The Enigma Game

by Elizabeth Wein

  I barged past her into the kitchen at the back.

  The kitchen was full of weapons. Everywhere I looked I saw things I could use to hurt the bastard with. Cast-iron pans! A butcher’s knife! Toasting forks! Blimey, I could break a milk bottle over his head if I were brave enough, couldn’t I!

  I could hear Jane cracking away in quiet German with the pilot, and Mrs Campbell dithering behind the bar. ‘Tea, that’s what we need,’ she said, and I heard the skritch of a match as she lit the gas burner to boil the kettle.

  Aye, cups of tea – that will stop the invasion!

  Stupid woman, I thought, and bit my lip. I was too frighted of the strapping tall young man and his gun to get around Nan with a frying pan and try to hit him in the head. I’d never manage it fast enough or hard enough. And anyway, I’d been told to let him get on with his mission, not to knock him out.

  So I yanked open the icebox and found a big slab of butter. Where did Nan Campbell get so much butter, I wondered, did she have friends in the black market? No matter, there was cheese and bread, and I slapped a sandwich together.

  When I came out of the kitchen, the lass Louisa was sitting silent and small on the piano stool. She was watching the Jerry pilot with the faintest frown. Interested. Not frightened. Or, if she did fear him, not showing it.

  He was back at the bar, with the wooden box that he never let out of his reach, answering Jane’s quiet questions.

  I pushed the sandwich across the bar. The Jerry pilot wolfed it down so quickly I began to make him another without thinking.

  ‘Oi, leave off, that’s not for hotel guests!’ Mrs Campbell cried. ‘That’s Isle of Man butter!’

  I froze and gave her the worst kind of cold and fearsome glare. ‘And it’s Scottish bread, aye? He doesn’t care.’ I went back to buttering.

  Jane held up her empty tumbler. ‘How very exciting this is!’

  The Jerry took her glass and gave it to Nan to fill again. I wondered who would have to pay for that wee dram; whisky wasn’t cheap. He passed the glass back to the old woman and they jawed some more. Then he took a silver cigarette case from inside his coat and held it out. She took a cigarette and leaned forward, and he struck a match.

  Oh, the look on Nan’s face when the German pilot gave her old auntie a cigarette!

  Jane called to the lass.

  ‘He says to tell you, Louisa, that he has great respect for the American Negro. He saw Jesse Owens run in the 1936 Olympics.’

  ‘I’m not American,’ Louisa said, her head high.

  ‘I told him you are a British subject.’ Jane smiled, her eyes wrinkling so you couldn’t see the colour in them. ‘From an island in the West Indies.’

  The pilot took fresh interest in the lass, his brows knotted. He asked a question, and Jane translated in a soft voice. ‘Do you know the music he played, the piece that made you cry?’

  Louisa nodded, and glanced again curiously at the German pilot. ‘The Hebrides Overture,’ she said. ‘Scottish music by a German composer. Mendelssohn is German, isn’t he?’

  ‘Yes, but he was born Jewish,’ Jane explained for the benefit of us musical ignoramuses, me and Nan. ‘Not a Nazi favourite. Mendelssohn’s work is banned in Germany. They pretend he’s not one of theirs.’

  I wondered what the pilot would think of me, neither black nor Jewish, but a Traveller. What would he think of my people, who moved from place to place selling horses and willow baskets, collecting old clothes and mending pans, working in the tattie fields and at the berrying? Most British people don’t like us. Surely the Nazis are worse.

  I cringed into my uniform, as if it were a costume that didn’t fit.

  The outrageous Jerry asked another casual question.

  ‘He wants to know,’ said Jane to Louisa, ‘if you are familiar with the music called Calypso.’

  The lass nodded. She threw back her shoulders and stood straighter. ‘But it’s from Trinidad. I’m from Jamaica.’

  The Jerry pilot breathed a long, raggedy breath. Then he held a hand towards Louisa. She flinched at first, but at last she reached to shake his offered hand. He looked her straight in the eye, solemn and serious, and repeated, ‘Calypso.’

  ‘I’m Louisa,’ she said.

  Nan Campbell spoke up, wiping her hands on her pinny. ‘He can have Room Number Four, the best double room, at the single-room rate. Ask him how he means to pay.’

