Code Name Verity

by Elizabeth E. Wein

  Still, Fräulein Engel will probably appreciate the closure of hearing about Maddie’s operational flight to France. I suppose somebody will be court-martialled for that. I’m not sure who.

  The Special Duties squadron leader was supposed to take me. The Moon Squadron was suffering a bit at the end of September – they’d had a fantastically successful summer, a dozen flights a month, twice as many agents dropped off and scores of refugees picked up – but injury and incident had winnowed their Lysander pilots down to four at this particular point in time and one of those was so stricken with ’flu he couldn’t stand up (they were all exhausted). You can see where this is going.

  For me, the preparation took months – another parachute course, then an elaborate field exercise in which I had to scramble around a real city (an unfamiliar one, they sent me off to Birmingham to do it) leaving coded messages for contacts I’d never met and arranging clandestine pick-ups of dummy parcels. The chief danger is that a policeman will notice your suspicious activities and arrest you – in which case it is quite difficult convincing your own authorities that you’re not working for the enemy.

  Then there were specific arrangements to do with my own assignment – taking apart and putting together every one of those flipping radios a dozen times; making sure my clothes couldn’t be traced back to England, ripping the labels out of all my underthings (you see why the pullover is so ideal a garment – wholly anonymous and made over from locally obtained materials). Learning yards and yards of code – you know (all too well) that the wireless code gets keyed to poems so that it is easier to remember, and I was rather hoping von Linden would make his cipher breakers try to crack the ‘Tam o’ Shanter’ so I could laugh at them. But he is wise to me.

  Then I had to undergo the nastiest sort of drills to make sure I had my story straight. They found it very difficult to simulate an interrogation for me. Most people find it disconcerting being woken in the middle of the night and dragged off for questioning, but I simply could not take it seriously. I knew the routine far too well. After about 5 minutes we would be wrestling over some detail of protocol or else something would send me into gales of laughter. In extremis they blindfolded me and held a loaded gun to the back of my head for nearly 6 hours – it was sinister and exhausting and I did go a bit wobbly eventually. (We all did. It wasn’t fun.) But even so I wasn’t ever afraid. You knew – you knew you’d be all right in the end. There were a lot of people involved because they had to keep swapping over guards, and my C.O. refused to tell me who it had been, to protect them, you know? 2 weeks later I presented him with a list of suspects that turned out to be 90 % accurate. I’d made the narrow rodent eyes at everybody for a few days and over the next week every single one of the men who had been in attendance that night bought me a drink. The women were harder to figure out, but I could have opened a black-market corner shop with the chocolate and cigarettes they slipped me. Guilt is a marvellous weapon.

  So, mentally prepared, there was then packing to do – cigarettes (for gifts and bribes), clothing coupons (forged and/or stolen), ration cards, 2 million francs in small notes (now confiscated – it truly makes me ill to think about it), pistol, compass, brain. And then just waiting for the moon. Actually I was very good at being summoned to action without any notice, I was used to that (also at learning poetry by heart) – but this business of waiting, waiting, waiting for the moon, nibbling at your cuticles and watching the moon nibbling at the sky, is very testing. You sit by the telephone all morning, leap out of your skin when it rings; then when it turns out there’s too much fog over the Channel or the German army has put a guard over the farmer who owns the field you’re supposed to land in, you’re let off again for the rest of the day. Then there’s nothing to do except mooch about wondering if you can bear to sit in a smoke-filled cinema watching The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp for the sixth time, and if you will get in trouble if you do, because the Prime Minister disapproves of it and secretly you fancy Anton Walbrook as the noble German officer and you’re pretty sure your C.O. knows it. Just as you have decided ‘Bother the Prime Minister!’ and are looking forward to spending another dreamy afternoon with Anton Walbrook, the phone rings again and You Are Operational.

  Have I got the right shoes on, you wonder frantically, and bloody hell, where did I leave my 2 million francs?

