by James R Benn
I hoped.
I ran low, keeping an even pace to avoid any sudden moves that might draw the eye of a semi-alert sentry. As I rounded the rear of the north wing, I spotted another room with a thin line of light showing from the bottom of a blackout curtain. It hadn’t been lowered all the way, leaving an inch or so for the light to seep out. Someone on duty, or had they forgotten to turn off the lamp?
I crawled under the window, resisting the temptation to peek inside. It would be good to know who was up, but not at the cost of someone spotting the whites of my eyes and sounding the alarm.
I made it to the corner of the north wing, flattening myself against the stonework as I watched and listened for any sign of movement. I stuck my head out and scanned the front of the main building. Quiet.
What were the chances of a guard being posted at the main entrance? Fine time to think about that possibility. I kept my eyes on the woods and the path on the other side of the fence. A patrol could come along at any time, but I ought to be able to catch a glimpse of their flashlights, even if they kept them dimmed.
Nothing. No light, no sound, no telltale whiff of tobacco from a guard sneaking a smoke. Time to move.
I made my way to the main entrance. No lights were on along the front, so my luck was holding. No guard stood by the door. I darted to the file-room window and crouched beneath it, doing one last check, which was made more difficult by the sound of my heart pounding loudly in my chest.
I hoisted myself onto the narrow ledge, balancing on my toes as I grasped either side of the window frame. I had maybe three inches of stonework to stand on and less than that around the edges to hang on to. If I had a third arm to push up and open the window, it’d be a cinch.
Clinging to the gritty sandstone with my left hand, I used my right to push on the window. It didn’t budge. One foot slipped, and I had to grab hold with both hands again as I regained my toehold. I tried again once I’d steadied myself. This time I was ready to apply more pressure, and I grunted as I worked to force the window open.
I heard voices. How loud had I been? I stopped forcing the window and clung to the sides of the frame, waiting to get a sense of where the chatter was coming from. The door at the main entrance opened. Flashlight beams played across the walkway behind me as the voices hit the night air and became distinct.
“No sign of Sarge.”
“Unless he’s already been by looking for us.”
“Don’t worry so much. That’s one less circuit to make. And cut your torch, no reason to let him spot us.”
The two Home Guards walked behind me, still chatting about their non-com and oblivious to the GI clutching the wall for dear life not five yards away. God bless goldbricks everywhere. If they stayed on the walkway, there was a good chance they wouldn’t spot the hanging sheets. They’d have to get closer for that, and these guys didn’t seem the type to go the extra mile.
I gave the window another shove. It moved this time, the warped wooden frame groaning. If those two guards had been in the foyer doing their Sad Sack routine for a few minutes longer, they would’ve heard the racket.
One more push and I had enough clearance to slither in, push aside the blackout curtain, and close the window behind me. I dropped to the floor and let my breathing calm down as the silence settled in around me.
Silence in a big old building is noisy. Odd and faint sounds came to my ears. The creak of wood expanding. The metallic ping of heating ducts contracting. The scritch-scratch of mice making themselves at home in the walls.
A single harsh sound. Something being dropped? Someone was awake, perhaps in one of the lighted rooms, or on patrol. It was time to move. I pulled the blackout lantern from my jacket and went to Clarissa’s desk. Using a letter opener, I jimmied her desk drawer and grabbed the filing-cabinet keys.
In the gloomy night, the wall of files was even more daunting. I held up the lantern and looked for the H section. Then I saw the cabinets were divided by years. Good, that made it easier. I moved down to 1944 and found the G-L cabinet, then the right key, and there it was.
Holland, Thomas. I sat on the floor and opened the thick folder, letting the blackout light cast its reddish glow across the page. Admitted 21 May 1944. They hadn’t updated his file. According to the SOE bureaucrats, he was still alive.
A photograph was clipped to the inside of the file. Thomas Holland as I’d never seen him. Youthful. Smiling and staring at someone off camera, a drink in one hand, outdoors on a bright spring day. On the back Sorbonne 1938 was scrawled in a flowing hand. Another photo showed him posed with a friend, their arms around each other’s shoulders and broad grins lighting their faces. Georg, Paris. A lifetime ago.
Flipping through his personnel file, I saw that he’d studied music at the Sorbonne in Paris. That probably meant his French was excellent. He was brought into SOE in 1941 and underwent the usual rounds of training. Wireless, explosives, weapons, and hand-to-hand combat. High scores all around, including languages. He was graded as fluent in French and German. A selection board had passed on approving him for operational status. Their report was four typewritten pages and I didn’t bother with much of it. I found Holland’s personal history much more interesting.
His father, William, was a chemist who’d served in the trenches during the Great War. His mother was a German Jew who’d emigrated with her family in the twenties. She’d converted to the Church of England before marriage. Greta Mosinger became Gretchen Holland, imparting to Thomas an affinity for the German language and perhaps a personal reason for striking back at the Nazis.
The next photograph was more somber. His false identity photo. Longer hair, a suit jacket much the worse for wear, and a scowl on his face. The perfect Frenchman under the Occupation.
