‘Successfully?’ Shaw grinned.
She made a scornful noise. ‘My eye! Mind, he’d talk most anyone into anything he wanted ’em to do, but he failed with me. My family fought the Nazis — my dad, couple of uncles, you know? Both uncles killed. Pop went on feeling the effects till he died six years back, had a tin leg and a pound of Nazi steel in his seat.’ She stopped, frowning. After a moment she went on. ‘You know something? Pop, he used to talk to me a lot when I was home, about the war. About the Nazis. Maybe he had a bee in his bonnet, I don’t know, but he always reckoned that in the war he was fighting the Nazi Party, not the German people. He told me they were kind of led into it — you know? That’s what he said.’
Shaw nodded. ‘I think I’d agree with that. But go on.’
She said, ‘There isn’t really any more to tell.’
‘Well, let’s get one thing straight, shall we.’ Shaw sat forward with his shoulders hunched. ‘Fleck’s an international Nazi — part of a world set-up, right? If that’s so… why hasn’t someone got a file on him — even if he is peanuts? The security boys’ll be keeping an eye on all members of the American Nazi Party and their known contacts, you can bet your life on that!’
‘Well,’ she said, ‘the high-ups don’t know everything, it seems! Anyway, Fleck’s not a member of the American Nazi Party, nor is he in contact with them. They’re just a front, you see, a noisy but harmless front, a kind of lunatic fringe Fleck can do without when it comes to real planning — but they do kind of take the publicity off the genuinely dangerous boys like Fleck. That’s what Fleck says. Give the Pentagon and the State Department something to watch, he says, something nice and screwy, and they’re happy. That leaves the field clear for Fleck and plenty of dedicated people like him all over the world, America included, to get the real dirty work done. Only he didn’t say dirty work. Anyway, the big bugs are not any of them members of the national parties, not anywhere. The real leaders, they’re all outside and underground, and the more dangerous because of it.’ She stopped. ‘Guess I’m teaching my grandmother all right, this time.’
‘Well, never mind,’ Shaw grinned. ‘I get the message! So what is Fleck aiming to do?’
‘I don’t know — except on the general count of putting the Nazis back where they were — and that’s dead honest. I told you.’ She looked straight at him. ‘He didn’t take me into his confidence that far.’
‘Well,’ he said, ‘you’ve been a great help anyway, and I believe you when you say you don’t know any more. You’ve gone quite a long way, and I’ll accept that you’d go right along with me if you could.’ He put the gun down on the desk, and the girl looked at him gratefully.
She said, ‘Thanks. I appreciate that.’
‘Good. And now there are one or two other things you may be able to help me over. First, do you know a girl called Patricia O’Malley?’
She nodded, but her eyes were cautious now. ‘She’s with Fleck.’
‘As I thought. How is she?’
Myra Yarrow looked down at her fingernails. Quietly she said, ‘She’s okay… or was.’
‘Alive?’
‘Oh, sure. But — not happy, I guess. And I should have said she was with Fleck. After Hanson, the guy who was tailing you, reported back… he shunted her, but fast.’
‘Where to?’
She shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Honest. Somewhere safe. Safe for him, I mean. I believe he had some use for her, in his plan.’
‘Has he tried to get anything out of her?’ It could still be that Fleck had known his likely movements from Patricia… and he wouldn’t blame the girl, if Fleck had put Willoughby on to her with his third-degree methods — or worse.
The girl said, ‘Yes, he tried, I guess. He didn’t say what she told him, if anything. But I’d suggest you get tabs on that girl as fast as ever you can.’
‘That,’ he told her grimly, ‘is just what I mean to do, among other things! Now — did you ever meet a girl called Rosemary Houston?’
She made a vague movement of her shoulders. ‘Why no, I don’t believe I did. Who’s she?’
‘Just a girl. I believe she and Fleck had an affair.’
She smiled, scornfully. ‘Fleck’s had as many affairs as a monkey’s got fleas.’
‘Yes… I somehow gather he’s an attractive man so far as women are concerned. Is that right?’
She nodded. ‘Yes, he is. He’s… sexy. Got a kind of a way with him, too — you know? He’s a bit too smooth in the way he talks, but he kind of gives the impression of being on the level. The act’s as phoney as hell, of course, once you really get to know him, but I guess most girls’d be fooled by him. Never heard of this Rosemary Houston, though.’
‘Or Dolly Gray?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Blank again. Sorry.’
Shaw nodded abstractedly. Rosemary Houston was still the puzzle, still the missing link — with what? Possibly she really had fallen for Fleck and had chucked discretion to the winds. It didn’t seem very likely and it would have been right out of character for a trained agent, but it still had to be faced that Rosemary had been a human being… though it would have been a queer coincidence indeed if Rosemary, after being intimate with Fleck, should subsequently have been sent on the Warmaster job. No, she must have been on to something, something that had led her from Fleck to Germany in the end. The plastic surgery would have helped to keep her nicely anonymous. Shaw felt that if only one detail would crystallize, if something would just click neatly into a slot, a pattern might begin to emerge.
Just one thing. But what was it?
He considered once again what Myra Yarrow had just been telling him. There were any amount of implications there. Maybe it was simply a case of being wise after the event, but he couldn’t understand, now, why he hadn’t tumbled to a lot of it earlier. He had got it so firmly into his thinking that it had to be the Communists he was up against, but this new concept fitted.
The Nazis were coming up in all sorts of places, just as this girl had said. You didn’t need Fleck to tell you that, you could read all about it in the newspapers of half a dozen countries. Cranks, hooligans, thugs they might be; but they were becoming a force to be reckoned with just the same, both inside and outside Germany. The pendulum was swinging again, and so many countless millions of people had forgotten all about the war and the men and women who had died in the mud and the sand and at sea, in the air and in the concentration and P.O.W camps to rid civilization of a pernicious creed. And the new people, the young, who had never known the war anyway, were fed up, bored and listless with their full employment and high living standards and the telly. They were left, so many of those spoon-fed masses, with nothing to do for themselves and time hung heavy on idle hands. And they no longer paid any attention to what their fathers told them; fathers were as out of date as the war itself — and to the sons and daughters the war was history, the causes of it sheer boredom to listen to. Many of them just couldn’t care less either way but some of them, the most cretinous elements, turned to the thrills of Nazism to satisfy their need for action and excitement, and they saw nothing in it for anyone to get upset about.
Thus was the stage once again being set.
It was a process that would be extremely difficult to arrest.
Rosemary again… she had been in Germany—though she had been sent initially into Russia. Something must have taken her across the Oder-Neisse line, something vital. And that dock had sailed from Hamburg, from Gottlieb Hauser’s yard. Shaw wondered if Latymer back in London had managed to get anything on Gottlieb Hauser. His thoughts circled relentlessly as he sat opposite Myra Yarrow in that underground office. Fleck was a German — so was Keiler, Otto Keiler the Communist.