A Fire Sparkling

by MacLean, Julianne

  Then I heard it. The distant rumble of heavy machinery rising up in the distance, men’s voices shouting orders in German. A large flock of birds flew out of the treetops in a thunderous fluttering of wings.

  My heart began to race, and I waited until the first vehicle came into view before I slid onto my bicycle seat and began to pedal, ahead of them, toward the river. By the time my bicycle tires rolled off the planks and onto the gravel road on the other side, the first army vehicle was driving onto the bridge.

  I pedaled faster, heading for a side road that had been identified as my best escape route should the soldiers come after us. Then suddenly, there was a series of explosions. I skidded to a halt.

  With one foot on the ground, my hands gripping the handlebars, I looked over my shoulder. All I could imagine was death and destruction. The bridge being blown to smithereens, heavy tanks and foot soldiers careening into the river below. I heard gunfire and more explosions. Men shouting.

  My orders were to keep cycling. To get out of there as quickly as possible and return to the safe house where Deidre was waiting for me. The rest of the Resistance fighters would scatter into the forests, and Armand would disappear as well, to the next town until it was safe for us to meet again at our next rendezvous point in three days’ time.

  But I couldn’t move. Part of me wanted to turn around and go back and see the destruction. How many German soldiers were dead? All of them? Or were they fighting back, killing our agents and allies?

  Was Ludwig there? My heart was in my throat. I wanted desperately to know, yet, at the same time, I was terrified to know the truth. What if he was lying facedown in the river, and I had been the one to signal for the assault to begin?

  I felt a sudden mad compulsion to go and search the riverbanks for him and drag him to safety, to nurse his wounds. I could take him somewhere safe and remote and try to turn him—convince him to become a spy like me and help the Allies.

  But he wasn’t on that bridge, I told myself. Such thoughts were pure fantasy. I had to follow my orders and return to the flat.

  Pushing myself off again and pedaling as fast as I could, I blinked back tears and told myself that Ludwig was still safe. He was somewhere else, far away.

  That night, I lay in my bed, facing the wall and agonizing over what might have happened to Ludwig that day, if he had been on the bridge. The French Resistance was highly motivated. They would show no mercy, take no prisoners. Or perhaps Ludwig was already dead, killed in some other battle many months ago.

  Breathing heavily, I wiped a tear from my eye and didn’t care that he wore a Nazi uniform and was fighting for the other side. The man I knew and loved was not my enemy, and I wanted him to be safe.

  A memory surfaced. A day in Berlin . . . it was the summer before Germany had invaded Poland. Ludwig and I had taken a picnic basket, a blanket, and a bottle of wine to the Tiergarten on a hazy Sunday afternoon. We had stretched out together in the shade beneath a gigantic chestnut tree, feeling relaxed and contented.

  “I hope you know how much I love you,” he had said, gently stroking my back, his thumb brushing lightly between my shoulder blades. “And that I would do anything for you.”

  “Anything?” I replied with a teasing smile, leaning up on an elbow, my body warm and thriving with desire. I ran my fingertip across his soft, beautiful lips.

  “Yes.” He took hold of my hand and kissed it. “I mean it, April. I love you more than life itself. I would die for you.”

  His words touched my heart, and my teasing smile faded away. “Let’s hope it never comes to that. I would prefer to have you alive, so that we can grow old together.”

  He pulled me close for a kiss that touched my soul.

  The memory took flight, and I was back in the safe house, lying on the uncomfortable bed. I squeezed my eyes shut in anger, because he had not been willing to do anything for me. He had chosen duty to his country and his despicable führer over his love for me, and he had sent me away, back to England.

  Where were we now, as a result of that? Not growing old together. The love we once shared was gone, out of reach.

  Yet . . . even through the heat of my anger, I prayed that he was safe.

  Please, God. Let him be alive.

