World War II Thriller Collection (101 page)

“Just unlock the luggage,” Peter said.

Conrad opened all the bags and Peter began to search them, with Juel and Braun looking over his shoulders, and a crowd of people watching through the window of the departure lounge. He imagined the moment when he would triumphantly produce the newspaper and flourish it in front of everyone.

The crocodile cases were stuffed with expensive old-fashioned clothing, which he dumped on the ground. The duffel bag contained shaving tackle, a change of underwear, and a perfectly pressed uniform shirt. The businessman's tan leather case held papers as well as clothing, and Peter looked through them all carefully, but there were no newspapers or anything suspicious.

He had left the cheap cardboard suitcase until last, figuring the less affluent businessman was the likeliest of the four passengers to be a spy.

The case was half-empty. It held a white shirt and a black tie, supporting the man's story that he was going to a funeral. There was also a well-worn black Bible. But no newspaper.

Peter began to wonder despairingly if his fears had been well founded, and this was the wrong day for the raid. He felt angry that he had let
himself be pushed into acting prematurely. He controlled his fury. He was not finished yet.

He took a penknife from his pocket. He pushed its point into the lining of the old lady's expensive luggage and tore a ragged gash in the white silk. He heard Juel grunt with surprise at the sudden violence of the gesture. Peter ran his hand beneath the ripped lining. To his dismay, nothing was hidden there.

He did the same to the businessman's leather case, with the same result. The second businessmen's cardboard suitcase had no lining, and Peter could see nothing in its structure that might serve as a hiding place.

Feeling his face redden with frustration and embarrassment, he cut the stitching on the leather base of the colonel's canvas duffel and felt inside for concealed papers. There was nothing.

He looked up to see Braun, Juel, and the detectives staring at him. Their faces showed fascination and a hint of fear. His behavior was beginning to look a little crazy, he realized.

To hell with that.

Juel said languidly, “Perhaps your information was wrong, Flemming.”

And wouldn't that please you, Peter thought resentfully. But he was not finished yet.

He saw Varde watching from the departure lounge, and beckoned him. The man's smile looked strained as he contemplated the wreckage of his customers' luggage. “Where is the mailbag?” Peter said.

“In the baggage office.”

“Well, what are you waiting for? Bring it here, idiot!”

Varde went off. Peter pointed at the luggage with a disgusted gesture and said to his detectives, “Get rid of this stuff.”

Dresler and Ellegard repacked the suitcases roughly. A baggage handler came to take them to the Junkers. “Wait,” Peter said as the man began to pick up the cases. “Search him, Sergeant.” Conrad searched the man and found nothing.

Varde brought the mailbag and Peter emptied the letters on the ground. They all bore the stamp of the censor. There were two envelopes large enough to hold a newspaper, one white and one brown. He ripped open the white one. It held six copies of a legal document, some kind of contract.
The brown envelope contained the catalogue of a Copenhagen glassware factory. Peter cursed aloud.

A trolley bearing a tray of sandwiches and several coffeepots was wheeled out for Peter's inspection. This was Peter's last hope. He opened each pot and poured the coffee out on the ground. Juel muttered something about this being unnecessary, but Peter was too desperate to care. He pulled away the linen napkins covering the tray and poked about among the sandwiches. To his horror, there was nothing. In a rage, he picked up the tray and dumped the sandwiches on the ground, hoping to find a newspaper underneath, but there was only another linen napkin.

He realized he was going to be completely humiliated, and that made him madder.

“Begin refueling,” he said. “I'll watch.”

A tanker was driven out to the Junkers. The detectives put out their cigarettes and looked on as aviation fuel was pumped into the wings of the aircraft. Peter knew this was useless, but he persevered stubbornly, wearing a wooden expression, because he could not think what else to do. Passengers watched curiously through the rectangular windows of the Junkers, no doubt wondering why a German general and six civilians needed to observe the refueling.

The tanks were filled and the caps closed.

Peter could not think of any way to delay the takeoff. He had been wrong, and now he looked a fool.

“Let the passengers board,” he said with suppressed fury.

He returned to the departure lounge, his humiliation complete. He wanted to strangle someone. He had made a complete mess of things in front of General Braun as well as Superintendent Juel. The appointments board would feel justified in having picked Juel instead of Peter for the top job. Juel might even use this fiasco as an excuse for having Peter shunted sideways to some low-profile department such as Traffic.

He stopped in the lounge to watch the takeoff. Juel, Braun, and the detectives waited with him. Varde was standing nearby, trying hard to look as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. They watched while the four angry passengers boarded. The chocks were removed from the wheels by the ground crew and thrown on board, then the door was closed.

