Code Name- Beatriz

by Lou Cadle

  It seemed a long time before she heard his footsteps coming this way again. He was humming quietly. Then the steps stopped. He may have noticed the light was gone. The humming stopped, but the steps continued, slowly now.

  He would be on alert. She waited, waited. Footsteps, booted, coming nearer. When he was close to the corner, she flew around it, knife raised, and launched herself at him, stabbing blindly.

  “Ach,” he said, and then her fist glanced off his nose, and she knew where his face was, his throat. She stabbed for it.

  A bark of pain, and he tried to shove her away. But she was fighting for her life, and she knew it. Mustering every bit of energy her illness-ravaged body possessed, she lunged forward again, stabbing, once, twice, three times, forcing her damaged hand to function, ignoring the pain from it. The knife tip hit a hard spot, a clavicle maybe, and she slid it up and pushed upward. The knife found something soft and slid in.

  He coughed. Then he fell, and she fell with him, holding to the knife handle for dear life. He made a gurgling sound, rolled off her, and crawled away. She grabbed for him, finding cloth, and pulled him back to her—or tried. He was big, and his mass was much greater than her own, so she slid on the tile floor instead, being pulled along as he crawled.

  Ridiculous. She had to end it. But her strength was draining away. She’d given it her all, but her “all” right now was very little indeed.

  For England. For France. For Mama and Papa. For Will. One more time, Antonia. On hands and knees, she followed him, feeling dampness under her knees—his blood. She overtook him and shoved him over to his side, and then stabbed him two-handed in the torso—the chest and belly—as many times as her strength would let her.

  She was done. She had no more to give. She lay there panting, expecting him to rise up and attack her, but he did not move.

  When he had not moved for five minutes, and her energy had begun to return, she reached to feel for his face again and held her hand against his nose. No breath. Somehow, in the dark, weak as a kitten, she had killed him.

  She must be covered with blood by now.

  Wanting nothing more than to crawl back onto her cot and sleep for an hour, she made herself instead stand. She returned to his guard post and, using the dim moonlight, looked into his lunch pail and around his chair. She wanted a lighter or matches. There were none. She went back to the guard’s body and searched his pockets. She found keys, and coins, which she took, and what she thought was a money clip with but a single piece of paper in it. Better than no money at all. She found a wrapped candy, also worth taking. And finally, matches. She took them and went back to the lantern, lighting it and turning it to its lowest setting. She took it up and went back into the hallway where the guard was.

  Yes, there was blood, a trail of it like a slug might make. The Nazi who had seemed so massive and impossible to beat was not. He was an averaged-sized man. Also blood-covered. His feet were big. Those boots would be of no use to her.

  She would have lost hope then, feeling as weak as she was, seeing her knees and the sweater stained with blood, but her second search of his body found her a sidearm. She unsnapped the holster and drew it. A snubnose semi-automatic. She tilted it and read the name in the lantern light. Dreyse. She had never heard of it. It looked quite old.

  She hoped it still worked. A quick check told her it was loaded. She felt on his neck for his pulse—none. She shone the lantern into his face and lifted an eyelid. No. He was dead. Good. She would not have to waste a round on him.

  Antonia stood for a long moment and considered. She needed clothes. Shoes. A way to look normal, not like a madwoman, dressed in a hospital gown and covered with blood She wondered how many people were in the building. Was there another guard who lived here? More medical personnel? There must be a cook. Did he or she live here, or come here only in the day?

  She hadn’t come across anyone on her last two nights of exploration, and she thought it was possible there were only two staff here at night, the guard and the nurse. The nurse was not the one who had been kind to her that one night. That made Antonia’s decision a little easier. The nurse was both taller and bigger boned than she. But her clothes would serve.

  She took the lantern and the gun and walked back down the hall. She climbed the final flight of stairs and walked down the hall to the nurse’s room. If there were anyone else in the building, a gunshot would wake them. So once she fired the weapon, she’d have to move quickly. And be ready for more trouble.

