Code Name- Beatriz

by Lou Cadle

  Then she dug through her valise and found the dictionary and studied German vocabulary for a time. The more she could understand, the better an operative she’d be.

  That thought made her go back in her imagination to the night they’d taken Will back. She hadn’t been a good operative then, perhaps. Will wasn’t that important to the war effort. Another sort of person might have left him to be taken to Baumettes.

  But he was important to her, and she couldn’t think of him as only a cog in the war machine. She had gotten lucky that night, or her instincts had served her well. If the man who drove them back to town had studied her face, he’d be able to recognize her on the street. She might be forced to move, to get reassigned to another circuit. Perhaps even the resurrected Monk circuit, which would carry its own dangers. Once a circuit was blown, there was always the risk a traitor was still loose.

  She hadn’t heard any more about the suspected traitor of that circuit, or what had happened to him. Since the plan for the kidnapping, and then Will’s arrest, she had forgotten about all the other irons in the fire of resistance.

  Good thing Will was leaving. Clearly, he was a distraction for her. Her feelings for him had compromised the craft she had been so proud of learning.

  She returned to her German studies with renewed fervor.

  He woke a few hours later, and if anything, his fever seemed worse. She forced more aspirin down him and water, but he still didn’t want an egg.

  “Does any other food appeal?” She’d hate to bother the old woman, but for Will, she’d suffer her scolds and Claude’s wrath.

  “No, nothing.”

  “What can I do for you to make you feel better?”

  “I don’t know.” He laughed weakly. “Make ten days pass. I think that’ll do ‘er.”

  “I wish I could.”

  “I don’t. Then I’ll be gone, and you’ll still be here.” He struggled to sit up. “I don’t want to waste any more time sleeping. Let’s talk again.”

  “Tell me more about Canada. Where else have you visited there? Where did you go on holiday?”

  “I talk all the time about myself. You tell me about you.”

  She thought again about what it might be safe to tell him.

  “You know, I’ve already been tortured by the Gestapo. I didn’t talk then, and I won’t talk if it happens again.”

  “Oh, God, don’t say that. I can’t bear to think of you going through that a second time.”

  “I’m not keen on the idea either.”

  “Here.” She reached back to unclasp her necklace.

  “Are you going to show me a picture of your husband?”

  “What? No,” she said. “I thought we discussed this. It’s my lethal pill. Cyanide.” She finally had the latch undone and handed him the locket. “It’s yours if you want it.”

  He hesitated. “You need it. And besides, I prefer wearing cameos to lockets.”

  She shook her head at his sense of humor. “I won’t use it now.”

  “No?”

  “No. You made it through torture. I believe I can. And more—I feel I have something to live for.”

  “You always had something to live for. Everything, in fact. Life.”

  “Yes, but I feel it now. You’ve made me see life again. I’m happy for the first time since….”

  “Since?”

  She struggled to be candid. “I suppose I’ve had snippets of happiness in training. When we did operations, and I did so well, that was as happy as I’d been in months. The exhilaration of the first parachute jump. Some of the training in—well, if you don’t know where, I can’t say. Up north, in the obstacle courses and climbing with a heavy pack and so on. When you reach the top of the mountain, there is a very real sense of accomplishment. So those moments were akin to happiness.”

  “But not precisely that?”

  “No, because why I was happy was that it brought me closer to killing Nazis, to getting back at the fascists for what they’ve done to me. It was a bitter kind of happy. I was thinking, the last time I felt joy at all before now, pure joy, that was when my husband and I were courting.”

  “Love is a powerful feeling.”

  “I had lost everything before that. My parents, my home, my language, everything I had known and loved and taken for granted. A friend of my cousin helped get me to England, and I found work, dull work really, but it helped keep my mind off my troubles. And then I met Reg.”

  “This is a little painful for me to hear.”

  “You said you wanted to know more about me.”

  “But I didn’t want to hear how you loved another man.”

  “And yet I did. It’s part of who I am. I loved, and I lost. That shaped me.”

  He nodded, slowly. “I can see that. All right then.” And he sat up straighter, as if bracing himself. “What did you love in him?”

  “I don’t know exactly,” she said. “I don’t keep a list of qualities. At first, he seemed far too British for me—reserved, polite to a fault.” She smiled at Will. “Not a problem you share.”

  “Thank you, I think.”

  Will was not like Reg, and if anything was too open. Too open to be an agent. “But eventually, he softened, and there is an appeal in that, in seeing a cold man warm to you. And I was lonely, and so I gave him time. But I never fell hard. Life in—where I come from—is lived more spontaneously. People yell more at each other, and forgive each other sooner. When people fall in love, they fall as if from cliff and into a warm and churning sea. And they don’t surface for some time. I don’t know that my parents ever did surface.”

  “Lucky for them.”

  “There was a lot of yelling, mind you,” she said. “And a lot of kissing and teasing and laughter.”

  “Sounds lovely.”

  “I suppose. I was an only child, and sometimes I felt left out of the circle of two.”

  “Were you closer to your mum or your dad?”

  “There wasn’t a great difference. My mother, I think, by a hair.”

