“Very likely,” Canidy added, “that happened after the SS gouged the eyes with a bayonet.”
Fuller looked like he might be sick again.
“You going to be all right?” Canidy said.
Fuller nodded meekly.
Canidy went on: “It sends a message, too. ‘You don’t tell us what you see, what you know, then we will take your ability to see.’ Same thing with the mouth.”
Fuller narrowed his eyes. Then he shook his head to show that he didn’t understand.
“Those shits in the SS,” Canidy explained, “they take a special joy in smashing prisoners in the mouth with the butts of their Mausers. They do it till all the teeth are knocked out. Message being: ‘You don’t talk, then we’ll see that you really can’t talk.’” He paused. “Of course, the real message is for those who witness such atrocities: ‘Cooperate or this will be you.’”
Fuller was familiar with the Mauser Karabiner 98k. He had fired one of the bolt-action carbines that the OSS had in Algiers—and painfully recalled the dense wooden stock with its butt plate made of steel. The mental image of that steel striking teeth made him uneasy.
Canidy looked at Fuller and felt obligated to add, “I have to say that it certainly has gotten my attention.”
Fuller nodded.
“But,” Canidy said finally, “unfortunately for the SS, it’s only served to piss me off.”
Canidy noticed Fuller’s unease and decided that he had said enough on the subject.
Need to get his mind thinking about something else.
“Can you give some thought to getting the radio set up?” Canidy now said to Fuller.
Fuller brightened slightly. He nodded. “Sure.”
Canidy looked at Nola.
“Where’s a good place, Frank?” He pointed to the ceiling. “Maybe the roof? Is there access?”
“Yes.”
“Can anyone—a neighbor up the hill, say—look down on it?”
Nola thought about that, then said, “I don’t think so.”
“Okay,” Canidy said. “But we’ll let Tubes determine that.”
He looked at the chronograph on his wrist.
“It’s now oh-seven-thirty,” Canidy said. “The Casabianca right now should be waiting on the bottom. Our first opportunity tonight to contact her is twenty-one fifteen. That’s just under fourteen hours from now. And the last chance is six hours after that, at oh-three-fifteen. That gives us a lot of time.”
“To do what?” Nola said.
“To find out what happened to the Tabun that Professor Rossi said was on the boat. Did it go up in smoke? It does not appear that it did—at least, judging by the fact that the cloud did not cause mass death—so where is it? On the harbor bottom?”
Nola nodded his understanding.
“And then,” Canidy said, “we need to find out about the villa with the yellow-fever lab. Or maybe we can do that first and it will lead us to the answer about the gas.”
Fuller looked at Canidy and said, “If those fishermen were hung because the SS want to find out who blew up the boat, then wouldn’t there be a price on your head?”
“As far as the SS is concerned, yes,” Canidy said. “But I’m what’s known as an asset. As are you.”
“Me?” Fuller said.
Frank Nola cleared his throat.
He explained to Fuller, “My people will not stand for these atrocities—the hangings, the slaughter of that fishing-boat crew. We are a tough people. We can wait for the opportunity to beat these Nazi bastards and their puppets in the OVRA. And you are that opportunity.”
Fuller nodded as he absorbed that.
“If we get this gas thing figured out,” Canidy added, “we will arm the Resistance with weapons, radios, explosives—”
“Not if, my friend,” Nola interrupted, “when. And until then, my people will take care of you two.”
Canidy thought, Better, I hope, than they took care of those guys hanging from those nooses.
[ONE]
OSS Whitbey House Station Kent, England 0705 4 April 1943
Charity Hoche rubbed her eyes, then yawned. As she sipped tea from the fine white porcelain china cup and found that it had turned tepid, her stomach growled. She looked at the clock.
Okay, she thought, one more cup and then I’ll head down the hall for something to eat.
I’ve been at this two hours—eight, counting last night—and I don’t feel I’m any further along than when I started.
Charity put the cup on its saucer, then reached across her desk and picked up the matching fine white porcelain teapot. With one hand on the teapot handle and the index finger of the other hand holding the teapot lid in place, she refilled the cup.
As the pleasant waft of fresh hot tea from the cup reached her nose, she thought about how acclimated to England she had become—at least, in one way. She almost never drank tea in the States. Yet here, despite the endless supply of coffee that was available—there always seemed to be a pot brewing—she not only had come to drink tea, she had come to drink only tea.
And she had become somewhat of a tea snob. She found that she preferred the Irish teas over the English ones, particularly the Irish Nambarrie for its remarkable full flavor and delightful aroma.
She found, too, that for some reason the caffeine in tea better suited her. It was easier on her mind and helped her to think more clearly and—if it were indeed possible—think more easily.
And she really needed that benefit now.
She had spent most of the previous night in her office—some six hours—having begged off the repeated offers to join everyone headed to the pub for the ministrations of Major David Niven’s Attitude Adjustment Hour.
At the massive, ancient wooden desk—she envisioned a progression of English noblemen over the centuries also working at it—she had tried to list everything she knew about the missing Ann Chambers.
