Liberation

by Imogen Kealey

  Then Nancy’s men were back in the car, and she was back in her seat and the farmhouse disappeared back into the folds of the valley.

  Back at the bus, after she’d told them the location and timing of that night’s drop in a monotone, Mateo handed her a single sheet of paper.

  “It was pinned to Monsieur’s coat,” he said. Then he picked up his rifle and, with the other senior men, ducked out of the bus, leaving her alone with it.

  She unfolded it. Her picture. A good likeness too. “Reward for murderous and unnatural English spy, Nancy Wake, aka Madame Fiocca, aka the White Mouse. A million francs.” That boy could buy a new farm for that. She knew that wasn’t why he had attacked her, but for a moment she was sorry he hadn’t managed to get to gut stab her and claim the cash. Fuck. Get it together, Nancy. If they were ready to do this, hang a husband, a wife and an old man for her sake, what were they doing to Henri? She remembered the first time she had seen Gregory after his stay with the Gestapo, and tasted bile in her throat.

  The door of the bus slammed open. It was Denden.

  “Nancy! Have you sorted out the reception committees for tonight? They are going to rain all sorts of goodies on us.”

  She didn’t reply, just handed him the notice. He scanned it quickly, raised his eyebrows.

  “A million francs! My, my! Well, don’t let it go to your head.”

  She grabbed a glass off the table and poured herself a large measure of whatever the hell it was in the clear glass bottle on the shelf. Some sort of brandy. Burned like hell.

  “It’s not funny, Denden. These sick bastards have my husband, and they know exactly who I am. They’ll take it out on his hide.”

  He held up his hands. “Sorry, sorry! Just a stupid joke.”

  She poured herself another drink and drank it. Closed her eyes and saw the old man’s body swinging from the chestnut tree. Who would cut him down?

  “Yes, it’s all one big fucking joke to you, isn’t it?” she muttered darkly to the glass. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Denden flush.

  “What did you say?”

  “You know, Gaspard has a point.” She picked up the bottle and slouched opposite him, took another swig. “I’m responsible for hundreds of lives, but you prance around like you’re on holiday.”

  He lifted his hands. “Here we go!”

  “Sticking your cock in every hole you can find…” The corner of his eye twitched, a sure sign he was hurt. She knew that. Remembered it from training. Didn’t care.

  “Fine, Nancy! Take your guilt out on the queer!”

  “We’re out there, sacrificing everything…” She could feel the rope in her hands. She saw her own hands tying it round their necks. Saw herself kicking them out of the loft, laughing as the rope squeaked and stretched.

  “Yes, come on then, all your self-loathing, lance the boil…”

  “And you won’t even pick up a gun, because you are a fucking coward.”

  She took another swig, watching how the words stuck him right between the ribs.

  “Apologize, Nancy,” he said standing up, his face white.

  She looked at him and found she didn’t want to apologize. “That’s ‘Colonel’ to you.”

  He waited, and when he spoke again his voice was cold.

  “Message from London, Colonel. You are to pick up a shipment of bazookas and a man to train the Maquis in their use. Tomorrow night. Courçais. Rendezvous is the Café des Amis. Contact is blond, code name René. Ask him the time, he’ll tell you he sold his watch for brandy.”

  She studied him. He hated her at this moment, she could see it. And it felt right.

  “Dismissed.”

  He saluted and left her to the bottle.

  Still no proper sleep, and when she did fall into a half-doze, she dreamed of Böhm, his face in the square. It kept flickering in between memories of bomb blasts, of flames. Then, as his smile grew kinder, warmer, the flames engulfed her and she woke hearing her mother’s voice whispering in her ears. She came to, finding herself sitting on the edge of a field near Saint-Marc. For crying out loud, she’d been napping in the middle of a drop. The canisters were already coming down, the sky was full of them.

  She pushed herself to her feet and Tardivat turned to look at her.

