Ghosts of the Empire

by Justin Sheedy

  Concert pianist.

  His eminent piano teacher had thought otherwise…

  I’ll not deny it, Werner; you have a comprehensive handle on the score. You play the notes immaculately. With an astounding physicality, in fact. But with you, my boy, Liszt is rendered as if by some highly sophisticated organ grinder.

  Werner asked his father about studying medicine.

  You have not the way with people, Werner, to make a good doctor. …Dentistry, perhaps.

  When war came, Werner had applied for the SS – their smart black uniform, cap and boots guaranteed to pull the really top-flight girls… However, lacking the better than 6-foot, blond hair and blue eyes apparently required he was channelled to a subordinate arm of the organisation: a subordinate though rapidly expanding department within which Werner’s strengths – dogged persistence and analytical brain – had at long last brought him success. If only his old piano teacher was still around to see it: Denounced for comments critical of the Reich, by the powers invested in the Führer’s ‘Night and Fog’ decree Herr Professor Weissmann had disappeared as quickly and completely as if he’d put on Wagner’s magic helmet. Werner had many times reflected on the irony of it: It wasn’t even the Gestapo making the German population disappear; it was the German population denouncing each other to the Gestapo. Just as the French population were starting to – not yet as prolifically as the German Volk but give them time…

  Yet this morning – finally – an actual bit of ‘detective work’: Werner considered again the two reports that had just landed on his desk, the first regarding the British pistol found amongst the German wreckage, the second on the crashed Spitfire, or what was left of it, no pilot accounted for. Of course, they not always were, and from the attached photos this one looked as if a tight cluster of meteorites had fallen to earth and tried to keep on going all the way down through to Australia. Werner checked the time of the report, and peered back to the first. Same time: a British pilot’s pistol found two miles away. In the German motorcycle crash site…

  Werner smelt a rat. With a Webley and Scott point 455 Mark 6 revolver, an English rat that would lead to a French one.

  A French rat Werner would sniff out and smash with a hammer. Just as Werner had and would continue to smash anyone, friend or foe, who stood between him and this first taste of shining success he’d ever known, this first taste of everything he had been denied by his teachers, by his father, and by every girl who’d ever found him invisible.

  Werner opened the right-hand drawer of his desk, drew out his Walther PPK, slipped the ammunition clip out of its handgrip, checked it loaded with bullets, slipped it shut. Safety catch on, he considered the weapon for a moment: The Polizei Pistole Kriminal, the small yet powerful side-arm of the plain-clothes ilk to which Werner now belonged and up whose ranks he had just been promoted.

  Kriminalinspektor. Gestapo. Saint-Saëns office.

  With his left hand Werner picked up his telephone receiver, ‘Unterfeldwebel? Mein Auto,’ replaced the receiver, closed the drawer, stood, placed the PPK on the desk while he donned his leather coat, plunged the pistol into one of its pockets, grabbed his hat and went out the door.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Up through the trap door of the barn rose a blue felt cap, beneath it a round, sun-bronzed face with brown, wary eyes which fixed and stayed fixed on Mick right the way through the man’s climb up onto the wooden floor. He wore a neck-scarf of dark red, denim workshirt, overalls and muddy boots. Mick put him somewhere in his late-forties, and though standing mere inches over five foot he was broad with sleeve-rolled-up arms thick and sinewy, hands now poised by his sides as if for immediate and decisive use.

  ‘I am Orval,’ he said. ‘It is my daughter who has brought you here. And you are welcome here. But not for long.’ He extended a heavily hairy-wristed hand. ‘Jacques,’ he pronounced. ‘I am a farmer of apples.’

  Shaking his hand, the Frenchman’s grip sent Mick straight back to the Everleigh railyards; it was pure sandpaper, a fine-grained one but sandpaper all the same. ‘My name’s Mick. …I’m a carpenter.’

  ‘Ah oui…?’ The man half-stepped back, drawing a finger and thumb to his lower lip. ‘I could use you here… Yet there is no time; Jacqueline has told me about the gun that was left behind.’

  ‘I’m just so bloody sorry,’ issued Mick. ‘It was my fault.’

