Dennis Wheatley - The Black Baroness

His surprise was short-lived. There was, after all, nothing particularly extraordinary in the Chief of the Gestapo Foreign Department, U.A.—I, moving freely about in an enemy country in plain clothes, or that he should have had a rendezvous with his friend, Die Schwartze Baronin, to receive in person her report of the momentous conferences which had taken place in the last few days.

His delight came from this unexpected opportunity to settle accounts, once and for all, with this murderous pervert who had climbed to power over the tortured bodies of a thousand victims and was the living symbol of all that was most foul and loathsome about the Nazi tyranny.

His consternation was due to the fact that he knew the Baroness to be as subtle and poisonous as a female cobra and considered her quite enough to tackle single-handed without having to take on her equally redoubtable ally at the same time.

Gregory possessed immense self-confidence, but even he doubted his capability to overcome that ruthless pair in open daylight when there was at least one servant, and perhaps more, in the house who might come to their assistance. But just as the British destroyers had gone in against a superior force of Germans in the first battle of Narvik he also was determined to go in. Nevertheless, knowing that he would almost certainly be outgunned and that Grauber, at least, would get away, he decided to do his best to sabotage the Gestapo Chief's line of retreat.

Grauber had backed his car up to the front of the garage, where it was not visible from the house; then, getting out, he had gone to the front door where someone had let him in. Slipping over the wall and down into the roadway, Gregory opened the boot of the car, hunted round until he found a greasy leather tool-sack and took out a pair of pliers. Getting down on his hands and knees, he crawled under the car and partially cut through one of the wires of the steering gear. If Grauber did succeed in escaping a bullet he was not going to get very far on that twisting coast road without having a nasty smash; and, with luck, he would go right over the precipice to meet his death on the rocks below.

Crawling out, Gregory replaced the pair of pliers, shut the boot, scrambled back over the low wall and through the shrubs at the side of the garage to its garden end. He paused for a moment to regain his breath, then once more crept with catlike step along to the terrace, his pistol drawn ready in his hand.

Very, very cautiously he knelt down by the open French window, then gave one swift glance inside.

Grauber was there, and Gregory's heart thrilled again. A merciful God had at last delivered his enemy, bound, into his hands.

Evidently the Gestapo Chief had asked for the Baroness and had been shown into the big lounge-room to wait until she came downstairs. He was sitting in a low armchair, facing the door and with his back to the window. His fleshy pink neck, which protruded in ugly rolls above his collar, was on a level with Gregory's head and only a few feet away.

There was not a second to be lost. At any moment the Baroness might appear, then Gregory would have lost his God-given opportunity. He had no scruples about what he was going to do. Grauber would have killed him or Erika without warning or compunction, just as he had already killed scores of other people. Reversing his pistol, Gregory took a firm grip of the barrel. Rising to his full height he took one step forward and brought the butt of the pistol crashing down on Grauber's skull.

Grauber slumped forward without a sound. Not even a moan issued from his lips as the blood began to ooze up through the broken skin of his cranium. Jamming his pistol back in its holster, Gregory seized the Gestapo Chief by the back of the collar and, hauling him out of the chair, dragged his body behind a nearby sofa where it could not be seen from the door of the room. Then he pulled out his gun again and tiptoed across the parquet to take up his position behind the door.

His hand that held the pistol was steady but his heart was thumping. For once the big cards in the pack had been dealt to him. Not only had he put one enemy out of the game already, but the coming of that enemy so unexpectedly had solved for him the tricky problem of getting the Baroness downstairs without her suspicions being aroused by the announcement that a stranger was asking to see her and without any of her servants yet being aware of his presence there.

He had hardly placed himself when the door opened and the Baroness came in. From his post of vantage Gregory was immediately behind her as she walked into the room. With his free hand he gave her a swift push in the back; with his foot he kicked-to the door. She gave a little cry, stumbled and swung round to find herself looking down the barrel of his automatic.

Her dead-white face, framed in its bell of jet-black hair, could go no whiter but he saw shock and dismay dawn in her dark eyes.

'I've got you now,' he said quietly; 'and don't imagine that the Herr Gruppenfuhrer will come to your assistance this time, I've already dealt with him.'

She stared at him like a small, ferocious, trapped animal for a moment, then she murmured: 'I thought—I thought . . .'

'Yes,' Gregory went on for her, 'you thought that I was dead, but I survived your hospitality and I've come back from the gates of Death to claim you.'

'What—what d'you mean to do?' she breathed. 'Are you going to kill me?'

He nodded. 'As the price of your treachery you no doubt anticipate great rewards from your Fuehrer, but you're not going to get them. You are the woman who sold France to her enemies, and for that you are going to die.'

A new expression came into her face, neither resignation nor fear, nor determination to fight for her life, but a strange spiritual flame that lit up her whole countenance, as she cried in ringing protest: 'That's a lie!

I did not sell France; and I shall go down in history not as the woman who betrayed France but as the woman who saved her.'

Gregory was so taken aback by this extraordinary declaration that he could only stammer: 'You—you've done your damnedest to ensure that France shall surrender and desert her Ally.'

'Her Ally!' she sneered. 'For nearly a thousand years England was our hereditary enemy, and the Entente Cordiale is a thing of yesterday, based on false premises. That unnatural alliance will pass as swiftly as it came and will soon be forgotten. Deep down in you the truth is as plain to you as it is to me. The French and the English neither like nor understand each other and their paths lie in opposite directions. For a few decades Britain has used France as the weaker partner to be her bulwark against Germany. France suffered inconceivably more than Britain in the last war and, once again, she is being martyred in this one, while the English sit at home in their cities, safe and secure. But that is finished. Henceforth Britain must fight her own battles and France will go back as an integral part of the Continent to which she belongs.'

'I see,' snapped Gregory. 'It's not, after all, that you're pro-Hitler but that you're anti-British. Yet you worked on Leopold, who was just as much France's Ally as Britain's, to make him throw his hand in; and you helped to persuade Mussolini to stab France in the back. Your hatred of the English must have unbalanced your brain if just for the sake of making things difficult for us you've gone to the length of betraying France to the Nazis. Damn it, you must be crazy!'

'You fool!' she spat at him. 'I tell you I have saved France— saved her from herself—and if you knew the things that I know you would realise it.'

A sudden spate of words poured from her scarlet lips. 'France in our time has become decadent, vile, rotten to the core. Look at our great families—the aristocrats and the intelligentsia who should think for and lead the nation—how do they spend their lives? Money-grabbing at the expense of the workers so that Communism has become rife throughout the land. At all times in history the ruling caste has had its own code of morals, yet used a cloak of some decency to screen its love affairs. But not these people.