Liberation

  Denden was tugging at his own rope. “Darling, I swear by all that’s holy, you want to lean out over the edge too, you just don’t know it yet.”

  Satisfied with his knot, he took her hand and led her to the very edge of the drop. The rope behind her still seemed pretty slack. Even in the almost moonless dark he must have caught her expression.

  “Nancy Wake, I have set up the ropes for a thousand trapeze acts and tightrope walkers while you were swigging cheap champagne in cheap bars. Trust me. Just walk until your toes are on the very edge, then lean backward as far as you can. It’s utterly delicious.”

  He demonstrated, his whole body hovering above the deep dark, just his hands on the rope, his boots resting on the cliff edge.

  Oh, why not? Nancy turned, set her feet apart and leaned back. And felt it. The pull of gravity on her back, on her head, the comfortable tug on her arms as the rope tightened and held. This did feel good. She let a little more of the rope out, leaning farther back and bending her back—then laughed, a great burbling laugh that came from the soles of her feet and shook loose her whole body. Behind them the void pulled at them and the breeze whipped her hair across her face, but the void could go fuck itself. Captain Nancy Wake commanded gravity.

  “I never drank cheap champagne, you horror,” she said. “But you were right, Denden, I needed this.”

  Beside her, Denden let go with one hand and took one foot off the edge, swinging from side to side.

  “Best trick I learned in the circus. Whenever I hated my sinful self, which was every time I got hot for another boy, which was every goddamn day, well, I’d hang off the trapeze. No net. Made me feel alive again, being on the edge.”

  “It’s a ‘sod you’ to the universe, isn’t it!” Nancy said, then whooped, hearing her voice echo and bounce into the darkness below, and giggled.

  “It is! Don’t feel bad about destroying those bastards, Nancy. Even if you have to do it with your own hands. Use it! Use that feeling of being out over the edge to live. Sure I like shagging boys and people tell me I shouldn’t, and people tell you you should sit at home and let the men get their blood rage on. Well, screw them. Use your rage and never let them shame you for it.”

  “Thank you, Denden.” He got it. He got how it was to be her. She released one hand too, felt the lurch, re-found her balance and felt a surge of pleasure. “But you know you sound a bit like Dr. Timmons when you talk like that, don’t you?”

  He howled. “You monstrous witch! I’ve never been so insulted in my life.”

  Their laughter echoed down into the silence.

  33

  She could have sworn she’d barely closed her eyes, having stumbled back to camp exhausted and triumphant, when Denden woke her.

  “Nancy, there’s trouble! Come on!”

  She struggled clumsily into her clothes and boots. Not that she was hungover—no, lacking sleep, sir, that’s all… something in her eye made the light look a bit too bright. It was quiet in the camp, too quiet. What the hell?

  “Nancy!”

  “Jesus, I’m coming!”

  She stumbled out of the tent to see Denden was already deeper into the woodland in the direction of the hot spring, beckoning her on. She checked her side arm, then followed him. Perhaps Fournier had picked up a spy, and they wanted her help interrogating him. Or Denden thought it was time for the interrogation to stop… The thoughts chased themselves round her sodden head as she made her way down the path. She could hear men talking now, but although she couldn’t hear the words she could hear the tone. Relaxed, happy even. So what the…?

  She turned into the clearing and saw the old bus they’d stolen last night.

  “We left it at the bottom of the slope! How the hell did it get up here?”

  Most of Fournier’s men were here along with Fournier himself, the Spanish brothers and Tardivat. They were all dirty as sin and looked extremely pleased with themselves.

  “We pushed it up the hill, last night!” Jean-Clair said eagerly.

  Fournier took a cigarette from his mouth. “Thought you could do with some privacy, Captain. We’ve fixed it up a bit for you.”

  It was the first time he’d called her Captain without making her rank sound like an insult; first time he’d done so sober anyway.

  “Thanks,” she said, meaning it.

