by David Boyle
They both laughed. It relieved the tension. A little.
“I am normally part of the consular staff – I deal with visas – but I’m allowed out occasionally.”
There were suddenly soldiers ahead.
“Now we have to be seen here,” he said. “Just in case. This is the northern checkpoint in the city. We want them to look back at their records and see that an embassy car went north. Now, quick, put the scarf to cover your hair…”
The car was flagged down by two stormtroopers. Xanthe’s heart seemed to stop. William wound down the window.
“Papers…”
They inspected their passes, William and Shirley out for a drive.
“And what brings you both out here tonight?”
William winked at them and leaned out of the car window. “Between you and me – you understand, a man has certain recreations…”
The soldiers guffawed and handed back the documents.
“You can’t do it anywhere in the city then?”
“We’re diplomats,” said William, spreading his hands.
“Ok, ok. On your way – and have a good one.” The leering laughter continued as they drove on and she breathed again.
“Sorry,” he said. “I thought that was the best approach.”
“Honestly, you do as you think fit,” she said. “They should remember, which makes sense.”
“Quite.”
*
They sped north on Autobahn 44, with the signs indicating Hamburg in the far distance, and then turned west. There was hardly any other traffic. When William fell silent, the picture of Stumpf’s staring dead eyes began to haunt her. When she managed to push it back down, what emerged instead was the rage in Ralph’s face at the Rundfunk party. As the dawn seeped into the sky, they headed through the narrow streets of Wittenberge and along the river, which became slowly visible, glinting in the morning light. William drew up outside a nondescript front door.
“Here we are, thirty-three Dorfstrasse, black front door, see? You can get out at the end of the road – here’s the key – and I’m going to put the car somewhere less obvious. This is our safe house.”
Five minutes later, William was back. But he hardly stayed long.
“Right Xanthe, may I call you that? I’m going to leave you here. You will see that there’s an express train southwards which leaves the station round the corner at eight thirteen a.m. and I suggest you get on it if possible. Did you say you had some dark hair dye? The colour doesn’t matter – it’s only a black-and-white photo. You just have time to use it.”
Xanthe gathered her bag and papers together. She had been dreading this moment as they had driven through the night.
“Oh, and I have been instructed to give you this.” He handed her a small parcel. Inside was a wad of banknotes.
“William, how can I thank you enough?” she said.
“That’s an easy one to answer. By getting home safely.”
*
The train was an hour late. It was packed and, by the time she had changed at Leipzig and reached Munich, it was running at least five hours behind and almost a whole day had gone by since her disastrous awakening at the hands of Ralph. The various uniforms on board made way for her to sit down but the delays and the lack of refreshments made her tired and tetchy. There were grunts of protest when anyone else tried to squeeze into her apartment or when the ticket collector tried to check their papers.
The train to Zurich was no better. Then the police checked everyone on board. Had the soldiers at the checkpoint noted down her new name when she was with William or would they still be searching for a blonde called Xanthe Schneider? She had no idea and this was the critical moment. But they checked her pass, stared into her face and passed on.
There was a clanking as the locomotives changed and then the Swiss border guards came on board. Xanthe burst into tears of relief.
The plane from Geneva airport took off that evening, swinging and wobbling into the sky. They touched down once in Barcelona before they reached Lisbon. She was utterly drained, feeling desolate and wracked with guilt, but she went straight to the British embassy and asked them to send an urgent telegram to Commander Fleming at the Admiralty in London to verify her identity.
“I don’t think that’ll be necessary, Miss,” said the official. “If you would come with me, please.”
She followed him behind the desk, down a short corridor in municipal paint, down to a small office. There, standing in his full naval uniform, was Fleming. He was grinning.
“I’m sorry,” said Xanthe. “I’m so, so sorry.”
*
“I’m sorry to ask you this, miss, but we’re at action stations. Could you please go below?”
“Ok, Jack,” Xanthe said, and the petty officer indicated a ladder downstairs.
She had been holding onto the rail on the quarter deck of the destroyer HMS Harvester, speeding across the Bay of Biscay with the spray in her face, staggered to be alive and away from the horrors of Berlin.
“The chaplain suggested you join him in the wardroom,” said Jack.
“I’m afraid you’ll have to direct me.”
There was some discomfort about having a woman on board, and an American woman at that. Fleming had spent most of his time on the bridge, claiming that she was unnerving the crew. This seemed to her to be highly unlikely, though there had been some obviously raised eyebrows as they had been transferred quickly onto the destroyer from a Portuguese fishing boat. It was explained that British vessels could not use a neutral port like Lisbon. The destroyer could not come to them, so they had to go to the destroyer, which had been redirected from convoy duty up the coast of Africa.
“You can’t be doing all this for me,” she said to Fleming. “Not when I’ve let you down so badly.”
“Nonsense. If you had let us down, I would hardly be here myself. Our American friends tipped us off about what you were doing and I took the plane to Lisbon yesterday morning, probably just as you were crossing into Switzerland.”
