by Bonnie Toews
Grace’s gentle eyes fastened on her. “You’re wrong if you think I feel sorry for you. You have too many wonderful qualities to admire.”
To hide her flustered feelings, Lee crouched down and asked Grace to show her how to wipe the mare’s legs.
Clearing her throat, Grace knelt down beside the chestnut and picked up her foreleg, carefully wiping out the heel of her hoof with the rub cloth. “It’s important to get all the moisture out before you cool her out,” she explained. “The big danger is exposing her to a draft. She could catch cold.”
“How do you do that? Cool her out I mean.”
“Usually by covering her with a wool blanket and walking her. For now, we can cover her and turn her loose in her box on a good bed of straw.”
Lee nodded. Looking after Decency helped her recover her composure, but it also seemed these special moments with the chestnut mare brought out hurtful memories and her vulnerabilities. It had been wise of Sir Fletcher to send them to Guild Oaks before confronting Grace with the whole complex truth. They both needed this period of adjustment, for their lives would never be the same again, and Lee would have to rebuild emotional blocks to do her job justice.
PART THREE
“Therefore encourage one another and build up each other, as indeed you are doing.”
1 THESSALONIANS 5:11
SEVENTEEN
Monday, March 1st, 1943
The tide was in. An American Gato Class submarine slipped up the Thames River in the smoky light of predawn. Approaching Kew Bridge, it submerged below the water level and veered portside, toward the south shore on what would normally be a collision course for the riverbank. But, at this point, it was the correct heading for a manmade underwater channel built after the Battle of Britain. The sub aqua watercourse led back to a natural basin beneath the Kew Palace dungeon. When the submarine surfaced inside the hidden cave and slid into its berth, a handful of sailors dressed in black fatigues sprang out of the forward hatch and moored the sub to Amanita’s quay. The captain appeared on the bridge with two men in woolen caps and arctic parkas. They hunched against the March chill, their breaths scaling the morning air as they climbed down from the conning tower and threw the gangplank from topside. It landed on the dock with a splat. Two of the black-garbed seamen anchored it to the iron rings fastened to the landing pier.
“Permission to come ashore, sir?” hailed the captain to the imposing figure standing on the wharf. His voice faintly echoed through the cave.
“By all means,” acknowledged Sir Fletcher. Under the spill of candle flares, his prodigious shape cast a giant shadow across the bow of the submarine.
The captain and two men immediately disembarked.
“I see you enjoyed good fishing in the North Sea,” Sir Fletcher greeted the captain, nodding briskly to the two civilians beside him.
He chuckled. “You might say we caught a real live pair, sir.”
“Good to have you back, Quinn. Two years in the field is far too long.” Sir Fletcher shook his hand.
“And you, Rolf. What you have accomplished is quite amazing. Harry Hopkins extends his greeting and President Roosevelt’s gratitude. Sorry to have to break your cover to bring you in, but it is vital, I promise.” He grasped the other man’s large rough hand with his crushing grip before turning his attention to the submarine captain. “There’s breakfast waiting for you and your crew.
“I hope some black coffee will hold you two over,” he addressed Quinn and Rolf separately. “You will have to forego breakfast until after your debriefing.”
“Very good, sir. If you want to escort the Captain and his men to the mess area, I know my way about this complex. Rolf and I can meet you in the debriefing room.”
“See you both later then.” Sir Fletcher hurriedly ushered the Captain and his sailors through Security with directions to follow him.
“Black coffee? I hate it,” grumbled Rolf as he and Quinn passed through Security.
“Just about everything is rationed, sir … bacon, butter, meat, sugar, milk…”
“You’ve made your point, soldier,” Quinn flatly interrupted the military policeman sitting behind the wicket.
The armed sentry leveled Quinn with a resentful glare.
Rolf Haukelid knew what the guard’s look meant. He had branded them as commandos. It never failed. Secret agents were perceived differently. Most were humble and appreciative, while commandos were seen as cliquish because they acted like conquerors of the night. The world owed them something for surviving the hazards of their trade, or that was the attitude attributed to them, whether they deserved it or not.