  ‘No it was not; it happened and that is all – Jacqueline has told me all that happened and, alors, to see things with clearness, it is her gift… Oui.’ He took off his cap, his hair jet black though receding. ‘Mais c’est vrai: It is bad, very bad for us; it may lead les Boches more quickly to here.’ He slapped the cap in his hand. ‘This is why we must get you away from here as quickly as possible. Perhaps even this night.’

  ‘I agree,’ said Mick.

  ‘C’est bien. I know some people in Saint-Saëns. Résistance. They can get you away. A message I have already sent.’

  ‘Thank you,’ released Mick.

  The man’s face pouted, eyebrows and shoulders quick-lifted and settled: ‘It is not just for our safety, but to send you back to England as quickly as it is possible… Yesterday morning we thought,’ his tone lower, breathier now, ‘we thought it was l’Invasion.’ He took a heavy breath indeed. ‘La Libération de la France. La Résistance was poised to fight… Mais, malheuresement,’ his stare sank to his boots, ‘les Canadiens… Pushed back into the sea.’ Yet his eyes rose again to Mick’s, as did his tone: ‘You are from Australie, yes?’

  ‘Yes I am.’

  ‘C’est bien. I knew des Australiens, knew them well, in the last war. Even now their reputation en France, en Belgique, it is very high: against les Boches, they were a well-driven plough.’

  ‘You fought alongside Australians?’

  ‘Non, not quite alongside but we drank together many times – when fortunate enough to be resting back from the front.’ For a moment his face seemed to lighten, become less care-worn. ‘They were…’ He seemed to search for his words. Found them: ‘They were good blokes.’

  Mick grinned.

  As did Orval. ‘They called me a good bloke. This is high praise in your country, is it not?’

  ‘Yes,’ Mick smiled. ‘Yes it is.’

  ‘C’est bien. Alors, my-friend-for-a-very-short-time,’ he moved to go back down the trap door, ‘to my apples I must return: Next month it is Octobre. Harvest. And you, my friend, soon you will return to drive les Boches out of my bloody orchard; you have done it before.’

  *

  Whitehall

  ‘Saint-Saëns, you say?’

  ‘Saint-Saëns,’ replied Crispin Jessop, who felt up his spine the phantom rock and judder of the overcrowded trains on which he’d endured standing-room-only since first light. He now sat, finally, before the desk of a private room at the end of the long corridor which had led him to a British War Office department known to a highly select few as MI9. Behind the desk sat the man who ran it. A man who, from the age of 12 until 17-and-a-half, had been with Jessop at Eton College. With receding hair like Jessop and in the khaki uniform of a British Army Major this man was busy lighting a pipe, his eyes darting up and across the desk to Jessop between initial puffs.

  ‘Oh, we can get him out, alright,’ said the Major. ‘…If he’s still alive… It’s part of our charter to do so. Taxpayer forks out so much per Spitfire pilot we rather have to. Reclamation of assets is what it is.’

  Jessop sat up excitedly. ‘Y’mean…?’

  ‘Yes, we send in a Lysander.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A Lysander.’ The Major let go a huge waft of smoke. ‘High-winged aircraft, unarmed, one pilot, one passenger. Short take-off and landing job.’

  Jessop’s head wavered in subtle wonderment. ‘I can’t thank you enough, Bunty.’

  ‘No need; all part of the service.’ The Major smiled sharply, briefly. ‘In any case if y’want your chap picked up before Doomsday we’d best choof on up to Signals.’ He
tapped out his pipe in an ashtray on the desk as he stood up from it. ‘Then a spot of lunch at my club.’

  ‘Haven’t you got a girl to send messages for you?’ Jessop put to him as they crossed the room to the door.

  ‘Well, yes, but I suspect she may have been sent to me by MI6,’ said the Major as he closed and locked the door behind them.

  ‘MI6? What of it?

  ‘I’m the head of MI9, Crispin.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘MI6 hate my guts.’

  The Major spoke up again as they strode down the long hall together. ‘So, my dear Crispin… How are you?’

  Jessop considered the question as they went. ‘Well, to be perfectly frank, Bunty…’

  ‘Ohhph, one oughtn’t be that, dear chap…’ Another quick smile. As they reached the lift, he pressed the button for the top floor of the building.

