by James R Benn
“And to Shakespeare,” Kaz said. “Billy? What do you have for us?”
I held onto my seat as Big Mike hit the accelerator, the traffic jam finally giving way. We cleared an intersection, the tail end of a convoy disappearing off to our right. As I was about to begin, the distant sound of aircraft engines rose up from due south, and within seconds it became a sputtering, growling noise, signaling a plane in big trouble.
“There!” Kaz said, pointing ahead to a black smudge in the sky, descending and trailing smoke. It was a B-17, probably hit by fighters or flak along the French coast and heading for home. A couple of trucks ahead of us pulled over to watch, and Big Mike gunned the engine, passing them and a couple of other vehicles that had slowed down. The B-17 was closer now, losing altitude and airspeed. It was off to our right, but parallel to the road, and I began to wonder if it was going to land on top of us. Two of the four engines trailed smoke, and a third suddenly sprouted yellow flames, as the smoke turned an oily black. I saw its flaps go down, and knew the pilot was trying for a belly landing. It was going to have to be in the plowed fields alongside the road, the flattest ground within sight. I hoped they’d jettisoned the bomb load in the channel and the crew had bailed out over land. The bomber seemed to drop straight down as it slowed, its huge wings wobbling back and forth as the pilot fought for what control he could get out of the damaged plane. Kaz and I stared, transfixed, but Big Mike took his opportunity and sped between the line of vehicles, as nearly everyone on the road stopped to watch.
A line of deuce-and-a-half trucks blocked our view for a few seconds, but we got around them in time to see the pilot raise the nose a bit, seconds before the aircraft touched down. It slid forward, gouging out a blackened trench as one of the propellers spun off. The plane smashed through a stone wall, spinning crazily across the field, like a giant child’s toy. The B-17 swerved sideways before coming to a shuddering halt, its nose yards away from a row of oak trees edging a lane between the fields. We were close enough to see shredded metal where machine-gun or cannon fire had raked the wing and fuselage. Dozens of GIs ran over to help, spilling out of vehicles, swarming the aircraft, reaching to help any survivors out through the hatches. Smoke bloomed from the damaged engine and enveloped the rescuers. An ambulance pulled out of the traffic ahead of us, bumping over plowed fields, and disappeared into the thickening haze. We drove on in silence, stories forgotten.
An hour later, with images of death beneath gnarled oaks playing across my mind, we turned off the main road at a sign for Shepherdswell. We crossed the train tracks and parked at the station, not far from the Bricklayer’s Arms. It was a pleasant-looking place, and we walked toward it, silently in agreement on the need for a drink. Shepherdswell was a sprawling little village with a main street of shops and homes all built in the same brickwork style, painted a uniform white. Narrow side streets led off into country lanes dotted with larger homes, bounded by farmers’ fields showing husks of the last autumn crops, endless rows of withered stems, lined up like tombstones.
The Bricklayer’s Arms was warm and welcoming, the publican quick with his pints, a sharp, crisp ale that bit through the dust in my mouth and the visions in my head. We drank, and didn’t speak, the only sound a long sigh from Big Mike after he polished off his pint. He spoke for us all.
“Another?” the publican asked, appearing as soon as he noticed the empty glass.
“Sure,” Big Mike said. “But maybe you can help us first. We’re looking for a girl.”
“What kind of establishment do you think this is?” He took a half step back, his eyes wide with amazement at this cheeky Yank.
“No, no,” Kaz said. “What my friend means is we are searching for a specific young lady. We were supposed to deliver a gift to her, from her fiance, but we lost the address. All we know is that she’s visiting here, and wondered if you may have seen her. She came by train, and we thought with the pub so close to the station, she might have come in.”
“Well, then, that’s a different story. What’s her name?”
“Sheila,” Kaz said, leaving it unsaid that she might have used a different name. “Early twenties, dark hair, dark eyes. A pretty girl, not a movie star, but nice looking.”
“Kind of a small, round mouth,” I added. “A smart kid, too.” She had to be.
“Visiting here in Shepherdswell?”
“Yes, that’s what we were told,” Kaz said.
