by Celia Rees
Edith selected a postcard—the Atlantic viewed from the Außenalster—uncapped her pen, and began to compose a message.
Dear Dori,
Arrived safely. Journey uneventful. Thought you might like a recipe for Dutch Broodje croquetten which formed part of a delicious picnic I shared with a young army officer on the train. You are right. English food is boring. I hope there will be more to follow.
The Atlantic is as luxurious as ever. The Occupiers live well. I’m popping in a couple of menus to show just how well!
Love, Edith
P.S. So glad you want to carry on our cooking lessons—even if it is by long distance! Stella is pleased!
She opened the Radiation Cookery Book to code the messages folded into recipes that she added to the observations and descriptions she’d made to aid the illusion that she was just sharing the meals she’d been enjoying. Then she put everything in a Hotel Atlantic envelope and delivered it to reception, sealed and addressed to Dori in London.
Tomorrow she’d travel on to Lübeck, to see what the future held.
Dori
34 Cromwell Square, Paddington, W2
Dori in her hallway, still in her shantung dressing gown. A weak, winter sun casting a slanting light through the frosting of filth on the fanlight.
“Let yourself out, will you, darling?” She hadn’t even glanced at the young man hovering behind her. “I’ll call.”
The door opening, shutting. Dori sorting through the mail.
Bill, bill, bill, squinting against the smoke curling from her cigarette, adding to a pile of unopened brown envelopes. Then Dori Stansfield. German stamp. Postmark Hamburg. That was more like it. She’d left the rest and took the letter down to the basement kitchen.
Atlantic Hotel stationery. Very snazzy. Only just got there and already busy. She had been certain that Edith would come through. Vera had been the tiniest bit skeptical, but Dori had no doubts at all.
“You handle her,” Vera had told her. “She’s your Joe.”
Time to get busy. Dori collected the Radiation Cookery Book and sat at the kitchen table with pad and pencil. Edith had met Drummond on the train. Identified him as being of interest. Well spotted, Edith. And useful. Vera could do a little cross-checking. See what Drummond made of their latest recruit. She’d been rather expecting that encounter. The next one was more of a puzzle. Part code, part crossword. Breakfast Omelette to be found in Egg, Cheese, and Vegetarian Dishes, Ham and Eggs in Breakfast Dishes. Dori flipped to the relevant pages. McHale in the British Zone interested in von Stavenow. He must have heard more than they thought.
Dori had known McHale in France, seen him operating. Seen him go down a line of traitors, collaborators, and German prisoners and shoot each one in the back of the neck with a gleam in those blue eyes and a glimmer of a smile, as though he was enjoying it.
Edith had added a note. Crêpe Suzette meant Adeline. It was her favorite dish. Edith had invented a memorably disgusting wartime version with marmalade and gin. Danger meant danger. Most unpalatable. A threat to Adeline? Adeline was a big girl. She could look after herself. Dori went back to the McHale message. Americans on the hunt in the British Zone? War Crimes would be interested. She’d pass that on to Vera. It would put the wind up Intelligence. Vera would find a way to pass that on.
She turned to the next menu. Edith had met one Adams (Meat: Roasting). Dori knew him. Of him, anyway. SIS during the war. Now in Germany with Military Intelligence. One of Leo’s men. Good to know who was running Edith.
She’d really taken to the work. Dori knew she would. Dori burned her transcriptions in the Aga and slotted the recipes in her copy of the Radiation Cookery Book next to a cutting for Stella Snelling’s 10 Quick and Nourishing Winter Suppers.
Dori smiled. She taken a pride in cultivating Edith’s “Stella” side. It was this that made her different, that had intrigued and attracted, an imago emerging, but it was the real Edith that Dori was putting her faith in now. Practical and dependable, her very ordinariness would be her cover. Something that Leo recognized, too, but he’d reckoned without her high moral sense. He’d lost his a long time before, if he’d ever owned such a thing, which was doubtful. Most people wouldn’t associate Dori with any kind of morality. Slept around, drank like a fish, racketed about generally. She stared into the glowing heart of the Aga. She’d killed and had killings carried out on her orders, but for all her sins, she’d never been a traitor, and there had been a traitor at the heart of SOE. Too many agents betrayed, too many circuits blown. Any hopes of finding whom it might be vanishing by the day. Files already disappearing: lost, stolen, strayed, unaccountably mislaid. Dori wouldn’t be surprised to hear of a fire in some distant depot or mothballed air station. Either that, or they would be sealed safely away until everyone even remotely involved was dead, gone, and forgotten. Or Hell froze over, whichever was the sooner.
