I beat some of the dust off the settee and stretched out on it.
After a while I realized that there was no tapping noise from the roof.
I went up, opened the door carefully, and slid out. Two or three pigeons went up indignantly from the leads. I walked over to the tower, and I realized at once that I had committed the cardinal sin of any military commander. I had failed to ensure my lines of communication with the rear. I was sitting on top of the Schloss with no way of getting down, except through the house. That snake Hesseltod had finished his job on the tower and the long ladder that had reached up to it was now lying on the lower roof twenty-five feet below me.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
THE KATERINA PHILOSOPHY
I couldn’t tell how long I was going to be marooned in the suite and on the roof top, but, like a good castaway, the first thing I did was to carry out a much more thorough survey of my little double-decked island.
On the roof I found a plentiful supply of food. On a Pacific island it would have been seagulls and their eggs. Here, it was pigeons and their eggs. At least, I wouldn’t starve.
I found drink, too, in the cupboard in the sitting-room. There were a couple of bottles of brandy and two unopened bottles of Rhine wine. Behind a silk screen to one side of some bookshelves in the sitting-room there was a glass door about four feet high with rows of drawers below it. It was a wall case and in it were a couple of hunting rifles and a twelve-bore shotgun. The drawers below held boxes of ammunition. At that moment my eye was caught by the title of one of the books on the shelf at my right hand.
The title of the book was Les Crimes de l’Amour by the Marquis de Sade. With it were Justine and Philosophic dans le Boudoir. And beyond these the whole row was taken by other authors ... about thirty volumes of erotica.
I kept watch from the window but there was no more movement outside. As the sun went down I moved up on to the roof.
I didn’t care a damn about all the political malarky involved around the girls. The people pushing it and the people trying to put a spoke in it wouldn’t move an inch from their plans to accommodate a simple little human need like saving a beautiful girl from being dropped into a lake. That’s how life was with the Sutcliffe, Malacod and Spiegel types. First things first. All I could think of was a helicopter flying low in the dark over the Zafersee and the weighted cargo being jettisoned.
I had to get in touch with Katerina, and that meant bursting out of the suite and taking my chance in the house. I had to get the girls out, and I might have to do it by force. For myself, I had the Le Chasseur – but it would be handy to have the girls armed. Katerina, I knew, could handle a gun.
As the darkness gathered over the bowl in the hills that held the place, I went down to the suite. There were thick velvet curtains in the sitting-room. I drew them and turned on the light.
I opened the gun-case and took out the shotgun. It was a twelve-bore, hammerless ejector gun by Cogswell and Harrison, a nice job, fitted with ornamental strengthening plates, and there was ammunition for it in one of the drawers below the case. The other two were German Walther rifles, one a ·404 that would stop an elephant, and the other a ·22 repeater. This last seemed a handier model to me. A ·22 slug can make a man think twice about coming on and, if that’s all you need, there’s no point in blowing his head off.
I put the two I had chosen on a table with their ammunition.
I shut the glass front of the case. It had a round brass knob as a handle. Maybe because it hadn’t been opened for years, the door of the case stuck a little. To get it closed I pushed the handle hard, turning to the left as I did so, in order that the small lock tongue should not catch the lock casing until I had the door shut. The door went home into its frame with a jerk and I nearly fell over. The brass knob in my hand, held to the left, took another half turn and the whole gun-case moved away from me, hinging on its left like a door. I was staring into an aperture about four feet high and three feet wide. From the light behind me, I could see a narrow run of stone steps going steeply down for two or three yards and then the outline of another opening which looked about six feet tall and just wide enough to take a man who didn’t carry too big a girth.
I stood there in the darkness, listening. A faint draught from the entrance funnelled up into my face. After a few moments I realized that on the draught there was coming to me the smell of frying onions.
I got my torch, and kept the beam well down to the ground. There was a thick layer of dust and mortar powder on the floor of the passageway. When I moved my arms just brushed the sides. After about twenty yards there was another drop down of six steps. Then the passage turned sharply and some yards ahead I saw a small patch of light striking across the passageway from left to right at about eye level. Switching off my torch I went quietly down to it.
I found myself looking through a small double-sided ventilator grille into
