Faked Passports
Authors: Dennis Wheatley
Dennis Wheatley
Edited by Miranda Vaughan Jones
FOR
JACK YOUNGER
My soldier stepson. With deep affection and the wish that crossed swords and batons may one day grace the shoulders of his tunic, crowning his success in the profession of arms which he chose when still a boy.
IV
“Hands up,
Herr Oberst-Baron
!”
VII
Invitation to the Lion's Den
VIII
The Waiting Room of the Borgia
IX
“He who Sups with the Devil needs a Long Spoon”
XIII
The Beautiful Erika Von Epp
XIV
To Singe the Gestapo's Beard
XV
Herr Gruppenführer
Grauber Wins a Trick
XXVIII
Gregory Gambles with Death
XXX
Voroshilov Signs two Orders
Dennis Wheatley was my grandfather. He only had one child, my father Anthony, from his first marriage to Nancy Robinson. Nancy was the youngest in a large family of ten Robinson children and she had a wonderful zest for life and a gaiety about her that I much admired as a boy brought up in the dull Seventies. Thinking about it now, I suspect that I was drawn to a young Ginny Hewett, a similarly bubbly character, and now my wife of 27 years, because she resembled Nancy in many ways.
As grandparents, Dennis and Nancy were very different. Nancy's visits would fill the house with laughter and mischievous gossip, while Dennis and his second wife Joan would descend like minor royalty, all children expected to behave. Each held court in their own way but Dennis was the famous one with the famous friends and the famous stories.
There is something of the fantasist in every storyteller, and most novelists writing thrillers see themselves in their heroes. However, only a handful can claim to have been involved in actual daring-do. Dennis saw action both at the Front, in the First World War, and behind a desk in the Second. His involvement informed his writing and his stories, even those based on historical events, held a notable veracity that only the life-experienced novelist can obtain. I think it was this element that added the important plausibility to his writing. This appealed to his legions of readers who were in that middle ground of fiction, not looking for pure fantasy nor dry fact, but something exciting, extraordinary, possible and even probable.
There were three key characters that Dennis created over the years: The Duc de Richleau, Gregory Sallust and Roger Brook. The first de Richleau stories were set in the years between the wars, when Dennis had started writing. Many of the Sallust stories were written in the early days of the Second World War, shortly before Dennis joined the Joint Planning Staff in Whitehall, and Brook was cast in the time of the French Revolution, a period that particularly fascinated him.
He is probably always going to be associated with Black Magic first and foremost, and it's true that he plugged it hard because sales were always good for those books. However, it's important to remember that he only wrote eleven Black Magic novels out of more than sixty bestsellers, and readers were just as keen on his other stories. In fact, invariably when I meet people who ask if there is any connection, they tell me that they read 'all his books'.
Dennis had a full and eventful life, even by the standards of the era he grew up in. He was expelled from Dulwich College and sent to a floating navel run school, HMS Worcester. The conditions on this extraordinary ship were Dickensian. He survived it, and briefly enjoyed London at the pinnacle of the Empire before war was declared and the fun ended. That sort of fun would never be seen again.
He went into business after the First World War, succeeded and failed, and stumbled into writing. It proved to be his calling. Immediate success opened up the opportunity to read and travel, fueling yet more stories and thrilling his growing band of followers.
He had an extraordinary World War II, being one of the first people to be recruited into the select team which dreamed up the deception plans to cover some of the major events of the war such as Operation Torch, Operation Mincemeat and the D-Day landings. Here he became familiar with not only the people at the very top of the war effort, but also a young Commander Ian Fleming, who was later to write the James Bond novels. There are indeed those who have suggested that Gregory Sallust was one of James Bond's precursors.
The aftermath of the war saw Dennis grow in stature and fame. He settled in his beautiful Georgian house in Lymington surrounded by beautiful things. He knew how to live well, perhaps without regard for his health. He hated exercise, smoked, drank and wrote. Today he would have been bullied by wife and children and friends into giving up these habits and changing his lifestyle, but I'm not sure he would have given in. Maybe like me, he would simply find a quiet place.