  An Irregular Ferry Flight

  Maddie, lucky beast, did not have to endure any of this. Maddie just picked up her ferry chit as usual from the Oakway Operations hut, grinned at the ‘S’ and the destination ‘RAF Buscot’ because it meant she’d get to share a cup of tea with her best friend at some point in the next twenty-four hours, and walked out to the Puss Moth with her gas mask and her flight bag. It was routine. Incredible to think what an ordinary day it was for her, to begin with.

  It was still light when we landed at RAF Special Duties. Moonrise was early, half past six or so, and because of Double Summer Time we had to wait for it to get dark. Jamie – call sign John – was flying out that night, and Michael. The call signs are all from Peter Pan of course. This particular night’s venture was called Operation Dogstar, which seems appropriate. Second to the right, and then straight on till morning.

  It’s awful, telling it like this, isn’t it? As though we didn’t know the ending. As though it could have another ending. It’s like watching Romeo drink poison. Every time you see it you get fooled into thinking his girlfriend might wake up and stop him. Every single time you see it you want to shout, You stupid ass, just wait a minute and she’ll open her eyes! Oi, you, you twat, open your eyes, wake up! Don’t die this time! But they always do.

  Operation Dogstar

  I wonder how many piles of paper like mine are lying around Europe, the only testament to our silenced voices, buried in filing cabinets and steamer trunks and cardboard boxes as we disappear – as we vanish into the night and the fog?

  Assuming you don’t incinerate all record of me when you’re done with it, what I’d love to capture, to trap here for eternity in amber, is how exciting it was to come here. Me skipping across the concrete as I got out of the Puss Moth, through crisp October air smelling of leaf smoke and engine exhaust, thinking, France, France! Ormaie again, at last! The whole of Craig Castle had wept for Ormaie as the German army marched in three years ago – we have all been here before, visiting la famille de ma grandmère – now the elms are all cut down for firewood and barricades, the fountains are all dry except the one they use to water horses and put out fires, and the rose garden in memory of my great-uncle in the Place des Hirondelles has been dug up and the square is full of armoured vehicles. When I got here, there was a row of rotting dead men hanging from a balcony of the Hôtel de Ville, the town hall. The evil of daily life here is indescribable and if this is civilisation then it is beyond the capacity of my smallish brain to imagine the evil of a place like Natzweiler-Struthof.

  You know, I speak German because I love German. What good was a degree in German literature going to do me? I was reading it because I loved it. Deutschland, das Land der Dichter und Denker, land of poets and thinkers. And now I will never even see Germany, unless they send me to Ravensbrück – I will never see Berlin, or Cologne, or Dresden – or the Black Forest, the Rhine Valley, the blue Danube. I HATE YOU, Adolf Hitler, you selfish wee beastie of a man, keeping Germany all to yourself. YOU RUIN EVERYTHING

  Bother. I did not mean to deviate like that. I want to remember –

  How after supper, my admirer the police-sergeant-cook produced real coffee for us. How Jamie and Maddie lay on the hearthrug in front of the fire in the sitting room beneath the staring glass eyes of the stuffed foxes and partridges on the mantelpiece, Jamie’s sleek blond head and Maddie’s untidy black curls bent low together in conspiracy over Jamie’s map, thoroughly against all regulations, discussing the route to Ormaie. How we all crowded round the radio to hear our own code announced on the BBC – ‘To us les enfants, sauf un, grandissent’ – the random message that
told our reception committee in France who to expect that night. It is the first line of Peter Pan. All children, except one, grow up. Expect the usual lads with one exception – tonight there’s one wee lassie coming along.

  How we all sat shivering on deck chairs in The Cottage garden, watching the sun set.

  How we all jumped when the telephone rang.

  It was the squadron leader’s wife. Peter – that is not his real name, Engel, you silly ass. Peter had met his wife for lunch, driven her to the railway station afterwards, and almost immediately after dropping her off had been involved in a messy road accident in which he had broken half his ribs and been knocked completely unconscious for most of the afternoon. His wife had not heard about it earlier because she had been sitting on a train that had been 3 hours delayed after it was shunted on to a siding to give priority to a troops train. In any case Peter would not be flying to France tonight.