As the aircraft moved off its stand, Peter was struck by inspiration. “Stop the plane,” he said to Varde.

Juel said, “For God's sake . . .”

Varde looked as if he might cry. He turned to General Braun. “Sir, my passengers . . .”

“Stop the plane!” Peter repeated.

Varde continued to look pleadingly at Braun. After a moment, Braun nodded. “Do as he says.”

Varde picked up a phone.

Juel said, “My God, Flemming, this had better be good.”

The aircraft rolled onto the runway, turned a full circle, and came back to its stand. The door opened, and the chocks were thrown down to the ground crew.

Peter led the rest of the detectives out onto the apron. The propellers slowed and stopped. Two men in overalls were wedging the chocks in front of the main wheels. Peter addressed one of them. “Hand me that chock.”

The man looked scared, but did as he was told.

Peter took the chock from him. It was a simple triangular block of wood about a foot high—dirty, heavy, and solid.

“And the other one,” Peter said.

Ducking under the fuselage, the mechanic picked up the other and handed it over.

It looked the same, but felt lighter. Turning it over in his hands, Peter found that one face was a sliding lid. He opened it. Inside was a package carefully wrapped in oilcloth.

Peter gave a sigh of profound satisfaction.

The mechanic turned and ran.

“Stop him!” Peter cried, but it was unnecessary. The man veered away from the men and tried to run past Tilde, no doubt imagining he could easily push her aside. She turned like a dancer, letting him pass, then stuck out a foot and tripped him. He went flying.

Dresler jumped on him, hauled him to his feet, and twisted his arm behind his back.

Peter nodded to Ellegard. “Arrest the other mechanic. He must have known what was going on.”

Peter turned his attention to the package. He unwrapped the oilcloth. Inside were two copies of
Reality.
He handed them to Juel.

Juel looked at the papers, then up at Peter.

Peter stared at him expectantly, saying nothing, waiting.

Juel said reluctantly, “Well done, Flemming.”

Peter smiled. “Just doing my job, sir.”

Juel turned away.

Peter said to his detectives, “Handcuff both mechanics and take them to headquarters for questioning.”

There was something else in the package. Peter pulled out a sheaf of papers clipped together. They were covered with typed characters in five-letter groups that made no sense. He stared at them in puzzlement for a moment. Then enlightenment dawned, and he realized this was a triumph greater than he had dreamed.

The papers he was holding bore a message in code.

Peter handed the papers to Braun. “I think we have uncovered a spy ring, General.”

Braun looked at the papers and paled. “My God, you're right.”

“Perhaps the German military has a department that specializes in breaking enemy ciphers?”

“It certainly does.”

“Good,” said Peter.

An old-fashioned carriage drawn by two horses picked up Harald Olufsen and Tik Duchwitz at the railway station in Tik's home village of Kirstenslot. Tik explained that the carriage had been rotting in a barn for years, then had been resurrected when the Germans imposed petrol restrictions. The coachwork gleamed with fresh paint, but the team were obviously ordinary carthorses borrowed from a farm. The coachman looked as if he might have been more comfortable behind a plow.

Harald was not sure why Tik had invited him for the weekend. The Three Stooges had never visited each other's homes, even though they had been close friends at school for seven years. Perhaps the invitation was a consequence of Harald's anti-Nazi outburst in class. Maybe Tik's parents were curious to meet the pastor's son who was so concerned about the persecution of Jews.

They drove from the station through a small village with a church and a tavern. Beyond the village they turned off the road and passed between a pair of massive stone lions. At the far end of a half-mile drive Harald saw a fairy-tale castle with battlements and turrets.

There were hundreds of castles in Denmark. Harald sometimes took comfort from that fact. Although it was a small country, it had not always surrendered abjectly to its belligerent neighbors. There might be something of the Viking spirit left.

Some castles were historic monuments, maintained as museums and visited by tourists. Many were little more than country manor houses occupied by prosperous farming families. In between were a number of spectacular homes owned by the wealthiest people in the land. Kirstenslot—the house had the same name as the village—was one of those.

Harald was intimidated. He had known the Duchwitz family were wealthy—Tik's father and uncle were bankers—but he was not prepared for this. He wondered anxiously if he would know the right ways to behave. Nothing about life at the parsonage had prepared him for a place such as this.

