Blue Noon

by Robert Ryan

  ‘Where did you do your English course?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘All Poles take an English course before being allowed to fly.’

  ‘I didn’t need one. Good English.’

  Something wasn’t right here. The man was too chippy, too confrontational. Or was that just the Polish way? The woman returned with two small glasses of orange liquid. Harry watched as Rola tossed it back in one and shuddered with pleasure. Harry sipped his. It was sweet and sickly. He smiled insincere thanks at the woman.

  ‘What did you say you flew? Spitfires?’

  ‘Ha! I wish. Hurricanes.’

  Harry looked over at Leverin. He was seventeen, a boy, who looked even younger, but he was quickly learning more about the RAF than most of the downed pilots. The lad nodded slightly. Hurricanes were more common among the volunteer squadrons.

  ‘OK, Odile, get François to bring his van.’ He looked at the boy. ‘Go with him to Povan, put him in with Mahoney.’ No, that could be a disaster, if the Pole was a plant. ‘On second thoughts put him at the farm. The barn. OK? And get him some decent clothes.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Rola as he stood.

  ‘Don’t thank me. Nothing happens till we find your parachute and confirm that a Hurricane went down.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘But nothing. Listen, there is a man in the rue de l’Arc in Lille who likes to sew the fingers of Frenchmen and women together, just to start them talking. When he is finished with fingers, he starts on other parts. That’s what happens to people who get betrayed. So you stay put till we are sure you are who you say you are. Understood?’

  Rola went pale at the thought of enforced suturing and nodded. ‘I’ll tell you exactly where I went down.’

  Odile snuggled closer to Harry as the explosions became more frequent and then turned into one long, low rumble, the flashes of the bombs seeking out the gaps in the blackout curtains of her bedroom and playing across the ceiling. The chemical works was getting it tonight, ten, twelve miles away, but it felt like the next village as the bed creaked and shuddered under the impacts.

  The ack-ack was pounding away steadily, audible in the pauses between the bomb clusters. Harry knew from bitter experience that the fields for miles around would be showered with hot, twisted metal from the exploding shells.

  ‘More customers,’ he said and she buried her head in his chest.

  ‘For you or me?’

  Odile was still working at the hospital in Lille, and would often see the results of what the Germans called ‘the callous targeting of civilians’ by the RAF terror bombers. Like most, she would find her loyalties strained by the sight of maimed innocents, especially the children. There were times, in her darkest moments, that she really did believe the bombers unloaded their cargoes without bothering too much about whether a factory or houses were below.

  ‘Both.’

  She snaked up his body and kissed him. ‘How much longer can we go on?’

  He pressed himself against her. ‘I reckon I can manage it one more time.’

  She slapped his chest. ‘That’s not what I meant. It’s not going to get any easier, is it?’

  He shook his head. ‘No. It’ll get worse before it gets better.’

  ‘How long have I got you for, Harry?’

  He rolled over to look at her. It was a strange question, but he knew what she meant. It was no good giving Odile happy-ever-after. She wouldn’t fall for that. She’d take happy-for-however-long. ‘A thousand and one nights.’

  ‘A thousand and one nights is almost three years. Three years of this. Jesus, my nerves won’t stand it. Sooner or later someone will …’ She couldn’t finish the sentence. Betray us. ‘You know that for every night there was a shadow night?’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘You know the stories? A Thousand and One Nights?’

  ‘Not really. I mean, I know about, what’s her name …?’

  ‘Scheherazade. My father told me about her and the stories. I think he fancied himself as Richard Burton. The great explorer.’

  ‘I thought he was into tonsils?’

  ‘That’s what paid the rent. He saw himself as a more glamorous figure. Eventually, a few years back, he went to the Congo ostensibly on a medical mission, but really, I suspect, just to see how it felt to do some exploring.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘He died of malaria.’ She paused and he looked at her as the white of an explosion flicked over her features. She was dry-eyed. ‘Anyway, he told me that every story had several versions, different endings, that these were called the shadow stories and Burton said there were a thousand and one other nights, darker nights. I wonder if these are our thousand dark nights?’

