Code Name Verity

by Elizabeth E. Wein

  When I was eight, before the Depression, we had a holiday in Paris – I remember bits of it, we took a boat trip on the Seine, and we saw the Mona Lisa. But the thing I remember most is how Granddad and I went to the top of the Eiffel Tower. We took the lift up, but we walked the whole way down, and on the way we stopped at the First Stage and we could see Gran standing in the park below, wearing a big new hat she’d bought that morning, and we waved at her – she looked so posh, all alone in the Champ de Mars, that you’d have never known she wasn’t French herself. She took a picture of us and though we were so far away and tiny you can’t see us in the picture, I know we are there. And I remember also there was a shop, way up there on the First Stage, and Granddad bought me a tiny gold Eiffel Tower on a gold chain as a souvenir, and I still have it, back home in Stockport.

  It wasn’t so long ago. What is happening to us?

  Maman Thibaut has been dosing Amélie with café au lait at the big kitchen table, Mitraillette and I taking turns holding her tight and exchanging horrified glances over her head. She won’t stop talking. I only get every third word or so. Mitraillette whispers a rough translation –

  ‘Il y en avait une autre – there was another. Il y avaient deux filles – there were two girls – La Cadette et ses amies n’ont rien vu quand on a tué l’autre –’

  They didn’t see the second girl executed. It was torment for all of us, dragging this information out of La Cadette. There were two girls brought there together, tied to each other. The second had to stand and watch as they butchered the first – so close, they made her stand so close that Amélie said the blood spattered on her face. Then they closed the gates. Over the courtyard wall Amélie and her friends saw them raising the blade again and that was when they left.

  The second girl was Julie. Certain of it. There can’t be another petite blonde in a pullover the colour of autumn leaves being held prisoner in the Ormaie Gestapo HQ. Amélie saw her.

  But I don’t believe they killed her either. I just don’t believe it. I keep thinking of those pictures of the pilot. They must have shown Julie those pictures by now, and perhaps she thinks I’m dead. But I’m not. And it’s the same for her, I’m sure of it. It might look like she’s dead, but she’s not. They’ve got a reason to fake her death now, since Georgia Penn talked to her this week and they need to re-establish their – supremacy or whatever, their control over what everybody knows or doesn’t know. That captain/commander must be in trouble – he went behind his superior’s back to let Penn in. Perhaps he’s been told to kill Julie. But I think he’s just as likely been told to stage her death, so she disappears again. Sharing cognac with her and sending her to the guillotine in the same week? I just don’t believe it.

  I WANT TO BLOW THAT PLACE APART.

  Planes go over almost every night – there are some munitions factories working for the Germans and launch sites here in France that they are desperate to put out of action. They won’t drop a bomb in the middle of Ormaie, not on purpose, for fear of hitting civilians. They have hit the railway junction here and had a go at the factories to the north of the city though I don’t think Ormaie carries on any significant manufacture apart from umbrellas. But the RAF won’t bomb the middle of the city. It’s why Julie was sent here, so we could get at it from the ground. Not many people here know the RAF is trying to avoid hitting them – no one feels safe. The Americans dropped some bombs on Rouen in broad daylight. People panic when they hear the air-raid sirens and dive for shelter just like we did back in the Manchester Blitz. But nothing ever hits the centre of Ormaie.

  Sometimes I wish it would – just one great big blast to wipe out the Castle of Butchers. I want that evil place to go up in flames. I want it so badly it hurts. Then I remember that Julie is still inside.

  I don’t believe she’s dead, I don’t believe any of their bluff and lies and bullying threats. I don’t believe she’s dead and I WON’T believe she’s dead until I hear the shots MYSELF and see her fall.

  Another Nazi Sunday dinner at the Thibauts’, 28 Nov. Had to make myself scarce. Can just imagine La Cadette feeding them our line – ‘Käthe has got an older man! You would not believe how fast she works. It is a friend of Papa’s driver, she met him when we were loading hens a couple of weeks ago. They go out together every Sunday. And some evenings too!’

  And Maman, rolling her eyes, ‘It’s not right, not right for such a young girl, he’s twice her age. But what can I do to stop her? She’s not my own – we work her hard and she gets no wages, so I have to give her Sunday afternoons – and she’s of age. I just hope she’s careful, doesn’t get herself in trouble . . .’

