The Dragonfly Pool

She remembered. She looked at him in silence—she did not shout or exclaim or drop the pillowcase she was putting on the line. She just looked. Then as he came up to her, she opened her arms and called him by his name.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Treachery

The man who sat in the best bedroom of the Blue Ox could not be mistaken for anyone but a very high-ranking army officer—and a Nazi officer at that. Though he was still eating breakfast, Reichsgruppen Führer Anton Stiefelbreich was fully dressed in a khaki jacket so covered in medals that they dazzled and caught the eye, and afterward people who met him never quite remembered his face. His cap lay ready beside him, adorned with the swastika of the party he now served, and he wore jackboots even while buttering his roll.

As much as Karil detested his uniforms, with their scratchy collars and showy buttons and infuriating plumes, so did Colonel Stiefelbreich love his. Back in Berlin, where he now worked at the headquarters of the Gestapo, he had a whole cupboard of uniforms. That was one of the many things he valued in his new job—the job of stirring up trouble in those countries that did not understand how important it was to cooperate fully with Herr Hitler’s dreams for a united Europe. United, of course, under the German flag.

And to impress foreigners one had to be properly dressed. The colonel was waiting for Gambetti, the Berganian foreign minister, who was coming to see him on a private visit here in his room. Meanwhile, to make certain that his bodyguards were in place, he walked silently to the door and opened it.

The two men who had been sitting in chairs in the corridor got to their feet.

“Got any jobs for us to do, Colonel?”

“Not at the moment. But stay in position—I’m expecting the foreign minister. Make sure no one follows him upstairs.”

The two men Colonel Stiefelbreich had recruited as his bodyguards could not have been more different, nor were they simply bodyguards. They were more by way of being spies and sleuths and he used them for all the work that he wanted to be kept secret.

One of them was good at his job simply because of his enormous size and strength. He was one of those people who seemed to be made of something inorganic like iron or stone—in fact his huge, stupid face might well have been carved from granite, except that granite, when it catches the light, sometimes sparkles, and the thug’s face had never sparkled in its life. He was known as Earless, because he had lost his left ear in a fight. He had lost a lot of other things, too—the tip of one finger, part of a nostril, and more teeth than he could count—but it was his ear he worried about because his wife, Belinda, had been fond of it. She was a tiny blonde woman and Earless, who would throttle someone with his bare hands without thinking twice about it, was completely soppy about Belinda.

The other man was called Theophilus Fallaise, and he had been brought up in a library where his father was Keeper of the Books. One can read about all sorts of wonderful things in a library but the things that the young Theophilus had chosen to read about were not wonderful. He read about the tortures they had used in the olden days: the rack and the iron maiden and thumbscrews—and about the punishments they had used in foreign countries like China, where people were driven mad by having water dripped on to their skull.

The library was in a castle belonging to an eccentric nobleman in a country about which Theophilus never spoke, and because the boy had hardly ever gone outdoors, but only deeper and deeper into the basements in search of more and more horrible books about inflicting pain, he had grown up very unhealthy. His skin was pale and clammy, he blinked in the light and his upper lip was lifted by a wrinkled scar that parted to show a filled gold tooth.

But as a sleuth and a spy he was second to none. He could see in the dark, because of the years he had spent underground, and wriggle through the narrowest spaces—and there was nothing he didn’t know about the more silent and sinister ways of getting rid of someone.

The two bodyguards did not like each other. Theophilus thought that Earless was a stupid thug—which he was—and Earless thought that Theophilus was a slimy creep—which was true also—but the two men made a good pair. One had brains and the other had brawn—and Stiefelbreich had taken a lot of trouble to get hold of them for his latest assignment in Bergania.