Читать книгу The Nightmare - Cecil Louis Troughton Smith - Страница 5

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On the Night of the Long Knives three men drove out to the Bower of Roses. One of them was Adolph Spiegel, and he was sick with fear. His right hand rested in his coat pocket on the butt of an automatic pistol, and to his unaccustomed hand the weapon seemed incredibly large and heavy. He was sweating, and his sweat felt cold on his skin. To-night he was seizing his one great opportunity. He was on his way to kill Lucas. Lucas was the terrible, awe-inspiring, utterly ruthless head of the Seventh Bureau in which Spiegel in those early days of the Nazi power had unexpectedly found himself head of a section. Lucas had never concealed his opinion of Spiegel, had called him to his face timid and cautious and unworthy to serve the Fuehrer, had mocked at his anxiety not to risk physical danger, had laughed at the mincing precision of his manner, but had retained him in his employment because he knew Spiegel to be a conscientious hard worker. Spiegel had no illusions about that; he knew that while Lucas lived he would never have much opportunity for promotion although he could be sure of having responsible and difficult work heaped on him to the limit of his endurance. But if Lucas were to die——! This was the Night of the Long Knives, and Spiegel knew that many men were dying at that very moment.

The Fuehrer was asserting his authority. Some of those who had helped him to power were asking too much of him by way of reward; some were desirous of pushing him too far and too fast along the road he had mapped for himself; some might even be suspected of something far worse, of plotting to seize some of the power that was rightfully the Fuehrer’s. These men must all die; that was a matter of course, there could be no room for them in the Reich along with the Fuehrer. And when so many people were dying another death might not be inquired into too strictly; if Lucas were killed by his trusted subordinate, and that subordinate maintained later that he had indisputable proof—nothing written, of course—that Lucas had been involved with the plotters, then his reward would be great. Probably he would be head of the department, wielding Lucas’s power, enjoying Lucas’s prestige. Spiegel could thrill to the thought, for the little man, although he could be sick with fear, was consumed with ambition; although he was running with cold sweat at this moment he still had his clarity of vision and his remarkable capacity for summing up motives and prejudices. On the morning after the Night of the Long Knives, Lucas’s death would be looked upon as the clearest proof of Lucas’s guilt. The cold heavy pistol in Spiegel’s pocket was the key that would open for him the door to power—the door which otherwise would always remain closed to him.

‘Drive faster,’ he said to Klein, as though he had been used to driving in motor cars all his life, although the occasions when he had could be counted on ten fingers, and of course he could not drive one, which was partly why he had associated Klein and Kramer with him on this enterprise.

‘I am driving as fast as I can,’ answered Klein; the car was rocking along the narrow road through the summer evening.

‘We’ll be soon enough for Lucas,’ said Kramer, sitting beside Klein.

Men and women working in the fields looked at the black car flashing along the road, and at the uniforms worn by the occupants. They had seen many such during the last year or two, heading for the Rosenbau—the Bower of Roses—where Lucas lived. Even in this short time since the Nazis had come to power Lucas had taken for himself a country house and estate, where he lived the life of a nobleman, copying his superiors in the Party. The fat war profiteer who had previously owned the place had given it its name, and Lucas had seen no reason to change it. Perhaps it was not entirely coincidence that he was here on the Night of the Long Knives instead of being at his desk in Berlin. Lucas may have guessed what was going to happen—although very few people did—and he may have decided that out here, thirty kilometres from Berlin, he would not have to declare which side he was on until the next morning, when it would be easier to pick the winner. Spiegel touched his pistol again. He knew quite well who was going to be victorious, and he was going to be on the winning side, even though the thought of the risk he was taking made his hand tremble.

They whirled through the pine woods at the end of the lake and shot out again into the late sunshine beyond. There was the wall and the gate. Klein swung the car through, turning the corner so closely that a twig on a low tree rapped sharply against the windshield, startling Spiegel with the unexpected noise. There was the house, built in two storeys in a faint echo of the Gothic style (not that any one of the three men driving up to it knew the word ‘Gothic’) with tall narrow windows, all alike. It was L-shaped, and they could see for a moment both faces of the house. The sun was about to set behind them, and in the front of the house the windows caught the rosy light and reflected it back at them so that for the moment the name of the Bower of Roses seemed appropriate.

