The Enigma Game

by Elizabeth Wein

  Whoever it was must have known now that I was there. If I tried to run back to the bathroom or my room, it would just look suspicious. Even ridiculous. So I sat down at the top of the stairs and waited.

  Three-quarters of the way up, the stalker stopped and lit a match.

  ‘Oh,’ said Miss Lind when she saw me.

  For a moment our eyes were level.

  Hers were clear amber, like dark honey, in the matchlight. She shook the match to put it out before it burned her fingers.

  ‘Hello,’ Miss Lind said softly.

  ‘What are you looking for?’ I asked.

  ‘What are you doing up?’ she fired back.

  Her pretty vixen’s face lit again as she struck another match and touched the flame to a cigarette. She vanished into the dark once more as the match went out. She took a quiet drag on her cigarette; the red glow of its burning tip wasn’t enough to light her face.

  ‘I was in the bathroom, not sneaking around in the dark!’ I objected. ‘And you had your light on before, which anyone could see from ten miles away,’ I added in accusation. ‘There was a Luftwaffe bomber out there!’

  She made an alarmed noise like a cat’s hiss.

  ‘I heard the engines,’ she whispered. ‘I thought it was our own planes coming back! I knew the Blenheims were circling, and I thought they couldn’t land because of the fog! I put on the light for them, not for the Luftwaffe – it’s terrible, waiting on the ground and not being able to help!’

  ‘It was jolly careless of you if you’re working for Intelligence!’

  ‘I know it. Cromwell chewed me out on the telephone and said he’d report me.’ I heard her give a sharp, snorting sigh through her nose. ‘I’m sorry. But I thought if they could see my light, they’d know which way to come in. I had to do it.’

  ‘I know,’ I said. I understood why. ‘You’re Jamie’s sister.’

  She was silent for a moment.

  I added quickly, ‘Don’t tell me your real name. I don’t want to use it by accident.’

  ‘I wasn’t going to.’ She drew on her cigarette. It glowed red and faded again before she asked, ‘What gave me away?’

  ‘Ellen told me.’

  ‘Thank heavens you didn’t work it out yourself,’ she said. ‘It’s hell not being able to speak to Jamie in case someone notices the family resemblance. It’s such a stupid charade, trying to keep the Germans happy, when they won’t tell me anything anyway. Although I suppose it is good practice.’

  Miss Lind lit another match. She cupped it in her hands, holding the cigarette between her fingers, and came the rest of the way up the stairs. She sat down beside me on the top step before the match went out. I felt her shuffling about in the dark as she reached into the pocket of her silk dressing gown. ‘Would you like a cigarette?’

  ‘No, thank you,’ I said. ‘What were you hunting for downstairs?’

  She returned fire just the way she did earlier. ‘How do you know my light was on?’

  Oh, bother. If I’d been in bed when I was supposed to, with our own blackout curtains properly drawn, I shouldn’t have been able to see her window.

  ‘I’ll tell you if you tell me,’ I offered.

  ‘You first, then,’ she said.

  ‘I went flying with Jamie.’

  She took a deep breath.

  ‘All right.’

  She spoke practically in a whisper. I could feel her close beside me, a warm bundle of rustling inky silk in the inky dark.

  ‘I told you Felix Baer doesn’t trust me. I know you haven’t been able to do anything about it – how could you, really? But I can’t just come clean with Cromwell, either. I also have to answer to my department in Intelligence, and the German navigator – Dietrich Althammer – told me the most extraordinary thing today. He accused Cromwell of using a coding machine that Baer brought here in November. He says Baer had no authorisation to give it to Cromwell, and Althammer and Moritz want to convince Cromwell to turn it over to the correct authorities. My department. Except …’

  She paused. I didn’t say anything.

  ‘Except Cromwell hasn’t got it. Cromwell doesn’t know anything about it. Yet the Germans think someone’s using it.’

  I kept my lips pressed together.

  ‘The thing is, my department has been expecting this particular machine. The German Navy and Luftwaffe have used these things since the beginning of the war, since before the war, to generate code for the messages they send each other about their attack plans. Intelligence has an entire operation trying to crack the codes these machines generate, and they can’t do it. Coastal Defence hears German wireless communications flying about all the time, but no one can decode any of it. We already know how their machines work. But if we could capture one and get the settings to go along with it, we’d have a chance of cracking their code. Not just in the North Sea. All over the Atlantic. One machine, and a few pages of paper.

