Smith walked up the half-dozen steps to the front door and opened it. He winced as the blast of sound reached him, an almost physical a.s.sault upon the eardrums. Heaven knew the last two Weinstuben had been clamorous enough but compared to this place they now seemed, in retrospect, to have been invested in a cathedral silence. To the blaring accompaniment of a battery of discordant accordions what appeared, from the sheer volume of sound, to be an entire regiment were giving "Lili Marlene" all they had. Smith glanced at his men, nodded and pa.s.sed inside.
As the others followed, Schaffer paused in the doorway as Christiansen took his arm and said wonderingly: "You think he thinks this isn"t packed?"
"They must," Schaffer conceded, "have had them packed six deep in the other joints."
They weren"t exactly stacked six deep inside "Zum Wilden Hirsch" but they might well have been if the music-swaying crowd of elbow-jostling customers has a.s.sumed the horizontal instead of the perpendicular. He had never, Smith thought, seen so many people in one bar before. There must have been at least four hundred of them. To accommodate a number of that order called for a room of no ordinary dimensions, and this one wasn"t. It was a very big room indeed. It was also a very very old room.
The floor of knotted pine sagged, the walls sagged and the ma.s.sive smoke-blackened beams on the roof seemed to be about ready to fall down at any moment. In the middle of the room stood a huge black wood-burning stove, a stove stoked with such ferocious purpose that the cast-iron top cover glowed dull red. From just below the cover two six-inch twenty-foot long black-enamelled stove pipes led off to points high up on opposite sides of the room--a primitive but extremely efficient form of central heating. The three-sided settees--half booths--lining three walls of the room were of oak darkened by age and smoke and unknown centuries of customers, each booth having recessed holes for stowing newspapers rolled round slats of wood. The twenty or so tables scattered across the floor had hand-cut wooden tops of not less than three inches in thickness with chairs to match. Most of the back of the room was taken up by a solid oaken bar with a coffee-machine at one end, and, behind the bar, swing doors that presumably led to the kitchen. What little illumination there was in the room came from ceiling-suspended and very sooty oil lamps, each one with its generations-old patch of coal-black charred wood in the roof above.
Smith transferred his attention from the room to the customers in the room, a clientele of a composition such as one might expect to find in a high Alpine village with a military encampment at its back door. In one corner were a group of obvious locals, men with still, lean, aquiline, weather-beaten faces, unmistakably men of the mountains, many of them in intricately embroidered leather jackets and Tyrolean hats. They spoke little and drank quietly, as did another small group at the back of the room, perhaps a dozen or so nondescript civilians, clearly not locals, who drank sparingly from small Schnapps gla.s.ses. But ninety per cent of the customers were soldiers of the German Alpenkorps, some seated, many more standing, but all giving of their very best with "Lili Marlene", and nearly all of them enthusiastically waving their pewter-capped litre Steinbechers in the air, happily oblivious, in that moment of tearfully nostalgic romanticism, of the fact that the amount of beer finding its way to comrades" uniforms and the floor was about the equivalent of a moderately heavy rainstorm.
Behind the bar was the obvious proprietor, a gargantuan three-hundred pounder with an impa.s.sive moon-like face and several girls busy filling trays with Steinbechers. Several others moved about the room, collecting or serving beer-mugs. One of them approaching in his direction caught Smith"s eye.
It would have been surprising if she hadn"t. It would have been surprising if she hadn"t caught the attention of every man there. But there was no surprise. She did. She would have won any Miss Europe contest hands down if she had had a face other than her own which, though pleasant and plump, was rather plain. But any possible lack of attraction in that cheerfully smiling face was more than over-compensated for elsewhere. She was dressed in a gaily-patterned dirndl and Tyrolean blouse, had a hand-span waist, an hour-and-a-half-gla.s.s figure and an obvious predilection for low-cut blouses, that in terms of attracting local custom, must have been worth a fortune to the gigantic proprietor behind the bar. She drew a great deal of attention from the a.s.sembled soldiery, not all of it just consisting of admiring glances : if she weren"t wearing armour-plating, Smith reflected, she must be permanently black and blue. She approached Smith, brushed back her blonde hair and smiled, the gesture as provocative as the smile.
