Telegram For Mrs. Mooney

by Cate M. Ruane

  Daphne asked what she’d done before the war. Art student was the answer. “Good training for this sort of work,” said Dédée laughing. “I suppose illusion and creativity is something I’m skilled at.”

  “I’m an art student also!” said Daphne.

  “I’m going to arrange to have you sent from here to Paris and then from there to the South of France, where you’ll make your way over the Pyrenees Mountains and into free Spain. From Spain you will be taken to a boat and then—voilà—you will be home to England. We’ve done this many times. By now we have the route carefully arranged. We call it the Comet Line.”

  “We aren’t prepared to go home,” said Daphne. “We came to find Jack. If you can’t help us find him, then we plan to go to Dunkirk.”

  I said: “That’s were the Resistance people at the bookstore said we should look for his—his grave.”

  “Daphne, my dear,” said Dédée, “we are certain that your fiancé perished in the crash. Our agents saw the Germans remove his body from the airplane. It’s time to go home to the comfort of your families and mourn.” Dédée took both Daphne’s hands in hers, but Daphne looked down at the floor saying nothing.

  “Your lives are in danger,” said Antoine. “We can’t let you fall into the hands of the Gestapo.”

  “Daphne’s half Jewish,” I said. “Like Pauline Goddard, the actress.”

  “Quoi!” said Dédée, and for the first time she looked terrified. “All the more reason for you to leave immediately.”

  “Without delay,” said Antoine, throwing up his hands. “If caught, you’ll be executed. Or wish you’d been.”

  “O je,” I said, looking at Daphne with Oliver Twist eyes.

  She loosening Dédée’s grip on her hands and hugging them to her body like a stubborn child. “I intend to go to Dunkirk before jumping to conclusions. I’m quite determined, quite settled in the matter.” She said this with gusto, then whispered, “Otherwise, I’ll always wonder.”

  “Think of the boy, if not yourself,” said Antoine, pointing his chin to me. “Think what’s best for him.”

  I snuggled close to Daphne. She grabbed me to her and we hugged. I wanted to say, I’ll protect you, don’t worry, but I’d lost all my nerve with that word executed.

  “I’ll arrange everything for your evacuation,” said Dédée. “Antoine will let you know when to be ready to leave. It could take a few days to organize everything. In the meantime you’d best remain here. I’ll arrange for a driver to pick you up. I have one in mind. He’s very dependable and you need fear nothing.” Dédée kissed Daphne on both cheeks as Antoine and her got up to leave.

  Marlene leaned her chin on Daphne’s knee, gazed up toward her—ears lowered, eyes droopy—and sighed.

  A couple days later on, Daphne woke me while it was still dark. She was wearing her new black suit with a hat pinned to her head and a black lace veil covering her eyes. When she lifted the veil, I seen she’d been crying. She gripped a valise Madame DeQuick must’ve leant her. She placed it on the floor and sat on the edge of my bed.

  “Thomas, I need to go to Dunkirk, but you shan’t come with me.”

  “You’re leaving me?” I was waking up fast and sat up in the bed, throwing off the covers even though the room was cold.

  “Darling, I’d feel dreadful if something were to happen to you. I think what Madame DeQuick was telling me about her daughter, and then sleeping in the girl’s bed—well—it’s made me realize how foolish I’d been to let you come to Belgium. You go to Paris and I’ll meet you there in a few days. We’ll have a grand time with my aunt Dalia, eating like kings. Then we’ll go to Spain together.”

  “What will happen if you’re catched?”

  “You mean, caught? Can’t you see I’ll be safer going alone? The Gestapo is looking for a boy and a young woman traveling together. And besides, your mother would never forgive me if I let you take any more risks.” She tickled my chin, “Do you know how important it is for a bride to have a mother-in-law on her side?”

  “But—” That’s all I could get out, because my head was all in a tangle. I looked into her eyes and saw stubborn determination. “How will you find me in Paris?”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll come back here first and I’m sure they’ll take me to you. Now give your future sister-in-law a hug and a kiss, and then go back to sleep.”

