by Mick Hare
He moved away from her and seated himself at his desk. Anger flickered across his face. “Curse that Captain Vogts. And curse those two imbeciles who gossiped about him.” He banged the desk with his fist. “Curse that blasted policeman Stern.” He stopped his rant and looked across at her. “We haven’t found him. So far he has made good his escape.”
Lily composed herself, sitting upright and crossing her legs tightly. “Do you think I have been compromised?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” Netzer answered frankly. “I don’t know. And that’s what worries me. We are no nearer to the leadership of this conspiracy than we were at the beginning. I have to decide what I should recommend to Berlin now. My whole future depends on my decision-making here. With Stern at large, word could get to the good doctor that his mission is compromised. If we allow that to happen not only might we lose him, but your life could be at risk. Maybe we should move now to eliminate him. Maybe we should just take him in and interrogate him. See how well he stands up to our techniques before he tells us what he knows. Maybe he can tell us who is orchestrating this conspiracy.”
Thinking rapidly Lily said, “You are right to re-assess our position in the light of recent events, my love. But let’s be thorough. First, if Robert knew of the leadership then I would too. He and I have had to share all our information to survive thus far.”
“Ha! I think not, my sweet Lily,” ejaculated Netzer. “At least I hope not. Pray re-assure me that he does not know you are a double agent!”
“Of course he doesn’t you fool. If he did I would not be sitting here. I would not be sitting anywhere. But apart from that! We have been jointly briefed. I know what he knows about this mission.”
Lily shifted in her seat, uncrossing and re-crossing her legs.
“Putting that aside,” she continued. “If we stop now all of our planning will have been for nothing. My years “sleeping” in England, waiting for a mission of sufficient importance, will have been wasted.”
Netzer went to the door and shouted, “Schirach!” The sound of boots marching swiftly down the corridor preceded Schirach’s arrival.
“Get us some food and drink. And don’t bring any of that blasted substitute tea or coffee. Get some meat and cheese and red wine.”
“Yes, Captain. Heil Hitler!”
“We have less than a week to keep the mission alive,” argued Lily. “It is our only chance of uncovering the conspirators. We know that there are traitors at the highest level of the Wermacht. We could be less than a week away from exposing them. We are confident that there is a link to them from this mission. Remember what is at stake. If we abort this mission the conspirators melt away into the night. We set them free to plan another act of treason against the Fuhrer. We must go on as long as we can.”
Lily looked into Netzer’s eyes. She was assessing how close she was to convincing him. In her agent’s mind she knew he was right. Now that Stern had fled, their knowledge of the mission had been exposed. How far and to whom was not yet clear. But Netzer, as the commanding officer, should clearly abort the mission and eliminate all known conspirators. However, as she argued with him she sensed she was close to convincing him to let it run.
“At any moment I can signal you to move in and finish it. Surely, to have come this far and to give up now would be madness.”
“But how do we hope to proceed? In which direction are we to move to discover more than we already know? The apothecary is dead, as is his assistant. Stern has disappeared and, according to you, the good doctor knows nothing. “
Lily was beginning to panic. Her assessment of Netzer was proving wrong. She struggled to keep her thinking straight because her true agenda was to help Robert complete his mission safely and escape. She had no idea when this decision to tie herself irrevocably to Robert had been taken, but it was fixed in her now and was as immovable as concrete. She could try to persuade Robert that the mission was fatally damaged and that they should disappear whilst they still could. But within her she knew that, given the events that had crashed into his life, he could never even begin to resolve the turmoil within him if he decided to walk away from this mission.
With Netzer she had to doublethink herself back onto their original agenda and not give herself away. ‘At least,’ she thought, ‘he has posed a practical question about how to move forward rather than how to abort.’ So she had better give him a practical answer.
“What has changed?” she challenged. “Yes, you know about Vogts and Stern and the apothecary. But that information has not got through to the doctor yet. You and I both saw to that when we disposed of the teacher, Helga. If it had I would know.”
A loud knock sounded at the door and in walked Schirach at Netzer’s command. He placed a tray containing a bottle of red wine and a chunk of yellow cheese. Alongside, stood two glass beakers and a plate of gritty looking biscuits.
“Apologies, mein Captain. These are the only biscuits I can lay my hands on.”
Netzer waved him away without looking at him. Lily considered the incongruity of the relationship between the giant Schirach and the arrogant Netzer, whose neck Schirach could break with one hand.
Maybe the act of pouring and tasting the wine made Lily’s argument more palatable. Sensing success she pursued her point.
“The Pope is in no more danger than he ever was. From Robert’s point of view nothing has changed. As long as he is in place and continuing with the mission there is still a chance that we will be led to the conspirators.”
