Текст книги "Watcher in the Shadows "

Автор книги: Geoffrey Household

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WATCHER IN THE SHADOWS

a novel by

GEOFFREY HOUSEHOLD

For Win and Cyrus Brooks

Burning Bright

I look back on my course of action as lunacy; and yet at the time it seemed the only way out. Pride, probably. One can never quite escape from one’s ancestors. Old Cunobel understood that. But there was a perverted common sense in it, too. The police admitted afterwards that if I had continued to live my normal life —and since I had to work to eat, what else could I do? – they would not have been able to protect me.

Ian Parrow saw the position as that of a hunter who is trying to protect some terrified native village from a man-eater. It is no use to cordon the place and post a rifle up every tree. The man-eater simply observes the whole preparation – tempering its disappointment with contempt – and goes away until everyone is sick of the whole business. Then it returns.

In my case there was no one to protect except myself, terrified enough, God knows, for an entire village. But the principle was the same. I had to hunt the poor brute down alone, on foot and on horse, and give him every chance to show himself.

Since the late nineteen-forties I have earned an obscure but very satisfying living as a zoologist, specializing in the life cycles of the smaller European mammals. Experience from youth onwards has fitted me for patient work out of doors in all weather, and I have even learned to enjoy the long hours at my desk, comparing and compiling statistics. English is not my native tongue, but I speak it without accent. As for writing it, the international jargon of scientists generally eases my task. That will not help me here. But I take it I cannot go far wrong if I write as I talk.

On the morning of May 20, 1955, I was working on some weak but fascinating evidence of delayed implantation of the blastocyst in the red squirrel – already proved for the roe deer and the badger – when I heard the double knock of the postman at my front door. It was before eleven and I was alone – thank God! – in the house.

The French windows of my study were wide open. Before leaving the room I closed them to prevent the fresh west wind blowing all the papers off my desk. Then there was a delay of another half minute while the catch of the window gave trouble. Meanwhile the postman, I imagine, was waiting impatiently to deliver his small parcel. When at last I walked up the passage from my study to the front door, its panels disintegrated in front of me.

That was my first impression – through the eyes. Though I was only some fifteen feet away from the door, I observed it separating into its original planks before I was conscious of noise and vapor.

The lock had jammed, and there was enough door left, except around the letter box, to obstruct the way out. I ran into the dining room and out through its now glassless window. On the path lay the upper and lower halves of the postman, joined together —if one could call it joined – by the local effects of the explosion.

The red post office van stood at the gate. My very suburban street was filling with people, mostly women. I remember wondering where they all came from. I have a habit of distracting my mind from whatever shocks it by a moment of unrelated speculation. Did those morning houses always hold such an intolerable crowd of untidy human beings behind their closed doors?

The more sensitive stood at my garden gate only for seconds. The rest stayed to stare, gradually infiltrating the garden. None of them approached the postman. I do not think the reason was the public’s callous lack of initiative. It was so obvious that the postman needed no help.

I tore down one of the dining room curtains with a nervous jerk and covered the body. All the intruders were firing questions at me. I could only reply that I hadn’t seen, didn’t know, couldn’t explain. I vaguely expected some sort of hostile demonstration. Of course there was none. That horrified little crowd assumed that the postman’s death was as meaningless as a road accident.

At last a policeman arrived; then, with very creditable speed, a patrol car and a van of police from the borough station. Like a team of well-trained, fatherly sheep dogs, they handled the gaping women, the body and the search for every scrap of paper from the presumed parcel.

I disliked both them and their uniforms. At that time – I think I am over it now – police, even the kindly English police, made me as unreasonably impatient as some ardent pacifist bristling at the approach of a battalion behind its band. I knew of course that it was absurd to resent the obedience of a sheep on an occasion when one could be nothing else, and I tried to avoid too aristocratic a coldness in answering their quick, courteous questions. I doubt if I succeeded, but they put my manner down to the effect of shock upon a retiring scientist.