  I confess that it was my idea to find a substitute.

  After the sergeant hung up there was a lot of flap as everybody gasped in dismay and concern and disappointment. We had been tut-tutting from time to time all evening over Peter’s late arrival, but it never occurred to anyone that he wouldn’t turn up well ahead of take-off. And now it was dark and the BBC announcement had been made and the reception committees in France were waiting and the Lysanders were out there with their long-range tanks full of fuel and their rear cockpits full of guns and radios. And bouncing on her flat heels, full of coffee and nerve and code, was Eva Seiler, Berlin’s interpretive liaison with London, soon to insinuate herself into the German-speaking underworld of Ormaie.

  ‘Maddie can fly the plane.’

  She has presence, Eva Seiler or whoever she thought she was that night, and people pay attention to her. They don’t always agree with her, but she does command attention.

  Jamie laughed. Jamie, sweet Jamie – the interpretive liaison’s loving, toeless Pobble of a brother laughed and said with force, ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Just – no! Never mind the breach of regulations, she’s not even been checked out –’

  ‘On a Lysander?’ the liaison said scornfully.

  ‘Night flying –’

  ‘She does it without a radio or a map!’

  ‘I don’t fly without a map,’ Maddie corrected prudently, playing her cards close to her chest. ‘It’s against the rules.’

  ‘Well, you don’t have your destination or the obstacles marked most of the time, which is much the same thing.’

  ‘She’s not flown to France at night,’ Jamie argued, and bit his lip.

  ‘You made her fly to France,’ said his sister.

  Jamie looked at Maddie. Michael, and the goddess-like Special Operations officer who was there to oversee Queenie’s packing, and the RAF police sergeant, and the other agents who were flying out that night, watched with interest.

  Jamie played his ace.

  ‘There’s no one to authorise the flight.’

  ‘Ring the Bloody Machiavellian English Intelligence Officer.’

  ‘He’s got no Air Ministry authority.’

  ATA First Officer Brodatt made her move at last, and trumped him calmly.

  ‘If it’s a ferry flight,’ she said, ‘I can authorise it myself. Let me use the telephone.’

  And she rang her C.O. to let him know she had been asked to taxi one of her usual passengers from RAF Special Duties to an ‘Undisclosed Location’. And he gave her permission to go.

  Ormaie 24.XI.43 JB-S

  He knows now.

  Nacht und Nebel, night and fog. Eva Seiler is going to fry in hell. Oh – I wish I had some clue whether I have done the right thing. But I don’t see how I can finish this story and keep Eva secret. I did promise to give him every last detail. And ultimately, I can’t imagine that giving her identity away will change my fate much, whatever it is.

  Because I’d written such a lot the day before yesterday it has taken a while for Hauptsturmführer von Linden to get caught up on the translation, and he and Engel (or somebody) must have kept going without me after I’d been locked up in my cell again last night. I have still not quite slept off the excesses of that day and was out cold at 3 a.m. or whenever it was that he came in – but woke instantly when the padlocks and bolts on my door began their official-sounding sequence of thuds and clicks, as it always fills me with the most curious mixture of wild hope and sick dread when they unlock my door. I have slept through air raids more than once, but when my door is unlocked I am instantly On My Guard.

  I stood up. It is pointless backing against the wall, and I have stopped bothering about my hair. But the Wallace in me still makes me want to face the enemy on my feet.

  It was von Linden of course – I almost want to say ‘as usual’ as he often comes in now to chat briefly with me about German literature when he’s finished work. I think it is the only self-indulgence of his day’s strict routine – Parzival as a nightcap, to clear his mind of the blood that flecks the silver pips on his black collar patches. When he stands in my door and asks my opinion on Hegel or Schlegel, I dare not give him less than my full attention (though I have suggested he needs to take modern writers like Hesse and Mann more seriously. How those schoolboys of his, back in Berlin, would love Narziß und Goldmund!).