  She rushed out of the room. I jumped out of bed and reached for my clothes, meaning to follow her. I’d left them on the floor next to the bed when I undressed, but everything was gone. It was the oldest trick in the book. Lying there was my biplane, bow and arrow, a key, a marble, a two-leaf clover, and a stick of gum. It wasn’t going to be easy to find where she hid my clothes. At least she took the slingshot. Also, one of my good-luck marbles—or maybe it had rolled away. I hoped it was in her pocket.

  I couldn’t go back to sleep and laid awake thinking. It was my own fault Daphne was going off without me. If anything, I’d been like a pebble in her shoe, always talking about giving up. You dumb cluck! I thought.

  Madame DeQuick came to wake me. When I explained about Daphne leaving for Dunkirk, she looked worried and said, “Impossible,” shaking her head. She gave back my blue jeans and the rest of my clothes. They’d hung out to dry in the back garden all this time. We found Antoine’s old clothing stuffed under the kitchen sink.

  Marlene was sore as me when she realized Daphne was gone.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  IT WAS TOUGH DRAGGING MYSELF out of bed the morning the driver came to take me to Paris. Daphne still hadn’t come back. For all I knew, she was in a Nazi prison camp with no one to help break her out. Madame DeQuick stopped me from flying to the rescue. At night I’d had dreams where I heard Daphne crying somewheres way far in the distance, but I couldn’t never get to her. It was enough to drive me bonkers.

  And I was headed home to East Hempstead without my brother. A long journey stretched ahead of me, with nothing to look forward to except maybe seeing the Eiffel Tower—not much of a consolation prize, if you asked me.

  Marlene had to live with Madame DeQuick. My ma was allergic to dogs, so if I took her back to East Hempstead she’d end up at the pound. Madame DeQuick was happy to have a pet. At least she wouldn’t be lonely—maybe the only good thing to come out of the whole deal.

  The driver arrived in a Renault four door and opened a rear door for me to get in. When I asked, he let me sit up front next to him. I was glad to see he could speak some English. “Will you be taking me all the way to Paris?” I asked.

  “No, petite monsieur, only to Mons, near the border of France. Another agent will meet us and you will continue with him. Comprendre?” I watched as he opened the glove box and reached in, removing a pistol, which he placed between us on the seat. “To be safe,” he said. “And by the way, my name is Paul-Henri and I’m your uncle if anyone should ask.”

  “So, I guess that means your name isn’t really Paul-Henri?”

  The man laughed when I said this. “You are very swift.”

  “And from Mons, who will take me to Paris?”

  “We are to meet a man at the train station in Mons. He’ll be carrying a box of bonbons. That’s all I know.”

  “Do I get to eat the bonbons?” Bonbons were sweets: chocolates usually filled with nuts or maraschino cherries. I have a passion for maraschino cherries. Our contact would look like he was waiting for his girlfriend—enough throw the Nazis off.

  We drove through the congested streets of central Brussels, some so narrow the Renault barely fit between parked cars. Our side mirror scraped the paint off of a blue car, but we didn’t stop. I reached out and rubbed the blue paint off, so’s there’d be no evidence. Paul-Henri poked me with his elbow as a way of thanks. We came to wider streets with less traffic and Paul-Henri relaxed and began whistling a tune I didn’t recognize. Something snappy like what a high school marching band might play at a Fourth of July parade.

  “What is it?” I asked.

&n
bsp; “The Internationale. It’s a Russian song.”

  “Are you Russian?”

  “No, Belgian.” He kept on whistling the tune. I wondered why he was singing a Russian song if he weren’t Russian.

  Soon we got rolling through countryside spotted with windmills and fields like green patchwork quilts. Paul-Henri reached behind the seat and found a paper bag, placing it in my lap. “I’d forgotten,” he said. “This is from Dédée.”

  I opened the bag and seen it contained a coloring book and a package of crayons. Also, a book of crossword puzzles with the clues all in Dutch. At the bottom of the bag I found an oval tin with a picture of a skinny queen on the lid. Inside were mints. They were called “LeReine Pastilles.”

  “Dédée says you can eat the mints but must save the tin until you are safely home. They are for a signal: to let people along the line know you are who you say.”

