The Enigma Game

by Elizabeth Wein

  The cigarette paper she’d fished out of the ashtray fell out of her pocket.

  I didn’t see it till she’d gone, along with everybody else. By then, Jane had smoked her Woodbine and decided she needed to go upstairs to lie down and ‘rest her eyes’. As I was getting up to help Jane with her sticks I noticed the crumpled piece of cigarette paper beneath the table.

  I only picked it up because I thought Ellen might want it back. Wartime rationing makes everybody terribly thrifty. It was a piece of paper not much bigger than a few postage stamps! Isn’t it strange how you follow along when somebody else does something?

  In any case, I picked it up and was about to put it in my pocket when I realised why Ellen had saved it – and why Bill Yorke had tossed it away.

  It was covered with blocks and blocks of letters, beginning with two meaningless groups of three letters apiece and the rest in rows of five, lines of nonsense marching down the thin sheet. I couldn’t read it. I mean, I could read the letters; they were neat block capitals, evenly printed. But they didn’t say anything – they didn’t make words that meant anything.

  Whatever it said, it was in code.

  Back upstairs in Room Five, Jane lay on the bed and rested her eyes.

  I sat down and opened a book. But I kept thinking about the cigarette paper with the rows of meaningless letters. I felt like it was burning an imaginary hole in my skirt pocket. Was it important? No, it couldn’t be, or Bill Yorke wouldn’t have tossed it in the ashtray. But what if he’d done that because he wanted to get rid of it? Had Ellen noticed the writing – did she wonder what it meant?

  I pulled the paper out of my pocket and spread it flat on my open book, like a bookmark. The sheet was covered front and back with the rows of printed letters. Bill Yorke was the wireless operator for his flight crew as well as their gunner – he must have taken this down in the air not long ago. Maybe only last night.

  Then I had a wild thought.

  I had a coding machine and I had a coded message. Perhaps I could put the two together.

  By now, Jane was snoring gently as she rested her eyes. I shut my book on the cigarette paper and went to the wardrobe. When I opened it and dug out the coding machine and the box of extra rotors, Jane didn’t stir. So I picked everything up, and my book and a pencil too, and let myself out of the room.

  I listened for anyone in the passage. But Phyllis had gone with Ellen to deliver the 648 Squadron airmen to their barracks, and Mrs Campbell was downstairs washing up. I made my way quietly down the passage and into the loo – the toilet was separate from the bathroom, right next to it in a little closet with a door and an arrow-slit window of its own.

  I locked the door and sat down on the loo with the book on my knees and the coding machine at my feet. I felt like Pandora as I opened the beautiful wooden box.

  Jane and I had left Felix Baer’s leaflets lying beneath the lid on top of the keyboard. I opened the first booklet. I couldn’t read the German headings, but Jane had explained to me how to match up the rotors and plugs. The two groups of three letters on Bill Yorke’s cigarette paper told me where the message began. I knew from Felix Baer’s instructions that when I keyed them in with today’s settings, they’d give me the starting letters for the rotor dials. I took a deep breath and began to type. I didn’t really believe it would work.

  I couldn’t decode it quickly. There weren’t any proper words to look at or remember. I had to do it letter by letter, and pay attention to make sure I was hitting the right keys. I hadn’t thought to bring extra paper, so as the decoded letters lit up in the upper keyboard, I wrote them down on the blank endpaper at the back of my book.

  After five minutes of struggle and with my back starting to ache from leaning down to the floor to hit the keyboard, I sat up and read in my notebook what the lamplit letters had spelled out:

  FEIND LICHE NSCHL ACHTS CHIFF E …

  It didn’t look like nonsense.

  I tried rewriting it by putting spaces between some of those bunches of consonants, and got:

  FEIND LICHENS CHLACHTS CHIFFE …

  And that looked like German.

  The hair stood up at the back of my neck.

  I couldn’t read this, either, but I could tell it was real words. Maybe I hadn’t split them the right way. But those letters meant something.

  And with the cipher machine, I’d worked it out myself.

  For a moment I was so excited I thought I was going to be sick.

  I thumped my fist on the floor. Then I regretted that in case anyone heard it. I was all cooped up in this tiny little room and I wanted to shout and jump up and down, but there wasn’t room to do anything, and also I knew this was as secret as secret could be, and whatever I did, I mustn’t shout.