Lily was thinking about the gardener. She had never spoken about him to Netzer when she had first relayed information about the group. Should she now throw him in? Did she need to use him as a poker chip to keep Netzer in the game?
Netzer lifted a soggy biscuit out of his wine where he had been dunking it and lowered it into his mouth. Tossing a chunk of cheese into his mouth to accompany it he chewed as he considered. When he spoke he relieved Lily of the decision she thought she was about to make.
He said, “I think perhaps you are right. We will continue. Why not? War is a game. A great game. Let’s play it! But you must inform me as soon as you know when the assassination is to take place. We must act to stop it even if we have not uncovered the identities of the conspirators.”
Finishing a second beaker of wine in one swallow he got up from his seat and came around the table to Lily.
“Now let’s spend some time doing what soldiers and female spies do best.”
He pulled Lily to her feet and pushed her against the wall. His hands moved swiftly around her back and lifted her skirt above her waist. He slid both hands inside her panties and began to probe her with selfish pleasure. Being completely un-aroused, his attentions hurt her. However, she was determined not to do anything to upset him in case he changed his mind about allowing the mission to continue.
As he continued his attentions upon her she found herself thinking of the treatment she had undergone in Leicester gaol at the hands of Herbert and his colleagues. In her ear Netzer’s breathing rasped and she could feel the sweat from his face on her neck. The odours of wine, cheese and stale biscuits enveloped her breathing. Netzer interpreted her gasp as a passionate response to his lovemaking. This was not the future she had imagined when she had first watched this young hero of the Nazi youth marching along the boulevards in his crisp uniform. What had happened to honour and heroism?
Reaching into his fly she forcefully took hold of him and with strong movements and a few mumbled phrases quickly brought him to a climax. It was her safest and quickest route to escape from this situation.
Netzer pulled away sharply. There was an immediate release of tension but when he spoke there was annoyance in his voice. “I didn’t want that!” he complained.
She looked at his dishevelled, slumped form. His eyes were red rimmed with tiredness and the effects of alcohol. She felt no pity. She realised that she despised him. She went across to where he sat and took his face between her palms. She kissed hi
m as sweetly as she could.
“Do you really want to conceive our child here, like this?”
He looked up at her sharply. The implication in her words worked on him. He took it as a declaration of commitment for the future. He stood up and held her tightly in his arms.
“Let’s get this damned mission over with,” he whispered hoarsely, “And then I’m going to marry you.”
They kissed again and Lily knew she had succeeded in her aim.
Thirty-nine
Robert stepped out of the café where he had been eating a dry doughnut and drinking some chicory essence in the absence of any coffee beans on the premises. He was feeling a little disappointed with himself. He did not like to suspect someone without justification and his suspicions, on this occasion, seemed to have been unfounded.
He still believed he had justification for checking things out since he found himself cut adrift from the network he had been drafted into.He traced the disappearance of the network back to the day Helga had called at the surgery to tell them about the date of the Pope’s arrival. Lily had dealt with that and he had thought no more of it. However, since then he had attempted on several occasions to enter the apothecary on the pretext of acquiring medication for his patients. Each time the apothecary had been closed. The last time he had been there two windows were broken and no attempt had been made to repair them, even temporarily. The shop had an air of abandonment about it.
As an agent he was trained to anticipate the worst, and in this instance he needed to assume that their network had been infiltrated and their cover was blown. The very worst possible scenario was that Lily was the traitor in their midst. He had forced himself to retain some scepticism about Lily. In his business no one could be one hundred per cent certain about anyone else. One or two tiny things had lodged in his mind and he thought about them now. They were attitudinal aspects of her and he knew they might be completely innocent, but he had pondered them as he had followed her into Marienplatz earlier that day and watched her stand before the statue of the Virgin. The first little thing had been her attitude to the Black American folk singer they had seen in London at the string quartet concert. He felt she had let slip an ingrained attitude, a deeply held prejudice that jarred with her persona as an anti-Nazi. Secondly, he had always wondered at the way she had not allowed the treatment she had received at the hands of the British authorities to affect her determination to become an agent. Most people would have decided that a nation that treated people with such barbarity did not deserve their loyalty. He balanced these thoughts with a recollection of his own contorted background and accepted that, in love and war, nothing was predictable.
Her account of the assassination of Captain Vogts had failed to convince him. Since then he had retained the position that he must be prepared to act as if she was a double agent. The conundrum lay in the fact that he had not been lifted by the Gestapo. However, it had been the arrival of Helga’s body at the morgue that had cemented these concerns. Robert was working a shift at the hospital and had been the only one available to take a body down to the morgue after the mother of four he had been operating on had died. He had been due to go off duty when an emergency came in involving a train derailment and a dozen badly injured soldiers. Normally he would have stayed on, but his superior saw that he was sleep-walking following a forty-two hour shift and ordered him off site. As the staff rushed to deal with the incoming casualties he realised the corpse he had just finished working on lay abandoned on a trolley in the corridor. In an automated state he sleep-walked the trolley along the corridor to the lifts and waited for a car to come to ride him down to the basement where the corpses were stored.