  A stop at the linen closet gave her another blanket. She wrapped it around and around the pistol. Not a very good silencer, but perhaps enough of one.

  She slipped into the mean nurse’s room, where the woman lay snoring softly. Antonia did not let herself think or feel. She did what she had to do. Crossing swiftly to the woman’s bed, she pressed the pistol against her temple and fired, once.

  Then she dug through her closets and drawers until she had shoes, which were only a half-size too big, and clothes, which were quite large on her. But no one would see that under the coat she found. She put on two layers. Then she dug through drawers and the closet until she found a wallet and money.

  Should she wake a fellow patient and explain they were on their own?

  No. The cook would come tomorrow, maybe another guard to relieve the night guard. They’d….

  Would they simply eliminate the patients, shoot them? Would they call the doctor? Where was the other nurse, the nice one? Would she be returned to care for the women?

  Well, damn it. Of course they didn’t care about those women. She had to at least give the women who’d been part of the experiment a fair chance to survive. Even if it put her at more risk.

  She knew which ones were healthiest from eavesdropping the past two days. She went back to the room and turned the lantern up to its brightest. She shook one of the healthy women awake.

  “What?” the woman said in German. Or maybe it was Dutch she was speaking.

  In German, Antonia said, “Someone has killed the guard and the nurse. You are alone here now. It might be time to escape. Do you understand me?”

  “Who are you?” the woman asked, blinking in confusion.

  “No one,” Antonia said. “Will you wake the others? Decide what to do. You could find clothes and run. You could barricade yourselves in here and make up a story about what happened to the nurse and guard.”

  “I don’t understand,” the woman said. “A guard?”

  Antonia said, “I’m afraid they might kill you all. Wake up the other women and decide what to do. There is a kitchen two floors down with some food in it.”

  And then she left. It was up to them now. She’d done what she could, and she had to save herself if she was able. Escaping in a group would be no good. She’d be more likely to survive the next days if alone.

  She trotted down the dark hallway, stopped to get her bedroll with its precious food, and then ran out the front door. She jogged down a road, seeing no one else, hearing nothing at all but an owl who seemed startled by her passing. The road was headed west-northwest. Good enough for now. She stopped, scrubbed the pistol of her fingerprints, and flung it into the woods. It would do her more harm than good were she stopped by German police.

  Soon she was in the shadows of the trees that overhung the road, moving as fast as she could. She’d stay to the road unless a car drove down it, or until dawn came. And then she’d turn, heading due west.

  Chapter 40

  For three days, she walked, sometimes during the day, and sometimes during the night, fueled by the cans of food. When they ran out, she tried to eat acorns, but they did not set well on her stomach. She could not afford to vomit and have diarrhea, for that would weaken her further. Her natural strength was returning, but slowly. It would return better if she could find more food.

  She crossed several roads, one that had passing cars as she came to it. She waited five minutes after the engine sound faded and went on.

  On the fifth day,
she became dizzy and disoriented. Was she relapsing into the illness? Or was it from lack of food? Her feet were blistered from the loose shoes. When it began to rain, a cold, heavy rain that left water dripping from trees and onto her head, she gave up for the day, finding a thick pine to shelter under that was relatively dry beneath.

  The next morning, she woke. There were footsteps nearby.

  I shouldn’t have tossed away the gun.

  She waited, her bladder insisting on being relieved, stupidly demanding attention when she needed to focus on the sounds and the danger they represented.

  Across the way, from behind some bare bushes, a man stepped, holding a rifle.

  She froze. He did not see her. He looked up at a bird call. And then he turned around, facing away, and she could see he had squirrels, a pair of them, hanging off a rope tied around his back.

  A hunter. As he turned back, revealing his face again, she could see he was not a man, as her fear had first made him, but a boy, maybe twelve or thirteen.