  Jessop took off his spectacles. ‘No, seriously, old boy… I’ve not been happy. For some time, I think.’

  ‘Sorry to hear it.’ The Major watched the floor indicator needle begin to creep round its arc.

  ‘N-no, you don’t understand: The thing is,’ Jessop looked down at his spectacles, ‘I feel as if…’ A smile crept across his lips. Strengthened. And lifted to his old friend. ‘I feel as if I’ve just woken up.’

  ‘Capital.’

  ‘Yes, t’is…’ Jessop put his spectacles back on. ‘Anyhow. A Lysander, eh? Re-markable.’

  The Major turned to Jessop as the lift arrived, ‘I’d say it’s the chaps who fly ’em are the remarkable bit…’ its door pulled open by the driver, ‘…They do it in the dead of night. Signals, please, driver.’

  *

  Werner Gruber stood on the scorched surface of the meadow.

  Quietly.

  Seething.

  With rage.

  In the stark midday sun he surveyed the complete and utter fuck-up all about him one more time: Blackened earth. A piece of broken glass. A sliver of shattered mirror reflecting the blue sky above. Green meadow beyond.

  A sheep bleated.

  How in the NAME OF DAMNATION did the Gestapo expect him to sniff out and smash the French Résistance if the SHIT-SHOVELLERS of the German Army insisted on carting off the contents of the crime-scene in a truck?! IMBECILES!!

  Not a single decent-sized piece of wreckage left. Not a nut. Not a fucking bolt.

  The single thing one might deduce from the richly plentiful LACK of evidence here was that the all-powerful Ministry of Information didn’t want the wrong sort of information getting out: namely, about any of the German soldiers occupying France coming off the worse for it! No, Werner spat, there was one other thing he might deduce from the nothing he’d been left to work with: that the shepherds of France were given to gossip.

  Well, Werner promised himself on the spot, somebody was going to suffer for this. He was going to make somebody suffer for it and, in doing so, send out a message that anyone who stood between Werner Gruber and his next success wouldn’t live long enough to regret it. Yet who to suffer? Of course: the ‘get-there-first’ duo responsible. Werner would get them transferred to the Russian Front. Then get the word out amongst all such units locally that you didn’t simply follow orders and radio your commander with your get-there-first report; you radioed the office of Kriminalinspektor Werner Gruber, and only then your commander when Werner said so. Or he would personally send you to your certain death. Yes: Simple. And effective. ‘Simple and effective’ – Werner’s golden rule of late delivering him if not happiness then at least success after so much failure, and a notion with which he felt in actual harmony after so many years of being in harmony with nothing. …What was the name of the Unterfeldwebel? Ah yes, Steinhoff. He’d been to Russia already, hadn’t he. Survived it too. Well he was going back. And you didn’t survive Russia twice…

  Yes. Make someone suffer. And make it known. Simple and effective.

  That settled, Werner breathed in deeply, breathed out, and drummed into himself what had stopped him putting his pistol to his own head late at night more than once since he’d been issued with it: If he couldn’t be brilliant, he could be dogged. Use his analytical brain. He looked up and about him once again.

  Was there anything to go on here?

  He scanned hard across the meadow: on sides one, two and three, bocage hedgerows. He turned about. On the fourth, forest.

  SHIT.

  He spat. And spat again.

  And was just about to turn back away when his eye caught a glint. Something palely reflecting sunlight. On the grass about halfway between Werner and the forest. He sharpened his focus. No, he wasn’t imagining it: a copper-coloured glint.

  One step, then another, another and he was pacing towards it. Steadily at first, then more eagerly: 30 metres, urgently now, working up to a jog, at 20 metres a twinkle of light – ten – five – until it drew up before him, regaining his breath as he peered at it directly between the toes of his shoes.

  It wasn’t copper. It was brass. Highly polished brass.

  He squatted down, picked it up: a cylinder two fingers thick and a hand-span in length.

  A British 20mm cannon shell cartridge casing. As dropped by Spitfires.

