by Paul Griner
Feral cats wound like smoke through the mounded debris—London was filled with them, bombed out or left behind—and the air was clotted with the usual acrid postbombing dust; the standard mixture of broken slates and shattered glass was being swept from the streets and scraped into bins. At least the rain had let up. Toward Portland Street, where the smells of crushed leaves and powdered brick were thicker, Claus followed the crowd past a taxi crammed full of loaves of bread from a damaged bakery and past a couple holding suitcases who were being let into a sagging building, given a few minutes to recover what they could before the dust ruined everything. Beyond that, the Salvage crew and gas-company men were gathered near the blue incident flag. When he stopped by what looked like a perfectly good armchair on the curb, a redheaded Salvage woman in her green tweed suit detached herself from the group.
“Mind you don’t sit in it,” she said. “Glass splinters. It’ll tear your clothes to pieces if you do.”
Most of the bodies would already have been recovered, for which Claus was glad. Sometimes after an incident they were lined up by the dozens, and the small tarps covering children were the worst. Often it was impossible for parents to identify them—the aging process of dust and gore, their torn, unrecognizable bodies, a final reluctance to admit the truth.
Up the street a road mender was already working on the damp, shiny pavement, and chatting women stood clustered in doorways in their winter coats, all of them stopping now and then to take a look, but there was nothing to see beyond the milk float with its tinkling glass bottles. The orphanage had simply disappeared. In its place was a block of mounds of burned rubble, none higher than a dozen feet, and the very air smelled charred. Farther up, an elderly man was moving sooty bricks from a stack in the rear of a building to the front, using a wheelbarrow with a warped wooden wheel. Claus stopped him.
“Awful, isn’t it, targeting an orphanage?” Claus said.
The man loosened his grip from around the worn wooden handles and flexed his blackened fingers. “Not bloody likely they were aiming for this.” He ran a thumb under a suspender held together by red twine. “Three blocks that way they’re after.” He pointed over Claus’s shoulder. “And if it’s ‘it, we’ll all go up. I know. I worked there.”
A munitions factory; Claus hadn’t known about it. He looked casually over his shoulder to mark the spot as the man began tossing bricks on the pile, one with each hand, alternating. Of course it might not have been what they were aiming for. Berlin had told him that he was required only to find out locations and times of the landings; he couldn’t know what they were truly after and so couldn’t judge their effectiveness, but an orphanage? What would be the point? Morale busting, perhaps. He wanted no part of such a plan.
He had an approximate time for its landing, but he needed an exact one. If he was accurate, they could be too. No more slaughtered children. He again tried to convince himself that it was better he hadn’t changed the coordinates of any V-1 landings in his reports, that he had to follow Bertram’s dictates.
“Are there any clocks?” he asked.
The man tossed the brick from his right hand and stopped, still holding one in his left. “Sorry?”
“Clocks. I work at the Ministry of Information.” He pointed to his uniform as if the man might not have seen it. “We’re asked to find clocks from each incident.”
“What the bloody ‘ell for?”
Claus shook his head, equally dubious. “Beats me. The higher-ups think it will help them with planning, I guess.”
The man dropped the brick in his left hand and reached for two more. “No. No clocks.”
He seemed angry, and Claus decided not to push him; someone else might know the exact time. Twenty yards farther on a man about Claus’s age was squatting over roof tiles. Claus approached him as he squared one pile and scrabbled over to the next one.
“Excuse me, sir,” Claus said. “Did you work here?”
He looked up at Claus from under his hat. Unlike in Claus’s neighborhood, where blast survivors were a uniform terra cotta color, this man was ocher colored. Yellow bricks, a different-colored dust, which gave his face a faintly Asian cast. On his nose were crescent-shaped imprints where glasses had rested.
“Used to,” he said, and bent again to his task. “Nothing left to do now.”
Familiar with the despair of shock, Claus squatted too. “That’s not quite true,” he said, keeping his tone light. “Those roof tiles can be used to repair houses.”