  I had to tell Jamie Beaufort-Stuart. I had to figure out the whole message, and then the next time his squadron of Blenheim bombers went flying out over the North Sea, they’d know ahead of time what they were going to run into.

  So the only thing to do was to sit there and decode the rest of it.

  I was about to explode with excitement when I finally went back to Room Number Five. I felt as if I were tumbling to earth in a bomb dropped from a plane, Luftwaffe or RAF, I couldn’t quite work out which.

  Jane was sitting in her armchair in the chilly room. The radio was switched off and she wasn’t reading. Her face was blank, but her expression changed as I came in. She looked away from me quickly, the way you’d pretend to be innocent if you were caught on your way to scamper up a neighbour’s tree after their tamarinds, but you weren’t actually anywhere near the tree yet.

  ‘I tried to light the fire and it wouldn’t go on,’ Jane said cautiously, still not meeting my eyes.

  She hadn’t had to do that on her own before. She couldn’t kneel, though she was very good at leaning over, and could even touch her toes, to make up for her knees hardly bending at all. It was an awkward way to get at the fire.

  Guilt tore through me. I put down the cipher machine carefully, and laid the book on top of it – excited as I was, Jane was my first responsibility, and I’d left her here alone in the cold for half an hour at least. I looked at the meter. There was no gas flowing.

  ‘It needs another shilling,’ I said. ‘Oh, Jane, I’m so sorry! Why didn’t you call me? I was just down the passage in the loo!’ I reached for the shilling jar and dropped in a coin. There was a moment of very quiet stillness in which I could hear the meter start to whir. I bent down to turn on the gas tap so I could light the fire.

  And then I realised that the gas was already on.

  She’d turned on the gas tap and hadn’t turned it off again. If she’d started the meter herself without lighting the fire, the gas could have run and run, and filled the room. Maybe she would have sat there in the cold until she fell asleep again. How long would it be before the gas killed you?

  It looked like an accident. But even so, what if I’d come back into the room and found her stone dead? After the warning I’d been given – how could I bear it? Just the thought of it made my eyes prick with tears. Accident or on purpose – I didn’t know which would be worse. And it would be my fault for leaving her alone if anything happened, my fault for not being there with her.

  I could scarcely bear even to think about it.

  I knelt to light the fire and turned it up. I wanted her to get warm.

  ‘Tell me when you want the fire on,’ I begged. ‘Please just tell me. Don’t try to do it yourself. Let me take care of it. I’m sorry I was away so long just now—’

  I glanced over at the wooden box by the door, and my stomach jumped again. I looked back at Jane, and the excitement came flooding back.

  Jane met my eyes at last.

  ‘What have you been up to, Louisa?’ she asked.

  Jamie:

  ‘Jamie! Jamie Stuart! Hold on a wee minute—’

  Ellen leaned out of the Tilly, yelling, as I crossed to the Blenheims beneath the half-moon.

  I’d
been avoiding her, but I waited as the van pulled up. Ellen was an old friend, a good friend. And here was I, not daring to return a fond greeting in case someone threw it back at me as bad behaviour. I felt like a rotten coward.

  ‘Hop in,’ she said. ‘Och, don’t look like that, I’m not going to kiss you again.’

  ‘I’m sorry!’ I said. ‘It’s this bloody new commander. If he thinks I’m fooling around he’ll rake me over the coals, and Dougie Kerr can’t keep his gob shut.’

  ‘Well, I’ve met Cromwell now and he doesn’t like me either,’ Ellen said with sympathy. ‘Hop in, no one’s looking. I’ll take you across in a minute, but I want to talk to you …’

  I threw my parachute, helmet, and gauntlets in the back and climbed in next to her. I ought to be grateful for the short ride; I was geared up, and walking isn’t easy in a flight suit full of Ever-Hot bags topped off with a Mae West.

  Ellen put the van in neutral. She reached into a pocket of her ATS uniform and drew out a folded paper.

  ‘Should I read this now?’ I asked. The airfield was darkness and inky shadows. The lights would only be turned on for take-off. Anything that showed might attract German bombers.

