by Ken Follett
drove; a requisitioned fruit lorry, painted grey.
He began to get nervous as he approached home. The explosions were
sounding closer, and he could hear the aircraft clearly. The East End
was in for another bruising tonight: he would sleep in the Morrison
shelter. There was abig one, terribly close, and he quickened his
step. He would eat his supper in the shelter, too.
He turned into his own street, saw the ambulances and the fire engines,
and broke into a run.
The bomb had landed on his side of the street, around the middle. It
must be close to his own home. Jesus in heaven, not us, no There had
been a direct hit on the roof, and the house was literally flattened.
He raced up to the crowd of people, neighbours and firemen and
volunteers.
"Is my wife all right? Is she out? IS SHE IN THERE?"
A fireman looked at him with compassion.
"Nobody's come out of there, mate."
Rescuers were picking over the rubble. Suddenly one of them shouted:
"Over here!" Then he said: "Bugger me, it's Fearless Bloggs!"
Frederick dashed to where the man stood. Christine was underneath a
huge chunk of brickwork. Her face was visible: the eyes were closed.
The rescuer called: "Lifting gear, boys, sharp's the word."
Christine moaned and stirred.
Bloggs said: "She's alive!" He knelt down beside her and got his hands
under the edge of the lump of rubble.
The rescuer said: "You won't shift that, son."
The brickwork lifted.
The rescuer said: "Strewth, you'll kill yourself," and bent down to
help.
When it was two feet off the ground they got their shoulders under it.
The weight was off Christine now. A third man joined in, and a fourth.
They all straightened up together.
Bloggs said: "I'll lift her out."
He crawled under the sloping roof of brick and cradled his wife in his
arms.
Someone shouted: "Fuck me it's slipping!"
Bloggs scurried out from under with Christine held tightly to his
chest. As soon as he was clear the rescuers let go of the rubble and
jumped away. It fell back to earth with a sickening thud; and when
Bloggs realized that that had landed on Christine, he knew she was
going to die.
He carried her to the ambulance, and it took off immediately. She
opened her eyes again once, before she died, and said: "You'll have to
win the war without me, kiddo."
More than a year later, as he walked downhill from High-gate into the
bowl of London, with the rain on his face mingling with the tears
again, he thought the woman in the spy's house had said a mighty truth:
it makes you hate.
In war boys become men, and men become soldiers, and soldiers get
promoted; and this is why Billy Parkin, aged 18, who should have been
an apprentice in his father's tannery at Scarborough, was believed by
the Army to be twenty-one, made up to sergeant, and given the job of
leading his advance squad through a hot, dry forest toward a dusty
whitewashed Italian village.
The Italians had surrendered but the Germans had not, and it was the
Germans who were defending Italy against the combined British-American
invasion. The Allies were going to Rome, and for Sergeant Parkin's
squad it was a long walk.
They came out of the forest at the top of a hill, and lay flat on their
bellies to look down on the village. Parkin got out his binoculars and
said: "What wouldn't I fookin give for a fookin cup of fookin tea." He
had taken to drinking, and cigarettes, and women, and his language was
like that of soldiers everywhere. He no longer went to prayer
meetings.
Some of these villages were defended and some were not. Parkin
recognized that as sound tactics: you didn't know which were
undefended, so you approached them all cautiously, and caution cost
time.
The downside of the hill held little cover just a few bushes and the
village began at its foot. There were a few white houses, a river with
a wooden bridge, then more houses around a little piazza with a town
hall and a clock tower. There was a clear line-of-sight from the tower
to the bridge: if the enemy were here at all, he would be in the town
hall. A few figures worked in the surrounding fields: God knew who
they were. They might be genuine peasants, or any one of a host of
factions: fascist!" mafia, corsos, partigianos, communisti ... or even
Germans. You didn't know whose side they would be on until the
shooting started.
Parkin said: "All right, Corporal."
Corporal Watkins disappeared back into the forest and emerged, five
minutes later, on the dirt road into the village, wearing a civilian
hat and a filthy old blanket over his uniform. He stumbled, rather
than walked, and over his shoulder was a bundle that could have been
anything from a bag of onions to a dead rabbit. He reached the near
edge of the village and vanished into the darkness of a low cottage.
After a moment he came out. Standing close to the wall, where he could
not be seen from the village, he looked toward the soldiers on the hill
top and waved: one, two, three.
