Commander Amanda Nightingale

by George Revelli

  Bimbo did not answer. The men took her hands and they walked, hand in hand, out of the room. She shrank back as she saw they were taking her back up the corridor to the torture room. "No!" she whispered, her voice as hoarse as a man's. "No!" But the men pulled her, not roughly, along with them. Amanda's struggles suddenly stopped. She sniffed. Her nostrils flickered as she smelled something that made her giddy… Cooking!

  Chapter Seven

  Wonders were evidently not to cease, not this night. The room was exactly the same, the pulleys, the whips, the brazier, the pool of blood. But it could not have been more different. For one thing the two desks had been placed together and covered with a red-and-white checked tablecloth. Candles burned, rough farmer's candles, but candles. The German woman was standing over the brazier that Amanda had presumed was for branding her, cooking Bratwurst. A pan of pommes frites sizzled beside the sausages. Even the woman herself was different. For one thing she had removed her Wehrmacht tunic and wore an open-necked shirt, unloosened her bun so that her dark hair fell to her shoulders, and Amanda was startled to find that, even in her thick glasses, she was no woman but a girl, younger than herself, not really pretty but attractive with as lovely a throat as Amanda had ever seen on a woman, what the French call jolie-laide.

  She spoke. It was the first time Amanda had seen her open her mouth. "Hello," she said. "I was not expecting you back for another half-hour." She spoke in English, accented even more heavily than Bimbo's — "I vass not expectink," she said — but English in which she had complete confidence.

  "In another half-hour," said Amanda with feeling, "I would have been dead."

  The German girl did not seem in any way disturbed by the fact that she alone was correctly dressed, and that the others were sartorially bizarre to say the least.

  "I'm almost dead as it is," Amanda added.

  "I think introductions are in order," Scappini said. Amanda repeated the words silently to herself. "He said, 'I think introductions are in order. He couldn't have said it, but he did."

  "This is Erika Sass."

  The girl wiped her right hand on her apron, and extended it, smiling. "Erika," she said. Amanda shook hands.

  "I am Heinrich Scappini, and this is Sergeant von Bernstorff. Max von Bernstorff. But his friends, no doubt as the result of some childhood syndrome, call him Bimbo."

  "Ah really," Amanda cried hysterically. "His friends call him Bimbo, do they? Haven't we already met, Monsieur Bimbo? Epsom, perhaps? Longchamp? Or was it Bad Gastein" She ignored his hand but lifted his shirt and shook his slack genitalia. "How very nice to meet you, Monsieur Bimbo. Formally, I mean."

  This made everybody laugh, Erika Sass most of all.

  "Now that the ice is cracked socially," said Scappini rubbing his hands in the manner of the genial host, "champagne!" He removed a dark bottle from a wooden milk bucket filled with ice. "Dom Perignon," he said. "The finest champagne on the face of the earth."

  Amanda accepted the glass he had filled for her. She had scarcely tasted champagne since the beginning of the war. She sipped it. The bubbles skidded over the acrid taste that fouled her mouth, found a channel up her nostril and made her sneeze. But it was like magic. "Prosit!" she said to her host.

  "Do sit down, everybody," said Erika Sass. "I am not quite ready. Amanda is so beautiful," she said, smiling at her, "I thought you would have spent longer with her." Erika pronounced «thought», "thowt".

  Amanda gave up thinking. She padded barefoot to the table where four places were set and found each place marked with a card in immaculate Deutschschrift, "Heinrich", «Bimbo», "Erika", and "Amanda".

  Amanda's mind was the scene of such deathless strife that it resembled more a bar-room brawl, pulled not to and fro but in every direction at once. She sat before a plate of heavily truffled paté de foie gras, and Scappini filled her glass. "Don't wait for me," Erika Sass sang from the brazier. It occurred to Amanda that she had not eaten a bite since she left England nearly forty-eight hours before, and she had scarcely seen food like this in her life. She smeared the pate onto French bread and wolfed it. The two men regarded her objectively as she ate.

  "She has a healthy appetite," said Bimbo.

  "She is a blooming English rose," said Scappini. "All blooming English roses eat like pigs."

  "You eat a jolly sight better here than we do in England," said Amanda with resentment.

