The Girls from the Beach

by Andie Newton

  I spat once in the surf, lifting my face from the sand, and she tugged a lock of my hair where the seawater had turned it dishwater brown.

  “You okay?” she said. “I thought I’d lost you there.”

  “Yeah.” I patted the sodden pockets of my uniform, feeling my army knife and the morphine syrettes I’d packed earlier, taking a big sigh.

  Two more enemy aircraft flew out of the clouds like angry bees, engines revving. Zap, zap, zap… Patrolling MPs shouted at us to run, and Red took me by the hand, and together we ran up the beach and into the war.

  *

  The lorry’s gears shifted into a low groan. We turned away from the fighting, and the noises of the war fell behind darkened hills. I could tell we’d driven into the country from the smell alone, with the reek of rotten grapes thick in the air from vineyards left to the crows. And the soil. French dirt smelled like spoiled milk when wet—and boy was it wet. I’d never seen rain like I’d seen in France.

  We crept up a mound of dirt that resembled a trail, gears grinding, engine chugging, and drove right through a spot of tall trees with low-hanging branches. An occasional explosion in the distance sparkled through the leaves and shimmered like fairy lights dancing on the ground.

  “Where are we?” I said.

  Red looked out the back of the lorry, shrugging. “I don’t know…”

  I addressed the soldier. “Will you tell us now?” I asked, but he only looked straight, hand on his gun barrel beside him. Sergeant Meyer cut the engine, and I held on to the seat as we rolled to a slow stop into some thorny bushes. Gooseflesh erupted up and down my arms from a pocket of static air. I heard the sergeant’s door open and close, and I saw a cottage in the distance, darker than the night, with a roof that had toppled inward from a bomb. He came around the side of the lorry and unlatched the back, whispering for us to follow him. The air felt cleaner here, cold, and less wet from the sheltering trees. Quiet.

  The sergeant talked to Red, leaving me lagging behind, as we walked toward a barn several yards away made of wood and rock. “Are we clear?” he said to Red, and she nodded.

  The sergeant shoved a medic’s bag into my hands and rolled open the squealing barn door. It was bright inside, lit up by lanterns. I saw firewood stacked in the corner next to a cold, black stove. And a farm boy, which surprised me. Too young to be the owner of the farm and still too young to fight in the war. He stood against the wall with a rifle at ease by his side, but when he saw the sergeant, he disappeared into the dark back where the rafters had fallen and split.

  “Well, go on,” he said, and the soldier who’d ridden with us stayed behind to guard the door while I walked inside.

  A soldier lay on a makeshift cot made of blankets and hay, groaning, with shaggy blond hair that hadn’t been washed in days. Dirt covered his uniform as if he’d been lying outside on the ground for some time. One arm thrashed about at his side from shock, his eyes glassy and swiveling like a compass with nowhere to go. When the barn doors closed behind us, I smelled him, irony and warm from wounds left unattended for too long.

  Then he spoke and the gasp that came from my mouth sounded more like a last breath.

  “Fräulein,” he said, reaching for me. “Hilfe.”

  “He’s German?” I said, and the sergeant huddled me and Red into the corner.

  “He’s an SS officer, dressed up as one of ours,” he said. “He’s important. And he knows it. I need you to make sure he doesn’t die. Get him coherent. Then I need you to talk to him.”

  “Me?” I put a hand on my chest. “But I’m a nurse!”

  “Who speaks German,” he said, and there was a pause.

  A long, awkward pause.

  My mouth gaped open as if it was such an outlandish idea—me speaking German.

  “Are you denying it?” he said.

  I looked at the ground, searching for words that weren’t the truth. After all these months, my secret was out.

  Red reached for my arm. “You speak German?” she said, but I wasn’t prepared to answer and blathered some words, which nobody could hear.

  “Kit—”

  “Yeah, all right,” I finally said. “I know it.”

  “How come you didn’t tell me?” she said.

  I took a long jittering breath from having said it out loud; there was no going back. “Because if anyone knew they’d send me to a POW hospital.” I swallowed. “I didn’t come here to fix up Germans.”