He’d been on one mission in 1943, serving as a courier with the Jockey circuit in the Rhône Valley. His false identity had been that of a teacher recovering from jaundice, which had helped protect him from being picked up by the Germans for slave labor. He’d been called back to England to be part of a new mission earlier this year.
This assignment was with the Stationer circuit west of Paris. Holland’s job was to coordinate weapon drops and distribute arms to the Resistance for use in support of D-Day. A big job. So far, everything about Holland was exemplary. I turned the page.
He’d been betrayed. A member of one of the Resistance groups he’d worked with had been turned and revealed the location of an upcoming drop. The debriefing report in the official file was brief, noting that Holland was noncommunicative upon his eventual return to England. Docile, but unresponsive, the report concluded.
Attached to the short report was a longer account by fellow agent Peter Rowden who had been an eyewitness to it all. His debrief was more extensive and gave a full account of what had happened. He also had been part of the Stationer circuit and had been picked up by the Gestapo the day after Holland’s capture as he’d tried to board a train and escape. The entire circuit had been blown.
Both men had been imprisoned at 84 Avenue Foch, the most terrifying address in Paris. It was the headquarters of the counterintelligence branch of the SS, used for interrogation and torture prior to execution. The Gestapo had known that Holland possessed important information about arms caches and Resistance groups. Rowden had occupied a cell next to Holland and witnessed him being brought back every day from interrogation. Holland told him that the first sessions began with cigarettes, coffee, and conversation as the Germans tried to convince him to see the wisdom of cooperation. Holland refused. The interrogations moved on to torture as soon as the sympathetic routine produced no results.
They beat Holland, and each day he came back bloodied and bruised. He told Rowden he would never talk.
Then they moved on to the magneto torture. Two wires, one attached to a finger and the other to the genitals. He came back from those sessions writhing in pain from the burns, tel
ling Rowden he still hadn’t talked.
Until the day came when he was brought back and said nothing.
Then the Germans focused on Rowden. What did he know? Where were the arms caches? He could tell they hadn’t learned anything from Holland. They finally gave up on Rowden, guessing that he was telling the truth when he claimed not to have the information they wanted. It was true enough, but in his own report he said he would have given away anything to stop the pain.
One day a dozen prisoners were taken from their cells and loaded aboard trucks headed to the train yard for transport to concentration camps. Which meant death. As the small convoy neared the station, the Resistance ambushed the vehicles. Several prisoners were killed, some escaped only to be captured later, but Rowden and Holland made it out alive.
A Lysander flew them to England a week later.
A sigh escaped my lips as I finished the report. Docile, but unresponsive. Now I knew why. Holland never uttered a word. He kept his promise not to talk and somehow found himself marooned in his own silence, unmoored from speech and the possibility of betrayal.
Chapter Twelve
I closed the file on Thomas Holland, lingering for a moment over that photograph of him from a happier time. A man of tremendous courage, he kept his secrets until the end. Dr. Robinson’s notes had been sparse, describing Holland as compliant but nonresponsive and having little chance of a full recovery. An updated notation from two weeks ago mentioned a small improvement, but nothing else before he died.
And there was hardly anyone to mourn him. According to a note appended to the file, Rowden, the other survivor of the Stationer circuit, had died in a V1 rocket attack on London in June. Holland’s parents were both dead, his father of a heart attack right before the war and his mother in a bombing raid on Portsmouth during the 1940 Blitz. His only living relative was an uncle, a British Army captain serving overseas on active duty, meaning don’t ask where.
Who would remember Thomas Holland? And more to the point, who had a grudge against him? He betrayed no one, went above and beyond what was expected, and seemingly had no enemies except maniacs wearing swastika armbands. Who at Saint Albans wanted him dead?
I’d have time to think about that later. Right now, I needed to check some more files. After I returned Holland’s, I glanced at my watch. Twenty after four. I had a solid hour before I had to think about sunrise and folks rubbing the sleep from their eyes.
Next up was Miller.
Frederick Miller. Admitted 22 July 1944.
As with Holland’s file, the first photograph was from another place and time. Miller in uniform standing in front of what looked like a barracks, his arms akimbo and a grin lighting his face. The kind of snapshot you’d send home to your folks to show them how great life in the army was.
Miller had volunteered for the OSS and ended up in southern France, as he’d said. More weapon drops to the Resistance. There had been plenty of Maquis waiting for arms, and this small army had had a big role in disrupting German reinforcements headed to the D-Day beaches.
It was a dangerous job, according to the OSS officer who evaluated his performance. After D-Day Miller and his group fought with the Maquis, ambushing columns on the road and blowing up train tracks.
There was a traitor in their midst, a woman, just as Miller claimed. But it wasn’t Miller who uncovered her. According to a fellow OSS agent, it was the leader of the Resistance group, Valentin, who came up with the ruse concerning the explosives.
Miller volunteered to execute her, to forestall any bad blood among the local Maquis. Her family was well-known in the area and killing her might fester for years, long after the war was over. So Miller took her into the woods.
He let her go. He fired a shot, then another, into the ground. He’d fired his weapon in battle, but face-to-face with this Frenchwoman, he couldn’t do it.
