A Treachery of Spies

by Manda Scott

  ‘Here.’ She has a pack on her back, bulging.

  ‘Give it to me.’

  ‘Larry, you don’t have to—’

  ‘Let’s not go through this again, shall we? This is your show. You direct the men. I am wholly superfluous, but I do know how to place charges to blow a bridge. I may as well make myself useful.’

  Wordless, she hands him the bag. ‘It needs to break—’

  ‘Either side of the centre. I do know this.’

  ‘I can take one side.’ Paul Rey is beside him. Laurence wants to say no, we can’t both take on a suicide stunt, but Céline nods, as if this has sealed it. ‘Do it. We’ll hold them off. Call me when you’re done.’

  She is gone, a wisp in the morning mist, easing up the bridge, pausing, firing, moving on again.

  Paul Rey watches her go, thoughtfully. ‘Is she spoken for?’

  Laurence says. ‘She was.’

  Rey is smarter than he looks. He gives a rueful shrug. ‘Reckon she’ll get over it?’

  ‘Not so that you’d notice.’

  ‘Pity.’

  ‘You should meet Sophie. I think she may be less one-hearted. If we live through the next half-hour, I’ll make the introduction.’ And then, swiftly, because this is altogether too much like the real thing: ‘Shall we go?’

  This is the real thing. Every bridge is built to be repaired, and if it can be repaired, then you can demolish it. This is what they were taught in lectures, and in Cambridge, in Slough, in Shrewsbury, it proved to be true: always there was a way of gaining access to the underside – handholds or footplates, or something to give the maintenance engineers an easier life.

  And so it is in France. Laurence goes back to the head of the bridge and squirms down the embankment, next to the concrete footings that tie bridge to bank. Here is an iron ladder leading up to a set of rusting handholds, set into the fabric of the bridge, so that he can remain upright, with his head almost meeting the concrete and his feet braced against the edges. ‘Found them.’

  ‘Here too,’ Rey says, from the other side.

  ‘See you at the middle.’

  His injured hand is functional. It is not fully fit. He does what he can to spread the weight to his feet and crabs sideways, hand over hand, shuffling, listening to the chatter of machine guns up above, to the intermittent crump of a mortar. He isn’t hearing much by way of German guns, but perhaps he is not in the right place.

  He moves on and is out, over the river far, far below. In practice, they were always roped on.

  Hand over hand and don’t look down. Hand over hand, feet shuffle sideways. Breathe in the dust, the old concrete, the rust, the meaty, fresh-iron scent of gunshots and blood. His shoulders ache. His hand is cramping, badly.

  There’s a notch in the concrete on the underside of the bridge: a mark deliberately made. Here is a place where he can sit and breathe a bit. He says, ‘Here.’

  And now the difficult part. Bracing his feet apart, holding on with his good hand, he brings the sack of explosive round to lie on his belly. From there, he pulls out the doughy balls of plastique. It’s the 808, the one that gives everyone vomiting headaches. His cousin has wrapped each grenade-sized mass in rags. He lifts them out, precious as Fabergé eggs, and jams them deep into the heart of the superstructure, an arm’s length either side of the midpoint.

  Rey asks, ‘Black or red?’

  Black is ten minutes. It’s taken them six to get here and the pencils are notoriously unstable in warm weather. Laurence says, ‘It has to be red. And we have to hold them off long enough.’

  ‘Let’s do it.’

  And so to the detonators: crushed, inserted.

  ‘Time to go,’ Rey says.

  ‘Fastest one wins!’

  It feels a lot further back to land. The bridge has lengthened and he is clambering for ever, making no progress. He swears in his head, every blue word he has ever heard or even imagined. His legs judder. He thinks of Patrick, and what has been done to him. He has no idea of the detail, only that he was left hanging by the wrists when Kramme left. Three days of torture and he told them nothing. And so it is possible, after all, to go on.

  And on.

  And—

  ‘OK. You’re here. Larry, it’s OK. Let go.’ Paul Rey made it to dry land ahead of him. His hard, competent hands reach for his shoulders, lift him bodily from the bridge and set his feet on the bank.

