Judith

  “If I could free you, Günther... if I could free you, you would tell me.”

  She paused to see what effect this new idea might have upon him. He gave a short harsh bark of laughter — satirical laughter which disowned the validity of the idea; and yet... he did not move. He still stared at the table. Then he took up his cigarette holder and drew a mouthful of smoke from it which he softly launched into the darkness around the door, thinking deeply, almost voluptuously — as if the word itself had struck a note of music in his mind. She stared at him with the eyes of a Medusa. Slowly he turned his head, and his cold eyes met hers with their basilisk stare. For a long second neither spoke. She could hear the drone of a nearby mosquito; somewhere in the middle distance there was the noise of a radio playing Arab quarter-tones. Grete bent her rapt golden head towards him and said, with a queer note of triumph:

  “You would, wouldn’t you?”

  He rose stiffly to his feet and, with his erect military posture, he walked to the further wall, taking, as he did so, a handkerchief from his sleeve. High on the wall there was an object protruding into the room which might have been the metal end of an air ventilator — or some sort of microlink. He slowly and methodically blocked this aperture with his handkerchief. Then he turned and leaned back against the wall and uttered, with an insolent and indifferent tone, a single word.

  “How?”

  “I have a way.”

  A single muscle began to twitch with fatigue under his right eye; but he still stared at her carefully. Words began to tumble from her lips more freely now, for she scented her advantage.

  “I tell you I have a way, Günther. It is on me that the question of your identity turns. If I refuse to identify you, or swear a deposition to say you are not Günther Schiller but someone else... there will be no case against you, do you see?”

  “The Jews know already,” he said softly.

  “Of course; but I am not talking about the Jews.”

  “Who then?”

  “The British. I could get you into British hands quite easily; then I could convince them that you were the wrong man. Do you see?”

  “I don’t believe you,” he said, simply and without heat.

  “But I can prove it,” she said in her thrilling tones. “Günther, I can prove it to you.”

  “You will have me killed afterwards.”

  “Why should I? Once you tell me what I want to know, the British army would send you to Germany, and there you would be freed for lack of evidence. Can’t you see?”

  “How will you get me into British hands? One slip and the Jews will kill me, you know that.”

  “I know that; but leave it to me. All I want is your promise that if I get you into British hands you will tell me. Have I your word?”

  He hesitated for a long moment; she waited, trembling with excitement, staring into those cold little pig’s eyes. At last he said:

  “Very well. I will tell you then.”

  She heaved a great sigh of relief. “Thank God,” she said; and then all her doubts assailed her anew. She turned her face to him once more, scrutinizing his features with an obsessional attention, as if to read the truth on them.

  “Swear,” she said at last. “Swear on your mother, Günther.”

  “Ach.” He cleared his throat swiftly and made an impatient little gesture with his right hand.

  “I swear,” he said, “on my mother.”

  “Swear on Germany.”

  “I swear on Germany.”

  “Swear by Adolf Hitler.”

  “I swear by Adolf Hitler.”

  He stood looking after her as she turned and went to the door of the cell. His glance was one of thoughtful absent-mindedness, as if his preoccupations had suddenly shifted to a new topic.

  “Send me the gaoler please,” he said drily and, putting his hands behind his back, began to walk slowly up and down the cell, deep in thought. He stubbed out his cigarette and stood gazing at the smoke for a moment before resuming his walk. He heard the bolts shoot into the wall after she left, then voices, and finally silence. It was some ten minutes later when the same bolts creaked back and he saw the figure of David advance across the cell towards him. David was astonished by the change in Schiller. His face was pale and drawn and deeply lined.

  “I want to see a priest,” he said. “I am a Catholic. I want to be confessed.”

  “Tonight?”

  “Tonight.”

  “Very well.”

  •

  Lawton’s thoughtful grey eyes rested on the young woman who walked up and down on the carpet before his desk, talking with a strange new nervous intensity. He had never seen Grete so pale and tense; yet she spoke with incisiveness and clarity — almost as if she were talking to herself, defending herself against an imaginary tribunal. Her eyes were circled with black, which suggested how little she had slept.

  “Of course I have no means of judging the truth of the story, yet I believe it, for it comes from someone I knew well at Ras Shamir, and who is in the underground; why should he want to lie? On the other hand is this man Schiller — is he my husband? I can’t tell you that until I actually set eyes on him. That is what I am asking you, Hugh; let me prove it to myself. And then... if he is — you know what I want from him, don’t you? I have hidden nothing from you. But do you see?”

  Lawton puffed his pipe with maddening composure and stared at her with his sympathetic eyes.

  “I am waiting for Cairo to call,” he said. “We’ll soon know if the abduction story is true.”

  She bit her lip with impatience and restrained herself on the edge of an outburst.

  “If it’s true you will?”

  Lawton nodded. But he still sat in a pose of maddening inattention, considering; it was as if some aspect of the affair still troubled him. Grete leaned forward and continued urgently:

  “You see there is a grave danger that the Haganah will take the law into its own hands and murder him; that is what worries me. They are not concerned with abstractions like international justice. If they are satisfied that he is the man, do you think they would bother to hand him over to the Commission and risk him getting free again? Don’t you see the urgency of it?”

