by Thomas Wood
Giving a slight nudge with the pistol, I encouraged him to continue. He had already said as much as he reasonably wanted to, and I could tell in his eyes that he was praying for the Germans to suddenly burst in so that he wouldn’t have to retell the rest.
“The intention of Geranium was to plant a bomb in a Polish train station, near the border with Germany. It was hoped that we would, by manipulating assets in the Polish government and in the media across Europe, that we would be able to keep the whole thing under wraps, maybe even say it was some sort of a gas leak or freak accident that had caused the explosion.
“The three intelligence departments were all hoping that, by keeping it under wraps, the Polish government would be frustrated and embarrassed, burying the plot further under the ground. It was also the intention of Geranium that in the aftermath, the Poles would find evidence that it was a German made bomb, causing them to invade the Germans as a retaliation.
“That way,” he said with an element of shame badly masked in his voice, “the French and British would not feel obliged to go to war, as the Poles would come across as the aggressors. That way, this war wouldn’t be happening, or at the very least it would buy the Brits and the French a little bit more time to prepare for war, maybe even come up with a peace deal in the process.
“But it all went wrong,” he croaked, as I became bewildered at the fact that a man that epitomised pure evil to me, one of Satan’s own personal henchmen, was experiencing feelings of grief and humiliation.
“The bomb it…it went off too early. You have to believe me Alf, it shouldn’t have gone off when it did. It ended up killing a lot of schoolchildren…” his voice trailed off and he broke eye contact with me, and I had to consciously tell myself of what he had done to Louis to dehumanise him again.
“They weren’t the target, they never were. What would we have gained by killing children? It was supposed to go off later. When the platform was due to be full of soldiers that were being moved to the border. But it went off too soon….”
I had nothing to say, in fact, I had nothing that I could think either, as I was even more confused now than when I had started, particularly as I was beginning to feel ever so slightly bad for Joseph. It hadn’t been his fault that the bomb had gone off early, he hadn’t wanted to kill those children and spend the rest of his life carrying the guilt around with him. Maybe that was why he had been so merciless and evil ever since he had returned, his conscience overworked and over its capacity, so that anything he did now simply did not even rest on his shoulders anymore.
“Because of that, it was all hushed up. But for different reasons than we had intended…”
“So, who is ‘we?’” I questioned, reconnecting with his gaze as he appeared almost shocked that I was still in the room with him. “Who were the ones that were involved in this?”
“You already know Alfie…The three main intelligence officers that were caught up in the whole affair were completely disgraced and were instructed never to talk to one another again. As they were linked together by Geranium, anyone might have eventually made the association. But all three officers were connected together by a stronger bond than Geranium, one that was more long standing and that had driven our motives to prevent another all-out war in Europe. We wanted to help one another to survive.”
“Who were they?”
“Capitaine Joseph Baudouin, Captain James Tempsford and recently promoted Standartenführer Rudolf Schröder. We had all been at university together before the war.”
His voice trailed off pathetically again, as if what he had just told me was in contravention of some sort of moral code that I could excusably kill him for. Voluntarily, he continued.
“We were all so ashamed by what we had done, but we had done it with the best of intentions. We had done it to prevent another bloodbath. We valued one another’s countries so much that we didn’t want to go to war with each other.
“When our superiors discovered what had happened, I was ejected from the military altogether, which is why I came back so soon to war being declared. I had nowhere else to go. Rudolf, once he had returned from overseeing the operation in Poland, was removed from the Berlin office and put on routine intelligence duties, well below his rank. Which is why he ended up here in France, monitoring resistance communications and escape lines. James was the only one who emerged relatively unscathed.”
“Why was Jimmy saved?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps it was because your military couldn’t afford to lose someone like him so close to a major war. Maybe some other reason. I’m not so sure.”
“Why were you kicked out when the others stayed? What had you done that was worse than them?”
He seemed reluctant to keep talking, but he must have been getting some sort of relief from telling me all of this, as he carried on, almost to the point where I thought having the pistol was unnecessary now.
“I felt so bad about what had happened, that I began to leak defence plans to the Germans. Number of men at various outposts, mobilisation times, that sort of thing. I wanted the Germans to win the war, and quickly. That way, Geranium would be forgotten and buried. No one would ever have to know about it.
“But my army found out, they kicked me out. I should have been shot. But I supposed they thought that living with my guilt was enough punishment.”
He let a few moments of silence linger in the air, before gulping his mouth wide in an attempt to grab some air. The first sob was quickly followed by the second, and within a matter of moments, Joseph was sobbing as I straddled him, keeping him pinned firmly to the floor.
For the first time since winning our little fracas, I began to move my finger away from the pistol’s trigger, slowly.
24
I was beginning to feel good, buoyant almost, the prospect that I might be killed in the next few minutes completely waning from my mind. My finger was almost completely off the trigger now, but I felt quite safe, as I had Joseph pinned down to the ground comfortably, and even if the slightest hint of a breakaway attempt was detected, I would easily have enough time to react, in my mind anyway.