  “What did they do? For a living?”

  “I think I’ll save telling you that. For after the war.”

  “So you promise to meet me after the war?”

  “If we both survive it. That is no certain matter.”

  He held up the necklace with its L-pill. “And we might not.”

  “No.”

  “Then we should make love again.”

  “You’re not feeling well.”

  “You have a point. I wouldn’t mind if you lay next to me though. When you sit over there, I find myself aching to touch you.”

  She felt much the same.

  He dozed off and on that afternoon, and she stayed by his side. She made him eat a cold egg, but he vomited it back up, which increased her worry about him. She needed to get him medical treatment, and if the SOE couldn’t extract him soon, she’d ask Claude to arrange for a Résistance doctor or nurse—whoever they had—to come to see him.

  Finally, the sun was sinking low in the western sky, and she had to leave. She fetched him more water, and then she gathered up her wireless set. “I need to go listen for a signal.”

  “Can’t you do it here?”

  “And risk bringing them right to you? No. Impossible.”

  “Be careful.”

  “Always.”

  “Do you know where you’re going?”

  “Only vaguely. I think I remember a place that is out of sight of the road and any farm. Maybe two hours’ hike from here. Maybe a bit more.”

  “Will you be back by midnight?”

  “Don’t count on it. I’ll be walking back in the dark.”

  “I hate that you are risking your life for me.”

  “It is not much of a risk. Nothing like blowing up a bridge and snatching you back from armed Nazis.”

  “I suppose not. I owe you for that.”

  “No,” she said. “You don’t. You don’t owe me anything, and you’ve already given me much. A bientot,�
�� she said, until later. French didn’t really use a final term for “goodbye.” There was always hope expressed in French that you would see the person again.

  She had to hide twice on her walk to avoid passing cars. One was a private car, but the other was a German car, which she heard coming just in time. From a thin stand of trees, she watched it pass. It seemed not to be searching for anyone, but speeding along on its own task.

  Could she hope that they were giving up on their search for Will? Or were they focusing the search nearer to the sabotaged bridge or in town?

  No matter. She’d use extreme caution in getting Will to the rendezvous point, whenever and wherever that was. She hoped Claude could get a car, or a pair of bicycles, though if Will grew any worse, he might not be able to bike. His fever hadn’t spiked any higher than at midday, but it hadn’t left either. She wondered if the aspirin was working at all.

  The sound of the German car had faded into the distance. She returned to the road.

  She lost the moonlight soon after that, and at first she missed the footpath Claude had taken her down that led to the old crumbling building. When the road took a turn that was wholly unfamiliar, she backtracked and found the path. She stumbled along in darkness for a hundred steps, running into trees twice. When she stopped and listened for human noises, or car noises, and there were none, she dug out her red torch, the only one she had left, and illuminated the path.

  She wasn’t on the path right then, but twenty seconds of hunting found it again. She kept the torch on, aimed down. When she passed out of the trees and moonlight once again lit the landscape ahead, she turned the torch off while she crossed a meadow.

  For an hour, she went on, through thin trees, and then checked her watch. 8:40. It was time to find a good, private place to set up the radio.

  She soon found another clearing, and so she scanned all around herself, hunting for a knob, a lone, climbable tree, or an abandoned structure to use.

  There was nowhere good, so she went on.

  An old stone fence appeared, half fallen down, and on a bit of a rise in the land. That would serve. She took out a white handkerchief and left it under a rock in the middle of the path so she could find her way back when she was done.

  There was plenty of time left, so she spent a good ten minutes scanning the landscape around her, looking for the shape of a house or barn. But she saw and heard nothing. She’d come far enough off the road that, while there might be fields under cultivation this far from it, there were no homes. And possibly any fields this far from the road would lie fallow anyway this year, for the lack of diesel fuel to run a tractor, and the lack of workers to plant and harvest.

  She set up her radio and antenna, and had her candle at hand. She didn’t need to code anything to send, and she wasn’t going to decode out here, so she took out a pencil and paper and made ready to take notes. And then she waited and waited, and tried not to doze.

  But finally it was almost time, and so she lit the candle and warmed up the radio. The whine, and then long minutes of nothing but faint static. And then a faint Morse message, but she realized it was not for her, as it was in plain French. She fiddled with the knob again, re-centering on the right frequency, trying to dim the other message, and a stronger message came in:

  C N 4 R O Z

  This one was for her. She focused on writing down the letters correctly, but had two she questioned. When someone was sending plain text messages in Morse, it was easy to separate the dots and dashes because you knew the words. With coded messages, it was harder, and this operator had a fast hand.

  The message came again, and she was sure she had it right the second time. After packing up, she found her handkerchief and regained the path. A long time later, she was on the road, and the walking went faster on the smoother surface. She switched the radio from arm to arm. It was getting heavy as she approached the barn.

  She heard Will talking as she neared the barn. He sounded afraid.

  She crept around the barn, expecting to see a German car, or soldiers, but there was nothing, merely a still farmyard scene, bathed in moonlight. She opened the barn door, unsure of who was in there.

