Aurore

by Graham Hurley

  ‘How?’ Klimt was staring at him. ‘How did it happen?’

  ‘She ran towards the wire. She knew the rules. She knew about the forbidden zone. It seems she threw down her beret before the guards opened fire. She was warned, of course. They always shout.’

  ‘And then?’

  Schellenberg glanced across at his attaché. Apparently Erwin had talked to the people at Ravensbrück.

  ‘We believe she crouched beside the beret,’ Erwin said. ‘At first she refused to move. When the guards came to drag her away she died on the wire.’

  ‘Shot?’

  ‘Electrocuted. My sympathies, Bjorn.’

  Klimt was trying to absorb the news. War was supposed to harden you to shock, to pain, to grief. He was staring at Erwin Busch. The beret, he thought. The canvas in the gallery. The hawk riding high above the fields beyond the bedroom window. And the searing jolt that would have brought such a life to an end. Impossible to imagine. Impossible to accept.

  Schellenberg was reaching for his wine.

  ‘You met our friends from MI5?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What else did you discuss?’

  Klimt shrugged. His mind had closed down. He could think of nothing but Hélène hanging on the wire. A death like that was supposed to be quick.

  ‘Angell, perhaps? Young Billy?’

  ‘Angell?’ Klimt was trying to focus, trying to think.

  ‘Yes. Did his name come up?’

  ‘It did. Because you sent them a message. About Dachau.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘They wanted to find out what I knew about him.’

  ‘And where did that lead?’

  ‘I told them I’d never heard of him. They made some more enquiries. It seems he has a problem. A mental problem. That’s why he jumped from the aircraft.’

  ‘You believed that?’

  ‘Absolutely. It’s what he told me. He’d had enough of the war. He’d seen too much. He was finished. Thank God he found Hélène.’

  ‘And the rest of it? The story about his brother? Dunkirk? That was true too? You believed it?’

  ‘Of course. You know that.’

  ‘Indeed.’

  Schellenberg motioned to Erwin. Erwin opened his briefcase and extracted a folder. Inside was a long telex. Schellenberg gave it a glance and then pushed it across.

  ‘From Huber,’ he said. ‘In Dachau.’

  Klimt studied the first page. This was a transcript. It must have come from a recording. It seemed jumbled, slightly chaotic. He could sense the moments when Billy paused for breath, trying to remember a fact or a name or a date. The prompts from Huber were remarkably few. A textbook confession.

  ‘Ein Spiel, ja?’ Spiel meant ‘game’. Schellenberg’s voice was soft. In situations like these, he had the touch of the master. Deft. Silky. Implacable.

  ‘You were at the chateau,’ he said. ‘You must have known.’

  ‘I didn’t.’

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘Believe what you like. It makes no difference.’

  ‘That makes you stupid. You’ve never been fooled before. Why now?’ He nodded at the telex. ‘Why this?’

  ‘Because the story was very clever. And the boy was very good.’

  ‘So you never suspected? Not once?’

  Klimt held his gaze.

  ‘I made some extra enquiries in London,’ he said at last. ‘And Huber’s got it right.’

  ‘But you didn’t know before?’

  ‘No.’

  Schellenberg nodded but Klimt knew he didn’t believe him. In every possible respect he was finished.

  Schellenberg motioned to Erwin again. A second file. Inside, a single sheet of paper.

  ‘Read it please.’ Schellenberg was uncapping a fountain pen. ‘Word about your expedition has reached the Führer. Alas, someone has to pay for this. In blood.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Read it.’

  Erwin passed the sheet of paper to Klimt. In three short paragraphs, immaculately typed, it detailed how Oberst Bjorn Klimt had taken it upon himself to make contacts through Abwehr channels with key politicians in London. How he’d tried to pave the way for separate peace negotiations. And how he now admitted that this act of defeatism should warrant the harshest punishment.

  He looked at the proffered pen. He knew he would be signing his death warrant.

  ‘You sent me, Walther,’ he murmured. ‘You know you did.’

  Schellenberg said nothing. His eyes never left Klimt’s face. Erwin was looking at his hands. Klimt knew it was hopeless. He shrugged and took the pen. It was a Montblanc. A thousand dollars, at the very least. Nathan, he thought, probably had half a dozen.

