Code Name- Beatriz
Page 35
“How do I know you’re not a spy?” he said.
She was surprised at his insight, and then she realized he meant for the Germans. “You don’t, sir. My superiors know, however, and if you could contact them.”
“And who are your superiors? And how the devil did you get from England to here?”
“That’s even more complicated,” she said. “My commanding officer is—” And she gave him the name she’d been told to use, far back in her early training, should she ever cross the military police or other authorities. She didn’t even know if it was a real woman, or if the name itself was a code. “If you could pass that along up the line, I’m sure everything will become clear.”
“I don’t see why I should.”
Antonia had not considered this, not for a moment had she dreamt that now, so close to freedom, she’d be thwarted by some unimportant captain who didn’t have the brains God gave a flea. Anyone at all quick would have come up with the right explanation for why a female British officer was here, so far behind enemy lines.
But the whole while she’d been fighting her war, little bureaucrats had been fighting their own, she supposed. In fact, the only thing she should be startled by was that this man was here, in Germany or wherever they were, instead of safely at home sorting papers in a well-heated office.
“Well? I don’t have all day,” he said.
“Perhaps you should pass it up the line so as not to get a black mark on your record, Captain—” she read his nametag “—Captain Kent.”
“If you will not tell me something that makes sense, I’ll forget you exist and leave you to the tender mercies of these Yanks.”
“Oh, for pity’s sake,” she said, sitting down on the cot and rubbing her forehead.
“If you were really an officer, you’d stand at attention.”
“It’s been a hard damned year,” she snapped back. She stood and marched right over to the cell bars.
Her expression must have been murderous, for he backed up a step, wide-eyed.
She repeated the name of her false superior. “Just pass that up the line, and it will get to the right person.”
He took his leave without another word.
To herself, Antonia said aloud, “How long am I going to be stuck in this bloody jail?” If she had offended him too much, could he destroy the paperwork that had brought him here? Doubtful. But it could take months upon months to get out of here.
That night, she had a bad moment, not about getting out of there, but a moment when she realized that Will might not have made it. She had clung to thoughts of him all these long months. But he might have died of his injuries, a thought she had never once allowed herself to have. He may well have lived but forgotten her. What had they together, after all, but a few short days in France? He could be married and back in Canada. A lot can happen in a year. It broke her in a way the Nazi doctor and the officious captain had been unable to. She had a bad night.
The next morning, she felt better. Sternly, she told herself to buck up. If Will was gone, she would still live. They could be sweet memories for her from now on, like her memories of that time on the beach with Reg, holding his hand. They’d fade like those had. Surely they would. She almost convinced herself.
A day passed. Two days passed. She heard no news. She feared that the British captain had not said anything about her to his superiors. Or that he had said she seemed to be a German spy and it wasn’t their affair but the Yanks’, and she had been written off.
The fourth morning, she had convinced herself that was what had happened. She paced her cage, well fed now, but frustrated beyond measure. Insane. That she should have risked all she did to be here, at the end, lost in some bureaucratic maze.
She began to laugh. It ran away from her a bit, and by the time she regained control of herself, she was sitting on the cot, wiping her eyes. Her vision cleared and she saw an American officer she’d not seen before, standing outside the bars, watching her. She stood at attention. “Sir,” she said. “Maybe I help you?”
“Share the joke,” he said. “It seemed to amuse you quite a bit.”
“No joke, sorry, sir.” Funny, how this one commanded respect immediately. Not like the officious captain. Not like the American sergeant, despite his rifle. It wasn’t the insignia, which she hadn’t enough familiarity with the American Army to interpret correctly in any case. It was his bearing. He exuded command.
“You had your contact with the English Army, as you requested.”
“For all the good I fear it did, yes, sir, I did.”
“Oh?”
She said nothing.
“You can sit. And no need for that ‘sir.’ I’m not your commanding officer.”
“My commanding officer must assume I’m dead,” she said. “She has not heard from me in….” She shook her head. “I don’t know the date, so I don’t know how long. The Germans captured me in April of 1944. I assume it’s the next year, and the trees are budding out, so perhaps it is April again? May?”
He didn’t answer the question. “Where did they hold you?”