  ‘I’ll tell you what it says.’ She paused. ‘It’s a coded message.’

  I didn’t know what to think. I sat silent, waiting for her to go on.

  ‘It’s a bit of the message you overheard on the wireless yesterday,’ she added in a low voice.

  I turned sharply to look at her, but it was too dark to read her face. ‘How do you know about that?’

  ‘Your gabby new Australian sparks was blethering about it at Mrs Campbell’s. His pilot shut him up. You were busy buying Tex another beer.’

  ‘Oh, Lord!’ Bloody Dougie Kerr. ‘How did you get it on paper?’

  ‘That was Bill Yorke, your other new sparks,’ said Ellen.

  I shook my head in despair, and she gave a low, dry chuckle. ‘It’s like being stuck with a bunch of schoolkids, aye?’

  ‘Half of them are a bunch of schoolkids,’ I pointed out. ‘Is this the best time to tell me? I’m away on an op in ten minutes.’

  ‘Don’t be fashed. It’s not what you think. And I’m not Cromwell.’ She took a deep breath. ‘I know what the message says.’

  We sat in the van in the dark, and I stared at Ellen without being able to see her.

  I unfolded the paper and flattened it against my leg. Ellen lit a match and held it over a page torn from an ordinary school jotter, just long enough for me to see the writing: printed lines of clear English, beneath recognisable German, beneath unrecognisable code.

  I didn’t have time to read anything before Ellen shook the match out.

  She spoke quietly, hesitating. It was a long time since we’d seen each other, and she knew I’d lost most of my squadron a couple of weeks ago, and it made us awkward.

  ‘Yorkie – is that what you call him?’ she began. ‘Bill Yorke, the English bloke with the moustache. He wrote the code on his cigarette papers. I saw it when he tossed them away at Mrs Campbell’s before. And I picked ’em up—’

  ‘Traveller habit,’ I scolded. ‘You’ll get caught.’

  ‘Shut yer gob, Jamie Stuart.’ The familiar teasing made her less uneasy. ‘Well, I didn’t get a keek before I’d dropped one of the papers myself, and then Louisa, that West Indian lass who looks after Nan’s old auntie, picked it up next. She’s that canny, Louisa is, sharpest eyes I’ve ever seen, and that’s saying something.’

  ‘Fair dos.’

  We both know the Beaufort-Stuarts have a reputation that way.

  ‘Louisa took it and worked out what it meant,’ Ellen said.

  ‘How the devil did she do that?’

  ‘Och, well …’ Ellen hesitated. ‘This is the mad bit.’

  ‘Hurry up!’

  ‘Windyedge had an unexpected visitor …’

  Ellen told me about the German pilot. She told me about ‘Odysseus’, and how Louisa discovered the gift he’d left.

  I knew it was true, because it fit. Even without the code name Odysseus, which I’d overheard, the jigsaw pieces fit. Odysseus flew the missing Messerschmitt, the one we never saw. The other Messerschmitt, the one we tangled with, was trying to stop him from completing his mission.

  And his mission was to deliver this cipher machine.

  ‘So he hid the machine and Louisa found it, and she made it work,’ Ellen finished. ‘She couldn’t have done it without his list of settings, but she found that too.’

  ‘Does she read German?’

  ‘No,’ Ellen said softly. ‘She got the old woman to translate. So they both know.’

  I whistled.

  Foes’ gifts are no gifts, warned my classical education. The real Odysseus’s gift had been a trap.

  ‘Did he bring it for us?’ I asked. ‘For 648 Squadron?’

  ‘I don’t know. I never heard of anything like it.’

  ‘Neither did I,’ I breathed.

  Ellen held another match over the page.

  ‘See. It’s an alert to their pilots about the U-boat you met, telling them where to find our ships. If you’d known that when the message came in, you could have warned the navy. Or done something about it.’

  The match was burning low.

  ‘There’s more,’ she said, and shook that flame out too. ‘I’ll tell you this but once. You can get Silver to read it properly after you’ve set off.’ She lit a final match, but only used it to light a cigarette. She said in a low voice, ‘The last part tells where the German submarines will be tonight.’

  I sat agog, my mouth hanging open.