  Klimt read the confession again. Another little victory for the SD. Another scalp to hang on Himmler’s belt.

  Schellenberg still had the pen. Klimt took it and scribbled his name at the foot of the page. The nib moved sweetly beneath his fingers. Done.

  Erwin took the confession and blew the ink dry on the signature. Then Schellenberg asked whether he might have any special requests.

  How quaint, Klimt thought. The condemned man. He gave the question some thought.

  ‘Billy Angell,’ he said at last. ‘Send him back.’

  Erwin scribbled himself a note. Then Schellenberg produced a package from his own suitcase. Klimt recognised the torn wrapping paper. This was the bundle of Reichsmarks he’d negotiated on Hélène’s behalf for the services of her stallion.

  ‘We recovered the money from Madame Lafosse’s apartment,’ Schellenberg said. ‘I’m proposing we go downstairs. You might care to place a bet or two. Roulette might be amusing. Winnings to the Winter Appeal.’

  Another game, Klimt thought. They never stop. Not in my world. Not in Walther Schellenberg’s. Not in London. The Winter Appeal raised money for the armies in the east. These were men who’d be frozen to death by Christmas.

  Klimt nodded his assent. Schellenberg gave him the money. Klimt wanted to know how much.

  ‘One hundred and twenty thousand Reichsmarks, give or take. Enough for a blanket or two, Bjorn.’

  Klimt said nothing. He followed Erwin downstairs. There was an empty chair at the crowded roulette table and he wondered whether that was pre-planned. Schellenberg had a reputation for attention to the smallest details. Truly a survivor.

  Klimt took the seat. Erwin wanted to know how many chips to buy.

  ‘Spend the lot.’

  ‘All of it?’

  ‘Yes, please.’

  Erwin glanced at Schellenberg. Schellenberg offered the faintest nod. Erwin picked his way between the tables, heading for the cashier’s window. Klimt was looking round. He’d already spotted three men taking an unusual interest in him. They were all wearing civilian suits but the military haircuts gave them away. He’s got the place surrounded, Klimt thought. More men on the exits. And doubtless a car waiting outside. In Walther’s world you left nothing to chance.

  Erwin returned with a cardboard box full of chips. Play around the table had stopped. Gamblers were staring at the contents of the box.

  The croupier was looking at Klimt.

  ‘You want to place a bet, sir?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘The lot. Everything.’

  ‘On what?’

  ‘Red.’

  The croupier was looking troubled. A bet of this size? Crazy.

  ‘You know the odds?’

  ‘Of course I do. All my life I’ve known the odds.’

  The croupier shrugged.

  ‘Place a chip on red, sir. This will signify your entire holding. Are you sure this is what you want to do?’

  Klimt nodded. He was looking at a woman across the table. A stranger. Beautiful. And she was miming applause. His eyes returned to the croupier. The croupier spun the wheel and released the ball. The ball circled the wheel and danced from number to number as the wheel began to slow. Finally it came to a halt.
/>   Klimt smiled. Black.

  40

  Billy Angell was released from Dachau concentration camp three days later. Erwin, who handled the arrangements, had him flown to a Spanish airfield at Algeciras. From there he was delivered to the British at the heavily guarded crossing point into Gibraltar. An accompanying note from SD headquarters in Berlin presented Oberst Klimt’s compliments to the Director of Counter-Espionage at MI5 and requested safe passage for Wireless Operator Angell back to England.

  By now, MI5 knew that Klimt was dead. The Director convened an emergency meeting ahead of Angell’s arrival. Enigma intercepts had revealed that Agent Thesp had been blown. Under heavy interrogation, presumably at Dachau, he’d revealed every detail of the Dunkirk plant. The issue now was whether the Germans had managed to turn him.

  Making space for a double agent was an opportunity as well as a hazard. Double agents could themselves be turned, thus becoming triple agents. But would Billy Angell ever want to set foot in Germany again? Or even France?