  So – a visit not wholly unexpected, only last night it was not ‘as usual’ – he was alight. Animation and colour in his face, his hands locked behind his back so I could not see them shaking (perhaps also so I would not notice his ring – I am wise to such evasive tactics). He threw the door wide so my cell was lit by the blazing electric bulbs in the interrogation room and uttered in disbelief, ‘Eva Seiler?’

  He had only just found out.

  ‘You lie,’ he accused.

  Why the hell would I lie about that? I’m Eva Seiler. Ha ha, not really.

  You know, I was astonished he had heard of me, that he seemed to know who Eva Seiler is. I’ll bet it was that imbecilic Kurt Kiefer who spilled the beans on her, back in Paris blabbing about his conquests. Ugh, that ridiculous proposal. I warned them he wasn’t clever enough to be a double agent even before we decided to arrest him.

  I suppose Eva was quite successful at extracting information the Jerries would rather not have leaked to the Brits, and perhaps she’s even become one of many niggling thorns in the Führer’s side. But I hadn’t thought von Linden would know who I was talking about (I might have mentioned her sooner if I had). At any rate I didn’t miss a beat – this is how I operate. This is what I am so good at. Give me a hint, just one hint, and I will fake it. It’s the thin end of the wedge for you, me laddie.

  I scraped my hair back from my face in the severe headmistressy way they used to fix it, and holding it in place with one hand, straightened my shoulders and clicked my heels together. If you don’t stand too close to someone who is taller than you, you can still affect to sneer down your nose at him. I said coldly, in German, ‘What possible reason could I have to pretend to be Berlin’s interpretive liaison with London?’

  ‘What proof? You have no valid papers,’ he said breathlessly. ‘You were caught with Margaret Brodatt’s papers on you, but you are not Margaret Brodatt either, so why should you be Eva Seiler?’

  I don’t think he knew whether he was talking to me or to Eva at this point. (He suffers a certain amount of sleep deprivation as well, due to the nature of his work.)

  ‘Eva Seiler’s papers are all forgeries in any case,’ I pointed out. ‘They wouldn’t prove anything.’

  I paused – count to three – and advanced on him. Two baby steps only, to make him feel advanced on. Still enough of a distance between us, a metre perhaps, that he could not make an advantage of his height. Then another step, to allow him the advantage. I let go of my hair and looked up at him, dishevelled and feminine, all doe eyes and vulnerability. I asked in German, in a voice of wonder and hurt as though it had only just occurred to me, ‘What is your daughter’s name?’

  ‘I
solde,’ he answered softly, his guard down, and went red as a beetroot.

  I had got him by the balls and he knew it. I fell about laughing, instantly myself again.

  ‘I don’t need papers!’ I cried. ‘I don’t need proof! I don’t need electrified needles and ice water and battery acid and the threat of kerosene! All I do is ask a question, and you answer it! What more perfect proof than one lovely word out of you – Isolde? I’m a wireless operator!’

  ‘Sit down,’ he commanded.

  ‘What does Isolde think of your war work?’ I asked.

  He took the final step towards me, using his height. ‘Down.’

  He is intimidating, and I am so tired of being punished for my legion small acts of defiance. I sat down obediently, quivering, expecting violence (not that he has ever laid a finger on me himself). I pulled the eiderdown up round my neck, an illusion of armour.

  ‘Isolde is innocent of my war work,’ he said. Then suddenly he sang softly:

  ‘Isolde noch

  Im Reich der Sonne

  Im Tagesschimmer

  Noch Isolde . . .

  Sie zu Sehen,

  We lch Verlangen!’

  Isolde still in the realm of the sun, in the shimmering daylight still, Isolde – How I long to see her!

  (It is Wagner, one of the dying Tristan’s arias. I can’t quite remember it all.)

  He has a light, nasal tenor – so beautiful. It hurt worse than being slapped, being shown the irony of his life. And of mine, of mine – OF MINE – Isolde alive in the day and the sun while I suffocate in Night and Fog, the unfairness of it, the random unfairness of everything, of me being here and Isolde being in Switzerland, and Engel not getting any cognac and Jamie losing his toes. And Maddie, Oh lovely Maddie,