Blue Noon

by Robert Ryan

  She gently took his hand away. ‘Perhaps. Or perhaps we all do what suits us, and just dress it up as patriotism or altruism.’

  Neave’s eyes flashed. ‘Try telling that to half the people in the room. They are heroes. So are you.’

  ‘I don’t feel much like a hero. Right now, I have to go back and pick up a life, Major.’ Odile hesitated, then kissed Neave lightly on a well-shaved cheek.

  ‘Major Neave.’ The booming voice startled him and he spun round. Before him was a hatchet-faced man with a thin, tightly razored moustache under a beaked nose. ‘Major Hugh Fraser,’ he introduced himself. ‘Special Air Service. I believe we have an appointment with a bridge at Arnhem.’

  Christ, he thought, as Fraser squeezed his fingers together, who’d be a bridge? ‘Indeed we do, Major. Hold on a second.’

  Neave turned to say something to Odile, but she was no longer there, and the sensation of her lips on his skin, that had faded, too.

  Thirty-three

  HARRY HELD THE GUN on Wolkers, wondering whether he should pull the trigger. Wolkers looked sweaty, greasy, with patches of dirt and possibly bruising across the nose and down one cheek. Then Harry noticed the pool of congealed blood under the calf of his left leg. The man was badly wounded.

  ‘I should kill you,’ Harry said finally.

  ‘I think this’ll beat you to it.’ He nodded at the stiff limb stretched out in front of him.

  ‘What the fuck are you doing here?’

  ‘Dying, Harry, dying. Can you get me some more wine? There might be a couple of bottles left in the cellar that they didn’t drink or take. Shitty anaesthetic, but it’s all I’ve got. I made it down there once … can’t do it again.’

  Harry knelt down and pulled back the material of the trouser leg. It had already been slit with a knife and revealed a piece of metal shaped like a shark’s fin protruding from the calf. The flesh around it was swollen and multi-hued, with flecks of pus squeezing out where steel and skin met.

  ‘Jesus,’ muttered Harry. ‘How did this happen?’

  ‘Pretty, eh? No, don’t touch it. The wine? Please? Then you can kill me.’

  Harry went back towards the hall, trying not to look at Hellie, noticing the darker patterns on the floor where rugs and furniture had once stood. Like the hallway, this room had been gutted.

  The cellar, too, had been ransacked. Shelves had been pulled over, barrels split, bottles smashed, and the air was thick with sour fumes. He picked his way across to the largest pile of glass, then crouched, rolling the intact bottles aside, until he found one that was half full, and had, unusually, been re-corked.

  On his return, the Dutchman drank it down gratefully. ‘Thanks. Go ahead, shoot.’

  ‘You took all the money.’

  ‘You’re just pissed off you didn’t think of it.’

  Harry almost laughed. ‘I wouldn’t have cheated you.’

  ‘Crap. Had you thought of a way, you’d have done it. Harry, con men only get conned by con men and they don’t see it coming because they are conning themselves.’

  ‘How the hell did you get here?’

  ‘Look, Harry. After I saw Hellie at the hospital and you told me about her, she wasn’t hard to track down at the charity’

  ‘You fucked Hellie?’

  ‘Yes, me and half of Paris probably.’

  ‘So you took my money and fucked my woman—’

  ‘She was hardly your woman.’

  Harry fell silent for a moment, then pointed at Hellie. ‘So who did this?’

  ‘I don’t know. She was like that when we got here. We got strafed—’

  ‘We?’

  ‘I had one of the Hungarians with me, from Foch. We got strafed on the road from Strasbourg. I got this but we managed to make it here.’

  ‘Why here?’

  ‘I agreed it in Paris. With Hellie.’

  Harry sniffed. ‘Yeah, me too. Could’ve been an interesting party, that one. I wonder how many others she told.’

  ‘Nobody else made it so far.’

  ‘So who did it to her?’

  ‘Locals, I guess. Maybe she had a German lover. Maybe they just fancied some new furniture and a drink and she got in the way. Funny things are happening at the moment, Harry.’

  ‘And your Hungarian?’

  ‘He left me here and went off to get a doctor.’

