The Enigma Game

by Elizabeth Wein

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘No, I haven’t, but we read The Children’s Homer in school.’ I stood up. ‘I have to help Jane get ready for bed.’

  ‘Isn’t she in bed already?’ Miss Lind tilted her head to look up at me with her crooked smile.

  ‘Yes, but – I have to turn out the fire. And the standing lamp. You’re all right now, aren’t you? You did that perfectly.’

  Beneath the powder and lipstick her face nagged at me, familiar – until all I could think was that she reminded me a bit of Felix Baer himself. With his bruised eyes and swollen nose I couldn’t tell what he really looked like, either.

  Miss Lind stood up now too, in a swish of grey-and-black silk. She snatched my hand and squeezed it as if we’d known each other for years.

  ‘I won’t keep you,’ she said. ‘But I don’t know if I shall get you to myself again. I can’t ask you about Odysseus when anyone’s listening.’

  I stood still, my hand in hers.

  ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ I said carefully. ‘I thought you were here to help Wing Commander Cromwell while he’s questioning the Germans.’

  ‘Let’s not play this stupid game,’ she said. ‘I know you’ve heard the name Odysseus because I’ve been briefed about everything that’s happened here. I know he’s one of the Germans locked up in those awful pits below the hill; he’s Felix Baer, the pilot. He’s supposed to talk to me. They’re all supposed to talk to me; I’m standing in for their British contact. I even have a code name from The Odyssey, which Eberhard Moritz made up himself just in case this happened, so they can identify me and trust me.’

  It took every ounce of strength in my body not to pull my hand away. My skin crawled with suspicion, as if I’d bathed in syrup and woken up covered with ants. I said quietly, ‘What do you need me for, then?’

  ‘My code name is Calypso.’ Miss Lind let go of my hand. ‘Do you remember who Calypso is, from your Children’s Homer? She’s a goddess who lures Odysseus to her lonely island by singing to him. Then she won’t let him leave for seven years.’ She hugged the grey silk around her. ‘Calypso is also a type of music in the West Indies. Perhaps you know that.’

  ‘Yes, in Trinidad,’ I said.

  ‘Where are you from?’ she asked me. ‘Jamaica, isn’t that right? An island in the Caribbean Sea, like Trinidad. Even the British tried to ban Calypso music, and I’m sure most Germans don’t bother to distinguish where it comes from, if they’ve even heard of it. Just another type of forbidden music from a West Indian island full of British subjects of the Crown.’

  She’d lost me completely now. I shook my head, wondering if she was a little mad. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘I need your help,’ said Elisabeth Lind. ‘None of the Germans believe I’ve been sent by their British contact. They won’t tell me anything, and I know why. Felix Baer thinks you’re Calypso.’

  How was I supposed to know it was a code name?

  ‘I didn’t do it on purpose—’ I gasped. ‘I didn’t know!’

  The disappointment was almost as great as the shock.

  Of course Felix Baer hadn’t thought there was anything special about me. He hadn’t left me his message or singled me out because he thought I was clever or brave or connected to the aerodrome. He knew only that his contact was called Calypso, and here was I, fresh out of the Caribbean Sea and able to recognise Mendelssohn.

  But I’d still helped, hadn’t I? Without me, B-Flight would never have found those U-boats. I’d helped a little, even if it was unofficial and over now.

  ‘How can I fix it?’ I asked. ‘How can I tell him?’

  She shook her head, looking into the fire.

  ‘I don’t honestly know,’ she said. ‘648 Squadron’s dragon of a wing commander is always breathing down my neck whenever I see any of the German prisoners. I have my own commanding officer who’s supposed to cope with this, but he’s in Africa, and I can’t even speak to him. I’m just a deputy – I’m still in training and I feel rather out of my depth. None of those Germans want to talk to me anyway, not with Cromwell there, even if they believed I’m their contact.’

  She turned to look at me searchingly. Her expression was softer now, and for a split second I nearly caught why she looked so maddeningly familiar, and then it was gone.

  ‘You believe me, don’t you?’ she asked uncertainly, and it was like seeing a big crack opening up in a suit of armour.

  I nodded. ‘You couldn’t know about Calypso otherwise. He called me that the first time he was here.’

