Tender to Danger

Fourteen

Mr. Milan Nimcik, of the Yugoslav Special Investigation Bureau, said a lot about gold, as, propped up in a hospital bed, he talked to his old colleague, Mr. Botten, and to his new friends.

The story began during the two weeks’ campaign that shattered Yugoslavia in the spring of 1941. The Nazis poured across the northern frontier, flooding towards Lyublyana and Zagreb and Belgrade. They struck at the capital from Romania, too, and swept from Bulgaria into the Vardar Valley. They rushed on towards the Albanian frontier, they branched down towards Salonika in the south. Other forces engulfed Nish and Skopje. In six days Germans and Italians met at Struga, and the Yugoslav armies were divided and scattered.

Then there was chaos for the people. The fierce wind of the Wermracht tossed and whirled them all ways, and riding the storm came Kretchmann, a Feldwebel in charge of a small armoured reconnaissance patrol.

He was far out on the right flank of a motorised infantry division; his mission was to prevent the destruction of bridges and culverts on the transverse roads, and to feel for enemy forces reported to be reorganising to the north. He did not pause when the second vehicle in his patrol fell back with engine trouble. He had two motorcyclists and two men with him in the scout car, and that was plenty for the job in hand, even if there should prove to be some fight left in the local forces. Somewhere, in a patch of wooded country, they ran across a fleeing van. It was not an army vehicle, just a delivery van with a baker’s sign on the side of it, but it was important enough to have an escort of motorcyclists in uniform, and there was an officer on the seat beside the civilian driver. Here was transport commandeered in a moment of great urgency to carry something of high significance away from the invaders, — military secrets, plans, archives. Or treasure.

By then, Kretchmann and his men were trigger-happy. They shot up the van and the escort, and only one of the outriders got away. Kretchmann had a picked crew with him. They understood one another, and they understood their Feldwebel. Their wartime philosophy could be summarised in the word “loot,” and they had it in mind as they inspected the van. They lifted an old tarpaulin that had been thrown in a heap on the floor of the van. There wasn’t much under it; only seven great bars of gold.

Gold! The five men stared at one another. It was fabulous, a fortune. Not in all their dreams had they dared to conceive of anything like this. If they could get away with it, they would be rich. After the war they would live in comfort. To the victor, the spoils.

Kretchmann was the first to recover from the gratifying shock of discovery.

“It must be hidden,” he said.

It was a thought in the minds of all of them: to make it safe so that they might claim it for themselves when the opportunity occurred.

First they must push on; put distance between them and the scene of the incident. Eventually they would report a breakdown in their radio on the command network, but not for some time.

They transferred the gold to the scout car and rushed on. They were excited, and perhaps a sight of the Adriatic from the high hills suggested wild ideas of desertion. Perhaps they just went blindly on, to see what might be round the next corner.

Nightfall was near when they descended to the little port of Zavrana and came upon a small craft tied up to the pier of a re-pairing yard, a yawl with the strange English title of “Tender to Moonlight.”

Zavrana appeared to be almost deserted. Yet they waited for darkness, their vehicles concealed in an olive grove above the town. When they felt it to be safe, they carried their treasure on board the yawl. They saw all the auspices as favourable. Fate had tumbled a fortune into their laps and had then produced a craft to carry them away.

They were ready to cast off when the beam of a searchlight swung in from the sea and travelled over the port. Other beams cut through the darkness, sweeping sea and shore, and Kretchmann knew that the plan was hopeless. Vessels of the Italian fleet were on the prowl, watching for fugitive craft.

“We must go back,” he said. “In a few days the war will be over. We will be an army of occupation. Then we shall decide what to do.”

“Let us bury the gold on shore,” a man named Haller suggested.

“There’s no time,” Kretchmann objected. “Other units may be here any minute. If they catch us, we’ll lose everything, and maybe our lives as well.”

He took up the floor boards of the craft and inspected the ballast in the bilge. He raised seven pigs of iron and cast them overboard and replaced them with the bars of gold. Next he brought some tar from the yard and smeared it over the ingots and the remaining pigs of iron.

As he replaced the flooring, he said: “There’s our hiding place! The gold couldn’t be safer anywhere.”

“Fine,” Haller answered him. “What if someone runs away with the craft?”

“We shall come back before that can happen. Now there is no time for more.”

