The Beaufort Sisters Page 4

  Davoren led the way up the chipped and cracked marble steps to the house. This had once been one of the best areas of the city, but all its smug dignity and prosperity had gone with the bombs. Davoren thought of the ruined sections of London and wondered which would be re-built first. The Yanks were already talking of re-building Europe before the Russians got too strong.

  Rudi Schnatz was in a worn woollen dressing-gown with some sort of crest on the pocket: his day was just beginning. ‘I say, old chap, it’s a bit strong, isn’t it, busting in on a chap like this?’

  Davoren pushed into the two-roomed flat, away from the prying frightened faces that had already appeared at the other doors in the hallway and on the landing above. McKea, more polite, less belligerent, followed him, closing the door against the curious.

  ‘Rudi, I don’t have any time for manners.’ Through the open door to the bedroom Davoren saw a naked girl sit up in a big brass-railed bed; then she lay down quickly again, pulling the blankets up over her. ‘We’re looking for Miss Beaufort – she’s been kidnapped.’

  Schnatz pulled his dressing-gown closer round his throat, almost a feminine gesture. ‘Please, Tim – you don’t think I’ve kidnapped her, do you?’

  ‘If I thought that, you’d be out in the jeep now and on your way to the Provosts. No, I want to know who your contacts are in the American zone. The ones who told you who Miss Beaufort was. Is.’ He corrected himself, like touching wood.

  ‘Are they the ones who have kidnapped her?’

  ‘We don’t know. For Christ’s sake stop wasting time with bloody questions – this has got nothing to do with you! Tell me who your contacts are, where we can find them!’

  ‘I don’t know that I can do that, old chap. Honour among thieves, you know – ’

  Davoren grabbed him by the front of the dressing-gown and lifted him off the floor. The Englishman’s face was dark with anger, heightened by his bared teeth: he looked on the verge of a fit. ‘Tell me who they are, Schnatz, or I’ll break every bone in your body!’

  There was a muffled scream from the other room. McKea crossed to the door and closed that one, too. He didn’t have the true spirit of the conqueror, he was too much the lawyer. He just hoped Davoren wouldn’t try to kill the little German, though it looked very possible. But he wouldn’t interfere, not in the British zone.

  Schnatz struggled, unafraid, ready to fight the bigger man. He gasped something in German and Davoren let him go so that he fell back on his heels.

  ‘Who are they? Their names, bugger you, their names!’

  Schnatz pushed back his long blond hair, shook his head. ‘You’re acting just like the Gestapo, old chap – ’

  ‘Their names!’

  ‘Burns and Hiscox. They are with the Supply outfit just outside Frankfurt on the road to Fulda – ’ Davoren was already on his way out of the room and Schnatz shouted after him: ‘Don’t tell them I sent you! If they’re not the ones, I’ll still need them – ’

  Outside in the jeep Davoren said, ‘Drive me back to my office, I’ll get my own car and driver.’

  ‘I think you can safely leave it to us. After all, it’s in our zone – ’

  ‘Don’t start drawing bloody boundaries! Back to my office, driver, and get a move on!’

  The driver looked at McKea: who did this goddam limey think he was? But McKea just nodded and the driver let in the gears and they sped back through the city.

  Davoren picked up his own driver and the commandeered Mercedes which was his staff car. He invited McKea to ride with him in the more comfortable car and the American, after a moment’s hesitation, accepted. They sat in the back seat while the Mercedes sped down the autobahn after the jeep. Davoren had calmed down, seemed almost morosely quiet. McKea stared out at the passing countryside, now fading into the thickening dusk. He preferred Germany at night, when so much was hidden by darkness. It was a relief from what he read and listened to at Nuremberg during the day.

  At last Davoren said, ‘What’s Old Man Beaufort like?’

  ‘Autocratic. Devoted to Nina – she’s his favourite. Until we find the kidnappers, he’ll probably choose you to blame for what’s happened. We’ll have to tell him, of course. I mean, about – ’ McKea could see the driver in front of them half-turn his head, one ear cocked to follow the conversation.

