by Kurt Magenta
Lucien felt a sensation akin to pins and needles. ‘Son,’ he said, his voice hoarse.
‘I thought as much.’ Maddox lit his cigarette, shook out the match. ‘He carried a picture of you in his wallet. Much younger, of course. And you’re wearing his watch: a Cartier double calendar with a black face, heavily scratched. Quite distinctive.’ Lucien touched the timepiece reflexively. Maddox continued, ‘As you may have gathered, I was acquainted with your father. He was occasionally quite useful to us.’
‘Us?’
‘All in good time, my boy.’ He stood up. ‘I suggest you keep a low profile for a while. Our friends on deck have plenty to keep them occupied and they’ll soon forget about you. Try to make yourself comfortable. I’ll pop down for a chinwag when we’re at sea.’
‘One last thing, sir?’
‘Fire away.’
‘The young lady we passed on deck – is she Polish too?’
Maddox smirked. ‘Part of the loot we salvaged from the British Embassy. Until a week ago she was a translator there. She also happens to be my daughter.’
At first he was surprised that he had managed to sleep at all. He found himself curled in a foetal position on the divan, still fully dressed, with his cheek resting on the open pages of the Georges Simenon novel he’d taken from his case. He blinked and sat up, ashamed. His father’s watch told him it was past eleven.
The ship was underway, a low hum vibrating beneath his feet, accompanied by a slow rhythm like the beating of a distant drum. When he stood the floor was steady, but there was a definite sensation of movement.
There was another sound, too; one he recognized from his last few nights in Paris. It came just after an air raid warning.
His mouth dry, he made for the door. Seconds later he was out on deck, where the silhouettes of dozens of people were lined up against the rail. His stomach lurched as he focused on the sight that had captured their attention.
Despite the fact that it was now several kilometres away, the harbour of La Pallice was still clearly visible. In fact, it radiated light. Searchlights panned across the sky, chasing aircraft that glittered like flies in headlamps. The planes were the source of the grinding drone that Lucien had learned to identify with fear. The thought of the bombs that were about to drop on La Rochelle slicked his body with sweat.
Suddenly he understood the true meaning of his decision. If his mother and sister were killed, tonight or some night in the future, he would hear nothing of it. Dédé had been right: he had not just left them behind – he had abandoned them. Until that moment, leaving France had felt like a courageous act. Now he realised it was the most selfish thing he had ever done.
He slumped against the bulkhead, shame burning like a fever. How could you be so stupid? For an insane moment he wondered if he could plunge over the side and swim for it. I’m back home: forgive me.
But there was his father to think of. And others besides. He gathered his wits, made an effort to slow his breathing. The metal was cool beneath his shirt. He waited for the moment to pass. Breathe, breathe.
Then he moved towards the rail, his legs still sluggish. Involuntarily, he sought the ramrod-straight frame of Jasper Maddox. And there the man was, peering at the raid through binoculars.
‘Heinkels,’ said Maddox, sensing Lucien’s presence. ‘Not on a bombing run, though.’
‘What then?’ Lucien was surprised by the steadiness of his own voice. ‘Reconnaissance?’
‘Laying mines.’ Maddox lowered the glasses, but continued to study the scene. ‘We left in good time. Be bloody difficult to get a ship out of that harbour now.’
And equally, there was no going back.
His second jolt into wakefulness seemed to be borne more of instinct than anything else. He lay still, remembering where he was. Then he raised his head and looked around the darkened cabin. The single porthole offered little in the way of illumination, but he could see that Maddox’s bed was empty and undisturbed. He felt the eyes of the Polish actress on him; by now he had established that her name was Jadwiga Smorsarka.
The ship churned on. Where were they?
He visited the cramped bathroom to relieve himself. Then he dragged on his shoes and made his way up onto the deck.
It was lighter out here under a full moon. Over the rail, the glistening whitecaps of a light chop. The horizon rose and fell below a bank of silver cloud. He had read that mariners could smell land, but despite the occasional whiffs of acrid smoke belched by the ship, the air held the pure, iodine odour of open sea.