Haller was not satisfied. He removed the magneto and threw it into the harbour. He took a hammer and smashed parts of the engine. “That will make it safer,” he said, “but we must get back here very soon.”

“Don’t worry,” Kretchmann told him. “It will be easy.”

It was not easy. It was impossible. The Italians took over the occupation of the coast, and Kretchmann and his accomplices were sent to fight in North Africa.

“The next chapter,” Mr. Nimcik said, “does not begin till after the war, when we began to investigate cases of looting with the object of recovering our national treasures. And this is where Kusitch comes into the story, a clever man in some ways, a fool in others. You will understand there were all sorts of papers to examine and among those that came to the desk of Kusitch was a deposition made by the surviving motorcyclist of the gold convoy.”

Kusitch became very interested in the lost ingots. He could find no record of their receipt in the available German documents and he began to suspect the raiding party had made away with the gold. He established the spot where the incident had occurred. He mapped alternative courses that the looters might have pursued, and one of them led to Zavrana.

Here he found confirmation. A terrified boy, hiding from the invaders, had seen the Germans board a small craft, remain in it for some time, knock the engine about, then drive off again. The boat builder had fled in the general panic that had overtaken Zavrana, but when things settled down he had returned to look after his business. It was true that the engine of the small craft had been knocked about; moreover, the Germans had stolen the magneto. The boat builder restored everything, because he had made a bargain with the owner of the craft, a crazy Englishman named Meriden, who had left it with him for his use, provided he kept it in repair.

But there was small profit in it for the boat builder, for no sooner had he got the craft in working order than a group of Italian deserters ran off with it.

Here was an end to the trail, but Kusitch was not one to despair. “When I examined his correspondence,” said Mr. Nimcik, “it be-came clear that he had used official facilities to make inquiries in Italy. There were many references to a yawl called ‘Tender to Moonlight,’ but most of them were negative. No trace, inquiries without result, not in this locality, and so on. No doubt Kusitch would have had ready an answer about some art treasure had he been questioned, but the strange references remained unnoticed until after he took flight from Athens. That was when I became busy, and the files finally told me that the yawl had turned up in Calabria and that it had been restored to its English owner at some time after the war.

“And there was another angle to investigate,” Mr. Nimcik continued. “Just before Kusitch vanished, two Germans appeared in Zavrana and made inquiries about the yawl. We learned afterwards that one of them followed Kusitch to Athens, and it is obvious that this fellow must have warned Kretchmann about the fugitive’s movements. We were keeping an eye on the other German as a matter of routine, so when I needed him, it was an easy matter to have him brought in as a suspected spy.”

Mr. Nimcik smiled benignly. “I asked him a lot of questions,” he went on. “Many questions. He was frightened. Finally he confessed. A man named Schilling, he was; one of Kretchmann’s crew in the scout car. Not a nice man, though not so tough as Kretchmann or Haller; not, at any rate, as a single spy. He told me everything about the attack on the convoy and what followed. He told me that since the war their one thought had been to find the lost yawl, and Kretchmann had sent him to Zavrana with his companion to make inquiries. At Zavrana they had heard about Kusitch and his questions, and so they had watched Kusitch.”

It seemed, then, that the destination of Kusitch had pointed the way to England for Kretchmann and Haller. They had intended to pick up Kusitch on the last stage of his flight and deal with him in England, but the grounding of the London plane had made them change their plan. These two might maintain a stubborn silence to the end, but speculation could fill in the gaps. They had seized Kusitch. They had tried to get from him the whereabouts of the yawl, but this was something that Kusitch himself had not known. His hope, it appeared, had been to get in touch with Miss Meriden, to tell her some tale, or perhaps to buy the yawl from her. He had known of her visit to Dubrovnik, had followed her to Athens and Brussels. Perhaps he had intended to spy out the land in England before approaching her; perhaps he had had the idea that she might lead him to the yawl. He had refused to say anything about these things, and neither torture nor threats had budged him.

“Kusitch was that type of man,” Mr. Nimcik commented. “It was the Slav in him. Us Slavs are like mules sometimes, except that we have less feeling than mules. He would think: ‘This Kretchmann believes I have the information, so he will never kill me.’ But I have seen something of Kretchmann today. He is a man of violence, of sudden storms. He has the madness of the killer, and it is easy for him to press a trigger when he is in the anger of frustration… So the body of Kusitch is found in the Bois du Cambre, and by this time I am already in Brussels.”

