Mr. Behrens opened the door of the car and slid out. They were on an upland plateau, with a long view of the road in both directions. There was no other car in sight.
On his left, twenty yards down the track, was a small hay barn. He could see the policemen’s bicycles propped up against it.
“This apparatus – you have a licence for it?”
Mr. Behrens sighed deeply.
“Of course,” he said. He dipped his hand inside his coat and pulled out an automatic pistol. “If you do not do what I say, I shall be forced to shoot you both. I have already killed three men. I should not advise you to touch your own guns.”
The two men backed away. There was no fight in them.
“Into that barn,” he said.
The windows of the barn were mere slits, and the bar across the double doors looked stout. They would break out, but it would take them time.
He wheeled the two bicycles back to the road, and threw them down the ravine on the other side. Then he drove off.
Forty minutes later he was in Germany. There was no trouble at the frontier, where he joined a stream of cars passing the check-post. His English passport and gb plate took him through without a hitch.
As soon as he had got clear of the traffic, he switched on his set again.
The earphones crackled angrily.
“Where the devil have you been?” said Mr. Calder.
“A bit of a holdup,” said Mr. Behrens. “The police.”
“You’ve been held up by the police?”
“On the contrary,” said Mr. Behrens, pleased by his own wit.
“What are you talking about?”
“I’ll tell you later. Where’s our friend?”
“Ahead of us,” said Mr. Calder. “East by northeast. I hope he stops for lunch soon.”
The afternoon run was uneventful. Shura drove and Nichol kept his eyes on the map. They were turning slowly north, and he saw now that their long detour had been designed to avoid the barrier of Cologne, the Ruhr and the Lower Rhine where the nato and West German defences were thickest.
By teatime, they were running into the southern part of the Black Forest, a region of dumpy hills, thick woodland and occasional lakes. They passed through empty holiday resorts. By August they would be packed with stout fathers in lederhosen, white-faced hausfraus, and a Pied Piper’s horde of flaxen-haired children.
At six o’clock, they stopped at one of those lakeside villages and found a café open. They were the only customers.
“Where do you plan to spend the night?” asked Nichol.
“It is a Gasthaus in the forest, near Adelsheim. We shall have no company. It is not yet open for the season.”
Now that they had left France behind, she seemed more relaxed, a little more sure of herself, a little readier to talk.
“You know the proprietor then? He allows you to stay there out of season?”
“Certainly. His name is Bauer. He was a member of Goering’s personal bodyguard. The Reichsmarschall was an interesting man. Did you know that he was fond of birds?”
“Yes,” said Nichol, cautiously. “So I had heard.”
“Each of his country retreats was named after a different bird.”
“A romantic idea.”
“He was highly romantic,” agreed Shura. “This one was the retreat of the nightingale. Die Nachtigall.”
It took them two hours, by tortuous roads which zigzagged up hills, twisted into hidden valleys, crossed streams brown with the local iron-ore and climbed again through pine forest cut into geometrical patterns. It was too dark to read the map and some of the roads they used would not, he felt certain, have been marked on any map at all. The last fifteen minutes were spent bumping along a sandy track.
“It is a private road,” said Shura.
“It feels like one,” agreed Nichol.
The Gasthaus der Nachtigall was a three-story, shingle-roofed building, with a deep balcony along the second-floor frontage, and a wide door leading under the balcony into an interior courtyard. There were no lights in the windows, but Shura drove confidently into the courtyard and sounded her horn.
A door serving the kitchen quarters opened and a man came out.
“Good evening, Herr Bauer,” said Shura, in German.
“Good evening, Fraulein. You have made good time.”
Horn-rimmed glasses set on a long, thin nose. The hair grey, running back from the brown, seamed expanse of the forehead. The mouth prim.
He said, “My boy will take your things up to your room. A fire has been lit in the Gastzimmer. Come.”
He led the way into the front room. It was panelled in pitch pine, and from the walls the creatures of the Schwartzwald looked down at them: squirrels, badgers, roebuck, blue hare, and ruffed capercaillie.
