by Bonnie Toews
“Yes,” he said. “I have given Communism a chance to change the world for the better. A world without class and greed, a world where the earth’s riches can be distributed fairly to everyone.”
“You are as deranged as my mother,” Lee spat. “Lenin’s useful idiots.”
Hidden behind shrubbery bordering the paddock, Ludwig Ketmann smirked as he watched Quinn Bergin’s arrest. Finally, he and the stubborn Jewess agreed on something. The traitor was a useful idiot. The woman had figured out everything except one thing: Bergin and Sir Fletcher’s relationship. What he would have given to see the shock on her face if she knew the British Secret Service harbored homosexuals among its higher-ranking officers. It was the secret scandal of the war. Fingering the semi-automatic cavalry pistol he held, he stroked the snout of the Polish Radom, covered with a silencer, and crouched lower, waiting for the right moment.
“Lee, go back to Grace and Erich. The race is about to start,” Morgan ordered.
Lee glanced around. The walking ring was cleared of horses. People were rushing to the grandstand, ignoring the drama by the paddock. Morgan’s men, dressed as stewards, converged on the trapped traitor. In the background, she could hear the bugle calling the Epsom Derby race.
Quinn grunted. At the sound, Lee turned back to Quinn. His eyes glazed, and his knees buckled. Morgan grabbed him and swerved toward the direction of the silent shot. Blood dribbled out of the corner of Quinn’s slack mouth.
Lee stood rooted to the ground.
“Lee, get down!”
Invisible arms held her back.
“Lee!” Morgan hollered as his men drew their guns and fanned out, moving through the paddock. He dropped Quinn’s body to the ground and motioned to his men, while hastily issuing more instructions.
Lee stared at Quinn’s lifeless form. Why? Why? It didn’t matter that Quinn felt justified to the end and didn’t see himself as a traitor. Until the day she died, she would never understand him, or what he did, and a part of her clung to that sad loss.
From the grandstand, the loudspeaker blared. The horses are at the gate. The 1946 Derby Race is about to begin.
Morgan rushed up to Lee and wrapped her in his arms.
“It’s all over, Lee. Thank God, you’re safe.”
“Safe?” she whispered against his chest. “I don’t understand. Who killed Quinn?”
“My men will find whoever it was.”
She nestled into the haven of his arms and lost herself to the wonderful sense of coming home. She finally felt safe. Morgan Saunders made her feel safe.
And they’re off! Aloha, Sea Nymph and La Pomme d’Amour get away first. Razor’s Edge is on the inside. Intrepid is far back in the pack.
The announcer’s voice broke into her temporary surrender to relief. Intrepid! She drew away from Morgan’s comfortable haven. “The race! We can’t miss Intrepid’s race!”
“Of course. Come on.”
He gripped her hand, and they made a mad dash for the grandstand.
Abent, grungy stable worker with a jagged scar splitting his right cheek pushed a wheelbarrow of manure over to the dung heap beside the paddock, unloaded it, and pointed it back toward the barn. Ketmann pushed his straw hat sideways. Its floppy brim shadowed the scarred side of his face. He paused to remove twigs in the wheel when Morgan’s men skirted his empty wheelbarrow and rushed past him into the barn. He resisted smiling, as each one grimaced on the run and turned their noses away from his skunky odor.
Drooping his chin down to his chest, Ketmann shuffled along more slowly becoming the weary old worker onlookers saw pushing the dump cart. Under the cover of his hat, he watched the figures of Lee and Morgan recede into the distant tiers of seats as they climbed to their private box.
The restoration of Lee’s face bemused him. In frustration, he had disfigured her as punishment for her silence, a silence that robbed him of his place in history and the victory, which should have been Germany’s. Instead, he was the one scarred. He sighed. In the end, what did it matter? Hitler’s only answer to the German people was suicide. He betrayed his faithful followers and left them devastated, in defeat, with nothing and no one to believe in.
