by David Boyle
“Non, monsieur. Je suis Maria Duarte et cette voiture est un baggage diplomatique…”
Was that the correct term? She wasn’t sure.
“I demand that you get out of the car so that we can discuss this. I think you will find that I have the authority to demand, since I am in pursuit of a murder suspect.”
“Non, monsieur. Je regrette…”
She was going to have to think of something new and effective to say. She glanced into the back. Her ambassador appeared still to be reading.
By now, a small gaggle of officials had gathered around them and were in some kind of furious discussion.
A Swiss official came over. He bore himself with some authority.
“I am sorry, monsieur, mademoiselle, but we have received information that this lady is not who she claims to be and that she is wanted for questioning on a serious charge. I must insist that you and she get out of the car so that we can resolve this in an amicable way.”
A silence followed this demand.
This was the critical moment. She glanced back again at her passenger, and he was clearly aware of what was going on. This would be the moment he would throw her to the wolves. She knew only too well that ambassadors were not supposed to get involved in tussles like this. With her heart beating even faster, he reached over languidly to the window and wound it down.
“Listen to me,” he said, addressing the senior man. “This car and everybody in it is diplomatic baggage. If you insist on delaying us, we shall remain in the car while you contact your foreign ministry, who will tell you the same as I have done. You will also create a major diplomatic incident, for which you will be held personally responsible, and I have to say that my government will not take at all kindly to this violation of international law and the accepted formalities of diplomacy. Now, I suggest you go immediately and get advice from a more senior source. In the meantime, my driver and I will remain here. So, if you would be good enough to return our documents to me…”
With astonishment and relief, Xanthe turned to stare at the ambassador with gratitude in her eyes. The speech seemed to have had some effect on the officials, who now seemed to be in a loud argument with the Nazi officer, who was still shouting and gesticulating in her direction. After some minutes, the senior Swiss official marched back to the car and handed over their papers.
“Miss Duarte, I must ask you to stay here while we refer the matter to higher authority.”
Xanthe watched the ambassador in the back seat make a wave of acknowledgement, then sit back, close his eyes and appear to go to sleep. Still, she thought – it was all useful material for her New Yorker piece, especially now that her first draft had apparently been taken into custody by some Nazi thugs. She began to pass the nervous time by rewriting the thing in her head.
How did it go now? Something to do with being hanged in the morning?
That’s the thing about finding you are wanted for a crime which, in a sense, she knew she was actually guilty of carrying out – despite the circumstances – it concentrates the mind wonderfully. Not perhaps the happiest metaphor right now, she said to herself.
It must have been only ten minutes, as the snow piled up on the windscreen, before the new shift arrived at the checkpoint. The faces all seemed to be unfamiliar. To her astonishment, they raised the barrier and waved the car through.
Xanthe’s fingers were cold, and she struggled with the ignition key. Had these border guards made a mistake? Were they taking a risk on their own authority? She had no idea, but she gave them a little salute. One of them gave her a thumbs up. Another motioned them forward and pointed to the open gates ahead.
“I should drive on if I were you, Miss Duarte,” said the ambassador.
She breathed a sigh of relief as she managed to start the engine. The car moved forward and the guards came to attention and saluted as they drove by. It was a wonderful example of Swiss resistance to Nazi advice. What a pity she could not use it in her article, but she knew she would do nothing that might embarrass the ambassador, who had now saved her life twice.
She could not help smiling about how angry her Nazi kidnappers would be to find them gone. Perhaps the Swiss guards just felt uncomfortable being ordered around by a Nazi official. Who knows?
She had expected difficulty on the French side, but they seemed completely unaware of the fracas which had taken place on the Swiss side. They were soon driving almost alone down the road to Provence.
“I am very grateful to you,” Xanthe whispered to her ambassador. “I think the guards just changed shift, but I know you have taken a risk for me.”
“That is correct, Miss Duarte,” he said.
*
Once they were on the road in Vichy France, it struck her how miserable the country had become, how dependent on horses and carts, which were about the only conveyances they passed as they shot along the main road towards Lyons and then south towards Nîmes and Montpelier.
The small hotel there appeared to have become pinched and curmudgeonly under the Vichy government. The bitter resentment was palpable there. The manager and his staff and family stared miserably at Xanthe and her ambassador as they disappeared into their different bedrooms, as if regretting that the history of South America was turning out happier than their own.
Nor was the food any less bitter, and the bread was a day old at least. The ambassador asked for an egg, but he was told sadly that none was available. It was a relief to get on the road again after their dawn diet of mean slices of baguette and coffee that tasted like the dust from the road outside. There was no sign of the ambassador opening up.
“What a beautiful crisp morning,” Xanthe began hopefully.
“You are correct, Miss Duarte,” he said.
She was still feeling light-headed about her escape from the Nazis at the border. It was a wonderful sense of liberation and freedom, and it grew on her. They were not quite safe while they were still in Vichy France, it was still possible that they would guess their direction of travel and the gendarmes would wait for them, perhaps at the frontier with Spain. Otherwise, every minute, every hour, they get closer to safety, Xanthe told herself as she drove, writing and rewriting her article in her head, imagining Indigo in his cot and wondering – something she rarely allowed herself to do – what his father, Ralph, would be doing now, inside the Nazi war machine.
