by Bonnie Toews
Erich turned to the merchant watching them suspiciously from behind his shelves.
“Do you have a phone?”
The shopkeeper hesitated.
“Mme. Orsted!” Grace added anxiously.
Erich remembered how much the Danes loved their diva.
“She’s in danger. Do you understand? The Gestapo!”
Barely above a whisper, Grace rasped out the words, “Please let us warn her.”
Her sorrowing eyes begged him.
He bit his lip and nodded. Gesturing for them to follow him, he showed them to his storage room at the back of the shop. Mounted behind the door was an old-fashioned wall phone.
Erich frantically cranked it and rushed through a line of instructions to the operator.
He waited, while she rang Mme. Orsted’s dressing room at the Concert Hall. The phone rang and rang.
“Please!” Grace pleaded aloud. “Oh, please, answer.”
Nine. Ten rings. Finally, there was a click at the other end.
“Hello. This is Mme. Orsted’s room.”
Immediately Erich slammed down the receiver. He knew that voice. The Gestapo was already there. Who tipped them off?
THIRTY-TWO
Saturday, October 9th, 1944
The audience rustled as Mme. Orsted unexpectedly stepped across the stage. They rose and clapped as one tumultuous body. Graciously, she bowed and smiled before she whispered to the conductor. His bushy eyebrows puckered in concern. Their eyes expressed their silent communion. Briefly, he rested his hand on her shoulder in a gesture of comfort. After this touching exchange, he tapped his baton on the music stand for the orchestra’s attention.
“There’s been a change in program,” he announced. “We’re opening with our national anthem,” and he looked sadly at the empty piano seat.
A tight hum passed from lip to lip amongst the musicians. When they were settled with their instruments ready, Mme. Orsted gestured for the chorus to come on stage. They split into two files that entered from either side of the orchestra.
She had managed to persuade the smug SS captain and the Gestapo agent to permit her the dignity of one last performance before they spirited her away to the Gestapo dungeons at Aarhus. She had reminded them Goring himself had sponsored the concert. Did they want to risk embarrassing the Reichsmarshall by arresting the concert’s top star?
She stepped up on the podium beside the grand piano and turned to gaze down at the sea of adoring faces. Her people. She believed in them. She loved them. For a moment, she clung to the great love she felt pouring back from them. It strengthened her.
Two spotlights, one beaming down on the empty piano bench and the other on her, bathed her white sequined gown in a wash of glittering sprinkles. The long funnel of light illuminated her radiant face. She lifted her head proudly and sniffed an imaginary rose. The conductor flicked his baton, and the Danes’ beautiful stirring anthem began.
Below the stage, inside the prompter’s box, Quinn Bergin dressed as a lone stagehand in black coveralls opened his toolbox. At the bottom of the kit lay his crude single shot .45-inch pistol. The Liberator. He adjusted a silencer to its muzzle and waited for the Finale.
A part of him grieved. Why had it to come to this? But, he had promised Pia Margretha Orsted a long time ago, when he first recruited her, the Gestapo would never take her.
She had joined the Red Brigade after the League of Nations failed to punish Hitler for contravening the Non-intervention Pact in Spain. Then she had insisted she did not want to commit suicide in some unknown cell, her death another forgotten incident in the ugly business of war. If she must die, she had told him, she wanted her death to have meaning in a way her people could recognize and understand, in a way that would solidify their support for the Resistance, to give them tenacity and heart.
The music peaked. Her voice trilled.
Quinn raised the gun and aimed the Liberator directly at Mme. Orsted’s heart. He fired.
Simultaneously, a red spot marked her white dress. She clutched her left breast, hiding the ruby splotch that was spreading. Except for a slight catch in her voice when the bullet hit, she miraculously held on to the last note of the anthem until, with voice trembling and rapidly fading, she lifted up her arms in jubilant victory.
For a split second, time froze. And then, like a grand swan folding its majestic wings, she collapsed, falling down the podium steps to end up lying spread-eagled at the feet of the horror-stricken conductor. The uplifted expression of perpetual expectation still graced her face.
