Codeword Golden Fleece Read online

  For a moment de Richleau stood on the platform, half-doubled up, gasping like a fish out of water as he strove to regain his breath; then he pointed his weapon at the man and panted hoarsely: ‘Pull—pull that bell again! Signal your driver to go on!’

  The conductor backed away, simply putting up his hands above his head as though he had not understood. Both he and the driver had now heard the shouts of the oncoming crowd. In vain the Duke pulled the bell himself; the bus was slowing down.

  The idea of facing the driver to drive on at the point of the pistol flashed into de Richleau’s mind, but he abandoned it almost as soon as it occurred to him. There was a metal partition between the passenger compartment and the driver’s seat, so he could not get at the man to threaten him, except by getting off the bus. With the pack running hard behind them too much time would be lost before he could force the fellow to set his vehicle in motion again. As the bus jolted to a halt he jumped off and began to run once more.

  The lift on the bus had given him a brief respite and enabled him partially to recover his breath, but he knew that he could not keep going much longer. To his dismay he saw that two hundred yards ahead the street was half-blocked again by a fallen house and that a group of four soldiers was approaching the part where it narrowed.

  Suddenly a man ran at him from a nearby doorway. Swerving wildly, de Richleau thrust him off with the swift movement with which a rugby forward out for a try would have foiled a tackle by the opposing full back. The man staggered, overbalanced and sat down with a bump on the pavement, but in a minute he was up again and in hot pursuit only twenty yards behind the Duke.

  Before he was halfway to the pile of débris his wind was failing him. Every breath he drew seared his chest like a hot iron; the pain seemed intolerable. The blood was beating in his head, and his eyes were bulging. The swift running steps of the man he had pushed over were gaining on him, and ahead the four soldiers had halted with excited cries. They were spreading out at the far end of the bottleneck made by the rubble, to bar his passage.

  The position seemed hopeless, but he was still determined to make a fight for it, and he knew the time had come when he must use his gun. If only he could have explained to these people, he thought with intense bitterness, that he was in real truth their devoted ally, whereas the scoundrel who had set them on to murder him had endeavoured to sell them out to their merciless enemies before the war had even started. But that was impossible, and without the faintest knowledge of the facts they were hounding one another on to do him to death. All right, then, anyone who had the temerity to join in the chase of an armed man did so at his own peril. Their blood was on their own heads.

  Raising his pistol, he fired two shots at the little group of soldiers. Still running, as he was, he could not take deliberate aim at any of then, even had he wished, and they were the best part of a hundred yards away from him. Both shots went wide but had instantaneous effect. Two of the soldiers ran for cover in the nearest doorway, a third dived behind the heap of masonry; only one stood his ground at the far entrance to the bottleneck.

  The man behind was now gaining rapidly on the breathless Duke. He had come up to within fifteen feet of his quarry. Half-turning, de Richleau fired again. With a curse, the man hesitated and dropped into a limping trot, the bullet having grazed his thigh.

  As he had turned to fire, the Duke had glimpsed the part of the street which lay behind him. It was now half-filled with running people; two hundred at least had joined in the chase. Mack’s car was in the centre of them, but could not forge ahead, or it would have run down some of the leading half-hundred. Well out in the front, a policeman and the young sailor were running neck to neck barely fifty paces behind the now wounded man.

  Ahead the soldier still stood squarely in the centre of the gap, and one of his comrades, regaining his nerve, had come out of the doorway to join him. A pistol cracked somewhere in the rear, and its bullet whistled past the Duke’s head. As he had started the firing himself he could not blame the marksman.

  He was now in the bottleneck, but he felt nearly done and was practically certain that he no longer had the strength left to evade or fight off the two soldiers. On a sudden inspiration he swerved and began to scramble up the great heap of rubble.