“Humph. Sorry, can’t help you there. Sounds a bit like Miss Pemble, but she’s not visiting anyone, and not named Sheila either. Been here off and on for some time now.”
“Miss Pemble?” Kaz said, inviting more comment.
“Aye. Margaret Pemble. She’s a nurse. Rented a cottage out on Farrier Street a fortnight or more ago. She stayed here-we have a couple of rooms upstairs in case you gents need a place tonight-for a few days while she looked around. Nice young woman, I’d say a bit older than the girl you described.”
“Much call for nurses around here?” I asked.
“No, not much. We have the village doctor, that’s all we need. She’s a private nurse, specializes in rehabilitation, she said. Needed a place with plenty of room downstairs, to care for a crippled flier who hired her on. Some rich bloke, I’d say, after a quiet place in the country instead of a crowded hospital ward. I’d do the same myself, if I had the money.”
“So the place on Farrier Street, it’s his then?” I asked.
“I guess so, not that it matters. She’s the one doing everything, getting it all ready. He’s had several operations on his face and legs. Can’t walk much, that’s what she’s going to help him with. Don’t know what’s hidden under the bandages. Some of those pilots get burned something awful.”
“Yeah, we just saw a B-17 belly-land in a field,” Big Mike said. “It came in with three engines on fire. They were lucky to make it down in one piece.”
“Aye, we’ve seen plenty of crashes here, since 1940. A Hurricane came down not a quarter mile away, poor bloke dead at the controls. The Home Guard lads have rounded up a few Jerries as well, most of them glad to give up after a night in the woods. We had a Polish pilot-one of your lot, Lieutenant-he had to bail out, in September 1940, I think, and it took a while for him to convince the constable he was one of ours. He had a thick accent, just like Miss Pemble’s patient.”
“He’s a Polish flier?” Kaz asked.
“Aye, from the Kosciuszko Squadron, so he told me. Famous lot, those boys. He was a bit hard to understand, with his accent and the bandages to boot, but I got that much.”
“Perhaps I should stop and give him my regards,” Kaz said. “Miss Pemble and he are at home?”
“No, they left for London this morning. I think she has to bring him back for treatments at the hospital. We don’t see that much of them. She said it would be a while before he could stay full-time.” He briskly took our orders for lunch, gave Kaz directions to Miss Pemble’s cottage, and went off to pull Big Mike’s next pint.
“I think we should take a look at this cottage,” Kaz said in a low voice.
“What, you think Sheila Carlson is moonlighting as a nurse?” Big Mike said. “Sounds out of character.”
“Why not, as long as we’re here? She fits the description,” Kaz said.
“Look, you’re already wanted by Scotland Yard,” I said. “You want the local constable to throw you in the hoosegow for breaking and entering, too?”
“Hoosegow?” Kaz said, unfamiliar with the term.
“Clink. Pokey, the big house,” Big Mike said.
“Ah, the slammer,” Kaz said. “We must be careful then. I am only looking for my wounded cousin, Luboslaw. I am distraught, am I not?”
“Not responsible for your actions,” Big Mike said. “We tried to stop you.”
“Sure, that’s believable,” I said.
After a lunch of bangers and mash in apple cider gravy-two helpings for Big Mike-we drove along Farrier Street, past three small cottages, until we came to
Miss Pemble’s, marked by a large weeping willow. We knocked at the front door, and were greeted by the silence of an empty house. Big Mike looked in the bay window, and shook his head. No one home. We went around back, and Big Mike worked his knife-blade magic on the rear door. Ten seconds and we were in.
“Poor Luboslaw,” I said to Kaz. “He’ll never know of your grief.”
“You guys search the joint,” Big Mike said. “I’ll be on watch. If you hear me start up the jeep, it means someone’s coming. Go out the back, lock up, and say you were just knocking at the door. OK?”
“OK.” Kaz and I went through the rooms. Margaret Pemble’s room was upstairs, and she had a lot more stuff than Sheila had had on her last time I saw her. A few dresses hung in the closet, nothing fancy. A chest of drawers held the usual feminine stuff, and her dressing table was decorated with perfumes and makeup. No wads of cash hidden under the mattress, no oleander plant being cultivated. Downstairs, we went through the meager belongings of her patient. A couple of worn suits. One RAF uniform, a leather flying jacket, shirts, and corduroy trousers.
