Faked Passports (64 page)

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 opportuntiy 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.”