Now or Never

Manning Coles

Description

Tommy is back, and again he’s in Germany, posing as a camera-toting tourist while trailing Fascists. The investigation starts in Cologne when a corpse is found hung out like a batch of wash from a ruined building. Then Tommy learns about two girls whose custom it is “to frolic among the ruins” late at night and finds that his buddies are on hand to help him unravel the mystery of the Silver Ghosts, the Nazi outfit he is after. After another man has died among the wrecked buildings, can Tommy and his cohorts blow the top off an intrigue that might turn all Europe topsy turvy?

Sujets

• Policier & Thriller
• Thriller
• Policier
• Fiction
• Espionage
• Thrillers

Informations

• Publié par: Rare Treasure Editions
• Date de parution: 09 novembre 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781774643945
• Langue: English

Extrait

Now or Never
by Manning Coles

First published in 1951
This edition published by Rare Treasures
Victoria, BC Canada with branch offices in the Czech Republic and Germany
[e-mail]
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, except in the case of excerpts by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.
Now or Never




by MANNING COLES
1. Yesterday’s Happy Man
The moon crept across the sky until its light fell upon thegirder which had a rope on the end of it and on the rope the body of a manhanging by the neck and turning slowly, first one way and then the other. Fromit there drifted on the night air, faint but unmistakable, the incongruoussmell of bananas.
Cologne in 1950 is a city of ruins. If a man comes out fromthe railway station he will find the Cathedral standing with its twin towersapparently undamaged, the Excelsior Hotel looks the same as ever apart fromscars from bomb fragments, and the Dom Hotel, on the opposite side of the square,still has sixty bedrooms left out of six hundred. The fourth side of thesquare, opposite the Cathedral, is all ruins. If a man crosses the square andwalks up what is still called the Hohestrasse he will find small one-storyshops hastily built of rough brickwork, poured concrete, or timber; over theirheads loom the skeletons of tall houses, roofless, with sagging floors and bentand twisted iron girders sticking out at all angles like the arms of dementedgallows.
Behind these ruins, on both sides of the Hohestrasse, conditionsare even worse. Here and there a corner of a building still stands, but in themain there is nothing left but shapeless heaps of rubble of varying heights allovergrown with weeds. Young trees have taken root; some of them after eightyears are quite tall with leaves rustling in the wind and birds singing in thebranches. Small animals run about in the undergrowth; the country has crept inupon Cologne.
The street called the Grosse Budengasse leads from the Hohestrassetowards the river. Since it was once an important thoroughfare, the surface ofthe road has been cleared of rubble so that it is possible to pass along it.There is, in one place, a piece of wall left standing about three feet high andjust wide enough to permit the authorities to paint the name of the street uponit, though even that is crumbling, so that part of the B of Budengasse is nowmissing.
Four men came along this street pushing a truck loaded withbananas. It was late at night, well after midnight, very late for Cologne,which nowadays goes to bed early, but the moon, past its full, was rising andthey could see their way well enough. The four men were all pushing the truck,but bananas are, of course, a heavy fruit. They were stacked in a long heap thewhole length of the truck.
“If he hadn’t been a fool,” said one man in a low tone, “hemight have been having his usual instead of this.”
“If he’d stuck to beer,” said another, “but he would mix itwith Steinhager. Serve him right.”
“All the same,” said a third man, “I don’t want another.session like we had tonight. A full meeting, and that being done in front ofus all. I’ve seen some things, but that—”
“Going to dream about it?”
“I hope not, but I shan’t forget it in a hurry.” “Ofcourse,” said the first man, “that was why the president did it. I reckon anymember will think twice before he gets drunk and babbles like that. It’s ourlives, isn’t it?”
“There’s a lot more hangs on this than just our lives,” saidthe second man. “By the way, did you see his farewell letter? Oh, you missedsomething; it was good. Give you my word, if he’d lived long enough to see ithe’d have thought he wrote it himself. Gerhardt is clever, isn’t he?”
“I wouldn’t lend him my chequebook,” agreed the first man,
“What did they do with it? Post it?”
“Of course not. It’s in his pocket, naturally.” They came tothe corner of the Unter Goldschmied and turned right; the road began to risehere and the surface was rough and potholed. The four men bent to their workand the banana truck rumbled on. Not far ahead of them there was a heap ofrubble rather larger than usual; a wall, with the iron girders which hadsupported a floor still sticking out of it, had turned right over so that theend of one girder overhung the path. Bushes had grown thickly on the top of thepile, casting a dark shadow; as the men looked towards it the figure of a girlcame into sight and went back again. One of the men pushing the truck checkedsuddenly, but the leader reassured him. “It’s all right, it’s only Magda.”