  ‘Three days ago?’

  ‘He isn’t coming back. I didn’t think to look for my bag till he’d gone.’

  ‘The money?’

  Wolkers nodded.

  ‘All of it?’

  Wolkers looked at him. ‘I thought you were going to kill me.’

  Harry shrugged. ‘As you once said, I’m not the killing kind. It’s my burden.’

  ‘Well, I’m not going anywhere fast.’

  ‘I can load you into the car. If you can stand it.’

  Wolkers shook his head. ‘No need. About half an hour before you came an American Jeep drove into the courtyard. I think they saw me peering out—’ He flinched in pain and grabbed his thigh, waiting for the burning to subside. ‘Out of the window. My guess is they’ll be back with their pals before sunset. Thing is, Harry, I know you have a way with words. You best come up with the story of a fucking lifetime, my friend, otherwise Hellie’s going to have company’

  ‘That’s a hell of a tale, Captain Mason,’ said Captain Dixon of the United States’ 117th Cavalry Unit, one of the fast, mobile probing arms of the VI Corps that were racing to Germany. He had arrived with a dozen others in the half-track and three Jeeps parked next to the Opel outside. ‘Don’t you agree, Lieutenant Beiser?’

  The Captain turned to his intelligence officer, who nodded. ‘We can of course verify this with London?’ asked Beiser.

  ‘Absolutely, old chap, absolutely. But first, I think we should patch my friend up here. Don’t you?’

  Two GIs were lowering Hellie to the floor and wrapping her in a US army blanket.

  ‘So what is your mission now, Captain?’ asked Dixon. ‘Why are you here?’

  Harry’s story had stuck closely to the truth, although it made out he had been parachuted in as an agent in 1941 to run the escape lines, had been captured, and then gone into deep cover as a double agent, working at Avenue Foch while reporting to London. Wolkers was a trusted SOE operative. Harry had played up his old clipped officer accent and, after initial scepticism, they seemed to accept his fabrications.

  ‘Nazi hunting,’ said Harry firmly. ‘The worst of the bastards have gone undercover, posing as ordinary soldiers. We’—he pointed at Wolkers—‘saw many of them first hand. We won’t forget those faces in a hurry.’

  ‘Or what they did,’ said Wolkers.

  Dixon took out a pack of cigarettes and offered them round. ‘I’ll have to check you out.’ He gave Beiser a look which told him that it would be the Lieutenant doing the checking. ‘Make sure you didn’t do a little impromptu justice of your own with this woman here. But we’re picking up more prisoners than we can handle out there. Anyone who can help process them is very welcome.’

  ‘We’ll have to get you some uniforms. And have that leg seen to,’ said Beiser excitedly, ‘then we’ll be heading east, gentlemen. Into Germany proper.’

  Dixon held out his hand to Harry. ‘Welcome to the Hundred and Seventeenth Cavalry, Captain Mason.’

  Harry smiled as best he could. Just what he needed. Another bloody army.

  Thirty-four

  Paris, April 1945

  ODILE HAD FOUND A place in St Germain, not far from the Rhumerie Martiniquaise bar. It was a simple room, off a courtyard, with a bed and basin and the usual restrictions on cooking. She wouldn’t dare break this rule, because behind the desk in the office was a fearsome thing, a shrew-faced creature so intimidating she was almost afraid to ask for her mail. Strange really, to be able to face up to Nazis and traitors, and still find yourself at the mercy of the Parisian concierge.

  So she would eat her sole meal of the day among
the communists at the Bonaparte or at the Royal St Germain, with its jazz musicians, which she preferred, or the apprentice intellectuals at the Flore. Sometimes she would drink a solitary cocktail at the Rhumerie, and join in with the laughter at the tables.

  The heady days of the Liberation were fading fast now, although the infatuation with all things American remained—several bars had renamed themselves after US cities or popular American songs, the zinc tops replaced by fat, padded leather or plastic, the stern white-aproned waiters now transformed into chatty cocktail mixers or even pretty girls in tight skirts.