Just as he was entering the lift another trolley came around the corner pushed by a porter and he held the doors allowing him to enter. Less out of interest and more as a means of keeping awake, Robert commented on the toe tag attached to the second corpse.
“Not for disposal!” he commented. “What’s special about that one?”
“Cause of death,” the porter replied. “She was found in a bombsite but some clever junior at the coroner’s office discovered she’d been stabbed. Bombs are dangerous things but they don’t usually go around stabbing young women. There will have to be an investigation. And a complete waste of time that will be. Who cares about one more murder in a world full of murder?”
Robert shrugged himself away from the wall of the elevator car and pulled back the sheet covering the corpse. Staring up at him he saw the blood-drained face of Helga.
“You’re absolutely right, mein Herr!” he said “Who cares about one more death?”
As he drank his chicory essence and stared out of the cafe window at Lily, he saw the Mercedes skid to a halt beside her and a door open at the kerbside. He had no hope of following the car but he guessed where it would be going. He finished his drink and settled his bill. This could be the final piece of evidence he needed, or it could be an everyday snatch that the Gestapo indulged in. He walked out of Marienplatz and down towards SS/Getsapo headquarters. It was not an easy task to hang around outside this particular building for a couple of hours without attracting unwanted attention. Luckily he found a nearby bar open and he spent the time in there drinking beer and pretending to update some medical notes he had in his doctor’s bag.
He knew there was an outside chance that he was wrong about Lily. Maybe she was undergoing some unimaginable interrogation right now. But something within Robert could not believe this. When a figure came out of a side door, head hidden by a Gestapo overcoat he easily recognised the shoes, legs and skirt of his wife. She was escorted to the same Mercedes and whisked away. If she is innocent, he thought, she will tell me of her encounter with the Gestapo when we meet up at home tonight.
Robert walked to his watering hole, ordered a beer and considered his options. If Lily was a double agent and had betrayed the network, he would have to act. To his knowledge the only members of the group still in place were Sister Fatima and the gardener. He would have to warn them and enable them to make good their escapes. He should eliminate Lily immediately. That was his duty. But the moment he contemplated it he knew he could never carry that action out. Something folded and died within him when he realised what he was admitting to himself. Here was Lily, possibly a truly evil individual. Working to betray the people she purported to support and who had taken her into their confidence. They had entrusted their lives to her and she was planning to sacrifice them all. But deep inside he knew that this was the only woman he would ever be able to look at again. He could look at her and he could survive her gaze because they both knew each other in a way that not even lovers did. In this war there were three sides now, and he and Lily were the third side. And so he hoped that the alternative possibility was the true one. He hoped that Lily and Robert were loyal comrades on this dangerous mission that, if successful, might shorten the length of the war. He hoped, but he could not convince himself.
As individuals they might be on opposite sides, but as a partnership they belonged to no one. Each knew the crippled husk that inhabited the interior of the other and each knew that no other one could survive in a relationship with either of them. They could never truly love each other but their intimate knowledge of each other was an acceptable counterfeit. Whichever version turned out to be true he guessed his future, if he had one, was with Lily
He was glad that he thought of himself as Robert now and not Sean. Using a different name worked on the inside as well as for the outside world. The Sean he had once been could not have acted and thought as he was doing now. But for Robert it was hardly a problem.
His assessment came out like this. The mission was all that was left for him in life. It did not matter if he died trying to succeed. In fact it would be a blessed relief. The only alternative was to walk away; disappear. But to what? An Ireland without Martha; without Conny. What would be the point in that? Part of him knew that his desire to assassinate this Pope was a substitute revenge for havin
g failed to find and kill O’Shea. Perhaps every mission with a true motive needs an operative with a twisted motive to make it succeed.
He would warn Sister Fatima and the gardener to vanish and then he would ride the roller coaster until the end. If Lily was there to stop him there was no reason why the Gestapo should not have lifted him already. That was an argument in Lily’s favour. If she was acting as a double agent they were stringing him out in search of something else. Most probably the German organisers of the plot, he reasoned. So he would play the game too. Forewarned he was forearmed and would be slightly better prepared when they made their move than they would expect him to be. If Lily attempted to prevent him from killing the Pope he would remove her then. That was the only circumstance he could foresee leading to Lily’s elimination. But he would not take that action until he was absolutely certain that he had no alternative. To do so would bring the Gestapo down on him and terminate the mission anyway.