‘Ready?’ growled Klein.

‘Yes,’ said Spiegel. Excitement had dried his throat so that he could only croak, but then he forced himself to assert himself. Klein’s question made it appear possible that Klein was anxious to take the lead, with the obvious intention of claiming the credit later, and Spiegel was not going to have that.

‘Follow me,’ he said, getting out of the car and marching up the steps with his hand on his pistol.

At the door they were met by Richter, Lucas’s confidential secretary.

‘I was to see the Brigadefuehrer,’ croaked Spiegel.

‘Why?’

‘Party business,’ said Spiegel.

‘You could have spoken to the Brigadefuehrer on the telephone,’ said Richter, barring the way.

‘I insist,’ said Spiegel, but his resolution was oozing out of him. Already he was trying to compose in his mind the speech he would make to excuse his coming like this with two killers of the Party to Lucas’s house. Lucas might believe him. There was a loud report at his elbow which made him leap in surprise, and Richter fell to the ground. Kramer had shot him through the heart. At the back of the hall stood a large Chinese vase on a pedestal. It sprang into fragments at the same moment, the pieces clattering to the floor.

‘Come on!’ said Klein, pushing forward, and Spiegel realized that the bullet which had killed Richter had gone right through to smash the vase. They pushed on into the large sitting-room beyond, crammed with furniture, where a white-faced woman stood to face them. It was Frau Lucas; Spiegel had often seen her before.

‘What is it?’ she asked.

‘Where’s your husband?’ demanded Klein, walking towards her, pistol in hand.

‘He is not here,’ faltered Frau Lucas. ‘He—he has gone to Berlin.’

That was a lie, as Spiegel clearly saw. The presence of Richter in the house proved that Lucas was there, or had been until a moment before. He could think quite logically despite his trembling fear.

‘Where is he?’ he snarled, his lips wrinkling back from his teeth with the intensity of his feelings.

‘He—he has gone,’ said Frau Lucas.

Klein swept the room with his glance, and hurried across to the door opening into the dining-room. He had trodden in Richter’s blood, and both his feet left bloody imprints on the carpet. There was no one in the dining-room.

‘Watch her, Spiegel,’ said Klein. ‘Come on, Kramer.’

They rushed out of the room. Spiegel stood with his hand still on his pistol, but there was no need for such a precaution. Frau Lucas was a spiritless creature. She sank into a chair and put her face in her hands and wept, shaking with sobs. Within a few minutes Kramer and Klein were back again, herding two servant maids before them.

‘He was here when we came,’ said Klein. ‘He hasn’t left the house.’

‘Where is he?’ demanded Kramer of Frau Lucas, but Frau Lucas, when she raised her tear-wetted face, working with fear, could say nothing at all. Klein swore vilely.

‘Where is he?’

With his pistol he struck a sharp blow on Frau Lucas’s wrist so that she cried out in pain, but still she said nothing.

‘I’ll do it,’ volunteered Kramer. ‘Watch the girls.’

He stepped forward, pocketing his pistol, and slapped Frau Lucas on the face. Her head jerked back, but still she did not speak, and Kramer stepped closer to her.

‘Bend back her nails,’ said Klein.

This was horrible. Spiegel could not bear it. For all his clarity of vision and keen forethought he had not imagined anything like this; just a clean killing. Frau Lucas screamed. Spiegel walked nervously out of the room. In the darkening hall Richter lay in his blood, and the fragments of the Chinese vase strewed the floor. Richter was dead; that could never be explained away, nor could what was happening to Frau Lucas. It was his life or Lucas’s now. If Lucas were to survive, were to gain contact with Berlin, Spiegel and Klein and Kramer were all dead men. It might be a most unpleasant death, too. Spiegel felt his knees going weak at the thought.

Another scream from Frau Lucas, higher-pitched, agonizing. Spiegel wiped the sweat from his forehead with his left hand—his right still rested unconsciously on his pistol—and walked across the hall, through the open door opposite. This was both library and music room; shelves of books, a piano, a music stand. Oh, that frightful scream! He paced nervously on the thick carpet.