  Lawton nodded again, obstinately.

  “I want to cover myself against a mistake,” he said, and once again she was on the edge of giving vent to her feelings by an outburst when mercifully the phone rang. She heard the links snap home from exchange to exchange, and then the hoarse bronchial voice of Bruce Davis crackle in the receiver. Lawton said quietly:

  “Cairo, I have you; did you get my Immediate?”

  The voice at the other end replied:

  “Yes, it’s apparently true; they are keeping it dark for fear the press gets hold of it and turns it into a political triumph for the Palestine Jews. Hiding Nazis will reflect ill on them; and then another reason is that no one is really quite sure he was abducted. He might have done a bunk on his own, nicht wahr? But he’s gone, my boy, and all posts have been warned to keep a lantern in the window for our wandering boy tonight, to coin a quotation.”

  Lawton sighed shortly and said, “Thank you, Bruce.”

  “You see?” she said, her face breaking into a smile of triumph. He nodded. His face had gone very thoughtful all at once. He lowered the desk lamp until its greenish arc swung low over the map which he was unfolding with his other hand.

  “Show me where,” he said, and she stepped to his side, to trace with a nervous finger a maze of streets leading to the short and squalid cul-de-sac, along one wall of which ran the verminous and deserted cells of the now abandoned Turkish prison. He marked this point with a pencil and added the street number. His pipe had gone out.

  “I’ll get a warrant out this morning and take in a search party at dusk,” he said.

  “Not before?” she said with dismay.

  But he did not answer her. He was already dialling the number of the prison department to ask for a squad of police and a search wa
rrant. She was consumed with a burning impatience. The slow methodical British way of going about things drove her mad.

  “Hugh,” she said, “suppose they move him.”

  He re-lit his pipe and shrugged his shoulders negligently.

  “That would be our bad luck,” he said, and, once more ignoring her, picked up his telephone.

  She heard his quiet voice saying:

  “A squad under a lance corporal should be enough for this operation. I want both ends of the street cordoned from six to six thirty this afternoon.” Then he put down the receiver and stood up. He crossed from behind his desk and took her hands to squeeze them briefly.

  “I know what this means to you,” he said.

  “I’ll come with you,” she said eagerly, but he shook his head.

  “There might be some shooting. One never knows. Besides, it’s strictly forbidden to take you on operations of any kind. You’ll wait here and I’ll bring him back to this office under escort.”

  This solution did not please her, and she had difficulty concealing her irritation; but, after reflecting for a moment, it struck her that perhaps it was the wisest decision — particularly as she did not want David or the Haganah to feel that she had betrayed their secrets. She stood for a long minute considering. Lawton watched her sympathetically, and made an awkward attempt to cheer her up.

  “The only man I knew who took women on active service was Carstairs. In the field his tent was always crowded with veiled ladies.”

  But she did not smile. Instead she sighed and said:

  “Very well, if that’s how it must be... but I don’t know how I’m going to live through the day until this evening...

  •

  The operation, which had been inappropriately christened “Marigold” by Lawton’s G.S.O.2., whose interest in botany far outweighed any other, took place as planned with a precision which, to the professional mind, is almost elegance. Punctually at six thirty, two squads of troopers sealed off the cul-de-sac by the Turkish prison, while at the same moment Lawton and a senior police officer stepped out of their cars and walked with slow unhurried but purposeful tread towards the closed door of number 27.

  The street was deserted and silent, and their arrival seemed to cause no kind of interest. Beyond the cul-de-sac the traffic roared past on the Jaffa Road. Dusk was falling, and the first faint blossoms of street lamps were beginning to shine.

  Duff, the policeman, was a huge insensitive lump of manhood, with a rosy face and a walrus moustache. His portentous air irritated Lawton.

  “I think,” he said hoarsely, “I’ll call the picket and break the door down.”

  Lawton gave him an impatient glance and said:

  “It may not be necessary. Let’s try knocking first. We don’t want to wake up the whole street.”

  Suiting the action to the word, he advanced to the door and tapped it twice in peremptory fashion with the muzzle of his squat Luger. There was a long moment of silence. Nothing happened. They waited, feeling rather foolish. Duff gave a windy sigh and looked at his companion with an air of impatient concern. Lawton was about to concede the policeman’s right to call his squad and smash up the door when all of a sudden they heard the noise of footsteps within. They had already noted with care the existence of a Judas in the heavy oak door. This now flicked open, and a startled dark eye confronted them. Lawton barked:

  “Open up! Police!”

  And, to illustrate the matter, thrust his pistol into the aperture until the muzzle rested an inch from the cold forehead of the man inside.

  “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!” said the voice.

  “Then open,” cried the policeman in a sort of snarl.

  There was the squeak of bolts and the rattle of keys and the great door swung open on a deserted area of darkness, at the further end of which there could be dimly discerned a dilapidated stone staircase and a cobwebbed window. Somewhere in the darkness about them they heard the diminishing echo of footsteps scrambling upwards and a voice which shouted:

  “Police!”

