The Enigma Game

by Elizabeth Wein

  ‘Aye, he did that,’ Ellen admitted.

  I suppose it was odd Felix Baer would do that. Why had he chosen me? I wasn’t even in uniform. Perhaps he guessed his contact would talk to me later, and I was the one who had seen the machine.

  However, Robert Ethan hadn’t asked about the machine, and I didn’t find it till after he left.

  Jamie reached out a fine, narrow finger and dialled back one of the rotors.

  ‘You said the settings change every day,’ he said. ‘How many do we have?’

  ‘We think until the end of January,’ I told him.

  Jamie said forcefully, ‘So we have to use them now.’

  Ellen gave Jamie a long look, took a deep breath, and nodded in agreement.

  ‘I’ll have to spin a tale,’ Jamie said. ‘I mean, a tale about where we got this gen.’

  ‘Gen?’ Jane asked. She hadn’t said a word since he’d shaken hands with her, but she was leaning forward with her head cocked so she could hear everything, and I could tell she was just as excited as the rest of us.

  ‘Information. Sorry.’ He grinned over at her with bright eyes, amber-green flecked with brown, like dried palm fronds with the sun behind them. ‘We all have our own mumbo-jumbo, and I don’t get off base much.’

  Ellen chewed at her lower lip, watching him like she was worried about him. I didn’t think they were sweethearts, but I knew they’d been friends for a long time, since before the war. She wanted to help him.

  I had an idea.

  I leaned forward and picked up my L key. It came off the keyboard easily. Then I flipped to the back of my exercise book and found Felix Baer’s strip of onionskin paper that had been rolled inside the key.

  ‘November’s almost finished anyway,’ I said. ‘If we just keep the November setting chart that has the instructions, I can copy out the December and January charts for us to use, and you can give the real ones to Intelligence. I bet they’re what Robert Ethan was looking for anyway. You can pretend you found this key just now, in the bar downstairs with the other wishing coins, and that you found the leaflets where he hid them in the Django Reinhardt record album. And Jane can write this last message in German in the cover of one of the charts, as if the pilot left it there himself.’

  ‘And when I “find” it, I’ll have to pretend my German’s better than it is. I’ll see if I can borrow a dictionary off my wee sister.’ Jamie stood up. ‘Let me take your key and your note and do some sleight of hand with it downstairs. You’d better make those copies now, so I can take the charts with me today. Then I’ll warn Deeside.’

  ‘Ellen can get them to you,’ I promised.

  I didn’t think I’d get my letter L back, once Wing Commander Talbot Cromwell got hold of it. But I passed it to Jamie.

  ‘I’ll see you again, ladies,’ Jamie said, giving a gallant little bow.

  Then he and Ellen went back downstairs.

  Jane and I were alone again, me and my eighty-two-year-old operatic registered-alien German companion, involved in a wonderful small conspiracy that was going to help win the war.

  I set to work copying German code settings.

  When I’d finished, I folded the exercise book and the copied charts over the keyboard of the coding machine and closed the lid. I put it back in the wardrobe, where it was safe enough hidden beneath Johanna von Arnim’s old evening clothes. Now all we had to do was wait for Ellen to come back to collect the leaflets for Jamie.

  ‘Why don’t you play your flute for me again?’ Jane suggested.

  A different idea came to me all of a sudden.

  ‘Couldn’t you teach me Morse code?’ I asked.

  She turned over her upside-down teacup and lifted the teapot to pour herself some stewed, cold tea. She was surprisingly unfussy about her tea.

  ‘What makes you think I can teach you Morse code?’ she asked.

  ‘You were a telegraphist,’ I said. ‘And if I learned now, I could join the forces, perhaps, when I’m older. I only left school two months ago – I feel like I should still be learning things. And … it might be useful.’

  ‘It might be,’ Jane agreed.

  I screwed the sections of my flute together.

  ‘I thought I could learn it and practise at the same time,’ I said, and held the flute to my lips. I drew in a deep breath, as if I were about to dive into cold water. Then I held down my thumb and opposite pinkie and the first two fingers of my left hand and played an A.

  ‘Oh, of course!’ said Jane.

  She sang an A.

  ‘Tra-laaaa.’

  Dot-dash. Short-long.

