Be Shot For Six Pence Read online

  The sixth rubber was long and very evenly contested. Finally the cards came down decisively in my favour, and sweeping aside the proffered sacrifices of the enemy we rode through to six hearts and victory. I got to my feet feeling curiously stiff.

  “Bed time?” said the General, regretfully. I nodded and looked at my watch, I thought for a moment it must have stopped. It showed five o’clock.

  Walking over I drew open the heavy curtain. The window looked out over the tops of the trees. Mist and shadows filled the valley, but light had come back into the upper sky.

  I have a faint recollection of staggering to my room where I pitched into sleep; sleep bedevilled by dreams of wolf-men and witches, with the faces of Lady and Lisa Prinz, who played cards for stakes beyond my understanding.

  Part II

  THE MIDDLE GAME

  “And pat, and pitter-pat; too soft to feel How cunningly the velvet pads conceal

  Five cruel hooks of steel . . .”

  Battle of the Beasts.

  Chapter V

  MAJOR MESSELEN

  When I woke it took me more than the usual two moments to remember where I was. My watch, which I had forgotten to wind, had stopped at half-past six.

  I climbed out of bed, padded across to the window, and pulled at the cord which operated the long heavily lined curtains. They slid back and I stood for a moment held by the picture.

  The mountains filled the eye; from the eastern side, where they ran up low, kindly, covered in vineyard and olive grove, through a quarter circle to the wolf fangs, which stabbed the sky to the south.

  The sun was so high that it could not have been short of midday. I dressed and ran down. The drawing-room and dining-room were empty. I walked through them, into a smaller drawing-room and so out, on to the broad stone balcony.

  The Baron was perched on a wicker chair. He held in his hand a pair of field glasses which he lowered from his eyes when he heard me coming.

  “You are already up?”

  “I thought I should be the last,” I said.

  “More probably the first. Except for myself and Herr Lady no one rises here before afternoon. For myself it is no hardship to rise early. I have an interest in bird study.”

  The only sign of life in the landscape was a group of young girls who were beating out washing on the stones of one of the mountain streams.

  The Baron smiled, “Charming, are they not,” he said, and handed me the glasses. (They were, as I had guessed by their looks, a most efficient pair of high magnification.)

  “Such shoulders and buttocks,” said the Baron. “You would suppose them professional wrestlers. But interesting.”

  I agreed that they were interesting.

  “It is a lovely view from here.” The Baron elevated his glasses from the washer-girls and swept the mountain circle. “We are within four miles of the Yugoslav frontier here, did you know? And six of the Hungarian.”

  “Well sited,” I agreed. “From an ethnographical point of view.”

  The Baron looked at me. The resemblance to the late Emperor Franz Joseph was quite remarkable.

  “Hungary,” he said, “is a dull country, justified by her wines. You appreciated the Tokay we drank yesterday?”

  “Yes indeed.”

  “As Yugoslavia is by its girls. You noticed the one who served the Tokay?”

  “I am afraid, Baron, that my mind was entirely on the wine.”

  “Then you must look at her tonight. Have you experience of Yugoslavian girls?”

  I was saved the necessity of answering by the arrival of Lisa. The Baron creaked to his feet and bowed. Lisa gave him a kiss behind the ear.

  “Would you care for coffee?” she said to me.

  There was nothing I could have cared for more. Lisa said, “Pull that bell and someone will come. The service here is old fashioned, but it works eventually.”

  I jerked at a ten yard strip of tapestry on the left of the fireplace and a minute or two later the door opened and a girl came in.

  “We should like coffee,” I said in German.

  “So should I,” said the girl, in the same language.

  At that I looked again, and felt myself blushing. She was young, with fair hair and a simple linen dress cut rather high across the throat.

  Lisa was laughing maliciously.

  “It is your ‘jeune fille’ appearance,” she said. “People all mistake you for the skivvy, do they not?”

  The girl performed a demure little musical comedy bob and said: “Is there anything I can do for Monsieur?” This time in French.

  “Excuse my appalling gaffe,” I said, following her into the same language (which I speak clumsily), “and ask Lisa to introduce us.”

  “True Kethely,” said Lisa. “This is Phee-leep. He has a surname too, but it is extremely English and I cannot pronounce it.”

  “Philippe,” she said.

  “Trude.”

  “Please, no. Trüe. It is two syllables, but there is no ‘d’.”

  At this moment a lady with a grey moustache and beard came in with coffee, brioches, and, surprisingly, a plate of cold spiced sausage and gherkins. (I can only suppose that this was for ornament. I never saw anyone touch it during my stay at Obersteinbruck.) The coffee was excellent and my morale was so high that when Lady arrived I even managed to greet him with a cheerful good morning.

  It was ignored.

  He addressed himself to Trüe. “When you are ready,” he said. “I have some letters for you to write.” He banged out as abruptly as he had come. Trüe swallowed the remains of her coffee at a pace which brought tears to her eyes and scuttled after him.

  “If I spoke to my secretary like that,” I said, “or, indeed, to any typist in my office, she would first throw her typewriter at me and then remove herself, fast, to an employer with manners.”