An intelligent question. A question in fact the British captain should have asked. “First in a jail cell. I was tortured there, for I think less than a week, though it is hard to count time when they are breaking your bones and drowning you in ice water over and over. And then there was a train to I don’t know where. A long trip. I thought Hungary at first, as some prisoners spoke that language, but I came to think it was perhaps Poland. Seventy or eighty miles from wherever we are now, and if we are not that close to Poland, then my guess is wrong. And briefly, at the end, I was in a hospital in the middle of nowhere in what I guess is Germany, if this jail even is in Germany. Not too far from here, perhaps thirty miles, but even that is a guess.”
“I know the area, and I don’t know of a hospital that close.”
“I’ve been ill. And hungry. I think I’d been walking for a week since leaving when your platoon found me, but I did not believe I made good time. I might be mistaken about that and it could be forty or fifty miles from where your men found me to the hospital.” She did not mention it had been a mental hospital, for that would plant a thought in his mind she didn’t want him to have.
“Your English seems idiomatic.”
“It’s not my first language. Nor my only.”
In German, he asked, “Do you speak German?”
In English, she answered, “It’s a good idea to know it, in the camp. You want to know what those with power over you are saying. But I knew little until a year ago. I hope to never again speak another word of it. Indeed, I hope I can forget all I know.” She shook her head. “Though that seems difficult at this point, if that captain does not do as I asked and report my name to his commander.”
“Who is your commander?”
She repeated the name she had been told to use.
“I wonder,” he said.
“I’m sorry?”
“I’ve asked myself, since I arrived today and learned that you were here, what an English woman might be doing in Germany.”
“I told your men. And you, just now.”
“You did not. Before you were arrested, what were you doing? Don’t answer. That was what I asked myself, not what I’m asking you. What was it she did when she was captured? And tortured, as you just admitted, which makes me think my guess is correct.”
“And your guess is…?” she said.
He only smiled, if you could call it that, a quirk of one side of his mouth. “I’ll see if I can talk to someone else. I have met a few of my British counterparts. Is there anything else you can tell me? A name? A place? Anything at all you are allowed to say?”
She couldn’t give him the SOE or Miss Atkins. She could not say she was dropped into France and was a part of Cooper Circuit or even mention the French Résistance. There was the oath she had sworn, stopping her. She was stumped for a moment, and then she remembered the last message she had sent to England, when s
he’d asked for the arrangements for getting Will out of there. Maybe that would help identify her. “Say that I said, ‘Bugger the Gestapo. And Adolf too.’ I think that will be recognized. Eventually.” Marks would recognize it.
His eyebrows rose, and then he gave a little shrug and left without another word. She never saw him again and never learned his name.
But something he did must have started the correct wheels spinning, for in two weeks, she was transferred to British control, and a week later, after decent medical care, she was talking to someone in British Army Intelligence. To him, and only to him, she said, “I was in the French Résistance, for England.” She said no more than that, but it was enough, it seemed. Arrangements were made.
The war was nearly over, it seemed, but before the Germans surrendered, she was on another airplane, a larger one than that which took her here, flying again at night, but to the west over the Channel.
Chapter 42
She walked off the plane and looked around. A free land. She was free. The war was almost over, and she, at last, was free.
Miss Atkins was there to greet her. Three men stood in the background. She took a step toward Miss Atkins and stumbled when she saw one of the men back there was Will. She had come to believe that perhaps she had dreamt him up, and if not that, that he surely would have forgotten about her. It seemed he had not forgotten, and she wondered what strings he had to pull to have learned of her arrival, much less to be standing here waiting.
Miss Atkins extended her hand, and Antonia attended to her. The woman held on long enough to press her hand a second time. “I can’t tell you how good it is to see you. I cannot tell you.” Her words were heartfelt. She must have lost many people in the war, many agents. Antonia managed a wan smile, but Antonia’s eyes drifted to Will.
“You can have five minutes,” Miss Atkins said, “but then we need to debrief you. Don’t share operational details. The Secrets Act still applies.”
Antonia walked toward him, aware of how scrawny she still was, of the missing chunk of hair barely hidden under the length that had grown back, aware of the damage to her hand that might never heal right, and all the new scars, visible and invisible. And then she was close enough that she only was aware of his eyes.
He waited for her to cross the final distance. He held a cane in his left hand, though he did not lean on it. He seemed older than the man who parachuted into France a year ago, his face lined by worry or pain, but still his eyes were the same. There were too many words to say for such a time, and so they said none of them.
Just four hands meeting, lightly touching.
Then he said, “another moment, please,” and she realized Miss Atkins must have said something to them. To Antonia he said, “I don’t really need the cane. It’s just for show.”