  "It's not that, Amanda," Bimbo explained. "But we have been retreating, and when the German Army retreats it does the job properly, from grand pianos down to the last bottle of beer. That's why we are so well stocked with everything." Advances are the problem. Not a problem we have been having recently."

  "You aren't retreating now," Amanda said sternly, hoping that the champagne was not going to her head.

  "No," said Scappini. "But we will be, once the Americans invade."

  "And the British," said Amanda, her mouth full. She stared at Bimbo. Like the room, like Erika, he had totally changed. There was still the low forehead, the small eyes, but now he reminded her of nothing so much as a jovial piglet she had adored on the farm in her childhood. It was called Jimmy Cagney and was subsequently eaten, to Amanda's distress.

  Erika arrived now, with a plateful of Bratwurst and a bowl of pommes frites, and served each in turn. The group attacked the main meal, Amanda's white teeth making the juices of the Bratwurst fly, and conversation decreased to an essential minimum.

  "Pass the mustard, Heini."

  "Schmeckt gut, nicht?"

  "Any more pommes frites in the bowl, Erika Ach, vielen Dank!"

  From Amanda: "May I have a little more champagne, please, Captain Scappini?"

  Afterward, over a salad, they relaxed a little.

  "Damn good meal, Erika."

  "Prima."

  "It was most delicious, Miss Sass. Thank you so much."

  Bimbo spoke to Amanda. "Do you play bridge?"

  "Of course."

  The others cheered. "We have a foursome."

  Scappini rose to his feet, glass in hand. Amanda thought, "Good Heavens, I can see his… Good God, he's going to make a speech!"

  "A toast," said Scappini, "to our charming English guest, who dropped in on us literally out of the blue."

  "Amanda!" said Bimbo and Erika together.

  "I am going mad," Amanda said out loud.

  Scappini sat down, by which modesty Amanda was somewhat relieved. "It is a shame she has to turn up as our prisoner," said Scappini. "It will be an even greater shame the day after tomorrow when we have to hand her over to the Gestapo."

  "Gestapo!" Amanda exclaimed. "I thought you were the Gestapo!"

  "Amanda," said Bimbo, "if I hadn't eaten, you would have made me lose my appetite."

  "Goodness gracious, Amanda," said Scappini. "What kind of a spy are you?"

  "I'm not a spy. I'm in Intelligence. Or rather the French Resistance. I mean that I am basically an officer in the FANYs."

  "What on earth did they teach you at Arisaig?" said Scappini. "Don't you know the difference between the Gestapo uniform and Wehrmacht uniform?"

  "How can I in your case?" Amanda replied. "I've only seen you either in civvies or in your birthday suit. And as for Bimbo…"

  "She has a point there," said Bimbo, eating an apple from a bowl.

  "No, Zuckerpüppchen," said Scappini. "We are the Twenty-first Panzer Division. We are waiting for you fellows to invade, and then we shall kiss the Americans on their wet little crew cuts before pushing them under, with the battle cry of 'Last one ashore is a rotten egg!' "

  Amanda shouted, "I won't have you tell me I am mad. This is some ghastly plot on your part to break my spirit. If you are only ordinary German soldiers…"

  "Heini and Bimbo," Erika whispered, embarrassed, into her plate, "are not ordinary soldiers."

  "Why did you torture me?"

  "Who tortured you?"

  "Who tortured me! My breasts are in such agony I cannot bear it. What about the brazier?"

/>   "Cooking Bratwurst, Liebling," Erika muttered, acting like a dinner guest who has asked if she can bring along a perfect stranger and then finds she is behaving badly at the table.

  "The pulleys! The handcuffs!"

  Bimbo rose and disconnected one of the handcuffs. "Bought them at the Galeries Lafayette in Paris. Toys. I was going to take them to the children of friends of mine in Leipzig."

  "The blood. There. On the floor!"

  Bimbo bent down and scooped some up with his finger, baring a great hairy butt as he did so. He pulled Amanda's head painfully back by the hair. "Taste it."

  Amanda did so, feeling sick. "Chili sauce!"

  "Captured American chili sauce," Erika explained. "I intended to use it with the Bratwurst, but it broke when Bimbo had to beat up the Irishman."