Deep inside, Ketmann’s conviction refused to yield to that reality. The dream of the Third Reich didn’t have to die because Hitler abandoned it. The man was weak but the dream was still strong. There were others like him and Eichmann … true believers in the supremacy of their master race. They had siphoned fortunes away and prepared for Hitler’s fall. The war was not over. Far from it. He would find others like him, the believers, and National Socialism would rise again. Stronger. Shrewder. Better organized. And this time they would dominate the world.
As the horses rounded the first turn, Lee rushed up to Grace. “How’s Intrepid doing?”
She pointed. “He’s lost his cover. He’s falling back.”
“Oh no!” Lee shouted at the top of her lungs.
“Come on, Intrepid! You can do it! Dig in! Go, boy, go!”
Startled by Lee’s voice, Kendra raised her head from Grace’s shoulder and looked nervously about.
“Oh, I’m sorry, Kendra, but this is a horse race. See!”
Lee pointed down to the track for her. “See the horse down there. Cheer for Intrepid, Kendra. We want him to win.”
Kendra bounced in Grace’s arms, sensing everyone’s excitement. Fully alert now, she became intrigued with all the sights below and the horses streaking around the track.
“What took you so long?” Grace asked. “And where’s your hat?”
Lee touched her hair and face in wonder. “I must have lost it.”
Erich looked over her shoulder to Morgan and silently raised one brow in question. Morgan went over and clapped him on the shoulder. “You won our bet.”
Lee knew it was Morgan’s way of telling Erich he had successfully caught Quinn. Later, after the race, he would tell him Quinn was dead.
As they pass in front of the stands, Sea Nymph is in front. Battling her for the lead is Razor’s Edge. They are neck and neck.
Grace’s voice rose in excitement.
“Come on!” she urged Intrepid. “Change gears, boy. Pick up the beat. You can take the field from the outside, same as Decency did.”
As if tuned to her voice, Intrepid’s ears pricked forward, and he strode out. Head by head, he gained ground around the backstretch. Lee’s eyes stayed glued on the greased horse flying past the half.
Intrepid’s coming up on the outside! Now seventh. Now sixth. Now fifth. Now fourth. He’s winging up with amazing speed!
Grace turned Kendra around and cushioned her with her arms, one braced underneath like a bench and the other slung around her waist. “Go, boy, go!” she chanted in the baby’s ear.
Kendra’s enormous eyes ogled with excitement. She patted Grace’s arm and squealed. Grace laughed joyfully.
“Watch the horses, Kendra. Out there!” She pointed to them again. “See? Say GO … GO … GO …!”
Kendra clapped her hands in glee.
Lee grabbed Morgan’s arm.
Morgan removed her hand, pulled her towards him and drew her into the tight shelter of his arms.
What a race we are seeing here! Muscle and motion in perfect harmony.
Morgan spoke softly in her ear. “This isn’t the time to tell you, but I don’t know when I’ll have another chance. President Truman is setting up a special U.S. investigations team for the Allied Tribunal at the Nuremberg Trials. I leave tonight.”
She pulled her head back and stared at him. Grace, Kendra and Erich were leaving tonight. Morgan was leaving. She was going to be alone! The race … the excitement disintegrated before her eyes, and her energy drained, leaving her in a terrible void.
“I want you to be part of the team, Lee. Do you feel ready to go with me?”
“Ready? READY!”
She rested her forehead against his chest and nodded so he wouldn’t see the tears of relief flooding her eyes.
&nb
sp; “Good,” he said, massaging her shoulders.
Intrepid is refusing to quit.
Grace jabbed Lee with her elbow. Her eyes danced.
“Isn’t he magnificent?” Her voice trembled with pride.
Lee nodded.
“He certainly has his mother’s heart and his father’s speed.”
This horse holds nothing back. Intrepid’s inching up. Now he’s nip and tuck with Razor’s Edge. Sea Nymph can’t keep up. He’s falling back! They’re coming to the finish. Intrepid is lunging for the lead. Can he do it? YES!! He’s IN FRONT! He’s beaten Razor’s Edge. INTREPID WINS THE DERBY!