The ambulance came and departed. A policeman was posted at my front gate. I was offered a lift to the station which I accepted, smiling at what seemed to me hypocritical politeness. The detective was hurt. He explained that it really was an offer and that many people were shy at being taken away immediately in a police car when they had witnessed a crime or accident; they preferred to make their way to the station independently in order to avoid gossip among the neighbors.

Once in the superintendent’s office I was more at ease. The face above the uniform was that of a hard-worked accountant or civil servant. He was a sensible and kindly man of about my own age, and he made it plain at once that he thought me the intended victim of the explosion and in no way responsible for it.

“You know of no motive, Mr. Dennim?” he asked. “No enemies at all?”

I did not. It never occurred to me that anyone could think me worth murdering. But I had been half prepared for some nightmare accusation of blowing up red squirrels and bagging a postman instead.

“Any domestic cause which could help us?”

“You mean a jealous husband or something of that sort?”

“Just any irregularity,” he said quietly in the tone of a father confessor.

“Not on my part. And I am certain you can rule out my aunt.”

“She is unmarried?”

I saw the way his mind was working and suggested that he had better get his own impression of Aunt Georgi.

“She is a widow,” I warned him, “and of very sane, determined and individual character.”

“Have you any theory of what actually happened, Mr. Dennim?”

I had and I gave it him. When I did not answer the postman’s knock, he tried to force the parcel through my letter box instead of leaving it with the next-door neighbors or taking it back for a later delivery. My letter box had a bigger opening than usual; a good-sized book, for example, would fit in. The explosive was probably meant to go off when the string was undone or an interior lid was lifted. But what happened was that the parcel jammed in the box —which might have broken the acid container or released the spring of the trigger device.

I was so absorbed in explanation that I did not see I had given him a clue, harmless enough but inviting questions, to my past life.

“Never blown anyone up yourself, I suppose?” he asked with too forced a heartiness.

“Just an army course on how to do it.”

“You have never had any connection with – well, any of these violent nationalist groups?”

“No. The parcel could not have been meant for me or my aunt at all.”

“But you said your letter box set it off.”

I told him that it must have been delivered in error, that either the sender got the house number wrong or the postman made a mistake. The street was correct. I had picked up and handed over to the police a bit of blood-sodden brown paper which showed the last half of the street name in printed capitals.

“What do you know of your next-door neighbors?”

“We say good morning and comment on the tulips.”

“In your profession as a zoologist you have not come across anything which could provide a motive for putting you out of the way?”

“I fear my results are not sufficiently spectacular, Superintendent. I am only a decided nuisance to one microbiologist, and even so, he moderates his language when I buy him a drink.”

I tried to turn the conversation into the world of science where murder is rare. Presumably rare. After all we have so many ways of making it appear death from natural causes. But the superintendent refused to be sidetracked.

“I gather you were in some branch of intelligence,” he said. “Are you sure there is no motive dating from that?”

“I cannot imagine one.”

“Would you care to tell me more?”

I took refuge in the Official Secrets Act and referred him to the War Office. Whatever they chose to tell him – it would certainly be one of those statements of bare facts which look revealing and are not —I knew he would keep to himself. But I was by no means sure that the police did not gossip about any curious stories which they discovered on their own. I did not want my past and former nationality to be known all over the district just because a postman had been killed at my front door. I think I was unjust, but there again my prejudice against police, any police, was at work.

The superintendent got his own back when I left him. I was thoroughly disconcerted by the sight of half a dozen newspapermen in and around the entrance to the station.

“What on earth am I to say to these fellows?” I appealed.

“There is not much I can teach you about keeping back information,” he said drily. “I can only advise you not to make a mystery of yourself.”

In fact it was easy. I played the dull specialist in a dull profession who knew nothing, had noticed nothing and was outraged that there should have been anything out of the ordinary to notice. The representatives of the evening papers were completely taken in. What I said was not quotable either for its inanity or for any intelligent conjecture. Charles Dennim, a zoologist living quietly with his aunt, simply was not news.

