Where Dead Men Meet

by Mark Mills

  “I have a quick brain.”

  “And a remarkable lack of modesty.”

  She shrugged. “I can see why you don’t want to believe it.”

  “Oh?”

  “Because she died for you—because of you.”

  That cut deep, right down to the anger flaring inside him. “Thanks for that.”

  “If you want the truth, you have to be ready to hear it.”

  “And if you’re trying to get me to stay, it’s not going to work.”

  “Then go,” she said, pulling a key from her skirt pocket and sliding it across the table. “Take the car. There’s some money under the seat, enough to get you home. Leave it at the station in Konstanz.”

  His head ordered him to his feet, but his body refused to obey.

  “I need to think.”

  Pippi turned her attention back to her food. He had noted it before but not examined it. A curious formality about the manner in which she ate: erect in her chair, straight-backed, elbows pressed close to her sides—details that spoke of a childhood ruled by a rigid code of manners.

  She was the first to break the lengthy silence. “I could be wrong,” she conceded, taking the linen napkin from her lap and dabbing at her mouth.

  “Let’s say you’re not. What then?”

  “Then Borodin lied to you. He helped you, yes, but he also lied to you.”

  “And if he lied to me, he knows who I am.”

  “Probably.”

  Luke reached for his beer. So here he was once more, back in that place he had sworn never to return to. The first half of his life had been spent plagued by questions and aching for answers. How many times had he forced Sister Agnes to tell him the story of that night, of the snow on the ground, and the tracks leading through it to the shadowy man standing beyond the pool of light thrown by the porch lantern … and of the hand he had raised and held aloft until she returned the gesture … and how he had then turned up the collar of his overcoat and set off down the driveway?

  A few years ago, shortly before Luke joined the RAF, Agnes had unburdened herself to him during a visit to Ely Cathedral.

  “I could have followed him. I should have, but then I looked down and I saw you, and in my mind I urged him to keep walking. And when I heard the car drive off, I told myself I would never have caught up with him in time anyway. It’s not true, though. I could have. I could have talked to him, maybe even …” She couldn’t finish the sentence. “I’m so sorry, Luke.”

  “He drove through a snowstorm at night. I doubt he had any intention of taking me back.”

  “But he might have.”

  Luke banished the memory and set his beer glass back down on the table.

  “If you’re right, then Borodin also knows who killed Agnes.”

  “I can’t say. But I’m sure of this: you need me with you in Zurich.”

  “But only if I help you first.”

  Pippi shrugged. “One good turn deserves another.”

  “Where did you learn your English?”

  “I told you, I studied it at university.”

  “No. It’s too colloquial. And your accent …”

  She offered her hand across the table. “Do we have a deal?”

  “I have to be in Zurich on Tuesday.”

  “It’s happening tomorrow night.”

  Her hand hovered—a fine, elegant hand, with the long fingers of a pianist.

  “Not until I know what ‘it’ is. So you can put that away for now.”

  But he knew already they would end up shaking on it. How could he not have her at his side in Zurich? She had a steely competence about her, a quality lacking in him—except, maybe, when he was seated in the cockpit of an airplane.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Neither Otto nor Erwin made any attempt to mask their displeasure on seeing Luke clamber out of the car back at the farmhouse, and Pippi’s explanation did little to appease them.

  “There’s been a change of plan. We need another pair of hands. We’re bringing his family out, too.”

  The man in question was a scientist, a Jewish physicist. Many had already left Germany for Britain and America; others had remained in the hope that the situation at home would improve. It hadn’t, and whereas Hitler had once been happy to see the scientific establishment purged of Jews, he was now beginning to understand the true cost of the policy: he had handed some of his finest brains to countries that might well stand as enemies against him if war came. For Pippi, there was no “if”; it was only a question of time. And for Professor Weintraub, time was in extremely short supply. The British had been courting him for more than a year, but only recently had he accepted their offer to spirit him away to England, via Switzerland.

  News that the professor’s family would now be traveling with him had come to Pippi’s ears this morning, when she had called her British contact from Konstanz. She had sat on the information until now, while she figured how best to use it to her advantage, and against the possible traitor in their midst.

  “We need to find another boat,” said Erwin. “Something bigger.”

  Professor Weintraub was a widower, but his three children would be accompanied by their nanny, to say nothing of the extra luggage.

  “This is nonsense,” Otto growled. “Unacceptable.”

  “What else are we to do?” Erwin replied.

  “I mean him.” Otto shot Luke a sour look. “You trust him?”

  “I do,” said Pippi. “Luke will help us get them into Switzerland, and then he’ll hand himself over to his own people.”

  It was one of a number of lies they had hatched at the restaurant and during the drive back.

  “I’m still against it,” said Otto, flexing his jaw.

  “Then we’ll just have to make do without you.”

  “You would choose him over me?”

  “I’m just trying to think like Johan. He would want us to do what’s best for the professor and his family.” She glanced at Luke. “And if I’m wrong about him, I’ll be the first to correct my mistake.”

  “No,” said Otto. “I’ll be the first.”