The answer lay in Germany. Vera was back there now with Drummond at War Crimes in Bad Oeynhausen, involved in a desperate race to find out what had happened to the girls and men who had disappeared into the camps and who had not come back. The sands were shifting. Drummond’s outfit had been officially disbanded; SOE closed up months ago, the likes of Dori out on their ear with a “wham, bam, thank you, ma’am,” as the Yanks would say it. The Secret Intelligence Service were taking over, Leo and the boys of MI6. As a woman and of foreign extraction, old Dori was suddenly suspect. Vera was still operative, but for how much longer?
Dori was desperate to get out there. She felt the obligation to the missing agents as deeply as Vera, and civilian life didn’t suit her. Ever since VE Day, she’d been restless. Once the euphoria was over, she’d found herself seeking excitement elsewhere: drinking too much, mixing in bad company, dabbling in the black market. More than dabbling. She could do with getting out of London for a while. Then there was the guilt. Always there, no matter how much gin she drank, a darkness running under her waking life, surfacing in dreams where she saw the girls’ faces, heard their screams. Last confirmed sighting: Number 84 Avenue Foch.
They both felt duty bound to the missing agents, Dori knew: Vera because she’d sent them over in the first place; Dori because she’d come back. It went beyond finding out what had happened; there was a need to see justice done, to see those responsible brought to justice. The ones who’d given the orders were already slipping away.
Dori needed to be in Germany, but there was some snafu with her papers. Understandable on the face of it, but all her inquiries were meeting obfuscation or an escalating official impatience. Nothing stated but much implied. If Dori made any more of a fuss, Dori wouldn’t be going at all. Cue for Dori to pipe down and toe the line. It went against her temperament but, all in all, it might be no bad thing. With Edith in the field, she might be more useful here. She looked at her watch. Time to toddle to the Special Forces Club. She’d arranged to meet someone who might know something about the girls they were seeking: rumors of a group of women who had been brought to a small camp called Natzwieler; a Nacht und Nebel place tucked away in the Vosges Mountains, a place where prisoners were made to disappear, where they were vernebelt, “transformed into mist.” Her contact had reported it months ago but his report had been lost, buried, or ignored. Now he was collecting evidence on his own.
Who were these women? How did they get there, and on whose orders? That’s what she needed to find out.
10
CCG Mess, Lübeck
7th January 1946
Lunch Menu
Potage Parmentier
Boiled Brisket of Beef
Mustard Sauce
Dressed Cabbage
Pomme Purée
Spotted Dick, Cream Sauce
Coffee
Roz’s observations: boring, bland, mostly out of a tin but plenty of it.
Edith found the Education Branch Office on Königstrasse, housed in a tall, narrow building that was more or less intact. She was to report to her immediate boss, Brigadier Thomp
son. He had kept his military title, even though he now worked for the Control Commission and was sitting in his greatcoat, swathed in scarves, wearing half gloves on purplish digits. His nose was red and dripping. When he spoke, his voice was thick with a cold.
“Miss Graham?” He rose to meet her, his fingers icy. “Thank God you’re here! Come and sit down.” He sneezed. “Do excuse me.” He sneezed again and blew his nose copiously. “No heating today, I’m afraid. You might want to keep that fur around your shoulders.” He pressed a button on the console in front of him. “Can we have some tea? And some of those ginger biscuits.”
“Lebkuchen?” Edith inquired.
“The very ones!” He smiled. “German speaker? Then you are doubly welcome.”
“I thought we all were.”
“Preferable, of that there is no doubt but, alas, not always the case . . .”
“I see.”
