Faked Passports (46 page)

“‘It is also of the first importance that we should absorb as many of these small firms as possible on plausible excuses such as our excellent case for being granted the legal guardianship of Little August and Little Paul—so as to postpone arousing Jacob's open antagonism as long as we can. At any stage of our
arangements he may realise that our firm is once more becoming a serious threat to his and he may decide to take active counter-measures against us; but Mother must be used to quiet his suspicions. The longer we can prevent his endeavouring to wreck us by an open price-cutting campaign the more likely we are to succeed in undermining his business to such an extent that when he wakes up to what we have been doing it will be too late to save himself from bankruptcy.

“‘The following are the stages in which it is proposed eventually to bring about a complete Reunion with all interests amalgamated under the head of the family.'”

“Erika darling,” Angela interrupted, “must we really hear the stages by which this awful man proposes to blackmail all his relatives into letting him make a combine of their businesses?”

“Not if you don't wish to,” Erika smiled. “As we don't know any of these people his schemes aren't of the least interest to us. I must say, though, that I should like to know how the thing came into Gregory's possession.”

Freddie frowned. “Yes, it's hardly likely that you would have kept a thing like this in a secret hiding-place on your person if it wasn't of some importance. Perhaps we can help you recall where you got it if we go back over the last few times you've taken money out of your shoes.”

“I don't even remember when I took out the money last,” said Gregory despondently, “let alone ever having seen these sheets of flimsy before.”

“Well, you changed some German money into Finnish the day we arrived in Helsinki.”

“That's right—with that fair-haired, half-German chap in the hotel who did us down; but that was part of the money that Goering gave me and I was carrying it in my pocket.”

“Right, then. Did you take off your shoes for any purpose while we were at Karinhall? Didn't you have a bath in the morning?”

“I've got it!” Gregory suddenly snapped his fingers. “That's when I put the papers with the money. Those bits of typescript came out of Goering's safe.”

“Out of Goering's safe?” echoed Erika. “Then they
must
be something important.”

“I remember now”—Gregory stood up and began to pace quickly up and down; “I did have one look at them in Helsinki;
when I was up in that room we took at the hotel, Freddie, just before you came in with the invitation to lunch with Angela and her father. I read the first few paragraphs, and as I couldn't make head or tail of them I put the sheets back to study when I had more leisure.”

“But how on earth did you get hold of them?” Erika asked.

‘I stole them,” Gregory replied promptly. “It was while Goering was getting me the money. He had just taken a big packet of bank-notes out of his safe when the telephone rang. Thrusting the bundle into my hand he said: ‘Here! Count yourself out three thousand marks,' then he turned his back on me to answer the call.

“They were one-hundred-mark notes so I peeled off thirty, then I noticed that those flimsies had got wedged underneath the packet, in the rubber-band that held the notes together. I suppose it was a crazy risk to take but it seemed to me at the time that any typescript out of Goering's private safe might contain some terrific secret; so I acted on impulse, pulled the sheets from under the rubber-band and slipped them in my pocket. Later, when I undressed to have a bath, I took the opportunity to transfer the flimsies to my boot. It looks now, though, as if I risked my neck for an extract from his family album.”

Erika glanced at a few further passages in the closely-typed sheets. “Goodness knows! I've met most of Hermann's relatives at one time or another but I don't recognise any of these surnames and the Christian names don't seem to fit, either. It looks to me as though this has been sent to Goering because he is the commercial dictator of Germany and would naturally be interested in any amalgamation of big business interests that was projected; but how he could be expected to know all the ramifications of somebody else's family, I can't think.”

“Perhaps it isn't what it appears to be at all,” Freddie suggested, “but particulars of something quite different, set out in secret code. I'm jolly good at crossword puzzles; let me have a look at it.”

“What is a crossword puzzle?” Gregory asked.

While the girls explained to him Freddie studied the latter part of the document; his German was just good enough to make out the general sense. At last he looked up and said:

“The chap who compiled this seems a most awful thug and means to go to any lengths. In one place he suggests that his mother should forcibly remove a girl named Marlene from the
Schwartz's because they didn't look after her properly; and in another that they should get Mrs. Klein's daughter, Paula, certified as insane if she refuses to come into the ring. There's a lot, too, about the careful preparation of cases for the courts by which it's proposed to try to secure the custody of several children with a view, apparently, to influencing the parents through them afterwards.”

“Big business is often as dirty as politics,” Angela shrugged. “Many a rich man has made his millions by taking for his motto the saying: ‘The end justifies the means'.”

Freddie nodded. “I expect you're right. It's just a very carefully worked out plan to amalgamate a whole lot of commercial interests which are under the control of different branches of two or three families, and to break the rival concern of this Jew chap, Jacob Bauer, whom the writer seems to dislike so much. Still, as it came out of Goering's safe there's just a chance that it might contain some hidden meaning; and it will amuse me to see if one could possibly read any other interpretation into all this blather about uncles and cousins and aunts.”

He slipped the papers into his pocket and pulling on his furs went out to give the horses their afternoon feed and rub-down.

In the days that followed even the joy which the two couples derived from being together was a little marred by their extreme boredom. All four of them had hitherto led very active lives with many friends and interests, whereas now there were no papers, no posts, no radio, no parties, no cinemas, no shopping-expeditions, no business to transact, no minor family worries or joys to engage-their thoughts. They had not even the pleasurable anticipation of looking forward to seeing their respective lovers from day to day, or receiving letters from them, as for twenty-three out of each twenty-four hours they were cooped up together in the same room; and the spells of wintry daylight were so short that, in that room, it almost seemed that they were living in eternal night. There was not even enough blank paper in the house for any of them to contemplate writing some short stories or a book, and when Angela decided to make a pack of cards she had to use the crudest materials; moreover, as Erika loathed cards the experiment did not prove much of a success.

