by Alan Evans
Work in the yards was not over for the day but there were a few clerks and other staff on their way home. Some of them used the road along the side of the basin, the way Engel had come, crossing the Southern Entrance to the basin by the swing bridge and so going on into the town. He saw the Guillard girl in the trickle of men and women. He was not surprised that she had finished work early. She was personal assistant to a department head who said proudly that Mlle. Guillard worked twice as fast and twice as accurately as anyone else. And because of her knowledge of the dockyard and its workings she was of far more value than any secretary only trained to type and file papers.
Engel stood in front of her and saluted. “Guten Abend, Fräulein.”
“Monsieur.” The girl answered him coldly and in French. Her German was good. It was not as fluent as Engel’s French but good enough for her to interpret when German officers visited the yard. She spoke it then as part of her duties but would not use it now, Engel knew.
No matter. He had a reputation here and it was not for amiability and courtesy. Nevertheless, he smiled at Catherine Guillard and asked pleasantly, in French, “I trust you enjoyed your weekend?”
“I spent some days in Paris. I have an aunt there who is elderly.” The answer came curt.
Engel knew the girl visited that aunt at irregular intervals. He also knew she was curt because he was a German and she hated him. He was pleasant to her, despite her hatred, for the simple reason that he liked her. That had not kept him from his duty. Catherine Guillard held a position of some minor importance so he had checked on the existence of the aunt in Paris, vetted the girl herself and even kept her under surveillance for some time. There was nothing to cause even a breath of suspicion: his instinct told him she was all right and his instinct rarely failed him.
“Paris is a beautiful city. I envy you.” He stepped aside and saluted again as she walked past him and on towards the bridge.
Catherine’s heart thumped, as it did on every encounter with Engel. He was dangerous and she had told Quartermain so. Hauptmann Engel was the one who had seen at once that the gates of the Normandie dock were a temptation to sabotage, who had set up the surveillance of the engineers who operated them and who had neatly swept up the gate operators when they attempted their first act of sabotage, just before they could carry it out.
But it was Grünwald of the Gestapo who had interrogated and deported them.
*
Engel walked on to his office. A sentry stood at the door, wearing on his chest the metal gorget of the Feldgendarmerie , the Military Police. He saluted and Engel lifted a hand smartly to the peak of his cap as he entered the building. Inside was a hall, uncarpeted, and stairs led up from it to the two floors above, both of them empty as Engel wanted them. He liked the quietness, and the sense of space.
On the left of the hall a door led to the guardroom where an N.C.O. and six men of the Feldgendarmerie were always on duty. They supplied the sentry, and men when Engel needed them in a hurry. The door was shut, was never left open, and the men inside were never noisy.
Engel passed through a door on the right of the hall and into his office. He took off the high-peaked cap and dropped it on his desk. His office windows looked out over the basin to the U-boat pens but the curtains were drawn now and the lights lit. Another desk with a typewriter stood against one wall, close by the fire where an orderly now knelt, stoking it with huge lumps of coal. That desk was used by Private Pianka, who now lay sleeping on a bench by the door. Engel ignored him and the orderly and went to a cupboard behind his desk. He unlocked it with a key on his chain, took a bottle from a row inside and poured cognac into a tumbler. When it yielded a bare inch of golden liquid he swore, then hurled the empty bottle past the orderly’s ear to burst against the wall like a grenade. He opened another bottle. The orderly, pale and staring, scurried out like a frightened rabbit.
Engel terrified him. That kind of incident and the opinions Engel expressed of the Führer and various generals, openly and loudly, had convinced the entire German garrison at St. Nazaire that he was mad.
Pianka woke when the bottle burst, sat up and rubbed at his square face. Then he stood, tugged down on his jacket and at once the green-grey of his uniform settled neatly on his body. He was stolid, unimaginative and faithful. A puckered scar from a shrapnel wound narrowed his right eye, giving him a sinister appearance that was totally misleading. He was forty-eight years old and still a private.