“I don’t understand. I messed up everything. I didn’t warn you about Ralph. Worse, I even liked him. Maybe too much.”
“Oh, we don’t worry about things like that. I have to say, Xanthe, that your notes on the bigram were absolutely invaluable.” He saw her blank face. “On the numbers that set up the code every day – we call them bigrams in the trade. You made Turing’s blood race and his colleagues’ too. We thought we had understood before, but it is good to confirm our thinking. But the pièce de la resistance is this,” he produced the rotor which she had used so unexpectedly to kill Stumpf. “We have managed to capture these before but this one is invaluable: we haven’t seen one like it before. I have to congratulate you on a mission accomplished – not quite as planned, but then they never are. If you would like to continue to work with us, nobody would be more delighted than me.”
*
“You have met before, I believe?” said Fleming. They were at the Admiralty a week or so later. She had slept for what seemed like days, but still had the nightmares about Stumpf, both waking and sleeping. She shook his colleague’s hand.
She knew they had indeed met before but, for a moment, she could not place the man with the Hitler fringe and the faraway look in his eye. It was only when she saw that his trousers were held up by string – an unexpected touch for Whitehall – that she remembered. It was Turing.
She shook his hand and he avoided her gaze.
“In fact, we’ve met twice before, haven’t we?” she said gently.
“We have indeed,” he said, giving her a shy smile. “And once with Dr Wittgenstein of all people. Please call me Alan.”
“Thank you, Alan.”
Turing sat back in his chair.
“Now,” he said. “I have been given permission to tell you this. What really helped me were your bigrams, which you included in your second report, on a piece of old newspaper.”
“Really, I thought you knew all that stuff alr
eady.”
“No, well, yes, that is to say – we did, but we know – thanks to you – that the example had been given to you by a serving naval officer. So we theorised that he was actually using the settings for that day.”
She could not quite grasp what he was saying.
“Ok, I get that, but I never told you what day it was, did I?”
“Ah no, no you didn’t. But we had your newspaper and we guessed that it was the day’s paper when you had the conversation. And we were right – we have therefore been able to read signals, all the signals in fact, sent that day. Which was the third of July, as it happens.”
“The first day we have been able to do that,” boomed Fleming. “No other days so far, but we read that day, some weeks late I’m afraid, but it is all great practice until we can read every day on the day. And you made it possible.”
Epilogue
Bletchley, March 1941
The baby was due. The weather was improving by the day. Xanthe was bored; bored with England and her friends and most of all bored of being pregnant, of her weight which she heaved around her room at Bletchley Park in the pale English sunlight. She had written to her still unborn child, aware that Fleming wanted her to undertake another mission when she felt ready – if indeed she ever did.
The dark streets of Berlin already seemed a lifetime away. But at night, she would relive Stumpf’s staring eyes, and her panicked, desperate journey across the city. It seemed extraordinary to be where she was – still cut off from her family back home, but looked after at a secret government research station in the last stages of pregnancy.
Despite the despair, she had no regrets. She was surprised when she missed a period, and assumed it was because of the strain – but it was soon clear that she was, in fact, pregnant. The father could only be Ralph. She told her few friends that she had fallen in love, and slept with a pilot who had been killed defending London, as so many had been that summer. If the truth was a little different, it was not different in what she felt. Now her life had shrunk down to the chintz in this bedroom, having given up her new job on the New Yorker magazine, and she had come to regard Ralph as a hero in a similar way: he believed in something and he risked his life for it. The fact that she profoundly disagreed with him about it hardly detracted from that. Her baby had been conceived in love. She had loved and believed she had been loved in return, and her account would – she hoped – be able to help the baby understand later where it had come from.
Turing and Fleming were neither of them conventional people and they knew what had happened as soon as they saw her expand and offered their support, without judgement. That is what brought her here, to a place she could refer to only as “Station X.”
The invasion of England now seemed less likely but, if it happened – and if it worked – she told herself that there was a part of her that welcomed the fact that she, the baby and its father would be reunited at last.
PART TWO
THE ATHENS ASSIGNMENT
Prologue
Bletchley, April 1941
Xanthe breathed deeply, as she had been told to do. She blew out rhythmically, panting like a desperate steam engine, impatient to leave the station. Breathe, breathe.
She felt like she was being torn in two. It hardly seemed possible that she could survive such red pain. She gripped the bedpost ferociously and hated the doctors standing around as she lay, spreadeagled on the bed like a specimen on a dish. How long was this going to take? How much could she take? She had heard that sometimes it could take days and nights, and she doubted whether she could live through it and remain the same, down to earth, crossword puzzling, Cincinnati girl.
In the intervals between contractions, she let her mind shoot back to her weeks in Berlin, that she had spent as a foreign correspondent in the first months of the Nazi assault on the West, the year before, and her ordeal at the end of it, escaping from the country in disguise, chased by the Gestapo, and all the time feeling desperate about her lost lover – lost to the Nazis, in more ways than one.
Yes, she had escaped the prospect of her body being broken by the Gestapo torturers, but there was an irony here which she could not quite grasp – driven out now by another wave of pain. And here it comes again: remember, breathe, breathe, breathe.