  She squeezed my shoulder, and my eyes lifted to hers. There were no words between us, but I knew she understood and respected how I felt even though she wouldn’t have any qualms about serving in a POW hospital—a patient was a patient.

  “How did you find out?” I looked at Meyer.

  “I’m OSS.”

  I covered my mouth. OSS—Office of Strategic Services.

  “You can hide that sort of thing from the Nurse Corps—” he shook his head “—but not from us. Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone your little secret if you do this. You help me, and I’ll help you. Understand?”

  Red tore off the German’s jacket and clothes, ripping his shirt in half to assess his wounds. A bullet had pierced his upper chest, and the blood that had once pulsed from the hole was now crusty and brown. When Red pressed a few sheets of gauze to it he cried out with nail-scratching pain.

  “But it’s illegal, Sergeant,” I whispered. “There’s rules—the Geneva Conventions. He needs to be brought to a field hospital.”

  “This is war. Not everything is legal out here.”

  Red rolled him over to see the bullet’s exit wound, but there wasn’t one. She felt his tender flesh above his shoulder blade, nodding to me that she’d found the bullet that was still lodged in his body. This man could live if we let him, but we’d have to hurry, and I knew that each second I spent staring at him was a second wasted. The German waved in and out of consciousness, his head flopping and jerking.

  “But I could get in trouble for this,” I said in a breathy whisper. “Big trouble.”

  I wanted to ask why us—why me and Red specifically—but as I watched Red preparing for surgery, I thought maybe I knew. Red was a seasoned army nurse, having served in two campaigns; she was the most qualified to do the things he asked, except for our surgeon, and nobody would have put Doctor Burk in that kind of situation. As for me, well, that was an easy one. Surely there were other medics and nurses who spoke German, but probably none who got in trouble as much as me. Petty rules I’d broken, sure, but a troublemaker nonetheless, and one who kept secrets.

  “Kit…” Red looked over her shoulder, motioning with her fingers. “Morphine.”

  I took a step back, gripping the medic bag a little tighter. “Kit,” the sergeant said, and I was surprised to hear him call me by my nickname, “what do you think they’re doing to our boys over there, the ones they capture and imprison?”

  The sergeant let me soak in that thought for a moment before he brought out his big gun, which was more like a bird that had crawled into my heart and ruffled sharp feathers. “Your brother was part of the Eighth—the airmen captured not long ago by the Germans. Is that right?” he said, and I whipped my head up, meeting his eyes. “If this Kraut dies, we get nothing. If you save him it could lead to information that would end the war, bring all our POWs home. Is that worth violating the rules of war?”

  Maybe a second passed, I don’t know. I wasn’t thinking anymore about what was legal and what wasn’t. I was only thinking of my brother and the day he left for basic. How he swept his hair from his eyes and told me to remember his face, not him walking away. But I’d watched him leave anyway, slinging his duffel bag over his shoulder and walking down the long gravel road away from our farm until I couldn’t see him anymore.

  “Do you know my brother?”

  “I know men like him—brave.”

  It was true. All our men were brave, walking into the war and into the fire.

  “My brother’s name is Sam,” I said, and instea
d of pulling back even more, I reached into my medic bag for the morphine Red had asked for. She immediately injected the German in the neck with the syrette, and soon enough he was out. Limp as a noodle. And the barn got very quiet.

  I nodded.

  “Yes?” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  Sergeant Meyer ran his hand over his face. “Good,” he said, and the other soldier closed the barn doors. “Now hurry, ladies. We don’t have a lot of time.”

  I worked side by side with Red as the sergeant watched us with his arms folded. We patched him up good with supplies from the medic bag, sticking him with plasma and sewing up his chest wound and his shoulder, which felt hot from an oncoming infection. After hours of working on him, we finally reached a point where we had done enough.

  Then we waited.

  Waited for him to open his eyes, and waited for him to talk.

  “Red,” I said, quietly, “what if he knows where Sam is?” I watched the German breathe and Red grabbed my arm. “I can ask him where. Find out about my—”

  “No,” she said. “It’s too risky.” She pulled me in close after Meyer looked at us. “And it’s not up to you.”