It had not been a very long list at all.
More helpful—though, in and of itself, that was not saying much—was the memo that Lieutenant Colonel Ed Stevens had brought from OSS London Station. It outlined the bare-bones basic information that was known to them: the date that Dick Canidy had last seen Ann, the date she had last been in her office at the Chambers News Service bureau, the date the bombs of the Luftwaffe had turned her Woburn Mansions flat to rubble, and what it was thought that she had been doing at the time of the bombing.
This last item proved to be essentially useless since it said nothing: “As her whereabouts immediately before, during, and after the bombing are an unknown, it can only be presumed that she was either at home relaxing or working, or away from home relaxing or working.”
Despite the fact, Charity thought, that no evidence of Ann or anyone else was found in the rubble.
There also was a listing of twenty-plus people in London and the immediate area with whom Ann was known to have had more or less regular contact.
Each of the people listed had notations on the sheet of when they had been contacted about Ann’s disappearance and what—if anything—they had known about it. Almost all had stated that they knew only that Ann had gone missing. The few people who had nothing noted beside their names had yet to be reached at all, and there was a penciled notation in the margin that read: “Ann w/any of these??”
Stevens had also brought to Whitbey House a very large and very heavy brown manila accordion folder that contained copies of Ann’s last few months’ work. The bureau chief—her editor—had put together the package at Stevens’s request, and included a note stating that not all of Ann’s stories carried her byline and so in the interest of thoroughness he had included everything he thought she had written and edited.
Stevens had passed the bulky folder on to Charity, saying that if nothing else she could at least get a feel from the stories as to what Ann had been up to just prior to her disappearance.
Ann had been busy.
Charity had begun the previous evening by separating out the
articles with Ann’s byline from the rest. The pile it made was almost equal to the pile that remained. Reviewing the features turned out to be difficult. The reading aspect was hard enough—some of Ann’s subjects were very emotional—but trying to mine possible clues that could lead to someone—anyone—was mentally exhausting.
Does this seamstress who donates her time stitching special garments for bombing victims who have lost a leg or arm know anything of Ann?
What about the nurse voluntarily making the regular rounds to the infirm in their homes, bringing food and medicine and a human’s warm touch and kind words?
Possibly. Those and many others.
Yet the only way to find out is to actually find them all and ask.
And that is an immense task.
Still, it had to be done, and she methodically took notes on all possible contacts.
By ten o’clock, when Charity’s eyes began to water to the point they could no longer focus, she still had not finished reading all of Ann’s byline pieces.
And so she had gotten out of bed just before five o’clock and returned to reading those that remained in the pile.
They were mostly in Ann’s well-regarded Profiles of Courage series, human interest pieces that told of ordinary citizens rising in wartime to serve in extraordinary roles. More times than not, Charity found herself moved by the articles, and she wondered if that had been because of the power of Ann’s prose—it was indeed powerful—or because of the realization that these, in fact, could very well be Ann’s last words.
She sipped at her cup of tea, then picked up a news clip from the pile of Ann’s bylined pieces. It was the last of the pile and turned out to be the last story Ann had filed before the bombs reduced her flat to rubble.
She began reading it:
* * *
PROFILES OF COURAGE ONE IN A SERIES
THE FACE OF GRACE UNDER PRESSURE
A Brave Young Widow’s Personal Battle Against the Nazis
By Ann Chambers
London Bureau
Chambers News Service
ON THE ROLLING HILLS in the quiet countryside of central England, a war widow opens her doors to those who have none.
At five foot four inches tall and one hundred five pounds, Grace Higham is not a big woman in physical stature. But in the eyes of the men, the women, and the children she every day welcomes into her home, no one stands taller than the fair-skinned twenty-seven-year-old.
They are the injured and the orphaned, their lives horrifically altered by the attacks on London by the German Luftwaffe.
All come to Grace as strangers. And all become family.
Many stay after their recovery to work on the farm or in the kitchen, wherever they can, to help Grace help those who follow them to this haven on the hills.
One of those who helps here is Sara Spenser. Regular readers of this series will recall the profile of the young woman who, with the Light Rescue Section of London’s Civil Defence, also tends to strangers struck down by Nazi bombs. Wearing a dented 1914 Tin Hat, scuffed men’s Wellington rubber boots, and dirty, torn overalls, the intense and exuberant twenty-year-old works twenty-four-hour shifts, uncovering victims from the rubble of Luftwaffe bombs and transporting them by ambulance to hospital.
Sara on her off days brings the injured and the orphaned to Grace Higham and the handful of others who open their homes to the needy.
These outposts of compassion are necessitated by the fact that London hospital beds are far outnumbered by patients. While doctors and nurses perform nobly and efficiently in their jobs of saving and then stabilizing patients, there is no extra room in hospitals for the patients’ extended care and recovery.
And so they are transported the hundred miles north of London by Civil Defence ambulance. Brought to Great Glen, a postcard hamlet so aptly named, where one woman’s great work for hope and renewal began with a great personal loss.
