Heil Harris!

dangerous errand. He suppressed the unworthy thought that a mild fright would serve her right. No no. St. George and all that. He sat carefully beside a clump of bushes so that he could see the house and the lane to the village, and he waited. He ate a pack of salmon sandwiches and drank a little sickly brandy from the flask in his umbrella handle. He even tried again with the wretched crossword.
    He had learned a lot from his talk with old Jacob Ben Halle. He should have guessed before that Goldberg was working for the Irgun. But somehow it’s only when they do something like kidnap Eichmann that one remembers they exist. In Britain any way. Yet it was obvious that if anyone was interested in the new Fascism it would be the Irgun. Steed had crossed swords with them a few times in 1947 when they were using terrorist methods against the British in a utopian effort to create a Jewish state in Palestine. And nobody had been more pleased than he when they succeeded. Enemies like Jacob Ben Halle were best either dead or made into friends.
    It was safe to assume therefore, that Fritz Neufeld was an enemy. Someone the Irgun traced, although Jacob had been non-committal about that. “Let’s just say that he isn’t a friend of mine, liebchen,” he’d said.
    Neufeld’s house was a luxurious chalet with nearly all the rooms on the ground floor. There were perhaps two bedrooms perched on the roof. And the whole thing had that affected timber roofing one sees on those things where a man comes out if it’s sunny and a woman comes out to indicate storms. Steed waited until it was dark and then decided to move. Time to rescue the damsel in distress. There was about one hundred yards of ground to be traversed without hitting trip wires, falling into a booby trap or being seen.
    Steed picked up his umbrella, adjusted his bowler hat and straightened the discreet tweed jacket of his suit. “Geschick,” he murmured to himself. He spent the next 9.6 seconds covering the hundred yards to the side wall. Perhaps it was something to do with the mountain air but it took him a little longer after all.
    Without waiting to find out whether he’d been seen Steed climbed up the drainpipe onto the roof. Both the gutter and the umbrella handle stood his weight without difficulty, but the timber creaked slightly when he trod on it. He had to lie across eight or nine struts and then wriggle to reach the bedroom window. Steed peered carefully through the glass. As far as he could see it was empty.
    One of the complex propelling pencils in his pocket was useful for this sort of thing. He drew a quick circle with the diamond head and then unscrewed it to produce a tiny rubber suction pad. Steed pushed the pad against the glass, and then tapped until the glass came away on the end of the pencil. He put his hand through the aperture and flicked open the catch.
    So far, success. He crept across somebody’s bedroom, brushed down his suit with the clothes brush on the dressing table and then slowly opened the door. It gave on to a landing which overlooked a barn of a living room but again there was nobody around. There was nobody in the next upstairs room either so Steed went down into the main hall. He found somebody in the kitchen. An ape-like handyman was sitting at the scrubbed wooden table eating black bread. He threw the chair at Steed and broke three plates, then he advanced on him with the bread knife.
    “I say,” said Steed, “for all you know I might be the priest selling indulgences.”
    The ape wasn’t impressed with such fine distinctions. He threw the knife and it quivered gruesomely in the woodwork.
    Steed waved the umbrella and pressed the switch blade release. The ape blinked in disbelief and clutched his arm. There was blood pouring from his deltoid muscle. Then he screamed, in anger, or in fear because his arm hung limply by his side. Steed picked up the wooden mallet that Mrs. Neufeld used to make her steaks tender and hit the fellow on the head with it. Then he continued the search of the house.
    He found a basement underneath the stairs, and below the coal cellar was a small room in which Heidi was imprisoned. Steed just had time to grab the ape guard and drag him down the flights of stairs when a car drew up outside the house. Steed closed the doors, hit the ape on the head again in case of trouble, and went over to Heidi.
    She was tied up by the hands to two rings in the wall. When Steed turned the lights on and went