When the truck reached the patch of shadow it stopped. Twomen and two girls came forward to meet it; the men stayed, but the girls ranpast it and parted, one going south towards Laurenzplatz, the other north, theway the truck had come; fifty yards along the road they stood and waited.
There was no suggestion of lounging in their attitude butrather an alertness as of one who is keeping watch.
It was impossible to see in detail what was happening in theshadow; there was only a general impression of activity, as though the bananaswere being off-loaded and replaced. Presently the truck came out along the roadagain, briskly pushed by two men only. It still had bananas upon it, but onewould have said that the long mound was not so high as it had been.
A little later the road was quite empty; the girls had disappearedand there was no sign of the four men who had been so busy in the shadows. Themoon rose and crossed the sky until that which had been obscure wasilluminated. The girder which overhung the path was no longer useless and bare;it had a rope on the end of it and on the rope the body of a man hanging by theneck and turning slowly, first one way and then the other.
Tommy Hambledon was staying at the Gürzenich Hotel which,for reasons of his own, he preferred to the Dom Hotel for this visit. The GürzenichHotel, largely destroyed and now partially rebuilt, stands on an island site atthe far end of the Unter Goldschmied from the Dom, though one would not takethat way from choice because it is now so uncomfortably rough. It still remainsa short cut for people coming on foot; the chambermaid on Hambledon’s floorcame that way every morning just before six from her home between the stationand the river.
Hambledon was called later than usual on the following morning;Elsa came into his room so obviously bursting with news that he sat up in bedand looked at her.
“The gracious Herr will forgive my lateness, I beg his pardon,”she babbled, “I’m so upset, I saw something—oh dear!”
“Calm yourself,” said Hambledon. “I don’t mind being calledlate for once. What is the matter?”
“In the Unter Goldschmied—I come that way—there was a policemanand when I came to him he said, ‘Go by quickly, do not look,’ so of course Ilooked and oh, mein Herr, there was a man hanging by a rope from a girder-oh!”
“Only one?” said Tommy.
The girl gaped at him.
“Only one—how many did the Herr expect?”
“None at all. But it would have been a lot worse if therehad been a row of them, wouldn’t it?”
“Ach!” gasped Elsa, and hurried out of the room.
“I’m afraid I’ve horrified the poor girl,” said Hambledon tohimself, “but at least I stopped her describing it to me before breakfast.” Hethrew back the bedclothes and got up. Suicides are not uncommon in a countrywhich has been defeated, although this man seemed to have left it rather late,as it were. Despair comes upon people in the hour of defeat, not, as a rule,five years later. This man. Hambledon assumed, must have had some private reasonfor doing it. Tommy dismissed the subject from his mind, breakfasted, andstrolled down the Hohestrasse in the morning sunlight. He was dressed intweeds, wearing an English hat and carrying a camera slung from his shoulder;he looked about him as he went, stopping every now and again when anythinginterested him, the very picture of a harmless tourist,
He reached the Dom Square and wandered about for some time,watching the people and taking photographs of the Cathedral. He was, actually,waiting in the hope of seeing two friends of his come out of the Dom Hotel;they should have arrived there on the previous day, but when he telephoned thehotel the evening before he was told that the Herren Campbell and Forgan werenot yet there. They might come by the late train; their rooms were booked.
Hambledon was approached by an elderly man with a camera,desiring to take his photograph with the Cathedral in the background. The manwas one of Cologne’s official photographers licensed by the city authorities;he wore an arm band to that effect. Tommy agreed at once and paid six marks forthree copies to be delivered at the Gürzenich Hotel the following morning. He enteredinto conversation with the man, who was very ready to talk since business wasanything but brisk.
“It is the rate of exchange,” said the photographer. “It istoo high, eleven point eight marks to the pound sterling. It keeps the touristsaway, and who can wonder? No one is rich in these days. If the exchange wentdown to twenty or twenty-four to the pound as it used to be, the tourists wouldcome again and a man like me could earn an honest living.”
Hambledon looked across at the ruins and wondered what touristswould come to Cologne for, but naturally did not say so. He agreed, and addedthat a situation already difficult was made more so by the incomprehensiblerules of the currency controls on all frontiers. “The customs are bad enough,”he said, “but there have always been customs. This currency business—” He shookhis head and the photographer sympathized. “You English,” he said,
“for it is evident that the Herr is English, everyone knowsyou are severely dealt with by your government in the matter of money.”
“Not only my government,” said Tommy gloomily. •’They all doit except the American