  Ursula Barton, with her fluent German, was alarmed by the decrypted material. Billy, she said at once, must have had a difficult time. People he’d got to know at the chateau had been killed in front of him. A survivor, a Pole, had met a similar fate at Dachau. He’d grown fond of Hélène Lafosse and she, too, had disappeared without trace. For an ex-Quaker with a troubled conscience, the secret world probably had limited appeal.

  ‘So are we sending him back to Bomber Command?’ This from the Director. ‘Would they even want him?’

  There was no consensus around the table. The Director announced that they’d await his arrival for the full debrief. Only then could they make any kind of decision about where Angell’s future lay.

  Two hours later, Ursula knocked on the Director’s door. Billy Angell, she said, lay heavily on her conscience. It had been her decision to suggest the original approach, and she bore as much responsibility for what had happened as anyone else in the organisation. With this in mind, she’d commissioned a bit of additional research in the military archives.

  ‘Archives?’

  ‘Here, sir.’

  She slipped a folder onto the Director’s desk. He quickly scanned the contents, then looked up. He was visibly shocked.

  ‘Christ’, he said. ‘So what do we do now?’

  *

  Billy Angell found himself on a converted bomber for the flight back to the UK. Six hours in the air extinguished any flicker of a desire to fly again. The smells, the roar of the engine, the intense cold were all too familiar. Another world he was only too happy to leave behind him.

  A car was waiting for him at an RAF airfield on the north-west edge of London. He knew he was going to meet the people from MI5 again. They’d told him so at Gibraltar. Indeed, they’d treated him with a degree of respect. A secret agent stepping in from the front line. One of ours. Billy gazed out at the interminable suburbs in the last of the sunset. If they’d only known, he thought.

  Ursula met him outside a house in Mayfair. He’d never been there before. She took him inside and then up to a spacious reception room on the first floor. Expecting trouble from the start, Billy realised she was making a fuss of him. A pot of tea, even a slice of jam sponge.

  ‘Home-made,’ she said. ‘And you’re looking at someone who hasn’t baked a cake since the war began.’

  Billy was waiting for the inevitable. Any minute now, he knew he’d have to face the rest of them. Tam. The instructors who’d briefed him before his flight to France. Maybe even the Director. Everyone, in short, whom he’d failed. When Ursula enquired whether he was ready for the post-mortem, he shuddered at her choice of phrase.

  ‘Of course,’ he said.

  In the event, it was only Tam and the Director. To his relief, they seemed to know the whole story already. They even knew about Dachau, and about the morning they’d killed the old man, and when they went through his confession, the account he’d offered Huber, there wasn’t a hint of reproach. Operation Aurore, they told him, had been a brave attempt. But, all too sadly, it had ended in failure. Failure, to Billy, hardly did justice to the past few weeks but he was grateful, none the less, for their forbearance.

  The debrief over, the Director asked him what he wanted to do. Billy had thought a great deal about this very question over the past couple of days.

  ‘I have a friend in Devon,’ he said.

  ‘She’d look after you? For the time being?’

  ‘He. His name’s Don.’

  ‘I see…’ An exchange of glances around the table. Tam had evidently kept Don’s existence to himself.

  Ursula was the first to mention his mother. They’d been in touch with her, told her just a little about the circumstances surrounding Billy’s return. Your son’s been exceptionally brave, they’d told her. And we feel he might appreciate a bit of a rest.

  ‘So what did she say?’

  ‘She said she’d be very glad to have you home.’

  ‘And Ralph? Her new husband?’

  ‘She never mentioned him.’ The Director steepled his fingers. ‘We’d be very happy to run you down. Somerset, isn’t it?’

  They left the next morning. Ursula was at the wheel. A night’s sleep in a bedroom upstairs in the Mayfair house had made Billy feel a little less nervous and he was happy to let the glorious scenery slip by in silence. Proper conversation, he suspected, was something he wouldn’t be risking for a while. Not even with Don.

  His mother was pleased to see him. The hug felt genuine. She was still clinging to him when Ursula waved goodbye and got back in the car.

