Roots of Evil(78)

Once inside the small room, the incurious owner given a week’s rent, she felt safer, although the panic was still clutching her stomach and she was again aware of agonized fear for Deborah. Was I right to send her away like that? Should I have gone with her?

And abandon Conrad? said her mind at once.

When Alice thought of it like that, she knew she could not have acted in any other way.



Several times in the weeks that followed she considered taking people into her confidence – perhaps one of her friends from the film days, perhaps the lawyer who had drawn up the change of name documents – but she dared not trust anyone. Nazi rule was tightening around Vienna and people were eyeing one another uneasily. There were curfews for Jewish people in the city, and tales of ordinary men and women spying for the SS were rife.

Alice altered her appearance as much as she could. It was impossible to get rid of the baroness’s distinctive black hair – she would have to wait for the last lot of hair-dye to grow out – but she dressed unobtrusively and tied her hair beneath a headscarf when she went out. She changed her lodgings twice, each time going to a different part of the city, each time making casual acquaintances in shops and coffee houses, listening to all they had to say.

But the summer wore stiflingly on, and although she talked to more and more people, and although she hired cabs which took her into the Vienna Woods on the east and almost to the German border on the west, she did not pick up any clue as to where Conrad might be.

There were more soldiers on the streets now – the sharp-eyed men of G?ering’s Gestapo – and people scuttled along without looking to right or left. It grew colder; the leaves turned golden brown. Alice usually loved autumn, but now she found it hateful.

And then, just after October had slid down into November and there was a bite of coldness in the nights, a carefully casual remark to a chance acquaintance in a shop brought forth an inquiring look, and then the question: ‘You have a friend who was taken by the SS?’

‘A friend of a friend,’ said Alice, who by this time had worked out a reasonably safe system of questions and answers.

‘Jewish men and women from this area are being taken to Dachau,’ said the woman. ‘Your friend will perhaps be there.’

‘Dachau?’ Alice had never heard of the place.

‘A village in Germany. Fifteen or twenty kilometres outside Munich.’

‘That is a long way from here,’ said Alice thoughtfully.

‘Oh yes. Several hours’ journey. Four or five hundred kilometres certainly.’ A sideways look. ‘But your friend may not be kept there – we hear stories of prisoners being moved around.’

‘Why would prisoners be moved? Where would they be moved to?’

This time the pause, the sideways look were more pronounced. Then there was a shrug. ‘Who knows how the minds of Nazis work? Who knows what will happen to any of us next?’

Alice, not daring to appear too curious, said, ‘Who indeed?’ and left it at that.

And indeed, who could have guessed that the next thing would be for the intricate spider-web of intrigue and spying to pick up that fragmentary conversation? And who could have guessed it would be painstakingly traced all the way back to the quietly dressed, quietly living lady so recently moved into a small apartment on Vienna’s outskirts? Had that chance acquaintance been one of the spies after all? Or had the scrappy conversation been overheard?

Alice was never to know. Two days later, eating a modest and solitary supper in one of the little coffee-houses near to her lodgings, she was aware of the sounds of some kind of tumult from the direction of the inner city. People were looking towards the sounds, and pointing, and Alice saw that the sky had a curious dull reddish tinge.

‘Fire,’ people were saying. ‘Lots of fires.’

‘And shouting,’ said another. ‘Like people rioting.’

‘Listen,’ said one of them suddenly.

It was then that Alice heard the heavy menacing growl of the SS vehicles, and the wolf-snarl of the motorbikes they used as outriders roaring down the narrow street towards them.





CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE




This time there were no convenient back stairs or alleyways into which a fugitive could flee and achieve invisibility.

The jeeps screeched to a halt outside the coffee-house, and the soldiers spilled out and came running in. They were fast and efficient and they came straight across to where Alice was sitting, snatching her from her chair before she could do anything about it. She heard the fearful murmurs of ‘Jew’ from some of the other diners, but no one moved to help her.

She fought to get free, kicking out at the soldiers and clawing at their faces, but they pinioned her arms behind her back and one of them hit her face with the flat of his hand. Alice gasped, her eyes smarting with the sudden sharp pain. ‘Bitch,’ said the soldier unemotionally, and they dragged her outside and pushed her into the back of a canvas-covered jeep, nodding to the driver. The vehicle moved off at once, the outriders on the motorbikes surrounding it closely so that even if Alice had dared jump from the moving vehicle she would have been caught by them instantly.

‘Baroness,’ said a hated voice from the jeep’s shadowy interior. ‘Or shall I dispense with the pretence you have spun for so long and simply call you Wilson?’