The Black Laurel Read online

  THE BLACK LAUREL

  BY

  STORM JAMESON

  None of the characters in this book is a real person living or dead. The Political Investigation Division of the Control Commission for Germany has never existed.

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Chapter One

  From the window of his room in a two-roomed hut, the Commandant of the camp watched his visitor approaching him from the gate. He walked quickly, smoothly, moving his heavy body as though it were all energy, not, like most human bodies, partly inert and rigid. It’s the hour every day he fences with his body-servant, Colonel Brett thought. Why does he take the trouble, he’s not vain? Heaven knows he has other things on his mind.

  He turned from the window. The enormous wealth, power, importance, of his visitor were not things that impressed him. He was more conscious of William Gary’s charm of manner, the good humour and simplicity which are the graces of assured power. William Gary’s eccentricity had been to build, on the coal his forbears used to make themselves easy as landowners and diplomats, a web of steel, ships, finance, penetrating everywhere in the world as subtly as the darkness from his collieries flowed into miles of bright air. Not here. Nothing blurred the wide clear northern summer of this Scotch valley.

  What a place to put a camp for prisoners of war, where the horizon itself mocked them.

  The door opened.

  “Ah, there you are.”

  “I’m a little late,” Gary said.

  “It doesn’t matter. I’m not busy. I can’t work. Sit down, I’ll have him fetched.” He sat down himself, and took his telephone by the throat. “Is that you, Wilson? Get him in. Now.”

  “You’re upset,” Gary said gently.

  “Yes, I’m upset. By God, I am. I don’t like executions. I don’t like it at all. Mind you — there was nothing else for it. Nothing, not a blasted thing. They’ve got what they deserved. God help them.”

  As he spoke he saw the court-room and the Germans who were being tried. He had watched them for three days, but of the five faces he saw, really saw, throughout the trial, only two. One of them was the man, an officer, he had just sent for, the other a boy of nineteen. Like gargoyles on a stone doorway these two jutted from the mass of anonymous thick German flesh. The boy’s face was thin; its cheekbones sprang out above hollows deep enough to be shadowed; his nose was delicate, his mouth long and childishly fine. He kept his eyes — they were dark — fixed and attentive, as if he were standing all the time before a general. All through the examination of the other prisoners he kept himself in this concentrated terrible non-existence. His turn came. The focus of his eyes changed slightly, but not their fixity. To the first questions put to him he answered, “Yes.” He knew, yes, that an escape was planned; he was one of the six chosen to escape : then, he was warned that the attempt was off, the English knew about it, someone — he knew who it was — had given them away.

  The prosecuting officer spoke quietly, and as though he were tired.

  “You were present when Johann Schmidt and Franz Broesike were questioned?”

  “Yes.”

  “What happened?”

  The boy hesitated. A faint movement began in his eyes — imagine that in a dark mirror one of the images it has been accumulating all its life detaches itself and begins to waver upwards.

  “It was a trial. They confessed.”

  “Yes?”

  “Schmidt asked us not to kill him.”

  “Did you see the two men hanged?”

  “Yes. . . I saw it.”

  “Did you take part?”

  Again, the barely visible image in the mirror drew breath.

  “Yes.”

  “What part did you take?”

  The colonel leaned forward. He saw that the muscles of the boy’s face were being drawn even stiffer, by a last desperate calling up of the will. The young German had imposed a discipline on his very skeleton.

  The colonel’s attention was distracted from the faces by the struggle between the prosecution and the defence. The defending officer was eager; he looked smooth, young. Colonel Brett knew him : he was ambitious, and covered it by a youthful charm. He argued well. Prisoners of war have a duty to try to escape; the six plotting escape were decent honourable soldiers, and the two men who betrayed them, Schmidt and Broesike, scoundrels. Only a scoundrel betrays his comrades. Men who have betrayed once will do it again; the officer, Lieutenant Gerlach, and the two others, private soldiers, who carried out the death sentence were justified. It was not murder, it was justice. Rough justice, certainly, but they had a right to kill men, their own countrymen, who were preventing them from doing their duty as soldiers. . . The elderly extenuated voice of the Prosecutor grated on Brett; he even shivered, as though struck by a cold draught in the oppressive heat of the court-room.

  “. . . men have been murdered who were helping us. When they warned us about the escape, they put their lives in our hands. We should have protected them. . .”

  Yes, that’s true, by God, Brett thought. Sweat broke out on him; he wiped his forehead. When the thing happened he was on leave, but he felt uncomfortable and guilty. Yet why? Considering how many deaths I have been responsible for in my time. . . “We can’t allow prisoners in our charge to be killed,” the Prosecutor was saying drily, almost amiably.

  He asked for the death sentence.

  The colonel glanced at the boy. For one instant, as the Prosecutor stopped speaking, his face broke up — the surface of a pool when an animal moves suddenly in the mud at the bottom. One confused muddy image after another twitched the skin, the pupils of his eyes dilated. Disappointment and grief blubbered his mouth. He turned an imploring glance on his officer. What had he been expecting him to do? Look after him? Save him? Brett looked away, he could not bring himself to look again. . .