  In a moment she realized he was alone in the dark, talking in his sleep. He seemed to be having a bad dream. She hurried to him, finding and flipping on her red torch, and she whispered to him, trying to soothe him, but he tossed and turned, and when he yelped in fear, she could stand it no longer.

  She shook him awake. His arm was hot.

  “Mum?” he said.

  “It’s me,” she said, “Beatriz.”

  “Oh,” he said, and then again, “Oh. Bad dream. Strange.”

  “It would be stranger if you had none. Can I get you something? Water?”

  “No, I’m—. Gee. I’m fine. But what a dream.”

  “Do you want to talk about it?”

  “Definitely not.” He struggled to sit up. “What’s the news?”

  “I don’t know yet.” She felt his face. “Your fever is up. I need you to take the last of the aspirin.”

  “I won’t take the only one you have,” he said.

  “I’ll buy more at the pharmacist soon. Let me find it for you.” She dug through her valise for the first-aid kit, which was nearly depleted. She would have to restore her supplies in town soon. After she had Will safely aboard a plane, she’d do that or ask Claude to. She still had cash. And England would drop more whenever she asked.

  She settled Will in again, lit the barn’s lantern, and then took out the message and her silk, and decoded it.

  “What’s it say?” he asked, groggily.

  “Tomorrow night, they say.” That wasn’t all they said. Had she at any point been tempted to ask to be extracted with Will, the rest of the message made her more determined than ever to see this through.

  “That soon?”

  “Yes.” She burned the silk and the message. She knew where they were coming and when.

  “Come to bed,” he said.

  She put out the lantern, stripped off her boots, and climbed into bed with Will, who was too hot to the touch. He put his arm around her, and she kissed his hand. There were no words, but they spoke to each other nonetheless.

  Chapter 31

  Claude came in the morning, with a bag of freshly baked rolls. “From our mutual friend,” he said.

  “It’s tonight,” she said. “Or tomorrow, technically. They are aiming to land a half-hour after midnight, weather permitting.”

  “I can’t do it tonight. There’s something else.”

  “Another operation?”

  “Possibly.” He shot a glance at Will.

  She understood the message implied in that look. There was no reason to tell Will, and every reason not to. The same went for her. “Can I have two people to help with the lights? They’ll need their own torches. I lost my white one, but I have my red one.”

  “I’ll try. I’ll find you an extra torch. And one person.”

  It would barely serve. Three lights was the signal. A red light—telling the pilot that this was the field—and two white lights in a row beyond it, indicating the direction to land. It was best to have three people holding them right up until the plane was a hundred feet over the ground. To set them up in advance alone, you had to pick one angle for the two torches you did not hold, and at some point the pilot would lose sight of the stationary one.

  “You’re going home,” Claude said in English to Will. “You don’t seem happy about it.”

  Will said nothing. Antonia said, “He has a fever.”

  Claude looked from one to another. “Yes, I see.”

  She felt herself flush. She wasn’t sure why. “I’ve done nothing to compromise the circuit.”

  “I’m sure you haven’t,” Claude said, his puzzled expression apparently real. He went to Will and extended his hand. “Thank you for your help.”

  “I did nothing. Less than nothing. I caused you trouble.”

  “You helped us kill another
two Nazis. That’s not trouble. That’s an opportunity. May your flight be safe.” In French he said to Antonia, “It’s a lot of moon to fly in.”

  “There was another message. For you.” She jerked her head, indicating he should go outside to talk.

  They spoke in low tones, in French, rapidly enough that Will shouldn’t catch any of it. She didn’t think he was cleared to know this. “The invasion is on.”

  “The British are landing? When?”

  “And the Americans, in force. In about three months’ time. And they want all Résistance cells, everyone, to step up sabotage starting now, in particular any factories that make parts for German war equipment, propellers or ball bearings, fabrics for the war or so on. In six weeks, step it up even more. Blow up bridges, roads, telephone lines. Make it impossible for the Germans to get to and from the coast. Count on three months, and try not to leave them time enough to repair the damage. There will be more instructions soon.”

  “Which coast?”

  She smiled at that. “They didn’t include that information. Calais, perhaps. Perhaps somewhere else. You can guess as well as I.”

  “Yes, I can see why that doesn’t matter much to us here. We will destroy the same roads, the same train line, no matter which piece of the Channel they cross. They certainly won’t come through Gibraltar and into the sea.”

  “It matters a great deal to the Germans where the invasion is.”

  “Then I’ll leave that worry to them. We’ll need more matériel.”

  “That will come. I think it’s part of why they’re extracting Will right now. They are going to drop money and pistols when they land. So you can take all of my cash now, and buy whatever you need.”

  “You’ll have to hide the dropped materiel. Two of you can handle that.”

  “Then that is what we will do,” she said.

  “This is good. An end to the war.” He scrubbed his face with his hands. “Finally. Almost four years since those bastards marched into Paris. Four years of stripping our rights, shooting our neighbors, raping our women, forcing our young men into labor.”

  “You’ve gotten back at them,” she said.

  “I vow I will double all I’ve done before now in the next three months.”