Only one of the papers thought me worth a photograph. Aunt Georgi declared it to be unrecognizable. I looked, she said, like a hangman who had taken to religion. With my face at rest, perhaps it was not very surprising that I should.

Georgina and I shared the house and our small incomes, saving each other from the cheap hotel which might otherwise have ruined our privacy and digestions. It was a natural partnership. We were both survivors from another age – a couple of dinosaurs, let us say – one of an older generation than the other, but both equally successful at persuading a society of little mammals that we were perfectly adjusted to it. As for ourselves, we endured each other in an unbroken state of deep affection and armed neutrality.

Georgina had the genial, positive manners of a trim little cavalry general retired on a pension. When she wore a bowler hat and riding breeches she could almost pass as one. At the riding school where she was assistant mistress, she had been, I understand, occasionally addressed by a new pupil as “Sir.” But never twice.

I met her on her way back from the school to prepare her for the shock of finding no downstairs windows and a policeman at the front gate. She took the news extremely well. It was to her one of those inexplicable happenings in an unreasonably excitable society at which a woman of character shrugs her shoulders. Only the actual absence of windows prevented her saying that the whole affair had been much exaggerated by the press.

I was therefore surprised when, after dinner, she continued to show a too persistent curiosity. It was not fear. She was quite incapable of nervousness.

After I had made some of the polite but uninterested noises by which one assures a female companion, wife or aunt, that one is listening, she said:

“Charles, you are not to be deliberately stupid! Suppose that package had been meant to kill one of us?”

I laid down the evening paper and remarked that we did not know it was meant to kill anybody.

“Of course we do!”

“We do not. It might have been a packet of detonators which some damned fool sent through the post. One of our neighbors down the street or next door probably knows what caused the accident and isn’t saying.”

“Which next door?”

“I cannot guess.”

“And what was it?”

“Dear Aunt Georgi, how the devil do I know? You have, like all women, a tendency to argue when there is no evidence to argue from.”

“And you, Charles,” she retorted, “because the evidence was removed in an ambulance, try to believe that it was never there at all.”

That shot went home. I was so busy suppressing my own horrified disgust that I had also suppressed an uncomfortable whisper at the back of my mind. It had to be recaptured and thought out like the uneasiness which can spoil a morning until one traces it to a dream.

For the next two days nothing happened. Passers-by stared curiously at the house and at the builders who were repairing front door and windows, and continually discovering frames, gutters and plaster which had to be replaced. The superintendent telephoned once for no obvious reason. I continued to question the love life of the red squirrel. Georgina, jodhpured and tweed-coated, strode off every morning to the riding school, her straight back disapproving the vulgarity of crime and its publicity.

Only once did she approach the subject – obliquely, for she would never allow herself to be snubbed twice.

“It may interest you to know, Charles,” she said, “that there is a new municipal sweeper on this road whose face I do not remember.”

I complimented her on being so observant and added that there was another plain-clothes cop frequently engaged in changing all four wheels of an old car on the waste ground at the corner of Acacia Avenue.

“They seem to think someone is in need of protection.”

“My own theory, Aunt Georgi, is that they suspect you of posting parcels to me.”

“Pah! Fact is – they don’t know any more than we do!”

For the time being she did, I believe, give up any further idea that the parcel was meant for me. So did the superintendent. There were other claimants to the honor of being assassinated. My suburban street was long; still, I should never have guessed that in some three hundred respectable little houses there could be two people who thought themselves important enough to be murdered.

One was a television singer, momentarily resting. She gave the papers an incoherent story of a desperate lover. He really existed. Whenever the psychiatrists pronounced him harmless and returned him to his family, an enterprising publicity agent paid him a small salary. He could be trusted to create a diversion on the doorstep of any female entertainer. But his speciality was threatening suicide. He did not send bombs.