  ‘In trouble’ with Paul, yeccchhh.

  He and I bicycled off together to someone else’s house to refine my bomb-making and gun-firing skills. It is such a relief to focus on some neutral thing – how much plastic explosive you need to blow up a car, how to wire up the switches, how to use a magnet to attach a detonator, how to hit a moving target with a pocket pistol – a borrowed one, as Käthe doesn’t normally carry a gun since she would get arrested if she was caught with it. Thank you, Jamie and Julie Beaufort-Stuart, for the first few shooting lessons. Today’s moving target was not an Me-109 or a pheasant, but an empty tin on a stick, waved about by a very brave soul at the other end of the garden. The noise is hidden by the sound of a sawmill adjacent to the house. I don’t know if they normally work on a Sunday afternoon or if the noise was laid on specially for us.

  ‘It is a pity we cannot keep you, Kittyhawk,’ said the man whose house it was. ‘You were born to be a soldier.’

  Huh. Makes me quite puffed up with pride and yet fills me with scorn all at the same time – what rubbish! I wasn’t born to be a soldier. There’s a war on, so I’m delivering aeroplanes. But I don’t go looking for adventure or excitement, and I jolly well don’t go around picking fights with people. I like making things work. I love flying.

  Have to remind myself I am still Maddie – haven’t heard my own name for 7 weeks. And my stunt double Käthe is going to be pushed to her limits in the next few days.

  She – I – am supposed to deliver the message – invitation? – to Julie’s recruit, the German slave-girl secretary, Engel. Why me? Because I’m not local and with luck I won’t still be here after the next full moon. Engel doesn’t know my face, very few people do. But I hadn’t ever seen her before today, so we arranged for me to get a good look at her before I have to approach her in the street tomorrow. Paul and I came back to the Thibauts’ farm before the Nazi visitors left, and we waited – waited – waited for them to come out.

  We’d closed the gate. So the Gestapo Mercedes had to stop, and Engel, who is their driver, had to get out to open the gate.

  There was me, standing at the side of the road with my murdered man’s bicycle, waiting well back from the Merc with my head down and wearing one of Maman Thibaut’s motherly kerchiefs. There was Paul, feeling up the German girl bold as brass – I am sure no one gave me a second glance because what a performance he put on. He let the poor lass get the gate open about a foot or so then put one of his big hands over hers, to help, right, but he managed to get his other hand spread across her bum as they pushed the gate open together. I think it is safe to say she now hates him as much as I do. She scurried back to the car clutching her coat and skirt tight round her legs, and Etienne was in the back seat laughing.

  But all Paul’s fooling about did give me a good look at her. She’s tall, about my age, dark brown hair in a severe crimped bob, a bit old-fashioned. Astonishing pale green eyes. Not pretty but interesting – she’d probably be a knockout in a red cocktail dress, but looked dead frowny and drab in her sensible shoes and dust-coloured overcoat.

  Oh, I sound like Julie. ‘I say, Nazi Slave-Girl, you’d look super if you’d let me have a go at your eyebrows.’

  So Engel stormed back to the car and stalled it getting into gear – she was that angry. Started it up again right away though, pulled away smoothly –
didn’t even look at Paul as she drove off, left him to close the gate himself.

  Don’t think any of them noticed me; they were far too busy watching the Paul and Engel romantic comedy.

  I got a look at the Gestapo captain too.

  I know I was supposed to keep my head down. But I couldn’t stop myself gaping a little. That is the man who interrogated Julie, the man who will order her execution – or who already has. I don’t know what I expected, but he just looked like anybody – like the sort of chap who would come into the shop and buy a motorbike for his lad’s 16th birthday – like your headmaster. But also – he looked like he was on his knees. Dog-tired, absolutely haggard with it. He looked like he hadn’t slept for a week. The pilots all looked like that in September of ’40, during the worst days of the Battle of Britain – the vicar’s lad looked like that, running out to his plane, the day he was killed.

