Piece of Cake

by Derek Robinson

  “What a bloody day,” Barton said. It was dusk, and Arcis was blacked-out: the streets were gloomy. “First Lloyd goes for a burton. Then Moke Miller buys it. Then Rex. And now we’ve lost Flip and Pip. Where’s it all going to end?”

  “Stop brooding, Fanny. Worrying about it isn’t going to bring them back to life.”

  Barton sucked his teeth. “It’s all very well for you. You’re not CO. I’m paid to worry.”

  “No, you’re not.” CH3 gripped his arm and stopped him. “You’re paid to lead. Now for Christ’s sake stop being such a tight-ass. You’re spoiling the war for everyone.”

  They stood in the failing light and stared: CH3 calm, Barton wide-eyed with astonishment. “I see,” he said. “And what do you suggest I do that I haven’t been doing?”

  “Do whatever you want,” CH3 said. “You’ve got the power, haven’t you?”

  “I say, Fanny,” Cox called. “What d’you think of this place? Think they’d let us in?”

  It was a large hotel, the biggest building on the square. Barton led them up the steps and into the restaurant, which took up most of the ground floor. Waiters swayed between tables; silver and crystal gleamed and sparkled in candlelight. Cutlery tinkled, and the conversation was as soft and seamless as the carpeting. Fitzgerald, following Barton, caught a whiff of roast chicken that made him swallow and twitch his nostrils. The headwaiter appeared, and took in their scruffy uniforms with a single flicker of the eyes. “Messieurs?” he murmured.

  “A table for six,” Barton said firmly.

  “Je regrette—”

  “That one will do.” Barton pointed to an empty table.

  “Ah, je regrette, m’sieur, mais cette table est réervée”

  “That’s right.” Barton gave him a big, encouraging smile. “It’s reserved for us. Lead on.”

  “Non, je suis dèsolè, m’sieur, mais c’est rèservèe pour Gènèral Delacroix.”

  “This is General Delacroix.” Barton indicated the adjutant. Kellaway bowed. “Bon soir,” he said.

  The headwaiter was an experienced, intelligent man. He glanced at the rest of the party, and each of them returned a hard, hungry, unblinking stare. “Grand honneur, mon général” he said smoothly, and took them to their table. “Champagne for the general!” Barton ordered. The headwaiter snapped his fingers to left and right, and retired.

  “Well done, Fanny,” CH3 said.

  Barton grinned, uncertainly. “What about when the real general gets here?”

  “Use your famous initiative,” CH3 said. “Meanwhile, enjoy yourself.”

  The champagne came. Barton immediately ordered more. Cox intercepted an hors d’oeuvre trolley and they began eating. “Six large steaks,” Cattermole told the waiter, “with lashings of spuds and a bucket of plonk each. Comprenez?”

  “Non, m’sieur.”

  Cattermole groaned.

  “Biftecks pour tous” CH3 said, “avec des pommes de terre frites et du vin rouge en abondance.” The waiter hurried away.

  “You shouldn’t do that,” Cattermole said. “It just spoils them.”

  They got through three bottles of champagne, and they were making a start on the red wine, when Barton said: “Follow me.” They took the bottles and crossed the room to a table that had just been vacated.

  “What was the point of that?” Fitzgerald asked.

  “When in doubt, take action,” Barton said briskly. “Golden rule.”

  “Bollocks,” Cox said. “We’ve been taking action all day, and a fat lot of good it’s done us.”

  “What’s the matter, Mother? Life too exciting for you?” Barton took a glass of wine and tipped it over Cox’s head. “Just say the word and I’ll get you a transfer to a nice safe desk.” Cox was so startled he just sat, dripping, and stared. “No, no, no,” he said.

  “Glad to hear it,” Barton said. “Because life’s going to be a damn sight more exciting soon, if I have anything to do with it.”

  “I see a little thrill approaching now,” Cattermole said.

  It was the headwaiter, followed by a sergeant of the French military police.

  “Soon sort him out,” Barton said. “Fill your glasses.”

  “He won’t like it,” Cox warned.

  The headwaiter stopped alongside Kellaway and made a statement.

