Other Earths (19 page)

The commandant returned his orders, saying that
Herr
Churchill was not at his facility.

Sharply, von Steigerwald declared that he had been told otherwise.

The commandant shook his head and repeated politely that Churchill was not there.

Where was he, then?

The commandant did not know.

Who would know?

The commandant shrugged.

The commandant was to return to bed. Von Steigerwald, who would report the entire affair to the
Reichsf̈hrer-SS
, intended to inspect the facility. His conclusions would be included in his report.

The commandant rose.

Von Steigerwald motioned for him to sit again. He,
Standartenf̈hrer
von Steigerwald, would guide his own tour.

He would not see everything if he did, the commandant insisted; even in explosive German, the commandant sounded defeated. Sergeant Lohr would show him around. Sergeant Lohr had a flashlight.

Sergeant Lohr was the burly man with the submachine gun.

The prisoners were not held in the tunnels themselves, Lohr explained as he and von Steigerwald walked along a dark track, but in the rolling stock. There were toilets in the cars, which had been railway passenger cars before the war. If the
Standartenf̈hrer
—

“The cars were squirreled away down here to save them from German bombs,” a new voice said. “The underground had been disabled, but there was sound trackage left, so why not? I take it you understand English, Colonel?”

In the near-darkness of the tunnel, the shadowy figure who had joined them was hardly more than that: a man of medium size, shabbily dressed in clothing too large for him.

“
Ja
,” von Steigerwald replied. “I speak it vell. It is vor dis reason I vas sent. Und you are . . . ?”

For a moment, Lohr’s flashlight played on the shabby man’s face, an emaciated face whose determined jaw jutted above a wattled neck. “Lenny Spencer, Colonel. At your service.”

Lohr grunted—or perhaps, growled.

“I’m a British employee, sir. A civilian employee of your army and, if I may be permitted a trifle of boldness, a man lent to you by His Majesty’s occupation government. Far too many of my German friends speak little English. I interpret for them, sir. I run errands and do such humble work as my German friends judge beneath them. If I can be of any use to you, Colonel, I shall find my happiness in serving you.”

Von Steigerwald stroked his chin. “Dis place you know, ja?”

The shabby man nodded. “Indeed I do, Colonel. Few, if I may say it, know the facility and its prisoners as well as I.”

“Goot. Also you know Herr Churchill. He vas your leader in de var, so it must be so. He ist here. Dis I know. In Berlin he ist wanted, ja? I am to bring him. Show him to me. At vonce!”

The shabby man cowered. “Colonel, I cannot! Not with the best will in the world. He’s gone.”

“So?” Von Steigerwald’s hand had crept to his Luger, lifting the shiny leather holster flap and resting on the ivory grip; he allowed it to remain there. “The truth you must tell now,
Herr
Schpencer. Odervise it goes hard vit you. He vas here?”

The shabby man nodded vigorously. “He was, Colonel. He was captured in a cellar in Notting Hill. So I’ve been informed, sir. He was brought here to recover from his wounds, or die.”

“He ist dead? Dis you say? Vhy vas not dis reported?” Von Steigerwald felt that he needed a riding crop—a black riding crop with which to tap his polished boots and slash people across the face. Donovan should have thought of it.

“I don’t believe he is dead, Colonel, but he is no longer here.” The shabby man addressed Sergeant Lohr in halting German, asking him to confirm that Churchill was no longer there.

Sullenly, Lohr declared that he had never been there.

“Neider vun I like,” von Steigerwald declared, “but you, Schpencer, I like more petter. He vas here? You see dis?”

“Yes indeed, Colonel.” The shabby man had to trot to keep pace with von Steigerwald’s athletic strides. “He seemed much smaller here. Much less important than he had, you know, on my wireless. He was frightened, too. Very frightened, I would say, just as I would have been myself. Pathetic at times, really. Fearful of his own fear, sir. You know the Yanks’ saying? I confess I found it ironic and somewhat amusing.”

“He ist gone. Zo you say. Who it is dat takes him?”

“I can’t tell you that, Colonel. I wasn’t here when he was taken away.” The shabby man’s tone was properly apologetic. “Sergeant Lohr would know.”

Von Steigerwald asked Lohr, and Lohr insisted that Churchill had never been held in the facility.

This man, von Steigerwald pointed out, says otherwise.

This man, Lohr predicted, would die very soon.