  When Otto and Erwin drove off in search of a bigger boat, Pippi set Luke to splitting logs for the range. The reward for his labors would be a roast chicken for dinner, and enough hot water for a shallow bath in the tin tub in the corner of the kitchen. Alone in the woodshed beside the barn, he felt a strange calm descend on him. There was something comforting in the repetitive rise and fall of the ax, in the rhythmic thuds resonating off the planked walls. The systematic reduction of the logs to a pile of fresh stove wood suggested method, order, and purpose—qualities that could now be applied to his own situation when viewed through the prism of Pippi’s hypothesis.

  He wasn’t entirely persuaded by it, but after the fear and confusion of the past forty-eight hours he at least had something firm to fix on, to aim at. He thought of Sister Agnes, buried now, sunk deep in the soil at St. Theresa’s. A distressing vision of the last moments of her life came to him. He tried to repel it, but it caught him in its coils. He saw her resisting in order to protect him, and he saw the blows raining down on her. He couldn’t form a face for her assailant, but if Pippi was right, there was every chance Borodin knew the man’s identity and even where to find him. When he next swung the ax, it was with such force that the steel bit sheared clean through the log and buried itself deep in the chopping block.

  Once they had got the fire going in the range, they went in search of their supper. The chicken coop was a walk-in affair beside the barn. As they peered through the wire mesh, selecting a bird for the pot, Luke sensed a hesitancy on Pippi’s part.

  “You want me to do it?” he asked.

  “You have done it before?”

  “Yes.”

  He entered the coop and gathered up the chicken with as
little fuss as possible so as not to agitate it. Holding it close to his chest, he stroked it and soothed it with words, but once they had rounded the corner of the barn and were out of sight of the other birds, he didn’t dally. Holding the chicken upside down by its feet, he gripped the back of its head in the cleft between the forefinger and middle finger of his other hand and extended his arm toward the ground, stretching out the neck and snapping it with a twist of the wrist. Pippi gave a sharp gasp as the wings flapped wildly.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “It’s already dead.”

  The bird finally fell still. Pippi produced some twine, and Luke hung it by its feet from the beam over the kitchen sink, allowing the blood to drain into the neck.

  “Where did you learn to do that?” They were the first words she had spoken in a while.

  “A man called Solomon Finch.”

  In truth, chickens weren’t really Solomon’s thing, although he kept and bred a handful of them for eggs. This demanded the occasional culling of unwanted roosters, which was how Luke had learned at an early age how to dispatch a bird by hand.

  His first glimpse of the mysterious figure who lived alone in the tiny thatched cottage on the far side of Wicken Fen had come a few weeks into his new life with the Hamiltons. He was down at the end of the garden, exploring the boundaries of the big house that was now his home, when he saw through the trees, silhouetted against the lowering sun, a tall man standing in his punt, slowly poling his way one-handed across the fen. Poised in his other hand was a long spear with a three-pronged head, like Neptune’s trident. It flashed into the water and reemerged with a giant fish skewered on the end of it, writhing madly. Terrified but exhilarated by what he’d just witnessed, Luke turned and hightailed it back to the house as fast as his skinny legs would carry him.

  It wasn’t until autumn that they were finally introduced. The rains had come hard and early that year, and with them the floods that topped up the fens and turned the pastures into glistening meres. Luke was out walking this new water world with his father when they stumbled upon Solomon, heading home beside the swollen lode. He had a shotgun slung over one shoulder, a goose over the other.

  “I seen the young pup around,” said Solomon. “An’ he’s seen me. First time was when I darted that big pike, right?”

  Luke nodded shyly up at the craggy face, with its side-whiskers and high cheekbones and sweep of long, lank hair.

  “What Solomon doesn’t know about birds and fish isn’t worth knowing,” said his father.

  “An’ much of what I does know ain’t worth it, neither.”

  As far as eight-year-old Luke was concerned, their friendship was sealed right there and then with the little wink that Solomon fired at him.

  Solomon was a true fen tiger, a sixth-generation wildfowler and fisherman who supplemented his income as his forebears had: by digging peat and cutting sedge during the kinder months. He was also one of the last punt-gunners operating in the Ely area. The gun, a muzzle-loading monster some eight feet long, hung on leather straps from the wall of Solomon’s living room. He claimed to have once knocked forty-eight ducks out of the air with a single shot—half mallards, half wigeons. This might have sounded like a tall tale if, during that first winter, Luke hadn’t been with him in the punt one bitterly cold morning when he bagged thirty-seven birds with one shot.

  Like many fenmen, Solomon was tough as wire nails, stubbornly independent, and suspicious of strangers, but he didn’t live alone by choice. He had lost his wife to cancer, his daughter to an itinerant lay preacher, and his son to the Great War. Luke learned all this from his parents; Solomon never spoke of the family he once had, although one time he did mention them in passing.

  “It’s six years now you been itching to ask about ’em.”

  “Who’s that?” Luke replied, knowing full well.

  “You’re a sly ’un. I ain’t going to get drawn by you.”

  “You brought it up.”

  “Only so’s to say you done right to keep that trap of yours shut. Wouldn’t be sitting here now otherwise.”

  “You mean sitting here mending your nets for free?”

