Code Name- Beatriz

by Lou Cadle

  She hesitated. “Mal de tete,” she said, and then she remembered, not French. She spoke German here, but she could not for the life of her remember the right German words. She pointed to her head.

  “This is normal.” The nurse glanced around. “I can’t give you anything for it, but I’ll bring a cold ______. That may help.”

  Antonia filled in the missing word as “compress.” A new vocabulary word in German. “Thank you,” she said.

  “Please don’t thank me,” the nurse said, and she looked very unhappy. Perhaps this was not duty she had chosen.

  A true healer would not want to be part of this, no? Antonia knew that her situation was better than having heard her name called back at the camp as the other spies had. She knew burning with fever was better than being truly burned in the crematorium. She hoped that when those four had been burned in the camp, they were dead. But with Nazis, who knew?

  For the next few days, she faded in and out of reality. In her mind, she was in her childhood. She was in training in Scotland. She was in the barn with Will. She was watching his plane take off into the night, knowing that a part of her heart flew off with him. She was watching a bug make it way across the stone patio of her childhood home. She was in an air-raid shelter in London, pushing off the hands of some disgusting groper and, when he tried a second time, twisting his wrist hard while he cursed her.

  In one strange fever dream, she sat in a circle with many versions of herself, Antonia and Toni and Beatriz and all of them, discussing light topics as if at a party. A child Antonia served them canapés.

  And then she was awake, and she had no fever, and it was daylight again. She recognized the hospital. The light coming through the barred windows did not hurt her eyes any longer. Half of the beds around her were empty. They had once been full, twenty-four of them. Sheets were half ripped off and on the floor. Messy. No nurse was here.

  She felt a bomb go off, not too far away. She forced herself out of bed and staggered over to the window. She looked out and saw smoke rising in the distance. Another bomb hit, there was a flash that made her flinch back, and when she looked again, there was smoke rising again from that place.

  Had the other patients—prisoners—been taken to a shelter? Or had they been dying of typhus while she was ill? She had no idea, but she was in no shape to join them in a shelter. Or to try to escape. She staggered back to her cot, and lay back down, listening to the bombs growing closer. So this is how I die, is it? Bombed by my own.

  The meaning of that struck her, for surely it was her side bombing the Germans in their own territory. And then she remembered that the invasion of Europe had been set for months ago. Perhaps it had happened as promised. These might be bombers stationed in France, or nearer, softening up the enemy’s hold before troops came here, wherever “here” was.

  The next bomb sounded from the other side of the building, and the next was farther away still. Four more bombs, and there was silence. She had survived it.

  I have to escape. When the Allies march here, I must escape and meet them. Tell them what I know. Get back to England.

  The thought of England filled her body with hope. But not with strength. She was weak as a newborn pup.

  But better. I’m on the mend. The typhus did not kill me.

  It was a victory to celebrate. They’d tried to kill her many times, but they had not won yet. She had. Her inner strength, the gift of health her parents had given her, her training, or sheer luck. It did not matter which part of her should be credited, but here she was, still breathing. Still thinking. Still with a chance.

  What would happen as the Allies swept over Germany? Would the Nazis give up? No. That was not in their nature. They would fight to the bitter end. They would…. She tried to think.

  I need food. I could think better if I ate. I’ll ask for food.

  Or no, should she not? It might be best to pretend to still be ill, to be failing, and then take her chance to escape when it came.

  There was no chance of escape today, not feeling as she did. She should rest, and sleep, and recover. Exhaustion overcame her, and the urge to sleep could not be fought off. She’d decide what to do when she woke.

  When next she woke, it was night, and she needed a toilet. There was no light and she doubted there was a nurse. She stumbled out of her cot and felt her way along. She felt a human foot, sticking from a bed, and so there were other patients still here. When she found a wall, she pressed a palm against it and traveled along it, trying to remember the layout of the room. The night nurse had sat over in the corner, with a lamp on a table, and she had written sometimes. One nurse per shift. The night nurse was not here. Killed in a bombing? Or had she abandoned her post? Or been shot for being too kind to the prisoners?

  Antonia shuffled along until her thigh hit something. A table. She patted it. There was a mess of papers. A lamp, yes! The glass of an oil lamp. She slid it under her left hand and kept patting with her right hand. She found a pen. She found a hard piece of what felt like stale bread. And finally, she found a square metal shape. When she felt the little hinge, she knew she had a cigarette lighter. She fumbled it open, spun the wheel, and it lit.

  In a moment, she had the lamp lit, and was sitting in the nurse’s chair. It had been a piece of brown bread she had felt, dry and stale, but she ate it anyway. Her stomach immediately began to make noises. But she didn’t feel sick. The noises were her digestion, coming back to life.

  She glanced at the papers—medical records—and found her own, with the name of her cover identity she’d told back to Meyer of the Gestapo and never had changed. If she escaped—no, when she escaped—should she take them with her? Maybe they’d help identify her. Or maybe the papers would only bring trouble. It depended on who stopped and searched her. Probably no, she decided. Leave them here.