  They were waiting for her to go inside. She did and the men peered through the windows while she examined their work. Several rows of seats had been pulled out and the remaining ones rearranged to make a living space. Up front by the cab, a packing case table was surrounded with seats arranged in a U, like a meeting room. Against one side of the bus a couple more cases had been arranged on top of each other into shelves and one of the silly buggers had actually picked flowers, stuck them in an empty tin can and put it on top. Down the back of the bus, two more rows of seats had been shoved together to make a sort of cot. A nightdress, fashioned out of long panels of silk, was laid across it, along with a pair of folded blankets.

  She picked up the nightdress, felt the sheerness of the fabric, and put it across her arm before she went outside again. The men looked up at her, eager as puppies.

  “Bloody hell, guys. I love it!”

  They cheered and started slapping each other on the back again.

  “Right—breakfast now, I think,” Denden declared, rubbing his hands together. “Let the captain get settled in.”

  Grinning and shoving each other like kids on the way home from school, most of the men started drifting back up to the main clearing.

  “Tardi?” Nancy said.

  Tardivat disengaged himself from the back of the group and came back to her, his eyes lowered. She held up the ivory nightdress.

  “This is from my parachute. Tardivat, it’s perfect… But it’s for your wife.”

  He looked up as she held it against herself and ran her hands down its liquid folds. Then he smiled, a craftsman glad to see his work appreciated.

  “As is everything I create, Captain, but she can’t wear it. She died in forty-one. She’d want you to have this, I’m certain.”

  Nancy felt her throat close up. “Thank you,” she managed.

  The sun coming through the forest canopy pattered his face with light and shadow. “My pleasure, Captain.”

  He turned and walked away up the slope without waiting for her to say any more and Nancy watched him go. She had them now, Fournier and his men. They would follow her, they would listen, and when the invasion came she’d be able to provide London with a group of trained and disciplined fighters and saboteurs.

  The victory should have tasted sweet, but she could still feel something dark in it. She realized she was holding the fabric of the nightdress tightly in her hand and remembered the moment her training had taken over and she’d struck the blow across the German’s throat. She closed her eyes. Enough. It was necessary. If she wanted to fight alongside these men she had to live with the consequences. Still, it had been easy to shout about killing Nazis in London. It was harder than she had thought to do it with her own hands. Damn it. The thing that made her hate the Nazis was their contempt for human life, their brutality, and now she had to learn to have contempt for their lives, to not care that the guard she had killed, or the one whose blood Fournier had splattered all over her face with his bullet were, perhaps, just ordinary men with mothers and wives, caught up in something they didn’t really understand. But what was the alternative? Offer them tea and understanding? Send them to their rooms for being naughty murderous invaders? No. She needed to take on some of that brutality. Needed to sacrifice… what? Some corner of her soul. OK. She would take that deal.

  34

  Major Böhm was reading a letter from his wife when Heller knocked and entered his new office in Montluçon.

  Eva was well, and his daughter and the puppy were playing in the garden of their comfortable new house on the outskirts of Berlin. She was delighted to be out of France and among her own people and said all the proper
things about her admiration for his work and her desire to welcome him home when it was complete. He felt a twinge of envy. Montluçon was a fresh challenge, but the character of the people was more like the Slavs he had seen in the east than the sparkling, mercurial terrorists of Marseille. He could not quite decide if the people were as stupid as they pretended to be. Questioned about the roving gangs of Maquis, they offered nothing but a cow-like blank expression. No, they’d never heard anything about that sort of thing, sir. The officials blinked and promised they’d do everything they could to assist the major, but somehow the papers and reports he requested were painfully slow in coming.

  Heller set a knife on his desk and Böhm studied it.

  “I thought you might wish to see it, sir. It was dropped during the raid on the transmitter at Chaudes-Aigues.”

  Böhm set down his letter. “Were there any witnesses?”

