by Wilbur Smith
The rookworst were served sliced over a bed of stamppot: mashed potato, rich with butter and creamy Dutch milk, mixed with chopped onions and kale. And there were glasses of cold, foaming Heineken, brewed barely twenty kilometers away in Rotterdam, to wash it down. The hearty food and plentiful beer quickly filled the men with good humor.
Schröder was on fine form. He had insisted on seating Saffron beside him, which had caused Elias to make a beeline for the seat on her other side. For much of the meal she felt like a spectator at a tennis match, turning her head from one side to the other as each man tried to outdo the other in displays of intelligence and wit, delivered in German, for they were speaking the rulers’ tongue.
Even Marlize wouldn’t be impressed by these two, Saffron told herself. But I suppose she’d feel obliged to look as though she was bowled over by them.
Encouraged by what he assumed were displays of girlish enthusiasm, Schröder held forth on the inevitable triumph of German military might.
“Don’t be fooled by our so-called withdrawals on the Eastern Front,” he told her. “I have it on good authority from friends in Berlin—men who are in a position to know the facts—that the Führer is only toying with the Bolshevik rabble. Soon we will be blowing the Ivans to hell.”
“Marlize takes victory in the East for granted,” Elias said, wanting to demonstrate how much closer he was to the female over whom they were fighting. “What interests her is the destruction of the British.”
“Is that so?” Schröder inquired with a knowing twinkle.
Saffron nodded. “Yes . . . of course I despise the Bolshies, they are mere subhumans. But I hate the British for what they have done to my people, and how they treated me.”
“You should hear her denouncing the evils of the British,” Elias said. “I can assure you, Schröder, that our Marlize has a bright little brain behind that pretty face.”
“Oh please, Herr Elias, don’t tease me!” Saffron giggled. She turned to look at Schröder and said, “He doesn’t mean that. I’m an ordinary, simple girl.”
Elias glared at Saffron and then turned his eyes toward Schröder, who was smiling with lascivious smugness.
“Oh yes,” said Elias, forgetting his usual servility toward Germans, “you may lead the way in Holland, so far as catching Jews is concerned. But we in Belgium know how to catch spies.”
Schröder brushed away the boast with a flick of his hand. “I congratulate my colleagues on their successes,” he said. “But we in Holland have the advantage with regard to spies as well as Jews. The Security Police wing of the SS, working in conjunction with Major Giskes of the Abwehr, have, to date, arrested fifty agents, sent by the British into the Reichskommissariat Niederlande. Almost all of them were seized as they landed, because those buffoons in London had no idea that the so-called ‘Resistance’ men in Holland with whom they were dealing were our own radio operators. We have seized huge quantities of guns, explosives, radio sets and money. We have their complete plan for organizing Resistance forces in Holland. We know every detail of their recruitment, training, deployment and personnel. In short, we have it all. It is a total victory. What do you think of that, my dear Marlize?”
“Th-th-that’s . . . amazing.” Saffron was so appalled by what she had heard that she could barely speak, but prayed that her wide-eyed stammering would be taken for awe rather than horror. “I never thought I would hear anything so incredible. How . . . how did you do it?”
Schröder chuckled. “Ah, well, that would be giving away professional secrets . . . but you can take it from me that it has been a long time since the Dutch department of what the British call their Special Operations Executive sent or received a message that we did not read and reply to ourselves.”
“I . . . I congratulate you most heartily,” said Elias, through gritted teeth.
Schröder gave a curt nod of acknowledgment, then added, “Speaking of the British, we currently have three of their latest gifts to us in the cellars below the Binnenhof. We expect to complete their interrogation tonight, in fact.” He looked at his watch. “Almost nine o’clock. I must be on my way.”
Schröder looked at Saffron. “Perhaps you would care to accompany me, Fräulein Marais. I cannot allow you to attend the interrogation, of course. But you can look at the prisoners in their cells. It may amuse you to see the pathetic wretches whom those fools in London have sent as their spies and saboteurs.”