  Jane asked him.

  His eyes flicked up to 648 Squadron’s wishing coins studding the beam above the bar. But he put his hand inside the breast of his leather coat and pulled out a wodge of limp English pound notes in a silver clip.

  ‘I’ll show him upstairs,’ said Nan. ‘Ellen, perhaps you’ll come along so I don’t have to go alone.’

  The Jerry picked up his wooden box. He asked Jane another question.

  ‘What did he say?’ said Nan.

  ‘He wants to take my gramophone to his room.’

  ‘You let him,’ said Nan, shaking a finger at her old auntie to make her mind. ‘I’ve given him a bed, and I’ve given you another whisky, and Ellen has to drive him about. You let him choose some records.’

  Everybody paraded up the pitchy stairs together as if we were about to have a party. Louisa carted the gramophone, and I brought the record albums and the torch. Jane, who couldn’t do stairs quickly, jigged about trying to catch hold of things, finally anxious about something – her precious music. Louisa jigged about trying to catch hold of Jane. Mrs Campbell jigged about anxiously as well, but she was worried about something else. She needed Jane to translate as she showed the Jerry how to work the gas fire in his bedroom.

  He did not at all seem to understand about putting the money in the meter. In any case he hadn’t any small change. He turned the gas tap on and off about five times, which frighted me all over again, wondering if he might forget it was on and fill the house with gas.

  He was only going to be here for one night, God pity us – couldn’t Nan Campbell just turn the fire on herself this one time without having to teach him all the fine points of the meter?

  Louisa finally ran back to Room Number Five and donated a shilling of her own, which was a very dear donation. But it got the fire going without a gas leak, and it meant we could all go to bed.

  As Louisa dropped her shilling into the meter like a wishing coin itself, I wished that the enemy airman staying under our roof would not shoot any of us before he left.

  Louisa:

  Felix Baer looked exhausted, but he didn’t go to sleep right away. I know, because I heard him playing records for half the night.

  Beside me in Room Five’s mysteriously lumpy bed with its musty mattress – you could smell damp in it through the clean bedclothes – Jane was asleep, I think, the moment her head hit the pillow. Not me. It was the second-longest day of my life, after the day when the bomb dropped in Balham and Mummy was killed. I dozed off, in the unfamiliar bed next to this unfamiliar old woman, but I kept waking and hearing the music in Room Four. Record after record. I’d fall asleep listening to Mozart, and wake up and hear Ravel. Or Cole Porter. Or some German song I didn’t recognise.

  Felix Baer couldn’t have slept at all, because he kept changing records and winding the gramophone. Perhaps he was keeping himself awake on purpose, waiting for his contact from Intelligence.

  The music was only a lullaby lilt through the closed doors and the passage between us, but it must have been jolly loud in the room where he was playing it. By and by I noticed that most of what he played – most of Jane’s records, actually – were all forbidden in Germany now.

  So he was treating himself to a feast of beautiful music from before the war, from before the Nazis, when people could listen to whatever they liked.

  I wanted to hate him. But the music made my heart sore, and I remembered the warm touch of his palm against mine, and his bony fingers flying over the piano keys. What was it like to be a musician and not be able to play music you love? I thought of my flute a
nd all it meant to me, lessons with Mummy, duets with Daddy, sitting on the roof of the flat in London trying to imitate the starlings at dusk when I should have been practising.

  I drifted off once more, and this time when I woke I heard nothing but the wind in the Scotch pines on the knoll above the Limehouse, and Jane gently snoring beside me. Felix Baer was finished playing records.

  I knew there wasn’t a thing Jane could do if that German decided to shoot us in our sleep. But I didn’t think he would, not after she let him share her music. Lying next to her, I felt like I was in the safest place in the house.

  So finally I went to sleep properly.

  Hours before it grew light, I opened my eyes and stared into a wholly unknown dark. I had absolutely no idea where I was. On a train? Or a boat? In an air-raid shelter? England, Jamaica, the Isle of Man? I wasn’t scared – I just had no idea where I was. I’d been going so hard for so long that I’d lost my place in the world.