A small table by the window was stacked with bandages and dressings, along with a few bottles of medicines. A pile of books, one in Polish, rested on the nightstand.
“Stefan Grabin ski,” Kaz said. “He’s called the Polish Poe. Demon ruchu. The Motion Demon. Horror stories, not to my taste.”
“There’s horror enough,” I said. I flipped the pages of the other two books. One was a paperback, The Saint Goes On, by Leslie Charteris. I’d read a few of his books, and knew they were fairly easy reads. Maybe he was trying to improve his English. The other was a thicker hardcover, Selected Poems, by W. B. Yeats. That was heavier going, and I flipped through the pages, wondering at his wide-ranging interests. It opened to a bookmark at “The Circus Animals’ Desertion,” a poem I’d not heard of.
“Ah, Yeats,” Kaz said. “A famous Irish poet. Are you familiar with his work?”
“Not really. I don’t get this poem about circus animals, that’s for sure.”
“The meaning is in the last lines,” Kaz said, reciting them from memory.
Now that my ladder’s gone
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.
“He wrote it near the end of his life, about trying to recapture the creativity of youth,” Kaz said. “It speaks about returning to the elemental truths, I think.”
“He has those lines underlined,” I said, feeling easier talking about concrete truths.
“Poles have a deep understanding of poetry,” Kaz said, taking the book from my hands. “He knows Latin, too, if this is in his hand. Corpora dormiunt vigilant animae.”
“What’s that mean?” I asked, as Kaz showed me the inscription on the first page of the book.
“The bodies are asleep, the souls are awake.”
“Interesting guy,” I said. “Not that it matters.”
The nightstand also held a fountain pen and three small pebbles. Souvenirs of Poland, maybe? We looked under the bed, behind the chest of drawers, and found nothing but dust balls. Magazines and a radio in the sitting room. Coal in the bucket by the fireplace. Well-stocked larder and a few bottles of vodka to ease the pain. Nothing suspicious, just a chilly rural cottage with a decent stock of booze, books, and bandages.
“See anything out of the ordinary?” I asked Kaz.
“Nothing. It has a temporary look, no personal effects, but that fits with what we were told.”
We left, checking to be sure nothing was disturbed, and that we had locked the door behind us. The only evidence of our visit was a few scratches around the lock, where Big Mike had used his blade. Nothing a nurse or crippled pilot would notice.
“Waste of time,” I said to Big Mike.
“Worth checking out,” he said, like any good cop would. You never passed up a lead, no matter how slim. That’s how cases were solved. We drove back to the main road, turning south for Dover, belly landings and wild-goose chases behind us.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
We left Kaz at the Lord Nelson Inn, on Flying Horse Lane in Dover, not far from the docks that ran along the channel. Dover Castle loomed over the town from the heights to the east, an ancient gray fortress that had been called the Key to England since the days of Napoleon, maybe before. All three of us got rooms at the inn, since there wasn’t much of a tourist trade these days. Flying Horse Lane looked like a nice little side street, except for the building directly across from the pub that had taken a direct hit. The Germans still fired their big artillery pieces across the channel, aiming at the castle and hitting everything around it in the process. The front of the three-story structure was nothing but a mass of bricks, tumbled into the street. Stairs jutted out into thin air, and wallpaper fluttered in the sea breeze where it had torn away from the collapsed wall. A few men in blue coveralls worked at stacking the bricks, which meant this had been a recent hit. I hoped what they said about lightning held true for artillery shells.
I’d told Kaz to stay put, in case Scotland Yard had a long tail on us. We had passed a bookstore about a block from the inn, and Kaz said he’d only need a few minutes there and he’d be set to hole up in his room. The newly painted sign over the store window read FRONTLINE BOOK SHOP, and I got the feeling that folks here were proud to be closer than anyone else in England to the enemy, less than twenty-two miles across the channel.