  There was no way she could walk from here to the English Channel without being stopped and interrogated. Strike that. There was no way she could walk from here to the English Channel, full stop. Not without food, good clothes, and money. German money here, and neutral money as she traveled on.

  She did not stop to lecture herself that this was an insane hope, that she could walk so far without being shot or jailed. She had to believe in something right now, or she would crawl back into bed and cry and end up dying here.

  She carried the lamp around to look at the other patients. There were only seven of them. Two had horrible rashes. One looked dead. The other four might be on the road to recovery as she was. None stirred as the light hit them.

  Three of them had food trays on the table by their cot, and one tray was untouched. Antonia took it to the nurse’s table and ate all the food on it. It was cold, but it was sustenance. When she was done, she replaced the tray where she had found it and then went to the door, carrying the lamp. Opening the door a crack, she looked down the hall.

  In for a penny, in for a pound. She left her ward and padded barefoot along the hall, getting her bearings. She opened doors, slowly, cautiously. Two were large rooms where apparently staff slept. A nurse was asleep in a bed, the only one in the room, and Antonia withdrew quickly and quietly. She found a linen closet and made note of its location. If worse came to worst, she could fashion herself a dress of sheets and a cape of wool blankets. There were other wards, empty. It was a hospital, but a small one. She found a door that led to a stairwell, going down only, and she climbed down the stairs. She heard a voice at the first door, but the stair kept descending, below ground level, so she went down and down.

  On the lower level, she found a kitchen and a pantry. It was not stocked well. There were oats and flour in metal barrels, big cans of various fruits and vegetables, some smaller cans she did not examine, but nothing fresh at all. She zeroed in on a box of salt and poured some into her hand, licking at it. Her body had known before her mind that she needed it. Had she sweated out salt in her fever? Whatever the reason, it tasted better than plain salt had any reason to.

  She found
a fresh dish cloth and wrapped up a handful of salt in it. There was nowhere on her hospital gown to place it, so she held it clenched between her teeth. The rest of the lower level had storage rooms, most empty, and a room with a furnace and a row of—what? Hot water heaters, she guessed.

  She found a bathroom and used it, ran the water until it was hot, and washed her face and armpits and crotch with her hand. There was nothing to dry off with, so she left herself to air-dry. There was a clouded mirror, but she did not study herself for long. She had lost a patch of hair over her left ear, but her hair had grown out to over an inch all over, from the half-inch length they’d kept it at the camp. Who knew why she was missing hair?

  She went back up one flight and listened at the door again, but this time there were no voices. After turning down the lamp all the way, she peeked around the corner of the door. There was a light glowing down there, another lantern. Someone awake. Best not disturb them. But that was the level she’d need to leave the building on. Unless perhaps there was an outer staircase and she could leave that way instead? She’d check another time.

  She took herself back to the ward and made sure no other patient had woken. She sat and read her medical file the best she could. It was half in German and half in Latin or Greek, and the medical terminology and abbreviations thwarted her. She learned no more than she had guessed. She had received a treatment of some sort, but whether that had made her recover, or her own body had fought off the typhus, she couldn’t say.

  If there had been twenty-four women at first, and now there were only eight, that told her that their treatments did not work very well.

  She kept the light on for as long as she dared. She took her packet of salt back to her cot and stayed awake, dabbing at it with a wet finger from time to time until she grew thirsty, and then she stopped and threw the bit of cloth as far as she could. Let them wonder what it was the next time they cleaned the ward.

  The next time she was aware of anything, there was light streaming in a window, and someone was bustling around changing sheets. She peered out of a slit in her eyelids and watched. A few of the women were able to get off their cots for the sheets to be replaced, but others were rolled onto an adjacent cot while the sheets were changed. A nurse and the person with the sheets—an orderly?—did the rolling.

  Antonia decided to pretend to be unconscious and let them roll her back and forth. She was lying on clean sheets again in no time.

  A patient spoke in German to the nurse. “When will the doctor return?”

  “When he returns. Now lie still.”

  “But it has been two days. And I’m feeling better.”

  “He’ll be back when he is back. I can’t change that. You certainly can’t. Is there somewhere else you plan to go? You pigs are stupid.” She laughed.

  Not the kind nurse from the other night. A mean one. But the conversation had reminded Antonia that she could not just lie here and pretend to be sick. The nurse, the doctor—someone would come along and take her temperature and see that she was no longer feverish.

  She needed to escape from here. Tonight, or the next night at the latest. If there was no nurse on duty again at night, that was when she’d do it. She had to find clothes. That was the thing. A memory of the kitchen came back to her. There’d been knives there, yes? A cleaver. If so, she had weapons. She knew how to use them. One unwary nurse or guard, and she’d have her clothes. Nurse, probably, was what she needed. They surely had outerwear in their room, jackets, coats, a pair of boots or sturdy shoes. Weren’t nurses known for their sturdy shoes?

  Antonia had no idea where she was going to go, or how she’d get there, or how she’d survive on the way, or how many troops or police were nearby. She only knew she wanted to leave before they came up with the next horrible thing to do to her, or decided to execute them all once the experiment was over, which was surely a possibility.

