They Used Dark Forces Read Online Free PDF Page B

shoddy little
Nachtlokal
where one could dance to an ancient pianola.’
    â€˜And Mitzi?’
    The Russian shrugged his broad shoulders. ‘When one cannot get caviare one eats sausage. You will recall that in Paris the French used to describe the German girls in uniform as their troops’ “bolsters”. By failing to join up, Mitzi missed her vocation. These German women are abysmally ignorant of the art of love and have no imagination. But she has pretty teeth, is as plump as a partridge and has the natural appetites that go with a healthy body.’
    Three-quarters of an hour later, his buttons, boots and belt polished to a mirror-like brightness by the amorous ex-General, Gregory went downstairs to breakfast. After his meal he again went out to kill time in the town. The principal church had the bleak, uninspiring interior common to Lutheran places of worship; but there was a small museum in which he browsed for an hour over the weapons of long-dead soldiers, a collection of ancient coins and a number of indifferent paintings. At midday he returned to the hotel and, having told the porter that he was expecting a lady, settled himself at a table outside on the pavement in the row immediately in front of the cafe’s plate-glass window, so that by sitting with his back to it he would not have to turn his head frequently to make certain that anything said there was not overheard.
    Idly he watched the somewhat lethargic activities in the square while wondering if Frau von Altern would turn up, or if he would have to take more risky steps to get in touch with her. Owing to petrol rationing there were not many vehicles about; so, after he had been sitting there for some time, he noticed a rather battered farm truck when its driver parked italongside a few others in the open space and, getting out, walked towards the hotel.
    She was a tall, thin woman and, seen from a distance, appeared to be about forty. As she came nearer he saw that she had an oval face with high cheek-bones, very fine eyes, a mobile mouth and was considerably younger than he had at first thought. But her nose was fleshy, her complexion dark and, although he could not see the colour of her hair under the headscarf she was wearing, he felt certain that she was a Jewess. Knowing that ninety-nine per cent of the Jews in Germany had long since been rounded up by Hitler’s thugs and pushed into gas chambers or were in concentration camps, he found the sight of one walking unmolested in a North German town most surprising, and wondered idly what price she was having to pay to retain her freedom.
    The hotel porter was gossiping with a crony on the pavement, but the woman asked him a question and he pointed to Gregory. Instantly the alarm bell in Gregory’s brain began to shrill. For no conceivable reason could any woman in the town other than Frau von Altern come to enquire for him at the hotel; yet this could not possibly be the real Frau von Altern.
    Seized with acute apprehension, it flashed into his mind that the Gestapo must have got on to Frau von Altern and his letter to her had been turned over to them.
    No doubt they had reasoned that for a true German woman to send important information to the enemy would have appeared to British Intelligence hardly credible; so their agent would expect Frau von Altern to be of foreign birth or, since the suffering of the Jews had aroused in them such bitter hatred of the Nazi regime, a German Jewess; so they had decided to use a woman of that persecuted race as their stool-pigeon.
    The fact that she was free could be accounted for either by the possibility that she was the mistress of some Nazi official, or that she had been let out of a concentration camp and had agreed to impersonate Frau von Altern to save herself from the gas chamber. Probably she was hating the role she was being forced to play, but if her life depended on it that would not prevent her from doing her utmost to trap him.