It was all she could think of to say. It made no sense, but very little did in this new world which surprised and dismayed by turns.
“Ah, the inestimable Miss Esterhazy with the tea.” The Brigadier’s smile of relief exposed prominent, yellowish teeth under his bristling military mustache.
The Inestimable Miss Esterhazy was young, in her early twenties. She regarded the brigadier over her horn-rimmed half glasses as she poured the tea. She had startling violet-blue eyes.
“I prefer gingernuts myself.” The Brigadier dunked his biscuit. “Find these too soft. Not that the poor devils out there would be complaining.”
Despite his stated preference, he made short work of the Lebkuchen.
“Now, where to start?” He brushed crumbs from the wide lapels of his coat. “We’ve got our work cut out, no doubt about it.” He counted the problems off until he ran out of half-gloved fingers. “No buildings, no teachers, no books, no paper, no boards, no chalk, no desks, no chairs, no heating, no help.” He spread his hands wide in a gesture of hopelessness. “And more of the little blighters flooding in every minute from points east. Turning into a positive torrent. The whole area is filling up like a tank.” He leaned forward, hands folded now; his already furrowed brow wrinkled further. It wasn’t just his cold making him look tired and worn-out. “As Control Commission, Education Division, we have to set up schools where there aren’t any and get the kinder in. Most of them haven’t been near a school for the last three years, so that’s a job in itself. We have to inspect any places that are up and running. Make sure that the staff is vetted. No raving Nazis, secret devotees of Herr Hitler preparing for the Second Coming. That sort of thing. You need to develop a bit of an eye for who’s playing with a straight bat and who’s not. As for supplies and equipment—do the best you can. Sounds like a lot, I know . . .”
The Brigadier’s voice trailed off as if even he recognized the understatement.
“And what will be my role exactly?” Edith was almost afraid to ask. She’d heard all this before, but there was a difference between hearing it in a briefing in Kensington and actually being here. She felt a certain heart-sinking at the enormity of the job before her, and there was an ominous hint of what might be to come in do the best you can . . .
“Miss Esterhazy will fill you in. Now, do excuse me, I’m in need of a rum toddy. Medicinal purposes. They do a good one at the club.” Edith followed him out of his office. “Not much anyone can tell you, really,” he said as he pulled on a balaclava helmet. “Best to learn on the job.”
He put his cap on over the balaclava and was gone. From her desk, Miss Esterhazy rolled her eyes toward the closing door. She sat muffled in a bouclé coat that came up round her ears. She pulled the coat closer, tucking her chin into the shawl collar. Her liquorice-black hair swung forward from a center parting so severe that it showed the white of her scalp.
“That’s the last we’ll see of him today.” She looked up at Edith. “He really does have a rotten cold, but he’d do anything else rather than go through this lot.” She put her hand on the pile of papers stacked in front of her.
“What are they?” Edith peered over her shoulder.
“Fragebogen. Forms the Jerries have to fill in.” She picked up a couple of the papers. “One-hundred-thirty questions covering everything from religious affiliation to the membership of forty-four proscribed Nazi organizations. If they jump through all the hoops, they get a denazification certificate. The Germans call it a Persilschein, washed clean. One of our biggest problems, among many big problems, is finding staff. These—” she brandished the forms she held in each hand “—have to be filled in by anyone applying for anything. Then they have to be checked. Against what?” She swung in her chair. “Most records have been destroyed, either by the Nazis or in the bombing. Even if such records exist, people have been displaced, their records might be hundreds of miles away in the Russian Zone.” She swung back. “Before we get the forms, they have to go to Public Safety, who hang onto them forever, mostly because they don’t know any German. Then they are sent here, for the Brigadier to look through, which he might, or might not, get round to, then, and only then, we might, just might be able to employ somebody.” She let the forms drift back onto her desk. “Welcome to the Control Commission, Miss Graham. Welcome to the British Zone of Occupation. Welcome to Germany.” She put her hands inside her coat sleeves and shivered. “Added to which, it’s bloody freezing. Let’s get out of here.”