Without his cap, his hair showing iron grey and his long face lined, Engel might have been Pianka’s contemporary rather than twenty-three years his junior. He manoeuvred his body into the armchair and lifted his stiff right leg to rest its booted foot on the desk. The leg ached, as it always did. The knee was held rigid, locked with a metal plate but he was very lucky to have kept the leg at all. In Russia, where butchery passed for surgery, he had been leading guerilla columns behind the Russian lines and the pitcher had gone too often to the well. Pianka, his driver then as now, had brought him out, Pianka with a dressing over his eye, Engel with his leg splinted to a rifle.
Engel sniffed at the cognac, sipped, drank, sighed and reached out for the bottle.
Pianka said, “Go easy on that stuff.”
Engel ignored him and refilled the glass. He lay back with eyes half-closed, his long body relaxed, the ache in his leg easing. He thought this was the best part of the day, when he could take a drink quietly. Later Pianka would drive him to the Officers’ Mess where he would eat dinner, alone.
They heard a car draw up outside. Pianka, eye to a crack at the side of the curtains, said, “It’s that shit, Grünwald.”
Engel did not stir.
Grünwald entered, walking quickly, brisk, efficient. He was a short man, in his early thirties but running to fat that was not quite hidden by the carefully tailored dark grey suit. He was freshly shaved, his hair parted, oiled and brushed smooth. He halted before Engel, frowning portentously. “I’ve not yet had a reply to a memorandum I sent to you a week ago.”
Engel gave no sign of hearing him and Grünwald said, on a rising note of anger, “It concerned matters affecting our common duty.”
Their common duty was to stamp out French Resistance but they had not succeeded. There was a sporadic but continuous succession of minor acts of sabotage, telephone wires and railway lines cut. Engel had plotted the incidents on his map and was convinced the Resistance cell was in St. Nazaire. He reflected now that the very word sabotage was a French invention, dating from the railway strike of 1910 when they ripped out the cross-ties, the ‘sabots’. They were at it still.
Engel was Abwehr, Military Intelligence, specifically counter-espionage. Grünwald was Gestapo, and confined to secret police duties. But Engel knew Himmler wanted the Gestapo to take over from the Abwehr and run the whole counter-espionage operation, and was pressing the Fiihrer for this. Admiral Canaris, head of Abwehr, was fighting him but Engel believed that Canaris would lose because Hitler and Himmler were two of a kind. God help them all, he thought, when Himmler makes the rules.
That day had not yet come, however, so Grünwald made a great show of cooperating with Engel. Engel, on the other hand, cooperated only when he had to, and made that clear. It was a rare event.
Now he murmured, “Duty? The only memo I saw was about an office. I’m not a billeting officer so I sent it on.”
Grünwald said impatiently, “I spoke to the General about the empty floors above here. He said we must settle the matter by agreement.”
“I have settled it. I’m in possession.”
“That is not good enough. I need at least one of those floors for members of my staff.”
“One? And what about the basement?”
There were cells in the basement. Grünwald scented negotiation and agreed, “It would be useful.”
Engel shook his head. “No, it wouldn’t. There’s no bathtub.” One of the Gestapo methods of interrogation was to plunge the victim’s head under water until he was on the
point of drowning. Repeatedly. Until the answers came. Engel detested all such methods.
Grünwald slid away from the subject. “My staff has increased in recent months, I need further accommodation and this building—”
Engel’s boots slammed to the floor and he stood up. Grünwald started back from the towering figure but Engel said only, “I’m hungry.”
Grünwald ignored that and persisted: “I want a definite answer on the matter.”
Engel put away the bottle and locked the cupboard. “All right. I am definitely going to eat.” He paused, watching Grünwald, who stood thin-lipped and glaring. Engel said, “You want a serious answer, so I’ll give you one. I think it’s incredible that a man should be building a little paper empire when we’re living in the middle of a hostile population, we’re at war with Britain and Russia—and now, with America in the war also, two or three million Americans will be over here in a year or so to help all the others beat the hell out of us. And you want another office.” Engel walked to the door, flicked at the light switches and strode down the hall. Grünwald was left in the firelit gloom with a grinning Private Pianka. The Gestapo man muttered angrily under his breath and hurried after Engel. Pianka chuckled, locked the office and followed.