The other was a Cypriot, who had a genuinely strong case —though local police were not sure whether they were Greeks or Turks who thought the world better without him. It was the superintendent who told me all this. He must have had, as I expected, a resounding but reticent report on me from the War Office. He asked me to keep my supposedly experienced eyes open and accepted my assurance that the parcel could not possibly have been addressed to me. Why shouldn’t he? It stood to reason that if I was not confident I would be yammering for protection.

Now that both police and Aunt Georgi had ceased to bother me, my own doubts perversely began to grow. The time of that bomb’s delivery pointed straight at me. An assassin who is not normally a criminal must surely take infinite care not to get the wrong man. The Cypriot might have opened his parcel while talking to a friend, or his landlady. But if the sender wanted me and only me and if he knew the routine of the house he could be sure that I should be alone in it when the parcel postman called.

This suggested that I had been under close observation and might still be. If I were, some face which was familiar to me on my own street or station ought to turn up again on the underground or on my usual routes to the London Library, to the museum, to lunch. When in London I had become very much a creature of habit.

But I could not see a sign that I was followed. That was not surprising if my regular routine had already been checked. For example, it is not necessary for me to disturb an animal by following it about. After a period of patient observation I know what it is likely to be doing and where it is likely to be found at any given time.

I did not change my habits. It was not worth either the trouble or the reproving of myself for undue nervousness. I was still only admitting that it was possible, just faintly possible, that I had been the intended victim of that parcel.

Then there was a curious incident. Not another attempt on me. Nothing but a message, and a very clear one. I received a pamphlet published by some politico-religious society with revolting – and true —photographs of German concentration camps. There was a small cross in one corner of a picture of Buchenwald. It covered the officer’s mess.

Language is a clumsy way of communication. It takes me thirty-five words to convey the meaning of that cross. Something of this sort:

“You do not appear to be worried. That is a pity. I wish you to be worried. I wish it so much that I do not care if this message sends you to the police.”

The sender could not of course know what I had or had not told the police, but there was no sign that I was being guarded. I must have appeared to him very unimaginative.

All the same it was safe to assume that he would keep clear of my house and street for the next few weeks. The danger, if there really was any, would be outside. I took the precaution of moving about by unusual routes at unexpected times and avoiding the edge of underground platforms.

Meanwhile I wrote to an old friend in the Ministry of Justice at Vienna. We had lost sight of each other since 1943, but the bond was close. We were both Austrians with a tradition behind us which made us loathe Hitler and every one of his crazed fanatics. I came directly under his orders in the private war which we carried on under instructions from London. The English are too inclined to think of Germans and Austrians as one people. They forget – if they ever knew – that thousands of us were executed for sabotage.

His reply was immensely cordial. He looked back on that period with enjoyment. Well, perhaps we did enjoy it —for the first year. Death at the hands of the Gestapo had never been, in a sense, more than a day away and we gambled with it. We avoided the thought that if we were caught death would certainly be several months away and that when it came we should be without nails, teeth, sleep or sanity.

He seemed surprised at my question. He thought the murders would have been reported in British papers. I don’t think they ever were. The only foreign murders which interest the British are French.

“There have been no known cases of revenge,” he wrote, “except upon the former staff of Buchenwald. A certain Gustav Sporn, Major, was shot dead outside his home two days after his release from prison. The assassin left no clue to his identity, and nobody greatly cared. Sporn seems to have been an unspeakable brute, and German opinion (though of course, being what they are, they would never admit it) was that the Allies should have hanged him instead of letting him off with a ten-year sentence.

“A month later Captain Walter Dickfuss came out. He was decoyed to a ruined factory where, according to the medical evidence, he was kept alive with great ingenuity for three days. The medicolegal authorities were so shocked by the appearance of the corpse that investigation was and is most thorough.

“Obviously the criminal is some poor devil who survived the horrors of Buchenwald. But all possible suspects have been checked. Nothing fits.

“The third to go was a fellow called Hans Weber against whom there seems to be nothing at all except that he served in the Gestapo and was a guard at Buchenwald – if one can call that nothing. German police believe that Dickfuss implicated him by some confession, possibly false, during torture.

