The Schirmer Inheritance

That, he thought grimly, should give Mr. Sistrom something to gnaw on. He read it through again, striking out the unnecessary prepositions and conjunctions, and then translated it into the code they had agreed on for highly confidential messages. When he had finished he looked at the time. The post office would not be open for another hour. He would write to Mr. Sistrom and mail the letter at the same time as he sent the cable. He sighed. It had been an exhausting night-exhausting in some unexpected ways. When the coffee and buttered rolls he had ordered from the restaurant arrived, he sat down to compose his report.

“In my last report,” he began, “I told you of the evidence I had been given my Madame Vassiotis and of my consequent decision to return home as soon as possible. Since then, as you will have gathered from my cable, the picture has completely changed. I knew, of course, that the inquiries instituted by Madame Vassiotis would reach the ears of all sorts of persons who, for one reason or another, were regarded as criminals by the authorities. I scarcely expected them to come to the attention of the man we have been looking for. Nevertheless, that is what happened. Twenty-four hours ago I was approached by a man who stated that he had friends who had information to give about Schirmer. Subsequently Miss Kolin and I took a very uncomfortable trip to a secret destination somewhere up in the mountains near the Yugoslav frontier. At the end of the journey we were taken to a house and confronted by a man who said he was Franz Schirmer. When I had explained the purpose of our visit, I asked him various pertinent questions, all of which he answered correctly. I asked him then about the ambush at Vodena and his subsequent movements. He told a fantastic story.”

George hesitated; then he erased the word “fantastic”-Mr. Sistrom would not like that sort of adjective-and typed the word “curious” in its place.

And yet it had been fantastic, to sit there in the light of the oil lamp listening to the great-great-grandson of the hero of Preussisch-Eylau telling, in his broken English, the story of his adventures in Greece. He had spoken slowly, sometimes with a faint smile at the corners of his mouth, always with his watchful grey eyes on his visitors, reading and assessing them. The Dragoon of Ansbach, George thought, must have been very much the same kind of man. Where other men would succumb to physical disaster, men like these two Schirmers would always endure and survive. One had been wounded, had put his trust in God, had deserted, and lived to become a prosperous tradesman. The other had been left for dead, had put his trust in himself, had kept his wits about him, and lived to fight another day.

What the second Sergeant Schirmer had become, however, was a question that the Sergeant himself had made no attempt to answer.

His own account of himself had ended inconclusively at the time of the closing of the Yugoslav frontier by Tito, and with a bitter complaint against the man?uvrings of the Communist politicians which had defeated the Markos forces. But George had very little doubt now about the nature of the Sergeant’s subsequent activities. They had conformed to an ancient pattern. When defeated revolutionary armies disintegrated, those soldiers who feared for political reasons to go back home, or who had no homes to go back to, turned to brigandage. And since, quite clearly, neither the Sergeant nor Arthur was, to use Colonel Chrysantos’s words, a “simple, deluded fanatic of the type that always gets caught,” their gleanings in Salonika had almost certainly gone into their own pockets, and those of their men-at-arms. It was a delicate situation. Moreover, if he were not to seem suspiciously incurious, he would have to invite them somehow to explain their set-up in their own way.

It had been Arthur who had provided the opening.

“Didn’t I tell you it’d be worth your while to come, Mr. Carey?” he said triumphantly when the Sergeant had finished.

“You did indeed, Arthur, and I’m very grateful. And of course I understand now the reason for all the secrecy.” He looked at the Sergeant. “I had no idea that fighting was still going on in this area.”

“No?” The Sergeant drained his glass and set it down with a bang. “It is the censorship,” he said. “The government hide the truth from the world.”

Arthur nodded gravely. “Proper Fascist-imperialist lackeys they are,” he said.

“But we do not talk politics, eh?” The Sergeant smiled as he filled Miss Kolin’s glass. “It is not interesting for the beautiful lady,”

She said something coldly in German and his smile faded. For a moment he seemed to be reconsidering Miss Kolin; then he turned to George cheerfully.

“Let us all fill our glasses and come to business,” he said.