The English Agent

by Clare Harvey

  The building had a different feel in the morning. There was the sound of typing, and the smell of real coffee. A figure carrying a stack of manila files disappeared down the corridor. The interpreter nudged her through an open doorway into the room she’d been questioned in the previous afternoon. The office was as warm and welcoming as a drawing room today, the sunlight glancing off the prisms in the ceiling chandelier, making the room dance with pricks of light. The older man – Kieffer – who’d questioned her last night stood in front of the piano with another man: slight and pale, with gold-rimmed spectacles – he must be Dr Goetz. What did they want with her?

  The interpreter closed the door behind them as Kieffer and Dr Goetz began to walk towards her. She glanced sideways at the gold carriage clock on the mantelpiece above the hearth, calculating: if they’d used her set to transmit a message last night, after they got her poem-code, then it would have been in London, decoded and with Miss Atkins, hours ago. But they hadn’t had her security check. And a message received without a security check would alert Baker Street to the fact that either her set and code had been captured or she was being forced to transmit under duress, wouldn’t it? Edie tried to breathe deeply and keep her mind clear. She’d been trained for this. There was a system: without the security check Miss Atkins and the others in Baker Street would have realised something was wrong and would not have responded. She told herself not to panic.

  Even as Kieffer and Dr Goetz approached, Edie imagined Miss Atkins and Major Buckmaster noticing the absence of the check and sending telegrams and telephoning the boys at Tempsford. Perhaps they could get a direct message to Felix and Justine with that Lysander pilot who was flying over, warning them to lie low. It would ruin Felix’s plans for the depot sabotage, but at least they’d be safe, wouldn’t they?

  Kieffer and Dr Goetz were in front of her now, their figures blocking out the sunshine. The interpreter stood just behind her, to her left. At first, nobody spoke. The pale little man – Goetz – simply held out a piece of paper. Edie’s handcuffs jinked and pulled against her skin as she took it from him and held it up to read:

  Cat – Sloppy work. Remember your security check and stick to your scheds.

  Edie felt herself blanch, and the paper slipped from her cuffed grasp. It was like being kicked, hard, in the centre of her chest. She couldn’t breathe.

  Dr Goetz bent down to pick up the paper, his glasses slipping down his nose as he did so. Major Kieffer started to speak. Edie knew what he’d say even before the interpreter’s low voice began to translate.

  The radio game had begun.

  Chapter 8

  Gerhardt

  Dear Father, Gerhardt wrote. He could call him Father in the letters, where nobody else could see – it was only in public he had to keep up the pretence of the Count being Uncle – Mother had told him the reason years ago: the Count’s scandalous divorce from his first wife, his important diplomatic career, his position in the Nazi Party, the impossibility of admitting to a foreign-born mistress and bastard children. Mother seemed resigned to the situation, content to survive on scraps of love and attention foraged from the edges of the Count’s ambitious life. But Gerhardt had always wished for a real father, one that came home for dinner every night, helped with homework and took him sledging in winter. But now he was a man, and it was too late for any of that, he supposed.

  He paused, tapping the end of his fountain pen against his lip: cool and smooth. I hope this finds you in good health, he continued, thinking of the brisk morning walks the Count made them take when he deigned to visit (for your ‘wellness’, he always said). It was a relief when he left and they could return to their usual routine: Gerhardt only walking Loulou when the weather was warm, or when he needed an excuse to idle past Lisel’s house.

  I am settling down well here in Paris, Gerhardt wrote, the pen nib scratching across the pale blue, leaving an inky black trail. Was he, Gerhardt thought? Was he settling in well? Josef had been friendly enough, in his brash, slightly intimidating way, and the others, too. Even Frau Bertelsmann had smiled at him over the liver dumplings in the dining room. But it wasn’t like home. If he was at home now he’d be sitting near the fire, Loulou at his feet, paws twitching as she dreamt of chasing rabbits. Mother would be doing her embroidery and the wireless would be on in the background. And Franz would be drawing cartoons – no, Franz was dead. The recollection was sudden as a fist in the face. And Gerhardt realised he was feeling homesick for a place that no longer existed. In reality his mother would be stony-faced and mute, playing the same record – Franz’s favourite – over and over again on the gramophone. They would have had plain bread and cheese for supper, again, Mother either not noticing or not bothering to remove the blue-grey blooms of mould on the edges of the hard yellow cheese.