“His was an interesting case, for he was killed in spite of —one might almost say because of – police protection. He was stabbed in a crowd, recovered from a very nasty wound and was then well watched day and night.

“The watch began to slack off after a couple of months, as it always does, but the executioner was more patient. All the police know of him – and they are certain of it – is that he must have plenty of money and unlimited time at his disposal.

“He pretended to be a cop, frightened Weber out of his life, rushed him round a corner for safety, gave him a drink from his hip-flask. And that was that. The hipflask is conjecture. The rest is the evidence of Weber’s wife. She says that the man was above average height. Otherwise her description of him is worthless. She heard the quick conversation at the front door of the flat, but only caught a glimpse of the man’s back as he and Weber rushed out. He must have watched the flat until he was sure of the hour when she put the children to bed.

“We learned in a hard school not to ask unnecessary questions, old friend, but I am bursting with curiosity. If you are on the trail of the murderer – or shall we call him an executioner? – take it up with Scotland Yard. They will presumably have details of all three cases from Interpol.”

There was only one man in whom I felt able to confide. Even him I had avoided for years. I called him up at his farm near Buckingham and asked him to meet me urgently in London at some spot where we could not possibly be seen together. My plan was vaguely forming – clear enough to foresee that there should be no observable connection between us. He told me that he had the use of a friend’s flat and made an appointment for the following day.

Singleton Court was a huge, red-brick block of small flats, built in the middle nineteen-thirties – a regular warren of holes for respectable rabbits without young. As I wandered along the heavily carpeted passages looking for Number 66, I wished we had had something of the sort in central Vienna. Not even a continental concierge could have reported accurately the movements, political tastes and professions behind such an architect’s fever dream of white-painted, closed front doors. If I had been followed by my enemy —and I reckoned he had experience of how and how not to follow—he could never discover on whom I had called.

The door of 66 opened at once when I rang the bell. At the sight of Ian Parrow I felt a curious mixture of affection and resentment. He carried me back eleven years into a life which had become mercifully unreal to the zoologist. And yet that strained, thin face which smiled in the doorway – a face which used to give the impression of lank, black hair and office-white skin as marked as a waiter’s uniform —had meant to me such personal safety as I could have, and safety, still more important, for my honor and reputation. The thin mouth which had been too tense for a soldier had relaxed.

And now I must confess my secret. Even today I hate to put it on paper. Yet I suppose every one of us, whatever the nationality, who fought without a uniform or, worse still, in the enemy’s, must have memories which defile him and from which he shudders away. Perhaps the aristocratic tradition of my family made it harder for me than most. But the two thousand years of Christianity behind a proud and self-respecting boiler-maker are just as powerful.

My father used to say that the claim of the von Dennims to any Empire of Germans was rather better than that of the Hapsburgs. So it is, if you conveniently ignore —as he did —that our direct descent from the House of Hohenstaufen began with a daughter. However, by 1922, when I was ten, orphaned, and collecting cheese rinds from other people’s garbage cans, the point was of minor importance.

As soon as the inflation which followed the First World War was over and the Austrian Republic securely established, enough was recovered from the utter wreck of the family estate to give me comfort and a good education. I specialized in forestry and ecology. Even as a child I was a keen naturalist – too passionately fond of the gun, of course, but that was the fashion of the time.

In 1935 the government sent me to the United States to study some new forestry techniques and report. I was over there when Hitler marched into Vienna. I did not make any secret of my opinion. Normally that would have been recorded against me; but there were no Nazi spies in the forests of the State of Washington.

Our Canadian colleagues across the border were very friendly, and I used occasionally to meet distinguished visitors from London. It must have been one of those who recommended me as a useful man, but I really do not know through what grapevine I was tested and recruited.

In 1939 I was cut off by the blockade without a chance of returning to Europe till the end of the war. But I did return. I was flown to London secretly and trained for a year. My chief was Colonel Ian Parrow.