  He caught sight of her. He froze too. They stared at each other for a long minute. Then, without raising his rifle, he took another five steps toward her.

  “Are you a Jew?” he asked in German.

  Antonia wasn’t sure what answer would keep her alive. So she stayed silent.

  He studied her. “Do you speak German?”

  She didn’t answer that either.

  “Are you hungry?” he said.

  She nodded.

  “I have a mother and sister to feed,” he said, as if to himself. But he shrugged off the rope that held the two dead squirrels, cut one off, and threw it at her feet. And then he put the rope back around his shoulder and walked away. As he reached the bushes again, he said, again as if speaking to himself and not her, “My best friend was a Jew. Before.”

  And then he was gone.

  She had not thought there was good left in any German, but it seemed she had been wrong. Here, this child, hungry himself, with a family to feed, had given her part of his hunt.

  How close was she to his home? To perhaps a group of homes, a village? She did not know, but for the moment she did not care. The squirrel sat there, beckoning. She had kept the dead guard’s matches, and she had the knife. She was no hunter, but she had cooked chicken countless times and rabbit more than once. She knew how to clean this animal, but not how to skin it, she soon realized. Maybe she could just burn the fur off.

  It took some time in the damp and cold forest, but she finally had a fire lit, and the squirrel was gutted and spitted. She cooked it the best she could, but it was burned on the outside and raw on the inside when she became afraid to tarry there any longer. She put out the tiny fire and ate the hot meat, burning her fingertips and lips, letting blood run down her chin, hardly chewing the raw bits.

  She wiped her messy hands on damp leaves and gathered her things again. She should move while she could, get away from the boy lest he change his mind and tell the authorities about her. While the squirrel meat was fueling her muscles, she should walk as quickly as she could manage.

  Two days after that, she had found nothing more to eat. Water was not a problem, and she was grateful for that. The land was crossed by meltwater streams in several places. Her blisters from the ill-fitting shoes had broken again and again, and her feet were a mass of sores. She came to a cold stream and bathed, though the cold made her shake. Naked, she was able to take a moment to examine her body. She saw sores on the back of her arms—the disease they had given her, or something else? And she felt the bare spot on her head, where hair still did not grow. Soon the rest of her hair would be long enough to cover it. She doctored her blisters the best she could and used the knife to cut strips from one of the damp hand towels to pad the shoes. It would probably do no good, but she felt better for doing something about it, even if it was ineffective.

  Finger-combing her damp hair, she pulled out several leaves and twigs from it. She must look a horror. She was surprised the boy had not mistaken her for some woodland monster.

  After her bath, she dressed again in her filthy, stolen clothes and moved on. She was weak and tired, but she had to keep moving, or she’d be too cold after that dousing in the frigid stream and might lie down and never rise again.

  She found an abandoned farm the next day. The house had been bombed or been set ablaze, as had the barn, but there were six neat haystacks in the fallow field. She burrowed her way in one and found plenty of company in mice who had done the same.

  The next morning, she had gone hardly a mile when she was captured.

  Chapter 41

  When she saw the uniforms, she gave up every thought of running. They were Americans, a patrol of six men. She put her hands in the air. In English, she said, “I am English. I am English. Don’t shoot.”

  The leader of the men said, “Sure you are, sister.”

  “I am. I am—” The Official Secrets Act still applied. “I am in the English military.” She tried to remember her service number and failed. “Lieutenant Antonia Lazard of the Auxiliary Territorial Service.”

  “What is that, Navy?” asked a man.

  “Never heard of it,” the leader said.

  “It’s like your, your….” She couldn’t think. “Women’s Army Auxiliary, is that right?”

  “We don’t send women into enemy territory.”

  “Is the war still going on?”

  “If you were in this—whatever—Women’s Service thing, what was your assignment?”

  “Name, rank, serial number,” she said. “That’s all you need. Please, is there an English regiment stationed near here? Give me over to them.”