  He can’t stand. He kneels at the bridge-end, cups his hands to his mouth and gives the same high call he gave in the dark, the one her mother used to use when they were children at Ridgemount, playing too far from the house. For good measure, he fires his Colt into the air three times, aiming down the valley.

  He doesn’t know if he has been heard. He stands, shaking the tension out of his limbs. ‘I swear my arms are two inches longer.’

  From higher up among the trees comes a boy’s voice. ‘Tanks. I can see tanks.’

  So he can stand after all, and run. A boy with a bandaged hand is sitting on the branches of a tree with Céline’s field glasses making red circles around his eyes. ‘Over there.’ He points with his good hand.

  Laurence hoists himself up beside him. ‘Let me see.’

  ‘Alongside the river. At the notch where it goes between the hills.’

  And yes, on the road, too far away to be heard, are the child’s toys, weaving among matchstick-trees, a long, unending line, all in grey.

  ‘Will the bridge blow up in time?’

  ‘That’s the question, isn’t it? We have twenty minutes, give or take five.’ Laurence squints through shaded eyes. ‘We need to call Céline back.’

  ‘You won’t get her,’ the boy says, with evident pride. ‘When she’s like this, the only thing that will stop her is a rifle.’

  Paul Rey winces. ‘So let’s go give a helping hand. The sooner finished, the sooner they’ll come back.’

  They run. They fight. Here, more than ever in training, the Jedburghs are free of all constraint. They are apart from time, from care, from fear. Death walks amongst them, whistling. They are invincible, invulnerable: gods of devastation and vengeance.

  Ten minutes into the most vicious fire fight he can imagine, they find Céline crouching behind the smouldering-hot wreck of the Horch sedan. She’s firing a Schmeisser. Her Sten is empty, discarded. A welt of red, wet blood stretches from her nose to her temple. Laurence is fairly certain it isn’t hers.

  ‘If the timer holds, you have five minutes to get your men back to the bank.’ He is laughing, breathless. She stares at him a moment, as if he’s spoken Greek. Or rather, some language she doesn’t know. He thinks he may have to slap her, but she shakes herself, dog-like, and smiles at him distantly, and then, in a moment, more warmly.

  ‘We’d better go.’ She takes a whistle from her pocket and gives three ear-rending blasts.

  Five minutes later, all but two of her men are back on the right side of the bridge, crouched behind the poor cover, killing anyone in a grey uniform who strays into view. The two left behind are dead. Two out of two dozen: a miracle.

  The tanks are audible now. The bridge reverberates to the throaty rhythm of the treads. Amongst the trees, grey uniforms come and go.

  Paul Rey crosses himself. Beneath his sandy thatch of hair, his freckles make islands in the whey of his face. ‘We’re not going to make it.’

  Céline shakes her head. ‘We already made it. They won’t get over now.’

  Her words cause the world to end. A blinding explosion, a brilliance of sound. Everything stops: hearts, breath, thought, sight and sound. And when each of these returns and is assembled in its rightful place, the bridge is gone, and on the other side, tanks round the elbow of the hill and judder into line. Their turrets turn and waver, blindly. Men jump out, men with machine guns. Viewed through the field glasses, it is clear that one or two have rifles. At least one has a sniper’s scope.

  Laurence says, ‘We should leave now.’ And they do.

  CHAPTER TWENT
Y-THREE

  THE MOUNTAINS OF MOREZ

  26 June 1944

  SOPHIE WAKES TO the distant grind of the trucks and, by this, knows she has been asleep.

  She lies a moment, steeling herself, then rolls off the straw palette, shrugs on a shirt and men’s trousers, pulls on socks and boots.

  Here, under the trees, there’s a fire to build up – small, so that it does not light the forest – and a kettle to hang on the cast iron hoop that stands over it, ‘coffee’ to pour in from the tin in the box that’s kept in the small shed next to her sleeping hut. She does these things automatically now, and swiftly, with her attention divided between the trucks grinding their way up the hill and the shepherd’s hut set away from the rest: their infirmary.

  She has lived within reach of this hut for nearly three weeks, during which the others have been out on nightly raids. She has always been invited, but each time, the need to be here has outweighed the need to kill and she has turned them down.

