by Mick Hare
Lily sipped her schnapps and pondered.
“I suppose you are right. Next Tuesday it is then.”
Having finished their preamble, Lily began a rehearsed procedure to make sure each knew exactly what the other was thinking. The questions she asked were ones they had contemplated and answered many times.
“How do we ensure that we are inside the convent on that night?”
“Well,” said Robert, “That’s the ground we have been preparing all this time. We are familiar faces in there now. We must continue the charm offensive. I will concentrate on Mother Superior. I already have her convinced that my vocation for the priesthood was only narrowly squeezed out of my life by my vocation for medicine. She believes I am the most devout lay individual she has ever met. I constantly refer to my devotion for our beloved Pope. I am convinced that she is planning to invite me, or both of us, to meet him. I can tell by the way she smiles, a secret “I know something you don’t know” smile whenever we talk of him. I’m just a bit disappointed that we’re still waiting for the invitation. But I tell myself that she is only being wise in delaying until the last minute for purposes of security. From now we continue to visit every night. We will attend mass and benediction together every night and we will take a gift for the Mother. Whilst he is here Pacelli is bound to say mass for the faithful. We are surely part of the inner circle now. We have to be invited. Mother has no reason not to invite us. I don’t actually think she will be able to resist the temptation to show off in front of us her close connection with our beloved Father. In the meantime you must discover where Pacelli’s apartment will be inside the convent. That shouldn’t be too hard. I’m sure it will have one or two extra luxuries in it that you won’t find in the nun’s cells.”
“What if the invitation does not arrive?”
“We turn up at the convent next Tuesday night anyway – unannounced.”
“How will you do it?”
“I will overpower the target in his quarters and administer an overdose of adrenalin.”
“After the completion of our mission, what do we do?”
“Tomorrow I will inform the apothecary of our completion date and he will make the arrangements for our withdrawal.”
Lily looked down at her drink and sipped it thoughtfully.
“Very good,” she said eventually. “I think we are ready.”
Robert knew there was something they had not discussed. He had waited for Lily to raise the matter but he realised now that she was not going to. He placed his glass on the table beside his chair and looked carefully at Lily.
“You never told me about Vogts. What happened there?”
Lily’s hand paused in raising her glass to her mouth. But only for the slightest of moments. Then she took a sip and placed her glass on the table top.
“You can forget about that. I have dealt with that situation. I spoke to the Trings and they confirmed that Vogts had been around asking if the man he had seen leaving their apartment had been a doctor. They had told him yes and he had gone away. I decided that the only thing I could do was call on him and ask him outright if he needed medical attention. I called at his house and he let me in. When he realised I was connected to you I could tell that he had become frightened. This confirmed to me that he had recognised you. I killed him. I had no option.”
Robert got up from his seat and approached Lily.
“My poor girl,” he said, leaning close down to look into her eyes. “Why didn’t you tell me? You could be suffering a reaction.”
“I was going to. Perhaps the trauma caused me to postpone re-living the event.”
Robert leaned his head in and placed his lips upon hers. He felt the crinkled dryness of her lips and returned to his chair.
Thirty-six
“My nerves are destroyed.” It was Mother Superior speaking over a cup of substitute tea that she held close to her face in both hands. “I’ve reached the stage,” she said, “When I feel more relaxed when the bombs are falling all around us than I do listening to this fragile silence.”
“I know exactly what you mean, Mother,” said Frau Todt.
“It’s the waiting,” contributed Herr Todt. “We spoil the peace by constantly anticipating the arrival of the first bomb.”
“You’re right,” said Mother. “We are sinful. We should be thanking God for the respite instead of eating up time with anxiety.”
“We are only human,” ventured Frau Todt.
“Well,” declared Herr Todt, getting to his feet, “I am going to follow that advice and take advantage of this heaven sent pause to take a stroll in the garden. I will spare you ladies the scent of my cigar. One I have been saving for some time.”
He left the Mother’s office through the French windows and stood for a moment on the patio to light his cigar and study the sky. The women watched his figure recede into the gloom as he strolled along the path that wound its way around the garden. As he disappeared from sight they returned to their substitute tea and gentle conversation.
Behind an ivied wooden structure the head-teacher stepped up to the door of the shed secluded there and entered without knocking. The gardener did not speak as he entered. He had observed Todt’s careful approach and was not surprised.
Todt spoke first, “Next Tuesday it is,” he stated.
The gardener nodded in agreement.
“Good. I will be glad to have this task behind me.”
“You sound troubled,” Todt said.