What was that? As he turned he saw that a section of the bookshelves was slowly swinging out. It was a narrow secret door, and within, his back to him as he peered out, was Lucas, a pistol in his hand. Automatically Spiegel made the gesture. It was only yesterday that Spiegel had first practised with a pistol, but now, despite his thumping heart and shaking limbs one part of his mind worked fast enough even though another part did not know what he was doing. His hand with the pistol in it leaped from his pocket. One shot into Lucas’s back sent him reeling; with two more he sagged to the ground, and Spiegel went on firing into the prostrate body until the weapon was empty. It was all over in a matter of seconds, and instinct—the instinct never to reveal anything to a colleague without prospect of advantage—led Spiegel to close the secret door just before Klein and Kramer came bursting in. He was standing then pistol in hand over the body.

It was only a matter of days before Spiegel’s prevision when he plotted the death of Lucas was proved correct. The man who killed Lucas was held to have demonstrated Lucas’s guilt; his bold initiative and his obvious devotion to the Fuehrer was rewarded, in the reshuffling that followed the Night of the Long Knives, by immediate promotion. He was head of the Seventh Bureau in Lucas’s place, and it was now only to be expected that a man who worked as hard as he did, and who possessed that remarkable clarity of vision, should succeed in making the Seventh Bureau even more powerful and feared than when Lucas had presided over it. The outwardly insignificant Kurfurstendam office under Spiegel’s management was like the tiny body of some creature whose long tentacles, reaching out over vast distances, insinuated themselves through any unguarded crevices, and exuded a fatal poison if anyone were rash enough to interfere with them. The Bureau filched power from Goering and the Five-Year Plan, it filched power from Canaris and his intelligence agencies, and it even filched power from Himmler himself, as Spiegel directed its activities not only into espionage, but into counter-espionage, and then into counter-counter-espionage, working steadily towards the great moment when the Fuehrer would listen to reports—injurious reports, of course—regarding Himmler and his methods.

The Seventh Bureau was one of the agencies that held the power of life and death, and a word from Spiegel could send a man to the scaffold or into a concentration camp; sometimes, naturally, that could not be done without bargaining—Spiegel’s enemy A. could not be murdered without sacrificing to Himmler Spiegel’s ally B. But still it was power, vast power, and Spiegel, waking in the mornings in bed, would sometimes wonder whether or not it was not all a vivid dream, so exactly had he realized all his ambitions. He had enemies, of course, deadly enemies, for a man who held power under the Third Reich was the enemy of all who sought power or sought to conserve power, but he could deal with those, while revelling in everything that his starved childhood and his unemployed youth had lacked; the deference of the great, and the subservience of the little, power to promote and power to condemn; even medals and orders; and, beyond all those, the intense satisfaction, which never staled for a moment, of living (whenever he could spare time from the office) in the Bower of Roses. He slept in Lucas’s bed and he ate at Lucas’s table, and that was wildly gratifying, for he could always remember the fear with which he had regarded Lucas and the contempt with which Lucas had regarded him. And he had killed Lucas with his own hand; he could remember that and forget that it was pure chance which had presented Lucas’s back to his pistol.

Ten years of gratification, of power, of what to a warped mind was happiness, was what Spiegel enjoyed; perhaps for those ten years he may be considered fortunate. He extended his power, he increased his happiness, while the Fuehrer extended the Reich. The Saar and the Rhineland, Austria and Czechoslovakia; Spiegel shared in those intoxicating successes. He knew the rather dubious delight that followed the conquest of Poland, and the equally dubious delight that followed the conquest of Norway, and he shared in the culminating triumph, the one that swept away all doubts, of the overthrow of France. The Fuehrer entered Paris as a conqueror, without any of the blood baths, like Verdun and the Somme, that Germany had dreaded. The Fuehrer dominated the world; by his apparently magical power he had raised Germany to a position which she had failed previously to attain even at the expense of millions of lives. And Spiegel shared in his dominion, and he lived the life of a nobleman in the Bower of Roses.

It lasted ten years, as has already been said, before the unforeseen tripped Spiegel up. He did not anticipate the events of July, 1944. It was not a question of the defeats in Russia or of the landing of the Allies in France; Spiegel made no pretence of being a military expert. But he did not anticipate that there would be an attempt on Hitler’s life, and that that attempt would fail. It had not entered into his calculations, and the surprise of it unbalanced him so that he was taken by surprise by the next development, which normally he would have predicted with cold certainty.