  When, hours later, the nurse left the ward, Antonia climbed out of bed and went to the window to study the landscape. They were in the middle of nowhere, it seemed. A hospital in a field in a woods. Woods were good. Woods meant she could hide or climb trees. There were no tanks or army trucks or marching guards out there.. She’d want to go west, over that way, toward the setting sun. There was a road in that direction.

  She hadn’t seen anything in the other direction, but what she saw in this direction gave her hope. She could leave, and use the road to walk on, and jump into the woods if a vehicle came along. All good.

  Returning to bed, she closed her eyes and worked on her plan.

  Chapter 39

  The kind nurse did not appear again. The mean one seemed to only work days. Antonia gave herself another night of stealing food and spying in the building, working on building her strength and wind by climbing up and down the staircase for as long as she could bear to. But she dared not stay longer than that one extra night, for they would surely discover soon that she had recovered from her illness. She didn’t know what would happen then, but it couldn’t be good. The last thing she wanted was to be taken back to a fenced camp with armed guards and a crematorium.

  She’d be far better off alone in the woods.

  As soon as the last patient fell asleep that night, she was up and moving. First, she stopped at the linen closet and took a thin wool blanket, two hand towels, and a pillow case. She let herself into the empty staff sleeping quarters and looked around, hoping she’d find a pair of shoes. But there was nothing there except a thin cardigan with a torn pocket and frayed elbows. She donned it. From a distance, she might not look so much like a patient, but to complete the illusion she needed some sort of shoes. And she needed shoes to walk through the woods.

  Then she went down to the kitchen and ate as much as she could bear. She discovered some of the smaller tins were printed in English—Red Cross food, she thought, diverted from its intended recipients. There was no meat in any of those cans, and she suspected the German staff had taken it all. But there were dried eggs and something called apple pudding. Walking food. She pulled out a dozen cans of each and put them into the pillowcase. Standing barefoot on the cold kitchen floor, she grabbed the sharpest knife there was. Not the largest, but one she could hide on herself. She held onto it.

  Up to the main floor next. She left her bedroll on the floor at the stair’s landing and turned off the lantern. Letting her eyes adjust to the dark, she listened at the door. No voices tonight.

  When she opened the door and looked down the hallway, no one was in sight. After dropping her pillow case of supplies, she padded on feet growing numb from the cold on the tile toward a dim light. A shadow appeared on the wall. There was a guard, and he had been sitting, and now he stood and stretched, his lantern throwing the distorted shadow on the wall.

  Antonia pressed herself against the hallway’s left wall and slid along it, closer to the man, watching his shadow. He sat again and yawned loudly.

  Good, good. Drowse, you Nazi bastard. She stood still and waited, watching the wall where she had seen his shadow appear. She counted slowly to a thousand, then crept nearer. There was a perpendicular hallway to her left that must open onto a main entrance where he sat. She passed another closed doorway to a room, and another, the last one before the place where the guard kept watch.

  The shadow moved again. Antonia froze, gripping the knife, feeling the unfamiliar aches in her right hand. The figure stood and the shadow shifted, grew smaller. He was walking away from the light. This way. He was coming this way.

  She had a split second to choose—leap out and attack him? Or hide? She tried the doorknob of the door she had just passed. When it turned, that made the choice for her. She slipped inside a blackened room.

  I hope it’s not here he’s headed for.

  If so, then it was. She slid to the wall behind the door, trying to position herself just beyond where it would open. If he was coming in here, the door would pop open, and she’d attack with the knife.

  But it didn’t open. Seconds passed,
marked by the rapid beating of her heart. She had to look. Look but not be seen.

  Now. Do it now.

  She felt for the doorknob and turned it. The door had opened into this room, a bit of luck. She opened it a few inches, peeked out, saw nothing, and then stuck her head out, looking both ways. No one. Nothing.

  She crept down the hall again, craning her head, listening hard for the opening of a distant door. Perhaps he’d gone to use the toilet. Not very good security, but if there were only one guard, what else was he to do?

  Coming to the corner, she held her breath. Her heart was pounding still, and in her temples, giving her a mild headache, a mere echo of the terrible one she’d had while ill. She inched forward and then, putting on a burst of speed, ran around the corner, the knife raised.

  And saw an empty chair, a lunch bucket, and a lantern. That was all there was. And there was the main door, escape, right there.

  But her bedroll and supplies were down the hall. And if he was dead, she’d have more time to explore.

  If he was dead, his boots might fit her well enough.

  She turned off the lantern. Would that make him suspicious? Or would he assume it had just burned low? There was a draft coming from the front door, so it wasn’t impossible it had blown out.

  No matter. She had no way to re-light it. She’d made her choice. But to stand right here, she’d be visible, silhouetted against the dim light of the outdoors. There must be a sizable moon. She remembered the bright moon when Will had flown off. Five months ago? No, more. Almost a year? That was a long time.

  Her eyes were adjusting again to the lack of lantern light. There was no better place to hide than against the wall. Since she’d not heard him pass her where she’d hid in that room, he must be about to return from the other direction. She went to that corner and pressed herself against the wall there, waiting, gripping the kitchen knife, flexing her hand, willing it to work well enough to use the knife.