  Heller shook his head. “Two survivors, but they never saw the team which staged the raid.”

  “They used TNT?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Böhm picked up the knife, testing its weight. “This, Heller, is a Fairbairn-Sykes knife. Standard issue for British agents dropped into France to encourage and coordinate the rabble in the hills.”

  Böhm practiced a slash and thrust in the air and nodded his approval. It was a well-made weapon.

  “I think, Heller, it is time to show the French populace that our patience is not without limit.”

  35

  Sometimes there were moments when Nancy could forget the war. Just moments, but they existed—strange glimmers of light when she was so tired her brain switched off and she was freewheeling on her bike on a lonely back road with the scent of late spring in the air and the sunlight patterning through the trees hypnotizing her.

  The parachute drops were coming every night when there was enough moon, and every day more young men arrived at the campsites dotted across the plateau, in abandoned farms and patches of forest. She trained them, trained them to teach each other, distributed supplies and weapons, established escape routes and fallback rendezvous points, and gave a quiet nod when they approached her with plans for small-scale ambushes, thefts and plans for minor sabotage. She would not risk large actions, but she had seen the benefits of on-the-job training, and thought London would just have to trust her not to fuck up before D-Day. Then there was all the pastoral care. Money to be handed out, news to be exchanged. And every day someone asked her when the Allies were coming, and every day she said “soon” and hoped to God it was true, though she knew that landing would only be the start, the moment their work could begin in earnest. Until then, it was all preparation.

  The track curved and she slowed down, coming back to herself reluctantly. Tardivat had said he thought these fields south of the Maleval River would make a decent drop site, and she wanted to see them for herself. She hid her bike behind the hedge near a likely candidate and began to scope it out. Promising. Yes, this one would do, if the farmer who owned it was willing to turn a blind eye. She paced it out. Roughly seven hundred meters square. Spot-on. And no telephone wires or cables anywhere near. Decent cover, but it wouldn’t hide the signal fires from the approaching planes. So far so good. But to the west the ground sloped sharply upward between here and Chaudes-Aigues. Not steep or high enough to be a problem for the planes, but she’d have to hike to the top of the hill. If there were easy tracks up there from the town and the Germans spotted the planes coming over, they could trek up there, then launch an attack on Nancy and her men while they gathered in the parachute containers. If, though, the forest between the town and the top of the slope was densely wooded, it would be worth the risk. She’d just make sure they posted lookouts up here to watch for torches or signs of activity in the town below.

  She headed up the slope. She could feel the sweat trickling down the small of her back as she went. Did she need to find more locations to conceal the goodies they already had? Some of their stashes were turning into Aladdin’s caves of arms and ammunition. She needed to send the Spaniards out scouting for fresh places to conceal arms in the woods, perhaps along escape routes they’d worked out. Or, better still, a few totally remote locations known only to a few, so that if the Germans ever managed to deal them a severe blow, whoever survived would be able to find a gun and a bullet.

  When the gradient leveled out, she walked south for a thousand paces and, seeing no easy access for the Germans that way, turned, retraced her steps and continued north till she came to a point where the slope fell hard and fast under her toward the town. No easy route from here either, which was perfect, and from this point she could look directly down into the center of the town. A lookout standing where she was now would be able to signal to the reception committee in the field if things started getting lively.

  A movement below caught her eye. Not the usual comings and goings of the townspeople. Something different.

  She lifted her field glasses and trained them on a group of gray uniforms clustered at the top of the market place. They parted, and she saw they had a man and woman in civilian clothes on the ground between them. Nancy tightened her grip on the binoculars. Some of the soldiers dragged the two civilians to their feet. The woman twisted in their grip and she saw the heavy swell of her belly. The man struggled hard. Nancy could hear nothing but the stir of the leaves in the woodland around her, but she could see the man was screaming, his body bent double. She swallowed. She knew them both.