They stepped out from the offices onto Königstrasse. Edith had visited Lübeck before the war. The old Hanseatic port had been one of the stopping-off points on that Baltic trip. The medieval town was on an island, surrounded by water, bridges reaching over the circling river Trave and canals. She remembered the churches with their pretty green steeples; the conical towers of the Holstentor Gate; the Salzspeicher, salt houses, with their steeply pitched, rust-colored roofs; the medieval buildings with their distinctive crowstepped gables. It was a different scene now. Much of the center of the town was missing, obliterated in a great swathe from the Lübecker Dom to St. Petrikirche and the Marienkirche. The towers of the churches loomed gaunt and tall over the razed ground, their sides blackened by fire, the green copper spires fallen, their bricks stacked in great frozen heaps ready for reconstruction, whenever that might be.
“More than half of the buildings in the city were damaged or destroyed in a single raid on Palm Sunday, 1942. They say in the mess that it could take fifty years to build the place back up again.” Miss Esterhazy looked up at Edith. “You’re from Coventry, aren’t you?”
Edith nodded. The bare-ruin’d choirs of the churches, the rubble-strewn emptiness that had once been the tangle of ancient streets between them. She knew what kind of damage a concerted raid on a small city could do.
A bitter wind whined up from the River Trave and whipped down the streets, fluttering slips of paper plastered onto walls, shop windows, and lampposts by worthless postage stamps bearing the head of Hitler. Notes put up by displaced persons: refugees, returnees trying to find lost relatives.
Edith stopped to read the little messages: Ich suche meine Frau, mein Mann, meine Tochter, mein Vater, meine Mutter, mein Kind . . . Last seen . . . Last known place . . .
Some had been there so long that the color of the stamps had faded, the paper puckered by sun and rain, the message disappearing to invisibility. There was something forlorn and hopeless about them, the chances of reunion so vanishingly small. Did any of them mention Elisabeth von Stavenow? Were any from her? The chances seemed even smaller. Edith’s heart sank further at the impossibility of it all.
“The authorities clear them away every now and then,” Roz commented, “but they keep coming back again.” Miss Esterhazy turned her astrakhan collar against the biting wind. “Come on, it’s best not to linger in this cold.”
Like any bombed city, the damage was patchy. Outside of the center, Lübeck was remarkably intact. The mess was well away from the scenes of devastation. A large house, commandeered from an architect. Pale oak paneling and parquet flooring. It remind
ed Edith of a college of the more modern sort. There were rooms upstairs for visitors, Roz explained, and a library, and a dining room.
A German attendant took their coats. Under the bulky bouclé, Miss Esterhazy was tiny, trimly dressed in a smart navy skirt and twinset with a wisp of scarlet polka-dotted scarf around her neck to add some color.
“I don’t know about you,” she said, “but I’m going to have a large sherry.”
“I’ll join you.”
They went into a spacious, pleasant sitting room. A waiter brought their drinks. Miss Esterhazy took off her spectacles to sign for them.
Without her glasses, she looked younger. She was really very pretty, with a finely chiseled nose and a pointed chin. Her carmine lipstick gave emphasis to the sculpted shape of her mouth, the upper lip curving like a Scythian bow. There was something East European about the tilted eyes, the flat cheekbones, the canna-lily skin.
“Esterhazy? Isn’t that Hungarian?” Edith said to break the silence that had grown between them.
“My father was Hungarian, my mother Austrian; that’s how I speak German. We moved to London when I was small. My real name is Rozália—my mother changed it to Rosalind to sound more English, but everyone calls me Roz.” She toyed with her glass. “I was working in an office back home. When I saw this, I jumped at it. I put down Austria; we still have family there. Instead, I end up here, about as far away as you can get!” Her laugh had a bitter edge. “That’s me, Miss Graham.”
“Call me Edith, please.”
“The Brigadier won’t like it.”
“Who’s to tell him? Call me Edith when we are out of the office,” Edith said. “And I can’t keep calling you Miss Esterhazy.”
“It is a bit of a mouthful.”
“Edith and Roz it will be, then.” Edith raised her glass in a mock toast. “Would you like another?”