Towards the stern, a huddle of figures, the glow of a cigarette. The breeze carried a brief salvo of laughter. Probably the Polish soldiers, passing around a flask of vodka. He was tempted to try and inveigle himself into their company.
Something else caught his eye, up by the bow. Two more figures, one of them female. Maddox’s daughter? Unless Jadwiga Smorsarka was aboard, it seemed likely.
He watched for some time. Was the second silhouette Maddox? He didn’t want to intrude, but he was keen to talk to the Englishman – to find out what awaited him at their destination.
There was a sharp slap and a grunt, followed by a low curse; then a woman’s indignant voice.
Lucien found himself running.
When he arrived at the scene, Maddox’s daughter was trying to pull away from the chief officer, who had grasped her upper arm.
‘Everything all right?’ said Lucien.
The chief officer’s head whipped around. ‘What’s the problem, Frankuski? Come to give me the rest of my money?’
‘Let the lady go and we’ll talk about it.’
It was a mistake, touching the man – laying a hand on his bicep to pull him away from the girl. The Pole spun with a knife flashing in his hand, missing Lucien by a breath. Lucien backed away. Advancing, the chief officer drew a lazy oval with the blade. For somebody who’d been drinking, he was alarmingly steady on his feet.
‘All right, let’s not do anything stupid.’ Lucien was beginning to regret his bravado; he didn’t want to die before they’d even reached land. ‘You can have your money.’
The Pole grinned and lunged.
Lucien turned aside, letting the blade flash past his abdomen. Then he darted in, seized the chief officer’s wrist with both hands and twisted it clockwise, locking the elbow. At the same time, he drove his knee hard into the man’s groin. He heard a satisfying grunt of pain and the knife clattered to the deck. As it did so he used the man’s forward momentum to trip him with a sweeping kick to the instep. The Pole went crashing down. With Lucien still grasping his wrist, the fall was enough to sprain the man’s shoulder. Lucien almost felt the ligaments tearing.
‘Stop!’
Once again Jasper Maddox had emerged from the shadows – but this time his voice was an urgent bark.
Lucien let go. The chief officer lay curled on his side, clutching his shoulder, short breaths hissing through gritted teeth. With the immediate danger over, Lucien sensed his muscles unknotting. But his heart was pounding and he felt curiously euphoric. This was what he’d sought – this rush of fear and excitement.
‘Well, well,’ drawled Maddox, regaining his equilibrium. ‘Seems there are more weapons than brains on this tub.’ He picked up the fallen knife and flipped it neatly so the haft dropped into his palm. ‘What the devil happened?’
His daughter was still rubbing her arm. She shrugged. ‘I was out here getting some air. He asked me for a cigarette. I gave him two so he’d go away, but he took it as an invitation. Then he took my refusal as an insult. When this one came along,’ she indicated Lucien with a nod of her head, ‘they had words and he pulled a knife.’
‘I saw that part – or at least the end of it.’ He asked Lucien, ‘Where on earth did you learn to do that, my boy?’
‘Some of it comes from savate – French street fighting. Invent
ed by sailors, as it happens.’
‘Forgive me, but you hardly look like the street fighting type.’
It was Lucien’s turn to shrug. ‘At school I was tall but skinny. A useful target if you’ve got something to prove. I got knocked down a few times. Then I decided I’d had enough.’
‘Indeed. Wonders will never cease.’ Maddox looked down at the chief officer. ‘Well, we’d better let the captain deal with this one. I’ll smooth everything over. Back below now, please. You too, Anna.’
‘Very well.’
Her tone was flat, emotionless. Without a further glance, she walked away, the rapping of her heels diminishing in volume until it was lost beneath the sounds of the engine, the wind and the sea.
Later, when he looked back on the journey, it seemed to have passed in a matter of hours. In fact it took more than three days.
He rarely had a chance to exchange more than a few words with Maddox, who flitted like a shadow around the vessel, always on some unspecified mission. As for Anna, she nodded from time to time but approached him only once, at the rail, to offer him a cigarette. He didn’t want it, but he accepted it anyway. He cupped his hands around the flame of her silver-plated lighter.
