BIGGLES – SECRET AGENT

 

by Captain W. E. Johns

 

 

IV.                   THE JEW OF UNTERHAMSTADT  (Pages 55 – 67)

 

The knock has an eerie sinister sound.  Biggles knocks again louder and hears a curious whimpering sound.  After a rattling of chains and a scraping of bolts, the door opens and Biggles asks if they are in Unterhamstadt.  When told yes, he asks if the man has any walking sticks for sale.  He is told no.  Biggles asks if he can come in and ask some questions about accommodation in the village.  “You need have no fear of us,” continued Biggles, in a low voice.  “We are English travellers – and friends of the Jews”.  They are invited in by the man whom Ginger regards “with a mixture of disgust and sympathy” as he is old and bent, with an unkempt beard and clothes, face and hands dirty beyond description.  Biggles says to Ginger “Observe what persecution and the fear of death does to a man in time – Poor devil.  He is just an animated piece of terror”.  Taken into a small room at the back, “filty beyond description” with a “heavy foetid smell” hanging in the air.  Biggles asks if they treat Jews badly and when told “you have seen” he asks why the old man stays.  The man says he has no money to leave, if he did, the would go to his married daughter in Switzerland.  Biggles offers him two thousand marks for some information.  Biggles asks about a learned doctor who died in a motor-accident not long ago.  “The Jew crouched back, an arm over his face as if he feared a blow, No! he gasped.  “No – not that!”  The man says he knows nothing.  Biggles counts out and offers him twenty-five hundred-mark notes.  Biggles asks the man if he buried the doctor’s body.  The man says he didn’t, but his son did, who is also in the same trade of undertaker.  Now his son has gone; He has been taken away.  Biggles drags more information out of the man.  “The Jew’s agitation was pitiful to behold.  It was obvious that a battle between terror and avarice was raging in his brain.  “I will tell you”, he gasped at last, holding out his hand for the notes”.  The man tells the story he heard from his son’s wife, Greta.  After the accident the doctor (Professor Beklinder) was taken to the Kleishausen – the big hotel.  The son was called by storm-troopers to room 17 of the hotel where he saw a body on the bed so wrapped up in bandages that he could not see the face.  He measured the body and spent the night making a coffin.  The next day, helped by storm-troopers he took it across to the hotel and never returned.  Greta made enquiries but was told not to or she would never see her husband again. She was also told to speak to no one about it.  There was a secret funeral at dawn, witnessed from the woods by the son of the missing undertaker, a little boy called Joachim, who was trying to see his missing father.  The coffin was put in a vault on the western side of the church, near the tower.  As Biggles turns to leave he hears the slight creak of a door and realises that someone is listening.  Jerking the door open Biggles sees “a girl, young, good-looking, dressed in a neat brown tweed costume” standing on the threshold.  Biggles asks if she, like them, has lost her way and she says yes.  Biggles says they are just leaving and they depart.  Ginger is anxious to know what the old man has told Biggles as the conversation was all in German and Ginger doesn’t speak German.  Biggles suggests they go to the hotel and he will tell him all about it.