  He paused, as if considering his answer, trying to hide his befuddlement, before saying: ‘I think you are talking rubbish.’

  She laughed and pinched him and he kissed her forehead and she suddenly asked: ‘What about the Pole? What do you think?’

  They had discovered that a fighter had gone down into the marshland, as the Pole insisted, but it wouldn’t be the first time the Abwehr had switched pilots to try to infiltrate a line. ‘I can’t tell. I know a man who can though. Gérard in Paris. He has a Polish waiter. Old boy. Sharp as a knife, though. He’ll tell me what’s what.’

  ‘It means you’ll have to risk him as far as Paris. That’s six, seven people exposed in the chain.’

  ‘I know. We can’t sit on him for ever.’

  ‘What if he’s a spy?’

  Harry clutched her as the windows rattled and the mattress bucked. A stray bomb, a big one, had fallen nearby. When the noise subsided they could hear the desperate bleating of wounded livestock and the shouts of a farmer. A few moments later, the flat crack of a shotgun.

  ‘God, that’s Jean-Pierre,’ she said.

  Yes, thought Harry, and there might be fresh mutton available tomorrow.

  ‘Harry?’

  ‘Hhmm.’

  ‘What if he’s a spy?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  Another shotgun blast from the fields answered for him.

  Harry kept his contraband in the rear of an abandoned baker’s shop on the edge of Povan. The owner was too old to cope with rationing, he claimed, and had shut up shop and moved to be with his daughter in Paris. Harry rented it for a few hundred francs a week. Now he had filled the racks at the rear of the shop with tobacco, wine, ration books, blank passes, torches, currency pouches, parachute silk, cigarettes, canned goods, ladies’ underwear and precious shoes. As a collection of bargaining tools it was quite a resource.

  He found the pistol at the back of one of the racks, a heavy Webley .38 that one of the Wellington navigators had given him as a token of thanks. He was just checking the cylinder when he heard the footfall on the dank flagstones and instinctively spun round, pointing the gun at the stomach of the elegant, square-jawed man before him.

  Unfazed, the stranger took out a pack of cigarettes and offered Harry one. Harry shook his head.

  ‘Who the bloody hell are you?’

  ‘Henri Rex, Service Général de Contrôle Economique. Anti-black market.’

  Shit, Harry thought, these guys were making sure people got twenty months for trading a bit of coal or meat. He had enough on the racks for eternal damnation with no parole. Still, he was the one with the gun. ‘I hope you’ve got some friends with you.’

  The man lit his cigarette and took his time inhaling, before he said in English: ‘That’s a bloody awful French accent. You sound like a dustman. Real name’s Henry King.’

  He held his hand out, but Harry eyed it suspiciously.

  ‘You don’t remember me?’

  ‘Should I?’ Harry asked warily, trying to place the unfamiliar face.

  ‘No, you only had eyes for the Contessa as I recall.’

  Harry’s mind slid back to the dinner two years previously in Le Touquet. ‘The Englishman? In films?’

  ‘Correct. Location scout for Lo
ndon Films. A very handy cover.’

  ‘That wasn’t a coincidence, was it?’

  ‘That I was at dinner? Absolutely not. I’d followed you around for a couple of days. You were causing frightful trouble. They had to shut you down.’

  Harry touched the scar on his cheek. ‘Oh, they did that, all right.’

  ‘You didn’t know what you were getting into, Harry. Out of your depth. That had to be made clear to you. Trust me when I say you were lucky. Uncle Claude isn’t always so considerate.’

  ‘Uncle Claude?’

  It was Dansey’s nickname throughout the security service, an ironic reference to the fact that he was as far removed from a kindly relative as imaginable. ‘No matter,’ said King. He’d been with Dansey a long time, and he knew that few emerged from a tussle with Uncle Claude with just a souvenir scar. King admired Dansey. He also owed him because he was pursuing the one wartime career he ever coveted. He came from a long line of conventional soldiers but King felt he was modernising the heritage, as profound a change as the cavalry switching from horses to tanks. He agreed with Dansey that the future of warfare was intelligence and all its dark corners, the places where people like Harry Cole dwelt.

