die Stunde X

by Shaun Stafford

  “Is that Eric?”

  “You must have the wrong number.”

  “I’m very sorry.”

  The line went dead. Ben replaced the receiver and then leant back against the wall. He looked up the stairs, saw Jerome on the landing, his features dark, blurred.

  “I have to go out,” he told him.

  “Where?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “It does,” Jerome said, coming down the stairs. “That sounded like a pretty brief phone call to arrange an appointment.”

  “Jerome, it’s not what you think.”

  “How do I know?”

  “Because you can trust me.”

  “How do I know for sure? I mean, I thought I could, but now you’re clearing out after a two second phone call in which you told somebody they’d got the wrong number. What did they say, Ben? Did they say get out because the trouble’s about to start? Was that it?”

  “You’re wrong, Jerome. Seriously fucking wrong.”

  “Am I?” Jerome asked, reaching the bottom step.

  “Yes.”

  “I thought I could trust you.”

  “Yeah,” Ben said, nodding his head. “I know. And you still can.” He closed his eyes. He had things to think about. The phone call was, as Jerome had stated, brief. It was, as Jerome believed, suspicious. But what could he do? Jerome thought he could trust Ben – Ben thought he could trust Jerome. And now they had the chance to prove that trust.

  Ben had to prove his trust in Jerome.

  “I’m going to a meeting, Jerome. That was a coded phone call. And it won’t harm you to stay here. I promise you.”

  “What kind of meeting?”

  “Jerome, I can’t …”

  Jerome sat down on the stairs.

  “I’m going to a Combat UK meeting,” Ben finally said.

  Jerome immediately looked up. It was as though he had been punched, as though cold water had been thrown in his face. His eyes blinked quickly, then widened. His jaw dropped.

  “Now you understand why I couldn’t tell you?”

  “You couldn’t trust me?”

  “In a way,” Ben admitted. “I mean, I know you’re the genuine article, I know you’re wanted by the Gestapo.”

  “So why couldn’t you trust me with this?”

  “Because if you knew I was in Combat UK, and the Gestapo found you, you might let that slip,” Ben explained. “And then they’d try even harder to get information out of the both of us – and they might succeed. And that’d fuck up the London Battalion of Combat UK.”

  “I want to come with you.”

  “It’s too dangerous. You might be recognized.”

  “There are ways around that,” Jerome said.

  Ben had to agree that there were.

  32

  Jerome looked a lot different as he stepped from Ben’s house in Nürnberg Platz. His once-black hair was now bleached, his moustache was gone. He looked nothing like his former self. But there was, as Ben pointed out, one slight problem. He had no identification papers, which would prove hazardous should they run into an Orpo patrol or, even worse, one manned by Gestapo officers.

  Ben had assured Jerome that once at the meeting, they could give him a new identity. New papers to match his new appearance, and a new name, a new address. But they still had to get to the meeting.

  Ben let Jerome into the passenger seat of the car, and then slid in behind the wheel. He had the route to the meeting all planned out in his head, but he was trying to coordinate this with his knowledge of ‘surprise’ Orpo checkpoints on the way. Once a revised route was mapped out to his satisfaction, he fired up the engine, and they were on their way.

  They passed a number of Orpo patrols, but they were all in transit, and didn’t stop the Golf. Once, they saw a roadblock at the end of one of the streets, but Ben casually turned down a side road and bypassed the obstruction.

  Twenty minutes later, the car pulled up into the car park of a public house, the Pig and Whistle, in Frankfurt Boulevard, and parked up alongside a row of other lowly Volkswagens.

  Turning to Jerome, he said, “They’re not expecting you. They may be … hostile. To begin with … Just ride it out, you’ll be fine.”

  “”Perhaps I should wait here,” Jerome suggested, “then you can go in and prepare them for me.”

  “I thought you didn’t trust me to leave you on your own.”

  “If you’re working for the Germans, Ben, then my number’s already up,” Jerome said, shrugging his shoulders.