  But I knew the sleeping person beside me was not Mummy but Johanna von Arnim, otherwise known as Jane Warner. This reminded me I’d come to Scotland to look after her, and I was in the Limehouse, and down the passage was a music-loving German pilot.

  My stomach lurched with fear and fascination. It was hopeless trying to go back to sleep. I lay stiffly.

  Before long there came a tapping at the door, soft but insistent. Jane slept on as if she were completely deaf. What if I opened the door and it was Felix Baer, with his pianist’s hands and tired eyes? What would I say? We didn’t share any language but music.

  I found myself whistling the opening bars of the Hebrides Overture under my breath.

  ‘Louisa!’ The voice was high-pitched and urgent and definitely didn’t belong to the German pilot. ‘Louisa, wake up!’

  I crawled out of bed and clunked around in the dark, feeling my way. Jane and I had locked ourselves in; I’d shoved a chair under the door handle to brace it. It took me a moment to undo all this extra security.

  ‘Louisa!’

  ‘I’m coming!’

  I got the door open. Ellen McEwen stood in the shadowy passage in her ATS uniform, less crisp than it was the day before, holding an electric torch.

  ‘I have to take the pilot back to RAF Windyedge,’ she said. ‘His contact isn’t here, but he wants to go. You can tell he’s a mess of nerves. Will you come with me? Please come with me.’

  ‘Oh—’ I protested. ‘But I’m supposed to help Jane – it’s her first day here!’

  ‘I asked Mrs Campbell, and she’ll take over till you’re back. Please, please, Louisa.’

  Didn’t I want to do something to win the war? To be in the sky? To fly into combat against German pilots?

  Well, here was a German pilot.

  It wasn’t flying into combat, but it mattered. I could go with Ellen, and do a little thing for our side.

  And I wanted to see him again.

  ‘Yes, all right.’ It came out like the croak of a tree frog. I cleared my throat and tried again. ‘Let me get dressed.’

  ‘Thank you, thank you. He’s downstairs having coffee. We can have some too.’

  Mrs Campbell had also made a great pot of porridge. We all stood at the bar strengthening ourselves, Ellen and I at one end and Felix Baer at the other. The ‘coffee’ was made from chicory syrup, and it was terrible. I decided I would not drink coffee again until rationing ended or I went back to Jamaica, whichever came first. But that pilot-pianist drank it greedily.

  When he’d finished he looked up at the sixpences and shillings left behind by 648 Squadron, gleaming silver in the yellow light of the lamp Mrs Campbell had switched on behind the bar.

  He reached into a pocket and pulled out something that shone like a silver sixpence. I couldn’t tell what kind of coin it was between his thumb and forefinger. It wouldn’t have fit in the gas meter, but he reached up and pressed it firmly into a crack in the black oak beam over our heads.

  ‘You see, Louisa?’

  I jumped. I didn’t expect him to call me by name.

  ‘How you say – ?’ He faltered. ‘For luck.’

  ‘Aye, right,’ said Mrs Campbell darkly. ‘Good luck, then.’

  He pushed away his coffee cup and went through to the hall. His boots clattered as he took the stairs two at a time. I worried he’d break his neck in the unfamiliar dark. A minute later we heard him come back down.

  He whisked through the vestibule with his wooden box, and there was a lot of slamming of doors as he loaded his things in the Tilly. He ran up to Room Number Four again, and this time came down carrying Jane’s gramophone in one arm and the armful of records in the other. He set these politely on the piano and the shelf in the cupboard beside it.

  ‘Danke – thank you,’ Felix Baer told us, smiling. He pointed upstairs, mimed sleep, and said, ‘Thank you, ladies.’

  ‘Aye, right,’ Nancy Campbell repeated bitterly.

  ‘Come,’ he commanded Ellen.

  She flinched. Her pale face was fish-belly white again, as if she expected her head to be chopped off.

  Now was my chance to help her.

  I swallowed hard, linked my elbow with Ellen’s, and said to the airman, ‘I’m coming too.’

  Ellen squeezed my arm and turned her head to give me the faintest hint of a grateful smile. We stood side by side as if we were the best of friends determined to do a job together, not two strangers who’d only just met for a few minutes the day before.

  The German pilot seemed perplexed. Then he figured out what I meant. He shrugged and jerked his head towards the door, beckoning us both. ‘Come, two girls. It is good.’