“That’s right, Miss Schneider,” said the doctor patronisingly. “Nearly there. I can see baby’s head.”
She felt supremely sorry for herself. About five thousand miles from home in Ohio, in some kind of clinic in an alien landscape, missing her father and her friends in Cincinnati and missing, missing, missing Ralph, who had rejected her so publicly and had, in some ways, put her where she was now, trying to expel or extract his baby from her body. Where were they all when she needed them? She just wanted someone to hold her hand, not these clinical instructions and bright cheery midwives and the excruciating scarlet pain.
Why, why had she involved herself in a mission of such questionable sanity, a whim of a middle-ranking enthusiast in naval intelligence, and now look at her – breathe, breathe and now: “PUSH! There’s a good girl, now… yes, it’s coming! It won’t be long now. Ready…”
Once more, Xanthe had lost herself in the journey she had made through Berlin, on the night of Hitler’s peace offer to the British, having fought with her ferocious Nazi acquaintance in her small room in Charlottenburg – and apparently struck him such an unusual blow to the head that she escaped intact. The process of giving birth had put her into a semi-conscious dream where she relived every step of her journey across the blacked-out city, and down Unter de Linden, finally to the American embassy and another long and exhausting ordeal. Like this one, this tearing birth, it had been fearful and largely alone.
She summoned up all her strength again for a great heave. She gritted her teeth, imagined she was gripping the bag with the Enigma rotor once again, as she had that fatal evening, about to whack her attacker over the head for the second time. Then she pushed…
The English wouldn’t think this noise at all ladylike, she guessed as she groaned. But fuck them, she said, fuck them – SOD THEM ALL!
“There! The baby is out and, yes, you’ve got a little boy. Oh, and he’s absolutely lovely.”
Xanthe lay back, utterly drained, aware of the nurse bustling around with a pile of flesh in her arms. Would he look like Ralph, she wondered, too tired to find out?
“Do you want to hold him?” she heard the nurse say.
Xanthe ignored her, too exhausted to speak. She was not just physically exhausted, she was emotionally overloaded. She now had a son, for whom she was solely responsible, and – despite all British types wishing her all the best, as they put it, she was unsure what she was supposed to do now. Tied down in the prime of life. She had written to her father on the other side of the Atlantic, and begged his forgiveness for being pregnant for some months, without telling him – and explaining very little, and certainly not the full truth, that her lover had been in Berlin and had revealed himself as a Nazi rat and a traitor. Nobody seemed to tell the truth anymore, now that real war had taken hold – and she feared she only had a tenuous hold on the truth herself – and her beloved dad had sent no reply. Probably the U-boats had sent his loving letter to the bottom of the Atlantic. But whatever the reason was, she felt more alone than she had been in her life.
Then suddenly there was a burst of noise cutting into her reverie. The baby was crying, like a siren, and Xanthe emerged again into the present. She could hardly believe that out of her small and vulnerable body had come life. And now that it had done so, she felt the surge of an overwhelming need to protect it.
“Yes, yes, please, give him here.”
She no longer cared what the nurse thought of her, another unmarried mother among so many, a raucous swearing American reporter – involved in goodness knows what. Just a bit loose, perhaps. Well, really, who gave a toss any more what people said.
Her experience in recent months, and especially as an undercover agent
in wartime Berlin, had convinced her – personally and politically – that you could not just wait around for things to happen. You had to act. Well, it was time to act again, starting with holding onto the new life that her love for Ralph Lancing-Price had somehow managed to create, in the sickness of the Nazi capital.
The bundle of life, writhing a little, with its eyes closed, nestled into her, with a shock of untidy black hair and tiny fingers clutching at nothing. Xanthe’s heart went out to him. She felt his future pain, so alone in the world, so young, he had hardly lived at all. And yet somehow she had agreed, hadn’t she, and with some enthusiasm, to go back to the war.
But not now. She would call Commander Fleming as soon as she was up and about and would say that she could no longer help him. How could she leave her vulnerable, pitiable son, with his mewing and desperate hunger for the milk that was now filling her breasts?
From now on, she said, it was going to be somebody else’s war. It was quite clear where her duty lay, and it had nothing to do with codes at all. The only code she was prepared to help crack was the one which would help her understand her newborn son and his needs. It was going to be difficult, it might even take a lifetime, but she was going to work it out.
*
She woke with a start and for a moment she thought she was back in Berlin, with the constant underlying threat and fear. Where was the baby? She felt torn and bruised and exhausted beyond words. Her bottom hurt intensely. The fear was strong; what was she afraid of now? Had she dropped him already or rolled on him, or something awful? She looked around in the pale daylight, unsure what the time was, uncertain exactly where she was. The insipid April sunlight was falling across her face. There was the baby, asleep, next to the bed. She noted the good colour with a huge sense of relief. Yes, now she remembered where she was, at the nursing home in Bletchley. Yes, she had given birth. She now had a child to look after.