The attempt on Hitler’s life was revenged by a massacre compared with which the Night of the Long Knives was only a trifle. Ten thousand people died in those four weeks; generals and priests, diplomats and dancers, not only men, but women and children too, whole families, sacrificed to the resentment of the gloomy tyrant shut away in his headquarters in East Prussia, who found some sort of satisfaction in looking at films and photographs of the slow hanging of his enemies.

Ten thousand people died; it is not surprising that in that general massacre private grudges were paid off, nor that ambitious men seized the opportunity to eliminate those superiors who stood in the path of their promotion. Spiegel could have predicted all that, easily, but he did not have time. The wave of arrests engulfed him at the very start, almost before he knew that the attempt had been made.

He was at the Bower of Roses on that July day. He was taking refuge from the sultry heat of Berlin; and the incessant air raids on the city had induced him to go there, too, for—as he told himself—they were distracting, and liable to confuse his otherwise clear thinking. He had sat with his wife Charlotte listening to the first confused accounts on the radio, and then he had spent a couple of hours on the telephone—not hours of unbroken talk, because in that period of excitement not even the head of the Seventh Bureau could command unrestricted use of all the long-distance wires he needed—and he was glad that he was absent from Berlin at this moment, where arrests and executions, betrayals under torture, were going on. His absence from the centre of affairs would prove his lack of complicity, and if by any strange chance the conspiracy should still succeed he might still be able to disclaim any antipathy to the conspirators.

He sat at his dinner table, with Charlotte opposite him, feeling not too unsure of himself. His telephone calls had been well judged. He thought all would be well. It was comforting to sit where he did, with the red sunset bathing the landscape over which he looked from his seat at table. There was his own land, the green fields, the dark pine woods, and the glimmer of the lake through the gap. He tasted with pleased anticipation the soup that was put before him. Then he looked out of the window again and saw two motor trucks hurtling along the road, driving fast. He knew their type; he could make out the machine guns mounted above the drivers’ cabs. The trucks vanished at the corner and then reappeared. They were heading for the house. There would be twenty SS men, fully armed, in each. He put down his spoon. He did not stay to say a single word to poor stupid feeble Charlotte, but he hurried out across the hall, and into the library where he opened the secret door and took refuge in the secret room within.

He stood just inside the secret door, resting his hands against it, listening. He heard the tramp of innumerable booted feet, in the hall, in the very library itself, upstairs, in the sitting-room, everywhere. He heard loud voices, and one of them he could recognize, so that he leaned heavily, faint, against the door. It was the voice of Klein, one of his principal assistants (Spiegel had been too shrewd to have only one principal assistant) in the Seventh Bureau. Klein, the man who had driven the car on the Night of the Long Knives when Lucas had died, not a yard from where Spiegel was standing at the moment; Klein the ambitious, Klein the brutal—Spiegel knew now that he ought to have eliminated him a year ago at least, or earlier, as soon as the murder of Lucas had become such ancient history that Klein’s account of it would no longer be damaging to his chief. If only he had had him arrested even yesterday!

There were other loud and brutal voices to be heard besides Klein’s. Then through them all came the sound of another voice. It was Charlotte’s, raised in a high-pitched scream. Spiegel heard the voice again, and then again, agonizing, frightful. Scream followed scream. It was no use torturing Charlotte. No one knew of the secret room except Spiegel. He had even hunted out the men who had constructed it, and he had seen to it that they had met the fate of those who had buried Attila, and without knowing why. Spiegel stood and listened to the screams, almost inhuman now in their intensity. They were frightful, unbearable. In his office Spiegel had written words, had spoken sentences, which had sent men and women to horrible deaths. But he had not witnessed the results. Richter’s corpse and Lucas’s corpse were the only two he had ever seen. In his office, making his plans, Spiegel was always a man of steady nerve and of cold resolution, but personally he was a weakling, and he had always known it. He heard the screams again, and found his hand had gone, without his volition, to the catch of the door. Now, without his volition, he was opening the door. Now he was coming out into the library.

