Waiting for Orders (4 page)
Read Waiting for Orders Online
Authors: Eric Ambler
I saw it, far away below us, a pin-point.
‘That’s our light. When we are returning from Germany, we can see it from across the frontier and know that we are nearly home and that our friends are waiting. Hold on to my coat now. You need not worry about Johann behind you. He knows the path well. This way,
Herr Doktor.’
It was the only sign he gave that he had decided to accept me for what I said I was.
I cannot conceive of how anyone could know that path well. The surface soon changed from pine needles to a sort of rocky rubble, and it twisted and turned like a wounded snake. The wind had dropped, but it was colder than ever, and I found myself crunching through sugary patches of half-frozen slush. I wondered how on earth we were going to bring down a wounded man on an improvised stretcher.
We had been creeping along without the light for about twenty minutes when Stephan stopped and, shielding the lamp with his coat, relit it. I saw that we had arrived.
The climbing hut was built against the side of an overhanging rock face. It was about six feet square inside, and the man was lying diagonally across it on his face. There was a large bloodstain on the floor beneath him. He was semi-conscious. His eyes were closed, but he mumbled something as I felt for his pulse.
‘Will he live?’ whispered Stephan.
I didn’t know. The pulse was there, but it was feeble and rapid. His breathing was shallow. I looked at the wound. The bullet had entered on the inner side of the left thigh just below the groin. There was a little bleeding, but it obviously hadn’t touched the femoral artery and, as far as I could see, the bone was all right. I made a dressing with one of the towels and tied it in place with another. The bullet could wait. The immediate danger was from shock aggravated by exposure. I got to work with the blankets and the flask of coffee. Soon the pulse strengthened a little, and after about half an hour I told them how to prepare the stretcher.
I don’t know how they got him down that path in the darkness. It was all I could do to get down by myself. It was snowing hard now in great fleecy chunks that blinded you when you moved forward. I was prepared for them to slip and drop the stretcher; but they didn’t. It was slow work, however, and it
was a good forty minutes before we got to the point where it was safe to light the lamp.
After that I was able to help with the stretcher. At the foot of the path up to the chalet, I went ahead with the lantern. The woman heard my footsteps and came to the door. I realized that we must have been gone for the best part of three hours.
‘They’re bringing him up,’ I said. ‘He’ll be all right. I shall need your help now.’
She said, ‘The bed is ready.’ And then, ‘Is it serious,
Herr Doktor
?’
‘No.’ I didn’t tell her then that there was a bullet to be taken out.
It was a nasty job. The wound itself wasn’t so bad. The bullet must have been pretty well spent, for it had lodged up against the bone without doing any real damage. It was the instruments that made it difficult. They came from the kitchen. He didn’t stand up to it very well, and I wasn’t surprised. I didn’t feel so good myself when I’d finished. The cognac came in useful after all.
We finally got him to sleep about five.
‘He’ll be all right now,’ I said.
The woman looked at me and I saw the tears begin to trickle down her cheeks. It was only then that I remembered that she wasn’t a nurse, but his wife.
It was Johann who comforted her. Stephan came over to me.
‘We owe you a great debt,
Herr Doktor
,’ he said. I must apologize for our behaviour earlier this evening. We have not always been savages, you know. Kurt was a professor of zoology. Johann was a master printer. I was an architect. Now we are those who crawl across frontiers at night and plot like criminals. We have been treated like savages, and so we live like them. We forget sometimes that we were civilized. We ask your pardon. I do not know how we can repay you for what you have done. We …’
But I was too tired for speeches. I smiled quickly at him.
‘All that I need by way of a fee is another glass of cognac and a bed to sleep in for a few hours. I suggest, by the way, that you get a doctor in to look at the patient later today. There will be a little fever to treat. Tell the doctor he fell upon his climbing axe. He won’t believe you, but there’ll be no bullet for him to be
inquisitive about. Oh, and if you could find me a little petrol for my car …’
It was five in the afternoon and almost dark again when Stephan woke me. The local doctor, he reported, as he set an enormous tray of food down beside the bed, had been, dressed the wound, prescribed, and gone. My car was filled up with petrol and awaited me below if I wished to drive to Zürich that night. Kurt was awake and could not be prevailed upon to sleep until he had thanked me.