  An instant later he was cursing himself for his folly. The bricks and broken stone slipped and slithered beneath his feet. He felt that he would have stood a better chance if he had shot one of the soldiers at point-blank range and sought to slip past the other. But it was too late to think of that now. The pile of débris rose at an increasingly sharp angle to a height of about twenty-five feet. He was not halfway up it before the panting, shouting mob arrived at its foot.

  The policeman, the sailor and half a dozen other men began to scramble after him, but one of the soldiers won him a temporary respite by shouting: ‘Come back there! He’s armed! He’ll shoot you if you corner him! Leave this to us!’

  As he yelled his warning he was quickly loading his rifle, but his comrade in the doorway across the street had had the same idea and was already raising his weapon to his shoulder.

  The report of the rifle echoed above the tumult of the crowd. At the second the Duke heard it the bullet pinged upon a piece of brick which an instant before had been covered by his body. But now the crowd had rounded on the soldiers with cries of ‘Stop shooting! He’s a spy—shooting’s too good for him! We want him alive! Come on, boys; up you go! Lynch him! Lynch him!’

  As the leaders of the mob began to climb again de Richleau, half-blinded by sweat and dust, heaved himself up on to the top of the pile. He was now faced by the remains of an interior wall of the gutted house in which an open door hung, crookedly, still supported by one of its hinges. To scale the mound he had had to thrust his pistol into his pocket. With a torn and bleeding hand he pulled it out again.

  He was old enough to face most forms of death with a certain equanimity and he had always hoped that when his time came he would die cleanly and quickly from a bullet; but one type of death that he had never visualised for himself was to be torn limb from limb by a hooligan-incited crowd driven temporarily insane by the hardships and horrors of relentless bombing. It seemed now that such a fate had unquestionably been reserved for him, but the idea of mob-law, whether applied to himself or anyone else, had always filled him with intense repugnance. Even half-crazy as he had been driven by breathlessness and pain, he had instinctively recoiled from the thought of killing the soldiers who had courageously barred his path down in the street; but no such scruples weighed with him one iota where this human pack, that was surging up to overwhelm him, was concerned. Levelling his pistol, he emptied its remaining contents into the mass of struggling figures halfway up the mound.

  One screamed and slumped upon the slope of broken bricks; another threw up his arms and pitched backwards, carrying several of those nearest with him. A howl of rage and execration went up from the watching throng, which now blocked the whole street for a length of a hundred yards and was still rapidly increasing. But the rest of the climbers stopped in their tracks, not knowing that the Duke had now exhausted his ammunition.

  Seizing this new advantage as a last forlorn hope, de Richleau stumbled to the gaping doorway in the ruined wall. Beyond it the further side of the house had also collapsed from another bomb in the same stick as that which had brought down its front. The ruin was open to the heavens, the next standing wall was a good fifty yards away; all trace of the room beyond the doorway had disappeared, except for a small square landing from which led down a narrow flight of partially wrecked stairs.

  The stairs descended in two flights to a brick-scattered tiled floor on the ground level, which had doubtless been the hall of the building. The banisters had disappeared, and part of the lower flight had been blasted away, leaving a gaping hole through which could be seen some stone steps leading to a cellar. At a normal time no man in his senses would have risked stepping out on to the rickety landing without a rope round h
im and companions to check his fall, if the loose boards should collapse beneath him. But for the Duke no hesitation was possible; death from a hundred fists and boots was following hard on his heels. The mob would have recovered its courage in another few moments, and, more infuriated than ever by the casualties he had caused, it would resume its remorseless man-hunt. Still panting from his exertions, he dived through the doorway, and, keeping as close to the wall as possible, ran towards the stairs.

  He was three steps down when there was a sudden grinding noise, then a long loud creak, and the top flight gave way under his feet. For a moment it sank quite slowly, then in a flurry of splintered wood, dust and plaster it crashed into the hall below. As it fell de Richleau slid sideways from the wall and pitched into the already broken lower flight, which bore his weight for a second, then collapsed, sending up a great cloud of flying particles as its fall was abruptly arrested by the stone steps of the cellar.