At the end of my training I was returned to the United States – there was no evidence of any sort that I had ever left it —and told how to make my way to Vienna across the Pacific to Vladivostok and on by the Trans-Siberian railway. I managed it, arriving in the spring of 1941, just before Hitler’s attack on Russia.

I was not suspect. My story was carefully prepared and unshakable. I had completed a long and difficult journey to fight for Hitler, and I was held up as an example of the penniless aristocrat who had made good. God, the nonsense I had to talk!

The channel through which I reported and received my orders was that friend, now in the Ministry of Justice, to whom I had written. He had influence and was trusted by the Nazis. He suggested that I was just the fellow to train security units for operation in dense forest. Though the German armies in Russia had complete control of the main routes, they were bothered by the infiltration of agents and partisans. They wanted police patrols which could operate and maintain themselves out in the thick country on the flanks.

I knew more about trees themselves than playing Red Indians, but I quickly became an authority. It was worth the trouble. The continual posting of personnel to and away from the depot gave me a very good picture of troop movements, and I could pass on the information through my cell for transmission to London.

Then I myself was given command of a unit; but instead of sending us to the Russian forests – all armies are alike – we were stationed in the Apennines, where a good tree was a rarity.

In Italy there was little I could do beyond letting the organization know I was there. That was a pity, for I had two other patriotic, anti-Nazi Austrians in my command. Our chance came when Italy surrendered. We organized the escape of an entire prisoner-of-war camp – routes, stolen transport and all.

Owing to long boredom, we were careless and came under suspicion. Even so it could only be proved that we had been slack and inefficient. My two collaborators were punished by being drafted to grave-digging, and continued accurate reports of troop movements though they had ceased to move. I, since in a sense I was a policeman, was posted to the Gestapo and soon afterwards to the concentration camp at Buchenwald. It was a studied humiliation of my name. Even Hitler despised the Gestapo.

They may have thought that I would commit suicide. Perhaps I should have done so. Day after day I forced myself to resist the temptation to dig myself in with a machine gun and kill the swine till I was killed. But Ian Parrow’s cold-blooded training counted. I was in charge of records and could read committal orders and abstracts of interrogation. Sometimes the documents showed me what the enemy most wanted to know. It was my duty to get the information out.

Since I was hopelessly out of touch with the Austrian organization, it took me months to reopen some channel of communication. When I did, it was direct to London – usually by secret radio, but surprisingly often by what was practically air mail. Chaos in Germany was beginning, and the night sky was so full of activity that an occasional aircraft could land and take off unnoticed.

As soon as the war was over and the Buchenwald guards arrested, I was spirited away. I was not asked to give evidence at the war trials – partly because I was too valuable to be exposed, partly because Ian understood that I had had enough and that my whole soul was rotted by disgust. It was he who obtained for me British nationality – easily, for there was already a distinguished branch of the Dennims in England which had long since dropped the “von” and the title – and he who arranged a future career for me as soon as I had come out of hospital and could bear human society without washing myself continually.

For nine years I had not seen him.

“My dear Charles!” he exclaimed. “You haven’t changed a bit I And what a good little book that was on the squirrel I Obviously they took you for one of themselves!”

He always said in the old days that I reminded him of some confident squirrel flashing a swift look at the intruder before vanishing into the blackness of trees. My russetty color of hair and skin, I suppose, plus a pointed nose and the angular bones of cheek and jaw. But I cannot see any mischief in my face when I look at it. I am more like a tall, thin, battered monkey than a squirrel.

When we had had a drink together and sung the praises of old friends, I told him the story.

“So it’s obvious that someone who was a prisoner in Buchenwald has waited all these years for his revenge. And I am next on his list.”

“But you can’t be!” he insisted. “You weren’t a jailer. You weren’t involved in any of the brutality and executions. You were a sort of adjutant always in the office. Why you? And why now?”

Why me, I could not answer. Why now rather than long ago was pretty plain. Walter Dickfuss had screamed out some accusation during those three days of torture.