  For the next few days the huge house felt like a convalescent home. Ralph was away, tending his factories in the Midlands, and his mother – sensing his reluctance to talk – mostly left him alone. To Billy, her cooking had always been wonderful. Food from the estate – eggs, meat, fresh vegetables – appeared on the table every evening. They ate in the kitchen, just the way they’d always done at home, and as the days extended to a full week Billy began to feel that a return to normal life might just be possible.

  Then came the moment when his mother sat him down in the sunshine on the terrace. There was something they had to discuss. Something important. Billy fought the urge to say no. He was gazing over the estate towards the distant hills that led south to Cheddar Gorge. He didn’t want to talk about the chateau. About Hélène. About Malin. About the constant pressures of pretending to be someone else. His acting days were over. From now on he wanted to be as small and unremarkable and insignificant as possible. He didn’t want either attention or applause. Just getting by from day to day, if it ever happened, would be miracle enough.

  ‘It’s not about any of that, Billy.’

  He looked at her. For the first time he realised she was crying.

  ‘What is it, then?’

  ‘It’s about your father. Your dad.’

  ‘But he’s dead.’

  ‘No, he’s not.’

  ‘He must be.’ Billy was staring at her. ‘You told me he was. You’ve always told me he was. He died in the war. In the trenches. Before I was born. That’s what you said.’

  She shook her head, wiped her eyes, blew her nose. Dad, she explained, had been terribly injured in a battle during the war. It was true that Billy hadn’t even been born. In fact she was seven months pregnant when the Army people allowed her to visit him.

  ‘Where was he?’

  ‘In a big hospital. It was near Southampton. It was where they brought all the injured soldiers across from France.’

  ‘And how was he?’

  ‘Terrible. He was in a terrible state. He’d lost a leg and his right arm but he had no face, Billy. It had gone. All of it. In some ways he was better off dead.’

  Better off dead.

  Billy nodded. Said he understood. It was true. That’s exactly how you’d feel.

  ‘So what happened?’

  ‘They tried to patch him up. They did their best. At least they got him so he could eat, feed
himself, breathe properly.’

  ‘But what do you do without a face?’

  ‘They made him one.’

  ‘Made him one? How do you do that?’

  His mum did her best to explain. She described the metal mask they’d made, how it fitted, how it stayed on. Two years had passed by then. The war was over. Then came the moment when they’d asked him whether he was ready to go home.

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘He said no. He said he couldn’t face any of us. Not strangers. Not you. Not even me. He was ashamed of himself. He didn’t want people looking, asking questions. He just wanted to be left alone.’

  Alone. Yes.

  ‘He stayed in the hospital?’

  ‘Not that one. Not the big one. Another one. Smaller and much closer. A special sort of hospital. For men like him, soldiers who’d been so badly injured.’

  ‘Where is this place?’

  ‘High Cross. It’s half an hour away.’

  ‘And he’s still there?’

  ‘Yes.’ Billy’s mother took his hand, stroked it. ‘Would you like to meet him?’

  *

  They went next day. Ralph had bought Billy’s mum a car, a little Morris, and she picked her way through the country lanes until they slowed for a turn into a sweeping drive. The hospital was smaller and more intimate than Billy had been expecting. It faced south, bathed in the mid-summer sunshine, and Billy caught the bright golden twinkle of light on the faces of the men in wheelchairs, relaxing on the terrace. They were all wearing masks, every single one of them. Billy had been in a production like this before the war. Greek tragedy. Oedipus.

  The Morris came to a halt. Billy’s mum knew the way. The hospital was as bright inside as out. She led Billy through a warren of corridors, greeting nurses by name. A staircase led up to the first floor. Single rooms, left and right. One of the doors was open.

  She paused outside, peeked in, then turned to Billy.

  ‘He’s expecting you,’ she whispered. ‘But I think he might be asleep.’

  She was smiling and Billy realised that she must have been hoping for this moment for years.

  He stepped into the room, nervous about what he might find. The curtains were half pulled against the brightness of the sunshine. The room was a decent size. A cat lay curled on his father’s lap. His dad was a small man, thin. He was wearing trousers and a soft blue shirt. One leg was out straight, supported on a padded foot rest. One sleeve of the shirt was knotted above the elbow. But it was his dad’s face that drew Billy’s attention.