by Robert Ryan
Marshall grabbed his pack, swung it on his shoulder, picked up the gnarled branch he was using as a walking stick and they, and their strange caravan of allies, started to walk east, along the forest ridge. ‘Where is this place we’re goin’?’
She kept her voice low. ‘Fréteval? About eighty kilometres from Le Mans.’
‘Really? Jeez, I always wanted to see Le Mans.’
‘They won’t be racing today, I think.’
He laughed. ‘You ever seen it?’
‘Oh, yes. My father took me … must have been … thirty-seven. Year before he died. He was very excited because two Frenchmen won. I thought it was so very boring.’ Something else that didn’t endear her to Papa—she didn’t quite grasp the point of rich men driving stupidly fast cars round in a circle for a whole day and night.
They crunched through the leaf litter in silence, the only noises the huffing of men and the odd smart remark causing a little explosion of laughter, but most of them quickly dropped into the rhythm that would carry them through the next couple of days.
After twenty minutes of tramping, he asked: ‘What did you do? Before the Occupation?’
‘Nurse,’ she replied flatly.
‘Ah.’ He tapped the strapping on his leg. ‘Thought it was rather professional looking.’
‘You?’
‘Worked with my father. He makes fishing rods.’
‘Fishing rods?’
‘Yes. Someone has to. They don’t grow on trees. Well, they do, but you have to do a few things to them before you can sell them. Marshall Rods? No, you wouldn’t know them, but they’re famous all over the north west. Best rods a man can buy. Great reels, too.’
‘Is that where you are from? The north west of America?’
‘Yup. Seattle.’
She shook her head. She had never heard of it.
The noise of an aero engine pulsed through the treetops and most of the column stopped, heads cocked, trying to pick up the signature. A Typhoon, seemed to be the consensus. Odile looked at Marshall, but he just shrugged. ‘Can’t tell one from the other. Strictly Army, ma’am.’ He looked down at his foot. ‘Look what playin’ with airplanes got me.’
The trees on either side of the ridge thinned and they could see farmland below, dappled in summer sunlight, the only sign that there was trouble in Arcadia a farmhouse with a huge chunk torn out of its side, the table and dresser in the kitchen clearly visible, although both leaned at unnatural angles.
‘Married?’
‘What?’ Odile turned back to the American.
‘Are you married?’
‘No.’ It came very quickly now, no hesitation as there used to be when she debated each time if she and Harry were still together in the eyes of God. Once she stopped believing God had any eyes, it was easy to disown the bastard. Besides, she kept telling herself, it was all done on a forged marriage licence. Null and void: even His Holiness in Rome would agree.
‘Then why the ring?’
Odile looked down as if noticing it for the first time. ‘It keeps the flies away.’ She touched her matted hair and laughed. ‘Not that they need much shooing these days.’
‘Now, look—’
‘I wasn’t fishing for compliments.’
‘I wasn’t going to give you any. None that weren’t deserved.’
Langan was waiting for them as they entered the dark arch of the next section of thick forest, where the ground began to fall away again and early acorns carpeted the floor. ‘I think you should take the lead, Odile. You know where you’re going.’
She nodded and hurried ahead, past the slogging men, up to the front, wondering if Langan had separated her from Marshall on purpose, then discarding the thought. Few of them saw her as a woman any longer, especially not Langan.
They came to the open fields at around midnight and had made the outskirts of the huge oval of the Fréteval forest before first light. They camped in a clearing, bedding down as best they could, most of them slipping straight into a shallow sleep that would seem cruelly short when the sun came up and the first of the flies came to suck at their sweat.
Hoping they wouldn’t be observed, she took Marshall into the darker sections of the wood and they made love, although she had to admit it was more fucking than anything vaguely romantic, and she had wanted it more, she suspected, than him. Afterwards she pushed him away and told him to go back to his place with the others and, cradling her new machine gun—with the magazine out, the safety couldn’t be trusted—she fell into her usual restless, undernourishing sleep hoping that, just this once, Harry would stay out of her dreams.