  I didn’t know then – I mean, I didn’t know earlier today, when I saw the captain’s face and thought how tired and worried he seemed – but I know now that the Ormaie Gestapo is in uproar not only because of the captain having made the mistake about allowing Penn’s interview, but also because they have been burgled. Mitraillette dragged this out of Slave-Girl Engel during the ritual cognac at the Thibauts’. A set of keys went missing for an hour early last week and then turned up again in the wrong place, and nobody can account for the time they were gone. Every single one of the staff has been grilled by the captain and tomorrow the captain himself goes to be grilled by his commander, the dreadful Nikolaus Ferber.

  If I were the captain I would clamp a muzzle on Engel – fairly certain she’s not supposed to leak information like that. Well – if she won’t come to us willingly perhaps we can blackmail her – now’s our chance –

  And it’s down to me to pull her in. Can’t believe I told that intelligence officer I couldn’t do this kind of work! Couldn’t be more anxious than I am anyway – so relieved to be doing anything useful. Don’t think I’ll sleep much tonight though. I keep thinking about what Theo said after my first Lysander ferry flight – ‘We might as well be operational –’

  FLY THE PLANE, MADDIE

  Horrid dream about guillotines. All in French, probably very bad French – never imagined I could dream in French! I was using Etienne’s pocket knife to tighten up screws attaching a cable that lifted the blade, to make sure it would fall cleanly. Sickening – if it was a messy death it would all be my fault. I kept thinking, It works just like a choke – C’est comme un starter –

  Aye right, miss, as Jock would say.

  If I don’t end up in that foul hotel courtyard with my head in a tin washtub it will be a blooming miracle.

  I sat in Amélie’s favourite café for an hour waiting for an old man whose name I don’t know to tell me, ‘L’ange descend en dix minutes – ’ Ten minutes till the angel comes down. That meant Engel had gone to get the car out of the garage so she can take the Gestapo captain to meet his dreadful C.O. Then all I had to do was walk past the front of the hotel just as she was ushering him into the car, and hand her a lipstick with a slip of paper hidden in the sleeve, which tells her where we have arranged her own personal cachette – if she wants to make contact with the Resistance she can leave a note in the kids’ café, folded in a linen handkerchief which is wedged beneath a table leg to stop it rocking.

  Of course she can also set a trap for me now, since I will have to collect the note and she knows it.

  You know what? If she’s going to rat on me she doesn’t need to set a trap. If she’s going to rat on me I’m already dead.

  When I caught up with her this afternoon I knelt quickly at her feet, as though she’d lost something, when really it was me planting it there. Then I stood up and held out the little shiny tube. I smiled like an idiot and spoke half a dozen of the two dozen words I know in German.

  ‘Verzeihung, aber Sie haben Ihren Lippenstift fallengelassen – ’ Excuse me, you dropped your lipstick.

  The captain was already inside the car and Engel hadn’t opened her own door yet. He couldn’t hear us. I wouldn’t be able to understand anything she answered, so I was just supposed to smile sweetly and if she didn’t take the lipstick I was supposed to say ‘Es tut mir leid, daß es doch nicht Ihr Lippenstift war –’ I’m sorry, it wasn’t your lipstick after all.

  She looked down at the gold tube, frowning, then looked up at my bland, gormless grin.

  She asked curiously, and in English, ‘Are you Maddie Brodatt?’

  It’s a good thing I was already smiling. I just sort of let the smile sit frozen on my face. Felt utterly false, as though I had on a mask – like I was wearing someone else’s face. But I didn’t stop smiling. I shook my head.

  ‘Käthe Habicht,’ I said.

  She nodded once – like a bow. She took the lipstick, and opened the driver’s door of the Mercedes, and climbed in.

  ‘Danke, Käthe,’ she said before she shut the door. Thanks, Käthe. Dead casual. Informal and cheeky, as though I were a little girl.

  As she drove away I remembered that Käthe isn’t supposed to understand English.

  Fly the plane.

  I wish I could, I wish, I WISH I HAD CONTROL.

  I’m not dead yet and we’ve got Engel’s answer. I collected it myself, getting quite confident about cycling into town as Mitraillette always uses the same checkpoint – they know me now, and wave me through without bothering to check my papers. Engel’s left us Julie’s scarf. I didn’t recognise it at first; it was lying under the table in the café and the lad who sweeps the floors handed it to me. ‘C’est à vous?’ – Is this yours? I didn’t know what it was, at first – a wad of dull grey cloth – but when I touched it I realised it was silk, so I took it, in case it was important. I knotted it round my neck, smiling my idiot’s smile – ‘Merci.’ Thanks.