‘It was brave, what you did,’ she told him.
She was perhaps twenty-three or twenty-four. Her hair was a lustrous brown, almost black, long and wavy in the fashionable style. Her clothes were fashionable too: dresses with nipped waists and padded shoulders, but not the floral prints that were popular in Paris. Hers was a more severe look: navy, burgundy, emerald, the solid colours broken by wide contrasting belts. She always looked calm and rested. If he and Maddox were in the chief officer’s cabin, where did this elegant personage sleep? Was there a larger, more luxurious stateroom on board?
Her eyes were midnight blue.
‘I wouldn’t have done anything,’ he smiled, ‘if I’d known he had a knife.’
She looked out to sea. ‘I’m not so sure about that. You made it onto this boat, after all. You’re testing yourself.’
After a moment he asked: ‘Will you stay in London?’
She shrugged. ‘I suppose so. Back to The Smoke, after Paris. It hardly seems a fair exchange.’ She flicked her cigarette over the side.
‘Perhaps I’ll see you there,’ he said, keeping his tone light.
She fixed him with an amused expression. ‘I’m afraid you’re talking to the wrong person. Daddy’s the one with a crush on you.’
Then she was gone, leaving in her wake more turmoil than the passage of the ship.
During the crossing he bumped into some of Maddox’s waifs and strays, from Warsaw, Brussels, Paris…who knew where. Some of them were mournful and shabby, like sparrows huddled in the rain, while others seemed oddly ebullient, as if on a holiday outing.
He befriended a handful of the Polish soldiers, actually sharing some of their vodka on one occasion, just after dawn. He avoided the chief officer, who could occasionally be seen on deck with his arm in a sling. Maddox had finally, discreetly, paid him off. The captain, fortunately, proved as elusive as Maddox himself.
Lucien did manage to have one significant conversation with the Englishman. It was over breakfast in the small saloon below, with its panelled walls and algae green carpet. But there was a crisp white cloth on the communal table and the breakfast was surprisingly hearty: powdered eggs rehydrated and scrambled, tinned ham, dried fruit, rather challenging toast.
The room’s centrepiece was a gilt-framed portrait of a dark-suited, bearded man, upright in his starched collar, glowering at them from beneath heavy brows.
Maddox waved a fork at the picture. ‘Ship’s owner. Looks like a true capitalist, doesn’t he?’
‘I doubt he’s ever eaten tinned ham. What happened to him? Did he escape from Poland?’
‘Haven’t the foggiest. We requisitioned his tub at La Rochelle. He still has a cabin on board – Anna’s sleeping in it. Must be fairly comfortable, judging by the rarity of her appearances at breakfast.’
Mystery solved. But then another question presented itself. ‘You haven’t told me exactly what my father did for you.’
‘In a word, intelligence. You know, my boy, the difference between journalism and espionage is merely a matter of editing. Your father understood that very well.’
‘How did you meet him?’
‘The first time was in Paris, during the war. September 1914. As you know, the front line was very close to the city then. I was a young intelligence officer, not much older than you are now. I met Jean-Louis almost by chance, in a bar frequented by officers. He was on medical leave – told me he’d been serving in a cavalry brigade, handling communications. They had a truck stuffed with the latest technology: couple of electric telegraphs, three telephones, rolls of cable. The whole thing got blown sky high by a shell but he escaped with only a ringing in his ears. He seemed almost sorry about that.’
‘I’ve heard the story. It got more dramatic every time.’
‘He was a natural raconteur. The next time he got back from the front, I asked him to share some of his impressions with me. For him they were descriptions: for me they were intelligence. Later on, after the war, I used him in a similar capacity. The context had changed but his talents remained intact. Occasionally I was able to pay him for his trouble. His journalistic assignments were the perfect cover for our kind of work.’
Lucien was still digesting this when Maddox asked, ‘So what are your political persuasions? Not a bit of a Communist on the quiet, are you?’