“I don’t care about that,” she said. Or she tried to say it, and her lips moved, but no sound emerged.
She wanted to say something else to Will, the right thing. She did not want to say, “I must look a mess,” though she certainly did. She did not say, “I’m glad you are alive,” for that wouldn’t express what she was feeling at all, didn’t come anywhere near it. She did not say, “I want to be with you, if you’ll have me.”
What she did say surprised her. “I feel broken,” she said, in a whisper.
His eyes shone. “I’ll put you back together. I promise.”
And then it was time to go.
* * *
And so he did. They put each other back together, back in his beloved western Canada, though she would have gone anywhere with him, anywhere at all. Once she received official confirmation of Reg’s death, they married within two days of receiving the news.
They had no children of their own, but they had his family, a kind and open bunch who took her in as if she had always been one of them, and they had some friends to play cards with, to laugh with over the small jokes that mean both nothing and yet everything. But no one knew as Will did what she had lived through, and what she had sacrificed. And only she knew about his days with the Germans. That, they kept between the two of them.
They never parted for so much as a night, not for more than fifty years, until he went ahead of her to the land beyond death. She lasted until 2004, a very old woman with a garden that she often worked left-handed, and hens, always hens, and a shy wave for her neighbors, and small abstract oils she painted that she gave away to whoever admired them.
Only when her husband’s favorite nephew came a week after her funeral to clean out her house did he learn from records what Aunt Toni had done in the war. The agent Beatriz, who had taken part in successful sabotage operations against the Nazis, a survivor of a death camp and a Nazi medical experiment. The nephew thumbed through medals and certificates, through faded letters typed on flimsy paper, some in English, some in French, dating back to the 1940s. There was a yellowed photo of a young Toni in front of a monument that had French words inscribed on it, most of them obscured by the figure of an older man who stood next to her, his hand resting on her shoulder. In pen was written at the bottom, “Claude and I. 1949.”
Her nephew thumbed through the papers, and he wished very much that he’d known her secret and had taken the chance to hear her stories about this. He boxed up the papers, promising himself that one day, when he had a moment, he’d examine them more closely. But life intervened, as it does, and to this day, he has not touched them again.
The End
NOTES
Thank you for reading and, if you have a moment, reviewing.
On historical accuracy: I’ve been fuzzy about some dates and refused to commit to a French city name, but the information here about the SOE and its agents and operations is accurate as far as my research could reveal (and except when I needed to fudge some small procedure to make it a better tale.) I was surprised to learn how few local French Gestapo commanders names were known after the war—the Meyers of the world largely escaped justice. Nuremberg served up justice to many, but not to all.
It would take me four pages to list all the books I read for the background to writing this. If I can recommend only one, it would be Leo Marks’s Between Silk and Cyanide: A Codemaker’s War. If you have a movie streaming service, you might have Carve Her Name With Pride available, a biopic of one SOE agent, and you might have access to the BBC’s one-hour documentary program on Noor Inayat Khan, one of the agents who fascinates me most, for she was so ill-suited to violent war work but kept the Nazis confused for months as she transmitted back to England. Both of these are well worth watching. If you’ve never read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, it is well worth your time.
There are several biographies of Vera Atkins and various SOE agents. I’ve read three on Yeo-Thomas alone, who had his testicles tortured more steadily and terribly than Will did in this novel, and he lived to tell the tale. These agents were brave people, and the surviving SOE agents kept their vow and their secrets until the end of the century. Many women agents were gassed or shot at Ravensbrück and did not survive much past D-Day. One survived precisely by volunteering to be injected with typhus, which got her out of the death camp. At least one still in the camp was shoved into the crematorium still alive. The electrical shock between the eyes did happen to the captured Monk Circuit agents. Nazis were not—nor will they ever be—“fine people.” They are evil, brutal, and murderous, and we should expel them from our midst.
www.loucadle.com
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
PART II
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
/> Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Part III
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
NOTES
Also by Lou Cadle
Gray, a post-apocalyptic disaster series:
Gray, Part I
Gray, Part II
Gray, Part III
Gray, The Complete Collection
Stand-alone disaster novels:
Erupt
Quake
Storm
Crow Vector: Pandemic
41 Days
Dawn of Mammals series, time-travel adventure:
Saber Tooth
Terror Crane
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Oil Apocalypse series, post-oil near-future survival adventure
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In audiobook:
Gray, the Complete Collection
Oil Apocalypse books 1, 2, and 3.
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