THIRTY-THREE
Monday, October 11th, 1944
Sounds broke the endless hours of isolation … the clack-clack of jackboots on a terrazzo floor, clanging clicks, and the whir of an electronic door sliding back and forth … the changing of the guard. Occasionally, metal on metal noises vibrated through the old stonewalls… a toilet flushed, a tap squealed and a pipe banged… the habitual sounds of life going on.
To Lee Talbot’s parched lips and dried mouth, the sounds meant water … she imagined waters flushing, waters swirling, gurgling around and around and down the toilet bowl, out of sight and filling again … running tap water … cool, refreshing, quenching images, which tortured the relentless thirst clawing at her raw throat.
She tried to lick her lips, but her tongue rubbing over the sore cracks felt like an emery board. Even her saliva had dried up. Desperately, she strained against the handcuffs, which bound her wrists to an iron ring pounded into the masonry and forced her to sit in a fetal position on the cold concrete floor.
The Gestapo guards had taken her street clothes and dressed her in a thin cotton smock. Though the empty room was locked, they had manacled her in the locked room to further humiliate her. There were no provisions for her toiletries. The more pressing her miseries grew, the less her humiliation mattered. Eventually, caring more about survival than weakening valuable energies resisting, she submitted to the urging of her bladder. The longer she could hold out against the devastating cold and the tortuous thirst, which was even worse than the hunger, the more time she was giving Grace to escape. Time … just a little more time, she reminded herself.
Pain gripped her head like an orange hammered to pulp. It never let go. If only she could stretch her stiffened joints and cramped muscles, but then agonizing spasms seized her legs, her lower back and her crooked neck. She dreaded moving for fear of losing the small amount of heat her body had taken ages to warm against the icy stone wall and cement floor. To shift position, even slightly, risked touching those cold surfaces with her bare legs or arms, starting off perishing shakes all over again. She breathed in and out, very slowly, forcing as much oxygen into her lungs as she could inhale, but without water, every living cell in her body dried up. As each shrunk, she felt her life ebbing away.
Between the exhausting bouts of perpetual pain and teeth-chattering chills, when she was not drifting in and out of consciousness, lucid moments did take hold. During these periods, she swiveled her head… left, right, left, right… and arched her neck… up, down, up, down … she repeated the exercises over and over until either she tired or disconnected memories again tormented her.
She was in a clearheaded state now. After she turned her head from side to side and stretched her neck a couple of times, she let her head drop backwards, resting it on her spine, and closed her eyes while breathing heavily through her nostrils. A suffocating dryness tightened like a rubber band around her chest. All at once, brightness like a white veil swirling around and around beyond her eyelids bathed her face with delicate warmth. Her lids flashed open.
High above her, almost touching the ceiling on the opposite wall, was a window. It was small, round and recessed back about six inches. Through it, the first rays of sunshine that Lee had seen since her internment streamed into the tiny barren room.
“Oh God, that’s beautiful!”
Startled, she drew in a quick breath. That pitiful voice croaking between her cracked lips co
uld not be hers. Hacking coughs ripped from her throat like branding irons fire-balled from the burning pit within her chest.
“Oh God!” she rasped in despair.
It was more a curse than a plea. It seemed as if the choking would never stop. She feared her guts would turn inside out before the blood vessels in her head burst. She was going to expire in a convulsive fit of petrified spit.
The sunlight spilling down from the overhead window gently kissed her skin. With a shaky sigh, she again looked up at the captured loop of light, drawn by its eerie radiance so like a luminous pearl, and then she knew she was not alone. But it was not God she sensed. It was Rolf Haukelid. The bleak room seemed to fill with his spirit. She wanted to melt into the comfort of his arms.
Oh, Rolf, hold me. Please hold me!
She imagined him gathering her up into his arms. She felt him cradle her against his cheek. Where once happy tears shed in his embrace, only dried grit burned her tear wells, and she could not weep, even with happiness.
