Devil Darling Spy

by Matt Killeen

  “It’s a long story,” he replied with a shrug.

  Samuel’s Story

  Samuel was a Herero from the southwest of the continent. There was an unforgiving stretch of coastline that the Herero themselves called “the land that God made in anger,” and this inhospitable barrier of rock and marsh had protected the pasture inland from the attentions of the Europeans for centuries. Finally it attracted the German Empire, which was obsessed with acquiring colonies and feared missing out on the party.

  The Herero and the nearby Nama people ignored the scattered German settlers, disinterested in so-called protection treaties or trinkets. They were farmers, tending huge herds of cattle on land owned by everyone. Educated and sophisticated, by western standards at least, with a taste for European clothes, they were wealthy and could buy what they needed from any number of traders.

  Then the diseases came. Rinderpest, the cattle plague, annihilated the Herero herds. Their whole wealth and economy vanished overnight. People began to starve. This was followed by an outbreak of typhoid and malaria. Thousands of malnourished Herero and Nama perished.

  Rinderpest killed everything it could, so finally it extinguished itself. Some herds returned to full strength, but many of the Herero had lost everything and were now dependent on the settlers. They were put to work enriching the colony, and sensing their desperation, the settlers bought cattle at knockdown rates and sold goods at sky-high prices. Some of the Herero leaders had even started to sell land—which was not theirs to trade, but once the deal was done it was too late. The principle had been established.

  It took a minor war between the Herero and the Nama in which a panicky leader swapped a huge strip of land in return for help defeating their enemy to really change the balance of power, but the die was cast.

  “So you’re saying these diseases weren’t accidental?” Sarah interrupted, with more incredulity than she really felt.

  “Well, at first we thought it was just convenient for them. There was a drought, too, and no one believed that this was the work of a German. Think about it, how could anyone do that? Risk killing so many people. It defies the imagination, doesn’t it? It sounds ridiculous . . . but let me tell you how I came to work for Herr Professor Bofinger.”

  What followed would often be justified by saying that the natives needed to be civilized or protected from themselves, but there was nothing noble about the crimes the Germans committed. They grew more confident, more greedy. Treaties were ignored. Lands were taken. Cattle was stolen. The settlers all but enslaved the local population in the form of forced labor that was rarely paid.

  There were murders, beatings, and rapes, and nothing was ever done about it.

  Even peaceful resistance was met with horrific ferocity. When the Germans attacked the settlement of Hoornkrans, the soldiers didn’t follow the retreating Nama fighters, but set about slaughtering their elderly, women, and children, before enslaving eighty women.

  Planned reservations for the Herero and Nama that would have meant surrendering the rest of the lands were the final straw. They knew the settlers would never be content while the Africans owned anything or had any say over their affairs, so the rebellion began. Even then, the opening shot was engineered by the settlers.

  The Herero and Nama, now reconciled, knew their land and the Germans did not, so the invaders suffered several humiliating defeats. The Africans fought with honor, sparing and protecting German civilians. The Germans did not.

  The victorious Herero were encouraged to negotiate for peace and gathered on the edge of the Omaheke Desert to wait for a German delegation. Instead they were encircled by a reinforced army, now armed with machine guns and cannons from home. There was nothing the warriors could do against that kind of firepower.

  The Herero survivors retreated the only way they could, into the desert, and the pursuing enemy prevented them from breaking off from the main column. There was no water and no food. As each man, woman, and child stopped from exhaustion or thirst, they were executed by the German Army.

  This was a specific order from General von Trotha.

  Samuel stopped and closed his eyes. He recited something long committed to memory. Something he knew he must never forget.

  “Any Herero found inside the German frontier, with or without a gun or cattle, will be executed. I shall spare neither women nor children. I shall give the order to drive them away and fire on them.”

  He opened his eyes and exhaled, knowing he had remembered correctly. He paused, as if summoning the strength to continue. It was the only clue as to what recounting the story was costing him.

  Then they sealed off the desert, making it impossible to return.

  Any Herero appearing was shot or driven back to die of thirst.

  Fifty thousand people had camped on the Waterberg before the battle. Only a handful survived.

  The Nama suffered a similar fate. The army swept the bush for survivors and took them prisoner. Many were tricked into returning with promises of good treatment. There was a fake settlement where supplies were plentiful, and its inhabitants were sent out to draw others in. But the final camps were not homes. They were what the British in their second war with the Boers had called concentration camps.

  And they were prisons. Labor camps. Places of death.

  The inmates were barely fed, worked too hard, and were whipped for even gathering scraps from the roadside. But there was a worse fate than starving.

  Samuel met Bofinger in Shark Island Concentration Camp, a windswept, freezing piece of land surrounded by water, where Bofinger’s father was the camp doctor. Samuel was intelligent and educated, enough for the boy to see Samuel as something other than cattle. He slowly, carefully, made himself indispensable to the doctor and his son in their work.

  Their work was not to care for the prisoners but to use them in their research. Inmates were injected with poisons in an effort to cure scurvy, infected with malaria and typhoid to study the diseases and how they might be used as weapons.

