Dave gulped out the last as he got his first really good look at Herr Baron's face. Freddy had half rolled the limp figure over, and at first look Herr Baron seemed to have been hit square in the face by a pan of soggy bread dough. His nose was over on one cheek, and his jaw was twice as big on one side at it was on the other, his eyebrows pointed straight up, and his lips looked twisted all out of shape.
"Good grief, the floor must have done that!" Freddy Farmer gasped as he looked down. "Make-up paste, no less, Dave. Why—why, he hasn't really got any real face. It's horrible!"
"Just truss him up and leave him, Freddy," Dawson said, and swallowed hard several times. "I guess the rat was in some kind of an accident, and did his own plastic surgery with make-up paste, or whatever that stuff is. Sweet tripe! This thing gets screwier and screwier. Truss him up, and then get British Intelligence over here in a hurry. We'll—Hey, I'm nuts! We don't even know where we are!"
"That's simple, old thing," Freddy said, and lashed Herr Baron's arms behind his back with the man's own belt. "A fine detective you'd make. British Intelligence can simply trace my call, that's all, and be over here in no time."
"Call me dunce, and get going, pal!" Dawson said with a sigh of relief. "Sure, of course, kid. Boy, maybe old age is slowing me down at that."
"Not judging from what I saw just recently!" Freddy Farmer said, as he got to his feet, and headed for the side door of the room. "Be back in a jiffy, old thing."
Dave just grunted, completed his job of making sure that Hans would give no trouble should he come to, and then went systematically through the man's pockets. He collected the usual amount of personal belongings, but the man's papers were very interesting. They were all made out and officially stamped to identify him as a born Englishman, by the name of John Dobbler, with an East London address.
Dawson thumbed through them for a moment, and then stuffed them into his pocket and moved over to Erich's dead body. And what he found in the dead man's pockets made him realize all the more to what pains Nazi agents go. There was nothing on Erich's person to indicate that he was a Nazi. But everything to prove that he was one Harold Cabot, an Englishman who lived at an address in the Cheapside part of London. As a matter of fact, Erich's papers went Hans' one better. Erich also had identification as an Air Raid Warden.
"An Air Raid Warden, the dirty skunk!" Dawson grated, and put Erich's papers into his pocket, too. "I wonder how many of the poor devils he left to die under piles of bomb rubble?"
With a look of scorn and loathing for the dead man, he got to his feet and went over to the prostrate form of the man referred to as Herr Baron. The false face still looked the same, and the Yank air ace tried not to look at it as he went through the pockets of the man's uniform. What he found so amazed him and angered him that for a moment he trembled with loathing and blazing anger. Herr Baron's papers, all strictly official and military, showed that he was an American colonel in the Yank Air Forces, that he was commanding officer of such and such group, but that of recent date he was attached to Air Forces Intelligence in England.