  “She could be a German spy,” said the man who’d guessed she was in the Navy.

  “German, anyhow. Looking for free food.”

  “I have information that I need to transmit to my commanding officer,” she said. She had been trained to blend in. She had learned to live below the awareness of her enemies in the camp. But in this moment, trying to get herself acknowledged as an ally, she had no idea how to manage that.

  “Go on back home, Fraulein,” he said.

  “Sir,” she said, straightening her back. A memory came to her of a woman officer who was more than a bit of a martinet. She pretended she was that woman. “I am an officer in the British army. I demand you contact my superiors.”

  “Little lady,” he said. “You’re in no place to demand. You see who has the rifles here, right?”

  “I can use a rifle. I am, no doubt, a better shot than you, Sergeant.” She had no idea if that was his rank or not, but it seemed about right. “I am an officer with the rank to command lower ranks. I need to get information back to my superiors. Will you help me? If not, just point me to the nearest British unit, and I’ll walk there myself. Do not impede me.”

  “For fuck’s sake,” he said.

  “What if she’s not lying?” said another of the soldiers. “We might get in trouble.”

  “If you’re just some German whore trying to get a free meal, I’ll make sure you pay for this,” the sergeant said.

  “I am no German. I am no whore. I’m a married woman,” she said, haughtily as she could. It matched her increasing irritation at this fool. “If you will not take me to my commanding officer, you will take me to yours. God grant he has more wit than you.”

  It would have been an impressive speech, she imagined, had she not fainted dead away at the end of it.

  * * *

  She woke and saw bars on the windows. For a terrible moment, she thought she was still in the madhouse, and all this had been a fever dream about escaping the Nazis and she was still in their grip. But then a voice said, in English, “We found an English officer,” and she looked up and saw an American uniform.

  “Thank you,” she said. “What is this place?”

  “It’s a jail cell,” he said.

  “Do you travel with one?” It seemed excessive, and the thing was so well built, and so old, she realized that her first gu
ess was wrong. “Sorry. It must be the Germans’. You’ve taken over the town? The war is over? Near to over?”

  “The English officer will be here tomorrow morning. Until then, lady, all you get out of me is bread and water.”

  “Thank you,” she said, as polite as she’d been to her German captors in the camp.

  He left her alone, and she was brought a tray with coffee—real coffee, thank you very much—and a meal of powdered eggs and lean bacon. Also the bread he had promised. She ate every morsel, thinking that she didn’t know when she’d enjoyed a meal so much. She tried that aloud. “I don’t know when I’ve enjoyed a meal in jail so very much.” And she laughed a little at her own weak joke. The coffee was making her a bit giddy.

  Or freedom was. Freedom. So close, just on the other side of those bars.

  There was another meal later, and of all things, a third meal, an embarrassment of riches in food that she had not seen since her wedding day. One of the soldiers, the one who brought the evening meal, was absolutely pudgy. How strange to see. No one in the camp had been, not prisoners, not guards. Almost no one in France had been. So the Americans, coming to Germany to beat back the Nazis, had brought with them plenty of food.

  Perhaps German whores did try to find their way into the American jails to get fed like this, as the sergeant had accused her of doing. She wouldn’t be a bit surprised if they did.

  The next morning, about ten, a British Army Captain appeared before her cell door. “Sir,” she said, standing and saluting him. “Lieutenant Antonia Lazard. I apologize for being out of uniform.”

  “Yes, well,” he said. “You have an accent. ‘Lazard’ is Italian?”

  “Spanish,” she said. “But I’m an English citizen. My husband was Reginald Dankworth of the Fifth Army. Missing in Africa for two years, sir.”

  “Then why isn’t your name Mrs. Dankworth?” he said.

  “That’s complicated, sir.” And it was about to get more so. She couldn’t tell him much about herself and her mission. It was unlikely he’d ever heard of the SOE in any case.