  And please let me find him again.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  July 1944

  If any of us had been caught in France listening to a BBC broadcast on the wireless, we would have been arrested. That was why we disguised our radio as a small spice cupboard that stood on a shelf in the kitchen of the safe house.

  Each night, Armand, Deidre, and I brought it down to the table and listened to news about the Allies as they made their way deeper into France, and thousands more troops and supplies poured into the country. We also listened to personal messages, in code, that were intended specifically for us and other SOE agents in France. If the BBC announcer said, “The goat’s milk is green for Sunday,” or “Grandmother’s pillow fell out the window,” we understood that it was confirmation of a scheduled supplies drop, and we would set to work organizing a reception committee.

  In other ways, the weeks that followed the bridge bombing passed by in a slow-moving blur. There were days when nothing happened, and Deidre and I would loiter about in local cafés, eavesdropping on conversations, hoping to pick up something useful that might help our cause and give us something to do. Other days consisted of pure terror from sunup to sundown, when I carried documents or microfilm past Nazi checkpoints or boarded a train full of Gestapo officers when I was on my way to meet another operative and deliver a message.

  All the while, I found myself looking at each German soldier’s face, searching for the one I knew. But he was never there. I often wondered if I should accept the possibility that he was dead. This was war, after all. Casualties were a daily occurrence. But I simply couldn’t accept that. I wanted the dream to continue.

  So, I focused instead on harassing the Germans with what Armand liked to call “mosquito bite operations,” in which we cut telegraph lines, poured sand into oil containers, or changed road signs to point in the wrong direction and send a German convoy of supplies into parts unknown. Some folks back in London considered such tactics to be ungentlemanly warfare, but there was nothing gentlemanly about Hitler and his despicable circle of thugs, so we considered it fair game.

  “The donkey fell down the blue stairs,” the BBC announcer said in a dry tone one warm summer evening as we sat around the wireless with a bottle of brandy between us.

  “There it is.” Armand stood up from his chair and kissed Deidre hard on the lips.

  It was the coded personal message we had been waiting for, which confirmed that the supplies we had requested would be delivered to the prearranged drop zone the following night. We could expect more grenades, detonators, and Sten guns to distribute to the Resistance fighters we had been recruiting, and there were more of them joining us every day, now that the Allies were here.

  “Simone, you must go now to the dead letter box and leave a message for Evergreen,” Armand said. “It will be a large shipment, one of the biggest yet, so we’ll need eight to ten men with carts and wagons.”

  “I’ll take care of it,” I replied with renewed purpose after many days with no word from London. We’d all been growing restless and frustrated, but now things were finally happening.

  Though we were celebratory and invigorated by the expected delivery, we were by no means cavalier about it. As I waited the following night in the dark forest, listening for the sound of approaching aircraft, I sat down on a fallen tree and took a moment to reflect on the fact that the pilots and aircrews were endangering their lives by delivering these supplies to us. My thoughts drifted to Jack Cooper, and I hoped he was still flying safely back and forth across the Channel and that he hadn’t been shot down or captured since we last saw each other many weeks ago. Perhaps he would be flying one of these airplanes tonight.

  The thought of him made me feel wi
stful as I gazed up at the full moon and stars. I was alone now. Deidre had gone off to wait with Armand on the far side of the field, and the French resisters were gathered in the woods, a short distance away. It was peaceful, and I wished the rest of Europe could be at peace like this too. What a shame that there were terrible acts of violence being carried out at that very moment in wartime prisons and other places. Far too many places . . .

  “It’s quite a night,” someone said in a German accent, and my heart skipped a beat, because I thought, for a fleeting instant, that it was Ludwig. How many times had I dreamed of such a reunion, when he would find me somehow, and I would be surprised and overjoyed to see him? But when I looked up, I saw that it was only Hans. His German accent was so achingly familiar to me.

  “Yes, it’s beautiful,” I replied, tucking a stray lock of hair behind my ear.