  “Mon colonel,” he said softly. “Rest if you can, the men can gather these in. They know what to do.”

  She shook her head. “This is my job, Tardi.”

  “It is the job of each of us, and the responsibility of each of us.”

  Nancy didn’t hear the last part; she was already striding across the field.

  One of the containers had a black cross chalked on the side. A care package for her. Buckmaster must have passed the message to Denden that it was coming, and that was why he had been so cheery about the drop tonight. She remembered the first time one came, including face cream from Vera, it had felt like Christmas. She wasn’t looking for presents from Daddy Buckmaster now though. As soon as the container was in the back of the truck she clambered up after it and unbolted the latch, ignoring the grumbling of the men who muttered it “wasn’t procedure.” The cross marked not just the fact that the canister contained a package for Nancy, but also its rough position, so it was the work of minutes to pull it out from in between the packs of plastic explosive. She hopped out of the truck again and leaned against the cab as she unwrapped the bundle. More face cream and a bottle of cologne. The cologne was a decent antiseptic, so she kept that. The cream she would hand over to the first female villager she met. Then there was the letter.

  Very sorry to report no news of our friend delayed in Marseille, it said. Typed. She could see Vera at the desk in Baker Street tapping it out while the officers went to and fro in their nice clean uniforms discussing their losses among the agents in France: who was dead, who had burned out, who had ended up in a camp, a cellar. Then a note in Buckmaster’s firm hand. Courage, my dear. The end is coming.

  Fuck him. The nearest he’d got to action in this war was watching his agents clambering over an assault course. Had they even bothered trying to get any news of Henri? Of course they hadn’t. They were just pretending to keep her quiet a little longer. Keep her pretty nose to the grindstone until some Nazi sadist smashed her face to smithereens or hanged her from a hayloft. But Böhm knew. Böhm knew where Henri was.

  46

  The boy stepped into the middle of the road. Nancy had to brake hard and wrench the wheel to avoid killing the idiot. When he ran over to the window, Mateo curled his finger around the trigger of his pistol, but the boy was already talking too fast to notice.

  “Madame Nancy!”

  She recognized him now. She’d seen him peering at her from the doorway of a room in a house near here. His father had been one of the men killed in the rail attack Fournier led on D-Day. She remembered the speech she’d made to the young widow, one of ten she’d made that week telling families how the men they loved had died for France.

  “Relax, Mateo,” she whispered. “What is it, son?”

  “The Milice are in Courçais. They have sealed up the place,” the boy said. He was pale in the evening light. “You should stay away.”

  The Milice. Nancy hated them almost more than she hated the Nazis. French fascists given weapons and uniforms by Vichy and their German overlords to hunt Resistance fighters.

  “You and your mother doing OK? You need anything?”

  The boy shook his head. “My father would have wanted me to warn you,” he said staunchly.

  Nancy managed to smile at him; she knew it was fake, an impersonation of the sort of smile she might have given a boy like this a year ago, when she didn’t have blood in her eyes, but it was close enough to being real.

  “He would have been proud of you,” Nancy told him. “Thanks for the warning.”

  “You’re still going, Madame?” He looked up and down the road.

  “I am, kid. People to see.”

  She started the engine and left him on the r
oadside.

  Mateo cleared his throat. “But Nancy… we can arrange another meet.”

  She pressed her foot on the accelerator, feeling her heartbeat, steady and slow. “But Mateo, I need a drink.”

  The square was deserted. The main café was shuttered, but the place they’d been told to meet this René was up a narrow side street and the lamps inside were lit. There was hardly any one about, just an old man passing in the street, his shoulders hunched against the evening chill, glancing sideways at them as the light glimmering through the closed shutters of the café fell across their faces. Nancy pushed open the door. A quiet night, obviously. Only four men. All Milice. And the patron and a girl behind the bar. Looked like their contact wasn’t there yet.

  Nancy sat down at a table in the center of the room. The girl, stringy, and too young to be working in this place, approached them, her eyes darting everywhere.