  Gerhardt picked up the pen and started to write again. The top of his bedside locker wobbled, and he worried that the Count would complain about the illegibility of his handwriting. Although at first there didn’t appear to be much to do, the wireless detector operatives brought in a terrorist yesterday – a British wireless operator – and since then I have been quite busy. He thought of his irritation at being called in from his evening off, his surprise at finding out the prisoner was a young woman.

  The English agent is a girl, he wrote. Can you imagine, Father, the British send their girls to do their dirty work for them. Either they have no men left in the whole of the British Isles, or they don’t care about the safety of their womenfolk. It’s a disgrace! Gerhardt felt suddenly outraged at the very thought of it. What if Herr Hitler were to send the likes of Lisel to London as a saboteur? What would the island-monkeys do to her if they caught her? It was too awful to contemplate. He could only conclude that their Winston Churchill must be some kind of madman to send innocent young girls out into danger like that.

  He slammed down his pen, realising he was breathing rapidly with the outrage of it. He scanned his room, slowing his breath, thinking about how to continue with the letter. It was much smaller than his room at home, with varnished floorboards and a single electric bulb under a plain red fabric shade. There was a tiny, empty hearth – only the fires in Kieffer and Goetz’s offices were ever lit – and a cupboard to hang his things in. His trunk was at the end of the bed, underneath the window. The room must have belonged to servants when the house was a private residence, he thought. Now the domestic staff trudged in daily from – from where? Gerhardt realised he really knew nothing about the city that was his new home. He picked up the pen again.

  We were very lucky that the English agent was caught in the act of transmitting. The operatives got her crystals as well as her wireless set, so Dr Goetz and his team hoped to transmit directly back to London, as if they themselves were the agent. It’s a clever plan, which Kieffer says has had much success already in the Netherlands. I think it rather fine that we’re doing such a good job of outsmarting the British, don’t you?

  Gerhardt was aware that he was showing off. But it had always seemed that that was what the Count wanted: a son – albeit an unacknowledged, illegitimate one – to be proud of. Dr Goetz was worried that they didn’t have the agent’s personal code. Apparently they always use a poem or a song or something to encode their messages, before transmission in Morse, he continued. It was rather nice to be explaining something to his father, to be an expert, for a change. He thought about the poem, how he’d discovered it, but almost not handed it over, for fear of it not being important. He wouldn’t make that mistake again. In future everything he noticed about the prisoner he would pass up the command chain immediately. Luckily I found the poem-code, and they were able to transmit to London that very evening, he added. The muted sound of someone playing Kieffer’s new piano began to filter faintly up from the first floor.

  Gerhardt paused again, shifted position and yawned. He was exhausted. He hadn’t been sleeping properly on this bed: the springs poked in awkward places. And it had been such a long afternoon: he’d never had
to do that amount of simultaneous translation before. The problem was, he began writing again, but stopped, looked at the word ‘problem’ and scratched it out. He’d been switching between English and German so much that he’d forgotten what language he was even writing in. ‘Problem’ was an English word, wasn’t it? No, it was a German word. The script looked like hazy scribbles to his overtired eyes. He said ‘Problem’ aloud, his voice sounding startlingly loud in the small room. It was both: an English and a German word. A problem shared is a problem halved, his mother used to say when he was little, worrying about the bullies at school.

  The problem was that we didn’t have her security check. We didn’t even know the English agents had a security check as well as the code. But a few hours after we transmitted to London, Dr Goetz got a message back actually telling the agent off, and reminding her to include the check! So of course, then we had to interrogate her at length to try to discover this ‘security check’ and I have been quite busy, as you can imagine.

  Gerhardt thought about the events of the afternoon, wondering how much to share with the Count. His father had said he wanted to know every little detail of the new job. The interrogation took place in Kieffer’s office, he began, remembering how the questioning went on all afternoon, with Kieffer trying variously to catch the girl out and point out the rational choice she’d be making were she to help them. But the girl refused to even speak. It was a long afternoon and still she hasn’t given up her security check. We’re going to try sleep deprivation tonight, and there’s talk of sending her to the house prison tomorrow, Gerhardt wrote, thinking that Kieffer had underestimated the girl’s mettle, and wondering about what he’d do if he found himself in her situation. I’d kill myself if I wound up in enemy hands, he added. I’d rather die than betray Germany.