The benign smile of Mr. Nimcik travelled over the company and was directed at Andrew Maclaren. “And now the interest is focused on Dr. Maclaren, the companion and accomplice of Kusitch. Kretchmann is sure that Dr. Maclaren knows everything. I am inclined to be suspicious myself. The scene shifts to London. I watch Dr. Maclaren in the hope of picking up Kretchmann. Kretchmann gives him attention in the hope of discovering the yawl, and we know now that he is ultimately led to Miss Meriden. That was yesterday, but I was quite unaware of the young lady’s visit to Groper’s Wade. When I checked up on Dr. Maclaren, I knew that he could not have been in the confidence of Kusitch, so I dropped my interest in him. I had, you see, another line of inquiry, and it was productive. It was productive just in time.”

Mr. Nimcik had caused an agent to investigate the Calabrian clue in the correspondence of Kusitch. This agent had found the fisherman of Bova Marina and had learned about the man Ernest Jansen who had claimed the yawl on behalf of Meriden. Jansen had spoken of his plan to migrate to Algiers. The resourceful Mr. Nimcik had inquiries made in Algiers, only to learn that Jansen and his wife had returned to England, disgusted with the climate of North Africa.

“It is, perhaps, no place for the Norseman,” Mr. Nimcik observed. “The hot wind is hard on pink skin, but it blew me some luck, for Jansen was in London and this morning I located him, with the help of a private detective.”

Inspector Jordaens uttered a grunt of disapprobation, but no one took any notice; not even Detective Sergeant Stock.

“With a little prompting”-Mr. Nimcik rubbed his thumb and forefinger together roguishly-”Jansen became informative. He told me about the windmill and the landing stage and the boat, and it seemed to me then that I was at the end of my mission. All I had to do was go down to Groper’s Wade and make sure of the gold.”

Charley Botten complained. “If you had confided in me last night, we might have co-operated. You told me a cock-and-bull story about a Cellini sauceboat.”

“A diplomatic story, my dear friend,” Mr. Nimcik protested. “If you had not been so uninformative when I asked you about Dr. Maclaren, I might have talked of a fishing craft instead of a sauceboat. It was because Dr. Maclaren was in touch with you that I sought you out.”

“To pump me?” Charley laughed. “Was that your idea?”

“I was uncertain of my ground.”

“You are a cunning old man.”

“A foolish old man.” Nimcik smiled his broadest smile. “I trust too much to my empty pistol. Not that a loaded one would serve me any better. If I stood on the doorstep I could not hit a house.”

Inspector Jordaens was put out. “It is no matter for a joke,” he protested. “You knew that Kretchmann and Haller were very dangerous men.”

“I thought I was ahead of them, my dear Inspector,” Nimcik answered. “After my talk with Jansen, I went down to Groper’s Wade. As soon as I saw the boat, I knew that the others were ahead of me. I behaved with caution. I reconnoitred everything in the best possible style. I would have waited with patience to inform the excellent Scotland Yard, but I saw that Kretchmann and Haller were about to leave with the gold. I had no alternative but to interfere, to do my best. Fortunately it all ended well. You arrived in time to help the old man out of his difficulty, and now the work is done. My legation has been informed. It will be proved to the satisfaction of the British Government that the gold belongs to Yugoslavia. I believe the idea will be to use it for trade with this country, but the whole problem is one for the higher levels. For me, I would like now to sleep if you will not think me impolite.”

Andrew took Ruth Meriden back to London in the hired car. It was very late when they reached her place in Chelsea once more.

He said: “I suppose you’ll be going back to work tomorrow?”

“Not tomorrow,” she answered. “I think I’ll take a holiday.”

“What about your work?”

“Work?” she said vaguely.

“What about Mr. Hinckleigh?” he went on. “What about Mr. Alec Foster?”

“I think they can wait,” she answered thoughtfully. “When do you join that hospital?”

“I’ve three weeks yet,” he told her. “We could, of course, get a special licence.”

“And someone to repair the boat. We could fit her out and call her Moonlight and go cruising. Perhaps we’d find some more gold in her.”

“What would we want with gold?” asked Andrew.