Liberation

  A noticeboard was bolted to the wall just inside the door. Nancy looked at it sideways, just long enough to see Fournier’s picture and her own, and the ridiculous money now being offered to deliver them to this very building. The sentry didn’t glance at it, just led her, thumping in his heavy boots, up the narrow service stairs and then out into the part of the building designed for the guests of the hotel, and now the officers. Heavy wood paneling was punctuated with huge mirrors and electric lights glowed under stained-glass shades. Nancy walked between an infinite number of images of herself. The sentry became an army and so did she, their footsteps now muffled by the thick carpets.

  He pushed open a door, nodded her in with a sneer. Five men looked up from the table. None of them Böhm. Her instinct had been correct. He was pure SS and would never corrupt his flesh with a French whore. These men looked up at her with greedy surprise.

  Another girl was already here, a blonde, sitting on the knee of an officer who didn’t look more than twenty, blushing to the tip of his ears as she caressed the back of his neck and wriggled a little on his lap, making the older men laugh.

  The captain nearest Nancy reached out and put his arm around her waist, pulling her toward him, running his other hand over her breasts and down her front, then pushing his hand up her skirt, inserting a finger between the top of her stocking and the flesh of her thigh. He didn’t even look up at her face.

  “Sweet stranger, how kind of Madame Juliette to give us something fresh.”

  Nancy lifted the cap from his head and put it on, then leaned forward to kiss the top of his balding pate.

  “Fresh and strong, sir,” she said breathily, pressing closer to him. His fingers strayed up to the cotton of her knickers and the other men chuckled. “Another drink?”

  He let her move away to the side table where a carafe of red wine stood, surrounded by a dozen glasses. One of the other officers was growing impatient with the youth. He moved up his chair and began kissing the girl’s neck, kneading her breasts with his fat fingers while she giggled and groaned and squirmed on the boy’s lap. They were all red in the face, sweaty with building desire, impatient. They couldn’t take their eyes off the blonde.

  Nancy poured the contents of her scent bottle into the wine and swilled it round in the decanter before filling the glasses and setting them on the table in front of each officer, then resumed her place next to her fat-fingered friend and lifting her own glass.

  “The Führer!” she said. Even in their present state, their conditioning kicked in. Each man grabbed his glass, and raised it before drinking, repeating the toast, even if they couldn’t look away from the girl panting on the boy’s lap.

  Nancy felt the wine touch her lips; aware of the urge to drink herself, take it down to the dregs, but resisting. Böhm was somewhere in this building, waiting for her.

  All credit to the SOE, things happened very quickly now. Her fat-fingered friend began to pant, his hand to his throat. One of the others stood up, took two stumbling paces to the door, then fell onto the red and blue rug laid over the polished parquet and began to fit.

  Nancy’s officer looked up at her face for the first time, his fleshy face registering shock, rage and finally, Nancy noticed with great satisfaction, recognition. He fumbled for his pistol, and Nancy didn’t even try to stop him, just pulled the commando knife from his belt and cut his throat.

  The girl scrambled away into the corner of the room, too shocked to scream, covering her face with her hands. Nancy undid the belt from her officer, now slumped on the table in front of her, and did it up around her own waist. It sat on her hips like the belt of a western gunslinger. The boy was already dead. The last officer managed to raise his gun, but he was vomiting at the same time, and fell sideways onto the floor before he managed to squeeze off a shot.

  Nancy stepped over his thrashing body and pulled back the curtains at the window and, with the light behind her, waved into the darkness. Not exactly a subtle signal, but it didn’t need to be.

  The darkness, the void, had her now. It was Nietzsche these moronic sadistic shits liked, wasn’t it? That line, “If you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back at you”? She’d always thought it sounded a bit weak, the sort of thing that drunk journalists said to each other in Parisian bars when they were boasting about all the dangerous men they had encountered. But she got it now. She was the abyss, she had drunk it into herself in those moments after she had shot Böhm’s spy, and now the abyss wasn’t just looking back at these mad men—it was coming to swallow them up.