  The German moaned, finally waking up. “Quick, give him something…” Red said, tapping me. I searched my pack for something to give him other than morphine, thumbing through the different medicines. I paused, fingers on the sodium pentothal.

  “What is it?” Red asked, and I looked at her, suddenly aware I was more prepared for this situation than I thought.

  “I have this.” When I showed her the glass ampule of injectable medicine, she smiled.

  “If only Roxy was here,” she said.

  We administered sodium pentothal for pain, but we called it the Roxy drug because patients babbled on for many minutes about anything and everything. It was worth a try.

  Red swabbed the German’s skin while I prepared the medicine and drew it into a hypodermic syringe. “Here goes nothing,” I said, and I punched the needle into his fatty upper arm. His pasty face turned peach in a matter of seconds. He’d stopped moaning, and Sergeant Meyer pulled me off to the side.

  “Tell him you’re a special agent with the SS. You’re embedded with the army. That will explain our uniforms. Make sure he thinks you’re one of them…” The sergeant went on and told me things only a German agent would know, battle positions and plans lifted through telephone conversations. “Then, when he fully trusts you, ask him about the giant. What does it mean? Let him do the talking.”

  I nodded, trying to remember all he said, and thinking of the right words to use. I was the only girl in my town forced to go to German school, and I hated every minute of it. Never had I been more regretful about cheating on my final exam than at that very moment, standing next to a Nazi. Frau Hess, my long-suffering teacher, would flip over in her grave if she knew what I was about to use my German for.

  “Anything else?” I said.

  “Yeah,” Meyer said. “Stick to the script. These Nazis are clever bastards.” He pushed me toward the German.

  “Stick to the script,” Red warned, and I nodded, making the short walk over.

  The German’s eyes lifted and then fell, lifted and then fell. I waved smelling salts under his nose, and he roused enough to look at us coherently. My cold palm frightened him. I cleared my throat. “Officer…”

  He took a sudden breath and I think he was glad to hear my accent, which my mother made me master. “She must have a proper northern accent and know perfect German,” she had told my teacher, “as if she is one.” I swallowed, thinking of all the times I cursed my mother’s persistence.

  “Fräulein,” he said all weepy.

  “I’m an agent with the SS.” I waved my finger at the sergeant and Red. “These are my informants.” I went on to repeat the information the sergeant told me, and the officer nodded intermittently as if he already knew the things I told him.

  “Officer,” I said, messing with his blanket, buying time to remember the right words, and how to say “giant” in German. I tried looking into his eyes, but they were still a little shaky. “I need to know about the giant.” He’d just realized we’d sewn up his shoulder and felt around for the sutures, asking about what else we’d done to him. “Officer,” I said again, using his chin to move his head, and his eyes wheeled to mine. “The giant.”

  And he spoke very fast from the medicine I’d injected him with. Too fast for me to translate in my head, and I interrupted to tell him to slow down. “The giant,” he said, “was quartered and moved. Resistance. Alps. The tunnel, long days and nights.” He pointed a finger in the air. “Deposit is secure in the Black Forest. Führer is prepared. Be restful with this, fräulein. The butcher knows where,” he kept saying. “The butcher, the butcher…”

  “What’s secure, Officer? Ammunition?”

  “No, fräulein.” The man swallowed, taking a labored breath. “The Reich’s war chest,” he said, and I jumped up from the ground.

  2

  KIT

  The sergeant caught me as I stumbled backward, feeling white as a sheet and wobbly in his arms. The German had closed his eyes, wincing from moving his arm—he hadn’t seen my reaction when he mentioned the Nazi war chest. I felt an urgency to tell Meyer immediately what I’d heard, but I couldn’t. Not yet. I stood straight, composing myself and resisting the desire to feel my thrashing heart.

  The German rambled on again about his sutures, searching for them with his eyes and then feeling them with his fingers. I knelt back down, trying my best to look calm and in control, tucking my hair behind my ears, and turning my blubbering lower lip into a stiff one.