  He needed to get the letter in the diplomatic bag for Berlin that evening. Write every day, the Count had exhorted. Write every day, and be sure to leave nothing out.

  Gerhardt sealed the letter and got up. There was still the muted plink-plonk of poor piano practice from downstairs, which got louder as Gerhardt opened his bedroom door and began to descend: somebody murdering Mozart with clumsy, killing fingers. The dark stairwell opened out into the lower corridor. He had to pass the prisoner’s room on the way to the main staircase. Frau Bertelsmann had left the keys dangling from the lock, Gerhardt noticed: a dull flash of silver in the gloom. The floorboards creaked, out of step with the piano, as Gerhardt continued along the passage.

  Just after he’d passed the prisoner’s door, the piano music downstairs abruptly stopped. And that was when he heard it: a scuffle-thud from inside the girl’s room.

  Edie

  By the time she heard the door, it was already too late. There was no time to slide back inside, pretend she hadn’t pushed open the window, tried to escape. So she stayed put, fingers grappling the rough stucco, feet sliding against the icy ledge with its wrought-iron balustrade. The footsteps came to a halt behind her. ‘Don’t jump,’ said the voice in English. It was the interpreter.

  He thought she was suicidal, she realised. Because she was just a girl, because she’d cried, in the end, worn out by the interminable questioning. He thought her incapable of escape. But the hairpin was still on the floor by her bed when he’d brought her back to her room. She knew she couldn’t afford to wait, and she’d thought the sound of the piano would mask the slide of the opening window. Edie faltered, feet twisting awkwardly on the balconette. She caught the edge of the wooden shutter. The ground, far below, shifted in her vision. She looked sideways, up at an angle. If she could only reach the lightning rod, snaking up skywards, but it was too far away.

  ‘Please don’t jump,’ the voice came again. That accent, not English – but not German, either. ‘Think of your family.’ What about her family? About Pop drinking port in his London club? About Mummy, sighing and listening to Chopin on her gramophone? Her memories flickered like something at the cinema: ephemeral and unreal.

  The ground swayed hazily below. She saw the gate guard, moon-faced, looking up, reaching for his holster as he walked across the lawn. If she tried to get away now, he’d shoot. Let them think she was suicidal then. She dipped forwards slightly, out into the chill monochrome air.

  ‘Please don’t!’ he said. She could sense his presence behind her. ‘The war won’t last forever. You’ll be able to go home one day.’ Where had he learnt to speak English? Not in the beer halls of Munich with the other Nazi thugs, surely? ‘Who do you have waiting for you? Brothers? Sisters? A sweetheart?’

  She shook her head. She had none of that. No siblings, no lover – and why was there any reason to suppose things would change? She’d always be alone, she was certain of that. It was what she deserved. She stayed silent, shivering in the cold, holding on. She hadn’t thought of suicide. In training they’d been told they had a duty to try to escape. But could death be a solution, after all? She looked down: just three floors – high enough to break her neck?

  She could hear him breathing, and she remembered the way his breath had condensed on the window when she’d been stripped and searched by the German woman. ‘If you touch me, I’ll jump,’ she said.

  ‘I won’t. I promise.’

  It was hard to hold on. The ledge was narrow and her fingers pinched the wooden shutter edge, peeling paint beneath her fingertips. She swallowed, looking down at the garden to where a group of shadowy figures had joined the gate guard. If she tried to climb now, they’d see, and they’d shoot. How silent they were, though. She couldn’t even hear a whisper from below.

  He was standing so close behind her that she could feel his breath as a touch of warmth on the back of her thighs. ‘You can trust me,’ he said.

  Her hands were sweaty, her grip beginning to give. Three choices: climb and be shot; let go and fall; or go back inside. What should she do? What would Miss Atkins do? She thought of the older woman with her vivid red lips and steady gaze.