  “You should have said whom,” I said, figuring he needed help with English, just like me.

  “Comprendre?” he said, reverting to his native tongue.

  I opened the mint tin and counted the mints—there were twenty. “Goody,” I said, because I wanted to gobble them up.

  “The coloring book is for your amusement, but the crossword puzzles will tell you where to find our people in Paris, should you be separated from your contact. Find the message and then fill in some of the blanks in the other puzzles, so that if the book is discovered, the Germans will be confused.”

  This, I thought, is getting interesting. I leafed through the crosswords and noticed one of them was halfway completed. “I can’t understand none of the clues,” I said. “They seem to be in Dutch. How will I complete the puzzles?”

  “Be creative.” He winked at me.

  Within an hour we came to a crossroads. In one direction a sign pointed to Mons, in another direction, Bruges. And a third sign pointed to Lille. Under Lille was written Dunkerque. Paul-Henri turned toward Bruges. Trying to be helpful, I pointed toward Mons.

  “We need to take a detour to avoid a German checkpoint,” said Paul-Henri, turning down a bumpy dirt farm road. Dust came into the opened windows and I began choking. “Roll up your window,” he said, “We’ll be on this road for a spell.”

  It was getting stuffy in the car, and I was glad when we got to a paved road and I could let down my window again and breathe in the fresh country air. Soon we arrived in Mons and pulled in front of a train station, which looked identical to the capital building in Washington, D.C. “Wait here in the car,” he said.

  I watched him mounting the stairs to the station, looking in all directions for a sign of our contact. I wished I’d given him the LeReine mint pastilles, but it was too late.

  I took a peek at the crossword puzzles, killing time. Reading from top to bottom, one down spelled, GERMAIN. Six across spelled SAINT. The A met up with the one in GERMAIN. I’d never heard of a saint by that name. Over to the other side, there was a word PRES, meeting up with DES, but I didn’t understand the Dutch clue. I was baffled; it was all too cryptic. Until I got to the bottom right side of the puzzle: thirty-three down was a date—1927. The clue was “Charles Lindbergh.” I had that figured out straight away. 1927 was the year Lindbergh made his famous flight from Long Island to Paris.

  I gave up on the crossword, took out a crayon, and began working in my coloring book. The theme was automobiles of the 1930’s. While filling in a Lagonda Motors Ltd Drophead Coupe with a bright purple crayon—highlighting the trim with canary yellow—I heard a car backfire. I looked out the window but didn’t see a moving car anywheres near ours. Then I heard the backfire again. This time I stiffened, because it sounded like a gunshot.

  Two men came running down the steps from the station. The metal taps on the soles of their boots made loud stomping noises. One was wearing a long raincoat. The other was dressed in a pinstripe business suit with big shoulders. The sun flared off something metal and shiny sticking out of his front pocket. Both their faces had the expressions you see in Hollywood pictures—on mobsters right after they’ve bumped off a bit player. The two men jumped into a car and raced away. I began to get a queasy feeling in my stomach.

  I needed to use a men’s room, on top of everything. So I exited the car taking my things with me. I mounted the stairs in slow motion. As I got near the platform, there was the commotion of people running away from the ticket window—some screaming and wildly waving their hands. One lady fainted into her husband’s arms. The man calling himself Paul-Henri was laid out on the ground, and blood spilled from a head wound onto the tile floor. It was a good thing Daphne wasn’t there to see it.

  I turned my back to the wall and pretended to take a leak, but the whole time I kept one eye on the scene of the crime. I didn’t feel scared because I seen the two killers leave the station. Not at first, anyway. But then I began to shake. It started in my knees and before long the shake moved up to my hands. I had to sit down against the wall. Meanwhile, people started moving away from Paul-Henri’s body. Everyone knew he was dead—dead as a doornail. Too bad, because he was one of the good guys.

  It didn’t seem right to leave Paul-Henri. So I stood up, with some trouble, and walked over to where he was laying. My head was so light I had to sit down again, right there in the middle of the station. Paul-Henri’s hand was stretched out, like he wanted someone to hold it, but I was scared to touch a dead body. And his eyes were still opened, only they looked like marbles, not real eyes.