Thirty-one
August 1944
ON THE DAY OF what was to be his final meeting with King, Harry had heard that the Allies were out of the Cherbourg peninsula, and heading for Falaise. Wolkers had always said that if they got off the beaches, then nothing would hold them back. Hitler could launch all the revenge bombs he wanted at London, but the end was a foregone conclusion.
Meanwhile, he heard on the Foch grapevine that the sixteenth German spy had been hanged at Pentonville. Harry knew King was his long-term protection against suffering the same fate, that he had to square everything with him before they left the city, make sure that London knew he was back with the angels. So he’d told Wolkers to wait, one more day, he had a little business to finish, and then they could leave. They would be out of there well before the Allies arrived and the reckonings began.
Harry turned up at the apartment as arranged, only this time in a light woollen suit. The SS uniform was losing its menace; the bolder Parisians were risking stares of contempt.
It was dusk when he got there, the sultry heat of a blue-skyed summer day finally fading, only to find the ground floor apartment was empty. Harry sat down and waited in the gathering darkness, smoking three cigarettes before he realised King wasn’t coming. He made sure the shutters were closed and turned on the light. On instinct, he looked through all the furniture, but the drawers had been cleared. Nothing. It was a good twenty minutes before he thought to look at the thin, blackened leaves of paper in the fireplace. The first few crumbled in his hands, but he found he could locate an intact corner here or there. They were the remains of his own messages, his laboriously coded signals to London.
You would expect an agent to destroy the evidence after transmission, he reasoned. Except King had always been adamant there was no radio in this building, none within the centre of Paris, because the German direction-finding vans were too fast to risk transmission.
The dots wouldn’t join. He didn’t want them to. Harry knew what they would spell out.
The next morning he presented himself at the Swiss Bank on Avenue Montaigne and gave his account number. The clerk left the desk and consulted the manager, who came over personally to tell him the news. Yes, he and Wolkers were co-signatories, but Wolkers also had sole withdrawal rights. It had been on the contract. Had he not read it? So, said Harry, I need Mr Wolkers to get access to my money?
Technically, yes, replied the manager. However, there are no funds left in the account. Mr Wolkers withdrew them all two days ago. And the letter from King he had deposited? Mr Wolkers had taken everything, it was stressed, very patiently, to him, including the contents of the safety deposit box.
That evening he went to Tante Clara’s. He had spent an increasingly frenzied day scouring every known hangout of Wolkers, making a fool of himself at bars, brothels, even at Avenue Foch, demanding they tell him where the treacherous bastard was.
At Foch, a sympathetic Sturmbannführer Diels had quietly offered him safe passage out of the city as part of the SD convoy heading for Poitiers. It was only then he detected, rumbling beneath his own agitation, the sense of panic swamping the building, most visible in the reddened eyes of the French secretaries who would be left behind to face whatever punishment Paris felt inclined to mete out.
Elsewhere, he found files and documents being stuffed into boxes and there was a smell of burnin
g in the air, wafting through from the square at the rear of the building. Scorched paper. The last of the cells had been cleared, the baths of freezing water emptied at last, old stains mopped from floors. The Sicherheitsdienst, at least, had made up their mind which way the battle for Paris would go.
Sturmbannführer Diels gave him a final word of warning. ‘If you leave, stay away from Domont.’ Harry looked puzzled. ‘It’s a village, just north of Paris. The Gestapo are using it to settle their old scores. You wouldn’t want to get in the way’
Harry thanked him and on his way out passed one of the ground-floor dining rooms, where a group of SD officers were cracking open cases of champagne, drinking straight from the bottle and discarding them half full.
He took a small red Opel from the SD car pool, making sure it had plenty of petrol, and drove through the streets of a Paris already giddy with excitement. The patriotic red, white and blue clothing motif was everywhere, and women walked with a skip in their step, or at least the best they could manage in clogs.
King and Wolkers. Harry, King of the Cons, had been fleeced by his own. Once again. He banged the steering wheel in fury, and headed for Les Halles.
He climbed the stairs to Tante Clara’s, expecting to catch the smell of the dishes she conjured up out of the meagrest of ingredients, but there was nothing. The door to the apartment was open and he stepped in, calling her name, softly at first.