  “Yeah, well, believe me, Jerome, your number’s not up, not yet. Now, come on,” Ben said, throwing open his door and stepping out into the cold, misty air. Jerome reluctantly left the car, and the two of them made their way to the rear entrance of the pub.

  The pub, like a lot of buildings in London, was a fairly recent construction, built in the late Sixties on the site of an old church that had been demolished after the German invasion. There had been considerable pressure by the builders, who were English, to name the pub St Mary’s, after the church but the Germans wouldn’t allow it. Even the few clergymen in the area were aghast at the idea, despite the fact that the English builders hinted that the basement, which took up two floors underground, could’ve been used as a secret church.

  For ten years, the lower floor of the basement remained unused, until a member of Combat UK joined the staff. And from that day forth, the lower floor of the basement was used as an official meeting place for the members of the London Battalion of Combat UK.

  Ben led Jerome into the bar of the pub, and greeted a few familiar faces. Some of them gave him blank expressions when they saw Jerome. Ben stepped up to the bar, ordered a couple of pints of Becks lager, and then took them into the lounge. He and Jerome sat down at a table in the corner of the crowded room and sipped from their drinks.

  The lounge was a room of immense proportions. It held fifteen circular tables, each one with four chairs surrounding it. As well as those tables and chairs, there were bench seats that ran around the walls of the room, and these provided places for probably a further twenty customers. All in all, the lounge could’ve comfortably held eighty people.

  At this moment in time, Jerome thought as he sipped his lager, there were probably fifty people in the room. He hated to think what it would look and sound like when it was at full capacity.

  A smoke cloud hung in the air at chest height, blurring the view across the room, and the drinkers present spoke at a loud, rowdy level. Jerome caught occasional flashes of the conversation, but could make little sense of what was being said. A couple of tables to his right, a large, fat man kept laughing as he chomped on handfuls of peanuts. His two female companions were talking, but Jerome couldn’t hear what they were saying. They nudged the fat man every so often, and he would erupt into another bout of laughter, splattering the table with half-chewed salted peanuts.

  Jerome turned his attentions back to Ben, whose eyes were scanning the people in the lounge, occasionally lighting up as they fell upon somebody he obviously recognized. Finally, they remained in one position, and Jerome saw he was staring at a tall man with slicked-back hair standing at the bar of the lounge.

  “I’ve got to go and see somebody,” Ben said, getting to his feet. “You’ll be all right here.” And he walked over and stood beside the tall man. They spoke for a few minutes, but Jerome had no way of knowing what was being said. He figured that his name cropped up sometime during the conversation, because the tall man kept looking at him.

  Embarrassed, Jerome looked around the lounge and saw that some people were leaving. Others had already left. There were probably only thirty people in the lounge now. Tables that had once been host to four people now held just one or two. The fat man had been deprived of his female company, but seemed unconcerned as he drained the dregs of his bitter. The next time Jerome looked at the table, he saw the fat man was gone. He caught a glimpse of him disappearing through a doorway marked Toilets.

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nbsp; Jerome looked back to the bar, saw Ben making his way towards him. The tall man Ben had been speaking to walked to the toilet door and disappeared through it. Before Ben reached the table, two more people, one a man, the other a woman, had gone through the door.

  Ben stood beside the table, picked up his drink and drained the contents. “Drink up,” he ordered. Jerome did as he was told.

  Then Ben told him to follow him.

  Jerome did.

  Through the door marked Toilets.

  33

  There were two heavily-built men in the toilets, one standing by the urinals as though he were preparing himself to go to the toilet, the second standing in front of a sink, appearing to constantly wash his hands. They eyed Jerome suspiciously, but the tall man Ben had been speaking to came out of the one of the cubicles and nodded to them.

  Ben led the way, through the open cubicle door, where a narrow trapdoor opened into the floor. Ben climbed down into the hole, and Jerome followed, finding a steel stepladder. He descended down a dark, narrow tube, barely able to see Ben beneath him. The tube was cast in complete darkness as the trapdoor was closed over their heads, and Jerome felt himself start to panic.