She found it hard to understand how the man she had loved so passionately, albeit briefly, could have thrown his talents away on the bunch of thugs who had been pursuing her.
There was still the chance that her pursuers would be able to arrange some kind of interception at the frontier beyond Perpignon, but – judging by what she saw around her as they drove along – there was no stomach among most of the French population to assist their invaders, except possibly against the British. She remembered what the Royal Navy had done to the French fleet as they passed the naval base of Toulon, where presumably what was left of the fleet lay mouldering at anchor. But for an American wanted in Berlin, well – it wasn’t clear that anyone would stir themselves for that.
As her spirits lifted, the further south they drove, she took the chance to look more closely at Señor Santa Cruz, perfectly dressed in the early morning as he was late at night. He had a kind of guardedness and hauteur, even while he allowed himself, as a relaxation, to light a small cheroot before turning in for the night.
The miles fell away, and by lunchtime they were in Spain, heading for Madrid. When they reached the outskirts, it was clear that the city still lay largely in ruins left over from the civil war. It was a dismal sight. The ambassador directed her to the Bolivian embassy, where they left the car behind. She carried his valise, evidently the one that was not actually diplomatic baggage, onto a plodding train of ancient design, all the way to Lisbon. He travelled in first class, together with Lomax’s precious box.
When they were once more on a train, it suddenly struck her that – her whole time in the USA, Switzerland and afterward
s – she had never once encountered the mysterious or ghostly figure of her old friend Hugh Lancing-Price. Perhaps she was finally beginning to recover.
*
They slept the night on the train, and in the morning, there was the River Tagus and the sunny liberties of Lisbon, and the airfield awaiting for the BOAC clipper flight to Poole.
“You must excuse me, Miss Duarte,” said the ambassador unexpectedly as they took their seats aboard the plane. “I am usually airsick. I will endeavour to be discreet.”
“Please don’t worry, Señor Santa Cruz,” she said with a suitably discreet smile. “I too sometimes feel unwell when I am travelling by air.”
It was when they were in the air and swooping over the patch of water from where they had just taken off, buffeted by an Atlantic gale, that Xanthe realised what the ambassador had meant.
He was immediately and horribly sick. He vomited until he wept and until he was left shaking. And, moved by his plight, Xanthe had the temerity to hold his arm and then his head as he retched and retched again. The other passengers in their compartment pretended not to notice, though to have a man, dressed so resplendently, retching loudly just a few feet away was liable to be upsetting for everyone involved. But for Xanthe, it reminded her of Indigo and his habit of sicking up his meals, sometimes spectacularly.
When there was no more vomit, for a while at least, and the clipper was soaring high over the Bay of Biscay, she helped him – with the support of the stewards – into a recovery bay where he could sleep. And never once did he lose his dignity.
Then she sat back in her chair and stared out of the window, loosening the collar of the chauffeur’s uniform that Lomax had rigged up for her, patting the ambassador’s diplomatic bag beside her on the seat and relaxed. She let the roar of the plane’s four huge propellers lull her into a reverie.
For the first time, she felt pleased with her performance. She had succeeded in getting the workforce to agree to sabotage the production of the chronometers designed for the new Lorenz coding system. She had dodged the Nazi’s network of police agents in Switzerland, she had slipped out of the country and – barring accidents – would now make it home rather than spending the rest of the war interned by the Swiss or, worse still, packed off on a train to Berlin to face whatever trumped-up charges they felt like inventing for her. She had not done too badly. She only hoped that Fleming would see things her way.
But really, it hardly mattered compared to what was most important. She would be with her boy again.
VIII
London, December 1941
She remembered again once she was back in London, on the way to her debrief at the Admiralty, that there had been no more visions of poor Hugh which had so worried her before she had left. She could only conclude that either she had recovered – or they’d had nothing to do with her own mind. Unless it was somehow the proximity to where he had died that was setting off the memory in her head.
Perhaps, if it hadn’t been her imagination, she had really seen his ghost.
She arrived in London early and wandered down Oxford Street, hoping to get into the Christmas spirit, but it was a dismal sight for the third, dour Christmas of the war. No lights, little in the windows – hardly any windows on the boarded-up shops and the burned-out wreck of what had once been Bourne & Hollingsworth. It was sad and depressing.
The debrief had gone well. There had been some consternation that she had revealed her interest in the chronometers for Lorenz, but even Fleming understood that some kind of honesty was inevitable and necessary to achieve the objectives they had wanted.
“Thank goodness we did not come entirely clean with Wittgenstein and his brother,” said Fleming, musing aloud. “There’s no knowing what he might have taken it upon himself to say. It hardly needs saying how grateful we are to you.”
“Thank you, Commander.”
Fleming looked a little embarrassed.
“I think we also owe you an apology. We did not brief you fully. But I think,” he said with self-satisfaction, “that we had a good excuse. We were not aware of many of the circumstances.”
