“Blackmail then! That sounds a bit different,” cried a gendarme. “None of these damned affairs of traitors, arms dumps, secret tribunals!”
His colleague cleared his throat loudly, almost menacingly. “Let the hound smell the vest. Don’t move, anyone! Take Minka in a circle round the hollow; everything’s stamped down here.”
Within five minutes the hound, tugging at the lead, shot up a little path. The men hurried after it, out of the hollow and up a glade, further and further from Neulohe.
Suddenly the detective was at Pagel’s side again. “You did that very well,” he said approvingly. “Have you guessed it at last, then?”
“Is it really true?” In his shock Pagel stopped. “It can’t be.”
“On, young man! We’re in a hurry now, though I’m convinced we’ll be too late. Of course it’s true—who would it be else?”
“I don’t believe it. That gray, fishlike brute!”
“I must have seen him on the streets of Ostade yesterday,” said the fat detective, “I had a sort of inkling of his face. But one sees too many faces these days which look like the faces of past or future criminals. God help the chap if I find him!”
“If we can only find her.”
“Stop. Perhaps your wish has just been fulfilled.”
There was a delay. At right angles to the glade the bloodhound, tugging, went into a thickly wooded coppice of firs. Battling with the branches and aided by the torch, the men pushed on. No one spoke. It was so quiet that the animal’s impatient panting sounded like the strokes of a steam engine.
“The scent’s quite fresh,” whispered the fat man to Pagel, and forced his way through the undergrowth.
But the little clearing they came to, hardly larger than a boxroom, was empty. The hound with a yelp sprang forward, and its master bent down. “A woman’s shoe,” he cried.
“And another,” exclaimed the fat detective. “Here he … On, gentlemen! We’re just behind him. He won’t be able to go very fast with the girl in stockings. You can praise your dog, man. Onward!”
They ran.
This way and that went the wild chase, between firs and junipers, the hound yelping, the men knocking in the dark against tree trunks. “I can hear her!” “Be quiet!” “Wasn’t that a woman screaming?”
The forest became more open, they advanced faster, and suddenly, fifty or sixty yards in front, there was a light between the branches, a beam white and brilliant …
“A car. He has a car!” cried someone. And they stormed forward. The engine started up, it roared, the glare flickered, became weaker.… And they were running in darkness.
They came to a halt. In the distance a light traveled away. A gendarme lowered his pistol—impossible to hit the tires.
They must hurry back to Neulohe! They must telephone; the fugitives could be followed in the Rittmeister’s car. All set off.
“Pagel,” called out Studmann impatiently, “aren’t you coming?”
“In a moment.”
The fat man held Pagel by the arm. “Listen, young man,” he whispered. “I won’t come with you, I’ll go back to Ostade. Those chaps are full of optimism because they’re on the track and it’s nothing to do with a traitor. Chasing political murderers is something they don’t like, although they have to. But you, young man, are the only sensible-looking one on the farm. Don’t deceive yourself or the others, especially the mother. Break it to her slowly.”
“What is it I’m to break to her?”
“When we were pushing through the thicket I too thought that he’d done it. But when we found the shoes …”
“We had disturbed him.”
“Perhaps. But he had calculated it to the minute. Pagel, I tell you in your worst dreams you couldn’t dream of a fellow like that. It’s possible, of course, that he will still do it, but I don’t think so. It’s much worse.… There are people like that. Generally, in healthy times, the others don’t let them advance. In a rotten diseased age they flourish like weeds.… You needn’t think, Pagel, that this fellow’s a human being. He’s a monster, a wolf who kills for the sake of killing.”
“But you say he won’t do it?”
“Do you know what that means, to be sexually enslaved? Can you imagine it? Dependent on the breath and the glance of such a monster, able to do nothing without his permission and will? There’s your little girl! And now he’s got away he will do the worst he can; continually he will almost murder her and then let her live a little. What he calls living! Just enough for the spark of life to experience the fear of death!”
There was a gust of wind in the trees.
“Pagel,” said the fat man suddenly, “I’m going now. We’re hardly likely to meet again, but it has been, as they say, a pleasure.”
“Pagel,” he said once again urgently, “pray to God that this mother never finds her daughter—she’d no longer be a daughter.”
He was gone without a sound, leaving Wolfgang Pagel alone in the dark and windy forest.
Chapter Fourteen
Life Goes On
I
It was October. Neulohe grew increasingly damper, windier, colder. And more and more difficult did Wolfgang Pagel find it to collect the necessary people for the potato digging. Where in September three wagons packed with laborers had rattled on to the fields from the local town, in October it had come to one, bearing a few sullen women wrapped up in sacks and woolen shawls.
Swearing and complaining, they toiled through the sodden growth over fields which seemed only to grow larger. Already Pagel had had to raise their wages twice, and had this not been in kind, had he not paid them with potatoes—that support of life which can replace even bread itself—none would have come. In those October days the dollar rose from 242,000,000 marks to 73,000,000,000. Hunger crept through the entire country, followed by influenza. Unprecedented despair seized the people; every pound of potatoes was a fence between them and death.
Wolfgang Pagel was now the overlord of Neulohe Manor, the farm and the forest. No time now to stand among the potatoes and give out tokens. Next year’s rye had to be sown and the fields plowed. In the forest the cutting down of firewood had started, and unless one gingered up Kniebusch every day the forester would have taken to his bed and died.
Pagel would come on his bicycle to the potato field where old Kowalewski would meet him ever more and more hollow-eyed. “We can’t do it, young sir,” was his lament. “This way we shall be digging in January in snow and ice.”
Wolfgang would laugh. “We’ll do it, Kowalewski. Because we’ve got to. Because potatoes are bitterly needed in the town.” And because the estate bitterly needs the money for them, he thought.
“But we ought to have more people,” moaned Kowalewski.
“And where shall I get them?” Pagel was a little impatient. “Shall I have another prison gang sent?”
“Oh, Lord, no!” exclaimed old Kowalewski, horrified—much too horrified, thought Pagel, looking at the diggers. “They’re only townsfolk, they’ve no business here,” he said discontentedly. “The work’s too unfamiliar for them. If only we could get the people from Altlohe as well.”
“We’ll never get them!” declared Kowalewski angrily. “They steal their potato supplies from our clamps at night.”
“They certainly do that,” sighed Pagel. “Every day I see the holes and have to have them filled up. I am always intending to go out at night and see if I can catch one, Kowalewski, but I always fall asleep over supper.”
“It’s too much, what the young gentleman has to do. All the estate and the whole forest and all the pen-pushing—no one’s done all that. You need help.”