The two women’s shrieks ripped the air. Lee turned to Grace and her baby, still clapping in Grace’s arms, and gathered them to her in a tight embrace. Jubilant, Lee smiled through her tears. A triumphant smile. This is what she would always remember. The victory, not the loss.
AUTHOR’S NOTES
Dialogue Characteristics
In writing THE CONSUMMATE TRAITOR, I became fascinated with the speech patterns of Winston Churchill and Adolf Hitler. Both used speech to draw the masses and to exert power.
William Stevenson, who wrote A Man Called Intrepid, interviewed men who worked directly with Churchill, and said, even in his everyday conversations, there was a telltale cadence and emphasis unique to him. One line in particular I quoted directly in the story from Stevenson’s quote of Churchill’s actual words to Canadian Bill Stephenson, his director of British Security Coordination, whom he codenamed Intrepid and stationed in New York City: “The tactic, which brings an ally into the field, is as serviceable as that which wins a great battle.”
This statement alone proved to me that Churchill was behind the strategies, which often exposed villagers and citizens in Nazioccupied territories to massive reprisals that united the local people in resistance. They were the fifth column Churchill believed so necessary to win the war against the Third Reich. One scene in the novel is modeled on the discussion Stevenson describes took place between Churchill and his intelligence chief concerning the defection of the atomic scientist, Dr. Niels Bohr, from Denmark. Churchill did not come out and say directly what he wanted. He planted seeds for others to interpret and spread as demonstrated in this lone quote, and I picked up on his mannerism and the response to his suggested meanings in the dialogue throughout this scene.
William L. Shirer likewise notes in The Nightmare Years 1930-1940, whether you heard Churchill speak or read a statement, you could immediately identify whether he wrote it or not, by the rhythm and choice of words he used. His iambic pentameter cadence and alliteration are evident in Shirer’s quote of Churchill’s speech to the House of Commons following Hitler’s annexation of Austria: “The gravity of the event of March 12 cannot be exaggerated … How many friends will be alienated, how many potential allies will we see go, one by one, down the grisly gulf?”
Shirer further cites the warning Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin formally declared together to the Nazi regime on November 1,1943, had to be written by Churchill: “Let those who have hitherto not stained their hands with innocent blood beware lest they join the ranks of the guilty, for most assuredly the three Allied powers will pursue them to the uttermost ends of the earth and will deliver them to their accusers in order that justice may be done.”
Adolf Hitler was a master of euphemisms. He fed on the miseries and injustices wrought on the Germans by the Treaty of Versailles at the end of the First World War and created images and projected ideas, which sounded rationale and mesmerized his listeners. Hitler was a paradox. He believed himself to be a puritan. Shirer writes one of Hitler’s closest entourage told him Hitler lead a Spartan personal life. He was “a vegetarian, a teetotaler, a non-smoker and a celibate.” Another party member told Shirer he was sure Hitler would never marry because “Germany is his bride.” This was the image Hitler presented to the German people, yet history now knows he was a sadist in his private life, a sadist in his policies and probably a sexual deviate diseased with syphilis.
Shirer gives another example of Hitler’s puritanical expectations in his answer to the Nationalist Socialist League of Women on the role of women in the Nazi party. He tells them there will be no career women in Germany. At his command, they are expected to return to their homes and duties of their households, and the women obey him. Astounding! Here is part of what Hitler said: “Talk about the emancipation of women is an invention of Jewish minds. The German woman does not need to be emancipated. She has always possessed what nature has bestowed upon her… Her world is her husband, her family, her children and her home. Where would the great world [of men] be if the small world [of women] were not looked after? Providence has confined to women that care of their own world, on which the world of men can be built. These two worlds do not stand against each other. They complement each other, they belong together, as men and women belong to each other. We hold it is wrong for the woman to invade the world of men. We feel it only natural that both worlds remain separated.”