There seemed to be a maze of concrete corridors intersecting each other after they passed through the Security block. A strange pinging and whistling noise scooting through the tubes that lined the ceiling followed them.
Puzzled, Rolf tugged on Quinn’s sleeve and pointed above. “What’s that infernal racket?” It was the first time he had been inside Project Amanita.
Quinn looked up.
“Oh, that,” he grinned. “It’s Amanita’s mail service. We send interdepartmental memos and papers in canisters through these tubes. The noise you hear is caused by the compressed air that propels them along. They zip through at thirty miles an hour. You get used to it if you’re here long enough.”
Rolf spotted the concealed course of another canister and traced it whistling through the latticework of pipes crisscrossing the ceiling. “Are they all mail tubes?”
“No. We have a large underground complex to service.”
“So some are water, air and heat pipes.”
“Indeed.”
“It’s almost as awesome as the Norsk Hydro Plant,” Rolf observed.
“The underground bunkers were constructed out of special escape routes tunneled for King George III in 1829,” Quinn explained. “He had a labyrinth hollowed out under the Royal Botanic Gardens to the Thames River from Kew Palace. Since the palace is no longer used, its fortress-like tunnels are perfect for our project. Except for a few new passages we’ve dug out to give us access to Radcliffe House at the east end of the Gardens, we’ve reinforced what was already here with concrete.”
He turned down a narrow corridor. Rolf followed.
“How in the devil am I supposed to remember where I’ve been?” Rolf demanded after they turned another corner. “I’m lost now.”
“The sections are color-coded,” replied Quinn, pointing to a square brown patch painted on the south wall. “It won’t take you long to catch on to our system.”
“Yeah.” Dubiously looking around him, Rolf stuck close to Quinn. “As easy as falling off a log into a whirlpool.”
Dampness greased the amber-lit walls. Without warning, the narrow hallway ended at a metal door. A combination lock inset into the key panel controlled its latch. As Quinn spun the dial, Rolf whispered, “I feel as if we’re stepping into a vault.”
“We are,” whispered Quinn back. “A top secret vault.”
They heard the click. An orange light flashed in the tiny window above the dial, and the lock’s bolt slipped back. The door eased open.
“When you’ve been cleared, you’ll be issued this lock’s combination number,” Quinn told Rolf as they passed through into the underground communications center.
It was surprisingly large and well lit. Radio sets, arranged back-to-back, covered three rows of long army mess tables. The air rang with all patterns of Morse code stuttering. Young women in khaki and older women in comfortable civilian dress operated the transmitting stations. Those not occupied on the air knitted or read books.
“These are the radio telegraphists, our heartbeats of the air waves.” Quinn introduced them to Rolf as they passed through the hubbub.
Rolf noticed a young fair-haired girl at one of the sets. Something vaguely familiar about her ticked his interest.
Leading off from the main radio room was a series of anterooms. The sound of Teletype machines clicking and typewriters clat
tering came from the other side of a door marked CIPHER ROOM—TOP SECRET. Its access was controlled by another built-in combination lock. The color code bar above the dial was red. Further down from it, small meeting rooms and cell-like offices, each headed ‘Sector Control’ over their doorways, enclosed a classroom area.
“Well, here we are,” said Quinn who gestured to Rolf to precede him to a small group of folding chairs set out in a circle.
“Do you think the old man will tell us why he pulled me out of Norway and risked blowing my cover to have this debriefing?”
Quinn shrugged. “Sir Fletcher has his own agenda. At least you don’t have much longer to wait before you find out.”
EIGHTEEN
Tuesday, March 2nd, 1943
Even war could become boring, Grace discovered. As a radio telegraphist, or pianist, which was the more popular term, her duties had taken on a sameness that dragged the long nights she monitored radio signals for off-duty operators. Her only comic relief was setting nonsensical codes like A bore is a cherry with a pin on top or Michael Blue with a mop of green green moss to tunes, which seemed spontaneously composed for the loony lyrics on the air. She called them DITTIES FOR DOTTIES, and the listeners loved them.