  53

  The roar of an engine up the road and the guards scrambled to their guns, but too slow. The quiet of the streets had been of expectation, not peace. The van, stolen from the gendarme station, smashed into the courtyard, Juan leaped from the cab and took out the sentry who had escorted her in, while Rodrigo stood on the running plate and took out the left machine-gun post with a blast from his Bren. Juan was already running up the shallow steps to the right firing from his hip. Nancy watched, smiling, as René stood and fired the bazooka straight into the back door.

  The building shook and the remaining glasses rattled on the sideboard behind Nancy. The girl squealed. Half a dozen more men charged in behind the van through the broken barrier, and four of them took positions in the high guard posts. The insistent regular burst of fire from the captured machine guns met the half-dressed guards stumbling out of the shattered back door.

  Nancy stepped back over the corpses of the officers, checked the pistol and her ammunition, then stepped out into the hall. It was just like training, those walks in Inverness where the instructors pulled their levers and targets dropped down in front of you, out of the bushes, from behind doorways. Nancy shot from her hip, double taps, one, two, clearing out two sentries as they turned the corner into the paneled corridor. A sleepy-looking captain stumbled out of one of the rooms, still hooking his thin steel rimmed glasses behind his ears and blinking in confusion. He froze when he saw her, then raised his hands, started to speak. Nancy fired twice into the center of his chest and the force of the bullets knocked him back into the room. She crossed the corridor and glanced down at him. His lips were still moving, but she couldn’t hear his secrets any more than she had heard the secrets of that French boy she had watched dying on the street in Marseille. His eyes blinked behind his glasses. She shot him through his forehead and walked away. Another Nazi eaten by the void. She holstered her side arm and took out her knife.

  The Germans were all focused on the assault at the rear, so half of the sentries she encountered had their backs to her. It made killing them almost too easy. The knife was becoming slippery in her hand, so she wiped her palm and its hilt on her dress, humming the Partisan song. She walked down the grand staircase as if she was meeting her husband for drinks in the hotel bar. Little men in gray-green, scurrying about. She heard a yell and a burst of gunfire from the direction of the kitchens. Some of the men were in the headquarters with her then. She had to move briskly. Ground floor. Offices.

  A sergeant, urging his men through to the rear of the building, turned and found her facing him. He reacted quickly, knowing he had no time to reach for his gun or knife, and rammed his fist at her.

  She caught the blow on her left forearm, felt the flesh and bone of her body shudder, then drove her knife into his belly, slicing upward. This knife was almost as good as her own Fairbairn-Sykes number. London had sent her out a replacement for the one she’d lost almost immediately. Thanks, Uncle Bucky.

  The manager’s office. Of course that would be his, with its triple-locked safe and tall windows over the courtyard garden, which lay in the center of the hotel buildings. The door opened as she approached, and another young officer, this one with almost white-blond hair, emerged, a heavy-looking trunk of papers in his arms. He was speaking over his shoulder to someone in the room. She shot him in the face. She wasn’t sure if it was because she thought the box in his arms might deflect a bullet or just because she want
ed to.

  She stepped over his body and into the room. There he was, Major Böhm, looking exactly as he had in Marseille when they had last met, right down to the smile of polite surprise. He was standing by the neatly arranged bookcases as if choosing one for his night-time reading.

  “Mrs. Fiocca! You have come to make another inquiry about your husband, I take it? I am afraid you are not here to make the deal we spoke of in Courçais, given the manner of your arrival.” He shook his head slightly. “I confess I am surprised. I felt sure you would trade your life for Henri’s after all you have put him through.”

  He was speaking in English and she replied in the same language, the words feeling strange and awkward in her mouth.

  “Anne told me you had murdered him.”

  Böhm looked deeply saddened. “I understand. No, no, Madame Fiocca. Why would I kill someone so useful?”

  Henri. She could see him as if he were in front of her, his dinner jacket slung over his shoulder. She holstered her revolver.

  “He’s told me so much about you.”