  There was a roaring trade in shipping human skulls back to the Fatherland. There were plenty of corpses, and if there weren’t on that particular day, then Bofinger Senior just took a live one and afterward made their family or friends take some broken glass—

  “Stop,” Sarah interrupted, now nauseous.

  “Four thousand people died on Shark Island. More than sixty-five thousand people were exterminated by the German Empire in my country in just three years,” Samuel continued in a calm, level voice, a voice that had long since resigned himself to the role of spectator. “The young Bofinger grew up dissecting bodies, for fun. Some weren’t even dead—”

  “Just stop,” Sarah pleaded.

  “Infecting villages isn’t a big leap.” Samuel sighed. “Africans are not really human to him. That Germany would let him, would encourage him, would want to turn this into a weapon? I think we know the answer to that, too.”

  Sarah had a hand over her mouth, because she didn’t want to vomit or because she couldn’t trust herself to speak. She didn’t know which.

  “Your girl suggests that you are here to stop him?” Samuel asked.

  “Why have you stayed . . . Why haven’t you stopped him?” Sarah managed.

  A woman appeared at the flap, one of the white nurses. She was a slim woman in her late forties, brown hair pulled back into a ponytail, with a no-nonsense demeanor. Yet she carefully closed the flap and came to stand behind Samuel. Laying a hand gently on his shoulder, she muttered in his ear. He took her hand and muttered back before they both looked at Sarah again.

  “I stayed for Emmi,” he said, and the woman smiled at Sarah, squeezing his shoulder. “Realistically, there is no other place we could be together. And before he found this disease we did care for the sick, even if it was just to keep the workforce healthy. I hoped we would again, one day. But we have not stopped hi
m because the consequences for the African staff involved in harming a white mission, whether among the French, Belgians, or Germans, would be dreadful. People have families to protect. We have been trying to sabotage his work, but there are always more samples . . . Will you help us?”

  She wanted to agree, to help, to burn the tent that instant. Then she thought of the Captain and his chances of his survival in this state, of the road home, pursued by Hasse and Bofinger, of returning to a Gestapo cellar in Prinz-Albrecht-Straße . . .

  She felt overheated and breathless.

  “I don’t know how yet.” Sarah turned for the exit, her mind full of broken glass.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  CLAUDE WAS WAITING by her tent when she appeared, rubbing her temples and panting.

  “Your uncle is . . . sick,” he said, shifting uncomfortably.

  “My uncle has lost his Stoff, Claude,” Sarah chided impatiently. “He’s a Morphiumsüchtiger. Let’s stop pretending.” Just speaking the words was freeing, a liberation. “They have morphine here, don’t they?”

  “It’s all gone. Used up last week.”

  Things were beginning to fray at the edges.

  “Can we find some more?” she asked.

  The sound of an approaching truck engine reached them as Claude thought about it. “Maybe, but he’s lost his Pervitin as well.”

  “Pervitin?”

  “A stimulant. Everyone in Germany is taking it, apparently. It wakes him up after he’s taken the morphine. That’s how he functions. We won’t get that here.”

  “I take it he’s going to suffer now?” Sarah wondered aloud. “Like drying out?”

  “Yes, maybe two weeks.”

  Two weeks. Could they wait two weeks to act? How many more people might die? What if Hasse arrived?

  Sarah rolled her eyes, letting the action push back against the rising tide of panic and helplessness. There were shouts elsewhere in the camp. She spoke quickly to conceal her nerves. “Okay, first job for you is find some morphine. We’ll tell people he has malaria.”

  “I don’t take orders from you,” Claude spat.

  “Oh, enough of the self-importance,” Sarah snapped, allowing her irritation to drive the ship. “Just do it.”

  The nearby shouting continued. Wake up. Attention.

  Claude opened his mouth to speak, then stopped and turned away. Sarah wondered momentarily whether he felt bullied by his own Ngontang, but she struggled to feel sorry for such an appalling human. Before she could regret that thought, he grumbled over his shoulder.

  “I’m looking forward to not having you in my life.”

  Out of the gloom, Samuel appeared, a haze of agitation hanging over his calm shell.

  “Excuse me, Monsieur, Fräulein . . . the Free French are here.”

  * * *

  Sarah pushed into the Captain’s tent. He was sitting on the edge of his cot, his eyes wild and darting.

  “What’s going on?” he said.

  “Don’t you hate being right all the time? The Free French troops have appeared and want to know who we are and what we’re doing.”

  He was already pulling at his bag and removing the parts of the gun.

  “No, no shooting, no more death—”

  “I’m not going to shoot anyone,” he interrupted. He placed the metal pieces on the bed and reached back into his bag, producing an envelope. “Read, quick.”

  Inside were two French passports. Émile et Élodie Poulain. Marseille—

  “You can’t do a Marseille accent,” Sarah growled. “What were you thinking?” She struggled to fix the cadence in her head, the patter of consonants like a military band and the oooing of the vowels . . .

  “Don’t do the accent, we’re too traveled.”

  “What are we doing here?” She passed him back his identity card.

  “Saving the savages from themselves. We’re not Gaullists, but we’re not Vichy either, got it? We’ve been away the whole time.”