  "Either I am mad," Amanda declared, "or else there is only one solution." She stood up, and almost fell down without noticing it. The Dom Perignon was catching up. She held her jowls in her hands, opened her mouth and gave a piercing shriek. Then a second piercing shriek and a third. She shook her head violently from side to side, her long hair flying, her eyes closed. The others looked at her, interested.

  When she stopped, she said, "There. It never fails. My head is perfectly clear. The answer is that you are doing this deliberately to drive me mad, to weaken my resistance. Well, I didn't dream this." She feverishly unbuttoned her shirt, and dragged it open, baring her breasts. The thin stripes that had crisscrossed them had spread and widened into thick bruises, merging into each other so that the whole area of her breasts was a great mottled bruise of blue-black, flecked with red from internal bleeding. The Germans studied the sight.

  "Very pretty, Amanda," said Scappini. "But please not at dinner."

  Amanda closed her shirt, and shed tears. "I just don't understand," she sobbed.

  Scappini filled her glass and passed around the cigars. "Corona Corona," he said. Erika accepted one, so Amanda accepted one too. The smoke made her giddy and she realized she was very drunk but she was beyond caring. She drained her glass and held it out for another which Scappini filled.

  "God, I hate the Germans," she said.

  Bimbo cachinnated. "Who doesn't!" he said.

  Amanda stood up again. "If this has all been a joke," she said extending her arm, shaking her hand free of the long sleeve and pointing her finger at Scappini, "tell me one thing. Why did you have to hurt me so, and frighten me? Why did I have to be thrashed senseless just to satisfy your sense of humour? Answer me that, and I'll shuddup."

  The room went around in circles. The three Germans all seemed to be images in different distorting mirrors, Bimbo's round face getting flatter and flatter, spreading outward; Scappini's long face getting longer until his chin reached the table and his head the ceiling; Erika's long nose coming out of her in third dimension until it almost touched her. And then they all merged together, so that Erika seemed to have one of Bimbo's eyes. Amanda fell forward with a crash. She felt herself going and put her hands out, but there was no strength in them and they went outward knocking over glasses and bottles, plates, the remains of Bratwurst, potatoes, ashtrays, sending them flying in all directions. She lay there inert, unconscious, in front of the three seated figures who smoked their cigars and looked at her.

  "Little girl," said Scappini, "you've had a busy day."

  Chapter Eight

  Her sleep was a deep, deep, drugged sleep of fluttering sensuality, without dreams but with moist, warm, lotophagous sensations of floating, like gossamer and cobwebs in impenetrable darkness, of things like ducts, sap, lymph, down, peat moss and silk, scent of patchouli and ambergris, sound of Domine exaudi vocem meant sung by trebles. She did not want to surface. She was happy floating where she was in this womb of sensuality, but she felt herself being drawn along, like Eurydice after Orpheus, through the long corridors of Hades toward the light. She opened her eyes, or at least she thought she opened her eyes. But either she was still asleep, blind, or in pitch darkness. She closed and opened them again but it made no difference. She did not know where and scarcely who she was, only warm, naked, and not alone. She was lying sprawled over someone else's body, someone who breathed with a slightly catarrhal snore and smelled like a warm animal. Momentarily Amanda's recall was completely gone. Whatever had passed before, she was still down there, part of the baggage of her womb of sleep. Who the stranger was to whose body she clung, she had not the slightest idea, and when she tried to get hold of herself, she only succeeded in sliding back into unconsciousness. She felt her hand on a knee, a hard athletic knee, but hard in an undefinable way, not something precise enough to hang onto, but rather smooth enough to slide off. Her hand rose over a bare thigh, offering less friction than she might have been entitled to expect, to a predictable bush of coarse hair and… nothing. She was too deep in sleep and non-comprehension to know quite what she was seeking but whatever it was, it was not there. At first it seemed much too complicated to try and understand, but then the first faint truth of awakening dawned on the drugged Amanda. She was in bed with a woman.