The Maquis moved out. Two days later, in a village three kilometers from where Miller had been so merciful, Valentin’s entire family was shot in the village square. His wife, two children, an uncle, and his bedridden mother all dead because of the traitor whose life Miller had spared, never imagining she would repay his kindness with retribution.
Miller insisted he had killed her, but the other OSS agents didn’t believe him. Neither did Valentin. The mission was abandoned and the team returned to England. Miller began to talk of other killings, fanciful encounters with Germans and Vichy fascists, in which he dispatched them cheerfully and with a great deal of blood.
Delusional, Robinson had written. Paranoid grandiose delusion. Irritable, angry, but capable of nonimpaired functioning at times. Delusions rooted in the guilt he feels at not eliminating the subject. Further treatment required. Convulsive therapy recommended, whatever that was.
Eliminating the subject. So easy to write in a report while safe in a warm office in the heart of England. Shooting a woman in the head while she looks you in the eye, pleading for her life—much more descriptive but frowned upon in army medical reports.
I couldn’t look at his photograph as I put away the file. Miller was a good man, trapped within his own fairy tale of ruthlessness and violence. Maybe that made him a potential murderer, but I doubted it. Precisely the opposite. His killings were all in his head.
Angus Sinclair was next on my list. I had to go back to the 1943 files to find him.
Admitted 2 December 1943. Nervous breakdown.
His picture looked like Sinclair now. Maybe a little chubbier around the cheeks, but that was it. He’d been a professor at University of Cambridge with a bunch of degrees and letters after his name, most of which made no sense to me. Kaz would know.
He’d gone to work for the British Admiralty in 1939, employed by the Directorate of Miscellaneous Weapon Development, which was a mouthful of nothing. His file was thin, with lots of stamps proclaiming access denied, restricted, and most secret. Not much to go on.
Robinson’s notes indicated nervous exhaustion from overwork and severe stress. He’d given Sinclair the sleep cure when he’d first arrived, which had helped. Sinclair was better able to communicate and function, but he had lost all desire to keep secrets. He’d mention top-secret projects and wonder aloud at the progress his colleagues were making. Complete loss of inhibitions regarding security, Robinson had written, recommending continued incarceration until the end of the war.
Loss of inhibition, I thought as I returned the file. In someone else, that might lead to a violent physical reaction. With Sinclair, it seemed like he used his words rather than his fists.
Tough call for Robinson to keep him locked up here for the duration, not that it was the worst jail I’d ever seen.
Call? The word rattled around in my brain for a moment. Then it hit me.
Jesus, why hadn’t I thought of that before?
I could make a call. A telephone sat on Clarissa’s desk and I’d passed it by without a thought. My brain really was jumbled up. I’d planned on checking Kaz’s file to see what Dr. Hughes had to say, but that could wait. I flicked off the light and made for Clarissa’s swivel chair, wincing as the seat creaked under my weight.
I lifted the receiver. No dial tone. Then a click and a tinny voice.
“Operator.”
“Connect me with the London exchange, please,” I said, keeping my voice as low as possible without whispering. I didn’t know where Colonel Harding was right now, but someone at SHAEF headquarters would be able to get a message to him.
“Please repeat?”
“The London exchange,” I said loudly as I cupped my hand around the receiver.
“Very well. Security code, please.”
Oh no.
Now I knew what was going on in that room with the lights on. They had an internal switchboard. Of course.
“Sorry, I can’t hear you,” I said. “We have a bad connection. Say again?”
Then I
hung up.
I hurried to the door but stopped in my tracks. If the guards were called out, they’d be coming down the hall. The only way out was the window. I chanced a flicker of red light, scanning the file drawers to be sure they were all closed up tight. I opened the window and slid out, making sure the blackout curtain fell in place before I closed the window. There was no way to lock it.
I hit the ground and darted away from the building, reaching the edge of the woods on the other side of the walkway. If anyone was watching, they’d spot me, but I didn’t think they’d react that quickly. This gave me some cover and a view of the building. I melted back farther into the shadows and watched as lights flicked on in first one room then another, the curtains leaking pale yellow around the edges.
I moved along the edge of the tree line, staying low and hitting the dirt when beams of light broke through the undergrowth. Guards coming in from the outer path. Then two more, perhaps the goldbrick twins, circling around from the rear of the building. Good, they were all converging on the front door. They yammered and flashed their torches everywhere as one of them finally produced a key and opened the door. There was a brief argument about who should stay outside. I took advantage by running in the opposite direction and crossing the path, heading for the guards’ mess behind the main building. Where better to hide than the place everyone is leaving?
I drew closer, darting behind a tree as I watched a line of men head out of the guardhouse, splitting into search teams. I didn’t have much time. Either they’d pick me up out here or find my room empty. Either way was big trouble.
I took a chance. Instead of skulking around, I stood tall, straightened my shoulders, and took long steps, heading to the rear of the north wing and my waiting sheets. Best thing to do in a search when you can’t hide is to look like you belong. I swung my arms, swiveled my head as if I was on the lookout for escaped lunatics, and tried to ignore the growing crescendo of shouts and orders rising from every direction. I dropped the blackout lantern in the grass, where any careless guard might have left it.