  ‘I’m already blaming myself,’ said Davoren, careless of the driver. ‘For everything.’

  3

  Nina had a headache and felt ill. So far she had had no morning sickness; but she was sick this morning. And cold and miserable and afraid. She sat on the floor of the bare room, wondering where she was. She could hear no sound from outside except the occasional harsh cry of a bird; she recognized country silence, remembering vacations spent on the Beaufort plantation down in the south-east corner of Missouri. The two men who had kidnapped her had fed her army rations last night and again this morning: at least they were not going to let her starve. They had given her two army blankets, but even with those and still wrapped in her camel hair coat, she had not been able to sleep for the cold. She had never felt worse in her whole life and only an effort kept her from breaking down and weeping helplessly at her plight.

  The door was unlocked and one of the men came into the room with a mug of steaming coffee. He was the one who had been driving the truck and she had not seen him until she had woken up in this room last night. He was a small man, in uniform and wearing a parka with the hood up; Air Force dark glasses covered his eyes. In the gloom of the room, with the only light coming through the cracks of the boarded-up window and through the half-open door, it was impossible to distinguish his features. He was just a dark body and head with a rough soft voice.

  ‘Get this into you, honey. Sorry we can’t give you any heat, but we don’t want people coming around asking why smoke’s coming outa the chimney. If your daddy don’t fool around, you oughtn’t to be here too long.’

  Nina stood up, took the mug and almost scalded her throat as she gulped down the coffee. The man stood looking at her and she suddenly felt even more afraid: was he going to rape her? She tightened her grip on the mug, ready to hurl it if he moved towards her.

  ‘I’m just looking at you.’ The man’s voice was most peculiar, as if he had a small bag of sand or gravel in his throat instead of a voice-box. ‘We put a price of half a million bucks on you. You think you’re worth that much?’

  She almost said, My father would think I’m worth much more; but she was not so cold and miserable that her mind had stopped working. She suddenly realized how dangerous wealth could be. It was said that kidnapping in America had originated in Kansas City; people must have been abducted in colonial times, but it had been turned into a modern profession by gangsters in her home town. They had even kidnapped the city manager’s daughter; Lucas Beaufort had wanted to broadcast a plea that the kidnappers come back for the city manager, too. The spate of abductions had frightened the wealthy citizens and for a while no children of rich families went anywhere without an escort. When Nina had gone to college her father had wanted a private guard assigned to her, but the Vassar board had been firm that their campus should not be turned into a security camp. From her early teens Nina had been aware that great wealth made her and her sisters different from other children, but, despite her father’s concern, she had never really thought of it as endangering her. Now, chillingly, she knew better.

  ‘Why are you doing this?’

  But even as she asked she knew it was a foolish question, and the man laughed. ‘You ain’t that dumb, Nina. We’re doing it for money. Ain’t that what your old man and his old man worked for, screwed people for? We come over here, us GI’s, to fight for a better world, that’s what they told us. You need money for a better world, if you’re gonna enjoy it properly. My partner and me, we been making a little on the side. But you’re worth more than a truck-load of cigarettes, more than a whole PX.’

  ‘They might hang you for kidnapping. They wouldn’t do that for se
lling things on the black market.’

  ‘The Krauts spent three years trying to shoot my ass off, but I survived. I think my luck’s gonna hold. Nobody’s gonna hang me. You work for UNRRA, but you don’t know nothing about the real world. The real world is made up of people without money, and I don’t mean just Krauts. We gotta take risks, we wanna get anywhere. You’re lucky, you’re never gonna have to take a risk in your whole goddam life!’

  He sounded abruptly angry, though his voice didn’t rise. He went out of the room, slamming the door behind him and locking it. Nina put the mug down on the floor, began to walk round the room in an effort to turn the blocks of ice in her shoes back into feet. She heard an engine start up outside and she went to the window and tried to peer out through the thin cracks between the boards. But all she could see was snow, a blank white mockery.

  The truck, or whatever it was, drove away. When its sound had faded she stood listening, ears alert for any sound in the house. She could hear nothing; then the house creaked as if to reassure her that she had been left alone. She made up her mind that she was going to escape.