  “It would be a mistake,” said Lisa, seriously, “to judge us by English standards, Lady was born under the Twins. Like all Geminians he has two sides to his nature—”

  “So far as I’m concerned,” I said, “he can keep them both.”

  “Also he is worried this morning. There is something – I do not understand it. A man who was found in the river yesterday.”

  “A man?”

  “A young man who worked in the Schneidermeister wine shop. He was courting one of the servants here. He would sometimes be up here, after dark.

  “Schneidermeister,” I said. The radar gave back a very faint echo. It is a common German surname, but I had seen it recently. Then I got it. It was the wine merchant who occupied the ground floor building where Major Piper had his office.

  I asked Lisa.

  “That is right,” she said. “Kurt Schneidermeister is the wine merchant. He is a big man. Huge, I mean.” She held her arms wide. “Like a tub. He is the most important wine merchant in this part of the country. The Baron knows him well.”

  “Yes,” I said, disentangling it slowly as I went along. “But why should the fact that one of his men, who also happened to be courting one of the castle maids, is now found drowned in the river be a source of worry to our lord and master?”

  “You must not sneer,” said Lisa. “It upsets the balance of your face.”

  I gave it up.

  “Besides, I have something to tell you about Colin.”

  “Something—?”

  “No,” said Lisa. “I have heard nothing. But I have remembered something. There was one man in Steinbruck that Colin used to see more than any other. He is a German. His name is Messelen, Major Messelen. He was, I think, in Rommel’s Army in Africa.”

  “And why should this character know where Colin is, if you and the authorities do not?”

  “I did not say that he would know where Colin is. But he could tell you about him, perhaps, that is all. And do not snap.”

  “I didn’t mean to snap,” I said, and gave her a brotherly squeeze. “I’ll talk to the whole Afrika Corps if there’s a chance it’ll help. Where does he li
ve?”

  She gave me the address. I could see that she was upset about something. Probably the truth was that when Lady was in one of his difficult moods everyone in the castle reacted. Except the Baron. He was back bird watching.

  Number 40 (bis) Marienkirchestrasse was a dilapidated, whitewashed, many shuttered, steep roofed house in a close behind the church, let out in one and two roomed apartments.

  On the second floor there was a choice of doors. I knocked at two without success, and tried the third, which gave onto the back of the house. There was life in that one. Someone was whistling.

  I knocked again, then pressed on the door, which swung open. The whistling stopped, and a voice said, in the gemütlich Bavarian dialect: “Who is it? Come in, anyway.”

  The first impression I got was that the room was full of sunlight. Both big windows at the back were wide open, and the sun streamed in, gleaming from the brass wire of five or six birdcages. There was very little furniture in the room. A tiled stove, a few chairs, and a scrubbed table. Behind the table sat a man of about forty. He had light hair cut very short, light eyes, a short nose which started out in one direction and finished in another, and that sort of sand-blasted skin and general appearance of having been smoothed off on an emery-wheel which will be forever associated with General Rommel. Even in shirt sleeves his late profession sat squarely on his shoulders.

  “To what,” he said, “does one owe what is commonly, but sometimes mistakenly, called the pleasure?”

  “I’m sorry to intrude,” I said, in my best German.

  His face lit up.

  “Another Englishman.”

  “Since you say ‘another’ there is a possibility that you knew a friend of mine. Herr Studd-Thompson.”

  “I know Mr. Thompson, yes. Mr. Colin—Studd—Thompson.” He pronounced each word with relish. “A most friendly and agreeable character. A friend of yours, you say?”

  “A very old friend. I have come here to find him.” “He has been lost, then?”

  “That is where I hoped you might be able to help me.”

  “Alas, no. I have not seen Mr. Thompson for—oh—more than three weeks.”

  “But I understand that you used to see quite a lot of him?”

  “That is true, Mr.—?”

  I told him my name, but without much hope. He tried it in three different ways and then gave it up. “Call me Philip,” I said.

  “Very well, Mr. Philip. Yes. I saw him often. We had interests which we shared. For instance—”

  He moved to his feet with the sort of smoothness I should have expected from a man half his age, and opened a wall cupboard. Three of the shelves were piled with albums. He smoothed his fingers across them, pulled one out, and laid it on the table. “South American issues,” he said. “Some of them very rare.”

  He pointed to one small green stamp which sat alone in its glory, in the centre of a blank page. “I had three thousand dollars offered to me for that one. I said no. It will soon be worth more.”

  I could make out that it was a picture of a small, fierce man with a pointed beard in a frame of snakes and monkeys. It didn’t appeal to me as a thousand pounds worth of my money.

  “I’m afraid I know nothing about them,” I said.

  “No? Your friend was knowledgeable.”

  That I could believe. The ever widening circle of Colin’s knowledge could have embraced philately as easily as it had engulfed Esperanto.

  “Were stamps the only thing you used to talk about?” I said.

  The Major held his hand up. “A moment,” he said.

  Suddenly, near at hand, outside the window, the great clock of the Marienkirche began to speak for the hour. First came a triple four-note introduction. Then the great bell chimed twice. In the silence that followed I heard all the song birds trying to outsing their great brass rival. It was one of the most ludicrous but touching things I have ever heard.