  Stamped into the metal of its base, 1942, at its centre the percussion cap indented where it had been struck by a firing pin. Werner held the open end of the empty brass casing up to his nose and sniffed, the sharp, sulphurous smell of cordite strong in his nostrils; this shell casing was fresh.

  Werner slowly stood up. Loosed a terminal sigh. Tossed the shell casing away: He STILL had nothing, merely a deduction from physical evidence that the original get-there-first crew had been shot up by a Spitfire; he was searching for the unaccounted-for pilot of one that had crashed!

  He looked up again, towards the forest, about 20 metres off. Narrowly ahead of him he saw the grass of the meadow churned up in places – from cannon shell impacts, he didn’t doubt – beyond these what appeared another brass shell casing. Hands deep in the pockets of his leather coat, he trudged on towards it, though stepping round an area of grass stained a sticky dark red, an evil smell wafting up from where a sheep had died before being whipped away by Army evidence-jackals. Nearing the shell casing Werner caught a gentle wind in the leaves of the forest: an impenetrable-looking wall of trees now close before him.

  Well, he swore to himself as he toed this second casing, he had one thing here at least: further evidence of Army incompetence he could use to get someone sent to the Russian Front; the jackals couldn’t even clean up properly! Not that Werner would need such evidence to have them dispatched; he knew by heart the circulated decree regarding the blank cheque of the Gestapo: As long as it carries out the will of the leadership, it is acting legally. Yes, there was Law in the Reich. The Gestapo was above it, absolute power, and Werner its pointy end. Simple. Effective. Simple things so often were.

  A wind came up. The forest seemed to breathe.

  When it came to him…

  He had nothing.

  Yet that ‘nothing’ was precisely what he did have to go on: The original motorcycle crew, before taking a Spitfire’s bullets face-first, had seen a parachute coming down over this meadow and so had raced for it. Once here, they’d seen nothing: no parachute, no downed British pilot, yet here their quarry had come down so they’d gunned straight for the only place in the whole area he could be. The forest. In the forest. This forest. It was the last thing they had done on this earth, the last thing they’d have seen, a Spitfire coming straight at them over the tree-tops. And that fact confirmed Werner’s thinking: What was the Spitfire doing down here so very low to the earth but for the specific purpose of protecting a bailed-out comrade?!

  Werner surveyed the wall of trees before him. Drew his Walther PPK out of his coat pocket, pulled and released its sliding breach to cock it, a 7.65mm dum-dum round now chambered, switched its safety catch to FIRE, and, holding the semi-automatic pistol up and out before him, strode towards the forest.

 
; *

  ‘Here are some clothes for you to wear,’ said the girl, laying them out on the flat top of a wicker basket to one side of the loft. ‘Only in these will you be able to move at all avec la Résistance. They are a bit small, but will fit you, I think. Your uniform, it will have to be burnt.’

  Mick examined them: a jacket and trousers of well-worn blue denim, a grey shirt minus collar, red neck-scarf like her father’s, on top of it all a felt cap. ‘They’re good,’ he said, turning to her by his side. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘De rien,’ she smiled at him. ‘You will be travelling a long way in them. We are waiting to be contacted, that is all.’

  ‘How soon?’

  ‘Who can say? It could be in a few hours… Perhaps a few minutes… Or days.’

  ‘Whereto?’

  ‘Most likely south from here: to Marseilles is usual, then across the mountains of Les Pyrénées to Spain. And then, I think, to Gibraltar, from where you will be taken to England.’

  ‘A bloody long way…’

  ‘Quoi? …Ah, oui.’

  Mick looked back to the clothes. ‘Whose are these?’

  She looked back to them as well. ‘They belonged to my brother, Jean-Noël.’ She smoothed the cap with her hand. It was long moments before she continued. ‘He was killed, in the first months of the war. At Sedan, when les Boches broke through.’

  Mick turned to her. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘…So am I.’

  *

  Werner Gruber had adjusted to the darkness. Yet of the forest all around him he still saw only forest, its leaf canopy above him awash with a rising wind.

  On first entering it, for the briefest moment he’d thought he’d smelt petrol.

  He sniffed.

  Nothing – DAMN the wind…

  He crouched lower, sniffed again.

  Still nothing.

  He dropped to his knees, then flat on his stomach beneath the bracken.