  Instinct coupled with the still present thought of his pursuers made the Duke scramble up at once. Coughing, spluttering and half blinded by the dust, he thrust aside the laths and splintered wood with which he was surrounded and crawled out on to the tiled floor. It was only as he got to his feet that he realised with amazement that he had suffered no serious injury. He was scratched and bruised in a dozen new places, but the double check in his fall had saved him from disaster.

  Still coughing, and with more agonising pains than ever racking his lungs, he peered through the dust cloud in an endeavour to get his bearings. The wall through which he had come loomed dark and tall on his right, just in front of him a part of the hole over the cellar steps still gaped open, and to his left in the side wall of the hall he could discern a narrow archway, the lower part of which was filled with rubble.

  Again the shouts of the hunters came from above him; they had now scaled the mound, and in another moment the foremost of them would be peering down through the doorway that now led nowhere, to see if their quarry had killed himself in his fall. The dust clouds gave the hunted Duke momentary cover as he forced himself to assess the respective merits of the half-blocked archway and the cellar steps as a means for further prolonging his precarious existence. The archway might be entirely blocked further up, whereas the cellar was much less likely to be obstructed; on the other hand, it might not have any other entrance. In either case he might be caught like a rat in a trap, so there seemed little to choose between them. His swift deliberation was decided by the thought that, if die he must, it was better to do so above ground than in some noisome hole, so, choking with the dust as though his lungs would burst, he staggered towards the archway.

  Barking his shins and ankles afresh on the pile of bricks, he floundered over them into a long, dim passage, which, to his immense relief, was lit by faint daylight ahead.

  At a shambling trot he ran along it, knowing that, although the fallen staircase would hold up his self-appointed executioners for a brief spell, they would soon find means to continue the pursuit by lowering themselves down the wall.

  The passage ended in a half-open, nail-studded doorway. Beyond it lay a small stone-floored room with narrow, medieval windows set in thick stone walls. It was furnished only with a hideous pitch-pine cupboard, three wooden chairs and a deal washstand, from which most of the paint had flaked; but it showed no signs of bomb damage, except that most of the small panes in the leaded windows had been blown out. On a peg on a further door hung the black cassock and biretta of a Roman Catholic priest.

  Crossing the room, the Duke cautiously pulled open the door, half-fearing that it might give on to another street, where he would find some of his enemies awaiting him; but on the further side of the door lay a burnt-out church. The walls were still standing, but the roof was gone, and its charred beams lay in blackened heaps on piles of ashes in the nave that must once have been rows of pews.

  After one swift look de Richleau pulled the gown from the peg and slipped it over his torn and filthy clothes. As he snatched at the biretta and put it on his head he caught the first crunch of brick on brick, and knew that some of his pursuers were already scrambling over the heap of débris at the far end of the passage.

  Slipping through the door, he tiptoed to the charred steps, taking his spectacles from his pocket as he did so. One glass had cracked across, and the other had disappeared entirely, but he put them on, and crossing himself swiftly, knelt down before the high altar in an attitude of prayer.

  He was so exhausted that he knew himself to be utterly incapable of further effort. His one chance now was that, on entering the church and finding a priest immersed in his devotions, the mob would assume that their intended victim had eluded them and taken another line of escape. If they questioned him his broken glasses, his face covered with dirt and sweat, and his lacerated hands would prove an immediate give-away. He could only trust in the widespread devoutness among the Polish people and hope that it would prevent them from disturbing a priest at his prayers. Running feet sounded in the little robing-room, the door was thrown open, and the mob dashed in.

  The Duke had only just got over his violent fit of coughing, brought on by the dust, and his lungs were still paining him terribly. Desperately he sought to control his heavy breathing. His head was aching as though a hammer were rhythmically pounding on the brain inside it, and his body was so bruised that it seemed to throb all over. He would have given all the treasures of his Curzon Street flat at that moment for it to be safe for him to take the-weight off his battered knees and lie down unmolested on the cold stone. But his only hope of safety lay in maintaining his present attitude with absolute stillness.

