The Enigma Game

by Elizabeth Wein

‘They might be aiming for something else,’ Louisa said quietly.

  ‘Mrs Warner needs a bandage,’ Sergeant Lind said. ‘She’s twisted her wrist and dislocated her fingers.’

  ‘I’ll fetch Nan’s first-aid kit. Are you hurt, Louisa?’

  Louisa shook her head.

  ‘They got the hill above the limekilns,’ I went on. ‘If they’d waited a tenth of a second longer it would have hit this house.’

  Elisabeth Lind went to get dressed, but Louisa didn’t want to leave Jane. We bound up the old woman’s wrist and fingers, and pulled her off the floor and pushed her into the big stuffed armchair. But we couldn’t put clothes on her and there was no way to get her downstairs unless someone carried her.

  The bomb that missed the Limehouse did not fall harmlessly. You could tell that by leaning from Louisa’s window. There were sirens and shouts, and a scraping and pounding noise of men using spades and pickaxes against rock. The trees on the hill were aflame, and there came a delicious smell of burning pine, even through the window glass.

  ‘Louisa, you must go find out what’s happening!’ Jane told her.

  ‘But you can’t get up! Supposing the house is on fire!’

  Jane snapped at her, ‘Goodness, girl, you’d better find out if it is, hadn’t you!’

  Louisa and I both jumped. We’d neither one of us ever heard her speak so sharply.

  ‘You can get about and I can’t,’ Jane scolded. ‘Stop dithering and earn your keep.’

  Louisa looked as if she’d laugh and cry all at once.

  ‘Bring me some coffee if the house isn’t on fire,’ Jane added in a gentler voice. ‘I will hold the fort, as they say.’

  In the public bar, soldiers and firemen and the village Home Guard were running in and out and shouting to one another. The house did not look as if it were on the brink of falling down or burning up, but it was dark as a well because of the electricity being out. Nan rushed about boiling kettles and supplying folk with towels and blankets through the back door.

  ‘What’s happened?’ I exclaimed.

  ‘The limekilns have collapsed,’ Nan answered grimly. ‘Those Jerry prisoners are trapped. Maybe worse.’

  ‘Oh no!’ Louisa cried.

  Nan gave her a strange look.

  ‘RAF Windyedge sent their fire crew across. They’ll dig ’em out,’ Nan said. ‘The snow’s melting fast, and if they clear the runway I think the lads will be flying tonight.’

  ‘I ken, I’ve got to hike back to the airfield in case they need me in the Tilly,’ I said. ‘Phyllis went before the bomb fell. Where’s Sergeant Lind?’

  Nan shrugged. ‘Wing Commander Cromwell popped in and nabbed her so she can translate when they dig out the Jerries. There’s that much going on, I’m as glad not to have the house full of guests the day. Louisa, could you take this can of porridge out—’

  ‘I’ll do it, Mrs Campbell,’ I interrupted. ‘Louisa has to stay with Mrs Warner. She tumbled over when the bomb hit and she’s hurt her arm. She can’t use her sticks.’

  Nan pushed her wispy black hair away from her face and rubbed her eyes.

  ‘Whisht, I never believed I’d see this day,’ she muttered, and slammed a full kettle on the hob. The blue flame of the gas burner gave a merry glow – God be thanked, the gas mains weren’t damaged. ‘Is she all right?’ Nan asked. ‘Does she need the doctor?’

  As a Traveller I don’t believe I ever wanted a doctor in all my years, but after I’d seen one or two airmen fly in with punctured lungs after an op, I respected medical folk more than I did as a wee lassie. Aye, Jane ought to see a doctor – but it could probably wait until the blaze in the nearby trees had been put out, and the trapped men rescued.

  Louisa thought the same. ‘She’ll do for the moment,’ she said. ‘I’ll look after her just now.’

  Louisa:

  Jane said she wanted coffee.

  I tiptoed around the kitchen, trying not to get in Mrs Campbell’s way as I put together a tray. I couldn’t bear to think of what was happening in the limekilns; it took every bit of sense I had in me not to pull on Mrs Campbell’s wellie boots again and rush outside. I carried Jane’s tray upstairs. We couldn’t listen to the radio, but we heard the men digging.