It was less than a year later that Wolfgang Klein found himself walking along a Brandenburg lane. He was tired, he was hungry, he was ill, but he had to keep on walking. The war was lost, the Fuehrer was dead, the Russians were in Berlin—the Russians were all round him. Klein had managed to get rid of his SS uniform; he knew too well what happened to a man in that uniform if the Russians caught him. No trial, just a single shot. So now he was wearing an ordinary army uniform. He had taken it from a corpse lying unexplained in a wood, and the tunic had a bullet hole in it and bore an extensive stain of blood, but it was far better than that SS uniform, for all that. It gave him at least a faint chance. There could be no doubt that the Russians would seek eagerly for the head of the Seventh Bureau, and would shoot him if they could lay their hands on him. In this uniform, with pay-book and papers complete, he at least stood a chance of losing his identity and of being taken prisoner as a mere private soldier. Better even a Russian prison camp than a firing party.

His features were not too well known; it was hardly likely that any local informer would recognize him. Klein knew something about that ritual. In the villages and towns the Russians would find men ready to work for them. The Russian commanding officer would have each prisoner and suspicious character brought up before him in the presence of the local informer.

‘He Fascist?’ the Russian officer would ask in his childish German, and the informer would nod and the suspect would be led out to death.

Klein, even in his army uniform, did not want to run any such risk. He wanted to keep out of the hands of the Russians altogether. That was why he was creeping along the lanes like this, hungry, footsore, and tired—so tired that he could hardly think. He was a man of powerful build and great physical strength, but that strength was now exhausted. He could hardly drag his feet at each successive step through the sands of the lane. He staggered as he walked in the darkness, and his lips were caked with dried scum. He had not known that such weariness was possible.

All Germany—all the vast empire of the Third Reich—was in the hands of the Allies. There was no possible chance of his escaping out of it. The Americans were on the Elbe, he knew. He would stand a little more chance of life if he could make his way to them and give himself up to them. But he would not risk it. The Elbe was fifty miles away and the Russians would be watching every possible point at which he could cross, and even if he succeeded there would be trials of war criminals, hangings and shootings.

What he ought to do was to find somewhere where he could hide away, for months and months, until the Russian vigilance had died down and the American animosity had evaporated. Then he might at last emerge, find anonymity among the people—possibly even escape to the Argentine—and live. With all his faintness and exhaustion and hunger Klein still wanted to live. There was only one possible refuge open to him, and that was, absurd as it might seem, in his own house, where surely the Russians would be waiting for him. But what Klein knew and what the Russians could not know was that in the Bower of Roses there was a secret room, the perfectly planned hideaway. It was concealed between two partition walls between the library and the kitchen, and it was a place where he could live for months. Its window was one of a long row of Gothic windows in that wing of the house, and an active man could climb up to it from outside; no one was likely ever to count from the outside the long line of windows of library and kitchen and ballroom and then, remembering that number, count the windows from inside and find they totalled one fewer. Inside there was just room for a man to lie down—God, how he wanted to lie down at this moment—among the things that careful forethought had put there. There was a silent toilet, a water tap connected to the main supply of the house, and, above all, shelves and shelves of food, cans of every possible description, six months’ food at least for a man, perhaps even a year’s food. Klein felt hunger gnawing at him with renewed viciousness as he thought of that food. It might seem a mad plan to return to the Bower of Roses, of all places, and yet it was the best plan open to him. The Russians would certainly be there, but at night he could make his way in through the window with its cunning catch, and then he could rest, he could eat, he could drink. Klein stumbled forward with renewed strength as he thought of that. He did not even waste any strength in self-recrimination regarding his own lack of forethought in allowing himself to be in Berlin at the moment when the Russians came bursting over the Oder—a far-sighted man, one with military prevision, would have concealed himself in the secret room just before that event. As it was, his resolution and physical strength had enabled him to escape from the city during its nightmare end, out to this lane where he could plod along towards the Bower of Roses, stumbling with weariness, yet trying to keep his ears and eyes open for Russian sentries and patrols.

Klein reached the Bower of Roses the next night. It was before midnight that he sank down to rest for a while at the edge of the wood whence he could look out at the house, but he waited for three hours before he hoisted his exhausted body up on to his weary legs to attempt the last stage. It was not merely to rest himself that he waited. Between midnight and dawn would be the best time for Russian vigilance to relax, and besides he wanted to examine the situation for as long as possible beforehand. He watched lights come and go in the windows, the faint uncertain light of candles and lamps, for there was no electric power available, naturally. But there was one window that was never lighted; that was the one for which he yearned. The number of cars parked about the house showed that it had been taken as the headquarters of a large unit, a division at least, perhaps a corps; but that, too, was only to be expected. There was only the headquarters staff present, as far as he could see; no large fighting units. Then the flickering of an electric flashlight, off and then momentarily on, enabled him to see that there were sentries posted about the house; he was observing the midnight relief and was glad that now he knew where they were.

