Even Hess seemed surprised by this sudden volte-face.
"No need, old boy." Sir Seaton Begg lifted his hat. "Have this one on me. I am happy to serve the cause of justice."
Though dressed only in a mackintosh, Hitler visibly grew an inch or two. "You have served not only my interests and those of my great party, Sir Seaton. You have served the interests of the entire free world. Hess. We shall need the Mercedes. There is something I must take care of at once. Thank you again." He lifted his arm in his familiar salute.
"Only too happy to oblige, old chap." And with that Begg steered an open-mouthed Sinclair into the fir-rich air of the sub-Alpine forests.
"Take a good gulp, Taffy," he murmured.
"Are you out of your mind, Begg? That chap's about as unbalanced as it's possible to be without falling off the planet. You've no idea what notions you've given him."
"Oh, I think the ones he was meant to be given, Taffy. Perhaps you already suspect the truth? In this case we served a client other than we thought!"
By now Dolly's headlights were piercing the dark shadows of the German night. Taffy, still deprived of his usual amount of sleep, began to doze in the seat beside his friend. He was awakened to realize that Begg was driving far slower than usual and that the head-lamps of another car were coming from behind. He watched in some astonishment, as if dreaming. The great Mercedes swept past them, overtaking at almost one hundred miles an hour. Sinclair made out Herr Hitler in the backseat. Hess was with him. Strasser appeared to fee driving. Before he began to fall back to sleep, he remembered noticing that Hitler appeared to be wearing a suit and a tie and ask-ing Begg where Hitler was going at this time of night.
"Berlin, I'd guess." Sir Seaton kept Dolly at a steady pace.
"We're going to Berlin?"
"Good Lord no, old boy. Our work's done here. We're going home. If I put on a little speed at the crossroads, we should be just in time to catch the dawn zeppelin for London."
Without Sinclair's knowledge, Begg had already stowed the luggage. There had been no hotel bill to settle. By dawn they reached the great Munich Aerodrome and were soon installed in a comfortable suite. Through the portholes came floods of intermittent sunshine caused by the movement of the ship in her cables. A radio bulletin playing on the State Radio took on a rather excited air, and as soon as he had disrobed, washed, and settled in his seat, Begg turned the volume up.
He listened in some amusement, but Sinclair was aghast at the news. He even failed to notice the almost effortless lifting of the huge liner as she uncoupled from her masts and began her journey to London.
There had effectively been a complete disintegration of the Nazis. Already the Reichstag party seemed divided into opposing camps headed by Strasser and Goring. Nazi officials were issuing contradictory statements since the arrest earlier that morning of Adolf Hitler, self-confessed murderer of the man he termed the "Jew Fifth Columnist Himmler," hitherto his trusted aide and an ex-chicken farmer. Hitler understood that he could no longer hope to be vice-chancellor, but now it scarcely mattered, since he had in his own words "torn out the heart of the hydra sucking the life from Germany, keeping the nation safe against injustice and horror for a thousand years."
"You effectively put the gun into Hitler's hand and killed Himmler!" cried Sinclair. "Really, Begg, sometimes…"
"I told you, Taffy, that I did what I was supposed to do. Zodiac knew only too well that there are few better and more trustworthy messengers than you and me. So he sent us to Hitler with the evidence he had carefully manufactured over months. Those papers were enough to convince almost anyone and in a bad light they were even harder to detect. But they were forgeries, old man. Planted for someone to find. Just as those apparent sniper shots which always missed their targets were intended to distract attention from what was actually being accomplished. Zodiac had been looking for a good way to make the Nazi leadership fall out. When he knew we were on to him, he simply made us his cat's-paws. Pretty audacious, eh."
"But Zodiac killed that poor creature, Frдulein Raubal," insisted Taffy.
"Not at all, Taffy, though you could argue Hitler effectively drove her to her death. She killed herself, as everyone insisted. She tested the poison first. You smelled that distinctive odor as readily as I did."
"Cyanide!"
"Exactly. The smell of cyanide, if taken by mouth, lingers on the lips long after the taker has gone to the hereafter. That dead canary the young lady carried around all day. She had already tried the stuff on the bird and saw that it worked. She took a pretty heavy dosage, I'd say. The police remained deceived by the gunshot. The way she lay on the floor made it seem to others that she had died in the throes of passion. But I believe she died in the throes of death."
"But she was shot, Begg. Shot by Zodiac!"
"True."
"So Zodiac is the real murderer…"
"No."
There was a knock at their door and Begg called, "Come in!" A busboy with a salver presented him with a card which he glanced at; then he smiled and tucked it into his upper waistcoat pocket. He offered the boy a silver coin. "Ask Countess von Bek to join us at her pleasure." He beamed across at a bewildered Taffy.
"No?"
"No. Zodiac was, of course, Frдulein Raubal's lover. He played the violin by night and courted her by day. By whatever clever devices, he had provided himself with the assignment of keeping guard on her, knowing that he planned to seduce her. But I think he also planned to save her. He took some conventional 'glamour' pictures of her. He made those Himmler forgeries we showed Hitler. I don't think he had any plan to kill the girl. But he did want her to run away with him. So he suggested they go to Vienna together. He told her to demand of Hitler that she be allowed to stay with her relatives and study singing there. It was a plan she had already toyed with. So she did as she was told. But Hitler, as we know, had reached the end of his tolerance." Begg rose to his feet to open their door, bowing Countess Rose into their rather cramped quarters. Offering her his chair, he brought her rapidly up-to-date and then, leaning beside the porthole, continued.
"Someone, probably an SA spy, had reported the 'secret lover,' even if they had not been able to say who it was. So Hitler refused. Under no circumstances could she go to Vienna. She again threatened suicide. He did not believe her. Neither, I suspect, would 'Captain Zeiss' have believed her. But when he let himself into the apartment late that night, he found poor Geli Raubal on the floor, having tasted the torments of cyanide. She had left a note, no doubt. This went against his plans, but he had to go through with the rest of it. He pocketed the note. He found Hitler's gun, shot the already dead Geli through the heart in a way deliberately to draw suspicion on someone, placed the gun in her hand with equally deliberate clumsiness, then left the police and investigators, like ourselves, to conclude that the young woman had been murdered, either by Hitler or one of his lieutenants."
The Countess Rose sat back in her seat, her eyes gleaming with admiration. "So Hoffmann and myself were completely fooled. Only the fact that Hitler had an ironclad alibi stopped us from arresting him."
"Zodiac already had his original plan, which he modified. He knew that Hitler could not be 'framed.' So he planned to let his men discover the clothing and documents at the Hotel Rembrandt. Since I caught up with him so much sooner than he expected, he merely decided to use me as his messenger! He was always a clever customer. Even those pictures, released to the press, would be enough to threaten the fortunes of Hitler and his party. But Zodiac wanted to be dead certain. That was why he had forged some Himmler documents to make sure all in the party were suspect. He hoped they would find their way to Hitler. I made sure that they did. The consequences then followed like clockwork. Leading to a satisfactory resolution, I think you'll agree, Taffy. Sometimes it is just about possible for two wrongs to make a right."