  Nancy’s head spun. Her rich, sustaining rage was now caught up and confused with love, with hope. “Is he here?”

  “No. But he’s in a safe place though. Very safe.”

  Enough. She would cut the truth out of Böhm’s black heart. She launched herself at him, her knife raised to slash across his face. Her line of attack was obvious. He took a step back so his back was against the desk and caught her wrist as she came into the strike and held it in his right hand. His left arm locked around her waist, stopping her pulling free. The blade shook, their strengths balanced between them.

  “He wouldn’t know you now, of course,” Böhm said through gritted teeth. “You’re not Nancy Wake any more, are you?” She willed the blade forward, it shivered closer to his skin. “Or maybe you’ve discovered your true nature at last. You’re just what your mother said you were. A punishment to those who love you. Ugly, dirty, sin and waste of skin.”

  The image of Böhm and Henri sitting together in a room, like confiding friends. Discussing what Nancy’s mother had said to her, the poison she had dripped into Nancy’s bloodstream every day until Nancy had run. And kept running.

  “Mon colonel!” It was René looking for her, shouting from the lobby. “SS reinforcements arriving. Let’s go!”

  There was another explosion from the lobby of the headquarters and Böhm thrust her away from him. She stumbled, went down on her knees and when she looked up again he had his revolver in his hand, aiming at her head.

  “Better he does not see you as you really are.”

  She bared her teeth at him. He grunted, as if amused, and kept the gun steadily pointing at her head.

  She heard René call for her again.

  “Do you know what this symbol means?” he asked.

  She let her gaze flick down. The carpet on which she was kneeling, spattered with the blood of the man she had killed in the doorway, was patterned with swastikas, but not in black and red—they were spinning in rows of green and gold.

  “It’s Tibetan in origin,” Böhm continued. “It represents the sun. The Supreme Masculine. The Führer reminds us of that so we all strive to please him. He is our father. And how old were you when your father left? What would he think of his little girl now?” Again, that polite smile. “You’ve killed your men, you know. You let a spy give away your position then pull out twenty of your best fighting men for a suicide raid here? I ordered an attack on your camp at Chaudes-Aigues as soon as reports of Anne’s signal came in.”

  The door burst open. René, revolver at the ready. Böhm turned toward him, but before René could fire, Nancy sprang across the carpet, her knife in her hand, and slashed at Böhm’s face.

  “Fuck!” René yelled, just managing to jerk the muzzle of his revolver upward so the bullet, already speeding from the chamber, shattered the window rather than burying itself in Nancy’s back.

  Nancy caught him across his cheekbone, and the force of her attack made him stagger sideways, striking his wrist against the edge of the desk so his gun spun from his grip. He screamed, hand to the wound. The blood leaked immediately through his fingers and onto his collar. She came at him again, but René caught her around the waist lifting her away bodily, carrying her out of the room as she howled with rage.

  “Now, Nancy!” He screamed at her, setting her down in the hall and shoving her in the small of the back toward the lobby. “Playtime’s over!”

  Smoke, bodies. René threw grenades ahead of them to clear their path, pulling her sideways to shield her from the explosion. The mirrors shattered, the wood paneling splintering, the long after-hiss and rumble of masonry and plaster and a dense gray cloud of smoke and dust surrounding them. René dragged her forward again and she stumbled over a gut-shot soldier still twitching at her feet. The lobby. René rolled another grenade toward the double doors of the front entrance, and as it blew her hearing was knocked out, replaced by a high-pitched, insistent whine.

  René pulled her through the burning doors into the street, then picked her up again, throwing her into the back of a flat-bed truck, its cold metal floor already slick with blood. Franc was slumped beside her, back against the cab, trying to hold his insides in with this hands. She snatched his Bren off his lap and fired short bursts at the few Germans trying to pursue. They fell or scattered, looking for cover. Only when they reached the outskirts of Montluçon did she look at Franc again. He was still, staring sightless back at the hell they had left behind them.