  Early in the afternoon, the emergency workers uncovered Eberhard Moritz, and he was all right. They moved him to the aerodrome and kept digging. At the same time, men were also mending the underground electric cables that powered the Limehouse. I found this out from Morag Torrie, who brought us tea and sandwiches and some arnica tincture to rub on Jane’s hurt hand.

  ‘Mrs Campbell’s popped down to the village,’ Morag said. ‘There were so many folk in this morning, with the rescue, that she’s out of milk and tea and cheese. I don’t think she’ll get any at the shop – she’s not got the extra ration tickets and is cross about it. You’ve got the last of the bread. I’m off work now so I’ll lock up, as the other girls are at the air base and you’re alone here. Is Mrs Warner warm enough? Oh, the fire’s on and it’s not three o’clock yet. Does Mrs Campbell know?’

  We both looked at the fire. I noticed that the meter had about an hour to go before it would need another shilling.

  ‘She said to put it on for Mrs Warner, as she’s hurt and can’t come downstairs,’ I said.

  ‘Mrs Campbell is a very generous woman underneath,’ said Morag stoutly. ‘She’ll let herself in, but don’t open up to that emergency crew, because there isn’t anything else to feed them!’

  ‘You can count on us to hold the fort,’ Jane repeated, as if it hadn’t taken her twenty minutes to get to the toilet and back, hobbling with me for support and hanging on me with her bad arm over my shoulder while she wiped with her good one.

  So Morag went and we held the fort.

  Holding the fort meant trying to read aloud to Jane and stopping every ten minutes to stick my head out the window and try to work out if anything new had happened. We were both wildly restless. After an hour Jane exclaimed, ‘This will never do! Louisa, why don’t you bring up the gramophone? We can have a concert.’

  So I went to get it.

  Downstairs was dark. Even in daytime the unlit hall was gloomy, because it faced north-west and had only the one tall, narrow window letting in light opposite the landing at the top of the stairs. The public bar was gloomy too just now, without the fire burning or the lamp lit. I felt like an intruder. I hadn’t ever been there during the day without people about.

  I chose a stack of five record albums and laid them on an empty table to come back for. I took the gramophone up to Jane, set it on the floor between her and the bed where she could reach it, and came back down for the records.

  As I returned to the shadowy front hall with my arms full, I heard footsteps above me shuffling along the passage from the back of the house.

  My heart did its too-familiar somersault of guilt and fear. Had Jane managed to get to her feet and tried to reach the loo without my help? If she was using just one stick and fell again, wouldn’t she likely try to catch herself with her empty hand – the hurt one?

  I’d only been gone a minute!

  I put down the records to free my arms so I could hold up Jane if she needed it.

  Just as I started to climb the stairs, a young man in a flight suit crossed the landing above me and vanished down the dim passage.

  I didn’t see who it was, though I didn’t think it was Jamie; it looked like a bigger man. But I wasn’t afraid – there were airmen all over Windyedge. How had he got in, whoever he was? Morag had locked the door behind her. Had he been here all afternoon, since before Nan Campbell left the house?

  I went up the stairs after him.

  By the time I got to the landing, he’d reached Room Five. I’d left the door open, to make the return trip easier, expecting my arms to be full of records. I heard the airman gently close the door behind him.

  I followed him down the passage and stood outside my own shut door, listening.

  Jane w
as speaking calm, matter-of-fact German.

  She didn’t sound frightened. She sounded perfectly at ease – interested. Pleasant. Amused.

  The man answered her in German.

  His voice was hoarse and ragged, a person at the end of his strength and patience. The polite way he spoke to Jane was familiar, and I remembered how the navigator Dietrich Althammer had bent towards her so she could hear him, as if she were his own granny.

  Althammer was the one Felix Baer didn’t trust, the one he’d tried to kill, just as they were coming in to land, when Althammer had least expected it.

  I heard him say a word I understood, and Jane repeated it.

  Enigma.

  He was looking for the coding machine.