Big Mike gunned the jeep up the steep road as we tried to figure out where the entrance was. The castle was huge, the outer walls and battlements encircling the hill above the town. There was an inner circle of fortifications, with the actual castle in the center of that. It looked like something out of Robin Hood, and I half expected to see knights on horseback. Instead, we came to a stop at an antiaircraft emplacement, where the sergeant in charge told us to go back down the switchback road and find the military entrance at the base of the cliff. It was much less grand than the approach to the castle. We parked the jeep under camouflage netting and walked into a wide chamber cut into the limestone cliff. The air smelled damp and chalky, and I glanced back for a glimpse of blue sky before we turned a corner and lost sight of it. The duty officer checked our papers and directed us to the area assigned to the Eighth Air Force staff. The tunnels were well lit, clearly marked, and filled with a constant hum from the ventilation system. Offices and large rooms had been carved out on either side of the main chamber. It made the Underground Tube shelters in London look cramped.
“Billy, good to see you,” boomed the voice of Colonel Bull Dawson. “How do you like our little hideaway?”
“Not bad, sir,” I said as Bull pumped my hand in a crushing grip that came from long hours of holding onto the controls of a B-17 at thirty thousand feet. “Where do you have the Russians stashed?”
“Come on,” he said. “You’ll both want to see this.” Bull led us down a narrow stairway, the stone worn in the center by centuries of martial footsteps. He pushed opened two metal doors and ushered us into a large, square room with a catwalk, about five feet high, on one side. The other wall was filled with detailed maps, taped together, forming a mosaic of England, France, Germany, Italy, all the way to the Soviet Union. The tables between the two walls held plotting boards, maps with airfields, antiaircraft defenses, dotted with symbols for fighters and bombers along routes that stretched from England to the Ukraine, with connections to Italy and back to England. American and Russian officers huddled in small groups, pointing at maps, pushing aircraft markers across plotting boards. At the far end of the room was a communications center, filled with switchboards, radios, teletypes, and signal repeating gear, tall metal boxes that reached to the end of the corridor.
“This is where they fought the Battle of Britain from, can you believe that?” Bull said. “That was before either Russia or America was in the war. Now we’re planning Operation Frantic from the same rooms. Amazing.”
“Yeah,” I said, trying to sound ent
hused about the historical import of the whole thing, but my attention was on Captain Kiril Sidorov. He was up on the catwalk, walking back and forth, his hands clasped behind him, watching every Russian officer who talked with an American. His eyes danced over them all, looking for what, I wondered? Signs of disaffection? Desire for personal property? Preference for bourbon over vodka? By his side was Rak Vatutin, who had his eyes on me. Both of them wore sidearms, and I had the sense of being in a cell block, with those two as guards. Maybe the Russians were used to it, but I didn’t like it one bit. I was tempted to shout out Topper’s message to Vatutin, and see what his reaction would be. But I wasn’t here to have fun, so I waved to him, just to enjoy seeing him turn away.
“You wanted to talk to the Russians, right?” Bull said. “Captain Sidorov agreed, as long as he could sit in.”
“Who’ll sit in when I interrogate him?”
“Look, Billy, you tread lightly here, understand? This is a major operation, and I don’t need a loose cannon right now. Talk to these guys, fine, but don’t call it an interrogation and get their Russian noses bent out of shape. They’re easily offended. Like me. Got it?”
“Got it, Bull. When can I get started?”
“Right now. I’ll take you to an empty office. Forget you ever saw all these maps. Big Mike, you need some grub?”
“Thanks, sir, but I’ll stick with Billy,” Big Mike said, with a glance toward the Russian hawks on the catwalk. He must’ve been concerned to pass up a chow line. Sidorov took notice of us and came down the steps.
“I see you found us, Lieutenant Boyle,” Sidorov said. “I hope you do as well finding the killer of Comrade Egorov.”
“I will, unless they move all of you somewhere else.”
“I hope not. This was done quickly and with great secrecy, so I believe we are secure. We even have a good cover story, about being shown the local defenses against invasion. The Home Guard has given us tours, showing off their hidden bunkers and many devious devices. A true proletariat people’s army, the English Home Guard. We’ve gazed across the channel through binoculars, of course, and the British have allowed us to assist in firing some of their large artillery pieces at the Nazi beach defenses. It makes for good relations between Allies. Our officers go out to the pubs and local events to spread the cover story, along with our American and English hosts.”