  They leaped forward, their pistols cocked, and covered the great hall in a series of strides. The staircase, however, offered many advantages to a hypothetical defence, and they adopted the customary technique of mounting it, their backs pressed to the wall facing inwards, and taking eight stairs at a time before pausing.

  The first floor was deserted and in darkness. The policeman seemed disposed to search it thoroughly before continuing to the second floor — and indeed this would have been a very normal precaution under ordinary conditions. But Lawton knew what he was looking for and knew where to find it. He pressed on.

  The diagram which Grete had drawn on his green blotting pad was still fresh in his mind and, in spite of the almost total darkness, he felt confident and at ease. Experience, too, had something to do with it, for he knew that nothing is more futile than a desultory exchange of shots in darkness, and that no revolver can be counted upon beyond the range of eight feet.

  So far, however, no opposition seemed in sight, and it was when they reached the second floor that he saw a bar of light shining into the open corridor from a half-opened door. His heart sank, for this was the door of the cell in which the captive had been imprisoned.

  He quickened his pace, with the policeman at his heels.

  “It looks as though they’ve got him away,” he said hoarsely.

  The two men hurried — but with circumspection — down the long corridor and peeped into the room. It was indeed the cell as described so painstakingly by Grete, but the scene in it was a singular one.

  Attached to the high iron bar which held a radiator in place hung the body of the German, his neck twisted grotesquely on one side. He had died clumsily, by slow strangulation. Two figures were busy with an old sheath knife, severing the cord which held him to the iron bar. Neither seemed armed and, when the policeman barked “Hands up!” they merely turned frightened white faces upon him before ignoring the challenge and continuing feverishly to try and wrest their captive away from the death he had designed for himself. The Englishmen sheathed their pistols, as if struck dumb by this strange scene, and walked slowly into the radius of the light with an air of vague uncertainty.

  Günther Schiller’s body, in its strange dislocated posture, looked shrunken and twisted — like the body of a bird of prey nailed to a barn door. His face, puffy and contorted, was the colour of cigar ash. The black tip of his tongue stuck out of his swollen lips.

  This scene, which to Lawton was merely grotesque, offered the policeman a professional and academic interest.

  “Well, well, well!” he cried cheerfully. “The poor bugger miscalculated the drop. A foot and a half isn’t enough. He should have waited for me.”

  This gross pleasantry only added to the grotesqueness of the scene. Now the rope gave, and there was a soft plump noise as the body of Günther Schiller scratched down the wall and pitched forward into the arms of his gaolers. They laid him on the floor and, between them, made a desultory sort of inspection to see whether there was any hope of reviving him. But it was obviously a hopeless task.

  The policeman uttered a muffled expletive and turned on Lawton to say:

  “Now I’m beginning to wish we hadn’t come. I suppose we can’t ignore this.”

  He took out his notebook, sat down at the table and looked vaguely around him. The two Jews, having abandoned their efforts to revive the body, carried it to the low bunk in the corner and disposed it there, crossing the arms on the breast, covering its face with a cloth. Then they turned humbly round to face the policeman, who said with an air of massive reluctance:

  “I suppose I’ll have to put you under arrest.”

  Lawton, who had been absentmindedly reflecting on the scene — in his mind’s eye he could see the strained white face of Grete hovering near the office telephone — suddenly took a step forward and said brusquely, imperiously:

  “Has he no papers? Did he leave nothing?”

  H
e made a gesture of inconsequential exasperation in the air. Was this all that was left of Günther Schiller?

  “Identity cards, passports, letters?... he had begun to shout incoherently.

  The two gaolers shook their heads and spread their hands. One of them said:

  “He was captured from Cairo last week. All his papers were destroyed.”

  He smiled a weak, ingratiating smile.

  The policeman crooked a huge finger at them and interposed with his heavy toneless voice:

  “You come over here, you two, and sit down. Now I want to know your names and ’ow it ’appened.”

  He had reverted to type — had become a country bobby again. He produced an indelible pencil and dabbed at his long pink tongue with it. The pencil left a purple mark in the centre of it. Laboriously he began to write.

  Lawton watched for one second, consumed by an intense irritation and the feeling almost of despair.

  “Was it really Günther Schiller?” he asked sharply.

  And the two gaolers nodded. Then turning to the policeman, Lawton said:

  “Well, Duff, I can leave the case to you, I take it. There’s nothing more for me to do here. I’ll be back at HQ if you want me.”

  Duff nodded sagely, and Lawton re-entered the dark corridor, closing the door carefully behind him. When he was halfway down the staircase the dark window suddenly burst into a blaze of coloured light. For one wild moment he thought that someone was firing tracer bullets, and in his mind’s eye he saw the searchlights bracketing Tobruk harbour with a stream of molten rocket fire pouring up into the night sky.

  “What the devil!” he said, and stopped to look out over Jerusalem. “Who the devil is sending up fireworks?”

  Showers of golden drops slowly dispersed on the dark velvety skin of the night sky above the city. It was only when he reached the street that the explanation came to him. He heard the slow murmur of a crowd which was gathering in the street, the low murmur of chanting which was to swell gradually into a tumult of enthusiasm. While they had all been thinking about other things, Israel had been born.