Herr Bauer had brought them, unasked, a tall bottle of white wine and a squat bottle of brandy. He filled two large glasses with wine and two small ones with brandy.
“After a journey,” he said, “it is kinder to the stomach to take a small amount of fortified spirits before you drink a natural wine.”
Nichol swallowed the brandy. It was aromatic. The glass of wine followed it more slowly. Herr Bauer refilled the wine glasses, said, “Dinner in half an hour,” and withdrew.
Nichol said, “He doesn’t look much like an SS man, does he?”
Shura said shortly, “I imagine that even in SS units there must have been administrative people – clerks, and quarter-masters.”
She seemed to be regretting her earlier confidence.
Nichol nodded. The warmth from the tiled stove was welcome. Being locked away alone with Shura in this house in the middle of a forest gave him a delusive feeling of security. Tomorrow there would be trouble. Tonight was tonight.
“The luggage will be in our room by now,” she said. “I will go and change. Give me a quarter of an hour.
Nichol sipped the second glass of wine. Somewhere at the back of his consciousness, a very faint alarm had sounded. He took a moment to track it down. Two days before, when they had first met, the girl had shown no embarrassment when he had stripped to the skin in front of her. Why should she mind taking off all
her
clothes in front of him. And above all, why had she said something so entirely out of character, so missish, as “I’ll go and change. Give me a quarter of an hour.” It made no sense.
Nichol put down his wine glass, got up and went across to the door. The place was quiet as a tomb.
He went out. There was a staircase ahead of him, leading to a landing running the length of the buildings. He guessed that the main bedrooms would face south.
There was a light under the door of one of them, and after a moment’s hesitation he turned the handle and went in.
It was their room. Shura’s suitcase was on one side of the double bed, open, and her windcheater, sweater and trousers were lying beside it. Evidently she had changed, but she had done so very quickly.
There was a newish suitcase on the other side of the bed. Nichol opened it and found shirts and underclothes, a pair of flannel trousers, a dark blue pullover and a jacket, all new and neatly packed. He took off his shirt and tie, ran some hot water into the basin and started to clean himself up.
Herr Bauer said, “A car has just come into the southwest driveway. It has pulled off the road.”
He and Shura were in a basement room. They were watching a map of the estate on the watt, covered by glass. In the bottom left-hand corner two pinpoints of light glared red. “It could be a casual trespasser, a pair of lovers in a car. But if you are being followed—”
“I think we are being followed,” said Shura. “There was a man in a dark blue Saab who came into camp after us last night. He left before we got up, and I have not seen him at all today.”
“Martin is patrolling now. If there is a dark blue Saab, we should take no risks. The driver will have to be attended to.”
As he spoke, the lights on the panel flicked and changed pattern.
“Possibly I was wrong,” said Herr Bauer. “The car is going. Nevertheless, I think we will take all precautions tonight. If there should be trouble – I hope your passenger is a sound sleeper?”
“I will make certain,” said Shura, seriously, “that he sleeps very well indeed.”
It was, in fact, Mr. Behrens who had driven his car into the edge of the Nachtigall domain. He had backed out again in answer to a call on the wireless from Mr. Calder, who had come to a halt half a mile farther down the road. It was the first time they had set eyes on each other since leaving England.
Mr. Behrens pulled up, walked across and climbed into the back of Mr. Calder’s car. In the darkness beside him, something stirred.
He put out his hand and a cold nose was pushed into it.
“I didn’t know you were bringing Rasselas with you,” he said.
“He refused to be left behind.”
When Mr. Calder spoke, the great dog turned his head, and his amber eyes reflected the light from the dashboard.
“How are you going to get him back again?”
“We’ll think about that when the time comes,” said Mr. Calder. “I want to hear about your adventures last night. Tell me more about that chap at the camp.”
“He called himself Major Horton. Leathery skin, baldish, with a halo of reddish hair, thick gingery eyebrows, poached-egg eyes.”
“Sounds an unpleasant character. Do you think he rumbled you?”