  The épuration sauvage, the settling of scores, had also moved on from the mindless violence of the first six months. Paris had never been as bad as Avignon, with its lynch mobs, or Marseilles with its murderous ‘people’s police’, or Lyon, where acquitted Vichyists were kidnapped, bound hand and foot, then loaded into bombers and dropped onto a concrete runway. No, Paris had lashed out at its collaborators initially, but now it was as if a truce had been agreed, and the agenda was to try to heal, rather than pick at, the city’s wounds.

  Odile had found a job in a nursing home, looking after French men and women who had been maltreated in Germany, either in concentration camps or on labour gangs. She knew that there was an office near the Palais Royal where those who had worked the ratlines could go for financial compensation or for consideration for various medals. She wanted none of that. The shame of being duped by Harry into handing the information over to Wolkers still tainted everything else she had tried to do. She didn’t deserve a medal or thanks. She may have just been a dumb messenger, but if she hadn’t allowed herself to trust Harry, to love him, then the disaster might have been avoided.

  There was a young man in the nursing home. He had worked in the Volkswagen factory in Wolfsburg and had been wounded in an air raid. He had only one eye, and was missing some toes, but by the standards of the home he was pretty much intact, even psychologically.

  They had sat and talked about the future, she perched on the edge of his bed, long after she should have left for home. His family were shopkeepers. He thought perhaps he would sell radios and possibly televisuals if a service ever got started. He had been reading about the British and American broadcasting trials. He believed that after the silence and furtiveness of the war years, the French would embrace big radiograms and record players and possibly even televisual sets. She liked his enthusiasm and optimism and his lack of bitterness.

  So it was with a feeling of some joy that she left for work on that April day, skipping down the four worn steps to the courtyard and hurrying past Madame’s lair until called back to take the letter which had arrived for her with the US army postmark and aroused the suspicions of the concierge. Odile thanked her and slipped the missive under her cape, her happiness fading. She didn’t have to open the letter to know exactly who had penned it.

  Harry and his army swept into Delgau at noon, after a long drive through the gently curved hills and the patterned farmlands of Württemberg. He was a passenger in a sleek silver Mercedes, driven by Hervé, a young Frenchman whom he discovered trying to ‘liberate’ it. Hervé had been a forced labourer in German factories, and when Harry had explained his scheme, the young lad had agreed to join the ad-hoc deNazification force. The only problem with the Merc was the lack of a back seat, but the space proved ideal for the mountain of C-rations, cigars and silverware they had gathered on their trek from town to town.

  Harry was dressed in the US army captain’s uniform Dixon had given him when they had joined the 117th Cavalry. It was while they were helping process prisoners that Harry had hatched his current scheme.

  Behind the Mercedes came Wolkers in a Jeep, also in US army uniform, his leg now almost completely healed. He was accompanied by one of the two French women they had picked up along the way, Natalie. Suzy, the second woman, was in the Citroën driven by Jean, another Frenchman with scores to settle, along with their real prize, Jeff Hardman, a Lieutenant with the 101st who had been inducted into the OSS.

  Impressed with Cole’s English manner, Hardman had managed to get himself assigned to what he had convinced himself was a top British deNazification unit. His brief was to look out for any Nazi scientists, something they hadn’t yet come across. In fact, something Harry wasn’t at all interested in. There was no money in science.

  The town was bustling with US personnel and DPs—displaced persons—French, Czechs, Poles, Hungarians, overcrowding what had once been a quiet, prosperous spa town.

  As always, Harry would do the talking. The occupying forces were based in the best hotel in town, the Thermale, and Harry found the G-2 counter-intelligence officer in a comfortable bedroom on the third floor, the carpet covered in a thousand pieces of paper arranged in neat stacks. He introduced himself as Captain Mason and gave his letters of recommendation from Dixon and, the clincher, Hardman’s OSS orders.

  ‘Well, Captain,’ said Lieutenant Powell, the G-2, handing back the documents. ‘What can we do for you?’

  ‘We have reason to believe that this town was selected as a rendezvous point for members of the SS in the event of the unthinkable happening. Like losing the war.’

  This much was true. Wolkers beat it out of one of their victims in Gamisch. ‘I believe, among the ordinary Wehrmacht soldiers, you may be harbouring war criminals.’