  ‘And Odysseus was supposed to bring us both,’ she finished. ‘But the paperwork was destroyed when the airfield here was bombed, and the machine never turned up.’

  The paperwork was destroyed when Windyedge was bombed!

  ‘Oh, crumbs,’ I breathed. ‘I didn’t know – none of us knew.’

  ‘Didn’t know what?’ Miss Lind asked carefully.

  ‘That it was the only one!’

  None of us realised how special it was. Not really.

  ‘Does that mean—’ She caught her breath.

  ‘Cromwell doesn’t have it,’ she said. ‘You have it. You have it!’

  Her excited voice didn’t get louder – it dwindled to a sharp, hissed whisper. ‘Who’s “us”, anyway?’

  ‘Jamie and Ellen. And Jane.’ I rushed to get the confession over with. ‘Jamie picks up the code and Ellen drops it off here. I decode it with the settings Felix Baer left. Jane translates the German. Then we know where the U-boats will be.’

  ‘Settings!’ She laughed wildly. ‘You have the settings!’

  ‘We copied the leaflets,’ I whispered. ‘I made copies before Jamie turned them in.’

  ‘Proper little secret society!’ she gasped. ‘My God! Do you know how many scores of codebreakers are frantically trying to crack this technology?’

  ‘No,’ I answered, still whispering. ‘How could we?’

  Elisabeth Lind drew a shaky breath on her cigarette, tapped off the ash, and brushed it beneath the coconut matting on the stairs.

  ‘Ellen said to give you the machine,’ I admitted. ‘It’s – it’s contaminated. We’ve run out of settings, and the Germans know we have it and they’re laying a trap for our planes.’

  ‘How in blazes do you know that?’ she exclaimed.

  ‘Felix Baer told me.’

  ‘Of course he did.’ She was breathless with excitement. ‘I am most impressed.’

  ‘I wanted to help,’ I said, feeling idiotic.

  ‘You did. You have.’ She laughed again. ‘You have. You are. How were you to know there wasn’t a stolen Enigma machine in every RAF base in Britain? Jamie might have guessed, but you weren’t to know. At any rate—’ Her cigarette glowed. ‘At any rate, now we have one!’

  ‘Shall I fetch it for you?’ I asked. ‘It’s in Jane’s wardrobe.’

  ‘Ah—!’ She hesitated. Then she said reluctantly, ‘No. No, not just now, not at four in the morning. It’s as safe there as anyplace, for the moment. It will take a bit of work to ship it to the proper Intelligence boffins. It would be jolly bad luck if another bomb dropped on it.’ Her voice fell to a whisper again. ‘But I would love to see it.’

  ‘Come visit us tomorrow,’ I invited.

  Never had I been so glad to climb in over the foot of the bed in Room Number Five and curl up next to the old woman I was here to look after. Jane’s soft, purring snore seemed like the quietest sound I’d ever heard. I was still cold and my feet still hurt, and my confession to Sergeant Elisabeth Lind hadn’t untangled the knots in my stomach. I didn’t know what Falle Eni
gma was going to be; the German prisoners were still locked in the limekilns; the Luftwaffe bombers would come back.

  But as I lay in the dark next to Jane I still felt sure I was in the safest place in the house.

  I slept nearly till permitted hours the next day, and woke to find Jane pottering about in one of her fur coats. I sat up in bed. It was just gone eleven o’clock in the morning; the gas fire glowed warmly, and the windows gleamed with a dull, pale light I’d never seen before.

  ‘It’s snowing,’ Jane said. ‘It has been coming down all morning. Nancy lit our fire early, entirely for your benefit, I believe, and she has even brought up a pot of tea. She says the snow is halfway to her knees already! When did you come in?’

  ‘Snowing!’ I exclaimed, scrambling for the window. ‘Snowing!’

  I’d never seen proper snow. In London we got sleet or sometimes sooty slush. The high moors around Windyedge had been white all winter, but this was the first picture-postcard snow I’d ever seen up close. I threw the window open and leaned into the sill over the books.

