is worth to try to give you my protection—in fact, I am risking a great deal by coming to see you here today, and I only decided to chance it because Grauber has gone into Leningrad for the night.”
“Why have you come, then?” she cried desperately.
“Just to tell you two things which I thought might enable you to die more bravely. Firstly, I wanted you to know that the man you are in love with did not desert you; he moved heaven and earth to get an order for your release and to reach Kandalaksha before the Gestapo.”
“I know that,” she said quickly. “I know that.”
“I’m aware of his real identity,” the General went on, lowering his voice to a whisper. “We recognised each other when he arrived here. We were together in the fight that night at the Adlon, but by a miracle none of the Gestapo people who were there appear to have noticed me, so I was not arrested afterwards.”
“You—you’re one of us, then?” Erika said slowly.
“Yes. And the movement is still going on. As you know, it was only our friends in Berlin who revolted on the night of November the 8th. Since the Putsch was a failure the officers who commanded at the battle-fronts and in the garrisons all over Germany did not join in, so there are still many thousands of us who are ready to make a new bid for freedom when the time is ripe. You have been out of things for the last three months so you know nothing of our new plans and therefore can give nothing away however much they may torture you. But I wanted you to know that, although you will not live to see the day, all that is best in Germany will yet rise to overthrow Hitler and make our people great, free and respected again.”
“Thank you,” she murmured, the tears streaming down her face. “Thank you, Herr General; it was good of you to come to me. I shall bear things better now that I know that our country is really to be freed from men like Grauber and all the evil they have brought into the world.”
“You see now why I must resist the dictates of all decency and chivalry,” Von Geisenheim went on. “By seeking to intervene on your behalf I should jeopardise my life; and it is my duty to live because I have work to do for the salvation of Germany. You will die, I know, with the courage of a true von Epp; in the meantime I can only wish you fortitude.” Clicking his heels he bowed low over her swollen, blistered hand and kissed it; then he left the room as quietly as he had come.
That night she tried to fortify herself again with the thought that what she was undergoing was no worse than the sufferings of thousands of other men and women in the German concentration camps who had earned the hatred of individual Nazis or of the countless Czechs and Poles they had enslaved. Yet the knowledge that these brute-beasts, who were now seeking to bring the whole world under the scourge of their whips at the orders of their soulless, power-lusting Leader, would be swept away in due time by the forces of Good which were rallying against them was scant comfort beside the fact that she had yet so much to suffer before she died.
On the Wednesday morning she was shivering with fear again and even the sound of prolonged cheering in the camp about eleven o’clock did not rouse her curiosity. At three o’clock in the afternoon the door of her cell opened once again to admit Grauber.
He was in high good spirits and told her that the Russo-Finnish War was over. As he plied his switch from time to time he gleefully outlined the humiliating terms which the unfortunate Finns had been forced to accept after their magnificent resistance. In a spurt of rage Erika flared at him:
“You laugh too soon, you filthy brute! The Russians and you Nazis can smash these small people at your will, but you yet have Britain and France and America to deal with and they’ll get you in the end; then the German people will revolt and crucify every one of you.”
He laughed and flicked her across the face with his whip. “You little wild-cat; you’re talking nonsense. And, anyhow, if things do go that way you’ll never live to crow over us. Now this war’s over I’m going back to Berlin and I mean to take you with me. You remember that private cell of mine in my own house? We can have many pleasant little sessions there when I’m off duty. Auf weidersehen, Frau Gräfin” He stressed the last word mockingly as he turned and left her.
That night of Wednesday, March the 13th, was the worst of all the ghastly nights that she had spent during the past fortnight. The picture of the cell of which Grauber had spoken was constantly before her eyes; he might keep her there for weeks while satiating his sadistic brutality upon her. All night through she tossed and turned and when morning came she could hardly think coherently. She was afraid now that she would go mad before she died and barely had the strength to wonder what was about to happen; when, long before dawn, her cell was opened, her furs were thrust at her by one of the Russian soldiers and she was led outside to a sleigh.
In the faint light she saw that Grauber was already sitting in it dressed for a journey. He was wearing his eagle-crested peaked cap, instead of the fur papenka that he had worn on his visits to her hut, but he had a fur coat over his uniform and its collar was turned up round his ears to protect him from the cold. A Russian soldier was driving the sleigh and another sat on the box beside him. When she got in Grauber grunted at her as he moved over a little to make room, and the sleigh drove off.
Once it was clear of the wood it turned south. A few miles further, having reached the coast-line, it left the shore and drove on, continuing in the same direction over the ice. Erika roused herself for a moment to wonder if they were taking a short cut to the nearest railway-station by crossing a big bay; but she was so cold and utterly wretched that she no longer cared. Grauber, hunched up in his furs beside her, had gone to sleep and, having been roused so early, she tried to follow his example.
A bitter wind was blowing and it was still dark when, after two hours’ driving, they reached a break in the ice beyond which blue water could be faintly seen. The sleigh halted and, getting out, Grauber began to flash a torch. His signal was answered. A quarter of an hour elapsed and the sound of oars splashing in the water became perceptible; then a boat drew up alongside the edge of the ice.
Grauber motioned to her to get into the boat and she obeyed while he turned back to talk to the two soldiers for a few minutes. She noticed that in comradely Russian fashion he shook hands with them before he joined her. The boat pushed off and they were rowed away through the gloomy dawn light to a small tramp steamer which was standing out about half a mile away in the bay where the ice had melted. Some sailors helped Erika up the ladder and Grauber followed her. The boat was hoisted in and the ship’s engines began to turn over.