The groan came from the bedroom, and he found her lying next to the ornate wardrobe that had sliced a chunk from her temple as she had fallen. Her false teeth lay on the carpet a few feet away, and her arm was buckled under her.
He tried to roll her over, but the groan turned into a gasp of pain. How long had she been there? She was in her day clothes, but the absence of cooking meant she could have been there for eight hours or longer. He examined the bruised face and touched the blood on her temple. It was hard and congealed. As he pressed, Clara shuddered, and one eye flicked open, the pupil barely visible. Harry stood and left the apartment as quickly as he could.
‘I do not approve of bandit outfits running across this countryside willy-nilly, Major.’
Bandit? Neave glanced down at his corduroy trousers and his mud-caked brogues and suppressed a smile. In contrast, the American Colonel in front of him looked as if he was about to be inspected by General Patton himself.
Had Neave seen a British officer four years ago dressed as he was now, he would have put him on a charge. The years running Room 900 had altered his view of war, had put him at odds with the West Point correctness he had just collided with. These days, waiting for the US Third Army to give him permission to move forward was not to his liking at all.
‘I have fifty, maybe eighty soldiers and airmen out in Fréteval Forest, expecting me, Colonel. All I need is transport.’
‘All you need is your head testing, Major. Look at your men.’ The Colonel indicated the lobby of Le Mans’ Hôtel Moderne, filled with Neave’s ad-hoc force of rescuers, playing cards, smoking, dressed in bits and pieces of uniform, nobody’s idea of a regular force. He had heard them referred to as Privateers. Well, Francis Drake was a Privateer, so there was no shame in that.
‘You know the sort of German troops that are dug in out there?’ continued the American. ‘The sort that will make mincemeat of your boys. Spying and soldiering, Major Neave, are two different skills.’
‘Are you refusing me?’
‘Yes. And you can have it in writing,’ the Colonel sneered, ‘if you wish. I will not risk my men or resources on some crack-brained scheme to pull out a bunch of pilots who may or may not be there.’
‘They’ve been there two weeks now.’
‘Well, a few more days won’t harm them.’
The Colonel turned and left the hotel. One of Neave’s clerks brought Neave a terse message from Room 900, back in London. What was happening? Everyone, from Donald Darling, now running the office in London, to his wife Diana, was against him coming over, but Operation Sherwood, the gathering of evaders and escapees into forests, had been his idea, and he wasn’t about to let the final stage be botched by someone else. The way things were going, it seemed, he was perfectly capable of botching it himself.
‘Any reply, sir?’
‘Tell them: “Fuck all”.’
Neave turned and went into the bar, aware that someone was following him. He reached over the counter, looking at his fractured reflection in the damaged mirror tiles that backed this once-elegant corner of the hotel, and found the bottle of whisky he had secreted there. He poured himself a shot and turned to face the swarthy British Captain who had trailed him.
‘Got another?’ the man asked with a familiarity that momentarily took Neave aback, until he checked the shoulder insignia. Another irregular.
He fetched a second tumbler and poured the man an inch of the liquid. ‘There you are, Captain.’
‘Thank you, sir.’
‘Tony Neave. I’m with …’
‘IS9. Cheers.’ Intelligence School Nine was the name they used in the field to cover all the roles of MI9. In reality, it was a building in Highgate where intelligence officers were trained, but it was a useful catch-all. ‘Anthony Greville-Bell.’
They shook hands. ‘How can I help you, Captain?’
‘I couldn’t help overhearing you and the Colonel out there. I think it’s more a case of how I can help you, Major Neave,’ said Greville-Bell with a cock-eyed grin.
Neave’s heart leapt. Greville-Bell had drained his glass and Neave topped him up. ‘How so, Captain?’
‘Thanks.’ He took a more moderate sip this time. ‘In the square over yonder, I have thirty of my Special Air Service men sitting cooling their heels like you. We have two Jeeps with Lewis guns, and I know where we can lay our hands on fifteen or sixteen charcoal buses. You want to get your men out of the forest, Major, you talk to me.’