They were all there, grouped about the bed, when I went downstairs. Bruno was the only one who looked as if he had had any sleep.
He sprang to his feet. ‘Here, Kurt,’ he said facetiously, ‘is the
Herr Doktor
. He is going to cut your leg off.’
Only the woman did not laugh at the jest. Kurt himself was smiling when I bent over to look at him.
He was a youngish-looking man of about forty with intelligent brown eyes and a high, wide forehead. The smile faded from his face as he looked at me.
‘You know what I wish to say,
Herr Doktor?
’
I took refuge in professional brusqueness. ‘The less you say, the better,’ I said, and felt for his pulse. But as I did so his fingers moved and gripped my hand.
‘One day soon,’ he said, ‘England and the Third Reich will be at war. But you will not be at war with Germany. Remember that, please,
Herr Doktor.
Not with Germany. It is people like us who are Germany, and in our way we shall fight with England. You will see.’
I left soon after.
At nine that night I was in Zürich.
Llewellyn was back in the room. I put the manuscript down. He looked across at me.
‘Very interesting,’ I said.
‘I’d considered sending it up to one of these magazines that publish short stories,’ he said apologetically. ‘I thought I’d like your opinion first, though. What do you think?’
I cleared my throat. ‘Well, of course, it’s difficult to say. Very interesting, as I said. But there’s no real point to it, is there? It needs something to tie it all together.’
‘Yes, I see what you mean. It sort of leaves off, doesn’t it? But that’s how it actually happened.’ He looked disappointed. ‘I don’t think I could invent an ending. It would be rather a pity, wouldn’t it? You see, it’s all true.’
‘Yes, it would be a pity.’
‘Well, anyway, thanks for reading it. Funny thing to happen. I really only put it down on paper for fun. Have another brandy?’ He got up. ‘Oh, by the way. I was forgetting. I heard from those people about a week after war broke out. A letter. Let’s see now, where did I put it? Ah, yes.’
He rummaged in a drawer for a bit, and then, tossing a letter over to me, picked up the brandy bottle.
The envelope bore a Swiss stamp and the postmark was Klosters, September 4th, 1939. The contents felt bulky. I drew them out.
The cause of the bulkiness was what looked like a travel agent’s folder doubled up to fit the envelope. I straightened it. On the front page was a lino-cut of a clump of pines on the shore of a lake and the word
TITISEE
. I opened out the folder.
‘
GERMAN MEN AND WOMEN, COMRADES
!’ The type was worn and battered. ‘Hitler has led you into war. He fed you with lies about the friendly Polish people. In your name he has now committed a wanton act of aggression against them. As a consequence, the free democracies of England and France have declared war against Germany. Comrades, right and justice are on their side. It is Hitler and National Socialism who are the enemies of peace in Europe. Our place as true Germans is at the side of the democracies against Hitler, against National Socialism. Hitler cannot win this war. But the people of Germany must act. All Germans, Catholics, Protestants, and Jews, must act now. Our Czech and Slovak friends are already refusing to make guns for Hitler. Let us stand by their sides. Remember …’
I was about to read on when I saw that the letter that accompanied the folder had fluttered to the carpet. I picked it up. It consisted of a few typewritten lines on an otherwise blank sheet of paper.
Greetings, Herr Doktor. We secured your address from the Customs carnet in your car and write now to wish you good luck. Kurt, Stephan, and Bruno have made many journeys since we saw you and returned safely each time. Today, Kurt leaves again. We pray for him
as always. With this letter we send you Johann’s newest work so that you shall see that Kurt spoke the truth to you. We are of the army of the shadows. We do not fight for you against our countrymen; but we fight with you against National Socialism, our common enemy.
Auf Wiedersehen
FREDA, KURT, STEPHAN, JOHANN, AND BRUNO
.
Llewellyn put my glass down on the table beside me. ‘Help yourself to a cigarette. What do you think of that? Nice of them, wasn’t it?’ he added. ‘Sentimental lot, these Germans.’