  Then his feet jarred onto the solid surface of a basement, and he stepped back away from the ladder, bumping into Ben behind him. As he looked around, Jerome could see a dimly lit tunnel six feet high and three feet wide, leading to an opening beyond which there was bright light. A room, he surmised. A meeting room.

  The tall man stood beside him. Jerome could see his face now, his eyes growing accustomed to the low light. The tall man was smiling.

  “Hello, Jerome,” he said, outstretching a hand. “I’m Liam. I hear you could do with some help.”

  Jerome shook Liam’s hand and said, “You could say that.”

  “Well, follow me.”

  Liam led Ben and Jerome along the tunnel, and they quickly reached the room, which was indeed some kind of meeting place. The ceiling was low, and some of the forty or fifty people present had to duck down when they stood. Others sat on chairs positioned in front of and facing a large blackboard. The room was perhaps thirty feet square, well-lit, and there were two doors leading off directly opposite the passageway. One of the doors was open, and Jerome could see the three desks inside, the map of London on the wall and a computer terminal just peeking around the corner. There was also a large scale Ordnance Survey map of London running along one of the walls of the meeting room, and it appeared to have been divided into segments by a green marker pen. Various points of interest had also been circled, along with labels detailing what they were. They were too far away for Jerome to read.

  Liam left Ben and Jerome. He walked up to the front of the room, and stood in front of the blackboard. A hush fell over the assembled group. Jerome saw faces he had seen earlier in the bar, including the fat man and his two female companions. In this room, however, the women were keeping their distance from the fat man – probably his vile eating habits had put them off, Jerome thought to himself, or more than likely it was just part of their cover, and now they didn’t need it anymore.

  Ben ushered Jerome across the room to a couple of vacant chairs at the back, and they sat down, along with a dozen other people, in time to hear Liam speak.

  “Friends,” he said with a smile. “For the last few months, Combat United Kingdom has been fairly inactive. Not just here in London, but across the country. In England, Wales and Scotland. We know the cost our activity causes. Every German military officer we assassinate results in the lives of a hundred English men and women being taken. Every industrialist costs the lives of fifty. Every collaborator, the lives of ten. We are, in effect, achieving very little in the way of stopping the Germans, of forcing them out of our country, and we never will if we think small. We have to think big.” Liam looked around at his comrades, smiled, and continued. “There are ways of striking at the Germans and causing them serious damage. We have explosives in storage, and we should consider using them. We have the names and addresses of industrialists the Germans consider valuable, and we should consider assassinating them. We should continue to strike at the large, harder targets, rather than the soft targets. We can achieve massive coups only by destroying the German industry, by killing the most brutal German officers. But we have to consider the effects on the community. We have to consider whether or not our chosen method of attack, whatever the outcome, was worth the lives, the innocent lives, it cost.” Liam paused, seemed to consider his next few words. “We are planning a large operation. It would deal a massive blow to the Germans. But … we have to decide whether or not it’s worth the misery it will cause. We have less than six weeks to make up our minds.” Liam looked at his comrades, warmth radiating from his face. “Over the next few days, you will all receive information regarding your individual missions. We will all be busy. If there are any serious objections to a large scale operation, I would be happy to hear them. But remember, my friends, if we can manage to destroy the Germans’ spirit, if we can at least drive them out of the United Kingdom, then whatever the cost was, it would’ve been worth it.” He looked around the room, as though he were looking at each person in turn, and then smiled. “I’ll see the group leaders in my office in the usual order in a few minutes.” And with that, Liam walked around the chairs and entered one of the doors on the other side of the room. – the door that had previously been closed.

  Jerome looked at Ben as the people in the room started to talk amongst themselves again. Some of them got to their feet, and gathered in small groups of six or seven. Ben made no move.

  “What’s going on?” Jerome asked.

  “Like Liam said, they’re assembling in their groups.”