It was late on Saturday afternoon when the carriage dropped them at the cathedral-like front entrance. Harald walked in, carrying his small suitcase. The marbled hall was crammed with antique furniture, decorated vases, small statues, and large oil paintings. Harald's family were inclined to take literally the Second Commandment, which forbade the making of a likeness of anything in heaven or on earth, so there were no pictures in the parsonage (though Harald knew that he and Arne had been secretly photographed as babies, for he had found the pictures hidden in his mother's stocking drawer). The wealth of art in the Duchwitz home made him mildly uncomfortable.

Tik led him up a grand staircase into a bedroom. “This is my room,” he said. There were no old masters or Chinese vases here, just the kind of stuff an eighteen-year-old collected: a football, a picture of Marlene Dietrich looking sultry, a clarinet, and a framed advertisement for a Lancia Aprilla sports car designed by Pininfarina.

Harald picked up a framed photo. It showed Tik about four years ago with a girl about the same age. “Who's the girlfriend?”

“My twin sister, Karen.”

“Oh.” Harald knew, vaguely, that Tik had a twin. She was taller than Tik in the picture. It was a black-and-white photo, but she seemed to have lighter coloring. “Obviously not an identical twin, she's too good-looking.”

“Identical twins have to be the same sex, idiot.”

“Where does she go to school?”

“The Danish Royal Ballet.”

“I didn't know they ran a school.”

“If you want to be in the corps you have to go to the school. Some girls start at the age of five. They do all the usual lessons, and dancing as well.”

“Does she like it?”

Tik shrugged. “It's hard work, she says.” He opened a door and went along a short corridor to a bathroom and a second, smaller bedroom. Harald followed him. “You'll be in here, if it's all right,” Tik said. “We'll share the bathroom.”

“Great,” said Harald, dropping his case on the bed.

“You could have a grander room, but you'd be miles away.”

“This is better.”

“Come and say hello to my mother.”

Harald followed Tik along the main first-floor corridor. Tik tapped on a door, opened it a little, and said, “Are you receiving gentlemen callers, Mother?”

A voice replied, “Come in, Josef.”

Harald followed Tik into Mrs. Duchwitz's boudoir, a pretty room with framed photographs on every level surface. Tik's mother looked like him. She was very short, though dumpy where Tik was slim, and she had the same dark eyes. She was about forty, but her black hair was already touched with gray.

Tik presented Harald, who shook her hand with a little bow. Mrs. Duchwitz made them sit down and asked them about school. She was amiable and easy to talk to, and Harald began to feel less apprehensive about the weekend.

After a while she said, “Go along and get ready for dinner, now.” The boys returned to Tik's room. Harald said anxiously, “You don't wear anything special for dinner, do you?”

“Your blazer and tie are fine.”

It was all Harald had. The school blazer, trousers, overcoat, and cap, plus sports kit, were a major expense for the Olufsen family, and they had to be replaced constantly as he grew a couple of inches every year. He had
no other clothes, apart from sweaters for the winter and shorts for the summer. “What are you going to wear?” he asked Tik.

“A black jacket and gray flannels.”

Harald was glad he had brought a clean white shirt.

“Would you like to bathe first?” Tik said.

“Sure.” The idea that you had to have a bath before dinner seemed odd to Harald, but he told himself he was learning the ways of the rich.

He washed his hair in the bath, and Tik shaved at the same time. “You don't shave twice a day at school,” Harald said.

“Mother's so fussy. And my beard is dark. She says I look like a coal miner if I don't shave in the evening.”

Harald put on his clean shirt and school trousers, then went into the bedroom to comb his damp hair in the mirror over the dressing table. While he was doing so, a girl walked in without knocking. “Hello,” she said. “You must be Harald.”

It was the girl in the photograph, but the monochrome picture had not done her justice. She had white skin and green eyes, and her curly hair was a vivid shade of coppery red. A tall figure in a long dark-green dress, she glided across the room like a ghost. With the easy strength of an athlete, she picked up a heavy chair by its back and turned it around to sit on it. She crossed her long legs and said, “Well? Are you Harald?”

He managed to speak. “Yes, I am.” He felt conscious of his bare feet. “You're Tik's sister.”

“Tik?”

“That's what we call Josef at school.”

“Well, I'm Karen, and I don't have a nickname. I heard about your eruption at school. I think you're absolutely right. I hate the Nazis—who do they think they are?”

Tik emerged from the bathroom wrapped in a towel. “Have you no regard for a gentleman's privacy?” he said.

“No, I don't,” she retorted. “I want a cocktail, and they won't serve them until there's at least one male in the room. I believe servants make up these rules themselves, you know.”