Harry was sure he had the right house. He knocked on the door and a face appeared at the crack. A woman, in her thirties. Yes, this was the one. ‘I need a doctor.’
‘There is no doctor here.’
‘I know there is.’
The door opened a little wider and the woman said in a tone she would never have dared use three weeks previously, ‘I’ve seen you. I know who you are.’
‘No you bloody well don’t,’ he spat.
The door started to close and he threw his shoulder against it and the words tumbled out: ‘Yes, you’re right. You have seen me. You have seen what I can do. The Allies aren’t here yet. I can still do it. Still tell them you are harbouring a Jew. Have been for, what? Two years. How long does it take to put you against a wall and shoot you? Or put you on a train? They’re still running, you know. Every day. Now give me what I want.’
‘What do you want?’
‘Your Jew is a doctor. I need him. I’ll take him, I’ll bring him back. And then this didn’t happen.’ He puffed himself up as if he still had those twin flashes at his throat. ‘If you don’t …’
The man was pale, thin and frightened. Doctor he may be, thought Harry, but he’d never make a surgeon with those shaking hands. He wasn’t much help in moving Tante Clara either, and Harry took most of the weight as they got her onto the bed, her screams now down to whimpers. Harry was sent off to get water, while the man went to work, occasionally pausing as if the skills of doctoring had long since deserted him.
Harry waited in the living room pacing the threadbare rug, his stomach knotted, his mind racing through his options. He could wait for the Allies to arrive, but how would he establish his story? No King to back him up. No letter. And enough people had seen him in SD uniform at Foch to make sure he would be arrested, or worse. He was in the shit.
It was gone ten at night by the time the doctor summoned him. ‘She wants to see you. I’ve done all I can. Nothing broken … she is very lucky. Bed rest … and some food.’
‘Thank you, Doctor,’ he said. He reached into his pocket for money but the man raised his hand.
> ‘No. Just don’t come to the house again. Please.’
Harry nodded his agreement, and took the man back to where he found him. On his return, he went in to see Clara, who was sitting up in bed, one side of her face a purplish blue. ‘Oh, Harry. I’m sorry …’
‘No, no, don’t be silly.’
She licked her dry lips in a way he tried to ignore. ‘I didn’t eat last night and this morning I had just put my shoes on and I stood up and I must have fainted … if you hadn’t found me, I, well, I wouldn’t be here.’
He picked up her hand and felt the bones under his thumb. ‘I’ll get you some food.’
‘It’s gone curfew. Nowhere will be open now,’ she said. ‘And there’ll certainly be nothing left.’
‘Everywhere is open all hours for Harry. And there is always something left.’
‘There’s some money under the floorboards. Beneath the rug.’
‘No, I’m OK,’ he said quickly.
He returned two hours later, his pockets filled with meat and vegetables, and a goose over his shoulder. It had cost him every favour he had left in the city. He made up a plate of charcuterie and gave it to Clara with a half glass of wine and a pitcher of water. She thanked him over and over again. He posted a note through the apartment downstairs, telling the couple what had happened and asking them to look in. Then he said goodbye to her, with a kiss on her ravaged cheek.
‘Will I see you again, Harry?’
‘I don’t know, Clara. Things are falling apart out there.’
‘Try and stay lucky, Harry.’ She winced as she smiled, and through the bandage and the bruises he saw a flash of the other, younger Clara.
‘I will. Goodbye, Clara. Thanks.’
He wondered if she heard him, on his way out, pull back the rug, prise up the loose floorboard and help himself to all but a few thousand francs of the money. If she did, she never uttered a word.
As Neave walked into the square in the centre of Le Mans, its cobbles barely illuminated by the thin shafts of the new sun, he had to blink before he was certain what his sleep-filled eyes were seeing. There were indeed sixteen buses, but they were decked out as if they were going to some kind of exotic wedding, festooned with flowers and hung with French, American and British flags. Grinning civilian drivers, who clearly had no idea what they were letting themselves in for, sat behind the steering wheels. Greville-Bell was leaning against one of his Jeeps, smoking. He flicked the cigarette away as he saw Neave.