  “What about you?”

  “I’m not in a group,” Ben answered. “I work alone.”

  “Alone? What do you do?”

  But Ben didn’t answer. A short, heavyset man with curly, blond hair walked over. He smiled tightly at Ben, and then glared at Jerome, regarding him as though he were a piece of grime in a sterilized syringe.

  “Scott,” Ben greeted.

  “Liam wants to see you two,” Scott explained, still glaring at Jerome. “Come on.” He led the way into Liam’s office, and gestured for them to be seated.

  Like the rest of the basement, the office had a low ceiling. It was lit by a single lamp positioned on top of a filing cabinet. Consequently, it was quite dark, the shadows in the room long, faces occasionally half shrouded in blackness.

  Liam sat behind a steel-framed desk, a computer terminal to his right. Rows of filing cabinets lined the walls, with space only for a small map of London. Four chairs were positioned on the opposite side of the desk, and Scott, Ben and Jerome sat down.

  Liam was stroking his soft beard, a cigarette in his mouth. He took a long drag, then held the cigarette in his fingers. He stared at Jerome. Jerome didn’t feel threatened, as he had done when Scott had glared at him. There was trust in Liam’s eyes. More than that, there was compassion and warmth in his features, as though he believed and sympathized with Jerome. Jerome almost felt like smiling, but realized that wouldn’t be the right thing to do.

  It was a long while before Liam spoke, and since nobody spoke in the meantime, there was just silence in the room, occasionally punctuated by muffled chatter from the meeting room. By the time he finally did speak, more than three-quarters of his cigarette was gone, and his yellowed fingers stubbed it out in the ashtray that was on the desk in front of him.

  “Jerome, we need to know that you are what you say you are.” Jerome was startled by Liam’s statement. He had thought that the tall man understood him, could tell he was honest, trustworthy. Still, there was no hostility in Liam’s voice. He added, “Tell us about yourself, about what happened.”

  “The Gestapo took my father away,” Jerome said feeling his emotions building up. He didn’t want to cry, not in front of these men, but he had a feeling that if he did, Liam would not find it amusing. Liam would
understand. Liam had probably cried himself when telling his own life story. “They didn’t give a reason.”

  “A Schutzhaft Order?” Liam asked.

  “Yeah. Anyway, yesterday, I got home from work and my family were all upset. My mother, my younger brother and sister, my aunt. A funeral director had been in touch and … they had my father’s body.”

  “Mmm, go on.”

  “Anyway, I wanted to see it … you know, the body, because …” Jerome tried to think. Why had he wanted to see his father’s body? After all, it was only an empty vessel now. His father was no longer inside. Then he felt hatred washing over him. He seethed, “I wanted to see what they’d done to him.” He felt tears of anger, of sadness, well up in his eyes, and he wiped them away. “I … I went to the funeral directors, saw the man in charge. He told me I couldn’t see my dad’s body, that it had been sealed by the Gestapo, and they … they weren’t allowed to reopen it.” Liam nodded his head. Jerome saw that even Scott was nodding. He also saw the sadness in Scott’s eyes, and he knew that he wasn’t upset for Jerome, but for himself. He had lost somebody close to him in the past – Jerome could tell that. “They threw me out,” he continued, “but I was so mad, I went back later, broke in. I found my dad’s coffin, opened it …” He gasped as he remembered the horrific vision of his father, naked, the head severed from the body, the bruises, the dried blood … “They’d beaten him, then they’d beheaded him. I couldn’t believe it. It was …” He held his head in hands, felt Ben patting him on the shoulder. “Then this guard turned up. He had a gun, we fought, the gun went off … he was dead.” Jerome looked at Liam, looked into his eyes. Liam nodded his head. “So, I had nowhere to go. I went to Ben’s. He said he’d look after me.”

  “What about your family?” Liam asked. Jerome saw him look at Ben, and then his eyes fell upon him again.

  Jerome shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know. There’s no answer at home.”