  Hans sat down beside me and reached into his pocket for a silver flask. He unscrewed the cap and offered it to me.

  “Thank you.” I took a generous swig and winced at the searing sensation down my throat. Then I handed the flask back to him. “No wonder they call you a ghost. I didn’t hear you approach.”

  He tipped the flask back and took a sip as well. “I’ve learned to be light on my feet.” After replacing the cap, he slid it into his pocket.

  We sat together in silence, listening to the whisper of a light breeze through the leafy treetops.

  “Do you ever wonder,” Hans said, “why Hitler ever needed anything more than this? Why couldn’t he have just been a happy sort of man? Grateful for a simple life?”

  I looked up at the star-speckled sky. “I was just thinking something similar myself, wishing that everyone could feel this kind of peace tonight.” I paused and leaned back on my hands. “I hate war. And I hate Hitler.”

  He took some time absorbing that. “I presume you lost someone.”

  “Yes. Early on, in the London bombings. First my father, then my twin sister and her husband.”

  It was the first time I had revealed any sort of truth about my identity or broken cover. Normally I would have said that my husband had been killed, because I was supposed to be Vivian, a war widow. But here in France, I was just Simone.

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” Hans replied. “I don’t think I know anyone who hasn’t lost at least one person they cared about in this war.”

  “What about you?”

  He rested his elbows on his knees and gazed across the field. “You all have code names.” I thought for a moment he was trying to change the subject, but he quickly continued. “I’ve kept my real German name because that’s the name my mother gave me, and I want to respect where I come from, because she’s dead now. So is my father and my brothers and sisters.”

  “What happened to them?”

  “They were all sent to camps in ’41.”

  I watched his profile and felt the substance of his pain. “But you got away?”

  “Ja. I used to think I was saved by love, because that’s what I was chasing after when the Germans raided our building. But I’ve come to realize that it was luck, not love. Otherwise, my family would still be here.”

  “What happened, exactly?”

  He shifted slightly on the log. “I left Berlin to be with a girl I’d met in a library. We were both reading the same book at the same table, and she told me she was in Berlin only for a few days, visiting her grandmother. Then it turned out that our grandmothers were friends. This was before the war, mind you, when the future still seemed like something that could actually exist, but that didn’t turn out to be the case. Not for Jews.”

  “She was Jewish as well?”

  “Ja, and while I was on a train, traveling back to Berlin after visiting her in Hamburg, my family was arrested, and hers not long after. Everyone was gone, taken away, just like that.” He snapped his fingers.

  “I’m so sorry.”

  He reached into his pocket and withdrew the flask again, took a sip, and offered it to me. This time I declined, because I had to stay sharp for the supplies drop.

  “She was very beautiful,” he said. “I wanted to marry her, and our families were happy for us.”

  “Did you ever find out where she was sent? Is there a chance she might still be alive?”

  I’d been living with a similar hope for the past four years.

  Hans shook his head. “She was gassed, along with her entire family, at an extermination camp in Poland. The same turned out to be true for my own family.”

  “You know this for sure?” I wanted to cling to the possibility that some of them may have survived. Perhaps they escaped.

  “There’s no doubt. The Nazis keep meticulous records.”

  How he had access to those records was a mystery to me, but he was the famous Gray Ghost. He must have very clever methods and useful contacts.

  Hans stood up abruptly and walked to the edge of the field. “I hear something. They’re coming.”

  Leaping to my feet, I caught the distant drone of approaching aircraft and dug into my rucksack for my torch.

  Already, Armand and Deidre were running onto the field, so I hurried to join them. We stood in the shape of an L and pointed our lights toward the sky to indicate the location for the drop. Within moments, four planes released their cargo simultaneously. Down came the canisters, carried by white silk parachutes, like billowing clouds in the night sky. Our friends from the French underground emerged from the forest with carts and wagons, and we worked together to collect our bounty.