The man tilted his head up. “Perhaps you’re right.”
“Listen,” Claus said. “You’re busy. I won’t take much of your time. But I work at the MOI and we need to know. Are there any clocks from the blast, ones that might show the exact time it occurred?”
The man stood and turned to point, his slender hands a sign that he wasn’t used to such physical labor. The back of his pants had been blown off. He had the front of his pants, the waist, the belt, but everything in the back was gone save the pockets, still attached at the waistband. Claus, reeling, wondered whether anyone had spoken to him about it yet, if he didn’t feel the draft.
“Back there, I think,” he said. “That corner, if there are any.” Two timbers stuck up in a V shape from the largest pile of rubble. “That’s where the offices were, and it seems a bit better off than the rest of this. If any survived, they’d be there.”
He squatted again and began arranging another pile of slates.
“Sir,” Claus said. “Can I take you anywhere? To some relatives? You look as though you could use a rest.”
“No. I’m fine.” The roof tiles clicked like dominoes under his restless hands. “This was home, you see. It’ll take me a while, but I think I can get it in order.”
“You lived at the orphanage?”
“The wife and I. Yes” He bit his lower lip and turned to look at the rubble. “She’s in there still, I believe. Eventually we’ll find her.”
Which explained his apparent calm. Before the war Claus would have guessed wartime grief would be noisy, but the exact opposite had proven true: those who found others alive that they’d presumed dead were loud in their relief, but most mourners mourned silently.
He felt evil questioning the man in such a state, even if the information he gathered for the Germans was meant in the end to fool them, so after telling the Salvage woman about him and getting him a blanket, Claus dusted off his hands and left, wishing he could be away from it, done with the entire business.
July 9
FOR THREE HOURS he worked on the script, barely moving from his seat, writing the dialogue quickly but struggling with camera locations and angles. He’d have to use tracking shots, moving closer and away, to keep the passages of dialogue between sitting characters from seeming static. His forearms stuck to the table in the unusually humid night air—made worse by his closed windows—and he peeled them one at a time from the wood, leaving pear-shaped smears on the grain. For some reason Jeanne’s companion still didn’t sound right, and when he switched to the typewriter, Claus left some of his lines blank, to be filled in later. He had less than a week until Max’s final deadline and he didn’t think he’d make it; even if he did, there was no guarantee Max would approve.
Jeanne was going to pass through a city that had been bombed—Rouen, perhaps—trapped there both when she fled the outbreak of the war and when she returned, so that memories of one journey blended with the reality of the other. And her memories would be Kate’s of Hamburg. Kate had told Claus about her visit in ’43, but only after a few glasses of scotch. He wondered how his mother’s cousin Robert was—would ask later in the evening when he broadcast, as he usually did, part of his cover this feigned, ongoing concern—but from Kate’s description of Hamburg’s devastation, of the Altona district specifically, Claus doubted Robert had survived. His mother wouldn’t have liked what Germany had become, but she wouldn’t have liked her family destroyed either.
Kate had returned to Hamburg in late Sep
tember, two months after its horrific firebombing, and it was almost impossible for her to believe what had happened. Four days’ searching had turned up Marie, which she knew to be incredible luck, given that fifty or sixty thousand had died in a single night.
Marie had heard the sirens, but after five straight days of bombing she’d been too tired to go down to their shelter. Yet the bombs kept coming closer, and at last through her apartment windows she saw the firestorm burning toward her, swallowing building after building and street after street, so she’d grabbed her son, Rory, and run downstairs and boarded a northbound tram. Marie, Rory, and all the other passengers were pushed to its hot back—the side closest to the fire—by the enormous, hurricane-force winds rushing into it.