  My ears stopped working for some reason. Sort of like when you drive down a mountain too fast. Tears tried to escape from my eyes, only I wouldn’t let them. It helped not to blink, or even to move one muscle. I kept staring at a polka dot on his tie, even though right above it was a gold tiepin with a diamond chip. It was like that blue polka dot was the whole planet earth. I felt wet where my hands were folded in my lap and reached up to my face to brush away tears. But my face was dry. I looked down and was mortified. I hadn’t done that since kindergarten.

  Bells started ringing and at first I thought they were in my head. Then someone shouted, “Ambulance!”

  Better beat it before the cops show up.

  Everybody was onto the fact that the police were in cahoots with the Nazis. And my fingerprints were all over Paul-Henri’s car, footprints too. When a train pulled into the station, I jumped onto it and bolted for the lavatory. I was shook-up from seeing a dead body for only the second time in my life. The other time was at my great-great-aunt Sinéad’s wake but that didn’t count because she was ninety-seven and died of old age.

  When somebody began banging on the lavatory door, I slid the lock back and cracked the door open. A man shoved the door in, forcing me to stumble against a steel sink. I was afraid he was Gestapo but it was only a plain German soldier who had to go—bad. I got out of his way and left him to it.

  I rushed down the corridor and into a sleeper car, thinking that was a good place to hide. Most of the cabins were closed with red velvet curtains and I peeked behind a few. There was Nazis in every cabin: one was kissing his girlfriend who yelled something at me in French. I ducked into an empty berth and hid out behind a cushion. Telephone poles and barns whizzed by, all in a blur and making my head spin. A conductor came down the aisle but, luckily, he didn’t stop to ask for tickets. He shouted, “”LILLE! LILLE!”

  I remembered seeing Lille written on a road sign when Paul-Henri turned toward Bruges, headed the back way to Mons. Wait a minute, I said to my brain, because something was coming to it. The sign read Lille/Dunkerque. That must be French for Dunkirk.

  I was headed to Dunkirk. Where my brother Jack was buried. And maybe where I’d find Daphne.

  I took out my coloring book and started filling in a Triumph Dolomite Roadster but had trouble staying inside the lines, what with my hand still shaking. Had to put the crayon down and stare out the window counting telephone poles instead. Meanwhile, I was fighting tears. And I won’t say who won.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

 
Somewhere in German-occupied France

  A STONE’S THROW FROM LE BOURGET AIRPORT, there’s a bar that’s a favorite with the Luftwaffe. If you were to enter on this night in September 1942, if you were to pass by the few patrons, nervously sipping bourbon and white wine, if you were to enter the men’s toilet and look into the last stall, this is what you’d find:

  You’d discover a man, late-twenties or early-thirties. Hatless, hair close cropped, and wearing the rumpled uniform of the SS: brown shirt and black tie askew, the shirt untucked. The buttons on his black trousers are undone. On the right arm is a red band with a swastika. The band has come loose and is dangling from his shirt.

  His tall black boots are, by the way, spit-shined—resembling patent leather. This is incongruous with his otherwise slovenly appearance. The man is passed out, presumably drunk.

  Outside the stall, another man studies himself in the mirror. Touching his nose, he examines the areas under his eyes, which are healing nicely after a recent mishap. He straightens his tie; attached to it is an iron cross. He buttons his dress jacket: it’s black and made of wool. Slung on his arm is a long black greatcoat, suited to the changing weather.

  He has second thoughts and unbuttons the jacket to remove a thick billfold from the inside breast pocket. Admiring the fine leather, he opens it and smiles. There are Reichsmarks that Parisians will have to accept. Even better, there is also a thick stack of French francs. He will eat well tonight. It’s payday for pilot officers of the German Luftwaffe.

  He removes a black and white photograph, sighing as he looks at it.

  In the billfold are also identity papers, marked with the same iron cross that adorns his throat: Flieger-Stabsingemieur Hans Dorfmann. He looks at his reflection in the mirror and then at the photograph.