  “Messieurs, allons, ceci n’est qu’un malentendu. Je suis sûr que personne ne veut crèer d’embarras, et que nous pouvons rèsoudre cet incident rapidement, calmement, et sans causer de dègâts.”

  “It’s easy for you to say that,” Cattermole said.

  “I make a toast!” Barton declared. “A la belle France!” They all stood and drank. The sergeant stood at attention. The headwaiter waited, and cleared his throat. CH3 announced: “A I’Arémèe de la France!” and they drank again. Cox proposed: “The Entente Cordiale!” and this time Kellaway handed the sergeant a glass of wine and he joined in the toast. “Your turn,” Barton said to Cattermole. “Cherchez la femme!” Cattermole cried.

  “That’s torn it,” Fitzgerald said. The sergeant had returned his glass.

  “I couldn’t think of anything else,” Cattermole said. “Anyway, what’s wrong with it?”

  “Gènèral Delacroix?” the sergeant said to the adjutant.

  “No, no. Kellaway’s the name.” He got up, shook hands with the sergeant, and managed to tread on the headwaiter’s toe.

  There was an awkward pause, while the adjutant sat down, the sergeant looked uncertainly at the headwaiter, and the headwaiter looked savagely at the back of Kellaway’s head.

  “Jag tycker om det?” said Cox, without much hope. Barton had run out of initiative, and he took another drink to hide his desperation.

  “If you want General Delacroix,” CH3 told the sergeant, “he’s just come in.” He pointed to a group of senior French officers. At once the headwaiter hustled away, limping slightly. The sergeant wiped his mouth, straightened his uniform, and followed.

  Barton chuckled and then laughed. He laughed until he had to put his glass down. He had suddenly realized the pointlessness, the uselessness of worrying. Everything changed so fast that worrying about any of it was like trying to organize the weather. You had to blow with the wind! Trust the wind! Trust it to blow you some luck! “You sonofabitch,” he said to CH3. “I should have known it. Should’ve known you knew General Delacroix.”

  “Me? I don’t know him. The point is: neither does that head-waiter, probably. Anyway, here come the steaks. He can’t throw us out now. I guess we’d better get some more wine, while we’ve got the chance.”

  The rest of the meal was tremendously enjoyable to Barton. He felt that an invisible barrier had fallen: the other men had seen him take charge, take risks, and prove himself. They accepted him as boss. And this was what he had really been worrying about all along. Not Moran, not Patterson, not the aircraft or the water supply or the damn dog, but being accepted. He glanced across at CH3 and they exchanged stiff nods of self-satisfaction. It was the best bloody steak he had ever had. Also his ear-ache had gone.

  CH3 was right. The headwaiter left them alone. They ate dessert and cheese and drank coffee and cognac. The bill was stupendous. Not even CH3 had enough money to pay it. Fortunately the adjutant had Moke Miller’s checkbook—the only item of value he had found when he cleared out Miller’s tent. He gave it to Cattermole, who wrote a generous check and forged the signature with a flourish.

  But when they came to leave, the headwaiter was stationed in the lobby, and he had a couple of hefty kitchen-porters, their heads cropped and their knuckles curled, to back him up. He held the forged check gripped between two fingers like a note in a cleft stick. “M’sieur Miller?” he said.

  Now it wasn’t funny any more. Fanny sensed fatigue catching up with everyone, deflating their spirits; he felt it in himself. He wanted this whole damn fool affair to be over, so that he could go home to bed and sleep and forget everything. He didn’t want a brawl, he didn’t want an argument, he di
dn’t want to have to sort out other people’s troubles. But that was what they all expected him to do. Even the adjutant was looking at him. It made him angry, furious; and although he tried to hide his feelings they must have shown because when he took the headwaiter by the arm the man did not resist but walked with him, away from the group, around the corner to a quiet place.

  “Miller’s dead,” Barton said. He was standing so near that he could smell the man’s brilliantine. “Miller est mort. Contre le boche. Understand? Today. What the hell’s the French for ‘today’?”

  “Today is ‘aujourd’hui.’”

  “All right. Aujourd’hui, Miller. And Lloyd. Yesterday … What’s ‘yesterday’?”

  “Yesterday in French is ‘hier.’” The headwaiter’s English was very good, very fluent.