Behind them, burning people staggered after the tram or were sucked into the melting asphalt. A horse galloped past, ablaze from head to foot, and one girl who’d been wrapped in soaked sheets was pulled from the tram by the winds and hurled into the center of the firestorm like a whirling torch. When the tram slid into a bomb crater, Marie and Rory stumbled into a building burned in a previous raid, which turned out to be their salvation; the walls were so hot that jars of stewed prunes steamed and exploded, and in other nearby basements people were dying of the poison gases, but the cracked foundation let Marie and Rory breathe in cool sewer air in great gulps and live. Yet the firestorm grew stronger, its winds screeching and droning, howling and roaring, and at last it pulled the shelter door off its hinges as if it were something hunting for them and plucked Rory from her arms. She stood and sprinted after him, but a line of burning uprooted poplars flew past and knocked her down, and just before her eyes closed she saw other children soaring past like flaming angels.
The next day, only the shells of buildings stood, their bricks glowing, their window frames empty. The pavement burned the soles of Marie’s feet through her shoes. The worst part was the silence; the night before she’d thought she’d go deaf, and now it seemed she had. She passed a tram in the middle of the street, its metal wheels melted to the melted tracks, corpses swollen inside, and a group of thirty people huddled together in one basement as if sleeping, their tomato-colored skin a sign of carbon monoxide poisoning.
Closer to the city center, shrunken bodies were clustered in dried-out fountains or on the road, naked except for their shoes, their hair and features burned off, their faces as smooth as miniature tailors’ dummies. One woman went about removing their shoes, and another woman gathered chunks of charred humans in a pram. The very small children, like Rory, looked different from the other dead, blackened, curved, no bigger than eels. There were a dozen of them altogether. Marie collected them in a single zinc washtub and buried them under a small brick cairn, ignoring her blistered palms.
Somehow Marie survived even that. Kate found her living in a garden shed outside the city, subsisting on tulip bulbs and grubs. Though it was September, the lilacs and chestnuts were in bloom again, their internal clocks thrown off by the fire, and Kate had said that it was remarkable to see the snowy flurries of the chestnut blossoms and to smell the lilacs’ roseate perfume in the midst of that smoking wasteland.
When Claus had said he was surprised the city had still been smoking, Kate had given a short laugh. “They’re Germans, after all,” she’d said. “Already prepared for winter and storing coke and coal in their basements. I imagine it’s burning still.”
At last he put the script aside and stood—having worked on it so long he’d come to the recognizable point where everything seemed horrible—stretching his sore back and numb legs, listening to the building’s rhythms. Water in the pipes, someone singing, pacing from Mr. Morgan’s—all as it should be. He turned the radio on and let it warm up, staring at the pulsing yellow dial, then clicked the Gramophone/Radio switch, common to all Sabas but that on his turned the radio into a transmitter. After pushing a screw on the bottom, he maneuvered the tuning dial counterclockwise and pressed a recessed Bakelite panel twice to release the secret drawer, withdrew the miniature telegraph key, and began tapping out messages about weather and wind to alert Hamburg to his presence. A few more messages about troop dispositions to let Bremen and Bordeaux triangulate him and then he fell silent, to throw off any nearby radio-locating teams, since Bertram had told him to broadcast on a higher frequency for now. A change from the usual procedure, which meant Claus had to be on longer.
“We’re getting reports of radio locators in your area,” he’d said, “concentrating on the lower frequencies after dark.” Broadcasting was much easier than writing the letters but also far more dangerous, yet Bertram insisted he do it from home as he always had. “We don’t know if they can fix you to within yards or miles, and if they take your bearings and you’ve moved, well, your cover’s blown.” So from home it had to be. That Mr. Dobson had been an amateur radio enthusiast meant the building had an antenna, and that his room was on the top floor meant his signal was usually unimpeded. Both were important, as every extra minute he spent broadcasting increased the danger of discovery, which pleased Bertram: he wanted Claus to live as close as possible to the way a real spy did. “Makes you sharper,” he said. “More believable.”
When Robert had first demonstrated the set for him, his glee that it might in some uncertain but longed-for future help defeat the evil British had been off-putting. Claus had no love of the Brits, but any war was bound to be disastrous, and when he was called on by the British to use the set, he resented immediately that it tethered him to a position he hated. Twice he’d had laughably theatrical dreams about it, in both of which he was broadcasting, one hand resting on the table, the other on the key, when his fingers began to grow roots. He’d tried to pull his hands away but the roots had spread quickly, binding his hands to the table, the table to the floor.
