by Thomas Wood
I wasn’t too keen on the idea of stealing a boat, the hope being that we would eventually make it out into the English Channel, from where we would be hopefully spotted by a Royal Navy ship, out searching for downed airmen and taken home to safer ground. But I was not hopeful. I knew how much the Germans valued their security, and I thought it vastly unlikely that the men at the docks would have been sufficiently paid to betray their country.
It was a thought that I opted to keep to myself. I didn’t want to have to scupper these plans and get home later than I had anticipated.
The butterflies that seemed to be slowly taking over my entire consciousness were only given more enthusiasm by the whole situation between Jimmy and Joseph. I couldn’t help but feel angry at Jimmy for not revealing the true nature of his relationship with Joseph, and for Joseph not letting on that he was military, so that we could work together far more efficiently.
I wondered why Jimmy had merely referred to him as a contact when, according to Louis, they had been such good friends that they had remained in touch, across two different countries and apparently even now in the midst of a war. That was a pretty close friendship if you asked me.
I began to doubt whether Jimmy had been all that trustworthy to start with. I had surrendered my life to him and was prepared to put myself in front of the barrel of a gun for the work that he said he was doing. He had spent time with me, told me about his life and seemed to have taken a genuine interest in mine, but now, as I sat in front of Louis’ fireplace for the last time, I became suspicious over Jimmy and whether his interest in me and my life was completely feigned.
I questioned whether I was being played, and that I was just one big mockery to the rest of the department, a pawn in Jimmy’s big war game. The thought crossed my mind that it wasn’t because of my apparent knowledge of France and evasion techniques that I had been recruited, it was because I was already dead.
My mother and father had been told that I was dead, they had already gone through the pain of what it was like to lose a son, and so maybe he had thought that there would be far less paperwork to do, if he sent an already dead man over to France to do his work for him.
I wondered how many of the others in room 424 thought that this would be a one-way operation. I debated whether there had been some sort of lot casting for this op, but it just so happened that a gullible, highly impressionable young man was soon to be brought in through the door, and he would do practically anything he was told.
My uneasiness and paranoia was only fuelled by the repetitiveness of the dream that had haunted me for months now. The figure, the one that had sat in the front of the car in Paris, in total, deathly silence, was still there but this time, he wasn’t in the car in France, he wasn’t even in my parents’ kitchen back in Kent. He was standing alongside me, while I sat in the wing backed armchair by Louis’ fireplace, just watching me.
He approached me from behind and stopped right behind the chair, before reaching out a blackened, dark arm and gripping me on my shoulder. I felt his bony hand clasp its way over the tops of my shoulder, gently applying the pressure as he squeezed.
I awoke with a start and found that I was sweating profusely, Jacques and Julien staring at me as if I was some sort of madman. I was beginning to think that I was. I had seen the figure for no more than half an hour while we drove around Paris, and for some reason it seemed to appear to me frequently, even more so the closer we got to the start of our escape.
Saying nothing to the other two, I got up from the chair, walking around it to double check that the figure wasn’t there standing behind me and went into the kitchen to pour myself a glass of Louis’ milk that was in plentiful supply.
My heart thumped and every sip of milk that I took felt like it was going to regurgitate itself from the pit of my stomach. Gripping either side of the sink, I tucked my head into my chest to try and regain some of my composure, to realign the thoughts in my head.
To calm myself down, I tried to think of Cécile, I had to keep it together for her. I was longing for her and realised that I had already possibly missed my chance to find out what had happened to the sweet young nurse that I had attached myself to. I tried to look past the visions of her being tortured by the Gestapo and the hallucinations of her with her skull caved in, and tried to envisage the memories I had of her, the ones that we had made together.
I missed her every being, her soft, compassionate touch, the way that she smiled gently or nervously played with the pendant on her necklace. I hankered to be able to smell her again, the sweet aroma of her skin that I had adored for months before she was cruelly snatched from me. My heart had continued to ache for her, just to be able to see her again, or to hear that she was okay. If I got that, I was certain I would be content.
I wondered if German Frankie, the crazy Frenchman who had got me into the unoccupied zone of France, had managed to pass the note onto her, or found someone who could and if she knew that I was still alive.
My heart had calmed from the dream, but now fluttered enthusiastically from the excitement of thinking about Cécile, I couldn’t help myself. Someone would merely have to utter her name and my heart would jump for joy and I realised that without her, I would have lost the will to live a long time ago.
“Are you okay?”
My heart stopped beating for a second and I nearly leapt from my skin as Louis had somehow snuck into the room and right up into my ear.
“Sorry, I’m feeling a little jumpy.”
“It is understandable,” he replied softly, as if he didn’t want the other two to hear, “you have been preparing for this moment for a while.”
He didn’t know the half of it. He had no idea about what was racing through my head or any understanding of what I had been through before. For a moment, I thought I was about to explode at him as a sudden anger billowed from the pits of my being, but I was suddenly stopped. He had no idea what I had been through, but that was through no fault of his own, he had done nothing but help me since I had arrived here, and he had already had his fair share of being emotionally tormented by someone now prominent in his life.