  The Patron is her priority. Céline didn’t need to push: since the moment they cut him down from the hook in Kramme’s office, his welfare has been Sophie’s sole concern. Her guilt drives her, and the uncertainty of her culpability, but even without that, she is a nurse; it was her vocation long before she discovered a penchant for killing.

  Thus, day by day, hour by hour, she has sat with the man she now knows as Patrick, helping him to drink at first, and then, later, to eat. Eating is still not easy. Speaking is almost impossible. He doesn’t try except in extremis and they both regret it after. Céline’s wish to see him up and walking is a fantasy of impossible proportions.

  To the south, a small stream skips down the mountain. Sophie kneels and washes her face in the snow-cold water, straightens her collar, pulls fingers through her hair. Small things matter. She learned this long ago in Paris: an injured man sees himself reflected in the woman who tends him. Today matters more than most.

  She pushes open the door to release the first gust of not-quite-healing flesh. Her stock of penicillin is running low. Kramme told her once that when he was with the armies of the Eastern Front, he saw the nurses set up condensing stills to boil the men’s urine and reclaim the penicillin so they could use it again.

  She isn’t sure she believes this will work, and certainly doesn’t want to test it, so she is using smaller doses, further apart, and keeps asking for more. When Laurence Vaughan-Thomas comes, he will bring it. All night, she has thought this: he will come. He will bring what the Patron needs. What else he may say or do is beyond her ken. He would be well within his rights to shoot her. Pick your crime: I was ordered to kill Kramme and I failed. I was ordered to protect Patrick Sutherland at all costs and at that, too, I failed.

  Céline, she thinks, would be happy to see her dead, but Céline is very hard to read. Since the confrontation over Kramme’s ciphers, she has been affable, almost friendly, except last night, when she was on edge, smoking too much, counting the minutes until she could round up the men and drive out.

  They have not spoken of Diem, of who betrayed the Patron to Kramme. If it was not Sophie – and she holds a corner of her heart where it was not – there are only a handful of other options: JJ, René, Daniel – each unthinkable. Maybe it was Raymond. Maybe he isn’t dead, after all, but living a good life under Kramme’s protection. He can’t be, though: they would never have done what they did to René if Raymond was still alive. It could have been him though, and he died by a stray shot gone wide from the main battle. Maybe.

  The trucks are back again, grinding up the hill from the valley.

  Sophie crosses the three paces to the bed. ‘He’s coming.’

  A nod. The Patron is not sleeping. She is not sure he has slept at all in the past three weeks, certainly not since she first let him surface from the morphia dreams. ‘Do you want to sit up?’

  He doesn’t respond. She thinks this means no, that he doesn’t want to sit up, that he very much wants to lie in the dark, possibly that he wants to be dead. He could have killed himself by now if he really needed to: his hands, remarkably, have returned almost to their ordinary size and the tendons have healed enough that they have at least enough function to use a knife. She has left one within reach: she is not without mercy, or understanding.

  He has never used it, but she has seen his gaze follow the guns slung on the backs of those who have come to pay their respects: Vincent, Daniel, René of the ruined fingers.

  She says, ‘I can give you morphine now, or later, after they’ve gone. It’s your choice.’

  He stares at the ceiling. There are new lines at the margins of his eyes. She thinks he may be afraid, which is both new and terrifying. A stray flare of sunlight catches his hair and turns it from rust to liquid fire. She has come to see him as a Greek god, a thing of tragic destruction.

  ‘You should drink.’ She brings an enamelled tin mug full of stream water. He lets her lift him to sitting, with care for the still unhealed wounds on his chest that let the bones of his ribs show through, and the obvious damage to his arms and shoulders from hanging.

  These last few days, he has held the mug almost on his own. Today, when it matters that he feel more whole, she lets him take the full weight of it and watches as he drinks, slowly.