The gardener put down a pot he had been planting with bulbs and stood up to look out of the dirty window. Turning back to Todt he whispered, “Something is wrong.”
Controlled alarm brushed Todt’s expression as he removed the cigar from his wet lips.
“Explain yourself!”
The gardener again turned to the window. Without looking at Todt he said, “Helga is missing. Adolf is missing. The apothecary is closed and I can contact no one from there. Sister Fatima has spoken to me. She feels the same. It is as if the network has been erased. Yet we are still here.”
“When did you discover all of this? Why haven’t you told me before now?”
“I was not sure. I still am not sure. I am telling you my worst suspicions. We need to make sure pretty damn quick and if I am right we need to vanish.”
“But we are so close. In one week’s time our work will be done.”
“If the Gestapo know of us it will turn out to be the longest week of our sorry lives. One of us needs to inform the doctor and his wife in time for them to escape.”
“Hell! What shall we do?” asked Todt, more of himself than the Gardener. Taking a long pull on his cigar and inhaling deeply, as if to re-assure himself through the sharp sting of the hot smoke on his throat that his senses were functioning properly. He proceeded to answer his own question. “I will pass your suspicions on.”
Todt was thinking rapidly. The mission was the prime objective. Everything else was subordinate to that. “You have done well,” he said to the gardener, “But now you must save yourself. You must disappear. You will be one less link in the chain that might lead them to us. I will inform the doctor and his wife and enable them to escape.”
He took another lung destroying pull on his cigar. “Do you have a clear escape plan in waiting?”
“You can rest easy on that score Headmaster. The only unknown is when to activate it.”
“Now! Immediately! And that is an order. The link to the leadership must not be discovered. You are the only one who knows that I am the link. You must go. Now, tonight!”
As Herr Todt walked as casually as he could back to the French windows the gardener opened the door and window of his shed to rid the interior of the stench of cigar smoke and began to step out of his overall.
Herr Todt did not immediately return to join the ladies in Mother Superior’s office. Instead he walked silently towards the school building and his own office. He took care not to be seen. Inside the school he did not switch on the lights. Al
though it was dark he knew his way around this building better than a blind man. In his office he slid his heavy desk away from the wall it stood against. Taking a key from his pocket he slid it into the head of a flower on the wallpaper. Turning the key in the well-disguised keyhole he opened a door, approximately one-third of a metre square, standing at floor level. He reached inside and took out the receiver of a radio telephone. He dialled and asked to be connected directly to The Fox. After giving a complicated code sequence he waited for a full five minutes. Then, abruptly, he found himself talking to General Rommel.
Thirty-seven
Friedrich was already into his second beer when Robert arrived at their watering hole. On seeing Robert enter he ordered another beer and handed it to him after he had hung his wet raincoat over a chair arm and reached the bar. They sat on stools and sipped their beers as they chatted.
“She was the love of my life,” concluded Friedrich, speaking through the froth on his moustache. “I am ashamed to admit it but in all honesty I must.”
“What was her name?” Robert asked.
“Sadie.”
“Sadie,” remarked Robert with surprise, “But…”
“Yes, I know,” interrupted Friedrich. “A Jewess. That is why I am ashamed to admit it. But if a thing is true it is true. The Fuhrer has taught us that much.”
“What happened?”
“Well, it was after my discharge from the army in 1918. I fetched up in Warsaw. Don’t ask me why. That’s another story altogether. Any way, I landed a job in a shoe factory. Nothing grand, just labouring. Hired muscle. Carting heavy crates from one floor to the next. Well Sadie worked in the wages office and I used to see her every Friday afternoon when she brought around our wage envelopes. I never dreamed she would look at me as a potential boyfriend, but I harboured fantasies. She was the most beautiful girl in the world. Some of the men took small liberties with her. Well we were a rough crew and she took it in good part. I used to boil inside when someone made a suggestive comment to her but I was too embarrassed to intervene. It would reveal my feelings you see.”
Friedrich broke off his narrative to utter a deafening laugh and to clap Robert on his back, causing him to spill beer down his jacket.
“Can you imagine it, hey, Robert, my friend. Me, embarrassed. Me, shy. Hard to credit, hey?”
“Tell me more,” said Robert, when he had wiped his jacket off. “What happened?”
“Well one day one of the men went too far. As she handed him his wage envelope he pretended to stumble and fell against her, placing his hands upon her breasts. Something happened to me when I saw the distress he caused register on her face. I snapped. Shyness and embarrassment flew out of the window. I took hold of him by the throat and I would have broken his neck. If she had not restrained me I would have ended my days on the Polish gallows. Well after that we took to going out. I saw my first cinematograph with her. I went to my first art gallery with her. Eventually we became lovers.”