“I’m not sure . . .” Elias began, but Saffron said, “Thank you, Karsten, I would like that very much.”
“Excellent,” Schröder replied. “Don’t worry, Elias. Your, ah . . . colleague will be safe with me.”
•••
Schröder waited while Saffron disappeared to the ladies’ room. She reappeared with her face and hair freshened up and wearing her hat and gloves. They stepped outside into the late evening twilight. The streets were deserted, the air was warm and still, and the blackout meant that there was not a light visible anywhere.
Schröder offered Saffron his arm. As she took it she said, “It’s so quiet. Here we are in the middle of a capital city and it’s like a ghost town.” She wondered why Schröder was not accompanied by a bodyguard.
“I know,” Schröder said, his voice low and throaty. “We have the whole place to ourselves, with no one to disturb us.”
Plaats had buildings along two of its sides, but the third, which faced the Binnenhof, was open. Saffron looked across the rectangular, ceremonial lake, known as the Hofvijver, toward the old parliament buildings that rose on the far bank where high walls and steep roofs softened into an indistinct purple-gray mass by the deepening dusk.
It was a short stroll around the near end of the Hofvijver to the closest corner of the Binnenhof. But Schröder led her in another direction, toward an avenue of trees that ran along the longer bank of the lake, opposite the Binnenhof’s facade.
“I’m afraid the cells are at the far end of the building,” he explained. “But I hope the walk will be a pleasant one.”
They carried on in silence. As they walked between the trees, the sense of isolation from the rest of the world became even more pronounced. Saffron began to feel uneasy and it had nothing to do with being an SOE agent undercover in hostile territory. It was a primal female fear of being led into the dark by a large, potentially dangerous man. She noticed that, although Schröder was keeping his head still, he kept darting his eyes from side to side, as if checking that they were not being followed. That would be a basic precaution: he was a target for Resistance assassins. A decent man would not make that obvious for fear of upsetting the woman at his side.
But instinct told Saffron that Schröder’s motivation was very different: He’s making sure there’s no one around. He doesn’t want any witnesses.
Suddenly she felt frightened. She knew how to defend herself against an attack by a larger opponent. She could fight Schröder off. But Marlize Marais couldn’t do that. Either Saffron accepted that her mission required her to let Schröder do what he wanted with her—and it was obvious what that would be—or she stopped him, and blew her cover.
She felt helpless in the face of that dilemma. Don’t think about that, she told herself. Concentrate on the job in hand. Be Marlize. What would she be feeling?
That was easy. She’d be very nervous. She’d want to say something, anything to break the silence.
“Tell me about the spies you are interrogating,” Saffron asked.
“Why do you ask?” For the first time a note of caution, bordering on suspicion, had entered his voice.
“I want to know more about you, what you do.”
Schröder laughed. “You were right. You are a simple girl. But even a simple girl may have her uses. Come . . .”
He grabbed her wrist, holding it tight, and led her toward a large tree, whose trunk was barely visible through the deep shadow of the overhanging branches. They walked under the canopy of leaves and as they reached the base of the tree, Schröder spun S
affron around and shoved her hard against the trunk. She felt the bark scraping her skin through the fabric of her light summer dress.
Schröder did not waste time on small talk. He pressed the weight of his body against Saffron. His right hand reached down, pulled up her skirt and then reached beneath it, forcing its way between her bare thighs. His left hand grabbed the hair on the back of her head and pulled it so that her face was jerked up to face his. He tilted his face toward her, pushed his lips against hers and forced his tongue, like a thick, slippery eel, into the depths of her mouth.
Be Marlize! she told herself. Be Marlize!
Saffron tried to twist her head away from Schröder’s but he gripped her hair tighter, making her gasp in pain. She writhed her hips to try to escape his hand rubbing against her crotch. His fingers were playing with her through the fabric of her underwear. His breathing was hot and loud in her ear. He belched and the air in her nostrils reeked of stale beer and cigarettes.