  The man was one of Gaspard’s. He’d been in the barn when they pulled the feed sack off her head. She recognized the woman too. When she was in town a week or so earlier, the pregnant girl had approached her. Said she knew she wasn’t due anything because her husband wasn’t one of Fournier’s men, but if Madame could perhaps help with something for the baby? The baby had swung it. Nancy had given the girl fifty francs and a couple of bars of chocolate, knowing it would piss off Gaspard if he found out she was giving charity to the families of his men. Elisabeth, that was her name. Her husband was Luc.

  The soldiers lifted her onto the base of the market cross and were tying her hands behind it. SS men. Luc was on his knees now, begging at the feet of an officer in polished boots and the cap of a major. He lifted his hand. One of his soldiers unslung his rifle and fixed his bayonet. Nancy tasted something bitter and acrid in her throat.

  She spoke out loud. “No. No. They can’t…”

  The major dropped his hand and the soldier presented his weapon, but rather than a direct stab into the bound woman’s belly, he swung the blade sideways, under the curve of her pregnancy. Nancy dropped the glasses and turned sideways throwing up her guts into the grass.

  She didn’t want to see any more. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. She had to. Someone had to see this. She lifted her glasses again. The woman’s front was soaked with blood, and there was a purplish slop at her feet. Her dress had been pulled from her shoulder and Nancy could see the whiteness of her neck. She was still alive, twisting her head from side to side in rolling arcs.

  “Just die,” Nancy whispered. “Please, sweet girl, just die.”

  Luc was at the major’s feet, his hands together, pleading. The major had a pistol in his hand and was pointing it upward at Elisabeth’s head. He was saying something.

  Luc dropped his arms to his side. The officer appeared to be listening.

  The major’s hand twitched. Nancy heard the echo of the shot a second later, quiet as a twig snapping underfoot. Elisabeth slumped forward. Luc was still on his knees staring at her. He didn’t react, didn’t move at all as the officer walked over to him and shot him through the back of the head.

  Then the major turned and looked out into the hills, and Nancy saw his face for the first time.

  Major Böhm.

  He was looking directly at her, smiling that same pleasant, slightly patronizing smile he had worn when he showed her out of the Gestapo headquarters in Marseille the day he arrested Henri.

  She lowered her gl
asses and started to walk down the slope toward her bike, then her legs went out from under her and she was sitting at the base of a mountain ash, her breath coming in short tight pants, her chest tight, her head spinning.

  Stop it. Stop it. Slow down. Don’t think about it, think about what it means. What did Luc say to Böhm? What did he trade to end the torture of his wife?

  She shot to her feet. Rage, pure rage took her down the slope, across the field and onto her bike. Rage carried her up the flank of the valley and into the hills. Rage carried her over every one of the twenty miles to the first of Gaspard’s sentries as they blocked her path on the track on Mont Mouchet.

  “Madame Wake, such a pleasure,” the Maquisard said.

  “Drop the pleasantries, you little shit, and take me to Gaspard. Now!”

  If she’d had time to think, she might have realized this wasn’t going to go well. Gaspard would have heard that Fournier’s men now had Brens and TNT and plastic explosive and were having fun practicing with them from Clermont-Ferrand to Aurillac. Their victory blowing up the radio tower would have put his nose out of joint too, and none of that would put him in the mood to listen. She didn’t have time to play nicely though.

  She told him what she had seen.

  “You have to leave here,” she said into the sickened silence that followed.

  Gaspard was sitting on a crate by the fire pit. They had a tarp rigged above it so the smoke wouldn’t give them away to the occasional air patrols, though that and the lookouts along the roads seemed to be where their security measures stopped. At least seventy of his men were enjoying the sunshine in the open space around them. There were probably two or three hundred more in the immediate area.

  Gaspard looked at her as if she had suggested popping into town and sorting it all out over a drink with Major Böhm.

  “No.”

  Pig-headed, stupid arsehole. Deep breath. Explain it in terms even he can understand.