“Is that the case?” said a battered looking commodore, with his single broad gold stripe on his sleeves, next to him around the table. Xanthe did not recognise him. “May I ask, how confident are you in the shop steward? Will he be able to do what he said he would?”
“I believe so, sir.”
“Then I don’t think we could possibly have done more in the circumstances. All we can do is delay the shift to Lorenz, and if we are to accept Miss Schneider’s testimony here, then we have done so. They will inevitably find some other supplier from Switzerland, but if that gives us another six months for Turing’s old team to tackle the new system, it may be enough.”
Fleming sat back and pushed his legs out under the table, to show he was changing the subject.
“You see, Xanthe, while you’ve been away, there have been a number of changes at Bletchley. A number of senior staff there, including your friend Turing, wrote a private letter to the prime minister asking for more resources. The letter caused considerable consternation in official circles, but those resources are now on the way. Though, also, as a result, Denniston is out. We are therefore considerably expanding the payroll. That means space is at a premium, and it may mean it is time for you and your child to move out. You can, of course, rely on us to make satisfactory alternative new arrangements. That is right, is it not, Commodore?”
Turing, the quiet troublemaker. It was extraordinary that so diffident and shy a man could cause so much trouble around himself.
“We are also reorganising Hut 8. Turing is being sent to America to liaise with our new allies. So when the commodore mentioned Turing’s ‘old team’, that is what he meant.”
“Turing? Are you sure?”
Could Alan cope with her pushy fellow countrypeople?
“Well, he knows the world of mathematics, and I believe he was at Princeton too, wasn’t he?”
*
Alan gone! Frankly, Xanthe admitted to herself, she would prefer not to live at Bletchley without her friend. She forgot to ask when he would be leaving and wondered if he would have time to advise her on her burgeoning relationship with her friend, the Bolivian ambassador.
When they had landed in Dorset, he had turned to her and kissed her hand.
“Miss Duarte, Xanthe, I must thank you for your kindness and gentleness. I was not what I expect of myself, and for that, I humbly apologise. You have looked after me all the way from Berne, and I am grateful.”
Xanthe was taken aback by this dramatic change of tune, which often seemed to accompany something else which she had learned to expect. The moment a man could see her as a woman – not an operative or chauffeur – she sensed the flickering awakening of an interest in her.
“Señor Santa Cruz. It is I who must thank you. You saved me from the Nazi thugs in Berne. You saved my life outside Geneva at the French frontier. I risked discovery and goodness knows what else, and you stuck by me. I know you were running a risk too.”
“My dear Miss Duarte, it was the least I could do. Perhaps you would do me the honour of dining with me at the embassy. I had the great misfortune to lose my wife some months ago – to a U-boat. I have no love for the Nazis as a result. I am, therefore, in need of female company, and I can’t think of anyone I would like to see more than yourself.”
Since then, no word.
Well, she would take him up on the invitation if it transpired. She assumed this had not been a request to drop by. It would be fascinating to dine in an embassy, and she found she had a soft spot for the old monster, which had grown as they had driven away from the checkpoint to Vichy France.
She had spoken a great deal, and he had said virtually nothing on the whole journey, but somehow, somehow, part of the psychic communication between people which drew them almost unnoticeably together had operated on them both.
*
“I know I shouldn’t have do
ne it, but it worked. I’m only sorry it seems to have led to the demise of poor old Denniston – though I don’t know what he could have done to prevent that. I suppose the thinking is that we should have gone via him, rather than direct to Churchill himself.”
“I know,” said Xanthe. “I’ve got a lot to thank Denniston for. It seems strange that I’ve never actually met him.”
“Oh well, he’s secret, isn’t he,” said Turing with a grin.
They were having a quick scoot around the Bletchley grounds with Indy in his pram. Turing was pushing, and Xanthe was wondering, a little broodily she feared, what he would be like as a dad. Now that she was being actively pursued by the ambassador, she had begun to feel obsessed about who to choose. “It’s a big decision,” she said out loud.
“What is?”
“Oh, nothing. I was just wondering things, that’s all. Listen, what would you think about me getting married?”
Turing looked shocked.
“Don’t do it, Xanthe. Not now. Not till the war’s over. You can’t make a clear-headed decision before then.”
“Is that a proposition?” she asked cheekily.
“Oh, ha-ha. I’m not what they call the marrying kind, and in any case, I’m off to your homeland in a few weeks’ time.”
Xanthe was hit by a wave of sadness, and even as she felt it, she was aware of the irony – strange that she should feel nostalgic about the most miserable period of her life.
“I don’t know, Alan. I can see I can’t stay married to Bletchley for much longer. It’s going to balloon.”
Most miserable period? she thought to herself. Also the most intense, the most tremendous – the period of her life she would never forget.
*
“So you see, Xanthe. I am lonely here. In this embassy. I know this is premature, but I have noticed how quickly people make these personal decisions in wartime. Because tomorrow, a bomb might fall, so they might as well get on with it.”