  I played another A, tra-la, quaver and crotchet, tra-la, tra-la, tra-la.

  Jane’s amazing near-contralto swooped up a step to a B. ‘Traaaa-lalala.’

  I echoed her on the flute. AB, AB, tra-lahh, tra-lalala, tra-lahh, tra-lalala.

  And on up the A-minor scale, getting quicker and surer all the time, until by G we were both breathless and had to stop because Jane started to mix up notes to test me, and I trilled them staccato back to her like sleet against window glass, and we laughed so hard we couldn’t sing nor play.

  And in one afternoon I learned almost a third of the alphabet in Morse code.

  Phyllis wasn’t in on it. We didn’t dare tell her – she was under Cromwell’s thumb. When Jamie had to give her his report after they blew up the U-boats, he used the Bell Rock Lighthouse being alight as an excuse for sweeping the area around it. I don’t think he lied to her; I’m not sure anyone could. She talked to you like a primary school teacher, brisk and firm. She settled all of Ellen and Mrs Campbell’s arguments (over Ellen’s ration coupons, Ellen smoking in the bedroom, Ellen propping her bicycle against the shed door instead of properly putting it inside, Ellen hanging her wet mackintosh in the bathroom). Phyllis stuck to the rule book about everything. The Isle of Man butter ruffled her feathers something terrible.

  ‘Oh, no, Mrs Campbell, don’t butter my toast this morning, please. I don’t want to know where it came from, and I shall have to report it if any more comes in!’

  I didn’t think she really would report Mrs Campbell for a pound of contraband butter; she was kind as kind. But she would have reported the Enigma machine.

  So Ellen and I didn’t have much chance to talk about it, because she and Phyllis shared a bedroom, and there was almost always someone else about when I saw Ellen. I was hardly ever on my own.

  I had Jane to look after. She couldn’t go far or fast, but she was determined to make the most of her freedom, and I was constantly panicking that she’d go off without me and get herself into some difficulty. When the gales cleared off, she decided we should take the bus to Stonehaven to visit the library there. We timed it so Ellen could give us a lift to the bus stop (with Phyllis in the van too, on her way to the aerodrome; there was no escaping her).

  A thing happened on the bus that scared me and Jane both.

  We got on and I paid our fares, and we went and sat just across from a young mum with a wobbly baby on her lap and a little boy next to her. Jane, I discovered, could not resist a baby.

  ‘Hello, little man!’ She leaned forward, around me, to see him. She covered her eyes and uncovered them quickly. ‘Peepo!’

  The baby gave a gurgle of a laugh. His big brother, not yet old enough to be in school, stared.

  ‘How old are your boys?’ Jane asked in a friendly way.

  ‘Bertie’s four, and wee Angus is just nine months old today,’ said the woman.

  The four-year-old Bertie wasn’t staring at Jane. He was staring at me, sitting right across the aisle from him.

  Suddenly he buried his face in his mum’s arm, clinging and fearful. His shoulders shook as he started to sob.

  His mum leaned down to listen to him, then looked up and laughed.

  ‘No, don’t be a silly-willy!’ she told the boy. ‘Of course she isn’t a German!’

  Jane gasped and flinched. I heard and felt it. I’d only known her for a fortnight, bu
t in that time we’d seen Liverpool bombed and had faced down an enemy soldier with a gun, and delivered the code that sank three U-boats. I had never known her to be shaken by anything until this moment when she thought she’d been found out.

  And she hadn’t even done anything to give herself away; she’d just been caught off guard somehow by a small boy. She stiffened, and sat up straight so that my head blocked the people opposite from seeing her face, and her hands went tight where they were propped on the sticks that lay across our laps. I could feel the sticks pressing hard against the tops of my thighs as she pushed on them.

  But I knew that the boy had been looking at me, not her.

  He wouldn’t raise his head. He muttered into his mum’s arm.

  ‘I shall ask her myself.’ She leaned over her little boy and spoke to me directly. ‘You’re not from round about, are you? Where do you come from?’

  Jane got it, then.

  But she didn’t relax; the sticks pressed down more fiercely into my legs.