Dominic Wheatley, 2013
The Backwash of the Bomb
When the first glimmerings of returning consciousness stirred Gregory Sallust's brain the aeroplane was thousands of feet above Northern Germany. He was slumped forward in the bucket seat behind the pilot and for a moment he did not know where he was or what had happened to him. With an effort he raised his hand towards his aching head. The hand hovered uncertainly for a second on a level with his lowered chin; then the plane bumped slightly, jerking him a little, so that the feeble movement was checked and his arm flopped inwards towards his body. His greatcoat had fallen open and his fingers came in contact with the Iron Cross that General Count von Pleisen had pinned upon his breast. It was sticky with the half-congealed blood that had trickled over it from the wound in his shoulder. As his fingers closed over the decoration full consciousness flooded back to him.
It was the night of November the 8th, '39 and after many weary weeks of desperate hazard and anxiety, pitting his wits against the agents of the Gestapo in war-time London, Paris, Holland and Germany, he had that evening at last succeeded in carrying out the immensely important secret mission which had been entrusted to him. As a result of his work the German Army leaders had risen in a determined attempt to throw off the Nazi yoke and create a new, free Germany with which the Democracies might conclude an honourable peace.
There flashed back into Gregory's mind the incredible scene of bloodshed and carnage at which he had been present only a few hours before, when Count von Pleisen, the Military Governor of Berlin, had led his three hundred officers into the great Banqueting Room of the Hotel Adlon to arrest the Sons of Siegfried, a dining-club used as cover by the Inner Gestapo,
who were holding their monthly meeting there behind closed doors.
It had been hell incarnate. Six hundred desperate men in one vast room and every one of them blazing away with an automatic or sub-machine-gun. Some of the Gestapo men had reached the telephones and had warned their Headquarters, the Brown-Shirt barracks and other Nazi centres. The Generals had seized the Central Telephone Exchange and the Broadcasting Station. The people had risen and were lynching isolated Nazis in the streets. Artillery had been brought into action and shells were blasting the Nazi strongholds. But the thousands of S.S. and S.A. men had sallied out to give battle and when Gregory left Berlin they still held the central square mile of the city and, from what little he could gather, certain outlying areas as well.
In Munich that night Hitler and many of his principal lieutenants had attended the Anniversary Celebrations of their early
Putsch
with the Nazi Old Guard in the
Buergerbrau Keller
. As the Army chiefs who had planned the revolt could not be in Berlin and Munich on the same night, and considered it more important to secure the Capital, von Pleisen had reluctantly consented to the placing of a bomb to destroy the Fuehrer. But just before Gregory staggered out of the Adlon news had come through that Hitler and his personal
entourage
had left the meeting much earlier than had been expected, so although the bomb had gone off and had wrecked the cellar, killing many of its occupants, he had escaped and was reported to be organising counter-measures from his special train.
Now the die was cast it was impossible to foretell which side would gain the upper hand. With their Artillery and tanks the Generals
might
succeed in overcoming the thirty thousand armed Nazis who held Berlin for Hitler and raising the Flag of Freedom there; but what of the rest of the country?
As Hitler was still alive and at large the air must be quivering with urgent orders to his
Gauleiters
and Party Chiefs in every corner of the Reich, instructing them to arrest all suspects, to shoot on sight and to exercise the sternest possible repressive measures against all dangerous elements. Those Nazi Party men would act with utter disregard for life or any human sentiment. They had climbed to power by such relentless methods and they would certainly stick at nothing now, knowing that their own lives depended upon the suppression of the rebellion.
The plane roared on into the blackness of the night. Gregory had no memory of having boarded it at the secret landing-ground
some fifteen miles outside Berlin but he knew that the figure silhouetted against the lights of the dash-board was Flight-Lieutenant Freddie Charlton, who had flown him to another secret landing-ground north-west of Cologne just a week after the outbreak of war. Fate had ordained that Charlton should also be the pilot on duty that night outside Berlin, standing by to take any British secret agent who needed his services on the long flight home. With a fresh effort Gregory jerked up his head. The sudden movement caused a stab of pain from the wound in his shoulder and he gave a low moan.
“So you've come round?” said Charlton, turning his head. “Yes,” Gregory muttered. “I suppose I fainted from loss of blood soon after we reached the farm-house.”