  ‘Let me think about what we can do,’ she said. ‘You think about it too. I wish Cromwell wasn’t involved. I wish you weren’t involved—’

  That’s when Nancy Campbell barged in without even knocking.

  ‘Aunt Jane’s just gone downstairs on her own without her sticks, hanging on the banister and hunting for hot-water bottles,’ Nancy said shortly. ‘So I’ve made one up for her and helped her back to bed. Heavens, Louisa, I don’t pay you to sit about blethering! I shall cut your week’s wages if I have to see to Jane again!’

  I opened my mouth to make excuses, and shut it without a word.

  Jane going down those stairs in the inky dark, on her own, without her sticks!

  ‘I’m so sorry, Mrs Campbell!’ I gasped, leaping to my feet. ‘It won’t happen again.’

  But as I rushed from the room I realised how hard it would be to catch Miss Lind alone another time.

  Ellen:

  The moon was nearly full, but it was pig-awful dreich flying weather. At Windyedge we had sheets of sleety rain; five miles inland, higher up, the moors got a blanket of snow. Three Blenheim ops got cancelled. The lads slept all afternoon in case of a night-time clear-up, and Phyllis and I stayed at the Limehouse making toast over the fire while Louisa and Jane pounded out piano duets.

  Louisa was tense as a fiddle string. Whenever they finished a tune and Jane turned pages, Louisa leaped up to peep through the rain-flecked front window.

  The only folk who came in were Wing Commander Cromwell and Elisabeth Lind, after their afternoon with the Jerry prisoners.

  ‘Sergeant Lind, you’re dismissed. Volunteer McEwen, take me to the aerodrome,’ Cromwell demanded. ‘Come along, Flight Officer Pennyworth, you’re needed to write up my report. Toss your cycles in the Hillman, and you can ride back later and save the van making another trip.’

  Oh, ta very much, Wing Commander Cromwell. Flight Officer Pennyworth and I were looking forward to a push-bike ride through a sleet storm!

  While Phyllis and I pulled on our overcoats, Sergeant Lind stirred up the fire and then threw herself down in Jane’s comfortable chair. But she didn’t call for Nan to get her tea or coffee or sandwiches. As we filed out after Cromwell, I stole a keek in her direction, and, oh, was I going to have to worry about her and Jamie both now? She was that tightly wound she couldn’t relax. She sat stiff and straight, gripping the arms of that chair like she wanted to break them off, staring at Louisa’s piano-playing back as if she were trying to lay a curse.

  I dropped off Cromwell and Phyllis and slogged back on my push-bike, dodging icy raindrops and spraying slush up my shins. I was away about twenty minutes. When I came into the dry at the Limehouse again, the musicians were still tinkling away at the piano, and Sergeant Lind was asleep with her head on the table.

  Jane turned to smile at me.

  I raised one finger to my lips and pointed. ‘Whisht.’

  Jane didn’t lift her hands from the piano keys – just let them fall still. She sat with her head atilt, favouring her left ear. After a few more notes Louisa stopped playing, too, and listened.

  The big room was mostly empty, but it was full of soft wee noises: the sound of the low peat fire burning, the Scotch pine boughs swishing outside in the wind, sleet tapping against the window glass.

  And Elisabeth Lind was talking quietly to herself in German. In her sleep.

  ‘She’s counting,’ Jane told us. ‘Up to thirty.
She’s done it three times.’

  ‘It is German, isn’t it?’ Louisa asked softly, with her worried frown.

  ‘It’s Swiss German,’ Jane said. ‘She’s just counting.’

  We held still, listening to the wind and rain and fire, and to that slurry voice murmuring in German.

  ‘What is she doing?’ Louisa hissed.

  ‘I think she’s practising,’ the old woman said. ‘So she doesn’t blow her cover story. Her standard German is excellent and she has a lovely regional Helvetian accent. French may well be her first language. But she didn’t learn it in Switzerland, and she certainly isn’t Swiss.’

  ‘Don’t let Nan hear you,’ Louisa begged.

  Eins, zwei, drei … achtezwanzig, nünezwanzig, dreissig. Eins, zwei, drei …

  I went to give flipping Mata Hari a gentle tap on the shoulder to wake her up and shut her up. I wondered what Cromwell had said to those Jerries, and what Felix Baer had said to her. I was glad I didn’t have her job.