Erika had already guessed what was happening. Now that the ice in the Baltic was breaking up it would be quicker and more comfortable to go down by ship to Danzig than to spend two nights sitting up in a railway-carriage on a journey through Russia and Poland. Grauber was standing beside her on the deck as she watched the icy shore of mutilated Finland recede. Suddenly she felt him put his arm through hers and the voice she loved more than anything else in the world said:
“Take it easy, darling.”
She swung round with a half-strangled cry. Her companion had taken off his uniform cap and removed the black eye-shade. Next moment she was in Gregory’s arms.
“But how—how did you do it?” she gasped between her sobs of joy when at last he released her.
His old, wide smile lit up his lean, strong face. “I was a day too late when I arrived at Kandalaksha and I reached there in a raging fever that held me up for three days; but I left again on Monday evening. When I heard the Gestapo had sent a plane to fetch you I felt certain that must have been Grauber’s work so I hurried back to Voroshilov’s headquarters. Von Geisenheim told me what had happened and we planned this coup directly I got in last night.”
He paused to kiss the red weal that ran across her cheek, where Grauber had struck her the day before, then hurried on: “I already had Voroshilov’s order for your release and when I half-murdered Grauber a week ago I took everything of his that I thought might be useful to me, including his uniform and his eye-patch. With the patch and the bandages he had been wearing it wasn’t difficult to get myself up well enough to pass for him in the darkness. The two soldiers on the sleigh were grand fellows who had accompanied me to Kandalaksha and back; but I didn’t dare to let you know about my imposture in front of them, because they both speak German.”
“But the ship, darling—how did you manage to get a ship? And where are we going?”
“We’re going to Norway first, as this is a Norwegian vessel. If only Hitler hasn’t walked into it before we get there. You remember the plan. And now the Finnish business is settled Denmark and Norway are the next on the list.”
“Angela and Freddie!” Erika exclaimed. “They were taken away just a week after you left. D’you know what’s happened to them?”
“They’re all right, my sweet. When I first came South I saw the British Vice-Consul in Leningrad and fixed things up with him. No-one will ever know who shot those soldiers in Petsamo so the Russians have nothing against Angela or Freddie and the Consul was going to arrange for the British Embassy to demand their release. It came off all right, too, as Kuporovitch told me when I got back to Kandalaksha. A junior secretary from the British Embassy was sent up there to fetch them, so they’re on their way home to a grand honeymoon now.”
“Oh, bless them. And you’ll be able to get the typescript to London if only we reach Norway safely.”
He laughed. “It’s been in the hands of the British Government for days. I told the whole story to the Vice-Consul in Leningrad, wrote a letter explaining matters to my old friend Sir Pellinore Gwaine-Cust and swore an affidavit as to how that poisonous plan to brand the Nazi Swastika on every state in Europe, one by one, had come into my possession. He saw at once how damnably dangerous and subtle the whole scheme was and, although he’s not supposed to do such things, he agreed to take it himself to Moscow so that it could be flown home in one of the Embassy bags. That was much quicker than my trying to take it myself, and so much more certain.”
“But the ship, darling—how did you get the ship?”
Gregory turned to a fur-clad figure that had been standing near them. “You remember our old friend, General Kuporovitch? We left his little friend Oggie locked in a grain store that’s only opened once a week; then the General and I came South together. When we reached Leningrad yesterday afternoon I passed over to him my passport as von Lutz and Voroshilov’s order. With the order, and his new identity as the Colonel-Baron, he was able to go out to Kronstadt Bay, where the ice is breaking up, and arrange for the Norwegian captain of this ship to steam out and lie off here till we could join him.”
Kuporovitch kissed Erika’s hand. “Madame la Comtesse!” he murmured. “This Gregory of yours is a man in a million and between us we are ten thousand devils. It is I who have left prison and I feel young for the first time in twenty years. How marvellous it will be to see Faris again. The three of us together, eh? We must celebrate our freedom there for at least a month.”
Erika shook her head. “You’ve forgotten, General, that I’m German. I can’t go to either of the Allied countries before the war is over, since I won’t go as a refugee. I’m afraid you’ll both have to leave me in Norway.”
“Perhaps,” Gregory said thoughtfully; “but Norway won’t be safe for very long. We three know that; and we know, too, that the Allied Governments won’t make a patched-up peace after they’ve seen Goering’s typescript. But each time Hitler is compelled to break away from the plan and lash out in a new direction through the pressure of the German people, whom he cannot hold unless he redeems his promise to them of speedy victories, he will weaken himself. Norway, Denmark, Holland, Belgium and the rest—each will take its toll of German lives, planes, steel and petrol. Even if Hitler succeeds in overrunning them he will have to police them afterwards and tie up hundreds of thousands of men to keep them under, just as he has already had to do in Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland. In the meantime, just as in the last war, the British and French War Cabinets will be reconstructed to bring in more forceful elements, and while Germany exhausts herself the might of the Allies will constantly increase, until under the leadership of Churchill, perhaps, since he is the most dynamic and inveterate enemy the Germans ever had, the full, colossal power of the Free Peoples will stem the Nazi tide of conquest. Once that happens, Hitler’s edifice will go to pieces like a house of cards; so the war may be over much sooner than people think.”
“Then perhaps we’ll be able to celebrate together in Paris by the Spring.” Kuporovitch wafted an ironic kiss from his gloved finger-tips to the fading, icy shore of the new territories just acquired at such appalling cost by the Union of Soviet ‘Slave’ Republics and rolled the words round his tongue.
“Ah! Paris in the Spring!”
“Yes,” said Gregory. “Or Berlin.”