  “Absurd, is it not,” said Messelen. “I had a cock-bird who broke his heart trying to drown the big bell at midday. You were saying—”

  I wasn’t really saying anything. I was casting about wildly for a lead. “I was told you knew Colin well. It had occurred to me to hope—”

  “We had tastes in common,” said Messelen. “That was all. We liked stamps and we enjoyed the pizzup.”

  “The—?”

  He made the gesture of one lifting a tankard to his lips.

  Enlightenment came. “Well,” I said. “I’m not what you’d call a violent drinker, but if you’d fancy a couple this evening I’d be very glad to join you.”

  “At the Pleasure Island, then, at eight o’clock.”

  I had a solitary lunch in the town, took the bus to Kleinoosberg and walked the rest of the way back to the castle. There was no one about so I went up to my room and went to sleep on my bed and woke up three hours later with a mouth full of wood shavings and a dear little baby headache.

  It was in no very good temper that I sought out Lisa, and told her that I should not be in to dinner that evening.”

  “But you must be,” she said. “We all attend dinner. The Baron will be most disappointed.”

  “He managed to get on very well without me until yesterday,” I pointed out.

  “Also you will spoil the bridge four. Lady will be furious.”

  “What did they do before I came? Play three handed nap?”

  “I had to play, to make up the number.”

  “You have all my sympathy,” I said. “If Lady isn’t in a better temper than he was this morning I should prefer to be further away from him than the width of a bridge table.”

  I then went off and had a cold bath.

  At eight o’clock exactly I entered Pleasure Island. It was a curious place; about an acre in extent and roughly the shape of an Aircraft Carrier. It had, apparently been laid out by a committee of discrepant tastes. It contained, in no particular sort of order, a beer garden, an aquarium, a reading room, an open-air orchestra and stand, a swimming bath and a section labelled “Circus and Sideshows”. I have no doubt that in the heyday of Steinbruck the whole Island blazed with lights and swarmed with pleasure seekers but at that particular moment retrenchment was the order of the day and only the beer garden was really in action.

  Messelen had a beer ready for me; with a small schnapps as a chaser.

  We put that down and I ordered another. The orchestra filed on to the stand and a tall thin conductor wandered on, and bowed to a scatter of applause. An old man put up No. 1 on the board and the orchestra embarked on an obscure but hearty overture.

  I have not concealed the fact that I had liked Messelen at sight. After a couple of beers I found no reason to like him less. We talked about the War. Messelen held the detached, professional, views of most German officers I have met. He had been in Norway and Russia before he reached North Africa and it was evident that he knew what he was talking about.

  “The desert was a soldier’s dream,” he said. “If the whole matter had been deliberately stage-managed by the generals concerned they would not have chosen better. Imagine it. Sufficiently far from the Oberkommando and set down in a huge, open space, without a lot of pathetic civilians getting in the way.”

  About Russia and Norway he seemed less inclined to talk.

  I asked him what he was doing now.

  “I exist,” he said. “I am agent here for Kontour.” I knew the name. They are a big firm that specialises in harvesting machinery. We had once approached them to subcontract for lawn mower blades but their terms were too stiff. We thrashed the agricultural machinery market pretty thoroughly. It is warm work thinking out technicalities in a foreign language and we put back quite a bit of beer between us.

  The orchestra, I was rather surprised to see, had worked through to Item 10 – an imitation of a thunderstorm in the Harz Mountains. We must have been there longer than I thought. I looked at my watch and saw that it was already nearly eleven o’clock.

  Messelen leaned forward and sa
id something. It coincided with the best efforts of the timpanist and I lost it. He said it again.

  “Where?” I said.

  “In the corner. No, to the right of the bandstand. With the fat man. A blonde.”

  The place seemed full of fat men with blondes. Suddenly I saw her.

  “The big blonde.”

  “The one drinking beer?”

  “That’s right.”

  “What about her?”

  “Only that I once saw Herr Thompson here with her.”

  With a final crash the orchestra achieved its consummation. The last peals of thunder died away across the mountain tops. The Nibelungen stabled their horses and hung their armour on the wall. In the comparative silence I tried to order my thoughts.

  I said: “But that’s Mitzi – Major Piper’s secretary.”

  “That is so. Also she sleeps with him.”

  I said, “Last time I saw them they were sleeping apart,” but it went over his head.

  “And you say that Colin used to—”

  “I do not say that he slept with her.”

  “No. But you say that he came here with her.”

  “Once. Maybe more often. I do not think it was a secret.”

  I agreed that coming to Pleasure Island together would be an odd way of keeping a secret. The place was now absolutely jampacked with people. The orchestra was strapping away its instruments into wicker and canvas containers, and loud-speakers had started to give out bouncy jazz from a south German station.

  Once I had assimilated the idea that the fastidious Colin should be seen about in public with a girl like Mitzi, a possible explanation occurred to me. Whatever Colin was doing he was presumably, more or less, in liaison with Major Piper. Rather than hang around him and his office he might have preferred to keep contact through Mitzi.

  A waiter squeezed his way through to us with two more beers. As I paid him Messelen said: “You see the man with her now.”