  I didn’t know what to do. If I went in, wouldn’t Jane and I both be trapped? One smallish fifteen-year-old girl and one tottering eighty-two-year-old woman with a sprained wrist were not going to overpower a strong young airman, even if he had been locked up underground for a week.

  His footsteps crossed the room as he made for the door.

  I fled down the passage and through the first doorway I came to that was standing open – the loo.

  I darted behind the open door. Better not to try to close it … Was I breathing too loudly, and why was he taking so long?

  I forced myself to take slow, deep breaths. He might hear me if I panted, and I wouldn’t be able to hear him. I listened, trying to think of a sensible thing to do—

  And I heard one of Jane’s sticks tapping.

  The German airman was escorting her down the passage. She must have asked for help to reach the toilet. And, since she seemed to be a friendly, cooperative, ancient German native, he offered his strong arm for support. He coaxed her in German, and I heard her grateful response. She struggled through the doorway into the loo on her own.

  Jane closed the door and saw me standing in the dim light cast through the arrow-slit window below the high-up water tank. She raised her bandaged hand to her lips to warn me to be quiet.

  We heard the airman go downstairs. I slipped my arm around Jane’s waist so she didn’t have to put all her weight on one stick.

  ‘How did he get in?’ Jane whispered.

  ‘It must have been the kitchen door!’ Morag said she would lock up, but she might have only done the front. He could have come in any time that day. No one would have questioned anybody in a flight suit, even if they’d noticed him. ‘He must have used the service stairs at the back. Is it Althammer – the navigator? What does he want?’

  ‘He’s looking for the coding machine. I played dumb, but he’ll try to find it now.’

  ‘Perhaps that’s what Baer meant by a trap,’ I gasped. ‘A trap for the machine itself! If the Luftwaffe bombers can’t destroy it from the air, perhaps they sent Althammer to try to destroy it on the ground!’

  My voice had risen.

  ‘Shhh,’ Jane hushed. ‘I thought of that.’

  ‘What should I do?’

  ‘Wait,’ said Jane. ‘Just wait. Let him hunt. He might not find it. He’s bound to start with our room when he returns upstairs, but he’ll rush, because he knows I’m going back there.’ She paused, tilting her head to favour her left ear, listening. ‘I pushed the gramophone under the bed. He’s likely to look there first, and as it’s in its case, he might think it’s the cipher machine and just grab it and run.’

  The house was silent around us. The only noise came from outside.

  ‘Hush,’ Jane repeated. ‘All we need do is wait.’

  Once more, I had that false and foolish feeling that with her I was in the safest place in the house.

  Suddenly, and irrelevantly, I remembered that the meter had run out and our gas fire must have cut off by now.

  *

  We heard the German airman come upstairs, and Jane was right – he went straight back to Room Number Five. We heard him close the door. But there was still so much muffled banging and shouting outside that we couldn’t tell what he was doing.

  Jane whispered urgently, ‘I must sit. I suppose there’s only the throne. Help me—’ It was easier lowering her than before, and we didn’t have to fuss with her clothes. ‘Do you think you could open the window, Louisa?’

  The narrow glass in the arrow slit was solid – there wasn’t any latch. ‘It doesn’t open,’ I said.

  ‘You’d better break it, then.’

  I stared at her.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I think we should have some fresh air.’

  ‘But!’

  ‘Use my stick,’ she told me.

  ‘Whatever will Mrs Campbell say!’

  ‘We need fresh air,’ Jane insisted, and then confessed softly, ‘I forgot to turn off the gas tap when the fire went out.’

  ‘The gas doesn’t come back on until you put in another shilling,’ I told her.

  ‘But I did,’ she admitted. ‘I put in a shilling just before I asked that young man to help me out here.’

  ‘Did you light the fire again?’

  ‘No,’ she whispered. ‘I couldn’t reach. I didn’t want to ask him to do it …’

  ‘But that means he’s been in there with the gas leaking full on for half an hour!’

  We stared at each other.

  ‘Break the window,’ Jane told me.

  And I did.

  I took long breaths of fresh air before I set out to do the awful things that only I could do.