Schröder withdrew his hand and for an instant Saffron thought he might be done with her. He’d bullied her, overpowered her, humiliated her: that was where a man like Schröder found his pleasure. But she realized he was undoing his belt and fly-buttons, pulling down his trousers and underpants. He’d only just started.
At that moment, the role-playing ended. Now it was a fight for survival. To free himself from his trousers, Schröder had eased the pressure of his lower body against Saffron’s.
That was his mistake.
She did what Fairbairn and Sykes had taught her at Arisaig and powered her knee with every ounce of her strength into Schröder’s exposed testicles. He grunted in agony, let go of her hair, and as he bent double she followed up with the next move in a sequence she had practiced countless times and, aiming by feel and instinct in the near-darkness, drove the heel of her right hand into the left side of his chin as his head jerked down to meet it.
The blow propelled his head around, wrenching it violently up and to the side and knocking him off his feet. As he fell, barely conscious to the ground, Saffron kicked him in the way all Arisaig trainees were taught: not with her toes, as if kicking a football, nor even with a single downward stamp. She jumped in a two-footed “bronco kick,” aiming at his rib cage and shooting her legs out straight, immediately before she hit, so that the steel-tipped heels of her shoes slammed into his diaphragm.
Fairbairn’s book All-In Fighting provided a mathematical explanation of the force exerted on an opponent’s body by the full power of a jumping attacker’s legs being applied through an area not much bigger than a tent peg. She had bronco-kicked into soft turf and seen what a deep dent her heels made.
The effect on Schröder was devastating. The air was driven from his body as half his ribs caved in. He flapped on the ground like a fish out of water, gasping for breath.
Saffron sat astride his chest, with her knees pinning down his upper arms. “There, there,” she murmured softly. “I know . . . your balls hurt, your guts hurt, your neck hurts and your poor little brain’s been bouncing round your skull like a ping-pong ball in a bucket. Never mind, I’ll make it go away.”
Saffron reached up to her hat and pulled out the long steel pin that kept it in place. She leaned forward, grateful that the faintest shred of moonlight had penetrated the canopy of tree-leaves, making it possible for her to place the point of the pin delicately on the innermost corner of Schröder’s left eye.
It widened in alarm. Schröder tried to shout out a protest but could manage nothing more than a wordless gargling sound. Saffron looked at him and smiled.
“Oh, the things they taught us,” she whispered.
She placed her left hand over Schröder’s mouth, in case he should recover the power of speech. One couldn’t be too careful.
She pushed the pin with her right hand into Schröder’s eye-socket, exerting an even, steady pressure as the needle-sharp point felt for the superior orbital fissure at the back of the socket through which a bundle of nerves traveled to the brain. The point scraped against bone once, twice . . . and then she was through into the mass of brain tissue and blood vessels. Keeping the end she was holding steady, she worked the point of the pin back and forth, causing maximum internal damage before she withdrew it.
Schröder’s heart was still beating, but he was as good as dead. The internal bleeding in his brain would finish him off, even if all his other injuries had not.
Saffron’s body was casting a black moonshadow over the dark gray form of the man she had murdered. She leaned back to take a better look. Her night vision was excellent, sharp enough to see the blood, oozing like a black tear from the wound in his eye. She got up and went across to where her bag lay on the ground, knocked from her arm in the first seconds of Schröder’s assault. There was a small cotton handkerchief inside. She used it to wipe the blood away. If she had done the job properly, the wound would barely be visible. It would take until the post-mortem for anyone to work out what had killed him, and she would be long gone by then.
She looked around. There was no sign of anyone. Relieved, she turned her attention to Schröder as his life ebbed away. His trousers were around his knees and his genitalia were exposed. His body was sprawled on the ground. Even in the near darkness he looked like a man who had died while trying to rape someone. His would-be victim would be able to claim self-defense, but she would still be the only suspect.
Better do something about that.
Saffron grimaced in disgust as she put Schröder back in his underpants and did up his flies. That was more distasteful to her than killing him had been.