  He was going to let me go along without a fight.

  I stepped away from Ellen so I could pull on my mother’s winter coat.

  Then we followed the German pilot into the windy dark.

  Ellen:

  Gripping that black pistol, the Jerry pilot chivvied Louisa to get into the Tilly ahead of him.

  ‘You all right?’ she whispered as I climbed in on my side.

  ‘Aye, no bother,’ I muttered. ‘Better not chat.’

  She sat squashed between me in my woollen overcoat and himself in his shiny leather one. ‘He thinks we’re friends,’ she said. ‘We should chat. We should act like we’re not scared. He’ll tell us to stop if he minds.’

  I tried to get a keek at her face as I started the engine, but it was too dark. She seemed a quiet thing. But she was bolder than she looked, and clever with it.

  The Jerry pilot kept his pistol pointed at me, his arm across the dashboard.

  ‘Don’t wave your hands or look as if you’re going to fight him,’ Louisa said sensibly. ‘Just chat about the road and how long it takes to get there and things like that.’

  ‘Well then,’ I said, and swallowed. ‘Um. Bit cold for the time of year, aye?’

  ‘Is it? This is my first time in Scotland. Everyone always asks me if I’m cold! I’m used to being cold. I lived in London for three years, but I grew up in Jamaica.’

  I couldn’t remember if Jane had said it was in the East or West Indies, and I didn’t like to ask. Was this how folk felt when they found I was a Traveller, so full of ignorance they couldn’t talk sense?

  Of course most folk don’t ask those questions whilst driving an RAF utility vehicle, havering from hedge to hedge because they are trying to keep an eye on the German’s gun on the dashboard and hoping it doesn’t go off by accident when you hit a bump in the lane.

  The pilot didn’t tell us to hush, though, so Louisa kept going, like a terrier with a bone. ‘Could you drive before the war?’ she asked.

  ‘Only – only a wee bit,’ I said through gritted teeth. ‘I trained when I joined up.’

  ‘Do you like it?’

  Had I ever thought whether I liked it or not? It was a fair question.

  ‘Aye,’ I whispered. ‘I do like it. Makes me feel powerful, managing a big machine like this.’

  ‘All that noise and speed!’ she said as we rattled
up to the airfield barrier.

  ‘And the smell of petrol,’ I agreed. ‘Sharp and fumy. Exciting.’

  I stopped to wait for the guards to come out.

  Louisa said fiercely, ‘An important job to do.’

  I thought she sounded envious.

  Sergeants Nobby Fergusson and Jack Hinton came up to the van, and Jack pointed his rifle at us.

  Louisa:

  It was still dark. Ellen cranked down her window to talk to the guards.

  ‘All right there, Volunteer McEwen?’ one of them asked anxiously. He poked an electric torch through the window and swept it over us.

  ‘I am still alive,’ Ellen answered bitterly. ‘The Jerry’s heading home now. Get your light away, Nobby, you’re blinding me.’

  ‘Who’s the coloured girl?’

  I tightened my hands on the dashboard. Why didn’t he ask me that question?

  The light moved, and Ellen answered. ‘She’s called Louisa Adair. She’s new at the Limehouse. I asked her to come along with me.’

  ‘Has she got ID?’

  ‘Nobby Fergusson, I will give you ID at the end of my arm with my fist in your teeth. Or will you take over my job?’ Ellen snarled. ‘Because I have got a ruddy Jerry’s gun pointed at my face the day, as you can see—’

  The torch’s beam fell still, lighting up Felix Baer’s hand on the dashboard holding the pistol. The curves of shining black metal gleamed softly in the dark.

  Suddenly the barrel of the other guard’s rifle cut the light as he pushed it through the window past Ellen’s head, pointing it at Felix Baer. The end of the long gun was in front of my nose.

  In a flash, as I flung up my hands to protect my face, a lot of terrifying things happened. Ellen cried, ‘You idiot, Jack, away wi’ you!’ Felix Baer pulled me against his chest, which meant that if the rifle went off in that closed space in the dark, I’d be the first to die. Baer raised his pistol, reached across Ellen, and with a sharp crack, fired a shot out her window that must have missed the guard’s head by a quarter of an inch.