So his luck was in. He had sought and found her. But was finding her really good luck, he wondered, as he gazed down it this lovely wanton creature who had been the mistress of both himself and Ribbentrop. From what the fat-faced valet in Dahlem had said it seemed that Ribbentrop had cast her off. if that had been due to the false information with which he, Gregory, had sent her back to Germany, she might seize eagerly on the chance to revenge herself. And there was another thing. If he could succeed in explaining away his having lied to her, and she ranked the safety of her old lover above her duty as a Nazi, her welcome might prove almost as dangerous as her enmity. He knew her amorous nature too well to suppose that, should she agree to hide him, she would not expect him to go to bed with her again. And he was most loath to be unfaithful to Erika. Yet in Sabine lay his only hope of getting safely out of Germany.
16
The Lovely Wanton
SABINE was dressed in a light summer frock, and for a few moments Gregory stood there admiring her slim figure and the perfection of her features. She was now about twenty-eight and had changed little since he had first known her. A few tiny laughter wrinkles showed at the corners of her mouth and her hips and bust were slightly larger, but her magnolia-petal skin remained unblemished and a splendid foil to the dark hair that grew down so attractively into her smooth forehead as a widow's peak. Her mouth was a little open and showed a glimpse of her small, even teeth; her lips had always been a bright red, which he knew owed little to lipstick, and her dark eyelashes curled up making delightful fans on her cheeks.
Stepping back out of sight, in a clear voice he spoke one of the few sentences in Hungarian that he knew: `Holy virgin, we believe that without sin thou didst conceive.' It was the first line of a couplet he had heard her say a score of times before they had gone to bed together.
Suddenly there was a stir in the hammock. As Sabine sat up he ducked down behind it. With a low laugh she completed the couplet, `And now we pray, in thee believing, that we may sin without conceiving.' Then she cried, `Come out from behind there, whoever you are.'
Putting his head up above the back edge of the hammock, he grinned at her.
`Gregory!' she exclaimed, her black eyes going round with amazement.
`Then I'm not the only one who has heard you say your little prayer,' he laughed.
Goodness, no,' she laughed back. `But I thought you must be one of my old Hungarian boy friends. What in the world are you doing here?
'Oh, I'm in Berlin to destroy the Third Reich and put an end to the war,' he replied lightly.
`I wish to God you could,' she said with sudden seriousness. `The air-raids have become simply ghastly. Every night I go to bed expecting to be blown to pieces before morning. But, honestly; how do you come to be in Berlin?
'The usual way. I caught an aircraft and was dropped by parachute.'
She frowned. `You've come as a spy, then? After you got me out of the Tower and failed to get away yourself it was certain you would be arrested. I thought, perhaps, that you'd escaped from prison and managed to get here as a refugee. You told me that if your plan failed you would be finished with the British and try to get to Ireland.'
`It didn't fail, as far as you were concerned,' he said quickly. `But, of course, I was arrested. They gave me a whacking great prison sentence; so I've had a very thin time these past eighteen months. I'm only out now on what you might call ticket-of leave. Sent here to spy for England.'
As he told the lies he had prepared should he succeed in finding her, he watched her expression intently. For now was the critical moment. To his immense relief the frown left her face and, shaking her head, she said, `So you've been in prison on my account. You poor darling. But come round here and tell me about it.'
`I'd better not,' he replied. `I might be seen from the house and I'm on the run, remember. I knew I could trust you, but for both our sakes we mustn't be seen together.'
She shrugged. `You needn't worry. In the daytime I'm all alone here except for my maid Trudi; and it's her afternoon and evening off.'
Reassured, Gregory came round from behind the hammock and sat down beside her. With a smile, he said, `You wouldn't be you, my sweet, if you didn't have company at nights. Is it still Ribb, or have you another boy friend?
'I still see Ribb at times, but not often these days. He lets me stay on here, though, and my present boy friend, if you can call the old so-and-so that, was provided by him. He's a once-aweeker. Think of that, as a contrast to yourself, my dear, and those wonderful first weeks we spent together in Budapest.'
Of them Gregory needed no reminding. As her dark eyes, full of wickedness, caught his he could see her again lying naked and laughing on a bed, shaking her hair back a little breathlessly as she reached for a glass of champagne. This disclosure made him more uneasy than ever; for, since Sabine had such an unsatisfactory lover, he felt certain now that if she did let him stay there she would look on him as a heaven-sent outlet for her amorous propensities. As he was wondering how he could deal with such a situation, she said
`You'd never guess who my present boy friend is.' `Without a clue, how can I
'Oh, he's an old friend of yours; at least, a sort of connection -er, by marriage.'
`But I'm not married.'
`No, but there's that lovely blonde that got so het-up when she learned about our trip together down the Danube. You told me in London that for a long time past you had looked on her as your wife.'
`What, Erika? But I've never met any of her relations.' Sabine's big, dark eyes twinkled with amusement. `You've met her husband.'
`Kurt von Osterberg! My God, you can't mean…?
'I do. He has been living here with me for the past three months.'
`But damn it! He must be nearly sixty and…
`Don't I know it, my dear. And I shouldn't think he ever was much good between the sheets. But there it is. I'm saddled with him and trying to make the best of it.'
`But in God's name why?' Gregory stared at her in amazement. `You're as lovely as ever you were, and could take your pick of a hundred lovers. Von Osterberg hasn't even got any money. Erika married him only because it meant so much to her dying father that she should rehabilitate herself in the eyes if the aristocracy after her affaire with Hugo Falkenstein; and he picked Kurt because she knew that if she financed his scientific experiments with a part of the millions Falkenstein left her he would raise no objections to her having boy friends.'
Sabine made a little face. `My dear, for getting me out of the Tower you say you had to pay by being sent to prison. After I got back here I had to pay in another way, because the information you gave Colonel Kasdar was false.'
`1 know; but I didn't realize that till afterwards,' Gregory lied smoothly. `As I told you, I was never a Planner myself, only one of the bodies in the Cabinet War Room who stuck pins in maps. I thought that I'd passed the right dope to Kasdar for you to take back, but my pal on the Planning Staff had sold me the Deception Plan.'
`Is that the truth?' she asked, a shade suspiciously.
`Of course,' he replied, without blinking an eyelid. 'Kasdar's price for getting you away in a Moldavian ship was that I should get him the objectives of Operation "Torch"; so that by passing them on to the Nazis he would stand well with them when they had won the war and Hitler took over all the little neutrals that had stayed on the fence. He was pretty well informed about most things, so I didn't dare try to trick him. If he'd found me out he would have ditched us both.'