“Well, just look the other way for a minute,” Tik said, and to Harald's surprise he dropped the towel.

Karen was unperturbed by her brother's nakedness and did not bother to look away. “How are you, anyway, you black-eyed dwarf?” she said amiably as he pulled on clean white undershorts.

“I'm fine, though I'll be finer when the exams are over.”

“What will you do if you fail?”

“I suppose I'll work at the bank. Father will probably make me start at the bottom, filling the inkwells of the junior clerks.”

Harald said to Karen, “He won't fail the exams.”

She replied, “I suppose you're clever, like Josef.”

Tik said, “Much cleverer, actually.”

Harald could not honestly deny it. Feeling bashful, he asked, “What's it like at ballet school?”

“A cross between serving in the army and being in jail.”

Harald stared at Karen in fascination. He did not know whether to regard her as one of the boys or one of the gods. She bantered with her brother like a kid. Nevertheless she was extraordinarily graceful. Just sitting in the chair, waving an arm or pointing or resting her chin on her hand, she seemed to be dancing. All her movements were harmonious. Yet her poise did not restrain her, and Harald watched the changing expressions of her face like one mesmerized. She had a full-lipped mouth and a wide smile that was slightly lopsided. In fact her whole face was a little irregular—her nose was not quite straight and her chin was uneven—but the overall effect was beautiful. In fact, he thought, she was the most beautiful girl he had ever met.

“You'd better put some shoes on,” Tik said to Harald.

Harald retreated to his room and finished dressing. When he returned, Tik was looking spiffy in a black jacket, white shirt, and plain dark tie. Harald felt very much the schoolboy in his blazer.

Karen led the way downstairs. They entered a long, untidy room with several large sofas, a grand piano, and an elderly dog on a rug in front of the fireplace. The relaxed air contrasted with the stuffy formality of the hall, although here, too, the walls were crowded with oil paintings.

A young woman in a black dress and a white apron asked Harald what he would like to drink. “Whatever Josef is having,” he replied. There was no alcohol at the parsonage. At school, in the final year, the boys were
allowed to drink one glass of beer each at the Friday night get-together. Harald had never drunk a cocktail and was not quite sure what one was.

To give himself something to do, he bent down and patted the dog. It was a long, lean red setter with a sprinkling of gray in its gingery fur. It opened an eye and wagged its tail once in polite acknowledgment of Harald's attentions.

Karen said, “That's Thor.”

“The god of thunder,” Harald said with a smile.

“Silly, I agree, but Josef named him.”

Tik protested, “You wanted to call him Buttercup!”

“I was only eight years old at the time.”

“So was I. Besides, Thor isn't so silly. He sounds like thunder when he farts.”

At that moment Tik's father came in, and he looked so like the dog that Harald almost laughed. A tall, thin man, he was elegantly dressed in a velvet jacket and a black bow tie, and his curly red hair was turning gray. Harald stood up and shook hands.

Mr. Duchwitz addressed him with the same languid courtesy the dog had shown. “I'm so glad to meet you,” he said in a lazy drawl. “Josef is always talking about you.”

Tik said, “So now you know the whole family.”

Mr. Duchwitz said to Harald, “How are things at school, after your outburst?”

“I wasn't punished, oddly enough,” Harald answered. “In the past, I've had to cut the grass with nail scissors just for saying ‘Rubbish' when some teacher made a stupid statement. I was much ruder than that to Mr. Agger. But Heis, that's the head, just gave me a quiet lecture about how much more effectively I would have made my point if I had kept my temper.”

“Setting an example himself by not being angry with you,” Mr. Duchwitz said with a smile, and Harald realized that was exactly what Heis had been doing.

Karen said, “I think Heis is wrong. Sometimes you have to make a stink to get people to listen.”

That struck Harald as true, and he wished he had thought to say it to
Heis. Karen was smart as well as beautiful. But he had a question for Mr. Duchwitz and had been looking forward to the chance of asking it. “Sir, aren't you worried about what the Nazis might do to you? We know how badly Jews are treated in Germany and Poland.”

“I do worry. But Denmark is not Germany, and the Germans seem to regard us as Danes first and Jews second.”

“So far, anyway,” Tik put in.

“True. But then there's the question of what options are open to us. I suppose I could make a business trip to Sweden, then apply for a visa to the United States. Getting the whole family out would be more difficult. And think what we would be leaving behind: a business that was started by my great-grandfather, this house where my children were born, a collection of paintings it has taken me a lifetime to put together . . . When you look at it that way, it seems simplest to sit tight and hope for the best.”