Taking a sip of beer Friedrich seemed to be at the end of his tale.
“Like I said,” he concluded once more, “She was the love of my life.”
Exasperated by the inconclusive ending Robert demanded to know, “What happened?”
Friedrich wrinkled his nose. He glanced down at the swastika insignia on his armband.
“Well,” he replied, “It was at this time that I fell in with a group of German ex-patriots living in Warsaw like myself. They began my education. I realised an Aryan like myself and a Jewess could never be together.” After a pause he quietly said, “I gave her up.”
With that he lifted his glass and downed the remainder of his beer in one mighty swallow. Slamming it down on the bar he shouted, his good spirits returning in a flash, “Now then good doctor. You buy the beers and I will deal the cards. Give a poor man the chance to win some money from his friend, and I promise not to send you home penniless.”
Thirty-eight
Lily walked through Marienplatz from Kaufinger Strasse to the Altes Rathaus. She stood before the golden statue of the Virgin and attempted to evoke some emotion within herself. She was trying to find some vestige of the religious belief she had once held. Something to encourage her to destroy this mission she had infiltrated. ‘The one, holy and apostolic church,’ she recited to herself. ‘The blessed virgin’, to whom she had prayed adoringly as a child. ‘Hail Mary, full of grace,’ the substitute mother figure that she had worshipped.
She turned away. Her efforts unrewarded. Nothing within her raged against the assassination of this Pope. She looked back now upon her fanatical hatred of Britain and the British as a deviant form of self-indoctrination. She bitterly regretted the contempt she had secretly harboured for her father and she longed to have one moment with him to let him know she loved him. Ironically, it had been Robert (or should she call him Sean?) who had dismantled her hatred of the British. That man who had borne arms against the British Empire and spilled the blood of its soldiers. Here was a man who had been hollowed out by the events that had crashed into his life; a man who did not feel anything any more; just thought and acted. A man who was certainly incapable of love, but who had fired the love within her like no man ever before.
She turned and looked around at the destruction evident everywhere. She looked at the pathetic people, starving both physically and emotionally. Afraid of each other’s shadows. Gamblers who had risked all on the promise of a miracle cure only to discover that they had gambled away their souls. Now they faced retribution. How could it have taken the likes of Robert, a man with an interior void, to show her this world as it really is?
As she walked in front of the Altes Rathaus a Mercedes pulled up alongside her and Netzer’s voice called out of the window to her.
“Get in,” he said.
The ride to Gestapo headquarters had been a difficult experience for Lily. Netzer was full to the brim with desire and he could not keep his hands off her. Lily could not bear his touch today but could not let him think that lest she arouse his suspicions. She allowed his abuse of her with his fumbling hands and did her best to pretend she was enjoying it.
He threw his leather coat over her head as they walked from the car to the entrance and she kept it there until she was safely inside a cell. As Lily took the coat from over her head she had no idea what to expect from Netzer. Why had he brought her here? Could he have guessed her innermost thoughts – that she intended to help Robert complete his mission? How could he have? Nobody knew those thoughts. She was not even sure of them herself. All she knew was that she had begun a desperate game. If her actions and plans became known she would be as likely killed by Robert as by Netzer.
“Why have you brought me here? You are endangering my cover. And why have you brought me to a cell?”
“You are being interrogated, my dear. At least as far as everyone else is concerned. My handlers in Himmler’s department want as few people as possible to know about your mission. They do not want it to get out that the Reich Government is prepared to use His Holiness as bait to trap the conspirators and a British spy. I am the only one here in the circle. As soon as we decide to strike I will inform my superiors here. Apparently the Fuhrer is extremely paranoid. He suspects everyone. Hence the secrecy.”
“Anyway,” he continued, “Have no fear, my love,” Netzer soothed as he reached around her waist and cupped her breast in his hand. “We are safe here. I need to go over our plans with you to make sure you remain safe.”
Over his shoulder Lily was looking at the Gestapo’s infamous implements cabinet. Through a glass fronted door she could see steel implements of unusual shapes and sizes arranged in neat order. ‘Manufactured in Dusseldorf’ was imprinted into each one. She knew that the Dusseldorf factory produced these implements for all Gestapo/SS bases throughout Europe and North Africa. Dusseldorf factory workers knew exactly what they were manufacturing and why.