  I sat there for ten more minutes, my stomach turning over with fear and excitement, forcing myself to finish a bowl of the most horrid phoney coffee ever brewed, so I wouldn’t look suspicious leaving in a hurry.

  Bicycled home like a demon, pulled the crumpled silk from round my neck and spread it flat on my bed in Etienne’s room. That’s when I realised it was Julie’s Parisian silk scarf –

  I was only little when Dad died, but I remember how I used to open the drawer where he kept his ties, before Gran cleared them out, and take a big sniff. And the ties all smelled like Dad, still – like cherry tobacco and cologne and a whiff of motor oil. I loved the smell of those ties. It brought him back.

  Julie’s scarf doesn’t smell like Julie any more. I did stick my nose in it. It smells like carbolic soap. Like a school. Or a prison, I suppose. There’s ink smeared all over one corner and the silk’s all perished down the middle, as though she and Engel have been playing tug of war with it.

  That chemical smell, sweet and tarry. Not like Julie at all. It reminded me that Penn told us Engel is a chemist.

  I ran downstairs. ‘Tu cherches Gabrielle-Thérèse – you want my sister?’ asked La Cadette, glancing up from her schoolbooks at the kitchen table.

  ‘Oui – tout de suite – right now. I need an iron – a hot iron – oh bother –’ Frustration, I had no idea how to say it. Mimed ironing. That kid is so sharp – got it right away, tossed Maman’s irons into the kitchen fire to hot up, pointed me to the ironing board and ran for her sister.

  Mitraillette and Amélie and I stood like the witches in Macbeth over the ironing board, holding our breath – I was so worried I’d ruin it, burn the scarf, but I didn’t – and after a minute or so Engel’s message began to appear in scratchy brown print among the grey paisley, in the corner opposite the ink stain.

  You don’t need to be trained by the Special Operations Executive to know how to use invisible ink. You don’t even need to be a chemist. Me and Beryl learned how to do it in Girl Guides. We used to write secret messages in milk. It’s easy.

  I don’t know what Engel used, but she wrote in French, so I don’t remember
her exact words. She’s either tipped us off or betrayed us, won’t know which till later tonight. Mitraillette has sent for Paul – they use his courier as the go-between – we don’t actually know where he stays.

  This evening there are 19 prisoners from Poitiers being transported to a concentration camp somewhere in the north-east of France. The bus will swing by Ormaie and pick up 5 more prisoners here. Julie will be with them.

  If I make it like an Accident Report –

  Don’t think I can possibly make it sound like an Accident Report, but I’ve got to write something – I’ll have to remember – there may be a trial. I don’t bloody care if there is. I want to get it right while I remember.

  Mitraillette tried to dose me with knock-out drops again a few minutes ago – 30 minutes to oblivion. But this time I’m wise to her and I want to write. Perhaps I’ll take it after.

  I think I will. When I’m finished I won’t want to think any more

  Incident Report

  Attempted Sabotage of Poitou River Bridge on Tours- Poitiers Road, with intention of stopping German military bus carrying 24 French and Allied prisoners – Wed. 1 Dec. 1943

  Well, we did stop them.

  Made a great big hole in the bridge too, that’ll keep them deporting anybody via the railway station at Tours for a while

  I HATE THEM

  I HATE THEM

  —

  Must remember Paul – Paul, who I also hated.

  He was marvellous. I have to say it. He planned it all on the fly, made it up as we went along. The carnage wasn’t his fault. Mustered an army of a dozen men and 2 women in about an hour. We left all the bikes and the car hidden – it is the same Citroën Rosalie. I don’t know how the man who owns it avoids being found out or at least having his car impounded, and I think he is too old for this kind of job anyway. We hid the car in a garage, believe it or not, belonging to a lovely and heroic old woman who lives by herself in a riverside villa on the Tours side of the Poitou. She is the rose-grower the circuit is named for. We left our car parked behind her car, which is conveniently a newer and bigger model Rosalie, so it looked like ours had been her previous car, and we hid it under a dust sheet as well. The bikes were hidden in her abandoned stables beneath 20-year-old hay.