  ‘I grew up in Jamaica,’ I said. I could feel the blood rising to burn in my cheeks, the familiar anger and the unfamiliar urge to fly into a fight, the way I’d felt when that horrid Chip Wingate called me a darkie. ‘I’m British. My dad is—’ I swallowed. ‘My dad was a seaman in the merchant navy, but his ship was torpedoed. Hardly anyone was rescued.’

  ‘Oh, darlin’, how terrible!’ The young mum’s concern was warm and honest. ‘My husband too, last spring. Just after Angus came along, as well. He never saw the wee ’un.’ She bent her head so she could speak into the cowering boy’s ear. ‘You see, Bertie? Her daddy’s been lost at sea just like yours. She wouldnae speak English if she was a German!’

  Jane flinched again.

  The woman looked back up at me and gave an apologetic little laugh. ‘You must be the most northerly Jamaican in the kingdom! He’s no’ seen one before. Nor a German, for that matter. But he worries about Germans a great deal. Silly wee lad! There’s no Germans here.’

  I was the most foreign-looking person that boy had ever seen, so he thought I must be German.

  And here all the while was this German woman sitting stiffly afraid beside me and hoping no one would notice. For once, Jane hadn’t spoken up for me.

  I tried to smile – that poor young widow was being nice, after all. But I couldn’t manage it. People being nice to you after someone has made you feel like a criminal or an enemy is just like sticking cardboard in your window after a bomb has blasted all the glass out of it. The hole is stopped up, but the glass is still smashed and you can’t see through the window any more. Everything in the room is uglier and darker.

  Mummy would have poked fun at these people, helped me laugh it off, swept up the invisible broken glass, painted pretty patterns on the cardboard in the hole. Alone, I was helpless with anger. I didn’t want to live in the ugly dark room with the smashed window.

  ‘I’m sorry about your husband,’ I murmured.

  And that was that – nobody said anything else to one another throughout the whole eight-mile bus ride to Stonehaven.

  But after we got off the bus, and Jane and I were by ourselves being scoured by the salt wind as we made our way very slowly down the High Street to the library, Jane asked me about my parents.

  ‘Mummy was English,’ I told her. ‘She was born in London. Her father was in the Royal Navy, based in Jamaica, and directed a band for them. He died – both her parents died before she was married. But she was already grown-up then, teaching music at a secondary school for boys in Kingston. I look like her, except that she was blond! We have the same face, same shape of eyes and mouth. I can wear all her clothes now, well, if I take them in a bit at the top.’

  It felt good to talk about her, I realised.

  ‘She gave harp and piano lessons, and used to play at weddings and things like that. Sometimes I got to go along and sit in a corner guzzling wedding cake.’

  ‘How did she meet your father?’ Jane asked.

  ‘They both sang. They were in the same operatic society. He was a seaman, too, like her father, but …’ My daddy, Lenford Adair, always bringing me presents from faraway places and shouting with laughter at my school stories. Arguing politics with our landladies in London in his sea-deep baritone voice. My very earliest memory is of him singing on the veranda, while I lay in my cot under the mosquito net in the dark warm night and lizards scratched on the screens and the window slats. Come sit on my knee and sing, Carrie! he’d call softly to Mummy. I’ve missed you, girl.

  ‘Daddy’s mother, Granny Adair, lives on the tiniest farm on the edge of Kingston, and Daddy ran away to sea when he was fifteen. He was in the merchant navy. So my mother was alone with me a lot. And when I was in primary school there were labour strikes and workers rioting all over the Caribbean, and Daddy’s ship stopped more often in Southampton than it did in Kingston, so Mummy came back to London with me in 1937. She was glad she did it, too, because the very next year there was a big strikers’ riot in Kingston and people got killed.’

  And two years after that, the London bus she was riding on fell into a crater made by a German bomb and she got killed.

  Suddenly I felt like I was going to choke on the unfairness of this stupid war. How did I get here, walking at a snail’s pace down this windy cobbled street full of cold granite houses, carrying ration books and a forged passport for an ancient German opera singer, helping her find something to read while we waited for a winter evening bright enough to drop some bombs by moonlight?

  ‘My father wasn’t let in the Royal Navy because he wasn’t born in Europe,’ I added. ‘He’d been a British seaman since he was fifteen, but that wasn’t good enough for the Royal Navy. Even though he ended up dying like a navy man.’