  “Daughter?”

  “Yes.”

  “Promotion! What are you going to do with that?” She gestured to the gun. She could seize it, walk the camp, and— She shook her head to lose the fantasy.

  “Hide it,” he said. “But this one”—he produced an old revolver—“is French.”

  He went to stand but doubled over, and Sarah had to catch him. They staggered back until he regained his feet.

  “I’m fine, I’m fine,” he muttered.

  “You’re clearly not,” she snapped. “Get in bed, you have malaria. Go.”

  He sat back on the cot, too tired to argue, too agitated to marshal his thoughts. There was shouting and hurried feet all about the tent. She looked at the flap, at the sliver of the night outside.

  She grabbed at the situation, which was shaking and twisting like a wet dog. She held on as options and possibilities fell away, trying to contain her fear and her rage, which pulled in different directions.

  She leaned in to the Captain.

  “Tell me, why don’t we just hand all this over to the French now? Put the disease in the hands of the Allies . . .”

  He lay back and covered his eyes with one hand, beckoning her with the other.

  “One, these troops are allies now, they were enemies a month ago, friends before that. Next week? Who knows . . . Two.” He stopped to cough. “Two, who are they, how smart are they, will they even know what to do? Three, that would be it for us, cover blown. We couldn’t go home. Four . . .” He panted slightly and paused. “We need to know who the Americans are. If they can bankroll all this, then they’re a real danger. And if they’re the same friends of Schäfer . . .”

  Sarah experienced a sudden urge to hit something.

  “I don’t care who they are. No, we have to stop this now,” Sarah growled.

  “How will you do that?” he snapped back, shaking now. “We don’t know everything—”

  “We know enough.”

  “Do you? Really? Have they sent samples to Germany or the United States already? Have they been in touch with Hasse? Is there actually a weapon here yet? Who is making it—”

  “We know who’s making it—”

  “Maybe, but the rest? We need to play for time. Please, just see what’s going on. Just that.”

  Sarah looked at the entrance again. She felt pressure in the front of her head, from the weather or the decisions, she couldn’t tell.

  “For now,” she stated, and left.

  There was a standoff where the road met the camp. Lisbeth, at the head of a small delegation of mission staff, was talking to a surly looking French officer who was clearly not convinced by anything he was hearing. His squad stood behind him and around the French military troop truck, a new Renault.

  Sarah tried to surmise their intent. Black troops with soft fezzes. The red-hatted soldiers were bored, even resentful at being out at night. Three white officers in the French, stiff flat-topped kepi hats. One was disinterested and leaning on the truck. The one who was doing all the talking was incredulous, officious, and condescending. However, the officer behind him was silent and watching. Sarah couldn’t read his lapel badges, but she was sure she’d identified the senior man.

  Sarah could sense, rather than see or hear, intense activity in the camp behind them, probably because she had spent a night there listening to its usual rhythms and sounds. She hoped the soldiers couldn’t tell. Or did she really want that?

  Sarah looked round for Clementine but could only see Claude. She moved over to where he stood and spoke quietly.

  “We’re French now. My father is sick in bed.”

  “I know . . . look.” He nodded toward Lisbeth as she remonstrated with the officers. “They’re not listening to her because she’s a woman. They want to speak to a man.”

  “Where is Bofinger?”

&nb
sp; “Who knows?” He shrugged and made a dismissive noise.

  With that Claude approached them and began to speak over everyone in an unnecessarily loud voice.

  She watched him work and had to be impressed. He immediately made everything about himself, then turned that self-centered bonhomie on the officers. She remembered back to the airfield at Fort-Lamy and the ease with which an Italian plane had landed and the Germans aboard had sped away, unquestioned. She had on occasion wondered what kind of intelligence asset the unpleasant Claude was. Clearly his talent, his skill, was in talking. The papers that Lisbeth had been trying to show the soldiers were taken off her, and Sarah noted that Claude did not actually let the officer see them, yet was not withholding them either. It was a smooth sleight of hand.

  Sarah edged over to Lisbeth, who was fiddling distractedly with her necklace, and gave her a quizzical look.

  “Your uncle was right, and not just about our Swiss papers.” Lisbeth sighed.

  “My father, born and bred in Marseille, has malaria, Madame,” Sarah said deliberately.

  “Well, at least one of us was prepared.” She smiled wanly. “We just need time to pack up our things here. We can move fast, but they need to go away.”

  “Do you have a cigarette and a lighter?”

  “Erm . . . yes, but . . .”

  “Give them to me now, quick.”

  Sarah picked her way past the confrontation as Claude gave a booming laugh and punched the officer’s shoulder. Seconds later he had an arm around him. So effective. Such an Arschloch.

  She walked straight up to the senior officer, smiling the most sparkly of all her smiles, thinking of the salons and thick carpets of Berlin society. His troops shifted but saw only a harmless girl. She stopped in front of him and curtseyed.

  “Bonsoir, Capitaine, bienvenue. Voulez-vous une cigarette pendant que vous attendez?” she piped in her most endearing French, holding up Lisbeth’s pack of cigarettes.