Blue Noon

by Robert Ryan

Harry dropped his cardboard case over the wire fence and onto the grass verge, then stepped over into the road, glad to feel something solid underfoot. ‘You never know when chocolate will come in handy,’ he said enigmatically.

  Claude Dansey studied the daily reports from his usual stool at the Rivoli Bar of the London Ritz. It was against the rules to remove the documents from Broadway Buildings, of course, but as he was the one who made and enforced the regulations, he felt pretty sanguine.

  The glass and maple art deco Rivoli Bar, its famous etched and frosted windows defaced by crosses of blast tape, was drearily quiet. It was late afternoon and the normal Ritz crowd were still either hard at their war work or sleeping off the previous night’s excess. He was alone with the young barman, who ostentatiously displayed his limp, just in case his customers should wonder why he wasn’t in uniform. Dansey ordered a double port and leafed through the mundanities. It was all low-grade stuff. Even he wouldn’t risk removing anything that originated with Station X.

  He stopped at the one-page report from King, concerning Mason, then chuckled to himself. It was, astonishingly, that chap from the shed, the bogus wing commander. A nasty, amoral opportunist as he remembered. Ah well, maybe opportunity was finally knocking for this opportunist. King had recommended letting him run, to try to make use of his talents. So be it. Just as long as it didn’t blow up in his face.

  He scribbled an instruction to be sent to King the following day and turned to the next problem. Which desk should he give the resourceful Kim Philby after he had done such sterling work reporting to him on the SOE shambles from Beaulieu?

  Contrary to what he had impressed on the pilots, Harry had to get out of the little hotel, which was oppressive in its unclean mustiness. He’d put the two of them in separate rooms with a warning not to fraternise with the locals or each other and dumped his stuff in the musty shoebox he had been allocated. After he had paid the owner the bribe for non-registration, had given them their bread and cheese, he took himself off to a small bar down the road where he sipped pastis and thought about Odile.

  More precisely, he reflected on the hold she had over him. He’d been able to walk away from every other woman in his life, to disregard what they thought. Poor Dottie. Little Julie. He had never wished them harm, but with both of them, he had played the only hand he had. It hadn’t been his fault. With Odile and her funny eyes, well, to his surprise, he’d even been thinking about marriage. Yet he was certain she’d turn him down. ‘You should judge each man by his finest day,’ she had once said ominously. ‘This is yours. Make the most of it.’ God, she was full of shit sometimes.

  He was aware of the man bouncing onto the stool next to him, but made a point of not looking up until he heard the thick accent order one of the watery beers. His head snapped around and he found himself looking into the smiling face of the Pole.

  ‘Jesus—what the bloody hell are you doing here?’

  ‘I needed fresh air. That hotel stinks.’

  ‘That’s why we use it—it can’t afford to be fussy.’

  ‘The cheese was mouldy. The bread was sawdust.’

  ‘Oh, excuse me.’ He looked around to make sure they weren’t overheard. ‘And what do you think the food is like in a POW camp? Caviar and chips? Or do you already know?’

  Many a captured pilot had been offered a deal if they would work for the Abwehr, the SD or the Gestapo. This man could easily be a renegade Pole, Norwegian or even Dutch flier.

  ‘You still don’t trust me?’

  ‘It’s my business not to trust anyone.’

  ‘Mine too.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Your friend Mahoney. I don’t know what he has flown before, but not Hurricanes.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Hurricanes don’t have self-starters. They have starter trolleys.’

  ‘All of them?’

  ‘All of them.’

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘I’m with the 302 from Duxford. You can check. It’s a Polish squadron. Under Squadron Leader Jack Satchell. The squadron he told me he belonged to? Blenheims, not Hurricanes. Switched two months ago.’

  Harry nervously shredded the bar coaster in his hands. Mahoney was a stooge, a rat, a ringer. One who must know the risks, what would happen were he discovered. He thought of the floppy-haired young boy in the corn field and tried to equate him to this treacherous subterfuge, but the two wouldn’t gell. ‘What the bloody hell are they doing sending him along?’ he finally snapped. ‘He’s just a kid.’

  ‘That makes him more dangerous, not less. He has something to prove. Look.’