  He came back, with a shock, to his room. Gary was politely not noticing him. Footsteps sounded outside in the passage between the two rooms. The door opened and the prisoner came in, with his guards.

  The colonel was struck, as he had been at the trial, by the German’s air of fineness and energy. He was forty-five, but he had the skin, clear and as if untouched, of a younger man. It was the face, Brett thought, of a saint, not vulnerable, and not altogether human.

  “Must we keep your men?” Gary said.

  “No,” Brett said, “certainly not.” He glanced at them. “Wait outside.”

  The door shut. Quite noticeably, as if he were doing it on purpose, the German rela
xed. He smiled slightly.

  “May I speak?”

  “Certainly. Go ahead.” Half turning away, Brett left the air empty between him and William Gary. He would not watch. He listened the more sharply, hearing the two voices with the whole of his body.

  “It was good of you to come and see me,” Gerlach said lightly and merrily.

  “I came to ask you if you want anything,” Gary answered. “Can I — I’m going to Germany this month or in August — can I take a message to your brother?”

  “Do you know where he is?”

  A brief pause.

  “Yes, I do. I had enquiries made. He’s living in Berlin.”

  “Ah.” Gerlach seemed to hesitate. He went on in a low gentle voice. “You realise, I knew nothing about him. Since 1941. I’m very fond of him — but we don’t think alike.” His voice ran to an edge. “During the last few days I’ve thought it may be just as well I shan’t go back to Germany.”

  “Why?”

  There was a longer pause, Gerlach said lightly,

  “It gave me no particular pang to sentence to death two wretched fellows I didn’t know by sight. But suppose I had gone back, and then one day I had to condemn my own brother —”

  The colonel started round. Gerlach was smiling and placid, almost as if he were amused. A frown settled on William Gary’s face had given it a look of ruthlessness and irony unlike anything Brett knew of him.

  “What do you mean?”

  In the same light voice Gerlach said,

  “Treachery is always just treachery — even when it takes the form of high-minded ideals.” His laughter seemed to come from somewhere close and high up — the back of his skull, perhaps. “I was always the wolf in our family, our so respectable family. You never watched Lucius carrying his candle in the Easter procession in Cologne? Ah, you should.” He checked and went off again coldly. “I don’t know the state of mind of civilians at home, but quite possibly it’s madly unlike the state of mind of men like myself.”

  He made a gesture he had made often in court — hand stretched taut, pointing at his breast; the long middle finger touched it lightly. It was a curious gesture, half monk, half woman.

  “You know, in prison one has time to think. All my thoughts come to one and the same place. We Germans have not been ruthless enough — with each other. It should have been impossible for two of us to betray their countrymen. And if there are traitors here” — he smiled politely at Brett — “in our reasonably comfortable conditions — there will be others in the — the discomfort of Berlin and Hamburg and so on. Of course we shall deal with them. And since I’m devoted to Lucius —”

  He is mad, Brett thought. He was forced to see that Gerlach looked extremely sane. The conversation between him and Gary had not moved from its level of polite simplicity. Gary moved his hand as if brushing aside a rather tiresome subject.

  “My dear fellow,” he said in a warm voice, “if you want me to take anything to Lucius, here I am.”

  Gerlach took from his pocket a small leather case. He opened it, and showed them, politely holding it towards Brett first, the miniature of a handsome child, a boy, dark, with features of an extreme delicacy and purity.

  “My son, Rudi.”

  “I didn’t know you were married,” Gary said.

  “My wife, fortunately, is not living. She died when our son was born — that’s, let me see, more than twenty years ago. Twenty-five. He was, of course, in the army.”

  “Was?”.

  “He was invalided out — badly wounded. He lost a hand. Since he came out of hospital I haven’t seen him.”

  “Would you like me to see him?” Gary asked softly.

  Gerlach smiled.

  “No. Give my brother the miniature, please. And if I may” — he glanced towards the colonel — “be allowed to write him a letter?”

  “Certainly.”

  Brett spoke stiffly. He was ashamed to feel a dislike of this man so nearly gone, but he did not hide it.

  Gerlach gave him a charming smile.

  “I brought the book you were kind enough to lend me. I’m glad I have the chance to thank you for it. You are kind.” He laid the book on the desk.

  “What have you been reading?” Gary said.

  He picked it up — a book of poems. It opened at the title page, on which a schoolgirl’s hand had written the owner’s name. Lise Brett.

  “You like this sort of thing?”

  Gerlach spoke with a sudden eagerness.

  “Enormously. What I enjoy in your younger poets is their hate of the past. This man mocks it. I like that.”

  A paper on the desk lifted in a puff of air from the window. He turned his head.

  “What a day!”

  He touched the desk, then looked at his fingers as though the sun might have come off on them. His voice became mocking.

  “Really, it’s too bad to keep me shut up until a few minutes before you hang me. You ought to let me live in the light as long as possible. Why don’t you?”