Yet recently, under Kate’s influence, he was beginning to see most things German a bit differently, and he now regarded the radio’s simple design as marvelous. Even after closely examining it, an observer would never suspect its dual purpose, and Claus hadn’t the slightest qualm that Mrs. Dobson’s fastidious cleaning might unlock the radio’s secret. It was close to impossible to do even when you knew it, and if Mrs. Dobson lived with the radio for her entire life, she’d still never guess.
But this fondness for things German was disconcerting. He’d long since given up thinking of those he was in contact with as people, made easier because at the war’s start Robert had been replaced by an agent code-named Wind, yet when Kate played Marlene Dietrich records in German—in which she sounded vastly different than in her heavily accented English versions—or called him “meine kleine Kartoffel,” her “little potato,” before drifting off to sleep, he found parts of his suppressed Germanic past creeping back into him, and he wasn’t sure what to do about it. He awoke often to acute memories of his mother’s cooking, and he found himself wondering about Wind’s real identity; if he had family in Hamburg, if they’d survived.
Now he repeated his first signal, the metal warming under his finger, and took care to keep his fist recognizable, though whoever was decoding for Wind seemed a plug—asked twice that Claus repeat certain sections, probably missing a dot here and a dash there as he switched from sending to receiving—and Claus did his best to rein in his impatience; that kind of amateur mistake could be deadly. He transmitted again, still without flourish, and when he sat back his shoulders ached and his neck was stiff but he was pleased: he’d been very fast, sending out over fifty words a minute. The air-raid sirens were sounding, a good thing as it meant fewer would be listening to their radios and be upset that their reception was thrown off by his transmissions, and Mr. Morgan’s regular bath started up as he began to receive, the rattling pipes covering the radio’s low clicking.
Questions about landing coordinates of V-1s, about Calais, about aircraft and parachute factories, about convoys and submarine escorts; he deciphered as he listened, answered what he could, wanting to alter the landing coordinates but afraid to do so, then sent ba
ck the most important information he had, a series of dots and dashes that, elongated and translated, meant: Dover and Folkestone marshaling areas conspicuously empty. They were, though of course they never had been swarming with real tanks or assault divisions, yet the Germans believed otherwise. Plywood tanks and barracks had been used to fool German reconnaissance flights, and all his broadcasts and letters had supported this, and it was the information they asked for again and again. Like Brighton and Portsmouth before the feint, he tapped out. Believe Leopard a go, Calais landings imminent. He signaled a break to let them decipher and sat with his hand on the exposed drawer in case he needed to shove it home, thinking of the merciless bombing of Calais.
Bertram had instructed Claus to tell the Germans Calais was due for massive raids. It’s been happening, and it’s coming anyway, and they believe it, and they need to believe it more. Our deception needs to hold up longer. We’re actually flying more sorties against Calais than against Normandy.
They’ll be ready for the planes then, Claus had said. Antiaircraft. Fighters.
They’ll be ready anyway, and their air force is quite seriously degraded. The RAF knows what it’s in for. They think it important.
He heard a noise outside his door, Mrs. Dobson on her usual rounds probably, and he quietly slid the key into the drawer, the drawer into the radio, then sat until her steps went away down the hall, when he reversed the process and dialed a bit higher in the 7 MHz range to throw off tracking devices. Once Wind found him again he transmitted the White City damage report from memory—Factories hit, many workers idle, parachute production precipitously off— wondering why Bertram had become so obsessed with the possibility of someone following him. He’d insisted that Claus go out to White City for his “reconnaissance,” even though Bertram had fed him the numbers, and though it had seemed a waste of time Claus hadn’t asked him why; it would have been as useless as talking back to the radio. On certain things, Bertram worked in one direction only.