  “Well, hier it was deux pilotes called Nugent and McPhee. Both mort. Very mort. Understand?”

  “I understand.”

  “Good. Then there’s tomorrow. I know tomorrow, you don’t have to tell me tomorrow, tomorrow is ‘demain,’ but I don’t care about demain, because aujourd’hui was demain for Miller only yesterday, wasn’t it? See what I mean?” Barton stared angrily into the headwaiter’s steady and unblinking gaze and wondered just what the hell it was he did mean.

  “I see, m’sieur.”

  The last flare of fury inside Barton burned itself out. He was empty, powerless. He slumped against the wall and said: “Buggered if I do.”

  The headwaiter held up the check, still tucked between two fingers. “What about this?” he asked.

  “Tell you what,” Barton said flatly. “Let’s be reasonable. You give it back to me and forget all about it, or I’ll beat your head in. Does that seem like a fair deal?”

  The headwaiter shook his head. “Whatever I give back to you, m’sieur” he said, “I shall remain in your debt.”

  Barton needed a moment to work that out. He nodded, and they shook hands.

  Barton went back to the others, tearing the check into small bits which he finally threw over his shoulder. “Come on,” he said.

  “All sorted out?” Kellaway asked.

  “Piece of cake.”

  Cattermole had stolen two half-bottles of wine as he left the restaurant. They drank and sang all the way back to Mailly. When CH3 parked the Bentley and they fell out, the first thing they heard was the dog Reilly, still howling. “Soon sort that out,” Barton said. He got his revolver, found the dog, and shot it through the head. “Now we can all go to bed,” he told them.

  The dead dog was the first thing Pip Patterson saw when he walked into Mailly airfield at dawn. He was not really surprised to see it but he was saddened so much that he stood and cried for a minute or so. He had liked Reilly. Nice old dog. Everything that was nice, everything decent, was being killed or hurt. The killing of Reilly was just another part of Patterson’s nightmare.

  After he baled out he had fallen, as Barton feared, into a wood. The top branches had rushed up at him, whacking his legs and jabbing at his eyes. He wrapped his arms around his head and waited for the punishment to stop. When it did, he found himself hanging forty feet above ground.

  He tried to climb up the parachute shrouds. They were thin and slippery and they cut into his hands. He made ten feet and had to rest, but there was nothing to rest on, and hanging there was a drain on his strength. He let go.

  He fired his revolver, one shot every minute to attract attention. Nobody heard. Nobody came.

  After about an hour he had a brilliant idea. If he cut a few of the shrouds, he could knot them together, tie them to the harness and climb down. He had a knife. He sawed through the nearest shroud. The frayed end stuck out of his fist like the wick in a candle. It was, of course, utterly useless. He had to cut the other end, the top end, which was miles away. He howled his despair.

  That gave him another idea, and he shouted. For ten minutes he shouted, and made trumpeting noises, catcalled, sang bits of popular songs, whistled between his fingers. He silenced the birds, but nobody answered.

  A wind rocked the treetops, and once he dropped a couple of feet when the parachute silk tore. Maybe he could make it tear some more. He grabbed the shrouds in his bleeding hands and bounced up and down. Bits of twig fell past him but the canopy refused to give way. He stopped bouncing and hung there, gasping for breath, his chin on his chest. His hands burned. Occasionally he saw drops of blood spin away and make tiny, bright splashes, forty feet below.

  After a while he dozed and slept. The racketing alarm call of a bird awoke him. He felt stronger: it was dusky in the trees so he must have slept for quite a time. He twisted around to find the sun, and gave himself another brilliant idea. All he had to do was swing. Make himself swing like a pendulum. Reach a tree, grab hold, climb down. Easy.

  And it worked, up to a point. That point was roughly midway to the nearest tree. He could swing that far. Then, for some maddening bloody-minded reason, it got very hard to increase his swing. The sodding parachute seemed to be fighting him from that point on.

  He stopped trying. As he swayed back and forth he looked up and cursed this thing that had saved his life and was now doing its best to kill him. He noticed something funny. The parachute was very widely spread up there. When he swung to the right, the left-hand shrouds soon reached their limit and pulled him back. Same to the left: the right-hand shrouds checked his swing that way.