She encouraged her radio audiences to submit their own ditties for her to set to catchy melodies on the show. The challenge was in the silliness achieved, and some submissions were so silly they made the disguised codes seem sensible. It was an outlet for Britain to laugh at itself.
Sir Fletcher had been delighted with the popularity of her radio show. It made even better cover for his messages to undercover agents inside the Third Reich.
Grace also devoted a portion of her program—Champagne Serenade—to selections of classical music she played for listeners who preferred more soothing and romantic medleys.
When Project Amanita sent a secret code, she received the message by three o’clock that day. This gave her enough time to alter the daily program’s scripts to accommodate the message. For almost three years, this had been her routine. Between her evening half-hour broadcasts and eight-hour relief shifts in the communications center, she was continually busy, but it wasn’t preventing her growing restlessness.
Grace was proud her father’s funding helped keep the civilian intelligence agency going. It was listed under the British War Cabinet’s Special Operations Executive (SOE) as “Section G: Code Name—Project Amanita,” and the underground honeycomb burrowing beneath the Royal Botanic Gardens employed fifteen hundred people on secret assignments.
Busy as she was, Grace felt quite isolated. Even sharing the coach house apartment with Lee didn’t relieve the loneliness because they saw each other infrequently. Often Lee didn’t come home for days. Since her appointment as Chief of Field Training, replacing Grace’s father, she spent most of her time in the underground facility and only surfaced to rest.
Grace flung her FANY cap on the sofa and sank exhausted, with legs sprawled and arms splayed, into the Chippendale Wing Chair. She could barely contain her excitement. Her orders had finally come. Sir Fletcher was assigning her to be a real godmother. She would be working with her own field operative … sensitive fingers paired together over the air … pianists. She had no idea how eager she was for the change until she read her orders this morning. Now she rose from the chair and skipped with joy.
She washed her face, applied a light touch of make-up and brushed her hair, pinning it up into a neat French roll. Feeling refreshed, she decided to make herself a cup of tea.
As she crossed the living room floor to the kitchen, muffled scraping sounds escaped from Lee’s bedroom. Grace stopped, puzzled. She heard them again. Quickly, she went to Lee’s door, turned the knob and peeked inside.
“Lee?”
Lee sat cross-legged on the middle of her bed. Papers were strewn around her. She glanced up when she heard Grace’s voice.
“Aren’t you home early?”
“I’ve got a new assignment.”
“Mmm … let me guess. You’re going to be a godmother.”
Grace rapped her forehead and grinned.
“How silly of me to forget you are the Chief of Field Training. What are you doing?” she asked as she moved up to Lee’s bed.
Lee motioned for her to sit down at the end.
“I received very disturbing news last night.”
Lee frowned, became distracted, and then sighed. “I’ve been having the same nightmare for weeks. And one picture in the dispatch … is an exact replica of my nightmare.”
Grace wisely waited for Lee to go on.
Lee caught her breath. “It won’t let me rest. It’s so real, Grace. I’m standing there—”
“Where?” prompted Grace.
“On the pit of hell,” she said. “There are thousands of mouths… all open… all crying and screaming… but there’s no sound coming out of their lips. Their agony is inside me. I see lips of voiceless screams multiplying down this eternal pit, and they’re dragging me… pulling me … down into the pit with them.”
She shuddered. “It’s so god-awful real. At first I dreamed of the dead boy I found in Guernica … I told you about him. I was too late to help him. In every dream, I feel so helpless. First his mouth, open, silently screaming, tearing me apart, a lost soul I can’t touch. I stand there watching his agony… And then more mouths and more mouths, until there’s a sea of silent screams.”
She grabbed Grace’s hands. “What can it mean? I feel so powerless, so inadequate … I’m here. They’re there.”
“Who is there?” Grace eased her left hand from Lee’s desperate clutch and stroked her friend’s forearm.