  The trampling ceased. The leading members of the crowd halted. There were cries and questions from those still jammed in the little room behind, and gruff calls for silence from those in front who could see the kneeling figure.

  For what seemed an eternity to de Richleau he knelt before the altar, as utterly still as if he had been turned to stone. Vaguely he endeavoured to pray, but he needed every ounce of his willpower to keep himself from slumping down in a faint. In an agony of suspense he waited until the trampling of feet on the stone floor of the blitzed church sounded again. The footsteps receded, and the church became deadly still, but even then he dared not relax his pose for some moments for fear that a few of the crowd had remained behind and were still watching him. At last he turned his head very slightly and peered between his fingers; there was no one there. With a groan he slid forward on to his face.

  At least five minutes elapsed before he moved again. He was only semi-conscious, but he had fought a great silent battle to prevent himself from passing out, and he had won. Exhausted and shaken by pain as he was, he still had a job to do—a job not only of the utmost urgency, but one which would require sound, skilful planning at short notice and all the clear-headed initiative that he could bring to it.

  Loss of breath was the one thing which caused the Duke’s capable brain to cease functioning. As long as he was gasping for air it positively refused to work, except on matters concerned with his immediate safety. During the less exacting moments of his flight a dozen questions had flashed into his mind. What was Mack doing in Warsaw? Was he still a member of the Polish Government? Had he really wished to secure his persecutor’s arrest, or had he been sharp enough to appreciate that by raising the cry of ‘Spy!’ the mob would secure him his revenge without his having to concern himself in the matter further? Was his return to Warsaw only a flying visit on some official business, or did he intend to remain there? Had he, perhaps, never left the capital? How was his presence likely to affect the plans and safety of his recent captors?

  While he remained breathless and with his heart hammering as though it would burst, de Richleau had been utterly unable to assess any of these possibilities, and he was still in no state to do so. On the few previous occasions on which he had placed a similar, if lesser, strain upon himself he had found himself incapable of coherent thought for at least an hour afterwards. But h
e did know one thing. He had got to get back to the Lubieszow mansion and warn his friends there of Mack’s presence in Warsaw with the least possible delay.

  With an effort he sat up, and slowly got to his feet. Swaying slightly, he looked first round the roofless church, then down at his newly acquired habit. The priest who owned the cassock must have been a tall man, as it came well down past the Duke’s ankles and partially hid his scraped and dusty shoes; a circumstance for which he was devoutly grateful. With the black biretta he was wearing on his head this clerical disguise could hardly have been improved upon, but the spectacles had served their purpose by their side-pieces showing as he had knelt with his hands covering his face in prayer, and the fact that one of the lenses was broken and the other missing would only attract unwelcome attention; so he took the spectacles off and put them in his pocket.

  Crunching his way through the piles of ashes and charred wood, he went down the nave to the west end of the church, where he found one of the side doors unobstructed. With his lacerated hands thrust into the ample sleeves of the cassock, and his head bowed as though in pious meditation, he walked out into the street. Evidently the mob had not come this way and were still hunting for him in the cellars under the fallen staircase, as the Sunday-afternoon quiet here remained unbroken. In his first glance around he caught sight of a clock on a still undamaged building. Its hands stood at twenty past three. At first he thought that it had stopped, as it seemed impossible to him that barely a quarter of an hour had elapsed since Mack had shouted to the police and he had had to run for his life; but as he advanced towards the big dial he saw that the clock was going.

  As he turned into the next street and with returning strength began to increase his pace, his ear caught a sound now all to familiar to him at night, but not at that hour of the day. It was the deep, heavy throb of bombers, and a second later the air-raid sirens began to wail.