"Can I help you, sir?"
"Dark beer, please," Smith said politely. "Six."
"With pleasure, sir." Again the provocative smile, this time accompanied by a half-appraising, half-lingering look from cornflower blue eyes, then she turned and walked away, if her method of locomotion could strictly be described as walking. Schaffer, a slightly dazed expression on his face, stared after her, then caught Smith by the arm.
"Now I know why I left Montana, boss." His voice held something of the dazed quality on his face. "It wasn"t because of the horses after all."
"Your mind on the job if you don"t mind, Lieutenant." Smith looked thoughtfully after the girl, rubbed his chin and said slowly: "Barmaids know more about what"s going on in their own manor than any chief of police--and that one looks as if she might know more than most. Yes, I"ll do that."
"Do what?" Schaffer asked suspiciously.
Try to get next to her."
"I saw her first," Schaffer said plaintively.
"You can have the next dance," Smith promised. The levity of the words were belied by the cool watchful expression on his face as his eyes constantly travelled the room. "When you get your drinks, circulate. See if you can hear any mention of Carnaby or Reichsmarschall Rosemeyer."
He caught sight of an empty chair by a corner table, moved across and sat in it, nodding politely to a rather bleary-eyed Alpenkorps captain deep in what appeared to be rather u patronising conversation with two lieutenants. The captain showed no more than a brief recognition of his presence and, as far as Smith could tell, no other person present was showing the slightest interest in either himself or his companions. The accordion band finished its stint more or less on the same note and at the same time and the singing of "Lili Marlene" died away. For long seconds there was a profound and nostalgic.silence, four hundred men alone with Lili Marlene under the barrack gate lantern, then, as if on cue, a babel of voices broke out all over the room: four hundred men with unfinished litre jugs do not remain sentimental for overly long.
He caught sight of the girl returning with six Steinbechers on a tray, pushing her way through the crowd and fending off admirers with a practised hand. She gave drinks to Smith"s men who immediately but unostentatiously broke up and began to wander away into different parts of the room. The girl looked around, located Smith, smiled brightly, crossed to his table, and put the Steinbecher on it. Before she could straighten, Smith put his arm around her waist and pulled her on to his knee. The Jager captain across the table broke off his conversation, stared" across in startled disapproval, opened his mouth as if to speak, caught Smith"s discouraging glance, decided to mind his own business and resumed his conversation. Smith,, in his turn, looked away, squeezed the girl"s waist, patted her knee and smiled what he hoped was a winning smile.
"And what might your name be, my Alpine rose?" His voice had a slightly slurred edge to it.
"Heidi." She struggled to rise, but didn"t really put her heart into it. "Please, Major. I have work to do."
"There is no more important work than entertaining soldiers of the Fatherland," Smith said loudly. Holding Heidi firmly to forestall any attempt at escape, he took a long pull at his beer, then continued, quietly now, the mug still in front of his face: "Shall I sing you a song?"
"What song?" Heidi asked warily. "I hear too much singing."
"I whistle better than I sing. Listen." He whistled, very softly the first two bars of "Lorelei". "Do you like that?"
Heidi stiffened and stared but immediately relaxed and smiled at him coquettishly.
"It"s very nice, Major. And I"m sure "you have a beautiful singing voice, too."
Smith put his Steinbecher down with an unsteady bang that brought more disapproval from the other side of the table then lifted his hand to wipe the froth from his lips. Heidi smiled down at him, but the wary eyes weren"t smiling.
Smith said from behind his hand: "The men at the bar? The civilians? Don"t turn round."
"Gestapo." She made another apparently futile attempt to free herself. "From the castle."
"One"s a lip-reader." Smith had the Steinbecher in front of his face again. "I can tell. They"re watching. Your room in five minutes. Hit me good and Heidi stared at him in bewilderment, then yelped in pain as he pinched her, far from gently. She drew back, her right hand came over in a round-house swing and the sound of the slap could be heard clear across the crowded room, cutting sharply through the deep buzz of conversation. The voices died away, Steinbechers remained poised half-way towards lips, and every eye in the room turned until it was focused on the scene of the disturbance. Smith now had the exclusive and undivided attention of close on four hundred German soldiers which was exactly how he wanted it: no man anxious to avoid attention at all costs would ever do anything to incur the slightest risk of drawing that unwanted attention.
