Eric Ambler - The Schirmer Inheritance

“O.K. I’ll wait for you downstairs.” He rose and bowed to Frau Gresser. “Thank you very much indeed, madam. What you have told me is of inestimable help. I will see that your papers are safely returned to you tomorrow. Good day.”

He smiled affably, bowed again, and went. He was outside the apartment almost before Miss Kolin had finished interpreting his farewell speech.

She joined him in the street below ten minutes later.

“Well,” he said, “what was it all about?”

“Friedrich made advances to Ilse Schirmer.”

“To his son’s wife, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“Well, well. Did she go into details?”

“Yes. She enjoys herself, that one.”

“But the old man must have been around sixty then.”

“You remember the photographs that Father Weichs destroyed?”

“Yes.”

“He showed them to the wife.”

“Just that?”

“His meaning apparently was unmistakable. He also proposed in a veiled way that he should take similar photographs of her.”

“I see.” George tried to picture the scene.

He saw a shabby room in Essen and an elderly bookkeeper sitting there pushing dog-eared photographs one by one across the table to where his son’s wife could see them as she sat bent over her needlework.

How the man’s heart must have beat as he watched her face! His mind must have seethed with questions and doubts.

Would she smile or would she pretend to be shocked? She was sitting still, absolutely still, and she had stopped working. Soon she would smile, for certain. He could not see her eyes. After all, there was nothing wrong in a little private joke between a father and daughter-in-law, was there? She was a grown-up woman and knew a thing or two, didn’t she? She liked him, he knew. All he wanted to do was show her that he wasn’t too old for a bit of fun and that, even if Johann was no good, there was one man about the house for her to turn to. And now the last photograph, the sauciest of the lot. An eye-opener, eh? Good fun? She still hadn’t smiled, but she hadn’t frowned either. Women were funny creatures. You had to choose your moment; woo gently and then be bold. She was slowly raising her head now and looking at him. Her eyes were very round. He smiled and said what he had planned to say-that subtle remark about new pictures being better than old. But she did not smile back. She was getting to her feet and he could see that she was trembling. With what? Excitement? And then, suddenly, she had let out a sob of fear and run from the room out to the workshop where Johann was decarbonizing that Opel taxi. After that, everything had become a nightmare, with Johann shouting at and threatening him, and Ilse weeping, and the boy Franz standing there listening, white-faced, not understanding what it was all about; only knowing that in some way the world was coming to an end.

Yes, George thought, a pretty picture; though probably an inaccurate one. Still, it was the sort of scene about which nobody could ever be quite accurate; least of all, those who had taken part in it. He would never know what had really happened. Not that it mattered very much. Friedrich, Johann, and Ilse, the principal actors, were certainly dead. And Franz? He glanced at Miss Kolin marching along beside him.

“Do you think Franz is dead?” he asked.

“The evidence seemed conclusive. Did you not think so?”

“In a way, yes. If the man had been a friend of mine and had a wife and family he was fond of back home, I wouldn’t try to kid his wife that he might still be alive. And if she were crazy enough to go on believing that he wasn’t dead, I’d tell her as gently as I could to face the facts. But this is different. If we took the evidence we’ve got to court and asked for leave to presume Franz Schirmer dead, they’d laugh at us.”

“I do not see why.”

“Look. The man’s in a truck ambushed by these guerrillas. That Lieutenant comes along some time afterwards and has a look at the scene. There are lots of dead bodies about, but not the dead body of our man. So maybe he’s escaped and maybe he’s a prisoner. If he’s a prisoner, says the Lieutenant, then he hasn’t a hope, because the Greek guerrillas had the habit of killing their prisoners. ‘Just a minute,’ says the judge; ‘are you claiming that all Greek guerrillas operating in 1944 invariably killed all their prisoners? Are you prepared to prove that there were no cases at all of German soldiers surviving after capture?’ What does the Lieutenant say to that? I don’t know anything about the Greek campaign-I wasn’t there-but I do know that if all these guerrillas were so well trained and so well organized and so trigger-happy that no German who fell into their hands was ever smart enough or lucky enough to get away, they’d have had the Germans pulling out of Greece long before the Normandy landings. All right, then, let’s alter the wording of the evidence. Let’s say that Greek guerrillas often killed their prisoners. Now, then-”

“But do you think he is not dead?” she asked.

“Of course I think he’s dead. I’m just trying to point out there’s a whole lot of difference between an ordinary everyday probability and the calculated kind that the law prefers. And the law’s right. You’d be surprised how often people turn up when they’ve been thought dead. A man gets fired from his job and quarrels with his wife; so he goes down to the shore, takes off his coat, leaves it with a suicide note on the beach, and that’s the last seen of him. Dead? Maybe. But sometimes he’s found by accident years later living under a different name and with a different wife in a city on the other side of the continent.”

She shrugged. “This is different.”

“Not so very. Look at it this way. It’s 1944. Let’s suppose that Franz Schirmer is captured by the guerrillas but by luck or skill manages to get away alive. What is he to do? Rejoin his unit? The German occupation forces are trying to escape through Yugoslavia and having a tough time doing it. If he leaves his hide-out and tries to catch up with them, he’s certain to be recaptured by the guerrillas. They’re all over the place now. It’s better to stay where he is for a while. He is a resourceful man, trained to live off the country. He can stay alive. When it is safe for him to do so, he will go. Time passes. The country is under Greek control once again. Hundreds of miles now separate him from the nearest German unit. Civil war breaks out in Greece. In the resultant confusion he is able to make his way to the Turkish frontier and cross it without being caught. He is an engineer and does not mind work. He takes a job.”

“By February 1945 Turkey was at war with Germany.”

“Maybe it’s before February.”

“Then why does he not report to the German Consul?”

“Why should he? Germany is collapsing. The war is virtually over. Maybe he likes it where he is. Anyway, what has he to return to postwar Germany for? To see Frau Gresser? To see what’s left of his parents’ home? Maybe he married an Italian girl when he was in Italy and wants to get back there. He may even have children. There are dozens of possible reasons why he shouldn’t go to the German Consul. Maybe he went to the Swiss one.”

“If he had married, his army record would show it.”

“Not if he married someone he wasn’t supposed to marry. Look at the rules the Americans and British had about their troops marrying German girls.”

“What do you propose?”

“I don’t know yet. I’ll have to think.”

When he got back to the hotel, he sat down and wrote a long cable to Mr. Sistrom. First he set out briefly the latest developments in the inquiry; then he asked for instructions. Should he return home now or should he go on and make an attempt to confirm Franz Schirmer’s death?