  She had always been a resourceful girl, though never as good at practical matters as Margaret and Sally. She hoped she could get herself out of a locked, boarded-up room. One could not be more practical than to know how to escape from kidnappers.

  Buoyed up by her own determination, she began at once to seek a way out of the room. Ten minutes later she was as depressed and miserable as when the kidnapper with the husky voice had come in. There was nothing in the room that she could use as a club to bash the boards away from the window; the door was too stout to be broken open and the lock would have defied Jimmy Valentine or any other cracksman. She sank down to the floor beside the fireplace and began to weep.

  Then something fell into the grate, a lump of soot, and she heard the flutter of wings in the chimney. She sat up, waited, then crawled into the fireplace and looked up. A film of soot floated down on to her face; but high up in the chimney she could see a small square of light. She withdrew from the fireplace, sat on her haunches and considered. Weighed her strength and size (would the chimney be too narrow and too high?) against the urge to escape. Weighed, too, her determination against her fear that the men would come back, find her trying to escape and vent their anger on her.

  She measured the width of the chimney with her hands, decided it was wide enough to take her shoulders and hips. She took off her coat, knowing the bulk of it would handicap her once she began climbing up the narrow space. But she would need it once she was outside the house; she put the belt of it through the loop inside the collar, tied the belt round her waist and let the coat hang down between her legs. She pulled the knitted cap she wore down over her face to just above her eyes, pulled on her gloves. Then she crawled into the fireplace, stretched her arms above her, eased herself upright into the narrow blackness of the chimney and began to climb.

  She was glad she was wearing stout winter shoes; she searched for and found tiny crevices in the chimney wall into which she drove her toes. The chimney had not been cleaned in years and she had climbed no more than her own height when she began to feel she was smothering. A bird suddenly fluttered out of the top of the chimney in a panic; soot cascaded down on her and she shut her eyes and turned her face downwards just in time. She lost her grip and went plunging down, scraping against the bricks, taking more soot with her. She hit the floor of the fireplace, feeling the jarring shock go right up through her body to her skull; but she remained upright, unable to fall over because the chimney held her like a brick corset. She held her breath, feeling the soot in a thick cloud about her face, waiting for it to settle, then she opened her eyes and stared into the blackness.

  It seemed that every bone and muscle in her body hurt; her knees and ankles felt as if they might be broken. Her arms were trapped above her head; she could feel the pain where her elbows had been scraped as she fell. Her right knee felt as if there was an open wound in it and her right hip as if it had been kicked by a horse. She wanted to gasp for breath, but she was afraid that would mean sucking in a lungful of choking soot. She thought of the baby inside her, wondered if it was already beginning to miscarry. She was frighted, ready to scream, discovering, now, for the first time in her life, that she was claustrophobic.

  But she held on to herself, didn’t bend her knees, kept herself upright in the black prison of the chimney. She was on the point of hysteria, but, without recognizing it, something of the iron she had inherited from her parents and grandparents kept her from breaking. She continued to stare into the blackness, smelling the burned wall only an inch or two from her face, willing herself to believe that it was not going to collapse in on her and smother her. She was no longer cold, she could feel sweat running down her face and body. Some instinct told her that all she had to do was survive the next minute or two. If she didn’t, if she gave in and retreated from the chimney, she knew she would never enter it again. And the chance of escape would be gone.

  Then the hysteria passed, gone all of a sudden, as if wiped away by her will. She started to climb again, feeling more confident with every foot gained; soot continued to float down, but she ignored it, holding her breath till it had gone past. Her body was just one large ache, but she kept climbing, elbows, knees and ankles scraping against the brickwork. Then, all at once it seemed, the blackness turned to gloom, then there was light and a moment later her head cleared the top of the chimney.

  She scrambled out, holding desperately to the chimney so that she would not slide off the snow-covered roof. She was on top of a farmhouse that was more ruin than building; the only rooms left intact were the one in which she had been imprisoned and the room immediately below it. The rest of the house was a shell; charred timbers, a tumble of bricks and a big bomb crater told their own story. All around her the fields lay white and empty.