The squad scrambled down the hillside into the village.
Watkins said: "All the houses empty, Sarge."
Parkin nodded. It meant nothing.
They moved through the houses to the edge of the river. Parkin said:
"Your turn, Smiler. Swim the Mississippi here."
Private "Smiler' Hudson put his equipment in a neat pile, took off his
helmet, boots and tunic, and slid into the narrow stream. He emerged
on the far side, climbed the bank, and disappeared among the houses.
This time there was a longer wait: more area to check. Finally Hudson
walked back across the wooden bridge.
"If they're 'ere, they're 'iding," he said.
He retrieved his gear and the squad crossed the bridge into the
village. They kept to the sides of the street as they walked toward
the piazza. A bird flew off a roof and startled Parkin. Some of the
men kicked open a few doors as they passed. There was nobody.
They stood at the edge of the piazza. Parkin nodded at the town
hall.
"Did you go inside the place, Smiler?"
"Yes, sir."
"Looks like the village is ours, then."
"Yes, sir."
Parkin stepped forward to cross the piazza, and then the storm broke.
There was a crash of rifles, and bullets hailed all around them.
Someone screamed. Parkin was running, dodging, ducking. Watkins, in
front of him, shouted with pain and clutched his leg: Parkin picked him
up bodily. A bullet clanged off his tin hat. He raced for the nearest
house, charged the door, and fell inside.
The shooting stopped. Parkin risked a peep outside. One man lay
wounded in the piazza: Hudson. Rough justice. Hudson moved, and a
solitary shot rang out. Then he was still. Parkin said: "Fookin
bastards."
Watkins was doing something to his leg, cursing. Parkin said: "Bullet
still in there?"
Watkins yelled: "Ouch!" then grinned and held something up.<
br />
"Not any more."
Parkin looked outside again.
"They're in the clock tower," he said.
"You wouldn't think there was room. Can't be many of them."
"They can shoot, though."
"Yes. They've got us pinned." Parkin frowned.
"Got any fireworks?"
"Aye."
"Let's have a look." Parkin opened Watkins's pack and took out the
dynamite.
"Here. Fix me a ten-second fuse."
The others were in the house across the street. Parkin called out:
"Hey!"
A face appeared at the door.
"Sarge?"
"I'm going to throw a tomato. When I shout, give me covering fire."
"Right."
Parkin lit a cigarette. Watkins handed him a bundle of dynamite.
Parkin shouted: "Fire!" He lit the fuse with the cigarette, stepped
into the street, drew back his arm, and threw the bomb at the clock
tower. He ducked back into the house, the fire of his own men ringing
in his ears. A bullet shaved the woodwork, and he caught a splinter
under his chin. He heard the dynamite explode.
Before he could look, someone across the street shouted:
"Bull's-eye!"
Parkin stepped outside. The ancient clock tower had crumbled A chime
sounded incongruously as dust settled over the ruins.
Watkins said: "You ever play cricket? That was a bloody good shot."
Parkin walked to the centre of the piazza. There seemed to be enough
human spare parts to make about three Germans. He said: "The tower was
pretty unsteady anyway. It would probably have fallen down if we'd all
sneezed at it in unison." He turned away.
"Another day, another dollar." It was a phrase the Yanks used.
"Sarge? Radio." It was the R/T operator.
Parkin walked back and took the handset from him.
"Sergeant Parkin."
"Major Roberts. You're discharged from active duty as of now,
Sergeant."
"Why?" Parkin's first thought was that they had discovered his true
age.
"The brass want you in London. Don't ask me why because I don't know.
Leave your corporal in charge and make your way back to base. A car
will meet you on the road."
"Yes, sir."
"The orders also say that on no account are you to risk your life. Got
that?"
Parkin grinned, thinking of the clock tower and the dynamite.
"Got it."
"All right. On your way. You lucky sod."
Everyone had called him a boy, but they had known him before he joined
the Army, Bloggs thought. There was no doubt he was a man now. He
walked with confidence and grace, looked about him sharply, and was
respectful without being ill-at-ease in the company of superior
officers. Bloggs knew that he was lying about his age, not because of
his looks or manner, but because of the small signs that appeared
whenever age was mentioned signs which Bloggs, an experienced
interrogator, picked up out of habit.
