My chance came at last when the R.A.F. bombed Köln. The house was partly destroyed and my guard was killed. I got away while the bombs were still falling and took refuge with friends in the underground. They helped me across the border into Occupied France – I can’t tell you how – and eventually I got into Vichy France. For months I worked with the French underground, helping refugees from occupied Europe get from France into Spain and Portugal. After four years of uselessness, I was finally doing something to fight the Nazis. It was the best time in my life, but it didn’t last long.
The Vichy police got on my trail and I went to Marseilles and escaped to French Africa on a cargo-boat. But they caught me in Algiers and put me in prison. I don’t like to think of that prison. Have you read Koestler’s Dialogue with Death? I have just been reading it these last few days – it is so good to be able to read again, whenever and whatever I wish. Anyway, the prison in Algiers was something like Koestler’s Spanish prison. Some day I will tell you about it.
When the British and American forces invaded North Africa, I foolishly expected to be released from prison immediately. So did the other political prisoners, at least all that I knew – we were not allowed to talk but we had means of communicating with each other. But it was months before any of us were released. When democracy compromises with fascism, the result is a hybrid which looks more like fascism than democracy.
Finally, through an American officer who inspected the prison, I got in touch with Dr. Schneider, who I knew was at Midwestern University. I believe that it was through his efforts that I was released, though he has said very little about it in his letters. I can never repay him – he has even secured me a position at the university. I didn’t tell you I have a contract all sealed and signed. And just this week I received permission from the Department of Justice to live and work in the United States.
I am anticipating myself again. You must have patience with my narrative style.
I was released in June of this year and taken to England by airplane. I spent weeks there trying to obtain permission to come to the United States. Then I was advised to come to Canada and try to make arrangements from there. After more weeks of waiting, I secured passage from England to Canada. Several weeks ago I reached Toronto and got in touch with Dr. Schneider again. Through his good offices I have now at last been given permission to come to the United States. I expect to leave here for Arbana very soon.
You must wonder what I am doing in a gold-mining town in Northern Ontario. Perhaps my reason is rather foolish but if there is any risk it is my own. Dr. Schneider’s son, Peter, who is here with me – a charming and intelligent young man – thinks that my reason is sensible. I will tell you when I see you rather than in a letter, because my letter may be opened by the censor.
Auf Wiedersehen, Bob Branch. I am looking forward to seeing you. And please do not be embarrassed if you have a beautiful wife and three pretty children. I am not a romantic any longer – I am nearing thirty and sometimes I feel much older – and I would love your wife and children.
Indeed, I will love them; because, of course, you are married. I want so much just to live for a while in a peaceful place with good people who are my friends.
Ruth Esch.
When I finished the letter I stood and thought for a minute without moving, if the kind of circles my mind was moving in can be called thinking. Peter Schneider had been with Ruth in Canada, perhaps for a couple of weeks. Even then he was a fast worker. I had not been overwhelmed by his charm, but then he was my rival. If I was a competitor at all, and I didn’t feel like one. She must have been very willing, to be corrupted so quickly. I remembered what Dr. Schneider had called her, and had a sudden vision of two white German bodies grappling in darkness. I felt sick with a moral sickness I had felt once before: when I was four or five I walked into a little wood and found a small snake trying to swallow a large toad.
My mind veered away from this and went on travelling in circles. A day or two before, Kirkland Lake had been in the news. Twenty or so German prisoners had escaped from a Canadian prison camp near there. Most of them had been caught again, a few had been killed resisting capture. What was the errand which Ruth had been afraid to mention in her letter and of which Peter had approved? Had the two of them gone to Northern Ontario to help German prisoners to get away?
But even in a state of emotional bewilderment I saw that this logic was a bit hysterical. The sincerity and pathos of her letter flooded back into my mind and confused me more. I couldn’t believe that letter was an exercise in literary deceit. Perhaps she knew even less than I did about Peter Schneider, perhaps he had fooled her completely. Then I remembered that she was an actress. Perhaps she had fooled me. My feelings ran hot and cold, and the snake and the toad grappled amorously in the underbrush, eating each other behind the bedroom door.
The toll of the tower bell made me start and look at the clock on the mantel. It was midnight, and I had been on my way to McKinley Hall to find Alec. I cursed myself for a dawdler and went out the door, stuffing the letter in my pocket.
I lived on the north side of the campus, ten minutes from McKinley Hall, which is on the south side. I covered the distance in five minutes by trotting and cutting across the dark campus, and approached the building from the rear.
There was one light on in its block-long length. It seemed to be on the fourth floor. Of course, the Middle English Dictionary office. Alec must be up there again. I looked for a light on the fifth floor immediately above the Dictionary office, but the fifth-floor windows were all dark. No light in Alec’s office second from the end.
The walk that ran along behind the building was unusually dark. The flood-light on the corner must have burned out, I thought, and I looked up as I passed it.
As I raised my eyes, a light flashed on in the second window from the end on the fifth floor, Alec’s office, and a man leaped at me from the lighted window. He howled like a dog and stretched out his arms as he leaped outward and I cowered against the wall in terror, quivering like a beaten animal. No human being could make that leap to the bare pavement.
The howling man dived headfirst to the sidewalk in front of me and I heard his skull break with a sound like an egg dropped on the floor. One leg thrashed in a convulsion and the body crumpled and lay still. Blood spattered and glistened darkly on the dim pavement, and I moved sideways along the wall to avoid it.
Then I remembered the flashlight still in my pocket. I turned it on the upturned face. There was no face. Dark blood was flowing from the head like oil in steady, wormlike streams. I felt the pulse. No pulse. I straightened the twisted body and the ruined head moved limply sideways like a pumpkin on a string.
I knew by the hair and the clothes that it was Alec. I said to myself, I’m going to kill Schneider, and I heard the words said aloud by someone. I must have said them because there was nobody else there.
My mind began to function again after the shock, and a sudden thought jerked me upright and accelerated my heartbeat ready for action: whoever had pushed Alec out of the window must still be in the building. Before I could move I heard the faint sound of a woman’s shout from somewhere high up in the building, and then something that sounded like a door being shaken violently in its frame.