I calmed myself down quickly, with an overexaggerated sigh, trying to release all my negative thoughts out into the air around me, hopefully to be carried away before I could take another breath in.
As I looked into his sad little eyes, that looked like a puppy’s but one that was about to cry, I noticed that his face was etched with worry. I didn’t like it, he had always taken everything in his stride, like nothing would ever phase him, but he was petrified of something.
“Are you okay, Louis?” I asked, resting a hand on his shoulder.
“My friend,” he said, his voice almost quivering and distorted like he was under water, “you will not be leaving with the other two tonight. We must go and see Joseph at once.” He spoke in a whisper, obviously so that the two in the room next door didn’t over hear us and I wondered if he was ever going to tell them what had happened, or if they would have to just be content with my silent absence as an answer.
“It is most urgent.”
He ushered me out of the back door and into the terrifyingly cold night of the small French village, the light dusting of snow slowly becoming something far more substantial, the snowflakes trying to grow larger and fall far more heavily the closer we got to Joseph’s safe house.
There shouldn’t have been too much trouble in Jacques and Julien getting away that night, the air was far too cold for a German soldier to want to be out on patrol, and I imagined them all lining up next to one another around some fireplace somewhere, praising Mother Nature for giving them a night off. Either way, I found myself praying earnestly that they would make it to the schoolhouse, and that they would succeed in their objective in making it home.
I had so many questions for Louis, but he knew that I wouldn’t be asking them just yet and even if I had done, he wouldn’t have risked saying them out in the open, even if no one was around.
&
nbsp; After a few minutes, he dropped back so that he could walk right alongside me, and I was certain he began walking on his tiptoes, as he grew a few inches so that he could speak delicately and directly into my ear.
“After our chat the other night, I remembered something else about Joseph,” he said, the worry disappearing from his voice and morphing into a wild excitement.
In true Louis fashion, he failed to get straight to the point, instead opting to give me all of the needless information that merely set the scene.
“After he got back from the army, he would come to my house quite often. To apologise about what he had done to me before. More often than not, he would bring some wine with him, and we would stay up till late, after my family had gone to bed themselves. Sometimes we would sit in silence. Sometimes we would chat. It made me feel quite good, like I had a friend for the first time in my life.”
He paused, and I felt like giving him a good shake up and down and encourage him to just spit out whatever he was trying to tell me, and to get to the gritty part, and fast. But, at the same time, I was overwhelmed with a compassion for the man, to the point where I felt that he was half expecting, half hoping that I would begin jumping up and down in the middle of the street, declaring my love for him and how I was his friend.
“It was on one of these such nights that we got chatting. He had brought some wine with him, he had drunk most of it himself. He was always a much faster drinker than me. I think it is something to do with the milk…. anyway, he had probably had a little too much to drink, and I managed to ask him about his time in the army.”
I gripped his arm and spun him around, making him slide around on the softness of the freshly laid snow.
“Louis, why didn’t you tell me any of this sooner?”
He looked like a petrified little schoolboy as I gripped him, causing me to loosen my grasp slightly and soften my expression.
“Sorry, my friend…I had had a small drink too. It is so easy to forget these things.”
“It’s okay,” I said, trying to stop myself from getting overexcited about something that could be quite insignificant, “carry on.”
“Well, he began to talk about the army, so I asked him straight. I asked him why he had come back so close to the start of the war. It turned out that he had joined the army and within six months he had been handpicked to join military intelligence. He had worked for the Deuxieme Bureau, the military intelligence branch of the French forces, but something went wrong. It meant that he had to run away. After that, he didn’t tell me anything. He got up and left.”
I mulled it all over for a while in my mind, as Louis continued to walk alongside me, staring up at me as if he was waiting for some sort of approval.
“Thank you, Louis,” I finally managed to utter, just as we made it to Joseph’s second safehouse. I wondered if this was his own abode, or if this man just liked squatting in other people’s houses.
I was soon to find out. Louis opened the door for me and ushered me inside, leaning into me and speaking softly, “Wait here, Joseph will be here just before sunrise.”
And with that, Louis pulled the door closed, with him staying on the outside. I suddenly felt incredibly isolated.
11
As I walked through the house, I was struck by an eerie sense of loneliness, the empty tables and unmade beds only adding to my ghostlike existence. The house was coated in a thick layer of dust, the kind that you might expect to see when a bomb has fallen on a nearby street and has shaken the collected ashes from every corner of the house. None of it seemed to have been disturbed since it had started to settle.
I walked up and down the stairs, checking every single room for any sign of life, recent or long past, but there was none. I began to imagine what the house had been like in its day, a bustling heart of a normal French family; the father out all day at work, the mother lovingly toiling in the kitchen and the two children running ragged around her feet.
It was almost as if the family had been wiped off the face of the earth, like they had simply vanished. There wasn’t even any sign of them leaving. Their beds were made, their rooms were filled with toys and books, the wardrobes were still full of their clothes and the cupboards housed now old and decaying food.
