Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 5, No. 19, November 1944

“So are other men. But they come home on leave. Sometime. He can’t go on for ever. Soon they are bound to find out.”

“What can we do?”

“You can get him out of there. Hasn’t he done enough for you?”

He said gently: “It’s beyond our power. How can we communicate with him?”

“Surely you have agents.”

“Two lives would be lost. Can’t you imagine how they watch him?”

Yes. She could imagine all that clearly. She had spent too many holidays in Germany — as the Press had not failed to discover — not to know how men were watched, telephone lines tapped, table companions scrutinized.

He said, “If there was some way we could get a message to him, it might be managed. We do owe him that.”

Young Mrs. Bishop said quickly before he could change his mind: “Well, the code works both ways. The fact of the matter is... We have news broadcast in German. He might one day listen in.”

“Yes. There’s a chance.”

She became privy to the plan because again they needed her help. They wanted to attract his notice first by some phrase peculiar to her. For years they had spoken German together on their annual holiday. That phrase was to be varied in every broadcast, and elaborately they worked out a series of messages which would convey to him the same instructions — to go to a certain station on the Cologne-Wesel line and contact there a railway worker who had already helped five men and two women to escape from Germany.

Mary Bishop felt she knew the place well — the small country station which probably served only a few dozen houses and a big hotel where people went in the old days for cures. The opportunity was offered him, if he could only take it, by an elaborate account of a railway accident at that point — so many people killed — sabotage — arrests. It was plugged in the news as relentlessly as the Germans repeated the news of false sinkings, and they answered indignantly back that there had been no accident.

It seemed more horrible than ever to Mary Bishop — those nightly broadcasts from Zeesen. The voice was in the room with her, and yet he couldn’t know whether any message for which he risked his life reached home, and she couldn’t know whether their messages to him just petered out unheard or unrecognized.

Old Mrs. Bishop said, “Well, we can do without David to-night, I should hope.” It was a new turn in her bitterness: now she would simply wipe him off the air. Mary Bishop protested. She said she must hear — then at least she would know that he was well.

“It serves him right if he’s not well.”

“I’m going to listen,” Mary Bishop persisted.

“Then I’ll go out of the room. I’m tired of his lies.”

“You’re his mother, aren’t you?”

“That’s not my fault. I didn’t choose — like you did. I tell you I won’t listen to it.”

Mary Bishop turned the knob. “Then stop your ears,” she cried in a sudden fury, and heard David’s voice coming over.

“The lies,” he was saying, “put over by the British capitalist Press. There has not even been a railway accident — leave alone any sabotage — at the place so persistently mentioned in the broadcasts from England. To-morrow I am leaving myself for the so-called scene of the accident, and I propose in my broadcast the day after to-morrow to give you an impartial observer’s report, with records of the very rail-waymen who are said to have been shot for sabotage. To-morrow, therefore, I shall not be on the air...”

“Oh, thank God, thank God,” Mary Bishop said.

The old woman grumbled by the fire. “You haven’t much to thank Him for.”

“You don’t know how much.”

All next day she found herself praying, although she didn’t much believe in prayer. She visualized that station “on the Rhine not far from Wesel”: and not far either from the Dutch frontier. There must be some method of getting across — with the help of that unknown worker — possibly in a refrigerating van — no idea was too fantastic to be true: others had succeeded before him.

All through the day she tried to keep pace with him — he would have to leave early, and she imagined his cup of ersatz coffee and the slow wartime train taking him south and west: she thought of his fear and of his excitement — he was coming home to her. Ah, when he landed safely, what a day that would be! The papers then would have to eat their words: no more Dr. Funkhole and no more of this place, side by side with his unloving mother.

At midday, she thought, he has arrived: he has his black discs with him to record the men’s voices, he is probably watched, but he will find his chance — and now he is not alone. He has someone with him helping him. In one way or another he will miss his train home. The freight train will draw in — perhaps a signal will stop it outside the station. She saw it all so vividly, as the early winter dark came down and she blacked the windows out, that she found herself thankful he possessed, as she knew, a white mackintosh. He would be less visible waiting there in the snow.