For the first time in a long time, I was starting to feel like I was actually getting somewhere, I was making headway with my knowledge of Geranium and the picture was becoming drastically less hazy.
So, Jimmy had played a big role in Geranium, by talking to his friends in the French and German intelligence departments, which had led to him inadvertently helping to murder a group of schoolchildren.
But there were still things that were unanswered, there were still elements to this situation that didn’t add up, and I quickly found myself preoccupied by them, to the point where I started to look around the cold, dank room, trying to piece everything together.
The puddles that littered the floor like some sort of ragged carpet, glistened back at me as the setting sun pushed its orangey glows into the sparkling mirror of the stagnant water. Outside, I could make out the tops of the trees gently wafting from side to side silently, and I found myself staring at individual branches as they flittered about in the breeze.
I wondered how much longer it would be before that very same breeze began to carry bullets towards me, the air around it populated by the never-ending pops and snaps as a multitude of rifles, machineguns and anything else that the Germans fancied, started to cut my life short.
Joseph knew exactly what questions were going to come tumbling from my mouth next, but he waited for me to digest everything, before forcing the words from my mouth with his silence.
“What…What about Red? Where does he fit into all of this? How did he get involved in any of it? And why is he doing it? He’s not a traitor.”
I pondered, for a moment, why Joseph was doing this, freely giving up all this information without me having to force it out of him. He still had the option of maintaining a dignified silence. He even had the option of telling me a fabricated tale of lies and deceit, but the way in which he had sobbed, the way that the
story incriminated himself, told me that he was telling me the truth.
I came to the conclusion that he was utterly convinced that I would be dead within the next half an hour or so, which meant that it didn’t really matter to him if I was to know before I was killed or not. He was confident that I wouldn’t be able to act on my new found intelligence. There was simply no way that I could get it back to London, especially as my only contact there was Jimmy Tempsford, one of the main players in Operation Geranium, who would simply brush everything under the carpet, like he had done for the last two years.
I wondered if Jimmy knew what was going on right now and toyed with the idea that it was him who had given Joseph the permission to kill one of his men. In the light of what Joseph had told me, I did not doubt that he would have done it, especially as he appeared to have no guilty conscience over what had happened in Poland back in 1939. Jimmy was simply going about his life as if nothing had happened, slowly making his way up the ranks to increase his power and consequently his ability to keep Geranium under wraps.
The image flashed through my mind for a millisecond that one day Jimmy would become Prime Minister. He had the contacts and the abilities to, but I hated the thought of someone so distrustful, the one who had pretended to have been my friend, but instead had systematically lied to me. The whole time that I had asked questions about Geranium, he had dodged the answer and straight up lied to my face, and he had even had one of his men in the same regiment as me, who had now apparently gone rogue and was working for the Germans.
All of this zipped through my mind faster than a bullet, as I stared incessantly at the orangey glow that one of the puddles was giving off by the window.
Joseph began to look slightly baffled to my question, which angered me as I snapped myself out of the trance. Keeping my finger off the trigger still, I gently reaffirmed the pressure to the underside of his chin, as if that was the only way to draw the information out of him when he staggered.
“Red. Why is he working for you? I don’t get it.”
“Red? I’m not sure who you…Oh, Holloway?”
The slight relief in pressure of the barrel of the pistol was the only answer that I was willing to give him.
“Okay, okay. Holloway.” He stopped for a moment, as if he was waiting for all the memories in his mind to come to the fore, in order to let me have the full version of events. It was either that or he was rapidly concocting a series of lies to spill to protect Red.
“Holloway came to me after the evacuation, he was one of many men that I was looking after, that I was trying to sort transport for out of the region. Jimmy had informed me that he had a man in the Royal Tank Regiment who was his inside man and he wanted him to stay in France to help with the escape routes.
“It did not take me too long to find him, he has a big mouth and he was enjoying telling everyone how he had got away, driving his tank right under the noses of the Germans apparently.”
I recalled the episode with Red and Alan Clarke. Back when we had still been in possession of a fully working tank, in which we had accidentally collided into the back of a German convoy, somehow managing to throw them off the scent of us being British, by dropping the revs in the tank and haring away as quickly as we possibly could. I doubted, especially in the characteristically arrogant way that Red would have told the story, that anyone at all would have believed him, and wondered, if they were to be retold the story by me, if they would think it any more believable.
“Yes, I know. I was with him.”
He scoffed, his head jolting backwards and splashing in the puddle that he was lying in, soaking up the moisture, before the smile disappeared from his face as he realised I was not lying.
“You? No, never.”
“Yes. I was the tank commander. Holloway was my driver.”
He sat in a moment of disbelief, clearly trying to rack his brains and work out if he had said anything incriminating, or something that I would have known to be a lie. He couldn’t think of anything, my pistol prompting him once again to keep jabbering on.