  Rola brought out a fistful of paper scraps, each with dense, scribbled writing on them. Names, addresses, safe houses, false identities. The boy had been very thorough, keeping his eyes and ears open. Harry felt panic for the first time in an age, the thought that those bastards could come after everyone who knew him, from Odile down.

  ‘What’s to be done?’ asked Harry, trying to stop his voice shaking with anger.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Rola evenly and for the first time Harry noticed the size of his hands as the Pole curled them into a gripping, strangling action. ‘I’ve taken care of it.’

  Odile realised she was getting tipsy, but took another sip of the brandy anyway. She was enjoying herself. It was almost like old times. Round the table in the scruffy bar were Thérèse and Iva, her two oldest friends, Madame Chalon, the owner, and Guy Chalon, her leathery husband. It was after hours, and the only thing marking this out from the pre-war days the heavy blackout blinds drawn over the windows, sealing them in.

  Odile had spent the day bringing two Scots RAF men across the border from Belgium to her house at the edge of Madeleine. That made a total of seven living in the outhouses of what had been her parents’ house and was now jointly owned with one of her brothers, the lawyer she hoped was somewhere safe down south. Only one cryptic card in all that time, one of the ones with preprinted phrases. Am OK. Don’t worry. It only made her fret more.

  ‘Do you think it is wise to keep all these men at your house?’ asked Guy.

  ‘Are you offering to take some?’ Odile asked, emboldened by the drink.

  Guy cleared his throat. ‘The Germans come in here all the time …’ He shrugged in an I’d-love-to-help fashion.

  ‘Often best to hide under their noses. That’s what Harry says—hide in plain sight.’

  Iva snorted. She was no fan of the Englishman, but Odile suspected there was a tinge of green-eye at work. ‘He certainly does that. I saw him go into the Marie in these strange trousers … he looked like, like …’

  ‘An idiot?’ offered Odile.

  ‘Well, that’ll do to be going on with.’

  Odile smiled. The bizarre plus fours did make him stand out in a crowd as somewhat eccentric. Yet Harry knew that. In the same way he knew if you sat in a train and tried to hide behind a newspaper, you’d be the first one the Gestapo or the Gendarmerie or the Field Police would pick on. So Harry was always there, out in the corridor, whistling, singing, joking in his clunky French.

  ‘And have you seen his deaf-and-dumb act?’ asked Thérèse. ‘My God. It is like Popou.’

  Popou was a popular musical hall entertainer in Lille, a local man who had taken Paris by storm with his pratfalls. Odile couldn’t stand him, but she took the point. ‘Again, who’d think a secret agent would act so stupidly?’

  ‘Is that what he is? A secret agent?’ Thérèse again, with a sneer.

  Odile flushed and shifted. She was no longer certain what he was. ‘Well, not exactly. I mean, we’re all secret agents now, aren’t we? Look, I know most of you don’t like Harry—’

  A chorus of half-hearted protests.

  ‘But at least he is doing something. How many Frenchmen are taking the same risks?’

  ‘Young Lepers. Leverin. The priest in Abbeville. Doctor Tannery—’ began Madame Chalon, obviously intending to go on for some time.

  ‘OK, OK. But nobody is
as good at getting men through as my Harry. Are they?’

  Murmurs of reluctant agreement, even as they all noticed the possessive pronoun.

  Madame Chalon reached over and touched her hand. ‘Don’t worry, my dear. We appreciate what he is doing. And you. Just that these are strange times. And when it is all over, we’re sure you’ll find a nice French boy to settle down with.’

  French boy? She could hear the faint echo of her father uttering the very same words, warning her that a career was not an option, that she would only find a nice man, settle down and have children, and all her training would be wasted. Odile felt a hot anger well up in her, but swallowed the harsh words forming on her tongue. She rose as steadily as she could, grabbed her coat and slipped out the back door into the oppressively warm night. French boy, indeed.

  The body was already beginning to smell when Diels walked into the hotel room, the air thick and heavy with the stink of excrement. The Abwehr man looked down at the figure on the bed, the stains on the cheap bedspread, the grimace etched into his face as the life was choked out of him. He glanced at Wolkers. ‘How long?’

  ‘Twenty-four hours, maybe more.’