  “Who did you say, Officer? A butcher?” His head rolled from side to side, still asking me what I’d done to his shoulder when I placed a hand on his arm. “Look at me.” But he wouldn’t, and I felt a panic bubbling up from my chest to my throat, knowing the medicine would be wearing off shortly. He had to know where the airmen from the Eighth were taken; he had to know about my brother. Somewhere in that German-Hun mind of his, he had answers. I slowly glanced up at Red and her brow furrowed, and in those fire-green eyes of hers I knew what she was thinking—don’t do anything stupid.

  I squeezed the German’s arm, and his head stopped rolling. “Tell me about the American airmen captured two weeks ago. Where are you keeping them?”

  “Karlsruhe,” he mumbled, eyes closing, and I assumed it was a village—one of the many places the Germans had POW camps, secret camps.

  “Are they alive? Tell me what you know,” I said, and his eyes popped open. He focused on me much more lucidly than he’d been, and shifted in his bed after a long pause. That’s when I knew I’d messed up. My stomach sank.

  I let go of his arm, and he tried sitting up, now looking at us three with eyes wide, almost as if seeing us for the first time. “What’s your name, fräulein?”

  “I told you my name.”

  His face turned stern and browbeat, not affected by the pain anymore, or the delirium that infected him earlier. “No,” he said. “You did not.”

  My mind went blank. I couldn’t think of one German name, and I knew Kit didn’t translate well. I repeated some of what I’d already told him, making a point about being an agent with the SS. “We saved you from amputation. We saved your life!”

  I pointed to every part of his body that Red and I sewed up.

  “You think the Allies would treat you so kindly? We saved you from a prisoner of war camp.” I laughed cynically, glancing up at Red, but she looked lost since she didn’t understand German. “Surely you realize we’re on the same side…”

  I gulped.

  He looked at the plasma we’d strung up on a nail near his bedside and then fiddled with the needle. “Whose fluid is this? What did you give me?” His eyes slid to his jacket, which had been slung over the back of a chair after Red had ripped it off him. I stood up, not knowing what to say or in what language. He eyed his jacket again after glancing at me, and in
one swift move, he reached for it with a sudden burst of energy.

  Me and Red grabbed a hold of the same sleeve, yelling at him to drop it, but he’d dug his fingers into a hidden pocket and before we could stop him, he’d pulled out a cyanide capsule. The sergeant slugged him in the face before he could swallow, followed by a swift throw of his jacket across the barn. The soldier from outside rushed in to help, and they argued who was at fault for not finding the capsule during the search.

  Red put her hands to her cheeks, looking astonished. “Kit, what did you say?”

  “I didn’t say anything!” I said, and I lied right to my best friend’s face. “Honest!” I cringed, another lie.

  “You stuck to the script?” Meyer asked.

  “Yeah.” I chewed my nails.

  Meyer took me by the shoulders while the German lost consciousness behind his back, the only other person who knew what questions I’d asked. “What did he tell you?”

  And I told the sergeant everything about the giant. Red’s hands moved to cover her mouth, while the sergeant looked more stunned than one of our boys who’d come in completely shell-shocked. He felt behind him for the wall and leaned up against it.

  “The Nazi chest? It’s been split up and moved?”

  I nodded. “Yes, Sergeant. I believe so.”

  “And who’s this butcher?” he asked. “Did he say anything else? The slightest detail could be useful.”

  I paused, glancing up at Red, and she folded her arms. “That’s all.”

  “Well, it’s quite some news, I must say.” He looked at the ground, thinking, eyes pointed, before looking back up at us. “Now, ladies,” he said. “This is confidential information, as I’m sure you are aware. You do know what that means? Don’t you?”

  Red and I nodded incessantly.

  “Unfortunately, there are spies among us. He’s not the only hostile to infiltrate. You’re at risk if anyone finds out what you know. Trust no one.” We turned to leave after he’d asked the soldier to take us back to our hospital. “Oh, and Kit,” he said. “You made the right decision.”