Free Be Shot For Six Pence by Michael Gilbert

little man. Small, fat and frisky, like a biscuit-fed mouse.”
    “You say he’s the real power,” I said. “How’s that? There aren’t any Russian troops here.”
    “Not here,” admitted the Major. “Not as far as I know. Plenty over the border, though. Line-of-communication troops they call them. They looked fairly operational to me the only time I saw them. Of course, they’re not meant to be there at all. They were only supposed to be there whilst the occupation was on.”
    “Which no doubt accounts for the fact that they weren’t in any hurry to sign a treaty with Austria.”
    “No doubt,” he said, and looked at me sharply, as if I was the one who had been being indiscreet. “Where are you staying, Mr. Waters?”
    “He’s staying with us,” said Lisa. “We’ll see he doesn’t get into any trouble.”
    “An ethnographer, eh?”
    “Mr. Waters is one of the leading experts on the correlation of Slavonic and Teutonic racial characteristics.”
    “Ah, that accounts for it,” said the Major. “I thought I recognised his name when you mentioned it. I’ve no doubt I’ll run across you both from time to time.”
    We took our leave. Mitzi was boiling a large saucepan of chocolate on a gas ring in the outer office. She grinned at us.
    “Might have offered us some,” said Lisa. “It makes me slaver at the mouth just to look at it. Come to the Schlossgarten.”
    On the way to the Schlossgarten we dived down a close and up two flights of stairs to meet Lisa’s tailor. He was a nice old man, who worked in a small room which seemed smaller because of the number of children in it. During the process of being measured I counted eight, but there may well have been more.
    I ordered a dinner jacket, a suit for rough wear complete with knickerbockers (‘le sporting’) and a sober suit of dark grey with a generous roll to the lapels which is the uniform of all respectable continental racketeers.
    Then we went to the Schlossgarten and drank our chocolate sitting under a striped umbrella with moth holes in it.
    As we sat there the sun started to go down and a long shadow crept over the town from the west. The mountain line to the east was still warmed by the level sun but the shadows were stealing up the lower slopes.
    Lisa followed my eyes.
    “It’s just like a fairy story,” I said. “Not the nice, pretty, Walt Disney sort, but an old German fairy story with woodcuts. Whilst the sun shines, girls and boys play. But when it starts to go down, and the long shadows begin to creep, all wise children go indoors and pull up the drawbridge, and the creatures of the night come out and play till cockcrow. The little wicked creatures who live in the trunks of trees, and the night birds who talk to each other in whispers, and worst of all, the men with fox faces. They look like men, and you can’t be sure of them until they take off their shoes and stockings and you can see the hair between their toes.”
    Lisa said, “It is true. And in the morning, all the mountain line to the east is black and hard like the end of the known world. Then the sun comes up very slowly, and for a moment it turns everything red, like blood, before it comes flooding down into our valley, and life begins again.”
    She gave a little shiver.
    “I should have brought my coat. Come on, we will walk up the hill and warm our blood. Also, we must not be late for dinner.”
    Gheorge’s dinner jacket was a reasonable fit. He was longer in the arm than me but not quite so broad in the shoulders.
    I walked into the drawing-room a few minutes before nine.
    There were five people already there. I identified without difficulty the Frau Baronin, a tightly corseted old lady with the face and bearing of Senior Treasury Counsel; (she was deaf but apparently in possession of all her other faculties). The Baron Milo, a vital septuagenarian, was in front of the fire, with his son, General Milo, beside him. I had heard of the General. He had started the