Freddie spent a lot of time poring over the flimsy papers that had been found in Gregory's shoe. He ran all the words together then separated the letters into blocks of five and placed differently-arranged alphabets over them. He gave a different
number to each letter, added them up and turned the resulting numerals back into letters again, reaching various conclusions none of which made the least sense. He then got Erika to translate the typed pages for him into both French and English and once again set to work with his groups of five letters and innumerable alphabets; but that did not get him anywhere either. Yet he could not let the thing alone.

Perhaps it was lack of any other occupation, but the perfectly straightforward account of somebody's plans to hold a Family Reunion and amalgamate various business interests seemed to have become an obsession with him, and the more the others chaffed him about his efforts the more mulish he became in his assertion that since the papers had come out of Goering's safe they must contain information of importance, if only some clue to their real subject could be found.

Now that the risk of being caught in a blizzard made it impossible for them to go on long hunting expeditions or journeys to the lake the only exercise they could get, apart from work in the house and rubbing down the horses three times a day, was an hour or so each midday playing games in the clearing.

Freddie and Angela had always been winter-sport enthusiasts so they loved romping together out in the crisp air; Erika had never been interested in outdoor games and only joined in to oblige the others; but Gregory surprised them all. In his normal wits he would never have set foot outside the house, except when he positively had to do so, even if he had been confined there for a twelve-month. Physically, he was bone-lazy and loathed any form of unnecessary activity; so he would have slept a lot, talked a lot and made love to Erika whenever the other two were out of the way, and in the meantime would probably have taught himself to read Finnish with the aid of the Finnish-German dictionary which was among the books.

As it was, his loss of memory seemed to have thrown him back to the period of his life when, as a very small boy, his animal spirits had not been submerged in the joy of mental pleasure and he had not yet developed that contempt for “hearties” which became apparent soon after he went to his public school. Somewhat to Erika's annoyance, he entered with incredible gusto into snowball fights, games of leap-frog, tip-and-run, hide-and-seek among the trees and other childish pastimes. Not content with this, he made himself a long slide out of the frozen snow at which, from a slight eminence, he took a long run to come hurtling down it with loud, boyish cries of glee.

It was, curiously enough, this harmless if infantile amusement which on February the 17th resulted in an accident that had far-reaching results.

He was careering down his slide for the fifth time that morning when he tripped on a little freshly-fallen snow which he had failed to brush away sufficiently far to the side of his ice-run. His feet flew from under him. Crashing backwards his head hit the ice a blow that could be heard; then he skidded on for about fifteen feet and remained there, lying quite still.

The others ran to him and finding him unconscious carried him to the house. A few minutes later he came round, groaning, and complained of frightful pains in the back of the head. They gave him a hot drink and tucked him up on top of the oven where, after a little while, he went to sleep.

When he awoke that evening he sat up and stared in astonishment at the others and round the room. It then transpired that he had got his memory back; that is, he could remember perfectly the whole of his previous life up to the point when he had been wounded in the head by a spent bullet, outside the Petsamo aerodrome, on the night of November the 30th; but things that had happened since seemed to him like the disconnected episodes in a dream.

They were overjoyed at his recovery and it did not take them very long to run over with him the few excitements which had broken the pleasant routine of the two and a half months they had spent in the trapper's house. He laughed a lot when they recalled to him how they had driven the Russians away by pretending to be ghosts and even more when he realised that he owed the recovery of his memory to his favourite occupation of sliding like a schoolboy on an ice-track that he had made with considerable labour for himself. Next day they had great fun in taking him round their small domain and showing him all the arrangements they had made to continue there in as much comfort as possible until the coming of the thaw.

Two nights later Freddie was sitting up as he often did—long after the others had tucked up on the oven—straining his not very brilliant wits to find a hidden meaning in the now thumbed and crumpled typescript. Regardless of time, he worked on and on. It was past three o'clock in the morning when he suddenly stood up from the table, marched over to the oven and roughly roused the others from their slumber to declare with shining eyes that he had at last solved his puzzle.

“Oh, that damned letter!” murmured Angela sleepily. “But couldn't you have waited until tomorrow morning, darling, to tell us about it?”

“Certainly not,” said Freddie brusquely. “The explanation flashed on me quite suddenly, soon after you turned in, and I've spent the last five hours working the whole thing out. Every single piece fits into place quite perfectly, and it's really awfully interesting. Get up, you lazy little pig, and I'll read it to you.”

Grumbling a little the other three crawled from under the thick layer of furs which constituted their bedding; none of them displaying any particular enthusiasm, owing to the fact that they had become distinctly bored with Freddie's efforts and were still half asleep. As they gathered round the table and Angela poured some cups of hot coffee from a pot which they always kept simmering on the hob Gregory inquired:

“What's all this about a letter? I thought you were working on some damn-fool puzzle.”

“It's the letter you stole from Goering,” Freddie explained. “It was in code and I've been …”

“Good God!” Gregory sprang to his feet. “Why on earth didn't you tell me about this before?”

“But we did!” Freddie protested. “Still, perhaps none of us has said anything about it in the last two days, since you've been your old self again.”

“Of course! I remember now. Quick—let's hear what you've made of it?”

“The whole thing is frightfully simple, really, once you get the hang of it,” Freddie replied, as they all settled down. “You see; the family is really the German nation and the other branches of it include the rest of Europe. The Balkan countries are the Müllers, the Scandinavian countries the Heins, Mrs.
Klein is Russia and Mr. Saxe the United States. Every name in the whole thing represents some country or other and the wicked Jew, Jacob Bauer, who runs the rival business, is poor old Britain.”