“Well, to be begin with he was helping me organising safehouses, liaising with the soldiers, all that sort of thing. Then, he got suspicious, a bit too suspicious. Eventually, he began asking questions, about Geranium. Much like you did.
“I wanted to kill him, but Jimmy wouldn’t let me. He said that if I did I would spend the rest of my life looking over my shoulder. For some reason, Jimmy really wanted him alive.
“Anyway, he followed me. He saw me meeting up with Rudolf Schröder and he confronted me. I knew I couldn’t kill him, so offered him an alternative. A very lucrative alternative.
“He is from a very poor family. They do not have much. Which made it very easy to persuade him to stay quiet.”
“He’s on the German’s payroll?” I queried, disappointed that Red could have been so easily turned by a few used banknotes.
“Yes. I suppose he is. He’s being paid very well too. More than the British would ever pay him. More than he really deserves. It’s enough to start a new life completely when this war is over, which is what I am going to do as well…” He stopped, to take a quick look down at the pistol that was still protruding from the underside of his head, as if he was utterly convinced that I wouldn’t pull the trigger, and that he would be able to fulfil his dreams of starting a new life elsewhere.
“I like the thought of Switzerland. What do you reckon? Switzerland?” He was taunting me, and he knew that I was beginning to run out of time, and patience. If I didn’t have this wrapped up in the next few minutes, there would be no way that I would be getting out of here alive this evening.
I imagined a platoon of well-equipped and hard-nosed soldiers bursting into the factory floor from the stairwell that I had recently come up, and I knew that they would have very little hesitation in peppering me with bullets as soon as they saw me. I resolved to make sure that the one bullet I was able to get out of my pistol, as I heard them climb the stairs, would be straight through the brain of the man that I was questioning.
“It is a nice country, Alfie. I am sure you would like it very much. It’s quiet, it is a very peaceful place. You could come too? Stay here, with me and with your friend. You will have an easy life. You will be paid well. Imagine that. No more war for Alfie Lewis, just a little work now and soon you will be richer than your wildest dreams. Come on Alfie, you know it adds up.”
I was tempted, and I could envisage myself sipping coffee in Switzerland, staring at the snow-capped mountains, alongside Cécile, who could work for the Red Cross headquarters there. My life would be so simple. I would want a home, with a small amount of land, no neighbours to worry about and maybe a few cattle or even a horse to while away the days.
I thought about it all for a little too long, he knew that I was actually taking his proposition into consideration. But then, the doubts slowly began to creep in. Could I really trust this man? Was he actually going to let me go free tonight? Was the prospect of actually seeing the war out in relative peace a realistic one?
What if the Allies won the war? There was still a possibility that they might. I would be strung up on the nearest lamp post as soon as they had found out what I had done. The only reason that Red was still alive now was because I knew him, anyone else would have seen him dead the second they found out he was British.
“Alfie, come on. Your friend has seen the light. The Germans are not as bad as your government would like you to believe.”
I thought for a moment more, trying to think through a response incredibly carefully. I didn’t want to accidentally agree to something that would later come back to bite me. In either of the eventualities, agreeing or disagreeing to Joseph’s proposal, I was dead anyway, but at least with his option, I could wait for death with a few notes in my pocket.
What spilled from my mouth was not what I had intended, but pure emotion that had snuck up on me, like a sniper trying to find a decent vantage point.
“No, no.
Red’s not like that. He doesn’t care for money. You’re lying. You’re lying! You and Jimmy have forced his hand, if he was to go back to Britain he would be thrown into prison, you’ve placed him in this, he’s not like that!”
I felt the tears beginning to brew in my tear ducts and my excessive breathing and panting was merely an attempt to prevent them from falling onto Joseph’s face, as I didn’t want to display an element of weakness for him to build his argument upon.
“I very much doubt that he has told you the full truth my friend. Maybe you should ask him one of these days. Get his view on the matter, maybe then you will understand. Of course, that is if you live that long enough to speak to him. I hope that he lives long enough to see you. Maybe he will see that you would have let him down, and not for the first time from what I have heard.”
My finger was instantly back on the trigger, almost as if it had never left, the barrel being pushed so hard into the skin of his forehead, that it was like I was trying to leave the man with a permanent tattoo of its imprint, to act as an eternal reminder to him of me and what I had stood for.
“I haven’t let him down! I haven’t! I didn’t know he was alive, I thought he was dead!”
My saliva splashed all over his face, Joseph barely even flinching as more and more droplets began to drip onto his face, a mixture of my spittle and the large collections of perspiration that were now tumbling onto him.
His face started to turn into a wry smile, as he continued to mock me childishly.
“Are you going to kill me Alfie? I don’t think you’ve got it in you. Come on, do it.”
I began to shake erratically as the adrenaline began to take control over everything in my body, from my thoughts right the way down to how thirsty I had been feeling half a second before. My skin began to sear up. A burning red pigment began to rise to the surface, I could feel it on my face almost immediately, but could sense the volcanic-like lava beginning to elevate to the surface of my entire body. I was furious.