It had been the custom of that unspeakable swine, Major Sporn, to borrow occasionally these unfortunate creatures from Ravensbrück. Besides the political prisoners awaiting the Ravensbrück gas chamber, there were plenty of common criminals utterly demoralized and only too glad of a break in their half-starved lives and a chance to drink themselves into a stupor.
On the afternoon when I myself went to Ravensbrück, I slipped into my busload of gipsies, thieves and prostitutes Catherine Dessayes and Olga Coronel. They knew that they were to trust me, and that was all. Twelve women had left for Buchenwald — filthy, disheveled, gaudily painted. But was it ten or twelve who arrived?
Sporn, already drunk, didn’t know and didn’t care. I, pretending also to be drunk, had juggled with the two extra — subtracted them, added them, done everything but multiply them. Forty-eight hours later Dessayes and Coronel had been picked up at a secret landing ground and were in hospital in London. Meanwhile I was under arrest; but they couldn’t see how I had worked the trick and they shot the wrong man. At least he was the wrong man from their point of view. Otherwise they could not have chosen a more deserving candidate.
“Your wife could not have been among those women,” I said.
“She was, von Dennim. I know something of what they did to her in every week from her arrest to her death. The men who interrogated her were hanged as war criminals — all but one whom I hanged myself. With Major Sporn and Captain Dickfuss I had the pleasure of dealing when they had served their sentences. And in the course of my conversation with Dickfuss I learned that I had a debt to pay to Weber and you.
It took me some time to find you. I should have guessed you were the type to save yourself by making friends with British Intelligence.”
“What did she look like?” I asked, ignoring this.
“She had long, dark hair,” he said. “Her skin was very pale and transparent even in health.”
The corners of his heavy, mobile mouth twitched twice. He glared at me across the table with eyes in which the obsession of blood-feud had long taken the place of sorrow.
I remembered. The hair had been cut short, but the transparency of the skin was unforgettable. They had housed her, I suppose, among the dregs of the camp in order that she should disappear from all human knowledge. God alone knew how they had drugged and broken her before she was ever interned in Ravensbrück. When I saw her she did not seem to know where she was or to care. She was already dead, though physically in apparent good health.
“What had she done?”
“Done! What had she done? You scum, does the name of Savarin mean anything to you?”
I asked him peaceably if he were Savarin. I was.
Presumably some of the French knew to whom that cover name belonged. London never did, nor, I believe, did the enemy. A leader of the Resistance, incredibly astute and merciless, Savarin had carried on his own private war against the German occupiers. His every act of bloodshed and sabotage carried the stamp of his own temperament — a sardonic savagery which belonged to some sultan of the Arabian Nights.
“But those women,” I began, “were …”
I stopped. I was only making matters worse. And I found unbearable the thought of the revenge which the Gestapo had taken when they suspected that they had caught the wife of Savarin. Dessayes and Coronel could never have known of her presence in Ravensbrück since she was not interned among the politicals. If those two gallant women had guessed that she was in the bus, one of them would have insisted on her escape and given up her own life instead.
“Dickfuss and Sporn I can understand,” I said. “But why did you kill Hans Weber?”
“He went with you and drove the bus.”
Accurate again. Weber was the officer in charge of transport. I had persuaded him to drive for the sake of his quite remarkable stupidity. If a total of ten were repeated to him often enough he could be trusted to swear to it.
“You might as well have executed the man who made it!” I exclaimed.
I was overwhelmed by the cruelty and pity of the thing. I knew I could never kill Savarin in cold blood. To take revenge for acts of revenge was merely to extend the horror and call it justice.
I suppose no man who has given great love to a woman worthy of love could ever guarantee that he would not kill the devils who destroyed her. But on the spur of the moment. To wait ten years without losing, in spite of the wear and tear of sane daily life, the compulsion to avenge her must be rare. And yet not so rare a few centuries ago. I am no psychologist, but I think the true parallel is religious mania. In Savarin’s case the wrathful god was his own very real but perverted sense of honor. He felt that he ought to kill, that he was morally bound to kill and that he must never permit himself to fall into any backsliding. To that, of course, must be added a pleasure in killing. He must always have had a powerful streak of sadistic cruelty — perhaps sublimated in youth, but during the war magnificently released and justified by patriotism.
I was tempted to turn my back on him and ride away. That was how my father would have dismissed him, ignoring his existence at the possible expense of his own. A contemptuous and honorable way out of the dilemma. Pride, Benita would call it. The day before, I too might have turned my back. But the future was no longer my own to relinquish.
I told him that it was the end, and that he must surrender. I disclosed to him all I knew — how he had tried to poison me in my cottage, how he had watched me from the old air-raid shelter and left his horse with Fred Gorble, how I had so nearly trapped him before a witness at the badger sett.
His face hardly changed. I had the impression that he had considered all that over and over again, but rejected it as unlikely.
“Watching badgers down wind,” he said to himself more than to me. “I should have known that even the Gestapo could not be so stupid.”
So that was why he had instinctively suspected something wrong and avoided the obvious line of approach!
“You might have known, too,” I retorted, “that an authority on squirrels can spot the difference between the French and English varieties.”
That, I could see, at last disturbed him. The purchase of the squirrels which he had let loose in the Wen Acre Plantation was just the sort of evidence which police could trace.
“Do you understand now, Savarin,” I asked, “that if you force me to shoot I can plead self-defense?”
He understood all right, but he was beyond caring. This was the tiger I predicted, who would still come on even if a bullet had raked his body.
“I should be sorry not to be present at your trial,” he answered with a calm which was no less deadly for being artificial. “I am half English and was educated here. I know the English criminal law. No one will believe you, von Dennim, and my friends are influential enough to see that you are tried for murder. There will be several weeks — separated by a period in jail — while your past comes out. It will interest the charming girl to whom you were properly saying good-by. I should think you will have to change your name. A von Dennim in the Gestapo! The head of your distinguished family should kill you if I do not.”
“I am the Graf von Dennim,” I answered.
He jerked forward his body and spat in my face.
From that point on it was another person who took command. I neither approve nor disapprove of him. What he did is what I should do again in similar circumstances. But my normally quiet self recognizes him with difficulty.