  ‘It smells different!’

  I scooped snow off the sill and licked it. A flurry of wet flakes gusted into my face and the Scotch pines sighed.

  ‘It sounds different!’

  Jane laughed at me. ‘Shut the window,’ she said. ‘The fire is on.’

  ‘Can the Blenheims fly in snow?’ I exclaimed.

  ‘I shouldn’t think so,’ said Jane.

  ‘I told Miss Lind about the Enigma machine,’ I confessed.

  Elisabeth Lind came in for five minutes, carefully avoiding Nancy Campbell. She was so excited it made her weep. She gave a little sob as she opened the shining wooden lid of the cipher machine, and another as she pressed a key and a lamp came on.

  ‘I’ve never touched one,’ she whispered. ‘Show me how the code works.’

  I opened my exercise book to the first message I’d decoded, and showed her.

  ‘It’s so beautiful,’ she said. ‘Don’t call it contaminated just because they want to trick you. It’s the purest piece of machinery I’ve ever seen. It has to do what it’s told.’

  I know it sounds mad, but I knew what she meant.

  ‘When the snow is gone I shall have to send it away,’ she said wistfully. ‘I’m a bit envious of you getting to really use it.’

  The 648 Squadron airmen spent the day digging out Blenheims and clearing the runway, and the ground crew paraded up the lane to clear it as far as the main road. Ellen was busy hauling spades and soldiers; the Tilly rattled on tyres wound up in chains. I kept running to the window to try to see what was going on, and just before it got dark Jane insisted I run outside. She sat in the bar where Mrs Campbell could keep an eye on her, while I borrowed Mrs Campbell’s boots again and went down to the harbour to look at the snow falling on the cliffs and in the sea. My feet seemed back to normal, thank goodness.

  Low gold winter sunlight streamed through the south-east windows when I woke up the next morning, lighting corners of the room and casting shadows behind the furniture. The radio played while Jane poked about in the top dresser drawers, hunting for something. I jumped up to help.

  ‘Oh, just a clean handkerchief!’ she told me. ‘I can’t find a single one.’

  ‘I washed them all yesterday. They’re on the drying rack by the bathtub. I’ll fetch one – but it won’t be ironed yet, you know! Do sit down – I don’t like to leave you on your feet.’

  ‘I can manage being on my feet in this room by myself perfectly well, as you know.’

  ‘All the same!’

  I made her sit. I darted down the passage, stepped into the bathroom, and switched on the light.

  The whole world seemed to explode.

  It was a roar louder than being inside a Blenheim in the air, louder than standing next to a Messerschmitt 109 starting its engines. It was an explosion of thunder so suffocating I couldn’t hear my own shriek. The light overhead flickered out. The house shook. The floor beneath my feet shook. All I could think was that it was an earthquake, as once happened when Mummy and I were hanging out washing in our Kingston garden and we were both knocked off our feet – nothing else I ever felt could make a house tremble. I pressed my back against the bathroom wall, waiting for the earth to stop moving.

  When the world set itself aright, I tore back to Room Five where I’d left Jane sitting in her nightgown listening to Music While You Work on the wireless.

  The radio was dead and she was lying on the floor.

  She had jumped up when the thundering started. The shaking hadn’t knocked her over – it just startled her so much she lost her balance.

  She was doubled over between the armchair and the bed, whimpering. She had taken all her weight on her right hand as she threw it out ahead of her to break her fall.

  It was as if she’d stepped into a time machine and come out twenty years older.

  She cried and sobbed. She didn’t cooperate when I tried to help her sit up. I coaxed and pleaded and finally scolded. That made her whimper in a new and different way, whiny and snivelling, which shocked me. Finally I managed to make her roll on to her side – and gaped in horror when I saw that the last three fingers of her right hand were bent sideways.

  But it was her wrist, not her fingers, that she grabbed at with her other hand. She cradled the hurt hand against her chest, moaning. I thought she’d broken her arm.

  I was either going to have to leave her to get help, or yell my lungs out to make someone hear me.

  ‘Help! Help! Ellen! Phyllis! Nan!’