  Louisa came into the bathroom to brush her teeth while I brushed my hair. We ran the taps like spring torrents to cover our whispered secrets.

  ‘That German pilot – Odysseus, Felix Baer—’ She was so quiet I had to lean in to hear her. ‘He won’t talk to Miss Lind. He thinks I’m his contact.’

  I dropped the hairbrush.

  Over the noise of the water the clatter wasn’t anything. Louisa stayed bent over the basin.

  ‘You don’t even speak German!’ I exclaimed.

  ‘Remember he talked about Calypso when he was here the first time? That’s her code name. He thought it was me – that I’d been sent to meet him. And when I gave him that tea, in the pub after Chip punched him up, I thanked him by blinking at him in Morse code! So stupid of me! I just – I just wanted to talk to him, somehow. And when he warned me about the trap, I messed about to give us time! Now I don’t know how to fix things. I tried to talk to him today and I couldn’t, not with the guards listening! I don’t know what to do.’

  I picked up the brush and weighed it in my hand.

  I took a deep breath.

  Finally I whispered, ‘You should give the cipher machine to Sergeant Lind.’

  ‘What about Jamie?’ Louisa objected.

  ‘Even if we had the new settings for it, we daren’t use it now, not if they’re trying to catch him. Give the machine to Sergeant Lind,’ I said again. ‘She’s the one your Jerry meant it for; she’ll know what to do with it.’

  ‘How can we trust her?’ Louisa gasped.

  I put down the hairbrush and wound my shawl tight about my shoulders. Queenie, that canny, bonny lass, my old friend, was putting on her nightdress in the next room, and I had to pretend I didn’t know who she was! It was hard.

  But Louisa needed to know.

  ‘She’s our Jamie’s sister,’ I whispered over the rushing water. ‘You can trust her because she’s Jamie’s sister.’

  ‘Oh!’

  Louisa laughed wildly.

  ‘Of course she is!’

  She leaned over the basin with her toothbrush, which had not come near her teeth for at least five minutes.

  ‘Whisht. Don’t tell,’ I hurried to add. ‘She wants the Germans to think she’s Swiss.’

  ‘Jamie’s sister! Their eyes are exactly the same! No wonder she hides behind those stick-on lashes! But,’ Louisa asked breathlessly, ‘won’t she tell Cromwell? Isn’t she supposed to?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘I don’t think he’s meant to know a thing about it. She might report it to her own commanding officer. But she’d have a long jaw with Jamie before she did that. If she ever catches him alone.’

  ‘How am I going to catch her alone?’ Louisa wailed.

  That was the hard part. Sharing a room with Phyllis. Always carrying some gadgy in the van. Cromwell breathing down your neck. Worrying Nan would hear you.

  ‘Do you talk in your sleep?’ Louisa asked suddenly, reading my mind. ‘What if Phyllis heard? Do you think Jamie talks in his sleep?’

  ‘Silver will shut him up if he does,’ I said, hoping so, as I turned off the taps.

  Jamie:

  I tossed and turned in my bunk again, but tonight everyone was restless.

  Derfel was singing under his breath in Welsh. The Australians chattered quietly. ‘Tomorrow at Mrs C.’s?’ I heard one of them say. I didn’t know any of them well enough to tell apart their accented voices in the dark.

  ‘Too right,’ another answered. ‘My turn to dance with Sergeant Lind.’

  ‘She’s talking to the Jerries in the afternoon and we’re flying tomorrow night. We won’t even see her.’

  ‘I can dream, can’t I?’

  ‘Go ahead and dream,’ said the first – probably Harry. ‘Flight Officer Pennyworth is mine.’

  Meanwhile, Chip and Yorkie argued softly on the other side of the room. I couldn’t hear most of it, but it was about the German prisoners. If Cromwell was getting information out of them, he wasn’t sharing it. Our ground crew had gone over every inch of the captured German bomber and we’d all had a nosy inside the cockpit, but no one found any hidden secret messages or classified Luftwaffe radar gear. Or fresh code settings for a German cipher machine.

  I needed another meeting with Ellen and Louisa and Mrs Warner all together. Passing messages down the line while dancing in the pub or racing to climb into a Blenheim before an op was doing my head in.

  Also, I was dogged by dread of Felix Baer’s warning.

  Trap. Enigma.