  ‘And you’ve come to shut me down again?’

  ‘You can put the gun away, Harry. I’m here to help.’

  ‘I don’t need any help.’

  King delivered the next sentence as off-handedly as he could manage, dangling the bait casually. ‘Everybody needs twenty thousand francs.’

  Harry put the gun down.

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Twenty thousand francs?’

  Got you, King thought, with a tinge of disappointment. This was too easy by half—it was meant to be a game, and it needed two to play. Harry was too easy to read, the greed thick in his voice. ‘Not here, in Marseilles.’

  ‘Marseilles?’ Harry felt a niggle of doubt. ‘Why Marseilles? It’s a long way to go. Even for that much money’

  ‘Relax, Harry. It’s not a trap. That’s where the banker is, and believe me this banker wants to look everybody over before he parts with his cash. Go to the Seamen’s Mission. Give your men to Caskie there.’

  Harry nodded. He knew the routine, and he knew of Donald Caskie, the minister who ran his mission as a staging post before the last hazardous leg over the mountains to Spain.

  ‘Afterwards go to this address.’ He handed a piece of paper over. ‘Simple to remember?’ Harry nodded. King took the note back and set fire to one corner, waiting until it had caught before he let it drift to the floor. As he did so, Harry noticed his nails, bitten down so savagely that the fingertips were little more than misshapen lumps of skin. ‘Tell them Rex sent you. There is a Belgian chap who’ll give you the once-over. Bloody fussy. But without his say-so, no twenty grand. And no back up from London Central.’

  London Central? Harry couldn’t help but let his jaw drop. He knew war made for strange bedfellows, but it appeared that the very people who had once beaten the shit out of him were now trying to recruit him.

  ‘And what, exactly, do you want for your money?’

  King reiterated what London had told him. ‘You get all sorts of chaps down your line, don’t you? Soldiers, sailors, aircrew. People who have seen a lot of things. Things they might not know they have seen. We need them debriefed. Everything about any military activity that they may have come across.’

  ‘Why not wait until they get back home?’

  King sighed, as if vexed by a stupid child. ‘Because that could be an age. They sit around here for weeks, in Marseilles for months on end. They get into Spain, they may end up interned. You can be the best spy in the world, Harry, but unless your information gets through quickly, it’s just so much useless paper. We need the information now. I will give you a list of questions. We’ll pay for it, of course.’

  ‘Over and above the twenty thousand?’

  ‘Yes. I’ll give you a dead letter drop for reports in Paris. In return, you’ll find a consideration in an envelope. But you tell nobody, understood? Nobody at all. Alpha-Need-To-Know basis. You understand what that means?’

  ‘I can guess.’

  King laughed. ‘You’ll need to learn the lingo if you are ever going to be a proper spy.’

  They both jumped as Odile entered the room.

  ‘Ah, Mam’selle. I was just leaving. Henri Rex …’

  ‘Of?’ she asked suspiciously.

  ‘The SGCE.’ He waved a hand around the room. ‘But you have nothing that interests me here. Goodnight, Mam’selle.’

  Odile waited until he had left and snorted. ‘Ugh, what a reptile. What did he want?’

  Harry shrugged and rubbed thumb and forefinger together.

  ‘Like all of them, a bribe to look the other way. Where the hell have you been?’

  ‘You were right about us getting new customers. Dozens. The Lannoys had one, but someone shopped them. By a miracle they missed the pilot. He is in the safe house down near the Somme. There is another above the hairdresser, with Madame Druse. Leverin says he has heard of another two living rough in the sugar-beet fields. It’s going to get crowded.’

  Harry thought for a moment. ‘I’ll get the Pole and Mahoney out tomorrow. I’m going all the way to Marseilles. It’s about time we had some proper recognition.’

  ‘Marseilles? Are you mad? It means crossing the demarcation line. Twice.’

  ‘You think I can’t do that?’

  ‘No, but—’

  ‘I’ll be gone a week at most. I want to follow the ratline all the way through. Make sure it is absolutely secure. Then we can start feeding the pilots through faster. The longer they stay around here, the more danger we are all in. Come on, I need a drink.’