Soon, my darling. Soon we’ll be together again, she promised him, yielding to the lovely euphoria sweeping over her.
The tip of her suddy tongue reached for the cyanide pill lodged in her back molar. It was still there. She jiggled it. Her wracking coughs had not jarred it loose. Unless she bit down on it and crushed the rubber seal, it would pass through her body harmlessly. The idea she still controlled her death sustained her sense of ironic justice. Her private joke. The Gestapo could do nothing to her she did not allow. If it had not hurt so, she would have broken into gales of laughter.
A voice, deep, lyrical and soothing, called to her. An echo from her forgotten past. Words her mother once spoke: “You don’t face death. You face life! Remember that. Life at best is a challenging journey, never death, so there’s nothing to fear. Death’s but a light snapping off,”
After all the bitterness Lee harbored against her mother, it felt strange finding comfort and wisdom in what she said. It was, as if in linking minds with her, the connection dissolved Lee’s resentment. In this period before death, she saw many things differently.
Her head lolled, and a silly smile twitched her lips. Impending blackness sucked her into a swirling tunnel and bashed her against the remnants of her own nightmares mirrored on its walls … a hooded form vaguely suggesting a child, a young boy hidden deep in the shadows; browns upon browns—brown mouths, brown mouths in voiceless screams; brown flies swarming over frothy dribbles running down brown lips; brown mushrooms exploding in her face, splintering; dismembered arms and legs flying off in all directions; brown faces bobbing in the midst of dancing mists and then fading, buried in an avalanche of falling brown mortar—the endless cavern of mouths wide open and silent, layers and layers of skeletons stacked upright in brown pits, dangling, rattling… images gyrating from one mirror to another, in a maddening blur swirling deeper and deeper.
She was a small girl again, playing with her Alice-in-Wonderland doll… golden ringlets and an angel’s face … she lovingly cradled her doll… it mustn’t cry … Hush little baby, don’t you cry … the doll’s eyes blinked open … Grace’s lovely eyes … pearl-drop tears trickled down the doll’s face.
“There, there … Shhhhh…” Lee comforted her doll. “You mustn’t be sad.”
“Don’t go away!” wailed her doll.
“I must, sweet Grace. Don’t you see? I’ve told my truth, no one listened.” She rocked her doll.
“Someday you’ll understand. We were betrayed.”
The distant peel of steeple bells ringing out the noonday hour roused Lee in her isolated cell on the top floor of Copenhagen’s Gestapo Headquarters. Her head jerked in frightened flutters. Her fragmented dream filled her with remorse. She stared up at the lone high window, thinking of her mother.
Mother, mother, mother … Her spirit ached. I’ve wasted so much precious time hating you.
Her heartsick pain was as cruel as any torture, for she would never have a chance to mend the stupid useless years absorbed in anger and hate. She was thirty-two-years old and finally ready to forgive her mother for her long ago desertion. But then, childhood reflections became confused with memories of miserable loneliness and rejection, and she hated her again.
Like a neon light, Grace flashed to mind … the only person who loved her for herself, demanding nothing in return … the only one who listened with her heart and reached out to Lee’s inner loneliness … sisters-in-spirit Grace called them. It was more than that. Their bond transcended time and space. It was something quite extraordinary, and she drew strength from thinking about her. They had embraced good-bye beside the Lysander moments before Grace flew off into the dark cover of night to Sweden.
“If anything happens to me,” Lee recalled her last words, “notify King George. As my closest living relative, he must take over my estate to ensure the special conditions applied to Project Amanita are carried on.”
Lee had stuffed the piece of paper Grace had given her in her pocket. And then Grace had hugged her and whispered, “I love you. Remember that always.”
Lee had stiffened, struggling to control the well of emotion threatening to abort Grace’s mission on the spot.
Grace had understood her battle with her feelings, and as she was about to climb up the Lysander’s ladder, said one final thing Lee would never forget. “You are the missing part of my soul, the twin sister I always longed for. Not even death can separate us ever again.”