He waited for the next relief, and an hour after that, before he bent his stiff and aching joints and moved cautiously forward out of the wood. It was not far; there was only a single wall to cross, and after that he proceeded on his hands and knees. He had to lie prone for several minutes close to the house while a sentry stood close to him in the darkness, and then, when the sentry had moved off towards the corner of the house, he made his final rush as quickly as silent movement would permit. He put one foot in the niche of the buttress, as he had long ago learned to be necessary, and heaved himself up, climbed another step, and then reached for the window catch. As he pressed it, silently, and swung open the window he congratulated himself on his luck. He got one arm and shoulder through the window, transferred his weight, and hung for a moment before a final effort pulled him through, his hands on the floor first, and then his knees. He fought off his exhaustion long enough to make himself stand, to wait by the window for a second or two to make sure he had not been observed, and then to shut it.

The necessity for that amount of self-control made the reaction even more violent when he allowed himself to relax. He lowered himself to the floor. He would not eat or drink, not daring to risk making a noise in this unaccustomed darkness, and in any case he was too weary to move. All he wanted to do was to rest, to rest. He lay on the floor with his head pillowed on his arm, a feeble stream of muddled thought coursing through his weary brain. He was here, safe for six months. There was a momentary pride as he told himself that this was the boldest feat of his career, taking refuge in the midst of a Russian headquarters, but that satisfaction was at once engulfed in the greater one that he no longer had to exert himself or keep himself alert. With his eyes closed again in the darkness he let himself drift off to sleep. In his sick weariness it seemed to him as if the whole floor of the room was gently and slowly swinging from side to side, not unpleasantly, lulling him to sleep.

His consciousness forsook him for a few seconds, and then he came back into the world abruptly as light poured in upon him and voices spoke. The door was open and a man was standing framed in the doorway; the pistol in his hand was plain to be seen even though it was in the man’s shadow. It was pointing straight at Klein. And it was a Russian uniform that the man wore.

‘Komm,’ he said.

Klein blinked, stupid and stupefied; the only movements he could make were feeble and ineffective like the last flapping of a dying fish. A hand reached down and seized him by the breast of his coat and dragged him out into the library, his head bumping painfully on the edge of the door as he passed it. The hand tried to haul him to his feet, but was not strong enough. Another pair of hands came to its assistance and hauled him up, but he could not stand, and so they thrust him backwards into an armchair where he sat, still blinking in the light, and only slowly emerging from his befuddlement.

There were half a dozen Russians in the library, all with pistols in their hands. The senior one turned and gave an order, which resulted in the door into the hall opening and another man being led in, someone in a ragged black uniform. The half-grown beard, the mop of tangled hair, the dirty face, made recognition difficult, especially for a man as dazed as Klein. But the Russians stood aside, on either hand, so that the newcomer had a clear view of Klein and Klein had a clear view of the newcomer. Klein’s eyes submitted at last to being focused, and he saw who it was. Kramer, his chief assistant. They led him forward, closer, and the senior Russian officer pointed to Klein.

‘He Klein?’ he asked in his infantile German.

Kramer’s eyes met Klein’s for only a moment before turning away.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘He Klein.’

‘He Fascist,’ said the Russian with satisfaction, and he went on to speak in his own language to his colleagues.

Klein’s brain was working a little more rapidly now. Kramer had known about the secret room from which Spiegel had emerged when they had come to arrest him, and there had not been time between then and the advance across the Oder to silence him. And when arrested Kramer had bought his life by offering to deliver into Russian hands the head of the Seventh Bureau, who figured high on the list of war criminals. Klein hated Kramer, but then he had always hated Kramer.

There were some private soldiers in the room, and at an order from the senior officer they came forward and took Klein by the arms and lifted him up from the chair. He stood there sagging between them and then they began to haul him out of the room, his feet dragging on the carpet. At the door they had to relax their grip on him to pass him through; and he was free to turn back and address the Russians for a moment.

‘He Fascist,’ he said, pointing with one free hand at Kramer. ‘He Fascist.’

Then they led him out of the house.