  My voice was getting shrill.

  It still made me furious, and I dreaded that the same thing would happen to me when – if – I tried to enlist. I thought about the little boy on the bus, who’d taken one look at me and decided I must be the enemy, just because he’d never seen anyone who looked like me before.

  But there was the Enigma machine. If I never got another chance to serve, at least I had the Enigma machine now.

  I hated the bitterness I’d heard in my own voice. I took a deep breath.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said quietly. ‘I’m sorry. It didn’t seem to make him angry – he volunteered and they said no. They told him he was doing vital work that needed doing, and that made sense to him. And he was. But it made me angry. It still makes me angry.’

  Jane didn’t answer for a minute or so – just concentrated steadily on moving forward, tap-step-tap-step, with her feet and her sticks.

  Then when we got to a corner where we had to cross the road, she stopped to rest a moment and straightened up.

  ‘You have all your life ahead of you. You will have to start fighting,’ Jane said, as if it were a straightforward and practical plan for me: destroy the British Empire’s colour bar and save the world from fascism at the same time.

  ‘I envy you, a little, my dear,’ she went on. ‘I’m doing it the other way round. I started out my life with all doors open to me, and the world’s events of the past ten years have held nothing but sorrows and disappointments as those doors, and more, slammed closed. My nation has poisoned itself. I will never go home. I will never belong anywhere again. I have no people.’

  My heart gave an anxious little skip that was becoming familiar. ‘Oh, Jane,’ I scolded. ‘When the war ends—’

  She cut me off. ‘If the war ends tomorrow, I will already be eighty-two years old! My future is rather more predictable than yours.’

  She started tottering across the road.

  ‘But you, girl,’ she added to me over her shoulder, with the warmth coming back into her voice, ‘you might be able to change things.’

  Ellen:

  I was the courier now.

  It made me nervous. I admit it, I was scared of Cromwell finding out. I hadn’t crossed paths with him much, except to
drive him to Deeside. But I knew how Jamie hated him, and that made it worth the risk. Anything, now that Jamie had a whiff of his old self back. Pimms were the heroes of the day after that last op. The lads said Jamie never got so much as a Well done out of Cromwell, but that was his own fault for striding in for debriefing and boasting, ‘Guess what happens when we’re armed properly!’

  I stopped at the airfield gate on my way out to Stonehaven to collect a crate of administrative bumf from the rail station, and waited for Nobby Fergusson to raise the barrier. He sidled up to the Tilly looking important.

  I cranked down the window. ‘What now, Nobby?’

  ‘Watch out for that bus stop when you get to the crossroads, Volunteer McEwen,’ he said. ‘We have reason to believe it’s the centre of a dangerous spy network.’

  My belly lurched. What had he seen? Had he noticed my back-and-forth carrying-on between Jamie and Louisa? But I’d not gone at all out of my way!

  Nobby’s mate Jack Hinton put in, ‘I never liked that telephone box much, either.’

  ‘What are you lads gassing about?’ I said through my teeth.

  ‘Didn’t they tell you at operations?’ asked Nobby, pleased to be the bearer of bad news. ‘A German bomber flew over last night, dropped a load of TNT up on the main road, and scarpered off back to Norway. Flattened the bus shelter and knocked over the telephone kiosk!’

  ‘They missed a very suspicious postbox,’ Jack added with a wink. ‘It sits all by itself in a field wall. Perfect place to get rid of a secret message. Maybe the Jerries know something we don’t know!’

  ‘I’m sure they know all sorts you don’t know,’ I told them as they raised the barrier.

  That explosion hadn’t even shaken me out of bed. Why would the Luftwaffe send one lonely bomber to an empty, wet bus stop guarded by drookit sheep?

  It put out the telephone line into Windyedge village for a day or so. But we still had the radios at the aerodrome, so 648 Squadron was all right.

  In daylight, plain daylight, the Luftwaffe was back the next afternoon with three Junkers Ju-88 bombers. They went skriking past the Kingsleap Light and swung north along the cliffs. Pimms Section got scrambled out to chase them; Old Flash radioed Deeside to beg help from the Spitfires. And Wing Commander Talbot Cromwell leaped into the Tilly with me as his driver.