  Solomon gave a sudden loud bellow of a laugh. “Damn fool you is. Shoulda blabbed right on.”

  The knowledge that Solomon imparted was payment enough for Luke’s help around the place. He taught him how to shoot a bird on the wing, dart a fish, and net a river. Luke learned to weave eel grigs from osier wands, and Solomon showed him where in the waterways to lay the long, funnel-shaped traps. In early spring, he gathered basket loads of plovers’ eggs, peddling them door-to-door in the nearby villages; and he set horsehair nooses for linnets and goldfinches, which could then be sold to bird fanciers in Cambridge. He didn’t just make good pocket money from everything Solomon had taught him; he also had the satisfaction of putting food on the family table: a brace of teal or a fat gold-sided tench.

  By now, the chicken was plucked, ready to gut, and Luke realized he was still prattling on about Solomon, heedless of Pippi’s interest or, rather, lack of it.

  She dismissed his apology and pushed up the sleeves of her cotton blouse. “Show me what Solomon showed you.”

  He handed her the cleaver.

  “Head and feet first.”

  Otto and Erwin returned shortly before dinner, dejected after failing to find a motor launch both large enough for their requirements and, more importantly, fast enough to outrun the German boats that patrolled the unmarked border running down the middle of the lake. They still had a couple of leads to follow up, but the clock was ticking and tensions ran high during dinner in the kitchen—not helped, Luke suspected, by his presence. There was little in Otto’s and Erwin’s behavior to suggest that they had reconciled themselves, over the course of the afternoon, to his involvement in the mission.

  Pippi ran through the plan, as finalized with the British earlier in the day. They were to pick up their passengers from Friedrichshafen, which lay about twenty kilometers east of Konstanz, on the north shore. The weather was set fair for tomorrow, and what with it being a Sunday, the town would be packed with visitors, its port and surrounding waters teeming with all kinds of pleasure craft. They should have no trouble blending right in. Professor Weintraub was due to arrive by train in the late afternoon. He would check into his hotel and wait there until just before six o’clock, when he would tell the concierge he was going for a stroll before dinner.

  He would then make his way straight to the port. All being well, at seven o’clock sharp, his children would arrive at the port in a car driven by the nanny. After loading the luggage, they would cast off and head south to the mouth of the Schussen River. There they would shelter up, waiting for darkness to descend, which it definitely would—not by chance, there was a new moon tomorrow night. Pippi figured it would take twenty minutes at most to make the run across the lake to Romanshorn on the Swiss side, where the British would be waiting for them in a field. The Swiss authorities had been alerted to their arrival and were ready to turn a blind eye.

  Otto and Erwin expressed some concerns, which Pippi did her best to allay. A bottle of schnapps was opened. Glasses were raised three times in toast: to the success of the mission, to the boat they had yet to find, and to Johan. The alcohol worked its slow magic. Otto and Erwin began to unwind, with Erwin growing almost garrulous as the conversation turned to their escapades. The reminiscences were tinged with nostalgia, for they all knew that the drama was drawing to a close and the curtain would soon fall on the adventure they had embarked on together two years ago.

  It was a different world back then. The German people still traveled, the land borders were still porous, and the crossing guards were still happy to look the other way for a few cases of wine or a quarter side of beef. As in all things, Johan had been the first to detect the subtle shift in policy, the slow sealing-off of the country by the National Socialists. Hitler and his
henchmen had once been happy to drive their opponents abroad (while picking their pockets all the way to the border). No longer. Now they sought a reckoning at home with anyone foolish enough to challenge them: journalists, authors, artists, and other undesirables. And as for the Jews, well, they had to understand that personal freedom meant forfeiting all they’d accumulated over the years through their systematic exploitation of the herrenvolk, the master race.

  The days of bribes and kickbacks were gone; officials at every level of the regime feared for themselves; and the Bodensee, with its watery frontier, had become the last feasible route for those looking to flee into Switzerland with their belongings. But how long would it remain passable? Erwin, emboldened by the drink and beginning to slur his words, declared that he intended to fight on—if not here, then elsewhere.

  Relations with Erwin and Otto thawed still further when it emerged that Luke was not only a pilot but had seen active duty in northern India. These credentials seemed to elevate him to the same warrior class they imagined themselves belonging to. Otto even made a stab at a joke, suggesting that if they couldn’t find a bigger boat, they could always steal a plane at the airfield in Friedrichshafen and have Luke fly them to Switzerland.

  When it finally came time to turn in for the night, Luke snatched a private moment with Pippi at the kitchen sink.

  “How much of what you told us about tomorrow was true?” he asked.

  “Most of it.”

  “Anything I should know?”

  Her eyes flicked to the beamed and boarded ceiling. They could hear Otto and Erwin moving about upstairs. “Not now,” she said, handing him a plate to dry. “In the morning.”

  He kept his voice low, too. “I know what you’re doing, Pippi.”

  “Oh?”

  “You’re hoping the man who killed Johan shows up again.”

  “Am I?”

  “Revenge clouds the judgment.”

  “Not mine.”

  “We’ll see about that.”

  “Not mine,” she repeated tartly.