Heidi pushed herself to her feet, rubbed herself tenderly, s.n.a.t.c.hed up the note which Smith had earlier placed on the table and stalked haughtily away. Smith, his already reddening face discomfited and tight in anger, rose, made to leave the table then halted when confronted by the Jager captain who had already risen from his side of the table. He was a spruce, erect youngster, very much of the Hitler Jugend type, punctilious and correct but at that moment rather suffering from the effect of too many Steinbechers. Beneath the redly-dulled eyes lay a gleam which bespoke the not uncommon combination of self-importance and officious self-righteousness.
"Your conduct does not become an officer of the Wehrmacht," he said loudly.
Smith did not reply at once. The embarra.s.sed anger faded from his face to be replaced by an expressionlessly penetrating stare. He gazed unwinkingly into the captain"s eyes for so long that the other finally looked away. When Smith"s voice came it was too quiet to be heard even at the next table.
"Herr Major, when you talk to me, little man." The tone was glacial: so now were also the eyes. "Major Bernd Himmler. You may have heard of me?"
He paused significantly and the young captain seemed to shrink perceptibly before his eyes. Himmler, head of the Gestapo, was the most feared man in Germany. Smith could have been any relative of Himmler, possibly even his son.
"Report to me at 8 a.m. tomorrow morning," Smith said curtly. He swung away without waiting for an answer. The Alpenkorps captain, suddenly very sober indeed, nodded wordlessly and sank wearily into his chair. As Smith strode towards the door the hubbub of conversation resumed. For the soldiers stationed in that remote military outpost, drinking beer, very large quant.i.ties of beer, was the only pastime: such incidents were no sooner seen than forgotten.
On his way to the door Smith stopped briefly by Schaffer and said: "Well, I fouled that one up."
"You could have handled it differently," Schaffer conceded, then went on curiously: "What did you say to him? The young Alpine Corps captain, I mean."
"I gave him to understand that I was Himmler"s son."
"The Gestapo boss?" Schaffer asked incredulously. "G.o.d above, you took a chance."
"I couldn"t afford to take a chance," Smith said cryptically. "I"ll go try the "Eichhof". Better luck there, maybe. Back in ten minutes. Less."
He left Schaffer looking uncertainly after him, made an urgent negative move of his hand towards Carraciola, who was approaching him, and pa.s.sed outside. He moved a few paces along the wooden boardwalk, stopped and glanced briefly up and down the snow-filled street. It was deserted in both directions. He turned and walked quickly up a narrow alleyway which paralleled the side of "Zum Wilden Hirsch". At the rear stood a small wooden hut. Smith checked again that he was un.o.bserved, opened the door quietly.
"Eight o"clock," he said into the darkness. "Come on."
There was a rustle of clothes and Mary appeared in the doorway. She was shivering violently, her face blue-tinged with the extreme cold. She looked questioningly at Smith but he took her arm without a word and led her quickly to the back door of the Gasthaus. They entered a small hallway, dimly lit by an oil lamp, crossed it, climbed a flight of stairs, moved along a corridor and stopped at the second door on the right. They pa.s.sed swiftly inside, Smith closing the door behind him.
It was a small room, plainly furnished, but from the chintz soft furnishings and toilet articles on a dressing-table, very obviously a feminine room. Mary sat down on the bed, hugging herself tightly to try to restore some warmth and looked up at Smith without any admiration in her face.
"I hope you"re enjoying your little game," she said bitterly. "Seem to know your way around, don"t you?"
"Instinct," Smith explained. He stooped over the low-burning oil lamp by the bed, turned up the flame, glanced briefly about the room, located a battered leather case in one corner, swung it to the bed and snapped open the lid. The case contained women"s clothing. He pulled Mary to her feet and said : "Don"t waste time. Take off your clothes. And when I say that, I mean your clothes. Every last st.i.tch. Then get into that top outfit there. You"ll find everything you need.".
Mary stared at him.
"Those clothes? Why on earth must I --"
"Don"t argue. Now!"