  I’d left our door open, and Elisabeth Lind came flying into the dusty sunlight of our room wearing nothing but a fancy French silk bra and knickers, and one very ordinary darned wool stocking that was part of her WAAF uniform. She’d been getting dressed. She was not the least bit embarrassed. She knew what to do.

  ‘Stop moving her about,’ she told me sharply. ‘Mrs Warner, can you hear me? Did you hit your head? No? Ah, thank goodness—’

  ‘My wrist – mein Ärm ist gebrochen – ah—’

  ‘Shh – no German.’

  With Miss Lind on one side and me on the other, we helped Jane to sit. She moaned again as Miss Lind examined her hand. Her twisted fingers were horrible.

  ‘I don’t think these are broken,’ Miss Lind said cheerfully. ‘The same thing happened to one of my brothers, well very nearly, and when we rushed him to the doctor’s it turned out they were only dislocated. May I?’

  I could not look. I held Jane tightly, and Sergeant Elisabeth Lind straightened those fingers out all by herself.

  ‘Can you bend them?’ she asked kindly, and Jane could, a little. ‘Good. And the wrist – can you move it?’

  Miss Lind held her own hand palm to palm against Jane’s, their fingers interlocked. She rocked Jane’s hand gently back and forth and side to side.

  ‘I don’t think you’ve broken a thing, Mrs Warner,’ said Miss Lind. ‘I think the wrist is just a sprain. But it will all hurt a good deal while everything mends. We ought to bind these fingers together and wrap up your wrist.’

  ‘But I won’t be able—’ Jane sobbed.

  And I thought of a hundred things she would not be able to do, just without those three fingers, never mind her wrist. Playing piano duets was the least of it. She wouldn’t be able to dress herself; go to the toilet; put on shoes; use her sticks. She wouldn’t be able to walk independently, or sit down on her own, or stand up again.

  ‘How shall we get you off the floor?’ Miss Lind mused. ‘I don’t think we can lift you.’

  ‘If I put this arm around Louisa’s shoulder and you help on the other side, I think we can manage,’ Jane whispered.

  I was so relieved to hear her speaking sensible English without tears that I kissed her. She was still in pain, unsteady, but no longer a defeated, whimpering old woman.

  ‘What happened?’ I asked Miss Lind. ‘I thought it was an earthquake!’

  ‘It was a bomb,’ said Elisabeth Lind in
a low voice. ‘They very nearly got us that time.’

  ‘Yes they did,’ I answered accusingly. ‘They know just where we are. Maybe they will stop if they think it was a direct hit.’

  She flushed and changed the subject. ‘Last time I was caught in an air raid I had my clothes on! This is most embarrassing.’ She snapped the top of her one stocking against her thigh.

  ‘On the contrary,’ whispered Jane. ‘You always look lovely.’

  It was true, Miss Lind was annoyingly lovely, even wearing nothing but underthings and one darned stocking, her hair flying out of its plait like an untidy cloud of corn-coloured candy floss. Her make-up never seemed to smear – I wondered if she slept in it. She didn’t even look cold. She jumped up and began scavenging for something to wrap up Jane’s fingers and wrist.

  I kissed Jane’s silver-white hair again. She was recovered enough to be herself – I could tell. Fighting. Thinking.

  But my job had just become a hundred times more difficult.

  Ellen:

  I was downstairs in uniform and eating porridge when the bomb hit. The glasses rattled. My bowl slid and smashed on the flagstones. Nancy gave a wail and disappeared for a moment below the counter on the other side of the bar.

  By the time the roaring stopped and I’d dived behind the bar to haul Nan to her feet and try to shut her skriking, Nobby Fergusson was pounding on the door – he’d seen the bomb fall and thought it hit the Limehouse. I left him with Nan and ran upstairs to Jane and Louisa.

  There stood Sergeant Lind in her naughty French underthings and one stocking. I let out a howl of laughter and choked on it one second later when I spied Louisa on the floor with Jane.

  ‘That was a Luftwaffe Junkers 88 with a fighter escort of Me-110s,’ I told them, passing on what Nobby told me. ‘They came straight here and scarpered off again, whilst our lot are stuck on the ground clearing snow, and one of our lads, not saying who, never made it out of bed yesterday. And Deeside is snowed in too. Not a single RAF plane in the sky to chase off the Jerries, and they still missed the airfield!’