  A lone motorbike buzzed down the boulevard and suddenly Edie felt exhausted, alone, and done with the drama. She started to turn, giving up, ready to go inside, but as she did so her ankle twisted, and her bare heel caught the rusted ironwork. The ledge gave way, dipping under her scrabbling feet. She tried to cling to the shutter but the paintwork was slippery beneath her fingers and she was falling.

  His hand grabbed her wrist. Her dangling feet found purchase against the plasterwork. She caught the edge of the window frame with her other hand. She heaved and shoved herself upwards. His hands helped pull her in, wrenching her painfully through the open window and onto the floor of her room. As soon as she was inside, he let go, closed the shutters, and slammed the sash window down. She sat, panting, underneath the window, and he crouched down next to her.

  ‘They’d kill me if I let you die,’ he said. She heard a barrage of footsteps on the stairs, voices shouting, and he let go of her arms and shoved her into a sitting position. Then he slapped her face, just once, so her left cheek burnt with the impression of his palm. ‘What do you think you’re playing at, you silly girl?’ he spat, his voice suddenly hard and empty.

  But as the room filled with the uniformed figures and she was hauled roughly up, she couldn’t help thinking: Girl? You’re hardly more than a boy yourself.

  Dericourt

  ‘Hurry up, chéri!’ Jeannot called.

  ‘I’m coming, chicken.’ The front door of their apartment slammed shut behind him as Henri Dericourt lowered the heavy pallet onto the floor behind the coat stand. The satchel was cutting into his shoulder, too. He couldn’t wait to get it off. He looped it over a hook and hung his coat on top. It was dark in the hallway. He tried the light switch: nothing – another power cut. He’d been away from France for so long. He hadn’t realised how much things had changed: rationing, power cuts – it was worse than Britain. But at least Jeannot was here. Yes, it had been wonderful to touch and taste his wife; it had been almost like being on honeymoon again.

  ‘I can’t s
ee a thing,’ he said. ‘Why didn’t you leave a lamp for me?’

  ‘There’s been no paraffin for weeks, and there weren’t any candles in the shops today. I can’t even get the basics. It’s terrible, Henri. Can’t you ask one of your friends to help?’

  The apartment was so small it was possible to hold a conversation with anyone, anywhere, without even raising your voice. But it was in a very convenient location, Henri reminded himself. And besides, it wasn’t as if he was having to pay for it. ‘I’ll try,’ he replied, not feeling hopeful. Brandy, cigars, exotic fruit – Bladier was good for all that, but if he asked for candles he’d be laughed at. Jeannot would just have to get off her pert arse and get in a queue somewhere, like all the other little people.

  He was fumbling with the camera in the darkness, winding on the film so that he could take it out and put it in the canister. It would be easier if he could see what he was doing, but still. At least he’d thought to get the Photostats while it was still light.

  ‘I’ve been waiting up for hours for you, trying to knit in the dark. It’s impossible. I’ve dropped about a thousand stitches. Your scarf will look more like lace than knitwear – you’ll look like such a country bumpkin when you wear it!’

  ‘As if a bit of lamplight would make any difference to your knitting,’ he joked, slipping the film into the canister and wedging it underneath the fruit in the pallet. He would go to avenue Foch first thing. ‘In any case, I am a country bumpkin,’ he said, putting the camera back in the inside pocket of his coat. Hide in plain sight: wasn’t that what the Atkins woman told her agents?

  ‘Don’t be silly, Henri. Everyone knows about Château Thierry, you’re always talking about your childhood there. If you’re a bumpkin, then I’m Monsieur Hitler! Now, will you please come to bed; it’s so cold in here without you.’ Her voice wavered like a child’s. Even now she was the wrong side of thirty there was a vulnerability and an innocence about her. She still didn’t know how he made a living. And she seemed happy not to know, skating along the surface of things, like those water boatmen he’d watched on endless summer days in the gardens of the big house, waiting for his mother to finish ironing the bed linen or blacking the ovens or whatever exhausting, thankless task the housekeeper had assigned to her that day. Jeannot was right: everyone knew about Château Thierry, but nobody knew his mother was just a domestic servant. People believed what they wanted, and if it suited them all to think he was a dashing ex-Air Force officer, son of Picardie landowners, that was fine by him.