  Patterson thought about it. He tested it. He looked for the nearest tree. He thought about it some more. Then he lost patience and took his knife and slashed all the shrouds on the left-hand side of his parachute. At once he swung closer to the tree. Kicking hard, he got a pendulum-action going. Cutting the shrouds had worked: after a couple of minutes his boots scraped the bark. This was so enormously encouraging that he put all his strength into the next two swings. The third swing made it. He hugged the trunk and flung his legs around it. Success!

  The only trouble was he couldn’t work the parachute release-mechanism without taking an arm off the tree. If he did that, he would fall. He knew he would fall. He would have to lean back to let one hand get at the release and he couldn’t get a strong enough grip on the tree with the other hand. It was very simple and obvious and so disheartening that he shut his eyes and clung to the tree like a child to its mother. Then he let go and swung back to where he had started.

  It took a long time for his despair to subside. If God didn’t want him to reach the ground, then why the hell had He gone to the trouble of letting him get this far? It made no sense. Nothing made sense. It was all cockeyed and stupid and wasteful. Just like this bloody silly war: all that rubbish about Maastricht and Sedan, it was just an excuse for getting blokes killed, same as this.

  Patterson looked with hatred at the tree he had reached, and he saw an easier tree next to it. This tree was thinner, he would be able to get an arm right round it. Trouble was, he’d have to swing at a different angle to reach it and some of the shrouds would resist that. He got his knife and chopped them off. Now all his weight was hanging from a corner of the parachute. Branches tore and showered him with leaves but the silk held firm. He began swinging. Twenty good swings carried him onto the tree. He hung to it while he got his breath back, then discarded his harness and climbed down to a fork where he could sit and recover. Five minutes later he was on the ground. “Piece of cake,” he said.

  He began walking but within fifty yards he felt a physical reaction to his efforts. First he was lightheaded, then giddy, then faint. He sat down before he fell down. It was a long time before he got up. How long, he couldn’t tell, but the woods were quite dark.

  After that the night was shapeless. He remembered walking a lot and finding a stream. He took off his tunic to wash himself. The next thing he remembered was feeling cold and discovering that he had forgotten his tunic. By then the stream was far behind him. For a while it worried him, the loss of his tunic. It meant that his brain was not working properly. He tried to tell himself to be more careful but his
brain wouldn’t listen. He knew why that was, of course: it wasn’t working properly. Now how did he know that? He puzzled over it until he was too tired to think.

  Eventually, when his legs were so heavy that his boots were constantly scuffing and dragging, there was a house. First there was a dog that barked. Then there was a light in a window. Patterson walked into a thin fence and smashed something. The dog went insane with its barking.

  A door opened. A man shouted. Patterson hung on to the broken fence and answered. “Here,” he said. “Here. Here.” Now that he had stopped walking his legs were useless. The man shouted again. Patterson tried to wave. “I say,” he called.

  There was a long silence. Even the dog had shut up. Patterson set his brain to work, thinking of something stronger to say. He was opening his mouth to take a deep breath when the man fired a shotgun at him.

  The bang battered the night to bits. Its shock was so big and so brutal that Patterson’s knees gave way and he collapsed. All the same he was aware of lead shot ripping through the branches above him and he began running as soon as his hands touched the ground. He scrambled along on all fours, smashing through bushes and ferns and bouncing off trees until he was too bruised and breathless to go further.

  His next clear memory was of a road. It was a very black road and he kept wandering off it and falling into the ditch. After that he remembered the searchlight. It picked him out and dazzled him, so he just stood and shielded his eyes. Then he was inside a hut that was full of Arab soldiers who kept shaking him and shouting. One of them had a sort of machete or kukri, anyway a very nasty-looking knife that he enjoyed waving near Patterson’s throat.

  This went on for a long time. Patterson kept saying, “RAF, RAF,” until his throat was dry. At one point the soldier with the big knife emptied a sack in front of him and two human heads fell out. Patterson picked one up. It was the head of a young man, a white man, a European, no older than himself. He looked at the Arab soldier and shrugged. The soldier shouted at him in rapid angry French. He shrugged again. The soldier hit him in the face and he fell off his chair. Partly he was terrified: he could hear himself whimpering and sniveling. But he was too tired even to sustain terror. He fell asleep.