Von Steigerwald’s laughter echoed in the empty tunnel. “He vill shoot you, Schpencer. Better you should go to de camps, ja? Der, you might lif. A Chew you are? Say dis und I vill arrange it.”

“I’d never lie to you, Colonel.”

“Den tell me vhere dese cars are vhere de prisoners stay. Already ve valk far.”

“Just around that bend, Colonel.” The shabby man pointed, and it seemed to von Steigerwald—briefly—that there had been a distinct bulge under his coat, a hand’s breadth above his waist. Whatever that bulge might be, it had been an inch or two to the left of the presumed location of the shabby man’s shirt buttons.

Lohr muttered something, in which von Steigerwald caught “
Riecht wie höllisches . . .
” Von Steigerwald sniffed.

“It’s the WCs,” the shabby man explained. “They empty onto the tracks. The commandant had the prison cars moved down here to spare our headquarters.”

“In de S.S.,” von Steigerwald told him, “we haf de prisoners clean it up. Dey eat it.”

“No doubt we would.” The shabby man shrugged.

“One becomes accustomed to the odor in time.”

“I vill not. So long as dat I vill not pee here.” Von Steigerwald caught sight of the stationary railroad cars as the three of them rounded the curve in the tunnel. “Every prisoner you show to me, ja? Many times dis man Churchill I haf seen in pictures. I vill know him.”

Lohr muttered something unintelligible.

Von Steigerwald rounded on him, demanding that he repeat it.

Lohr backed hurriedly away as von Steigerwald advanced shouting.

The shabby man tapped von Steigerwald’s shoulder. “May I interpret, Colonel? He says—”

“
Nein!
Himself, he tells me.” A competent actor, von Steigerwald shook with apparent rage.

“He said—well, it doesn’t really matter now, does it? There he goes, back to headquarters.”

Von Steigerwald studied the fleeing sergeant’s back. “Ist goot. Him I do not like.”

“Nor I.” The shabby man set off in the opposite direction, toward the prison cars. “May I suggest, Colonel, that we begin at the car in which Churchill was held? It is the most distant of the eight. I can show you where we had him, and from there we can work our way back.”

“Stop!” Von Steigerwald’s Luger was pointed at the shabby man’s back. “Up with your hands, Lenny Spencer.”

The shabby man did. “You’re not German.” “Walk toward that car, slowly. If you walk fast, go for that gun under your coat, or even try to turn around, I’ll kill you.”

Twenty halting steps brought the shabby man to the nearest coach. Von Steigerwald made him lean against it, hands raised. “Your feet are too close,” he rasped when the shabby man was otherwise in position. “Move them back. Farther!”

“You might be English,” the shabby man said; his tone was conversational. “Might be, but I doubt it. Canadian?”

“American.”

The shabby man sighed. “That is exactly as I feared.” “You think President Kuhn has sent me because he wants you for himself?” Von Steigerwald pushed the muzzle of his Luger against the nape of the shabby man’s neck, not too hard.

“I do.”

Von Steigerwald’s left hand jerked back the shabby man’s coat and expertly extracted a large and rather old-fashioned pistol. “It would be out of the fire and into the frying pan for you, even if it were true.”

“I must hope so.”

“You can turn around and face me now, Mr.

Churchill.” Von Steigerwald stepped back, smiling. “Is this the Mauser you used at Omdurman?”

Churchill shook his head as he straightened his shabby coat. “That is long gone. I took the one you’re holding from a man I killed. Killed today, I mean.”

“A German?”

Churchill nodded. “The officer of the guard. He was inspecting us—inspecting me, at the time. I happened to say something that interested him, he stayed to talk, and I was able to surprise him. May I omit the details?”

“Until later. Yes. We have no time to talk. We’re going back. I am still an S.S. officer. I still believe you to be an English traitor. I am borrowing you for a day or two—I require your service. They won’t be able to prevent us without revealing that you escaped them.” Von Steigerwald gave Churchill a smile that was charming and not at all cruel. “As you did yourself in speaking with me. They may shoot us. I think it’s much more likely that they’ll simply let us go, hoping I’ll return you without ever learning your identity.”

“And in America . . . ?”

“In America, Donovan wants you, not Kuhn. Not the Bund. Donovan knows you.”

Slowly, Churchill nodded. “We met in . . . In forty-one, I think it was. Forty would’ve been an election year, and Roosevelt was already looking shaky in July—”

They were walking fast already, with Churchill a polite half-step behind; and Von Steigerwald no longer listened.