  ‘Twenty-four hours?’ Diels asked incredulously. ‘Don’t they ever clean the rooms? Are there no chambermaids in France?’ He looked around. The thick layer of grime on the window ledge gave him the answer. ‘I want the entire staff transported for war work in the Reich.’

  ‘For bad housekeeping?’ asked Wolkers. ‘Isn’t that a bit harsh?’

  ‘For not registering guests.’ Diels could see by the smile on the Dutchman’s face that he had been joking. He wasn’t sure he approved of his Brandenburger displaying a sense of humour at a time like this.

  ‘Shall we stop the trains?’

  Diels shook his head. ‘No, but check on traffic over the bridge in the last few days—question each guard shift, see if they remember this man and who he crossed with. Get a photographer up here, try and get the tongue back in.’

  ‘What are you going to do, Bernd?’

  Diels lit a cigarette to mask the smell of the corpse and walked to the window, looked across to the café opposite, at the morose faces of the customers as they studied their bastardised coffee and wished today was a cognac day. Alcohol or not, it was a beautiful afternoon, and he was hot in his unseasonably thick tweed suit. He must have some lighter clothes run up next time he was in Paris. In fact, he would like to move to the capital permanently, away from the depressingly sullen people of the north.

  ‘Sir?’

  Diels spun round and back to reality. His cigarette was almost gone. ‘I’m going to catch the bastards. We can’t have this. It’s anarchy. Rewards. That will be the answer. Rewards. A hundred thousand francs for each airman. How does that sound?’

  ‘Expensive,’ said Wolkers.

  Diels raised an eyebrow. ‘But worth it.’

  ‘Is it? We could hire ten of me for that.’

  ‘Perhaps, but I think we should let the locals work for us. From the inside. I know these French.’ He looked back across at the glum patrons in the café. ‘Right now they would give up their grandmother for a bag of decent coffee or a shot of brandy. We’ll get these pilots, Pieter. And soon.’

  Thirteen

  GÉRARD HELD UP THE glassy-eyed perch and pressed a finger to its scales, which yielded easily under the pressure. He looked dolefully at Harry, before throwing the fish back into the basket with the others and wiping his hands. ‘That fish last saw water before you did, Harry.’ Gérard wrinkled his nose at the smell of body odour. ‘What have you two been doing?’

  Rola, who had been given the all-clear by Gérard’s elderly Polish waiter, was busy slurping a bowl of vegetable soup. He stopped and looked up from the ancient wooden table which dominated the kitchen of Gérard’s Paris restaurant, its surface a mass of scar tissue from a thousand chopping sessions. ‘Walking mostly. Your friend Harry decided it was easier to walk here than catch trains. My feet—’

  ‘A precaution,’ said Harry when Gérard looked at him quizzically. ‘We caught a couple of locals. The expresses are getting too dangerous.’

  Gérard put a large arm round him and directed him away from Rola’s earshot. ‘Talking of which …’ He leaned in close, as if he wanted Harry to smell the garlic and aniseed on his breath. ‘I will have to put my prices up.’

  ‘Up? We’re going to put four, five, six at a time through. Couple of hundred a head, we agreed. That’s a fair whack for one meal and a bed. I could always put them in René’s knocking shop. He’d throw in a couple of girls.’

  ‘Oh, yes, that’s very secure. And they’re some of the most pox-ridden creatures in Paris. The English’ll get their pilots back, but they’ll be too worried about their cocks dropping off to fight Messerschmitts. And how much does he charge you?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Nothing?’ The expression showed his disbelief.

  ‘We pay you because you provide food and your beds aren’t as crusty as the ones the tarts use. But don’t push it, Gérard. Everybody else does it out of love for France.’

  Gérard made a harrumphing sound and tugged at his beard. ‘And why do you do it, Englishman?’

  Harry paused, reached up and took a salami down from the rack and cut himself a thick slice. ‘Me?’ he said between mouthfuls. ‘Because I’m good at it.’

  Nobody knew why she was called Tante Clara. Harry had never met anyone who claimed her as a blood relative, but Gérard had told him that if he ever needed a bed for a night, or a loan, or a large bosom to sink into, Tante Clara was his woman. Her apartment was on the edge of Les Halles, in those streets that never seemed to shake off the clinging odour of decaying vegetables.