  A snare for B-Flight – not just me. Eighteen of us that I was responsible for.

  Bill Yorke raised his voice. ‘If you ask me, the coloured girl knew they were coming.’

  ‘She knows how to transmit Morse,’ Chip agreed. ‘And the old lady speaks German. They could have a radio hidden up there. They could be sending messages in German to the bombers.’

  ‘Come bomb us, please,’ Ignacy put in sarcastically, and Derfel laughed.

  I sat up in alarm. I had to nip this in the bud.

  ‘Flying Officer Yorke, if anyone’s accused of careless talk, you’re going to be first in the queue for court martial,’ I growled. ‘You’re the one who left German code transmissions on cigarette papers in the public bar.’

  ‘I did what?’ Bill Yorke cried. ‘I copied out the transmissions and turned them in to Intelligence, like I always do! Tex told me to get rid of the scribbling papers!’

  ‘I said to burn ’em,’ Chip protested. ‘Not leave them in an ashtray.’

  Everybody went quiet. I couldn’t keep throwing threats at Yorkie, hoping one would make him start playing cricket with the rest of the side.

  Give him something to do, Silver had said. He hadn’t said what.

  Before I lost most of my old B-Flight in that November op, I’d never had trouble with my aircrews. But had I always leaned on my navigator to point me in the right direction as much as I did now? Was my civil war with Cromwell keeping me from solving my own command problems?

  For a start, I could put an end to this stupid scrapping.

  ‘Stow this nonsense about old women and kids being Nazi spies and go to sleep,’ I said. ‘Nothing happened. Volunteer McEwen found those codes and turned them in. She keeps mum about it, and if she can do it, so can we.’

  As I said it, I suddenly knew how to take some of the edge off Bill Yorke.

  I could put him in charge of Dougie – get him to keep Dougie’s chattering tongue in line. I’d have a quiet word in the morning. The wireless ops hung around together anyway; Chip and Yorkie were already wingers. Yorkie must have felt like I was nothing but a brand-new sprog bossing him about. It would do him good to earn the respect of the real sprogs.

  It would take some of the pressure off me, too.

  Ellen:

  As long as they were chasing U-boats, Jamie’s lads pulled together. Shut them up for a week of bad weather and they became a cloud of biting midgies.

  B-Flight was scheduled for its first night-ti
me op since the Jerries landed. But they stopped by the Limehouse before their afternoon kip, no doubt hoping for a keek at so-called Sergeant Lind. She was away translating German that day, so they’d have to wait. The wireless ops all ganged together, chatting up Nan’s mousy village lass Morag behind the bar, until she was blushing and getting orders wrong.

  I saw Bill Yorke give Dougie Kerr a warning thump in the shoulder, and Dougie went red. Yorkie gave him a wee lecture.

  It looked more like a superior officer dressing down a sprog than Yorkie’s usual stirring up mutiny. I caught Jamie’s eye, and he raised his glass ever so slightly. He was watching the wireless ops too. He still looked knackered. But not so old these days.

  I wished I could take over his job for a day and have a go at whipping his lads into shape.

  The wireless ops took their drinks and left the bar, crowding on stools among the rest of us lasses. Yorkie sat himself between Louisa and Phyllis, with his thigh pressed against Louisa and his arm over Phyllis’s shoulder. Phyllis was such a flipping good girl she put up with it, but Louisa scooted her chair to get away from him.

  ‘Coloured gal’s playin’ hard to get,’ Chip Wingate drawled.

  ‘Coloured gal prefers Germans,’ said Bill Yorke. ‘Bats her eyelashes at ’em like she wants to get paid.’

  ‘Oi, set an example, Flying Officer Yorke,’ Jamie warned. ‘I’m counting on you.’

  Louisa stood, her hand quivering on her chair back.

  She’d told me she’d blinked Morse code at Felix Baer. Yorkie was a wireless operator – she must be feared he’d noticed. She couldn’t risk getting angry.

  She moved to put Jane and the table between herself and Yorke.

  ‘I prefer musicians,’ she said.

  That fetched a good laugh from the lads. I stood up to join her so she’d know I had her back. But Yorkie didn’t move aside for me to pass.

  ‘Gadgy pillock,’ I muttered, going round the table the other way.

  Shaness. I’d used a Traveller word.