 

Aboard the fishing boat he had found for them, Potter cleared away what little food remained and shut the door of the tiny cabin. “Our crew—the old man and his son—don’t know who you are, Mr. Prime Minister. We’d prefer to keep it that way.”

Churchill nodded.

“If you’re comfortable . . . ?”

He glanced at his cigar. “I could wish for better, but I realize you did the best you could. It will be different in America, or so I hope.”

Potter smiled. “It may even be different on the sub. I hope so, at least.”

Churchill looked at von Steigerwald, who glanced at his watch. “Midnight. We rendezvous at three AM, if everything goes well.”

Churchill grunted. “It never does.”

“This went well.” Potter was still smiling. “I know you two know everything, Mr. Prime Minister, but I don’t. How did he get you out?”

Still in uniform, Von Steigerwald straightened his tunic and brushed away an invisible speck of lint. “He got himself out, mostly. Killed an officer. He won’t tell me how.”

“Killing is a brutal business.” Churchill shook his head. “Even with sword or gun. With one’s hands . . . He trusted me. Or trusted my age, at least. Thought I could never overpower him, or that I would lack the will to try. If it was in my weakness he trusted, he was nearly right. It was, as Wellington said of a more significant victory, a near run thing. If it was in my fear, the captain mistook foe for friend. What had I to lose? I would have been put to death, and soon. Better to perish like a Briton.”

He pulled back his shabby coat to show the Mauser. “Perhaps it was seeing this. His holster covered most of it, but I could see the grip. Quite distinctive. Once upon a time, eh? Once upon a time, long before either of you saw light, I was a dashing young cavalry officer. Seeing this, I remembered.”

“The Germans have pressed every kind of pistol they can find into service,” von Steigerwald explained. “Even Polish and French guns.”

Churchill puffed his cigar and made a face. “What I wish to know is where I tripped up. Did you recognize me? The light was so bad, and I’d starved for so long, that I thought I could risk it. No cigar, eh? No bowler. Still wearing the clothes they took me in. So how did you know?”

“That you were Churchill? From your gun. I pulled it out of your waist band and thought, by god it’s a broom-handle Mauser. Churchill used one of these fifty years ago. I’d had a briefing on you, and I’d been interested in the gun. You bought it in Cairo.”

Churchill nodded.

“That was when it finally struck me that Spencer was your middle name. Your byline—I read some of your books and articles—was Winston S. Churchill.”

“You didn’t know about Leonard, then.” Churchill looked around for an ashtray and, finding none, tapped the ash from his cigar into a pocket of his shabby coat. “In full, my name is Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill. I should have been more careful about my alias. I had to think very quickly, though, and the only others I could seize on just then were John Smith and George Brown. Either, I felt, would have been less than convincing.”

Potter grinned. “Very.”

“In my own defense, I thought I was dealing with a German officer.” Churchill turned to von Steigerwald. “This isn’t what I wanted to inquire about, however.

How did you know I had been lying to you?”

“I wasn’t certain until I realized you were the man I’d been sent to rescue. A couple of things made me suspicious, and when I saw the bulge of your gun butt—”

“What were they?”

“Once you said ‘we’ in speaking of the prisoners,” von Steigerwald explained. “I said that the S.S. would make the prisoners eat their excrement, and you said, ‘No doubt we would.’ It sounded wrong, and when I thought about it, I realized that you couldn’t have been what you said you were—an Englishman working for the Germans. If you had been, they would have made you clean under the cars. Why did you confirm that you had been a prisoner when the Germans were denying they had him?”

“Ignorance. I didn’t know they were. I had walked for miles along those dark tracks, trying to find a way out. I couldn’t. All the tunnels ended in rubble and earth.”

“Flattened by bombs?” Potter asked.

Churchill nodded. “To get out, I was going to have to go out through the German headquarters, and I could think of no practical way of doing that. Then the colonel here came, plainly a visitor since he was S.S., not army, and because he had an escort. I hoped to attach myself to him, a knowledgeable, subservient Englishman who might inform on the commandant if he could be convinced it was safe. I would persuade him to take me with him, and when he did, I would be outside. Sergeant Lohr and any Germans in the headquarters would know who I was, of course. But if they were wise—if they spoke with the commandant first, certainly—they would let me go without a word. If they prevented me, the army would be blamed for my escape; but if they held their peace and let me go, they could report quite truthfully that I had been taken away by the S.S. With luck, they might even get the credit for my recapture later.”