  “Cognac, dear,” Nancy said. “Bring the bottle.”

  “Shit,” Mateo said as the girl went wordlessly to fetch it.

  “What?”

  “Look above the bar.”

  Nancy glanced over. Her wanted poster was pinned up on the beam.

  Mateo leaned closer. “Let’s go, Nancy. While we still can.”

  The girl came back and poured the first round.

  “Sorry, Mateo,” Nancy said. “But I really want this drink.”

  She knocked it back and the girl poured her another.

  “What’s your name, dear?”

  “Anne,” she replied in a whisper. Her hair was dirty but combed back carefully behind her ears and her cuffs were clean.

  Nancy smiled. “Like Anne of Green Gables! That’s my favorite book. Have you read it?”

  Mateo looked left and right. The other patrons were watching them now.

  The girl shook her head.

  “But how rude of me.” Nancy nudged Mateo, showing him the gun already in her hand under the table. “I should introduce myself. I’m Nancy Wake. That’s my poster above the bar.”

  The girl turned, blinked at it, then back at Nancy. “They are offering a lot of money for your capture, Madame.”

  Nancy nodded as if considering this question for the first time.

  “Yes. Do you know why the Gestapo offer steep rewards for people like me, Anne? It’s not to motivate the Germans—no. They’d shoot me or turn me in for free. It’s for the French. For French cowards. For men and women who want to lick the shit off Nazi boots rather than stand up and defend themselves. For Frenchmen who say they love their country and claim the people they betray are just criminals, Jews and communists. Clever. These rewards make us wary of friends and neighbors. My husband—one of his spineless employees ratted him out. But here’s the thing: collaborators won’t get to spend their reward. No, we’re going to find them—every Vichy politician, every Milice thug—and we’re going to hang them by their traitorous little necks.”

  One of the patrons stood, reaching for his side arm. Nancy spun round and shot twice from the hip just like they’d taught her. The man fell backward, sending the table and glasses smashing to the ground. Anne didn’t scream, just fled behind the bar.

  Nancy shot the second Milice while he was still fumbling to get his gun out of his holster.

  The third one came at her with a knife. Cowards and bullies joined the Milice, and cowards were no good in a knife fight. Nancy used his momentum to tip him down onto the wooden floorboards, then twisted the knife from his hand and plunged it into his neck in one smooth movement. Like a dance. And she had been such a good dancer. Oh those nights dancing with Henri under the star-spangled sky! The man beneath her spluttered, coughed a fine spray of blood, which she felt on her face like summer rain, and went still.

  One, two, three. Mateo killed the last of them as he made a dash for the door. He sprawled in front of it. From man to meat in three seconds. That was the lesson of war. We are all just flesh. Nancy reached for her glass and finished her drink. Good stuff.

  She was counting out notes to pay for the drinks, and a bit more for the mess, when the door jangled open and a tall skinny blond man in a black jacket stepped into the room. He saw the dead bodies on the floor, the smashed glasses, Mateo with his pistol drawn and Nancy paying the bill, her hands red with blood, and he laughed, loud and long.

  “Hey, this is better than the usual password bullshit! I’m René. If you’ve had enough fun, you want to come with me and pick up the stuff?”

  Nancy and Mateo followed him out back into the darkness.

  Heller said a word of thanks into the phone, then went directly along the corridor and knocked on the door of Böhm’s office, going in before waiting for a reply. Böhm was working in a circle of lamplight, making his steady way through the pile of action reports on his desk. The volume of them increased every day—robberies, ambushes, anti-German pamphleteering, crude caricatures of the Führer painted on the walls.

  “Madame Fiocca has been seen in Courçais,” Heller said as soon as Böhm looked up.

  “When?” Böhm asked.

  “Now. She was seen entering a café with a man not more than ten minutes ago.” Böhm got to his feet and Heller watched in confusion as he picked up his greatcoat.