  I didn’t know what happened to Hans after we sat together on the log and spoke about our lost loved ones. He simply disappeared when the planes flew overhead, and I regretted that I hadn’t said goodbye to him before I dashed off.

  The following morning, our conversation felt like something out of a dream. It hardly seemed real.

  There was no explanation for why I ended up in the hands of the Gestapo a week after the drop, nor was there any warning.

  A few days earlier, Deidre and I had moved out of our cozy little flat in Saint-Jean-de-Braye and found cheaper lodgings in Fay-aux-Loges, simply because a man we didn’t know had watched us too closely in a bar one night after we made the mistake of leaning in to speak to each other, somewhat conspiratorially. (We were only talking about Rita Hayworth, but appearances were everything.)

  The gentleman was French, not a German soldier, but there were many collaborators in France who aimed to improve upon their own circumstances by snitching on fellow countrymen for the smallest infractions. When we left the bar, another man followed us, but we managed to shake him before returning to the flat.

  Nevertheless, fearing that we had been compromised, we packed up and left town the next morning.

  But it wasn’t enough. A week after the drop, Deidre and I were awakened at two in the morning by a violent pounding at the door. We sat up just as it was kicked open and two uniformed Gestapo agents burst into the room. We leaped from our beds and backed into the far wall, clasping each other’s hands. Two of the men had machine guns trained on our faces, while a third man entered and shouted, “Papers please!” He wore spectacles, and his cheeks were badly scarred.

  Deidre and I both hurried to our handbags to produce our identity papers, which the man looked over with a dark air of suspicion.

  “Search the room,” he said to the guards. They immediately set about opening drawers, checking under the beds, and swiping books off shelves. One of them lifted my pillow and found my double-edged knife, still in its sheath. He held it aloft.

  The officer in charge narrowed his eyes at me. “Tsk, tsk, tsk, Fräulein. Weapons like this are very incriminating.”

  I shrugged and allowed the silky fabric of my nightgown to fall lightly off my shoulder. “A girl can’t be too careful.”

  He strode forward, his heavy boots pounding across the plank floor, and slapped me across the face. The sting left me trembling.

  “I did not give you permission to speak. But speak you will.
Get dressed. Both of you.”

  “Why?” Deidre sobbed, playing the part of an innocent, frightened young Frenchwoman. “We did not do anything, monsieur!”

  The officer regarded her with loathing, then turned to leave. “If they resist, shoot them.”

  Deidre and I quickly got dressed while the guards held us at gunpoint.

  We were taken in handcuffs to a Gestapo prison in Orléans, where our handbags were emptied onto a desk and searched. Then we were dragged down a steep flight of stairs and shoved into separate holding cells. The guard removed my cuffs and walked out, and the heavy iron door clanged shut behind him. I was now alone in the cold, damp cell, shaking with fear and ire.

  They hadn’t asked us any questions yet, and the waiting was insufferable, but it was the middle of the night. Perhaps they simply wanted to pour gasoline on our fears. I remembered what the dispatcher had said to me on the plane. The worst fear is in the anticipation.

  There was a small, narrow cot in the cell, but I couldn’t lie down. I needed to think. Was escape possible? I searched all around, but we were below ground, and there was no window. I moved to the door, but it was impenetrable, with only a small rectangular opening.

  I began to pace, chewing on a thumbnail, wondering who had given us up or what mistakes we had made that alerted the enemy to our presence in Fay-aux-Loges.

  Had it been the man who watched us in the wine bar the week before? Or perhaps our new landlady had been listening to one of our conversations through a hole in the wall. Had any other members of our circuit been captured? Armand? Benoit? Our friends in the French underground? Perhaps one of them was arrested and had cracked under the torture and given up every last one of us.

  Forty-eight hours. That’s how long we were expected to hold out to give our fellow agents time to learn of our arrest and disappear.

  I wondered fretfully what was happening to Deidre. Was she safe? How strong would she be?