  Powell scratched his head and indicated the papers on the floor. ‘These are depositions taken from the prisoners. I am supposed to read them, report to CIC—’

  ‘I can save you a lot of time and effort, Lieutenant,’ said Harry smoothly. ‘Trust me. We’ve been doing this for almost six months now. We can give you full recommendation to action after three, perhaps four days.’

  ‘What will you need?’

  ‘A base somewhere, free access to the prisoners, the chance to speak to them away from their fellow internees. Peer group intimidation, fear of reprisal, they are powerful disincentives to talk.’ Harry grinned.

  Powell sat down on the bed and sighed. ‘I tell ya, I’m inclined just to send the whole lot back to where they came from. They’re a sorry bunch.’

  ‘And when it gets out that SS butchers slipped through your fingers? How will CIC feel about that?’

  Powell nodded wearily, grateful to be able to hand the responsibility over to someone else. ‘OK, I’ll get the papers typed up. But I want a full report at the end of each day.’

  ‘Of course. Be on your desk by twenty-one hundred each night,’ said Harry.

  Harry watched Hervé and Jean rain truncheon blows onto the German strapped to the chair. Every so often, Suzy spat in the man’s face, until a mixture of blood and spittle coated his skin. There was no doubt the French enjoyed this part, exacting revenge of some sort for the years spent under Occupation and in their stinking workhouses.

  Harry’s time with the Gestapo had coarsened and simplified his response to pain. As long as it wasn’t him under the cosh, he pretty much didn’t care what they did. He didn’t, however, enjoy watching and he walked out onto the verandah, trying to close his ears to the grunts and groans as more flesh split and teeth loosened. He’d have to stop them soon.

  The house was a mile outside Delgau, a thick-walled former farmhouse set high on a flower-decked hillside. It belonged to a local SS man, a name Wolkers had also been given in Gamisch. He was unceremoniously turfed out with the promise that he would get his house back when they had finished with it, along with the threat that any protest would mean his name went forward to the local G-2 officer as someone worth detaining pending an inquiry into his wartime behaviour.

  Once the verandah would have enjoyed a charmingly pastoral overview, but now the valley was blighted by the sprawling German POW compound with its metal huts and, on the opposite side of the town, the canvas tents of the Displaced Persons camp.

  Harry lit a Camel and wondered if it was a mistake to have written to Odile, but he desperately wanted to see her. Like the DPs in the tents, he had a life he needed to pick
up again. Two, perhaps three months more, if the chaos in Europe that allowed him to operate lasted that long, and he’d have enough cash to start over, in a place where he could build that new life. Maybe, he hardly dared even whisper it, with Odile.

  He was aware of a figure at his side. Hardman, the American. ‘Captain Mason—’

  ‘Harry, please. I’ve told you before,’ he said.

  Hardman stuttered it. ‘H-Harry. I think we are losing sight of the original mission.’

  ‘Are we?’

  ‘Yes, sir. I have to report back to OSS in five days, sir. So far … well, all we’ve done is beat up people. That might be the way you do it in the British army, but …’

  Harry glared at him. ‘These people are scum, Jeff. You understand? They tortured and looted their way across Europe.’

  ‘That’s no reason for us to do the same.’

  ‘You didn’t feel like that in Mengen.’

  Harry had encouraged Hardman to take part in an interrogation and watched the American begin to enjoy knocking an SS man down, standing him up and knocking him down again. It was an important part of initiation into the group.

  ‘I regret that now. I have no compunction about these people on the field of battle. But I overstepped the mark in Mengen.’

  Harry realised he had to lose the Yank. Perhaps the game was drawing to a close sooner than he had hoped. One of these days, a suspicious G-2 would get a query through to London or SHAEF, the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force, about a group of freelance deNazifiers, and his cover would be blown once and for all.

  Harry nodded, as if a sudden realisation had hit him. ‘You’re right, Jeff.’ He stepped back inside and said quickly: ‘Enough.’

  Hervé and Jean took a pace backwards, breathing hard from their exertions, and the German looked up, his nose trickling twin streams of red down into his mouth, his filthy uniform speckled with dark crimson.