  A little more of her emerged into the awakening blackness. Wherever she was there was no glimmer of light, and she had no inkling either of time or place. Fuzzily she realized that in the dark she was doing something rather awful, sensuous and infinitely pleasurable, but it took further thought to understand what it was. She was fondling a breast, a supple female breast, and more than that she was sucking the nipple, sucking deeply, salivariously, like a baby at the breast of her mother. Perhaps half of Amanda was out now, and she was beginning to remember. She must be in bed with the German girl, whose name she could not remember, and while fast asleep had been suckling her, driven by… driven by… well… what? Amanda was still too lost to be shocked at herself. Indeed it seemed a most interesting subject for mature study. She had often entertained grave suspicions of herself, especially during her years of marriage. Childhood of course did not count, but at Cheltenham she had known a girl of her own age. They had hidden in the lavatory and played with each other's nipples until they were like little raisins. They had taken down their bloomers and rubbed their loins together, their flesh crinkling into goose pimples until it assumed the texture of suede; red-faced with the wonderful horror of it all, and all the time aware that a fierce God was observing every move and making a note to condemn them for eternity to burning hell — and, scarcely less terrifying, there was the thought of the headmistress who, if she found them together in the lavatory, would sentence them to summary expulsion with a covering letter in full scabrous detail to their parents.

  Childhood did not count. But even when she was grown up, married and a mother, she often thought about it, especially when she was low in spirits, disenchanted. One day early in the war, shortly before she joined the FANYs, she was alone in London, feeling wretched, and recalled the name of her friend at Cheltenham. It was the Hon. Angela Bowman-Preedy. Amanda had not heard of her since schooldays, for Angela never attended the Old Girls' reunions. Amanda presumed that like herself, she was married now and probably had children, but she had a sudden urge to try and trace her. With fingers unaccountably trembling, she had looked in the London telephone directory. The sight of the name, listed with a Kensington address and a Knightsbridge number, made her heart beat. Impulsively she had dialled the number and found herself shaking with nervousness. A young female voice, high-pitched and girlish like her own, answered.

  It did not say, «Hello». It said "Yes?"

  "Is that Angela Bowman-Preedy?" Amanda asked.

  "Yes. Who is that?"

  "This might seem slightly odd to you, but I am Amanda Nightingale. We were at Cheltenham together when I was Amanda Hastings."

  The voice was surprised. "Good God! the cricket captain!"

  "That's right." Amanda went on in a frightened rush of lies. "I am in London for the day and I was looking something up in the directory and I saw your name, and I thought what a coincidence, so I thought I would give you a ring
and find out how you are."

  "In London for the day? I thought someone told me you had a flat in town."

  "Yes, I have," said Amanda automatically lying, to patch up her call into some kind of plausibility. "But it's closed up for the duration and we live in our country place in Northminster. Perhaps we could meet for tea, at Fortnum's perhaps, or Harrod's?"

  "Why not come here instead? Are you far?"

  "Oh no," said Amanda eagerly. "I'm in the West End."

  "Come over here at five-thirty, before the bombs start falling, and have tea or a drink or something."

  Amanda hung up and her whole body trembled. What she had in mind she did not know. On the contrary she knew that if Angela did by any chance make an advance, she, Amanda, would repulse her indignantly. She simply did not know. Some three minutes after she hung up, the telephone rang. None of her friends knew she was in London. Just time enough, Amanda thought, for Angela to check on her, to consult the telephone directory and find her number. The telephone rang, rang about a dozen times while Amanda lit and puffed on a cigarette, and then it stopped.

  Amanda had selected a Jaeger camel's hair suit in caramel and pale blue, light-blue gloves and a Mayfair hat. She applied light make-up, with a trace of blue eye shadow and quiet lipstick. She also allowed herself a dash of her rigidly rationed last bottle of Chanel and she arrived at Angela's block of service flats, as was her wont, exactly on time. She had brought herself more or less under control by now, and hoped no giveaway nerves in her face would twitch. She had an idea that Angela was watching the taxi arrive, because she answered the bell almost immediately, and the two girls regarded each other with the unabashed curiosity one always feels for friends one has not seen in a long time.

  Angela was much changed. She was pretty, very pretty, with lime green eyes, but she was pretty in a used-up, washed-out kind of way. Her good body seemed to have had the muscles and contours manhandled out of it, and it had gone soft. Her mouth was slack and inelastic, probably from the many services it had given to the arts of loving. Amanda decided she was the kind of girl that men call «sexy», which she of course was most emphatically not. All around, Angela suggested a loosening of her screws and a sagging of her human gut.