  ‘Just off Bell Rock Light,’ she added. ‘It says. A “wolf pack”, they call it, six of ’em hunting together. Their coordinates look like military mumbo-jumbo to me, but Bell Rock’s clear enough.’

  She laughed at me gaping, and held her cigarette to my lips. I took a long drag, but the faint red glow wasn’t bright enough to light the miraculous sheet of paper lying in my lap.

  What had I said to Phyllis, on the morning of 7 November, two weeks ago?

  I want to know where their submarines are. Some wee thing. One surprising smack in their faces.

  ‘Buckets of blood, I have to get going,’ I said. ‘Drive.’

  I folded the page and tucked it into my thigh pocket, and pelted Ellen with questions as she drove.

  ‘How can we trust the old woman? Maybe she’s just having fun with the girl. And what about her – Louisa – you only met her this week! Isn’t she terribly young? Is this cipher machine real, anyway? Have you seen it yourself?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe. Aye, she’s young. And no, I have not. But I can tell you Louisa is as sound as you or me. Braver than me. You should have seen her stand up to that Jerry! I trust her, and she trusts Jane, and—’

  ‘And we’ve nothing to lose.’ I couldn’t believe my luck. ‘You know what? I’d rather go on a wild goose chase for Nan Campbell’s old auntie than take another blind order from Wing Commander Talbot Cromwell.’

  Ellen pulled up by my Blenheim and told me, ‘Louisa says you were lucky. She only managed to work it out because it was a full transmission. If any bit’s missing, the letters get in a guddle. So tell your sparks to take care what he copies down.’

  The plane loomed above us, shadow on shadow; Chip was a stocky, smaller shadow heffalumping about against the sky as he climbed into the rear hatch. We were being sent on patrol again, bombed up this time, to escort navy ships heading into Edinburgh through the Firth of Forth.

  Silver yanked open the door of the Tilly.

  ‘Thank goodness you’re here, I was worried I’d have to do the flying myself tonight,’ he said. ‘Then you really would be in trouble.’

  ‘You have no idea.’ I grabbed my gear and jumped out. I didn’t think about whether what I’d do next would get me in trouble – I might never get a chance like this again. ‘Have you plotted our course? I want to take us on a little detour.’

  ‘W
here’d you get this?’ Silver asked. He sat at the navigator’s chart table in the Blenheim’s nose, juggling an electric torch and his wind-direction calculator. ‘This is Tex’s code! Translated! But—’

  ‘You cracked the Kraut?’ Chip called from the back. ‘I thought special codebreakers had to do that.’

  ‘Special codebreakers did do it,’ I said evasively.

  The intercom crackled as Silver started to talk but changed his mind. Finally he said, ‘East of the Bell Rock Light! Twenty minutes down the Angus Coast. Well, it’s not far off where we’re meeting tonight’s convoy …’ Over the dashboard, I couldn’t see what he was doing as he changed our route. ‘Are Pimms and Madeira going together?’

  ‘No, I’m going to send Madeira on to Edinburgh alone. Then no one can accuse B-Flight of being late.’

  ‘Will this get you another reprimand?’

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘It’s your funeral,’ said Silver cheerfully.

  Fifteen minutes after we took off Chip called out, ‘I’m getting more of those danged coded signals.’

  I shivered in the heavy flight suit, but kept my hands steady on the controls, followed my course, watched the quiet moon.

  ‘Take down as much of it as you can,’ I said to him. ‘Get it all.’

  No one questioned me when I ordered Adam Stedman to keep Madeira Section on track for the convoy, and Bell Rock wasn’t far out of our way. The lighthouse there got shot up by a swarm of German bombers not long ago, so it stayed dark unless British ships were about. Tonight it was lit. That was a good enough excuse for checking it out. I knew I could trust Silver with our secret; I could tell him later, and I wouldn’t need to confess to Phyllis or Cromwell.

  ‘We’ll catch up to you in a jiffy,’ I said to Adam. ‘I want to sweep around the lighthouse.’ To Pimms I said, ‘Stay with me.’

  I passed the light, and we kept going, following our strange instructions twenty miles further out to sea. We could still see Bell Rock gleaming. Silver peered through the observer’s window up front, and I glided lower to get a better view.

  Gunshot suddenly exploded around us.