  Swallowing is still hard. It may be that for the rest of his life, it will pain him to eat and to drink. For this alone, she will hunt Kramme and kill him, inch by slow and unremitting inch. The Maquis have men out tracking him, but Céline, so Sophie has discovered, has contacts in town: nameless women with courage beyond measure, who are pretending still to be loyal to the Reich. She salutes their bravery and waits each day for their reports because she, Sophie, will kill Kramme, even if she dies in the attempt. For days, she has promised herself this.

  She catches the mug as his fingers lose their grip, and blots the spillage with the hem of her shirt.

  ‘I have some soup from last night?’

  He isn’t listening. His attention is all on the door, and the world beyond, in which the trucks are almost here.

  Her mouth is dry, her hands wet. She wipes them on her sleeves. ‘Do you want me here? I can go if you want, and leave you alone with him? You’ll have a lot to catch up on.’

  Ro.

  She spins. Things fall from her plank-shelf and she does not heed them. ‘Patron?’ She wants to kiss him, to hold his hands and dance. She wants, actually, to scream. She won’t do any of these, of course.

  He is smiling a little, though his gaze is hot, and full of a pain she hasn’t seen before. He says, Stay. Please.

  It doesn’t sound like that, not remotely so – it’s a mangled, garbled bastard of the words, but she understands what he means and each of these things is remarkable.

  She holds his hand. She lets it go again, not wanting to disgrace them both. She says, ‘Wait, I have something,’ and runs back to her own pallet, to the collection of bottles and the hairbrush that she keeps as a last grasp on normality. A moment’s frantic search and she finds what she needs, runs back to show him. ‘From Marianne Fayette,’ she says. She doesn’t have to explain what it is for.

  Thank you.

  She does embrace him, then, and she does weep, and dries her eyes before the footsteps sound on the hill below the camp. Together, they wait for what is coming – who is coming – as they might await a death sentence.

  ~

  Patrick is alive. Laurence has killed a man: many men, actually.

  Until today, Laurence knew the number of men he had killed because it was exactly equal to the number of planes he had shot down: five. And now, he has no idea, except that it is many. Many, many, many, and so few lost. The bodies of two Frenchmen are in the lead truck, honoured war-dead, to be buried in the forest and their names remembered for ever. He doesn’t know their names, but he will find out.

  The camp is ahead: he can smell the latrines and the cooking, in that order. He passes the first armed guards and there’s still half a mile to walk uphill, through a da
mply verdant landscape, carrying machine guns, ammunition, Mills bombs, cigarettes, food: all the supplies that were dropped in the right place and collected by Céline and her men.

  Laurence is impressed with his cousin, and has said so. There was a time when his approval would have meant something. This morning, she was more concerned that nobody else was wounded, that the Boche did not call in an air strike before her men could leave, that the ammunition was packed in the same truck as the vast giant, JJ, who carried the mortar under his arm, so that if they were attacked they could defend themselves.

  These are small things, and obvious, but she was the one thinking of them at a time when all Laurence could think of was the blood rushing in his ears and the flashing memories of the rounds that hissed close. He imagines that she has seen action so often that she is immune to the after-burn of danger.

  Her Patron is not back yet. This is a matter of some concern. She issues orders, men run to her bidding. She walks up the hill, carrying a German rifle, her own side arm, two boxes of ammunition, and still she is walking on sprung feet, almost at a trot. They pass upwind of the latrines, and he smells something meaty.

  ‘Is that pork?’

  ‘Wild boar. In your honour.’

  Strewth.

  Céline strides on, well ahead of the rest of her men. It occurs to him that this may not be an accident. He hurries to catch her up.

  ‘Do we need to talk?’

  ‘You’ll want to see him. Best if your flash Yank and the little Italian sniper aren’t with you.’

  There’s an edge to her voice that kills the morning’s joy. He snatches at her sleeve. ‘Céline …’

  She is hard now. He hadn’t seen it before, but there’s a layer of armour that even Julie’s death didn’t create.

  ‘What is it?’

  She pauses a moment, sifting through things he can’t read and doesn’t want to. ‘Don’t stare. That’s the main thing. Treat him as normal.’

  A vacuum opens in his solar plexus. His courage plunges through. ‘He still has his eyes?’ In the back and forth of ciphered wires, he has not dared to ask that. Now he doesn’t dare not to.