William Higham, Grace’s husband of three years, was killed in 1940 by German bombs as he fought in France with the British Expeditionary Force at the Battle of Dunkirk.
“Will was my whole life,” Grace said. “And the heart and soul of this farm. Now there is new meaning for my life and for our farm.”
Amid the patchwork of rich farmland, cut by a series of clear, cold streams, three of five farm buildings have been converted to an infirmary, an orphanage with classrooms, and a boardinghouse for the adults.
Grace said it gave her great joy to be able to share all that she and Will had. She added that, despite the circumstances that brought them here, being with the children was a particularly rewarding experience.
“Will taught me the true meaning of sacrifice. His life was centered on it. There was nothing he would not do for friends. And, of course, for me. He was always working harder so that he and I would have a better life, and a family.” Her voice trailed off as she added, “But then he joined up and made the ultimate sacrifice.”
Grace then quoted John 15:13: “‘Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.’”
With so many people to take care of, so many tasks to meet in the course of a day, it was asked of Grace if there were any regrets.
She replied at first with a laugh. “Regrets? There is not time to wallow in such thought!”
And then she looked off, out across the large yard where children played. She sniffled, and her eyes watered.
“Yet if I would have one, it would not be for me. It is for Will, and for others. A son, a flesh-and-bones embodiment of my dearly beloved husband, so that a part of a man so fine and so compassionate could carry on in this mad mad world of ours.”
Grace Higham then turned away, softly sobbing, and excused herself. “Forgive me, but I must get back to my work.”
* * *
Charity put down the page, and with her finger wiped absently at the tears rolling down her cheeks.
Thanks, Ann.
That I really didn’t need.
She blew her nose.
Time to take a break from this.
Eat, then go down and see if I can help with Major Martin.
Before Ann really gets me blubbering….
[TWO]
Palermo, Sicily 0750 5 April 1943
“Something is not right here,” Francisco Nola said to Dick Canidy. “I would not be so concerned except that the house does not look right.”
How the hell can you tell? Canidy thought, glancing around the filthy kitchen.
They were seated at the flimsy table, Nola having taken Jim Fuller’s chair. Fuller stood near the window, keeping an eye on the street. The Sten 9mm submachine gun hung from its strap over his right shoulder.
“Nothing is put up,” Nola went on, “as one would do if expecting to be gone long. And it is not just the kitchen.” He pointed to the ceiling. “In the bedroom upstairs, on the table beside the bed, is a cup of mint tea. It has turned moldy.”
No surprise there, Canidy thought. They just didn’t get it down here to add to the other dirty ones by the sink.
Doesn’t necessarily mean anything more than that.
“And,” Nola said, “beside that cup is a book, left opened facedown on its pages. And in the closet, suitcases. They did not take a suitcase.”
Canidy shrugged.
“I don’t know what to say,” Canidy said.
“Something is not right,” Nola said again.
“There’s a lot that’s not right,” Canidy said. “It’s what we have to find out.” He paused, then asked, “Those fishermen who were hung, did you know them?”
Nola shook his head. “Uh-uh.”
Canidy considered that response, then said, “Probably a good thing.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because, then, they did not know you and could not link you to me. If they linked you to me, they would be looking for you.”
“Others could, but they would not have talked,” Nola said with conviction.
�
��Even as they watched their friends getting their eyes gouged out?” Canidy said slowly. “Their mouths smashed?”
Nola sighed.
“You underestimate my people,” he said, his tone one of disappointment. “And omertà.”
Canidy looked at him a long moment. The Mafia’s code of silence was legendary. And he instantly recalled one of its greatest examples, a tale of savagery that involved none other than Charlie “Lucky” Luciano.
After getting snatched off the streets of New York City, Luciano was taken to a warehouse—then strung up, beaten, his throat cut. He was left for dead. The tough sonofabitch, though, worked free of his ropes. He crawled to the street, only to be picked up by cops from NYPD’s 123rd Precinct. No matter what they threatened him with, he refused to finger the goons who tried to whack him. The cops had to let him go. And Charlie Lucky settled the score with the wiseguy who had ordered the hit—successfully, and without breaking the code of silence.
“My apology,” Canidy said.
Nola waved his hand, the gesture saying That is unnecessary.
“Who can we get to right away, Frank?” Canidy said after a moment. “What about Professor Rossi’s sister, what was her name?”
“Diana.”
“She lives near here, right? I remember it being in this area.”
And nothing like this dump. It was clean, well-kept.
“Yes,” Nola said. “We would have to be very careful. When the SS discovered that the professor had disappeared, they would have gone looking for her, too.”
“In which case, she may not even be alive,” Fuller said, glancing at them from the window.
“Or she is in hiding,” Nola said. “I know that the professor warned her before we left.”
“Then the SS could have someone watching her place,” Canidy said.
Canidy suddenly had a terrifying realization, and added: “And maybe this place, too.”
Fuller automatically looked back out the window.
The Double Agents Page 27