“I wondered,” said Mr. Behrens. “He did seem to accept me rather easily. If I really had been a modern Romany, or whatever it was he called me, presumably I’d have had some sort of card or papers. And if he did suspect me, that would account for the trouble I had near Altkirch.”
He told Mr. Calder about it.
Mr. Calder said, “We shall have to sort that out with the Department when we get back. The important point at the moment is,
were you followed?
”
“
I’m
quite certain I wasn’t.”
“Did it occur to you that they might have put a midget transmitter in your car, during the night?”
“Certainly it occurred to me,” said Mr. Behrens coldly. “I spent half an hour after breakfast turning my car out. Nothing had been tampered with.”
“In that case,” said Mr. Calder, “I wonder why we have already aroused such interest.”
“Interest?”
“Before you arrived, a man walked up to the edge of the trees over there and kept me under observation for several minutes. He has gone now.”
“You saw him?”
“No. But Rasselas told me about him. Never mind. The first thing is to find somewhere to eat. I passed a nice little place in the outskirts of Ringheim.”
They were finishing dinner when Mr. Calder suddenly said, “Got it.”
“Got what?”
“Nachtigall – the nightingale. It was one of Goering’s hide outs. He had five or six of them, all in remote areas, all top secret. When life at the centre got too much for him, he used to lie up in one of them. He called them his ‘nests.’ They were all named after birds, you see. The lark’s nest, the heron’s nest, the nightingale’s nest.”
“I wonder if he had one called the cuckoo’s nest.”
“I remember being shown round one of them by an American Intelligence officer in 1945. It had a very elaborate approach warning system, operated by crossing beams of infrared light. And one or two rather nasty booby traps for the benefit of unwanted visitors.”
“A highly suitable staging point for our friends.”
“Just what I thought,” said Mr. Calder. “A bit later on I’ll go and take a look at it. You’d better stop here and catch up on the sleep you didn’t have last night.”
“Are you sure you’ll be all right by yourself?”
“I shan’t be by myself,” said Mr. Calder.
A tail thumped against the floorboards.
It was past midnight when Mr. Calder switched off the engine of his car, let it coast quietly down the last hundred yards of road and came to a halt under a clump of trees. It was a clear night, with a full moon marbling the sky. He had been driving without lights.
Now he climbed out, of the car and stood for a moment. Rasselas sat beside him, head cocked, the tip of his right ear an inch from Mr. Calder’s left shoulder. His nose gave a thrust, as if to say, “Go on – what are we waiting for?” Mr. Calder crossed the road and climbed through the boundary wire.
It was tidy woodland with most of the undergrowth cleared, and man and dog advanced steadily on a long slant toward the house.
They were halfway across one of the open glades when Rasselas stopped. He had heard something, away to the right. There was a thick patch of bushes on the far side of the glade, with a slight depression in the middle, which made an admirable hiding-place.
From watching Rasselas, Mr. Calder could chart, with great exactness, the progress of his enemies. He saw the ears prick, the amber eyes swivel slowly as they followed something invisible to him. Then the lip lifted in a silent snarl as two men stepped out into the glade.
They were dressed in foresters’ uniform with leather leggings, and both carried, slung across their backs, short, double-barrelled rifles. Mr. Calder recognised them as the weapons issued during the war to guards in charge of working parties. They threw a spread of heavy buckshot, and were weapons for stopping and crippling, rather than for killing. One of the men carried a stick, which seemed to have some sort of spike on the end of it. The other had a heavy leather whip.
Mr. Calder slid his right hand gently inside his coat, until his fingers rested on the warm butt of his automatic.
The men walked slowly across the glade, heads turning to right and left, passed within six paces of where Mr. Calder was lying, seemed to hesitate for an instant and then were gone.
It was fully ten minutes before Rasselas stirred. Then he edged his way, silently, out of the thicket. Mr. Calder followed even more slowly. He was a professional himself and he recognised professional opposition when he saw it.
He moved slowly forward, Rasselas drifting beside him like a grey shadow. Now there was only a single line of trees between him and the house, since he was approaching it from the southwest corner and had a clear view of the long southern frontage. He noticed that a light still showed in one of the bedroom windows.