Lucien smiled. ‘My editor calls himself discreetly left of centre. I suppose that goes for me too. I don’t think France needs a Stalin any more than it needs a Hitler. Equality is one thing, tyranny is another.’
‘Is that what this is all about then – fighting the Nazis? You’re not a Communist. You’re not a Jew. A certain type of Frenchman positively welcomed Fritz with open arms. Why not you?’
Lucien considered his response. In his heart he knew the situation had answered a need to escape: from his disappointing job, from convention, even from family ties. He yearned to move, to act, to live. But there were other reasons too.
He replied, ‘It’s partly do with my father. He knew Hitler was dangerous from the start. Over the years I’ve watched the Nazis grow more and more belligerent, and I kept hoping somebody would do something about it. But nobody ever did. I felt a growing sense of…I suppose outrage is the only word. When we finally declared war, it felt like a personal victory.’ He paused. ‘But it’s mostly because of my family, my friends. I want to fight for them.’
‘Not for your country?’
‘My mother’s English, remember? To be honest I’ve never felt entirely French.’
‘And if you had to choose?’
Lucien looked around pointedly. ‘Perhaps I already have.’
It was if the atmospheric pressure had changed, forcing the level of anticipation up a notch. Crewmen darted this way and that; passengers appeared on deck to squint into the gauzy distance. Lucien leaned on the rail, taking in great gusts of salty air as the ship made a dash for the coast, its bow thumping through the waves. Gulls swooped and screeched overhead.
Soon the first dockside cranes strode out of the mist. He could see nothing of the land beyond – the frayed edges of England. Lucien had been here only once before, when he was five years old, visiting his dreaded aunt: a fussy woman with an assumed upper class accent, whose husband – his real uncle, this time – was a rakish perfume salesman. He remembered little of the trip: almost all his experience of his mother’s homeland had been gleaned second hand.
The view began to sharpen, grey buildings appearing beside the cranes and silos. The mist cleared to reveal a blue morning sky patterned with traceries of white cloud. Almost imperceptibly, the ship began to slow, preparing for its approach to Portsmouth harbour.
&n
bsp; Jasper Maddox materialised like a wraith beside him. The Englishman produced a packet of Gitanes and examined its contents ruefully. ‘Only two left. I suppose they’ll be hard to come by in London now. I’d gotten used to the filthy things, too. Want one?’
Lucien shook his head.
Maddox smiled. ‘So you’ll take a cigarette from a pretty girl, but not from me, is that it?’
Lucien looked at him. ‘So you know everything about everything, is that it?’
‘That is rather my job description.’ He drew on the cigarette, exhaled with a sigh. ‘At least I’ve got a rather splendid ’26 Margaux in my luggage. Perhaps you’ll accept a glass of that one day?’
‘Perhaps. Do you know what’s going to happen to me?’
‘Not immediately.’ Maddox shrugged. ‘Afraid you might end up in a refugee centre.’ He took a fountain pen from his inside breast pocket and, pressing on the rail, wrote something on the flap of the Gitanes packet. He tore it off and handed it to Lucien. ‘If you can get to a telephone, call this number. A woman will answer. Tell her you’re ready to taste the ’26 vintage. I’ll contact you after that.’ Catching Lucien’s expression, he added, ‘Apologies for the skulduggery. Something of a virus in my profession.’
‘I know I asked before, but why are you doing this?’
‘It’s always useful when somebody owes you a favour.’ He paused. ‘Tell me, would you do me a service?’
‘I can hardly refuse.’
‘Things are changing very quickly at present. People are pouring into England from every corner of Europe. Eventually there will be some sort of vetting procedure, but for the moment we have no real way of knowing who these types are.’
‘True – but I don’t see how I can help you with that.’
‘When you’re in the centre, just keep an eye out, would you? If you notice anything unusual – anyone unusual – I’d like you to make a mental note. I’ll ask you about it when next we meet. That suit you?’
Lucien smiled at him. ‘Perfectly. You’re quite a surprising person, if you don’t mind my saying so.’