He had been amused when they told him they wanted him to look at
pictures. Now, in his third day in Mr. Midwinter'sdusty Kensington
vault, the amusement had gone and tedium had set in. What irritated
him most was the no-smoking rule.
It was even more boring for Bloggs, who had to sit and watch him.
At one point Parkin said: "You wouldn't call me back from Italy to help
in a four-year-old murder case that could wait until after die war.
Also, these pictures are mostly of German officers. If this case is
something I should keep mum about, you'd better tell me."
"It's something you should keep mum about," said Bloggs.
Parkin went back to his pictures.
They were all old, mostly browned and fading. Many were out of books,
magazines and newspapers. Sometimes Parkin picked up a magnifying
glass Mr. Midwinter had thoughtfully provided, to peer more closely at
a tiny face in a group; and each time this happened Blogg's heart
raced, only to slow down When Parkin put the glass to one side and
picked up the next photograph.
They went to a nearby pub for lunch. The ale was weak, like most
wartime beer, but Bloggs still thought it wise to restrict young Parkin
to two pints on his own he would have sunk a gallon.
"Mr. Faber was the quiet sort," Parkin said.
"You wouldn't think he had it in him. Mind you, the landlady wasn't
bad looking. And she wanted it. Looking back, I think I could have
had her myself if I'd known how to go about it. There, I was, only
eighteen."
They ate bread and cheese, and Parkin swallowed a dozen pickled onions.
When they went back, they stopped outside the house while Parkin smoked
another cigarette.
"Mind you," he said, 'he was a biggish chap, good-looking, well-spoken.
We all thought he was nothing much because his clothes were poor, and
he rode a bike, and he'd no money. I suppose it could have been a
subtle kind of disguise." His eyebrows were raised in a question.
"It could have been," Bloggs said.
That afternoon Parkin found not one but three pictures of Faber.
One of them was only nine years old.
And Mr. Midwinter had the negative.
Henrik Rudolph Hans von Mueller-Guder ("Let's just call him Faber,"
said Godliman with a laugh) was born on 26 May 1900 at a village called
Oln in West Prussia. His father's family had been substantial
landowners in the area for generations. His father was the second son;
so was Henrik. All the second sons were Army officers. His mother,
the daughter of a senior official of the Second Reich, was born and
raised to be an aristocrat's wife, and that was what she was.
At the age of thirteen he went to the Karlsruhe cadet school in Baden;
two years later he was transferred to the more prestigious
Gross-Lichterfelde, near Berlin. Both places were hard, disciplinarian
institutions where the minds of the pupils were improved with canes and
cold baths and bad food. However, Henrik learned to speak English and
French and studied history, and passed the Reifepriifung with the
highest mark recorded since the turn of the century. There were only
three other points of note in his school career: one bitter winter he
rebelled against authority to the extent of sneaking out of the school
at night and walking 150 miles to his aunt's house; he broke the arm of
his wrestling instructor during a practice bout; and he was flogged for
insurbordination.
He served briefly as an ensign-cadet in the neutral zone of
Friedrichsfeld, near Wesel, in 1920; did token officer training at the
War School at Metz in 1921, and was commissioned Second Lieutenant in
1922.
(What was the phrase you used?" Godliman asked Bloggs.
"The German equivalent of Eton and Sandhurst.") Over the next few years
he did short tours of duty in half-a-dozen places, in the manner of one
who is being groomed for the general staff. He continued to
distinguish himself as an athlete, specializing in longer-distance
running. He made no close friendships, never married, and refused to
join the National Socialist party. His promotion to lieutenant was
somewhat delayed by a vague incident involving the pregnancy of the
daughter of a lieutenant-colonel in the Defence Ministry but
eventually came about in 1928. His habit of talking to superior
officers as if they were equals came to be accepted as pardonable in
one who was both a rising young officer and a Prussian aristocrat.
In the late twenties Admiral Wilhelm Canaris became friendly with
Henrik's Uncle Otto, his father's elder brother, and spent several
holidays at the family estate at Oln. In 1931 Adolf Hitler, not yet
Chancellor of Germany, was a guest there.
In 1933 Henrik was promoted Captain, and went to Berlin for unspecified
duties. This is the date of the last photograph.
About then, according to published information, he seems to have ceased
to exist.
"We can conjecture the rest," said Percival Godliman.
"The Abwehr trains him in wireless transmission, codes, map-making,
burglary, blackmail, sabotage and silent killing. He comes to London