Before the “cheerio” had passed her lips, Grace had clambered up the ladder and climbed into the moon plane’s cockpit.
Later, after Lee had discovered their betrayal and fled from Sir Fletcher, she had called the private number Grace had given her for Buckingham Palace. The king was her only hope, and he agreed to see her immediately.
While he read Grace’s will and personal directions in private, she waited in the royal drawing room, dazzled by the richness and historic splendor displayed there. When the king re-entered the room, he was grim-faced.
“You are quite correct,” he said. “We must not let her be captured by the Gestapo. Something strange is going on at Amanita, and I fear Grace, in all her innocence, has been victimized by a sinister plot.”
He had paused then and gazed solemnly into her eyes. “I am going to arrange for you to meet Morgan Saunders at the Whitehall bunker. Tell him everything you have told me and trust him. Whatever you two decide to do, do it with a clear conscience, my dear. Lady Grace accepted all the risks when she accepted her mission. You cannot hold yourself responsible for the madness of war and the unfortunate luck it brings to some. That is a burden we all must share. Now, go with God. Mr. Saunders will keep me informed.”
The king had graciously ushered her to the door where his personal secretary had met her and escorted her to the underground bunker at Whitehall.
Despite the urgency, Morgan Saunders managed to relax her. Even his unnerving habit of concentrating on her eyes at the same time as he watched her lips did not bother her. With someone else, she might have felt violated except his eyes—eyes that saw through everything— weren’t threatening. Instead, they listened, they absorbed and they analyzed, and when she finished talking, they studied her and quietly approved her plan.
Few words passed between them, yet she experienced the eerie sense they thoroughly knew each other. When it was time for her to board the moon plane for Denmark, he jammed his hands into his pockets rather than shake her hand and mumbled, “God speed.”
At take-off, he was still standing there, a forlorn figure in the gray mist watching after her, as if willing her courage from the shadow of her tormented dream. Clinging to that life force binding her to Saunders, she had stared back at his image long after he was out of sight.
Once she had settled back, she spent the rest of the flight reviewing her plan. As Lee had told Saunders, she had a personal interest vested in stopping Hitler’s monstrous insanity from devouring the whole world.
The time to pay the piper had com
e for her. She could not stand aside and let Grace die a needless death. Too many had already been sacrificed for reasons they did not understand, innocents like Grace, and in the manipulation of events, Lee had played a part. She had sent many agents to certain death. But not this time. The sacrifice was not Grace’s to make. It was hers. Grace was not going to pay with her life for a mistake Lee made underestimating Amanita’s traitor.
Now Lee’s nightmare was no longer a figment of her imagination. She was living it. If she were to feel absolved of guilt, being arrested by the Gestapo in Grace’s place was something she had to do. For Grace was not much more than a child herself, with her humble faith and simple belief in hope, in life, in the basic goodness of people. She believed in God and country and had done her duty, but if the war ended tomorrow, she could pick up her life, where it last left off, and continue as if it had never been interrupted.
The same was not true for Lee. She would miss the intrigue, the sudden boost of adrenaline shooting through her veins, the risk of danger and death. She was part of a ripple feeding on itself, growing in wider and wider circles, like tumbleweed rolling on forever, faster and faster. She was addicted to war, as shameful as that was. In saving Grace’s life, she was saving herself. And in saving herself, she was saving many. One small act, repeated over and over again, multiplied until it formed one great tidal wave, and she was part of the tidal wave sweeping Europe. Eventually, the Resistance would grow so great it would swamp the Nazi vermin and drown them in their own blood. She swelled with pride knowing she was part of the wave that would win the war. From this sense of vindication sprang her joy and absolution.
It was with this insight she finally recognized how much alike she and her mother were. They belonged to those they wrote about. Their words spoke for those who could not speak for themselves. Their words immortalized those who would otherwise be forgotten. Their words nurtured, cared and revealed. They belonged to their words, which were creations conceived and delivered with love. Their words were their children.