I wondered what had happened to them. Maybe they had been out one day as a family and were simply killed in a tragic accident. Or maybe they had panicked so much at the news of a German invasion that they simply left all their belongings and hopped on the next train south.
I stretched myself out on one of the beds and decided to lie in wait for Joseph and maybe get a few minutes of sleep while I did.
When I woke, I lay still for a moment, before realising that the noise that had woken me happened again. The creak of a floorboard as someone padded around downstairs was unmistakeable and it wasn’t long before they began to make their way towards the staircase.
Slowly making my way from the bed to avoid any noise, I silently tiptoed my way from the far side of the room towards the door. The footsteps were making no real effort in hiding where they were, and they were moving slowly, deliberately, as if they were taking a great deal of care in searching for something in the house, or someone.
I looked around the room swiftly for anything that resembled some sort of weapon, but I could find nothing. Whatever was about to happen to me, I was going to have to face it with just my bare knuckles and sheer grit.
I stepped out onto the landing and immediately felt the barrel of a gun embed itself in the base of my neck, pushing itself so hard into the skin that I thought it would be more likely to puncture my throat than have a bullet expelled through it.
Frustrated with myself for not picking up on the figure sooner, I began to turn in the direction that the gun was forcing me into, and slowly marched my way down the stairs and into the sitting room.
He stood me in front of the fireplace for a moment and I heard the unmistakeable sound of the top slide of a pistol being slid back slightly, probably checking that there was a round in the chamber and that this execution wasn’t going to go wrong in any way.
I braced myself for an eruption of pain as a bullet entered the back of my skull and I began trying to think of all the things that a noble man must think about at the point of death. But I couldn’t think of anything, nothing apart from one question.
Why had Louis set me up?
But the bullet never materialised, at least I don’t think it did. There was no pain, no ear-splitting bang as I lost my hearing to the fateful bullet that would end my life, nothing. Nothing but one, lone voice.
“Hello, Mr Lewis.”
I spun on my heel, just as the barrel of the gun was lowered from the back of my head, which was just as well, as I would probably have spooked the poor man holding the pistol, and I quite easily could have had no face in that short moment.
“Joseph!” I shouted, “What are you doing?!”
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry, it was all just security. We can’t be too careful. Your presence here has been enough to tell us that.”
“What’s going on? Why have I missed the escape? Jimmy will be furious about this when he hears, you know!”
“It’s okay, it’s okay,” he whispered, incredibly calmly, with an air of flippancy. My mind went into overdrive as Joseph nodded at his pistol-wielding accomplice and he promptly left the house. I couldn’t work out this man at all, one moment he tries to be my best friend, agrees to my plans, but the next, he has some bloke putting a pistol to my skull.
I began to think about what Louis had said, that he had been in intelligence and all of a sudden had needed to leave, and I wondered if somehow I had got in the way, and that this was where he dispatched of me himself, before I managed to dig too deep.
Before I allowed myself to get too carried away though, Joseph began to speak.
“I am sorry, truly I am. But you won’t be using our network to get out of France anymore. Not for a long time anyway.”
He left
a long pause, as if he was waiting for me to begin begging for more information on the matter, which was a bait that I wasn’t going to take. He didn’t look too impressed.
“You’ve been reassigned,” he eventually said, curtly.
I let my mind wander all over the place once again as I pondered the possibilities of what was going to happen next and, for some reason, I had a very grave feeling that my parents were going to be receiving a repeat telegram in the not too distant future.
“On whose authority?” I demanded, trying to make myself feel like I still had some sort of control in this sorry, deplorable situation.
“Jimmy’s,” he said reverently, and I was certain that I caught a glimmer in his eye as he pronounced the name of his best friend.
“Why here then? Why the big charade when you could have just told me at Louis’ house.”
“Louis cannot be trusted. He speaks too much. He has no friends and will tell anyone anything who seems to give him more than five minutes. Plus, it was safer here.”
I felt like he had personally attacked me as he assassinated Louis’ character. I felt hurt that he had seemingly patronised me in this way but, I also felt humiliated for Louis as, to me, he had seemed genuine, not the kind of man that would betray the trust of someone that he apparently cared about.
“So, what’s the reassignment?” I was irritated. Not only had I been hauled away from a half-finished job, but I was now being sent on somewhere else, probably having to start all over and make a new escape attempt from scratch.
He seemed reluctant to tell me at first, pursing and un-pursing his lips as if he had an odd taste in his mouth, but he eventually succumbed to Jimmy’s desires and began to speak again, just as I heard the first few birds begin to chirp around outside.
“You will meet a team of your commandos on the west coast. They will be coming in by a Navy submarine and then will paddle ashore. From there, you will go to the aerodrome at D’Ollone Talmont and plan an attack. They have a training school for Luftwaffe pilots over there now for final practices before flying over to England. It is very damaging to your country, they need it destroyed to at least set the Germans back in their pilot’s training. Understood?”