  You have to breathe quite a bit of coal gas before it kills you. It makes you sleepy – people who die of it usually die in their sleep. I didn’t feel like I was going to fall over in a dead faint, but I didn’t know how much gas was in the passage, or how much I’d already breathed, or how much more I might have to breathe before I managed to open the window in our room, turn off the gas tap, and get out again. Or what I would do if Dietrich Althammer was perfectly all right and ready for a battle.

  The only thing I was sure of was that I had to stop any more gas leaking into the Limehouse.

  I crept to the closed door of Room Number Five and listened to the terrible stillness on the other side. I thought of my gas mask, chucked under the bed out of the way after the journey from Liverpool. It couldn’t help me now, and the German navigator would not have known it was there.

  I went in.

  He’d worked hard before the fumes overcame him. He’d tipped the mattress off the bed and up against the wall, and threw aside Jane’s chair and the lamp and table to get to the gramophone in its shining wooden case.

  He didn’t even open it. He used my flute case to pound the gramophone into a mangled wreck of beaten metal and splintered wood. I couldn’t tell if he’d done it out of fury, just because it wasn’t what he was looking for, or if Dietrich Althammer really thought, at least before he started, that its polished lid hid the stolen Enigma machine.

  Dietrich Althammer also lay in a crumpled heap next to the hearth, his mouth open and his eyelids half shut. I didn’t think he was breathing, but I didn’t want to get close enough to make sure.

  I had to step over his body to reach the gas tap.

  Biting back sobs, I climbed over the fallen standard lamp to throw open a window. The radio sprang suddenly into life, right in the middle of a tune, as the electricity came back on.

  It was ‘The Spitfire Song’ again.

  I wrenched open the wardrobe. The other glowing box sat there nestled safe and sound among the furs and tropical silks. I grabbed the rotors and snatched up the wooden case in both arms as if I were rescuing a baby from a burning building, and fled from the room.

  Elisabeth Lind volunteered to move into a smaller room and give Mrs Campbell’s best double to me and Jane, so we didn’t have to sleep in Room Five that night.

  This makes no sense at all, but after I crawled into bed next to Jane as usual, I no longer felt safe.

  She was an eighty-two-year-old woman with a sprained wrist and knees that did not bend, and she had, in cold blood and full awareness, killed a young
man ten hours earlier.

  I know she did it to protect me. I think she did it to protect me. I don’t know if she could have done anything else. Dietrich Althammer was an enemy soldier. He was violent and frightening and dangerous – there wasn’t any question about that now. But no matter how I danced around the facts and made excuses for her, a man who was alive that morning was dead that night, and Jane had done it.

  I wondered if she had done it before.

  I lay awake beside this familiar stranger, wondering, and counted the Blenheim bombers as they roared out to sea under the waning moon, all six of B-Flight’s aircraft, one after another.

  It was just after midnight on Valentine’s Day. XIV II.

  I must have fallen asleep at last, because I didn’t hear any of them come back.

  Jamie:

  The joke was, as the Valentine’s Day moon came round, that of course we weren’t sent to Utsira. No one was sent there – no one but me had seen that baited message about mythical U-boats.

  ‘This’ll remind you of last year’s Norwegian Campaign, if any of you were around for that,’ Cromwell told us. All of us except Bill Yorke shook our heads; none of the rest of us had been operational a year ago. Ignacy and Derfel and Silver and I had fought in the Battle of Britain last summer, but we’d only been flying in combat for seven months. Wing Commander Cromwell sighed and cleared his throat.

  ‘You’re being sent on another retribution mission. You’ll be targeting Stavanger, the Norwegian aerodrome they’re using to get at Windyedge, and Coastal Command would like you to take flash-bomb photographs of the new field at Lista while you’re at it. A-Flight will attack Stavanger, and B-Flight will move on Lista again. We want to do damage on the ground – exactly what they’re doing here. Get in and out quick as you can and keep away from the anti-aircraft artillery.’

  It was a routine op. It wouldn’t be safe. But it wasn’t unreasonable.

  Cromwell hadn’t asked us to do anything unreasonable since – since mid-December? Since he confined me to barracks for getting the planes out of Windyedge when it first got bombed. And he’d complimented me at the same time for doing a good job. He sighed and barked and grumbled at me, and I argued with him. But now he listened.