  54

  The French workmen had just finished hammering sheets of plywood over the shattered window when Captain Rohrbach came into Böhm’s office, giving the room the gloom of late afternoon, though it was still not yet 9 a.m.

  The body of the corporal had been removed, but the bloodstained rug was still in place. Rohrbach glanced down at it as he came in, watching his step.

  “Thirty-eight dead, sir.”

  Rohrbach had volunteered himself to serve as Böhm’s new principal assistant eight hours earlier, and so far was doing a good job, gathering information, interviewing witnesses and arranging work parties to make the building safe while Böhm had his wound treated, and examined his new face in his shaving mirror.

  Böhm himself had found Heller’s body in the upstairs corridor. His protégé had been shot twice in the chest and once through his forehead. Executed by Mrs. Fiocca herself as she made her bloody way from the officers’ meeting room to his office. Heller’s death hurt and surprised him, not only because Böhm appreciated his junior officer’s capacity for hard work, his intelligence, but also because so many men like him, men on whom the Reich had planned to build its glorious future, had been lost. And lost to the stubborn, senseless Resistance of degenerates like Mrs. Fiocca and their subhuman allies in the east.

  Böhm resolved to ask his wife to visit Heller’s family when she had the opportunity. It was fitting for them to mourn together with his people both the man and what he represented.

  Böhm dismissed the workmen—they shuffled out without speaking—before he spoke to Rohrbach again.

  “And the Maquis camp?” Böhm asked. He spoke lightly, but the answer would make all the difference as to whether he could paint the events of yesterday as a success or not.

  “The base itself was utterly destroyed by the bombings in the early evening,” Rohrbach replied. “The snatch squads who went in before the ground troops managed to capture a number of fighters alive, and their information led to the discovery of several significant stashes of weapons in the surrounding area.”

  The snatch squads were an innovation of Böhm’s, eagerly adopted by Commander Schultz of the Waffen-SS troops who led the raid. He was all too aware of the frustrations of chasing parachute drops. Better to let the Resistance tidy it all away, then seize their supplies by the truckload when they thought they were secure. Good.

  “And the ground assault?”

  Commander Schultz had also agreed that an attack i
n darkness would give the SS a tactical advantage. In daylight the Resistance’s knowledge of the terrain gave them an undeniable edge. Darkness reduced it. Another suggestion of Böhm’s.

  “Final numbers are not confirmed, but current estimates are some hundred Maquisards dead, many more wounded and all the fighters dispersed,” Rohrbach said, a glimmer of satisfaction on his face. “But Commander Schultz was badly injured by a wounded fighter as he toured the remains of the camp. He is unlikely to survive.”

  “That is a loss,” Böhm replied quietly.

  Böhm’s wound had been cleaned, stitched and bandaged. Now it stung. Strange that by studying abroad he had reached adulthood without the dueling scars deemed so important to the manhood of many in the older German universities, but he had one now. Mrs. Fiocca had given him a perfect example, slicing his cheekbone.

  “Your opinion of the action, Rohrbach?”

  Rohrbach started with surprise, but to his credit took a moment to consider and answered crisply.

  “An unqualified success, sir. The Waffen-SS proved more than a match for the Maquis this time. We were, perhaps, lucky that the White Mouse chose to stage her raid today, leaving the camp without some of its best fighters.” Böhm thought briefly of Heller. Rohrbach was getting into his stride now. “It is shocking that some of the officers here were bypassing basic security however to satisfy distasteful appetites.” He produced a sheet from the files under his arm. “I suggest the following changes to security protocols.”

  Böhm scanned the sheet as it was laid on his table. Perfectly sensible. He would include some of the points in his own report. Yes, last night had been a victory, though for one moment as that maddened woman threw herself across the room at him, her knife in her hand, he had doubted it.

  55

  Nancy’s raiding party returned in time to at least offer a distraction and keep some of the escape routes open down the valley, but as the hours unspooled the scale of the loss became clear. Several of the larger arms stashes gone, their field hospital and its supplies, Nancy’s bus and the storehouse all destroyed. And the men lost.