“The Jews. The Jews are there, in Poland, in Warsaw. I saw them blockaded by the Nazis in a ghetto … I saw them dumped on trains.” Lee’s voice faltered. “Crowded together like cattle going to slaughter. Oh, Grace, they even mooed like cows from inside the freight cars. Creepy, awful moos.”
“In your dream,” Grace said, not comprehending.
“No. No. That’s what Quinn and I saw in Poland after it surrendered to Hitler.”
“Why didn’t you get out when you had the chance?”
“We were gathering proof the Russians were planning to smuggle out German nuclear scientists to their side. They have a Project Amanita too, you know. Can you imagine what would happen if Stalin developed the atomic bomb before Hitler or us? He’s as big a monster or worse than Hitler!”
“Good grief!” Grace muttered under her breath, completely aghast.
“No one believed us.” Lee bit her lip. “No one.”
“You mean about the Russians.”
“NO. The Jews!” Lee clenched her fists and drummed them on her knees. Eventually she relaxed her tense pounding and became quiet.
“I drew some sketches of the scenes at the train stations,” she said at length. “They can’t be used as evidence, but maybe, someday, they’ll have some significance.”
“May I see them?”
“Sure. I keep them in the closet.”
Lee slipped off the bed and shuffled over to the closet where she rummaged around in the bottom and dragged out an old portable safe.
Grace laughed. “That’s your filing box?”
“You bet. No bomb is going to destroy all these years of work. I’ve a sketch for every assignment I’ve been on.”
“I remember: ‘Some people take pictures, I draw’ Are the drawings of Kristallnacht here too?”
Lee nodded. “Everything.” She opened the safe with a small key she took from her vanity drawer.
“There,” she said, as she lifted out an armful of files and sorted them on the floor. “Here’s my folder on Guernica.” She opened it and gazed at one picture inside. “It was so serene,” she remembered.
“May I see it?” asked Grace.
“Sure.” Lee handed it to her.
Grace studied the drawing. Three wooden crosses by the side of a dirt road threw long shadows in a jigsaw pattern down the mountai
n slope toward a village nestled in the foothills below them. “It’s a beautiful drawing, Lee. You’re quite good.”
Lee continued searching and then paused. She pulled out another folder and handed it to Grace, almost shyly. “Maybe this one will interest you.”
Mystified, Grace opened it and expressed surprise.
“It’s me! At the press recital.”
Lee nodded. “I’m happy you recognize yourself.”
“I’ve never seen myself in a drawing before.”
She examined it curiously. “It’s definitely me.”
Lee grinned. “Good.”
“May I keep it?”
“I’d rather you didn’t. Drawing is something I do for me.”
Lee took Grace’s file back. “I found them. There’s five,” she said and handed another folder to Grace instead.
Grace opened up the folder and pulled out the sketches. Each line, contour and shading caught the despair and futility in the carriage of the bodies. Vacant eyes stared into nothingness. Listless shoulders slumped. Spines folded into fetal humps. One portrait caught her eye. It couldn’t be.
“This picture,” Grace said, pointing to the old man. “He looks like Dr. Kantor.”
“You mean your conductor in Vienna?”
Grace nodded.
“A likeness maybe,” said Lee, “but I doubt it.”
“I know …” Grace gazed into the sketch. “Nevertheless, the resemblance is uncanny. I think it’s the quizzical eyebrows.”
She held it up to the light. “This drawing is magnificent. His deep-set eyes. They express a strange compassion, almost as if he’s passed into a life beyond and is looking back at us with pity. There’s such love and forgiveness in those eyes, Lee. Not hate.”
Grace laid the sketch on Lee’s dresser. “The more I look at it, the more I see.”
“His face haunted me. I had to draw it.”
“I can see why. He is the uncorrupted soul in the midst of black evil. Where were the Nazis taking these people?”
“In hiding, we heard the trucks and the loudspeakers ordering the Jews into the ghetto.” Lee explained.