  Harry walked through the shop, stepped out into the street, holding the door open for her to follow, but she hesitated for a moment, rummaging in her bag for the stub of her precious lipstick, re-running their conversation, unable to shake off the feeling that she had missed something important.

  Twelve

  ‘HOW MUCH LONGER?’

  Harry turned to look at Rola, who was dropping behind as the trio trudged across the field. A group of redstarts were whirling overhead, as if keeping them company on their shortcut, and they could hear the persistent yapping of a far-off dog. The sun was dropping rapidly now, but the effort of crossing fields had made all three hot and sweaty and they were being attacked by voracious horseflies. Mahoney, the young English pilot who had been hidden in Povan, and who was also making the run south, had a cluster of bad bites on his face, which he kept scratching.

  Harry slapped Mahoney’s hand down. ‘Leave it. You’ll infect them.’

  Harry was fuming that they had missed the local train from the next town to Paris, the safest route he knew, which meant an overnight at a hotel. Not a good start to the trip to Marseilles.

  The car breaking down on the way to Lille station hadn’t helped, even though Harry had used the Wehrmacht motor pool mechanics to get it going again, while the pilots sat in a café and watched Harry berate the German mechanics for their unfamiliarity with Renaults. His forged papers as an inspector of mines meant he could throw his weight around with impunity, suggesting that delays were an insult to the Reich.

  The first train journey had been uneventful, but slow. Sections of rail were being repaired after the bombing raids, meaning parts of the network were single-track, adding an hour to the travelling time, hence their missed connection.

  ‘How much longer?’ repeated Rola.

  ‘About thirty minutes to the bridge,’ Harry said. ‘I know this is a round-about way, but it misses out two security checks. Over the bridge, we are out of the Forbidden Zone.’ Harry checked his watch. ‘Look, we’ll have to get the first train tomorrow now. I know somewhere we can stay without registering.’

  They tramped on for a while through sugar beet and corn, Harry waving at a farmer who, after a moment, waved back. Sometimes you just had to take a chance that not everybody
reported strange men traversing their fields to the Germans.

  ‘What got you?’ asked Mahoney. Harry turned, but realised the Englishman was addressing the Pole.

  ‘Ground fire,’ Rola said slightly shamefaced. ‘Of all the damn’ things. It all went wrong from the beginning. We were scrambled. Bandits over Kent. I got in the Hurrie to fire her up and the self-starter jams on. Terrible fooking racket. You know what it’s like?’

  Mahoney: ‘Don’t I just.’

  Rola carried on: ‘Mechanic whacks it with a hammer and it frees up and off we go. Got myself a one-oh-nine and followed it down through the cloud. Too low. Next thing I know, I have wings like a … What’s it called … lacy thing?’

  ‘Doily?’ offered Harry.

  ‘Yes, doily.’

  ‘Bad luck,’ said Mahoney.

  ‘Stupid.’

  ‘At least you got one of them.’ Mahoney couldn’t be more than nineteen, had already marked up two kills, and he was desperate to get back into the fight, with a fervour that, to Harry, bordered on the suicidal. ‘I got hit by a one-ten.’

  A rook took to the air with a lazy cawing, and Harry stopped still. He thought he caught a faint metallic sound, just before the bird had opened its big beak.

  ‘Shut up. Get down.’

  He waved an arm and they crouched down into the beet. Ahead was a narrow asphalt road, and after a while the pilots, too, heard the lorry, its badly worn gears grinding as it negotiated the bends. It passed, a six-wheel Mercedes truck, the canvas back snapping as it went, seemingly empty of passengers.

  ‘OK, chaps, no talking unless it’s in French now. Save the war stories till we are at the hotel. We have to follow this road north for a while. Any traffic, you duck into those trees. Two miles, perhaps a shade more, there is a bridge, cross that, we’re into the hotel. First big hurdle over.’

  ‘Well, at least we can have a nice meal,’ said Rola.

  ‘No we can’t. We stay in the rooms. Bread and cheese. There’s some chocolate in your cases. Don’t eat it all. You might need it.’

  ‘Chocolate? What for?’ asked Mahoney.