by Thomas Wood
The gunfight still continued on, but as the time wore on, it was clear that the resistance were winning. Before I had too much time to think anything else through, the resistance man was shouting at us.
“Go! They will be bringing their reinforcements. We have been told to stay here for a while longer. You must leave.”
Red and I both looked at each other, smirking and chuckling softly.
“No, let me stay here,” Red said to me defiantly, clearly already reading my mind on the matter.
“You know that I can’t do that Red. Come on, let’s fall back. Start again.”
“Let me stay a bit longer. I will fall back before it gets too bad.”
I stared at him in silence, like a forceful mother who knows she will eventually get her child to act in the way that she desires. I let the expression fester a little longer, before adding a final, closing statement on the matter.
“Look Red, we’ve done enough. Let’s try and get home, shall we?”
A spurt of gunfire from below the window grabbed his attention for half a second, before he turned back to face me.
“Remind me, where exactly is that again? I don’t really have a home anymore Alfie.”
I knew exactly what he meant, for I wasn’t entirely sure I was going to be getting a welcome home party if I ever made it back to Britain again. But, for now, we both had to focus on getting away from the factory, at least making it to the base of the water tower, where we would be able to regroup our thoughts.
32
I had run away from that factory with every last fibre of my being, confident at last that this would likely be the final time that I would have to call my limbs into action for a considerable amount of time. In my mind, I deserved a jolly good rest, one that would last until the end of the war with any luck.
My knees had felt like the small cracks, that had developed over the last few days, were beginning to splinter. I was only still going so that I could make it across the open ground, my eyes transfixed on the water tower that I had occupied an hour or two before. It had felt like an age since I had been there, and I recognised in myself a maturity that I had not possessed when I was lying thirty feet up in the air.
In the short space of time that I had been in the factory, I had learnt a great deal, about Geranium, about Red and about myself. I felt, for the first time in a long time, quite contented with the way that my life was, having closed a particularly troubling chapter. I hoped with all my heart that the next would be less fraught with fear and close encounters with death.
In my haste to make it away from the gunfire and grenade blasts that still resounded gently from the factory, I had failed to keep an eye out for Red, naively assuming that he would stick by my side, like he always had done in the past, where we would get the chance to have a proper conversation with one another. Maybe even without the presence of loaded weapons in the room.
I made it to the bottom of the steel ladder and, gripping hold of it tightly to keep myself upright, I realised that I was in fact totally alone. Again.
I wracked my brain, trying to search for a memory that might have immediately buried itself, but I was sure; I hadn’t seen Red go down. I was certain he hadn’t been hit.
As I began to calm myself down, forcing myself to think more rationally, I realised that I could just about make out the door of the factory from where I now stood, the ground that I had covered in the space of a few seconds being completely open and unobstructed.
It was not enough to say that I hadn’t seen Red get hit, but similarly, from where I stood, I could also see no body, no corpse lying motionless on the ground after being hit by a stray bullet. It was almost as if he had vanished into thin air.
It was the mortar hole all over again. One minute he was there, grinning at me or running by my side. The next, he was gone. No sign of him having perished, but none that proved the opposite either. He was just gone.
Staring down at the ground, I began to chuckle to myself, softly at first, nothing more than a smirk, but before too long it was a full-blown sniggering, as I began to think about everything that I had just done.
On Red’s part, I concluded, disappearing was probably his best option. It was what I would have done if I had happened to have been in his shoes. He had no real prospects, wherever he went. He was still a British soldier, but now he was one that the local German army would be onto, now that he had murdered their favourite asset. He would probably need to dye that hair of his at the earliest opportunity if he was to go on the run.
Similarly, in Britain, he had no future apart from staring at the inside of a prison cell, if Jimmy didn’t manage to get his hands on him first that was. But, then again, I doubted very much that Jimmy would actually go out and get his hands dirty. Somehow, based on his track record, he hadn’t seemed like the man that would do that.
He was the only one of the Geranium three that was still alive, apparently being the one who sent the other two in to bat for him when the questions got a little too tough for him to answer. It made me think who the main proponent of the whole affair had been and, the more thought that I gave to the matter, the more strongly I believed that it must have been Jimmy.
So Red would become the evader, which led me to think what role I would take up as a result. I had had enough of running. As far as I was concerned, I had done exactly what I had been told to do, surely even Jimmy couldn’t have been annoyed at that.
I had been sent to France to find and eliminate the informer, which I had done, to a degree. I thought about the possibility of maybe going to Jimmy, to tell him that the one who had in fact pulled the trigger, was Red, to maybe give him a shot at a new life in Britain. He might even get to visit his mum every once in a while. But I decided against it.
Red deserved to be given a new chance, and I found myself hoping that, wherever he ended up, that he made the most of it and that he would be far enough away from all of this, to the point where he could forget that there was a war on.
As I decided that Red had made his own choice in leaving me, I turned my back on the factory, praying that I would never have to return to the place for as long as I was still breathing. With a confidence and assurance that I had not felt in quite some time, I began to walk away from the complex, the last few gunshots finally fading into the silence of the forest that I began to drink in with an immeasurable gratitude and relief.
I knew that the Germans would more than likely start reprisals for mine and Red’s actions at the factory, and that many of the resistance fighters would die in the process. But ultimately, I was pleased with what I had uncovered in my pursuit of the informer.