  “I’m sorry,” Brett said, with energy. “But if I let you out you’d bolt.”

  Gerlach laughed.

  “I should. Of course I should.”

  No, he is really a likeable fellow, Brett thought. Abruptly, he could not stand this any longer. He made an impatient gesture and looked with raised eyebrows at William Gary.

  “You’ll see that I get the letter,” Gary said.

  “Yes, yes,” Brett answered. He looked at the German. “You’ll have to go now, I’m afraid.”

  He saw the change begin in Gerlach’s face, to a cold fixity.

  “Thank you,” Gerlach said. “I’m obliged to you.”

  Moving suddenly, the colonel opened the door. The two guards came in. They did not so much enclose Gerlach as stand while he placed himself stiffly between them. He saluted the colonel and they went out. Brett sat down.

  Gary looked at him.

  “When?”

  “To-morrow morning,” Brett said. He felt disturbed even in his joints. He watched Gary putting the miniature in his pocket, and was thankful he had not to deliver it.

  “One of the most attractive men,” Gary said.

  “Yes.” He added brusquely, “Cold-blooded murder, all the same.”

  Phrases from the evidence given at the trial started in his mind — an image so sharp that it seemed to cut a nerve. Hands moving with the suppleness of rats to gag, tie up, and hang the two traitors in the room where they had been tried. Outside in the darkness, a few yards separated them from the English sentries, yet they were helpless victims. He saw Gerlach’s long delicate fingers pointed at his breast. No! he thought.

  “What’s his brother like?”

  “Lucius? A remarkable man. I suppose ten years older than Emil.”

  “Have you known him long?”

  “Since 1908,” Gary said. “I spent nearly a year in Bonn, at the university — before going to Oxford.” He laughed. “A fantastic year. It could have been in 1808. Bonn, I suppose, is — better say was — the most snobbish of German universities. Lucius Gerlach was studying law. He comes of a Catholic family. His mother was the younger daughter of a Catholic steel-maker. Justice Gerlach, his father, was very pious, he had a reputation with the Church. I liked Lucius.”

  He half closed his eyes. The depth and apparent weight of his lids gave him in repose his look of hauteur.

  “I stayed with him when I went back to Germany — in 1924. Four years later he was made Legal Adviser to the Archbishopric. I suppose you could call him Chancellor to the Diocese. Of Cologne. He had fought during the war, of course. Between those years, and for a short time after 1928, I saw him quite often. He became a scholar — I think in Church law. I don’t know, but he was known about in Oxford; he lectured there, and I think in Harvard.”

  He was suppressing something, some violence — was it of anger? Brett felt it, and his curiosity became sharp.

  “What did he do during this war?”

 
“He’s been in Buchenwald for four years,” Gary said drily.

  “Oh.”

  There was a pause. Gary’s tone ended any talk of Gerlach as if it had dropped over a cliff. The colonel said quietly, “I’ve done a great many things in my life that I prefer to forget. I shall do any damn thing I can to forget that two prisoners in my charge were murdered.”

  “My dear boy,” William Gary said, with affection, “in a fortnight you’ll be in Germany.”

  Brett felt a sudden release and gaiety.

  “Thank God,” he exclaimed. “And thank old Smiler.”

  “What do you call him?”

  “Smiler. Major-General George Arthur Frederick Lowerby’s name was Smiler when I first knew him — at my preparatory school. He was Smiler when we were at Marlborough, and Smiler at Sandhurst. It’s a damned queer thing no journalist ever got on to it. Fact is, he doesn’t make friends easily. Those he does make stick to him. You know, I think of him as if he were my brother. But I feel like a dirty little squid in the third form, too. He’s got a mind like a pair of claws. And he’s the best fellow in the world — decent, generous, kind. No one like him.”

  Standing up, he moved quickly across the room. He felt so much vigour in his body that he almost thought he was dancing. He snatched up some papers, pushed them in a drawer, locked it. Seizing the telephone he held it five or six inches from his face, and shouted.

  “Is that you, Wilson! I’m going. D’you hear me?”

  Avie Lodge, Gary’s house in Scotland, was less than two miles from the camp, but from the park gates to the house the carriage road ran for another mile, turning in a half circle to avoid rising ground. A path climbed direct through Glen Avie. Gary stopped the car.

  “Let’s walk, shall we?”

  A rough cart-track ran between pines and birches. The heat of July, smooth and slippery like an olive, fell on them; it smelled of pines, wild garlic, earth. Gary strode ahead, younger by years than the man who left the car.

  “If I could only live here always!” he said suddenly.

  “Why not?”

  Gary did not answer. He smiled.

  Yes, yes, Brett thought, he loves this place, he’s contented here, and nowhere else. Then why does he spend the greater part of his life in London, in the completely sterile land of international finance, and the rest of it? God help him, doesn’t he want to use his senses? Of course he does — look at him now, drunk on sun and pines. What the devil will his triumphs in London do for him when he has two minutes to live? What a fool!