The Beaufort Sisters

She wondered who the soldier was, that he knew her name. Probably someone she had met on one of her visits to a military office; it was impossible to recognize him behind the scarf and earflaps. She put the jeep into reverse and followed the army truck as it backed up and swung into a side street. The sound of the chanting demonstrators was drowned now by truck horns being punched to the rhythm of the chant. Then a shot rang out and the blaring horns and chanting suddenly stopped. A moment later there were angry shouts and the sound of breaking glass. In a moment of imagination she wondered if she was hearing echoes of the Thirties: had the streets of Frankfurt clamoured like this when the SS had been rounding up the Jews? Street lights came on in the gloomy afternoon and the scene all at once became theatrical, a little unreal, a grey newsreel from the past. But the angry, yelling soldiers streaming down through the stalled traffic were real enough, frighteningly so.

She looked back and saw the GI gesticulating to her from the back of the army truck, which had turned round and was facing down the side street. She slammed on the brakes of the jeep, jumped out and ran to the truck. The GI reached down, grabbed her hand and lifted her easily, as if she were no more than a small child, into the back of the truck. The canvas flaps were pulled down and abruptly she was in darkness.

‘Thanks. I’m glad you came – ’

Then a hand smothered her face and she smelled chloroform on the rag that was pressed against her nose and mouth. She struggled, but an arm held her, hurting her. Then the darkness turned to blackness.

2

‘My name is McKea, Magnus McKea,’ said the tall American major in a voice that sounded slightly English; Davoren wondered if he had been an actor before he had joined the army. ‘I’m with the legal staff down at Nuremberg on the War Crimes thing. Colonel Shasta suggested I should come up and see you. It’s about Miss Beaufort.’

Davoren laughed, leaning so far back in his chair to let the laugh out that he looked in danger of falling over backwards. He was in his office in the big house on the Kasselallee, the walls papered with maps that he no longer looked at. Orderlies came and went in the corridor beyond the open door, all of them armed with the piece of paper that made them look as if they were too busy to be asked to do something by an officer or NCO. He was safe in British Army occupied territory and here was some Yank come to accuse him of something that was the best joke he had heard in ages.

‘You mean Miss Beaufort’s condition is a war crime?’

Major McKea looked puzzled. ‘Don’t joke, Davoren. Kidnapping is a crime, period.’

Davoren sat up straight, suddenly sober. ‘Good Christ – she’s been kidnapped?’

‘Yesterday some time. She didn’t return to her billet last night – ’

‘I know. I rang the billet, but some girl said she thought she’d seen Miss Beaufort come in and go out again.’

‘She was mistaken. Miss Beaufort never got to her billet. Her jeep was found abandoned in a Frankfurt suburb last night. An hour later Colonel Shasta got a ransom note to be passed on as quickly as possible to her father. He signalled Washington and they got in touch with Kansas City. I was brought in to represent Mr Beaufort till he gets here – my father is the Beaufort family lawyer. Nina’s father is being flown over by the Air Force. He’s expected in Frankfurt sometime tomorrow.’

Davoren was silent, but his face was expressive enough; he was too close to the war, to the cheapness of life, to be hopeful. Then he looked across at McKea. ‘I’m sorry I laughed. It was a stupid private joke.’

‘You said something about Miss Beaufort’s condition. Is she pregnant?’

Davoren nodded. ‘Does her father know about me?’

‘I don’t know, unless Nina wrote him. I don’t think anyone knows about you, except Jack Shasta. He thought you should be told.’

‘Why didn’t he tell me last night?’

‘I don’t know. I guess he was too concerned with getting in touch with Nina’s father.’ He lit a pipe, puffed on it. ‘I’ve known Nina since she was just a kid. We were never close, she’s about ten or twelve years younger than I, but I always liked her.’

Davoren saw the enquiring look through the haze of pipe smoke. ‘I love her, if that’s what you’re asking me. I didn’t think of her as just someone to jump into bed with.’

McKea ran a hand over his crew-cut, thinning red hair. ‘I didn’t mean to imply – sorry.’

Davoren got up, closed the door against the traffic in the corridor. This was no longer British Army occupied territory: it was his own and very personal, too. He remained standing, his back to the maps on the wall. The maps were pre-war, marked with towns that now were only rubble: they only seemed to deepen the lack of hope he felt. Nina could be buried anywhere in the havoc.

‘Is there any hint of who’s kidnapped her?’

‘Nothing definite. We think it’s probably Krauts. God knows, they have enough reason to be asking for money.’ It was difficult to tell whether McKea was critical of or sympathetic to Germans. But then he said, ‘The country’s full of communists and socialists, you know.’

Magnus McKea came from one of the oldest families in Kansas City, Missouri, a family whose conservatism had a certain hoariness to it. The army, and Europe itself, had opened up his tolerance, but he still tended to suspect any liberal thought that fell into his head, as if it might be the beginning of a brain tumour. He had a slightly fruity voice that almost disguised his Middle West twang. He had been fortunate or unfortunate enough, depending on one’s point of view and ear, to have had an English grandmother who had refused to speak to him if he spoke to her in what she described as a nasal infection. His grandmother, in earlier times, would have been scalped for her arrogance towards the natives. He had not enjoyed Europe, neither the war, the Nuremberg trials nor the havoc and misery that passed for conquered territory. All he wanted was to go home, but he had too much sense of duty to demonstrate towards that end.

‘Oh? I thought they’d all been killed off by the Nazis.’

McKea wasn’t sure whether Davoren meant to sound sardonic or not. ‘Not all of them. Half a million dollars, which is what they’re asking – what’s the matter?’

‘The Beauforts are that rich?’

‘I shouldn’t imagine Lucas Beaufort would miss half a million dollars. Finding the money is no problem – I believe he is bringing it with him this evening. In the meantime we’re looking for leads to the kidnappers, just in case – ’

‘Just in case they don’t hand Nina back to her father?’ Davoren tried to keep any emotion out of his voice; but he was suddenly afraid for Nina’s safety. ‘Are you expecting me to give you a lead?’

‘We thought you might have a suggestion – ’

Davoren clicked his fingers. ‘Rudi Schnatz! Do you have transport?’

‘I have a jeep and driver outside – ’

‘Let’s use it!’

McKea, a man accustomed to taking his time, had to hurry to keep up with Davoren as the Englishman led the way out of the house. They got into the jeep, Davoren gave the driver directions and twenty minutes later they pulled up outside a decrepit old house just off the Elbchaussee. On the other side of the street a row of bombed-out houses, like jagged gravestones, was an ugly testimony to the recent past. On a broken wall was scrawled a plea for the future: Let Communism Re-Build These!

‘You see?’ said McKea. ‘They’re not all dead.’

‘It’s in English. Maybe some of our chaps put that there.’

McKea said nothing, dismayed that communists might have fought on the wrong side; he had already decided that the Russians at Nuremberg were the enemy of the future. Even the British, usually so reliable, had tossed out Churchill for Attlee and his socialists.

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 selling 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?’