T
HE
Army of the Shadows
was written to meet a deadline and my haste still shows. Given more time I could have made the story crisper and the telling of it less John Buchanish. Still, the writing of it, and perhaps the deadline too, proved oddly stimulating. For the first time since that night in Harry’s Bar and the news of the infamous Pact I began to think it possible that my career as a writer might not after all be quite over. True, I was waiting to get into the Navy and did not want to start a new novel that I might not have time to finish, but I still had the habit of writing every day, a habit which I had cultivated and one with which I was always comfortable. When my agent reported that a weekly magazine the
Sketch
wanted to commission from me a series of six short detective stories, I accepted immediately.
Rash? I suppose so. I had never tried to write a detective story, but I had read the great masters of the genre, admired their fearsome ingenuity and deplored the faintly ridiculous set of ‘rules’ for their craft laid down by the early paladins of The Detection Club. The Father Brown short stories of G. K. Chesterton had entertained me, not least because of the author’s effrontery in endowing his detective with a private line to God. Any approach of mine to the puzzle problem was bound to be less fanciful, but at least it could be workmanlike. I must not disgrace myself by cheating the reader. My plots must work.
That was the week my orders came. They were to report to Room So-and-So at the Admiralty for an interview. I did and had a bad time. The list my friend in the Ministry had put me on was one for men capable of skippering minesweeping trawlers in the North Sea. The essential qualifications were deep-sea
yachting experience, membership of a recognized yacht club, and an ability to navigate. The interviewing officer was a polite bastard with a humiliating smile. I could have murdered him as well as the friend who thought that all writers of thirty could or should be amateur yachtsmen. Instead, with murder in my heart, I wandered across Trafalgar Square to the Charing Cross Road. There I bought a secondhand copy of Taylor’s
Principles and Practice of Medical Jurisprudence
, then the standard general work on the science of forensic medicine, a murderer’s vademecum.
Taylor came in two volumes. The first dealt with bodily harm resulting from external violence – blows, falls, stabbings, strangulation, fire, gunshot wounds, and other mayhem. The second volume was all about poisons. A couple of days’ browsing gave me the technical material for six cosy little murder mysteries; six little puzzles with six solutions that could be explained briefly and without elaborate dissection of alibis. A suitable master detective was needed. He would have to fit into small narrative spaces. His entrances and exits must have a clear pattern. He must belong noticeably to the times we were living in. He must be a refugee.
Dr Czissar, my refugee Czech detective, was based on two real refugees from Nazi persecution. I had known them both before the war; one a Prague newspaper editor, the other a German historian deprived of his academic post for being part Jewish. The flapping raincoat and the umbrella carried like a rifle were stage props added when I began to write. The historian was the author of a highly praised history of the German army, so it seemed to me right that Czissar should have a soldierly Prussian manner.
The Intrusions of Dr Czissar
passed the time between the refusal of my services by the Admiralty and their curt rejection by the RAF – ‘What the hell do you expect us to have for a thirty-year-old writer? Try the army.’ Louise Crombie and I were married in the local town hall, a civil ceremony conducted by the Registrar of Births, Marriages and Deaths. A certain piquancy was added to the occasion by our being in possession of inside information. In that London suburb the deaths expected in the first serious air-raid would number about five thousand, and collapsible utility coffins to contain the corpses
had been ordered by the man who married us. They were already stored in the town hall cellars below us.
I took a course in First Aid for stretcher-bearers.
The Case of the Pinchbeck Locket
T
HE
winter afternoon on which Dr Jan Czissar chose to introduce his peculiar personality into the life of Assistant-Commissioner Mercer of Scotland Yard was cold and depressing. And Mercer, besides having a cold and being depressed, was also busy. Had Dr Czissar not been in possession of a letter of introduction from, as Sergeant Flecker put it, ‘one of the ’Ome Office brass ’ats,’ he would not have seen the Assistant-Commissioner at all.
The letter was brief. Having presented his compliments, the writer said that Dr Jan Czissar had been, until the September of 1938, a distinguished member of the Czech police organization, that he was a welcome guest in this country, and that any courtesy which could be extended to him by the Assistant-Commissioner would be very much appreciated. It was not until it was too late to save himself that Mercer found that the letter, though brief, was by no means to the point.