Doesn’t this remind you of the Taliban’s attitude toward women in Afghanistan today?
Plot References
In Nigel West’s History of the Secret War published in 1992, he reveals rivalry between Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) and the civilian wartime sabotage organization, Special Operations Executive (SOE). This rivalry was set up “to help ensure that much of Eastern Europe would remain under totalitarian domination for a further forty-five years after the Nazi defeat.”
In other words, SIS set up SOE to fail, so the plot of THE CONSUMMATE TRAITOR follows this internal betrayal of British operatives in the field. SIS’s double Soviet agents, such as the later-exposed Anthony Blunt, Guy Burgess and John Cairncross, engineered enmity between the two services.
The novel depicts another weakness Nigel West reveals in SOE’s wartime operations: “the apparent willingness of senior officers to place themselves at risk by operating in the field.” This goes against the cardinal rule that personnel in possession of classified data must never risk compromising their mission to the enemy. West reports captured SOE officers were able to bargain for their lives in exchange for information provided to the Gestapo. Of the 52 women agents dropped into France, 17 were betrayed and arrested, and 12 died in concentration camps.
Historically, the agent “Trudi” truly was a distant cousin of King George VI. According to “Intrepid,” she was dropped into Denmark, betrayed to the Gestapo, captured, tortured and presumed dead, though her body was never found at the Copenhagen prison. At the end of the war, SOE listed her as missing in action (MIA). In creating the story for my novel, I did not set out to trace the real royal lineage and background of “Trudi,” but in speaking with a British movie producer who is also intrigued with what happened to the real Trudi, we have both focused on the same royal lineage in Norway. He believes Trudi lived in Germany or Denmark and spied for the British at length. William Stevenson mentioned to an interviewer that William Stephenson (Intrepid) regretted mentioning her existence to him in his biography of Churchill’s spy master. That is why any information about Trudi is so sketchy. So, I worked on the premise, “What if she survived, what would be her story?” From that scenario developed the sisters-in-spirit between Grace and Lee, and their characterizations, together with the other major players in THE CONSUMMATE TRAITOR, are purely fictional.
Research
When I started researching this novel, I spent weeks in Toronto’s Central Library reading all kinds of books, taking notes and photocopying what I needed for reference. I found a 1932 map of Berlin, in German. This gave me the locations and streets I needed to develop routes. I also read diaries written by Basques, who lived through the bombing of Guernica. Because I had trained to be a pilot in my younger days, I was naturally intrigued with the air battles along with the history of the undercover operations. To get a more balanced perspective of the time, I interviewed Holocaust survivors, discussed political motivations with them and even found a
former Nazi, an aeronautical engineer, who was part of Germany’s design team of fighter aircraft before and during WWII. He described how he felt during the pogrom of Jews on Kristallnacht in Berlin in 1938. Overall, I tried to look at the big picture before I saw the story from each character’s point of view.
Treatment
THE CONSUMMATE TRAITOR parallels what actually happened in history as close as I could carry it in a fictional plot, including the recruitment of homosexuals in SOE. I thought molding plastic explosive to look like horse manure was my invention, until someone pointed out to me that, in the book “Secret War” by Juliette Pattinson, he read British secret agents did use exploding horse manure.
BOOK CLUBS
READER DISCUSSION GROUPS
1. How does the author set up the plot?
2. What role does music play through the story?
3. What historical event brought the two women together? How did it affect them? How did if affect you, the reader?
4. Why are Lady Grace and the SS officer instantly drawn to each other, and what in their nature bonds them so loyally through the war?
5. Why is Lee so starved for love? How does this affect her relationships with everyone, especially men?
6. Why is the horse such a significant symbol throughout the story?
7. How are Lee and Grace alike? How do they differ? What inner conflict does each woman have to overcome through the story?
8. Do you agree or disagree with this statment and explain your reasons: Events through the story draw the two women into a friendship that becomes so close they are almost mirrors of each other.
9. Why did British Intelligence send coded messages in radio broadcasts during World War II?