Free Sleeper Agent by Ib Melchior Page A

jail. Please come at once!”
    Tom and Larry were there in less than ten minutes. The elderly German jailer looked gray-faced and sick. He hurried them to a cell, the cell that held the Gestapo colonel’s wife. He opened the door. She was there. Hanging from the bars in the window on the opposite wall. Dead. Even in the lonely cell she had been forced to listen to the lethal words of Goebbels and the Gestapo. And she had believed.
    The jailer was a kind man. A considerate man. A man of compassion. He had taken from the girl all her belongings, as was the regulation. Anything with which she might have harmed herself. But he had allowed her to keep her comb. And her handkerchief. And her large bag to keep them in.
    The girl had torn off the shoulder strap, and it had become a hangman’s noose.
    When she had stepped up on the bench fixed to the wall under the barred window, the strap had been just barely long enough to be tied to one of the bars and knotted tightly around the girl’s slender neck. In desperate determination she had stepped off the bench to hang from her macabre gallows until she strangled to death.
    Profoundly shaken, his stomach a sudden leaden knot, his throat a swollen lump, Tom stared at the girl.
    He put her there. . . .
    Staring glassy eyes which seemed to strain to escape their sockets. A blackish bloated tongue protruding obscenely between small white teeth. Purple-blue splotches on her puffy face and her bare arms, and a pair of grotesquely pointing, stiff legs on the side of the rough wooden bench that had served as her gallows platform.
    He—put—her—there.
    “Oh, my God!”
    Tom heard Larry’s shocked, hoarse-voiced exclamation as if through a cocoon of cotton. He had to turn away. But he didn’t. He had gone too far with her, he thought in bleak self-recrimination. He had driven her to this. And for what! His dread-dark guilt feelings were never more ravenous, threatening to devour his very being. He felt his sanity ripping loose. But he kept himself staring at the girl. Slowly he forced himself back to reality and reason.
    He had not killed the girl. The stinking, rotten lies of the stinking, rotten Nazi bastards had killed her! He breathed deeply. He began to think clearly once again. He looked away from the girl. And he saw it. It was written on the scrubbed, worn surface of the tabletop fastened to the wall. A message:
    “ Leb wohl mein Liebling, weitermachen! —Farewell my darling, carry on!”
    He walked over to the girl. He examined her more closely. She had had nothing with which to write her last words. She had had nothing with which to get at the only means of writing them—her own blood. She had been determined. She had bitten open a vein on her wrist.
    Farewell my darling . . .
    Slowly he returned to the table. He stared at the message. The blood-ink had dried a dirty brown.
    In his mind’s eye he saw the grim desperation with which the despairing young girl had gone about her ghastly task. Again he felt an overwhelming flood of pity wash over him.
    He stared at the pathetic message. And suddenly the guilt-created haze obscuring his mind swept away. The message! He should have seen it at once. The girl, for all her youth and appeal, was the loyal wife of a war criminal. A dangerous Gestapo officer. And she admired him. She had died only because in her own warped mind she had conferred upon her American enemies the same unholy, inhuman ways of her own rotten system. She had obviously been lying all the time. Undoubtedly she had known her husband’s whereabouts. She might even have been in on his future plans, and judging from the man’s record they would surely be worth discovering.
    The proof was right there in front of him. On the tabletop. Written in her blood. The message.
    For whom was it meant? Obviously not her friend. She would not call her “my darling.” Not her young son. It was not worded right to be for him. It had to be meant for her husband. And, if so, she