began to disintegrate, their brigade was one of the last to hold out in the Grammos area.
But they knew by then that the rebellion was over, and they were bitter. Neither of them had ever believed in the cause for which they had fought so long and hard and skillfully; but its betrayal by Tito and the Moscow Politburo had seemed an infamous thing.
“ ‘Put not your trust in princes,’ ” Arthur had quoted gloomily.
“Who said this?” the Sergeant had asked.
“The Bible. Only these aren’t princes, they’re politicians.”
“It is the same.” A faraway look had come into the Sergeant’s eyes. “I think, Corporal, that in future we must trust only ourselves,” he had said.
Eric Ambler
The Schirmer Inheritance
11
It was just after dawn and the mountains above Florina were outlined against a pink glow in the sky when the old Renault deposited George and Miss Kolin outside the cinema where it had picked them up ten hours earlier. On George’s instructions, Miss Kolin paid the driver and arranged with him to pick them up again that evening to make the same journey. They went to their hotel in silence.
When he got to his room, George destroyed the precautionary letter he had left there for the manager and sat down to draft a cable to Mr. Sistrom.
“ CLAIMANT LOCATED IN STRANGE CIRCUMSTANCES,” he wrote, “ IDENTITY BEYOND REASONABLE DOUBT STOP COMPLEX SITUATION PREVENTS STRAIGHTFORWARD ACTION TO DELIVER HIM YOUR OFFICE STOP MAILING FULL EXPLANATORY REPORT TODAY STOP MEANWHILE CABLE IMMEDIATELY TERMS OF EXTRADITION TREATY IF ANY BETWEEN U.S. AND GREECE WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE ARMED BANK ROBBERY. CAREY.”
That, he thought grimly, should give Mr. Sistrom something to gnaw on. He read it through again, striking out the unnecessary prepositions and conjunctions, and then translated it into the code they had agreed on for highly confidential messages. When he had finished he looked at the time. The post office would not be open for another hour. He would write to Mr. Sistrom and mail the letter at the same time as he sent the cable. He sighed. It had been an exhausting night-exhausting in some unexpected ways. When the coffee and buttered rolls he had ordered from the restaurant arrived, he sat down to compose his report.
“In my last report,” he began, “I told you of the evidence I had been given my Madame Vassiotis and of my consequent decision to return home as soon as possible. Since then, as you will have gathered from my cable, the picture has completely changed. I knew, of course, that the inquiries instituted by Madame Vassiotis would reach the ears of all sorts of persons who, for one reason or another, were regarded as criminals by the authorities. I scarcely expected them to come to the attention of the man we have been looking for. Nevertheless, that is what happened. Twenty-four hours ago I was approached by a man who stated that he had friends who had information to give about Schirmer. Subsequently Miss Kolin and I took a very uncomfortable trip to a secret destination somewhere up in the mountains near the Yugoslav frontier. At the end of the journey we were taken to a house and confronted by a man who said he was Franz Schirmer. When I had explained the purpose of our visit, I asked him various pertinent questions, all of which he answered correctly. I asked him then about the ambush at Vodena and his subsequent movements. He told a fantastic story.”
George hesitated; then he erased the word “fantastic”-Mr. Sistrom would not like that sort of adjective-and typed the word “curious” in its place.
And yet it had been fantastic, to sit there in the light of the oil lamp listening to the great-great-grandson of the hero of Preussisch-Eylau telling, in his broken English, the story of his adventures in Greece. He had spoken slowly, sometimes with a faint smile at the corners of his mouth, always with his watchful grey eyes on his visitors, reading and assessing them. The Dragoon of Ansbach, George thought, must have been very much the same kind of man. Where other men would succumb to physical disaster, men like these two Schirmers would always endure and survive. One had been wounded, had put his trust in God, had deserted, and lived to become a prosperous tradesman. The other had been left for dead, had put his trust in himself, had kept his wits about him, and lived to fight another day.
What the second Sergeant Schirmer had become, however, was a question that the Sergeant himself had made no attempt to answer.
His own account of himself had ended inconclusively at the time of the closing of the Yugoslav frontier by Tito, and with a bitter complaint against the man?uvrings of the Communist politicians which had defeated the Markos forces. But George had very little doubt now about the nature of the Sergeant’s subsequent activities. They had conformed to an ancient pattern. When defeated revolutionary armies disintegrated, those soldiers who feared for political reasons to go back home, or who had no homes to go back to, turned to brigandage. And since, quite clearly, neither the Sergeant nor Arthur was, to use Colonel Chrysantos’s words, a “simple, deluded fanatic of the type that always gets caught,” their gleanings in Salonika had almost certainly gone into their own pockets, and those of their men-at-arms. It was a delicate situation. Moreover, if he were not to seem suspiciously incurious, he would have to invite them somehow to explain their set-up in their own way.
It had been Arthur who had provided the opening.
“Didn’t I tell you it’d be worth your while to come, Mr. Carey?” he said triumphantly when the Sergeant had finished.
“You did indeed, Arthur, and I’m very grateful. And of course I understand now the reason for all the secrecy.” He looked at the Sergeant. “I had no idea that fighting was still going on in this area.”
“No?” The Sergeant drained his glass and set it down with a bang. “It is the censorship,” he said. “The government hide the truth from the world.”
Arthur nodded gravely. “Proper Fascist-imperialist lackeys they are,” he said.
“But we do not talk politics, eh?” The Sergeant smiled as he filled Miss Kolin’s glass. “It is not interesting for the beautiful lady,”
She said something coldly in German and his smile faded. For a moment he seemed to be reconsidering Miss Kolin; then he turned to George cheerfully.
“Let us all fill our glasses and come to business,” he said.
“Yes, let’s do that,” said George. He had given them the reassuring impression that he was content with his picture of them as simple revolutionaries still fighting for a lost cause. That was enough. “I expect you’d like to know a bit more about the whole affair, wouldn’t you, Sergeant?” he added.
“That is what I wish.”
George told him the history of the case from the beginning.
For a time the Sergeant listened politely, interrupting only to ask for the explanation of a legal word or phrase he did not understand. When Miss Kolin translated it into German he acknowledged the service each time with a nod. He seemed almost indifferent, as if he were listening to something that was really no concern of his. It was when George came to the part played in the case by the account of the first Sergeant Schirmer’s exploits at Eylau that his attitude changed. Suddenly he leaned forward across the table and began interrupting with abrupt, sharp- voiced questions.
“You say Franz Schirmer. He had the same name and rank as me, this old man?”
“Yes. And he was roughly the same age as you were when you dropped into Crete.”
“So! Go on, please.”
George went on, but not for long.
“Where was he wounded?”
“In the arm.”
“As I was at Eben-Emael.”
“No, he had a sabre cut.”
“It does not matter. It is the same. Go on, please.”
George went on again. The Sergeant’s eyes were fixed on him intently. He interrupted again.