Grünwald’s Mercedes was outside, a black and gleaming monster. Lights glowed inside it and showed Leutnant Horstmann sitting at the wheel. He was Grünwald’s aide, tall, blond, muscular, and handsome. Engel thought he would look fine on a recruiting poster and that was all he was good for. He was a wooden-head, but clever enough to keep clear of the Russian Front or any other front. In the back of the car sat Ilse, Grünwald’s wife. She was only twenty and when Grünwald first brought her from Berlin she had been sulky and sullen, but she had settled down now and seemed happy enough. She wore a fur coat, open to show her dress and her long legs. The dress had a low neckline and, as Engel saluted, Ilse leaned forward, gave him a wide smile and let him see into the valley between her breasts.
Engel grinned sardonically. As far as he as a person was concerned it meant nothing: the girl simply couldn’t help herself. Then Grünwald stood before him, tugging on his gloves. Horstmann started the car and Grünwald said savagely, “We will talk again, Hauptmann Engel!”
His voice was barely audible above the noise of the engine but Engel heard it and the menace in it. He said, “We will not. Listen, Grünwald, because I won’t tell you again—I wangled this office for myself in order to get away from the Kommandatur and you and a few more bastards like you. I keep it. You shut up and build your empire elsewhere. Now go to hell.”
Grünwald did not answer, Engel’s cold blue eyes stifling speech. He found himself in the Mercedes and across the bridge and into the town before he could recover. Then he told himself there would be a day of reckoning. And meanwhile…Meanwhile he would bide his time and make his plans.
He told Horstmann, “I have work to do. Drop me at the Kommandatur and take my wife home. Then go and eat. Fetch the car for me in two hours.”
*
Pianka said, “He’s dangerous.”
Engel nodded. “Very.”
“What if he finds out about his wife and her pretty boy?” Pianka opened the door of the ramshackle old Citroën that Engel used. Grünwald’s Mercedes looked what it was: official. The Citroën could have been driven into town by a farmer and that was why Engel used it, to see without being seen.
He climbed into the front passenger seat and settled the stiff leg. “Let us hope he doesn’t. At least, not till we’re ready. Ilse is our—what was that word Rudi Moller used?”
“Moller? Your friend the Schnellboot captain?”
“That’s right. And the word was sheet-anchor. It can save you when the storm breaks. Ilse is our sheet-anchor.”
And both he and Pianka knew only too well that the storm was building.
4: Landscape with Figures
Ward took his ship to sea in the forenoon of Monday, 26th January. The convoy formed up off Southend in two long columns: only two because the channel swept clear of mines along the East Coast was narrow. Arundel, Boston’s sister ship and the senior, was far ahead, leading the twin columns. Ward, as usual, tagged on at the rear as whipper-in
He stood at the front of the bridge, hands jammed comfortably in the pockets of his bright orange duffel coat. Another day, another convoy. A yellow sun in a heavy sky that could hold snow; it was cold enough and would be a sight colder further north. Forty-eight hours from now they would be opening the Firth of Forth.
Forty-eight hours: his mind switched back that length of time to Quartermain in the gloom of the car, saying, “I sent her back to France.” There had been silence then. It was hard for Ward to grasp that the fair-haired girl with whom he’d walked and talked that afternoon would be in German-held France that night and in mortal danger.
Quartermain broke the silence, carefully dispassionate: “I don’t like discussing personal matters but I must. You’ve only known this girl for a few hours. It isn’t serious, is it?”
Ward shook his head. “No, sir. I just—like her. When I found I had an extra day I thought I’d take her out for the evening again and I was going to look her up next time I was in London.”