Geranium had been an operation undertaken by three intelligence officers, that had no permission from their respective governments to carry it out. I had respected their motivations, to try and stop a devastating war in Western Europe, but what had ruined each of the individual’s moral motivations had been the way in which they had gone about covering the whole operation up, merely to save their own pride and consciences.
Rudolf Schröder, the Standartenführer in the SS that I had originally been sent to kill, had unknowingly unlocked the can of worms for me at the mere mention of Geranium. Had it not been for him, then I would have thought Geranium was just another codeword in Jimmy’s repertoire, down to his fascination with all things horticultural.
I if I had killed him, like I had meant to, then none of it would have come to light, for which I didn’t know whether I should be cursing his memory or venerating it.
Rudolf, according to Joseph, had been the weak link of the three. He had been the one who had been the most affected by the whole situation, probably because he had been the man on the ground, the one who had sourced the explosives and perhaps more damaging, the fuses for said explosives. Jimmy and Joseph had both known this, and so knew that, to keep Geranium hidden, Rudolf must die, but neither wanted to get their hands dirty when it came to sorting out the demise of one of their old university frie
nds, which is where I had come in to the story. Deep down, they were all still friends, which is why they had continued to assist one another in any way they could during the war. Sometimes, it seemed, friendships come way before national allegiances, even if those very same friendships lead to more people being killed or harmed in the process.
It had also turned out that my gut instincts had been correct; Joseph Baudouin had been a detestable man. Louis had been the one who had got it more accurate however; he had been capable of evil, no matter what his outward actions seemed to insinuate.
He had flown incredibly close to the sun, originally passing defence plans to the Germans, before being drawn into the light like a moth, undertaking further assignments for the Nazis, all in the name of money and a small pocket of land in Switzerland.
I considered for a moment whether Jimmy knew or not about how Joseph had been turned. For me, it had no real consequence. The chances were that Jimmy would soon assume that I had found out everything there was to know about Geranium, and as such, he would want me dead before I was able to talk to too many people.
I doubted that I would ever be able to see my parents again, not until I knew with an absolute certainty that Jimmy Tempsford was dead or in prison. I felt bad for them, but I knew that my life would not be worth living in Britain; I would spend it on the run constantly, always looking over my shoulder and questioning the people who tried to get too close to me.
No, now I had no nationality, nowhere that I would be able to call home. Ever since Joseph had told me all he knew about Geranium, I was destined to become a nomad; no fixed address, always on the move, never staying anywhere long enough to get to know my neighbour’s names. And Joseph had known that when he told me.
I would simply just have to roam for the rest of the war, if not for the rest of my life.
My entire existence had quickly transformed into one large question mark, leaping from one great uncertainty to the next. As I made it to the other side of the forest, I slowly began to piece together where I was. I had spent enough time in and around the village of Chautillion to know where I was now. I was in Pouraine, about five miles south of the place that was the nearest to home that I was going to get for the foreseeable future.
It was a simple enough journey back, about an hour and a half before I would make it to the outskirts of Chautillion, and where I would hopefully be able to rest before starting the main leg of my journey in the morning.
It was dark, walking along the track, the crunch of the gravel under my feet reminiscent of what had laid under my feet on the railway line. But, as I picked up my pace, desperately wanting to make it to my destination before the curfew set in, I felt overwhelmingly happy.
I thought about the question mark that loomed over my head, signifying how lost and uncertain my life had become. But, I took comfort, with an equal measure of discomfort, from the one thing that I knew in my life was certain, the one thing that I had left after this whole sorry episode with what I had also known right at the very beginning.
I was no closer to finding out where Cécile was, I had even started to doubt the fact that she was still alive. I thought about her once again, the soft, sweet smell that I gleaned from her cheeks as I had leant into her, the delicate touch of her hands, the smile that had seemed to light up the darkest parts of my soul and the way that I had felt safe with her, perfectly convinced that everything would work out okay.
But she was still just as far away now as she had been when I had first found out she was missing. I wondered whether I ever would get to see her again, even if it was in passing, or whether by some cruel twist of fate, we would only ever get those few weeks that we had had in Paris together.
My mind was beginning to run wild as a result of its exhaustion, something which I was more than happy to try and rest for the next few moments if I could. Repeating the same process that I had done for months on end now, I placed my thoughts of Cécile on the highest shelf possible, before trying to return my mind to the blank canvas that I had long desired.
It hadn’t taken me too long to descend down the slight gradient of the dirt track that connected Chautillion with Pouraine, and I soon began to make out buildings that I recognised, even paying homage to the church bench where I had spent so many of my recent hours trying to get some sleep or observing the goings on of the village.
But there was one house that I was giving special attention to on that night, the one place that I felt I could maybe call home and get away with it.
Like I had done earlier on in the day, I stared at Louis’ house from the opposite side of the road, wondering whether it would do my soul any good at all to go inside and see how he was, if he was in there at all.
Eventually I succumbed. I simply had to see him.
Besides, it was about time that I was the one to pour him a glass of milk.
The End
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About the Author
Thomas Wood is the author of the ‘Gliders over Normandy’ series, Trench Raiders as well as the Alfie Lewis Thrillers series.
He posts regular updates on his website
www.ThomasWoodBooks.com
and is also contactable by email at [email protected]