The Beaufort Sisters. Jon Cleary
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isn’t going to help.’
She did up her camel hair coat, pulled on her gloves. ‘We can’t talk to each other in this mood.’
‘I’d better see you back to Frankfurt.’
‘I’ll be all right. I’m not the helpless little mother just yet. I’ll call you during the week, when I’ve thought some more. No, don’t kiss me – ’ She was close to tears: to have him kiss her would be like turning a key in a dam.
‘I’ll marry you,’ he said quickly. ‘Despite your family.’
He had made a mistake in adding the last sentence. She shook her head, realizing how much she belonged to those back home. She hadn’t escaped by coming to Germany: she needed now, possibly always would, the security in which she had been brought up.
‘I’m part of our family and they’re part of me. That’s something we’d have to understand right from the beginning. They won’t be against you – why should you be against them?’
He sighed. ‘I wasn’t drawing battle lines. But if we marry, I’m marrying you, not them. I’d say the same whether they were rich or poor. I’ll ring tonight to see if you got back all right.’
Driving back to Frankfurt in the jeep Colonel Shasta had lent her, Nina was only half-aware of the traffic. She did not see the US Army truck that stayed behind her all the way from the village north of Kassel right through to the outskirts of Frankfurt. As she came into the city she had to slow; traffic had thickened and after a few blocks came to a halt. She leaned out of the jeep and up ahead caught glimpses of soldiers spread out in a thick human barricade across the road. She could hear chanting, loud and angry: she had never thought the word Home could have any threat to it. At once she felt frightened and looked about for a way to get out of the traffic jam. She was not normally nervous and she wondered if approaching motherhood made one so; then she ridiculed the thought, laughing at herself. The row with Tim had just upset her, all she really wanted was to get back to her billet and burst into tears.
‘We’ll get you out of this, Miss Beaufort.’ The GI, earflaps of his cap pulled down, thick woollen scarf wrapped round the lower half of his face so that his voice was muffled, had come up quietly beside the jeep. ‘It looks pretty ugly up ahead. Just back up and follow us.’
She wondered who the soldier was, that he knew her name. Probably someone she had met on one of her visits to a military office; it was impossible to recognize him behind the scarf and earflaps. She put the jeep into reverse and followed the army truck as it backed up and swung into a side street. The sound of the chanting demonstrators was drowned now by truck horns being punched to the rhythm of the chant. Then a shot rang out and the blaring horns and chanting suddenly stopped. A moment later there were angry shouts and the sound of breaking glass. In a moment of imagination she wondered if she was hearing echoes of the Thirties: had the streets of Frankfurt clamoured like this when the SS had been rounding up the Jews? Street lights came on in the gloomy afternoon and the scene all at once became theatrical, a little unreal, a grey newsreel from the past. But the angry, yelling soldiers streaming down through the stalled traffic were real enough, frighteningly so.
She looked back and saw the GI gesticulating to her from the back of the army truck, which had turned round and was facing down the side street. She slammed on the brakes of the jeep, jumped out and ran to the truck. The GI reached down, grabbed her hand and lifted her easily, as if she were no more than a small child, into the back of the truck. The canvas flaps were pulled down and abruptly she was in darkness.
‘Thanks. I’m glad you came – ’
Then a hand smothered her face and she smelled chloroform on the rag that was pressed against her nose and mouth. She struggled, but an arm held her, hurting her. Then the darkness turned to blackness.
2
‘My name is McKea, Magnus McKea,’ said the tall American major in a voice that sounded slightly English; Davoren wondered if he had been an actor before he had joined the army. ‘I’m with the legal staff down at Nuremberg on the War Crimes thing. Colonel Shasta suggested I should come up and see you. It’s about Miss Beaufort.’
Davoren laughed, leaning so far back in his chair to let the laugh out that he looked in danger of falling over backwards. He was in his office in the big house on the Kasselallee, the walls papered with maps that he no longer looked at. Orderlies came and went in the corridor beyond the open door, all of them armed with the piece of paper that made them look as if they were too busy to be asked to do something by an officer or NCO. He was safe in British Army occupied territory and here was some Yank come to accuse him of something that was the best joke he had heard in ages.
‘You mean Miss Beaufort’s condition is a war crime?’
Major McKea looked puzzled. ‘Don’t joke, Davoren. Kidnapping is a crime, period.’
Davoren sat up straight, suddenly sober. ‘Good Christ – she’s been kidnapped?’
‘Yesterday some time. She didn’t return to her billet last night – ’
‘I know. I rang the billet, but some girl said she thought she’d seen Miss Beaufort come in and go out again.’
‘She was mistaken. Miss Beaufort never got to her billet. Her jeep was found abandoned in a Frankfurt suburb last night. An hour later Colonel Shasta got a ransom note to be passed on as quickly as possible to her father. He signalled Washington and they got in touch with Kansas City. I was brought in to represent Mr Beaufort till he gets here – my father is the Beaufort family lawyer. Nina’s father is being flown over by the Air Force. He’s expected in Frankfurt sometime tomorrow.’
Davoren was silent, but his face was expressive enough; he was too close to the war, to the cheapness of life, to be hopeful. Then he looked across at McKea. ‘I’m sorry I laughed. It was a stupid private joke.’
‘You said something about Miss Beaufort’s condition. Is she pregnant?’
Davoren nodded. ‘Does her father know about me?’
‘I don’t know, unless Nina wrote him. I don’t think anyone knows about you, except Jack Shasta. He thought you should be told.’
‘Why didn’t he tell me last night?’
‘I don’t know. I guess he was too concerned with getting in touch with Nina’s father.’ He lit a pipe, puffed on it. ‘I’ve known Nina since she was just a kid. We were never close, she’s about ten or twelve years younger than I, but I always liked her.’
Davoren saw the enquiring look through the haze of pipe smoke. ‘I love her, if that’s what you’re asking me. I didn’t think of her as just someone to jump into bed with.’
McKea ran a hand over his crew-cut, thinning red hair. ‘I didn’t mean to imply – sorry.’
Davoren got up, closed the door against the traffic in the corridor. This was no longer British Army occupied territory: it was his own and very personal, too. He remained standing, his back to the maps on the wall. The maps were pre-war, marked with towns that now were only rubble: they only seemed to deepen the lack of hope he felt. Nina could be buried anywhere in the havoc.
‘Is there any hint of who’s kidnapped her?’
‘Nothing definite. We think it’s probably Krauts. God knows, they have enough reason to be asking for money.’ It was difficult to tell whether McKea was critical of or sympathetic to Germans. But then he said, ‘The country’s full of communists and socialists, you know.’
Magnus McKea came from one of the oldest families in Kansas City, Missouri, a family whose conservatism had a certain hoariness to it. The army, and Europe itself, had opened up his tolerance, but he still tended to suspect any liberal thought that fell into his head, as if it might be the beginning of a brain tumour. He had a slightly fruity voice that almost disguised his Middle West twang.