  “Bring the car round, Heller. I want a team of our men to follow us from here, and send up three squads from the barracks. I will have checkpoints in place at the mile point on every road out of that village within the hour, please.”

  “We are going, sir? Now?”

  He saw Böhm’s face distort, a quick and suppressed glimmer of frustration, but when he spoke his voice was under control.

  “Courçais is only twenty minutes away in a fast car. Mrs. Fiocca obviously has business to attend to there. We go now. Too much time has been wasted in this war by men afraid to act independently and decisively, Heller. I will not be numbered among them.”

  47

  Mateo was pissed off at her. Nancy could feel it coming off him in waves as they sat in the cab of the little truck. He disapproved of what had happened in the café and now was shooting her brooding disappointed looks like a maiden aunt who caught you not sitting up straight at a tea party. What was his problem? He hated the Milice, and now there were four fewer of them in the world, and they’d died easily, not strung up in front of their families or tortured into madness in Gestapo cells.

  She was so busy being angry at him that she hardly noticed the track René was guiding them along in the chugging truck, out to the west of the village through copses of beech and chestnut. It ended at a two-story barn.

  They clambered out of the truck in silence and followed René into the barn. The air was cool and dry and smelled of leather and fresh straw. René hung up his lamp on a nail hammered into one of the struts between the stalls and rubbed his hands together. They watched as he kicked aside the straw and pulled up a trapdoor, chatting as he did. Not the babbling, ingratiating speech of a nervous man, just a low happy burble. Mateo might have disliked the scene at the bar, but René seemed only pleasantly amused by it.

  “Southgate arranged for these to be dropped in February but told me to keep them out of the way until D-Day. When I heard the news of the landings my fingers were itching to tell you, but no Southgate, no orders. Poor René! All these lovely toys and no one to play with them.”

  “The Gestapo picked up Southgate in Clermont in March.”

  René paused. “That is a shame. A nice man.” Then he giggled. “Though he lacked your flare, Colonel Wake.”

  He unhooked the lamp and lowered it so they could see inside the space dug under the barn. A dozen hessian-wrapped tubes. Nancy hadn’t seen a bazooka since training in the Hampshire mud, but she recognized the deadly heft of them, sleeping under the horses.

  “How much ammunition do you have?”

  “Enough to take out a battalion.” He caught the look in her eye and shrugged. “Fifty rounds for each.”

  “Come on then,” Mateo said gruffly, and they began to maneuver each one
out of its hiding place and stack them near the door.

  Heller had selected an excellent driver and they covered the ten miles to Courçais in just under twenty minutes. Heller struggled to keep his torch steady as they sped up the road, reading to Böhm from his intelligence file on the village and its inhabitants. The last dregs of the fallen brandy bottle were still dripping from the table top into the blood of one of the murdered Milice when Böhm entered the café.

  The bar owner stuttered out his account of the woman, the murders and the man who came to meet her. Half an hour later, Heller brought him the news that the checkpoints had been set up and Böhm left the scene of Nancy’s madness. All these strange meetings and coincidences. He felt almost sorry for her. If he could only reach her somehow, make her see. Lights were flickering behind the shutters of a dozen of the houses now. Heller followed him into the square and found him staring up into the star-studded sky.

  “Set up the loud speaker,” Böhm said.

  “It will take a little time, sir,” Heller replied.

  Böhm only nodded. He seemed deep in thought, still looking up into the night.

  The bazookas had a thrilling power to them, even in their hessian covers and smelling of straw and earth. Nancy smiled. A round could blow an armored jeep ten feet in the air. If you got lucky, they could disable or destroy a tank. They needed two men to operate them properly, and the guys using them needed to be properly trained or they’d blow each other apart, but it was like being able to carry a cannon over your shoulder.

  The door creaked open, and Nancy glanced round.

  The girl from the bar. René pointed his pistol from the hip; Nancy held up her hand and he didn’t fire. She stepped forward. The girl was shaking.