“Urn!” Quartermain lifted his wrist to eye his watch and muttered, “I’ll be cutting it fine…” To Ward he said, “I can’t tell you to forget her, though it might be as well if you did—”
“I won’t.” Ward looked round at the admiral. “If you get a chance—I don’t know how you people operate—I’d like you to tell her so, and that I’m keeping my fingers crossed for her.”
Quartermain thought about it, not liking the idea, finding it unprofessional. Still—“It might be possible.” He would go no further. Wireless messages were of necessity brief because long transmissions invited pin-pointing by German radio direction finding stations, capture and death. But a few words like that might mean the difference between despair and hope, particularly to a young girl under continuous strain, a reminder that there was another world where sheer survival did not depend upon acting a part.
The Wren dropped Quartermain and his suitcase at Euston then took Ward back to his hotel. He did not know the workings of Quartermain’s mind, had only that grudging: “It might be possible.” He drank a few beers in the bar, tried to read but could not concentrate, tried to sleep but lay wide-awake. The next day he went back to his ship.
Now he crossed the bridge to the port wing and looked back along the narrow length of Boston. There were gunners servicing the two 20mm Oerlikons mounted on the port side by the second and third of the four funnels. The rapid-firing Oerlikons were a vital part of Boston’s armament. When the Admiralty took over the fifty ‘four stacker’ destroyers from the United States Navy for escort work they had drastically revised their armament. Three of the original 4-inch guns were ripped out along with nine of the twelve torpedo-tubes. Now each destroyer carried a 4-inch gun on the fo’c’sle, the two Oerlikons either side, three 21-inch torpedo-tubes abaft the funnels and a 12-pounder high-angle gun in the stern. This last, together with the Oerlikons, could be used for anti-aircraft defence.
It was not a fearsome set of teeth but all the Navy could spare. Ward wished they had taken out the last three torpedo-tubes and given him another pair of 20mm guns. The tubes had not been used and it was the opinion of the men of the ‘four stackers’ that they never would be, while the Oerlikons were in action on every convoy. The gunners worked quickly about them now, hands deft on the oiled machinery. The keenness of their eyes and the speed of their reactions might mean the difference between life and death for many aboard this ship.
Once Boston was clear of the Thames estuary Ward would order the guns to loose off a few rounds, to make sure everything worked correctly and so that the gunners could get their hands and eyes in. There were reports that an E-boat, possibly Dirty Bill, had sunk another ship off Cromer last night. The E-boats worked out of the Hook of Holland.
Joe Krueger sai
d, “Starboard column’s wandering a bit, sir.”
“Send ’em a smoke signal.”
Impassive as an Indian, Joe replied, “No fire, sir, and my blanket’s below.” He took all the old jests without a blink. He would point out, and with truth, that his New England accent was closer to that of the BBC than those of the crew with its leavening of Geordies, Scots, and Cockneys.
Ward turned forward, lifted the glasses to his eyes. “We’ll run up and chivvy ’em.” He stooped over the voicepipe. “Starboard ten. Fifteen knots.”
“Starboard ten…ten of starboard wheel on, sir. Revolutions for fifteen knots.”
Ward straightened as Boston heeled under helm, turning to head out to seaward of the starboard column and then scurry up its length, herding the ships into better station. They were bound for the Firth of Forth. Ward frowned thoughtfully. Quartermain had gone to Scotland but to the West Coast. Cousin Patrick, too, was in Scotland—somewhere. What had his mother said? Working on landscapes?
Had Patrick wangled himself a job as an artist for the Army? Odd. But Patrick was always an odd one, sarcastic, irresponsible, idle. He stood about six feet but Jack could hardly remember Patrick standing. He was more usually slumped in an armchair or lounging against a bar. He once said to Jack, “You’re welcome to the Navy, old man. It beats me what you see in it. There are easier ways of making a living, if you have to, which I do not. I suppose life is like an ocean liner, really. There are the earnest toilers, chaps like yourself, to make the thing go. And there are the passengers of which I am one; first class, thank God.”