  It took her another five minutes to get down from the roof. Twice she almost fell; snow slid down beneath her like an avalanche and fell into the yard. Then she was down on the ground, stumbling through the mud and snow, running like a crazed person, whimpering like a child. She fell down twice before she realized she had tripped over the coat between her legs. She stood up, gasping for breath, giggling hysterically at herself, and struggled into the soot-blackened, mud-stained coat. Then, steadying herself, she walked out into the lane beside the yard and began to hurry away from the farm.

  4

  Davoren and McKea were stopped twice for speeding by military police, so that it was dark before they pulled into the warehouse on the Fulda road where the supply company was headquartered. The place seemed deserted and it took them a few minutes to find a soldier who could tell them where the adjutant was.

  ‘What an army!’ said Davoren. ‘How did you chaps manage to win the war?’

  ‘We won it, that’s the point. It’s over and everybody just wants to go home. Don’t you?’

  But Davoren didn’t answer that, going instead to look for the adjutant, who told them, ‘Burns and Hiscox? Sure, they’re on weekend passes. They went off Friday night. I understand they do a little business on the side.’

  ‘You condone that?’ said Davoren.

  The adjutant was fat, bald, homesick and not inclined to take any moralizing from an unknown Englishman ‘The war’s over, mac. Didn’t you know?’

  Outside the office Davoren spat into the dirty snow in the cobbled yard. But he made no comment on the adjutant, just said. ‘Do we send your MP’s looking for Burns and Hiscox?’

  ‘We can’t go looking for them ourselves.’ McKea himself had a sour taste in his mouth at the sloppy moral attitude of the supply adjutant. ‘I understand how you feel, Davoren. But I think we have to do this through the proper channels.’

  ‘Bugger channels!’ Then Davoren threw up his arms and let out a loud sigh that was almost a moan of pain. ‘You’re right. But Jesus Christ – ’

  ‘Let’s go and see Jack Shasta. He may have heard something further.�
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  Colonel Shasta was in his office, even though it was Sunday night. ‘I’ve been trying to call you, but Hamburg said you’d left, didn’t know where you’d gone. It’s a helluva way to run an army, I must say.’

  Davoren looked at McKea, grinned, looked back at Shasta. ‘Nobody’s perfect.’

  ‘We’ve been doing some sleuthing,’ said McKea, all at once liking Davoren. ‘We think we might have a lead. If you get in touch with the Provost-Marshal – ’

  ‘There’s no need,’ said Shasta. ‘Miss Beaufort is safe.’

  ‘Where?’ The heart did not leap, said practical-minded medical men: but Davoren felt something rise in his chest. ‘Where, for God’s sake?’

  She was asleep in her billet, a house on the edge of the bombed ruins of the old city. The other women in the house did not try to stop Davoren as he walked in, asked where Miss Beaufort’s room was and went straight upstairs and into the room without knocking. He sat down on the edge of the bed and looked at her still asleep. She had been bathed and fed; her muddied and blackened clothes were in a heap in a corner of the room. But even in sleep her face showed the strain she had been under. She whimpered even as he looked at her and her body shook in a quick spasm. He bent and kissed her, feeling weak and empty himself, demolished by relief and love.

  Nina opened her eyes, saw his face close to hers and started away in fear. Then she recognized him and her arms, the elbows decorated with chevrons of medical tape, came out from beneath the blankets and went round his neck.

  ‘Let’s go home.’

  ‘Just what I had in mind,’ he said, thinking of England.

  5

  They went home to Kansas City two months later.

  Burns and Hiscox did not return from their weekend leave and were officially posted as deserters and never heard from again. Since kidnapping was not classified as a military crime, armies having indulged in it for centuries, they were not listed as suspected kidnappers. Military authorities, who had not even bothered to start a file on the Beaufort case, promptly forgot about it and went back to wondering what the hell one did with the peace when one had won a war. The black market continued to flourish, becoming a major industry, and the fed-up GI’s gave up demonstrating and went back to gold-bricking, fraternizing and all the other important functions of an occupation force.