  Harry usually parked the pilots either at the brothel or Gérard’s and headed to Clara’s for a decent night’s sleep. It meant if there was a raid by the Gestapo on either of those premises, Harry was well out of it, which suited him just fine. Her spare room belonged to her son, a gunner, missing since the invasion, who she forlornly hoped was lost in some camp in Germany.

  It was midnight when Harry arrived, and Clara made coffee and a huge sandwich from grey bread, filled with thick goose pâté, her favourite.

  Clara was a portly woman, probably close to seventy, with hair dyed a strange shade of brick-red. She dressed like any other working class Tante, but Harry had seen the outfits in her wardrobe, elaborate concoctions of silk and feathers and gold lamé. She had been rich once, back before the last war, but her husband had lost everything in the 1914-18 conflict and disappeared. Now, she let out the rooms below her floor to generate an income, the scruffy building the rump of a once great fortune.

  When he had finished the sandwich she gave him a splash of whisky. ‘How is that girl you told me about … Odette?’

  ‘Odile. Well, you know …’

  ‘You are blushing, Harry. I bet you don’t do that very often.’

  ‘It’s been known.’ Only where Odile was concerned, though.

  ‘Oh, I doubt that. I think you are used to being a heartbreaker, Harry. Not the other way round.’

  ‘You think Odile will …’ he yawned. ‘Will break my heart?’

  ‘I think, from now on, broken hearts are the order of the day.’

  He stood up, walked over and kissed her hair, which smelt of lavender. ‘I’ll try to keep mine intact.’

  She slapped him lightly on the arm. ‘And hers.’

  ‘Yes, and hers. Goodnight, Tante Clara. Next time I’ll come earlier. We’ll play cards. And I’ll fix that water heater.’

  ‘That’ll be nice, Harry.’

  She watched him leave the room, such a helpful young man, a credit to his country.

  The next day Harry and Rola took the train south, from the Gare d’Austerlitz. Harry secured them a compartment and did all the talking. His French may not have been perfect, but it was better than Rola’s. The Pole fell asleep, but Harry forced himself to stay awake, despite the soporific rocking of
the slow-moving carriages. They had cases, and in the cases were things he wouldn’t want SNCF inspectors or the Field Police or anyone else to see.

  They disembarked at Saint-Martin-le-Beau, had a late lunch of slivers of meat, and Harry walked them through the town down to the Cher riverbank, the glistening water criss-crossed by dog-fighting dragonflies. Normally he turned back here, entrusting the last part through the ZNO, the non-occupied zone, to Lepers or one of his other helpers.

  Once across the river, they would have a coffee at the little café, then walk on until they could find somewhere to spend the night, before catching a train to Marseilles. He explained all this to Rola who grimaced at the thought of more walking. ‘I would have taken more care about choosing my shoes,’ he complained. ‘The Frenchman who had these was a midget.’

  ‘They’ll sort you out in Marseilles. The Seamen’s Mission always has a supply of clothes. I reckon two more trains and …’ He hesitated and lopped twenty-four hours off. ‘A day on foot and we’ll be home and dry. Then we get you a guide, across to Barcelona, Gibraltar, back in Blighty within the month. One more Pilot Officer returns to fight another day.’

  ‘Sergeant.’

  Harry stopped and grabbed Rola’s arm. ‘What?’

  ‘Sergeant. I’m a Flight Sergeant.’

  Harry squeezed it to make sure he had Rola’s full attention. Behind the Pole, the river glistened in the late afternoon sun and a cruising swan gave them a quizzical glance. Part of him wanted to lie down and chew a reed and close his eyes. Instead he said with slow deliberation: ‘Don’t ever say that again. Pilot Officer. Understood? Pilot Officer?’

  ‘Why? What’s the problem?’

  ‘The guides who take you over the Pyrenees get forty pounds for every officer. NCOs and enlisted men—it’s twenty.’

  ‘You can’t be serious.’

  ‘Absolutely’

  ‘That’s unbelievable. But one pilot is much like …’

  ‘I know, I know. Orders from London. Officers are worth twice as much as everybody else. Therefore if a guide has a group of enlisted men and it looks like trouble ahead … well, they’ll leave you to the mountain. Or Miranda.’