“You mean the Gestapo had reported what you were doing to their Foreign Office?”
“They certainly had. That’s how that phony Rudolph Schneider claim of theirs started. You have no idea how difficult it is, politically and in every other way, to challenge the validity of documents produced and attested by the government of a friendly power-I mean a power enjoying normal diplomatic relations with your own government. It’s like accusing them of forging their own bank-notes.”
“And what about the Schirmer side of the family, sir? Did the Nazis ever get on to that?”
“No, they didn’t. You see, they didn’t have Amelia’s documents to help them as we did. They didn’t even have the right Schneider family, but it was difficult to prove.”
“And Friedrich Schirmer, Karl’s son? Did you trace him?”
“Yes, my boy, I traced him all right, but I had hell’s own job doing it. I got on his trail at last through a clerical employment agency in Karlsruhe. They found out for me that there had been an elderly bookkeeper named Friedrich Schirmer on their files five years previously. They’d found a job for him in a button factory at Freiburg-im-Breisgau. So I went to the button factory. There they told me that he had retired three years earlier at the age of seventy and gone into a clinic at Bad Schwennheim. Bladder trouble, they said. They thought he’d probably be dead.”
“And was he?”
“Yes, he was dead.” Mr. Moreton looked out at the garden as if he hated it. “I don’t mind telling you, my boy,” he said, “that I was feeling pretty old and tired myself by then. It was the last week in August and there wasn’t very much doubt, from what the radio was saying, that Europe was going to be at war within the week. I wanted to go home. I’ve never been the sort of man who likes being in the thick of things. Besides, I was having trouble with the interpreter. He was a Lorrainer, France was mobilizing, and he was afraid he wouldn’t have time to see his wife before he was called to his regiment. It was getting difficult to buy gasoline for the car, too. I was tempted to forget about Friedrich Schirmer and get out. And yet I couldn’t quite bring myself to go without just making a final check-up. Twenty-four hours more, that was all I needed.”
“And so you did check up.” Now that he had the facts he wanted, George was getting impatient with Mr. Moreton’s reminiscences.
“Yes, I checked up. But without the interpreter. He was so darned scared that I told him to take the car, drive it to Strasbourg, and wait for me there. That was a lucky thing, too. When the Gestapo got hold of him later, he knew no more than that I’d gone to Bad Schwennheim. Real luck. I went there by train. Do you know it? It’s near Triburg in Baden.”