But then, I am a killer. That’s why Mr. Brown was interested in me. That’s why SOE took me on. That’s my gift.
She grabbed Schröder under his arms and managed to drag his massive body toward the tree until he was in a seated position, with his upper back and head slumped against the trunk. The ground was dry and hard, which would limit the scuff-marks, but Saffron used her hands and feet to smooth over the ground and cover any trail she had made.
As a final touch, she took Schröder’s cigarette and lighter from the chest pocket of his uniform jacket.
Mustn’t get lipstick on the cigarette . . . But surely his fat slobby mouth must have wiped it all off me.
To be on the safe side, she applied as little pressure as possible from her lips as she lit the cigarette, breathed in just enough smoke to get it burning, then placed it between the fingers of Schröder’s right hand. She put the lighter and the cigarette packet back in his pocket.
Now he was a man who’d stopped beneath a tree to smoke a cigarette. And even if his head slumped to one side and he didn’t move, even if he looked very dead—especially if he looks dead—no Dutch citizen was going to go near a man in an SS officer’s uniform. It would take another German to raise the alarm, and that hopefully wouldn’t happen till the morning.
Somewhere in the distance a church bell rang the half-hour. It was only half past nine. There were at least seven hours before the first light of dawn. She thought about the three British agents in the cellars below the Binnenhof and whether she could try to rescue them. But she might simply end up with a bullet in her head. It would be child’s play to steal a bicycle and even allowing for time spent evading German patrols and roadblocks she could be most of the way to the Belgian border by morning. But then what?
Saffron shook her head. That wasn’t the way to do it. There was a better option. It would require a lot of luck, a cool head and a steady nerve. But it was the fastest and surest way out of Holland. First, though, she had to go back to the hotel.
•••
“Your colleagues are in the lounge, miss, if you care to join them,” the night porter said as he let her in.
Elias and half a dozen of his cronies were sat in a circle of armchairs beneath a haze of cigarette smoke with glasses beside them and a couple of bottles of brandy on a table in their midst.
“Aha! Miss Marais, how good of you to join us,” Elias said. “S
o . . . tell us about the British spies.”
Saffron looked down at her feet in embarrassment before she admitted, “I didn’t see them.”
“Oh . . . really?” Elias could not hide the triumph from his voice. “Don’t tell me that nice Hauptsturmführer Schröder tricked you in some way. What happened?”
“Well, we went for a walk along by the lake and we talked for a bit. He didn’t seem to be in as much of a hurry as he’d said. And then . . . then . . . he tried to kiss me,” she confessed, shamefaced amidst mocking cries from the men. “I had to push him off. And then I said, ‘No, I’m not that kind of girl.’ And he said, well, in that case, if I wouldn’t give him what he wanted, he wouldn’t give me what I wanted.”
“Sounds reasonable to me,” one of the VNV men remarked, to nods and laughs.
“Well, it didn’t seem reasonable to me. It was horrible. It made me feel dirty. Because I’m not that kind of girl . . .” Saffron looked around the room with pleading eyes. “I’m really not.”
“There, there, my dear, I’m sure you’re very virtuous,” Elias said. “But you only have yourself to blame. You kept calling him by his first name . . .”
Elias turned to look at the men around him. “Oh yes, it was Karsten-this and Karsten-that,” he said, then returned to Saffron. “You shouldn’t be surprised if he thought you were leading him on.”
“But I didn’t want to call him Karsten!” Saffron wailed. “He told me to . . . An SS-officer told me how to speak to him—what was I supposed to do?”
Elias nodded sagely. “Well, when you put it that way, I can see that it would be wrong not to act in accordance with the wishes of the SS . . . I hope for your sake that you haven’t offended him too badly by rejecting his advances.”
Saffron shook her head. “I don’t think so. I think he thought it was a joke. I said I was going back to my hotel and he laughed at me, which made it worse. He said, ‘You can’t blame a man for trying.’ Then he walked off in one direction and I came here in the other.”