Frankie's Letter

by Dolores Gordon-Smith

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And I need you to help me, yes?’ Perhaps the best way was to take her cooperation for granted. ‘I’m grateful to you. Just as you were grateful for Lottie’s sake.’

  ‘For Lottie’s sake. Yes.’

  He put his finger to his lips. ‘Stay there.’

  He swiftly went into the bedroom and opened the window as quietly as he could. With any luck the soldiers would think he’d escaped that way. Then, taking a wad of money from the desk and breathing a silent farewell to Cavanaugh, he returned to Frau Kappelhoff. She was still rigid, her back pressed against the door. The steps on the stairs were, as far as he could judge, at the far end of the corridor. The soldiers knocked at Herr Lehmann’s door. Anthony waited, ears straining, for the noises that would tell him they’d gone into Herr Lehmann’s room. There!

  ‘Frau Kappelhoff, my friend is in my bedroom. He’s dead.’

  Anthony immediately realized that was too harsh. She looked as if she might cry out and with every moment precious, forced himself to speak softly. He took five hundred marks and put them on the table. ‘This is to give my friend a decent burial. Please, as the good Christian woman you are, do this for me.’

  The word ‘Christian’ reassured her as he’d hoped, countering the idea that the English were all godless monsters. He gently moved her to one side and opened the door a crack. The corridor was clear. He could hear an argument in Herr Lehmann’s room. Lehmann was elderly and deaf. It wouldn’t take them long to work out he had nothing to hide. This was his only chance.

  ‘You haven’t seen me. Remember you haven’t seen me and no harm will come to you or Lottie. I wasn’t in my room.’ She nodded, her eyes fixed on his face. ‘Give me a few minutes, then scream as loudly as you can. They won’t harm you if you haven’t seen me.’

  She swallowed. ‘But . . .’

  ‘For Lottie’s sake you mustn’t come to harm. You haven’t seen me.’

  Leaving Frau Kappelhoff in his room, Anthony slipped out into the corridor and along to the attic. Of all the ways he’d worked out to escape from the house – and that was one of the first things he’d done – this was far and away his least favourite, but it couldn’t be helped. He made the safety of the attic staircase and closed the door behind him as the noise of the soldiers’ voices increased. They’d finished with Herr Lehmann.

  Up the attic stairs, avoiding the creaking boards in the middle, over the dusty floorboards to the window, fumble with the catch . . .

  An ear-splitting scream rang out. Frau Kappelhoff had found Cavanaugh’s body. There wasn’t any suggestion she was acting. A tirade of sobs followed the scream. No, he thought, the poor woman certainly wasn’t putting that on.

  He took off his socks and shoes, stuffed his socks into his pocket and, hanging the shoes round his neck by their laces, scrambled through the tiny window onto the tiles. He could hear Frau Kappelhoff’s sobs and the men’s exclamations as they discovered Cavanaugh. He was past all harm, poor devil and, with luck, they should be occupied for the next few minutes.

  The rain smacked down in a dreary drizzle. Putting his fears under stiff, if brittle, control, Anthony held onto the window frame, closed the window behind him, and set out to climb the roof.

  The window stuck out onto the roof in the shape of a little house. He edged himself round by holding onto the gutter, his bare feet finding a tenuous grip on the wet tiles.

  Frau Kappelhoff’s house was the last in a row of terraces. The roofs faced the street in a line of inverted V’s, like a series of miniature forty-five degree hills. He needed to get over the crest of Frau Kappelhoff’s roof to the other side. He sat astride the top of the window, judging the distance. It wasn’t very far, but the street yawned below and Anthony hated heights.

  At that moment it would have been as easy for him to go back as it was to climb that roof. Easiest of all was to stay put, but that wasn’t an option.

  He wiped his clammy palms on his trousers, stood up and started to walk. He’d seen builders walk up roofs, shouting to their mates, stopping to light a cigarette, laughing. Laughing, for God’s sake! If they could do it, so could he. But the roof was wet and a tile moved under his foot. In near panic he slipped, regained his balance, and flung himself up the last couple of feet to the ridge pole. Weathered by years of sun and rain, the cement crumbled under his hand. In sheer desperation he shifted his grip and lunged over the apex of the roof, facing the man-made. red-tiled valley of the roof of the house next door.

  His breath came in huge, unsteady gulps. Beneath him lay, like the promised land, the slope downwards to the flat parapet which joined Frau Kappelhoff’s to the Kolhmeyers next door. He half-climbed, half-slid down and sat on the parapet, shifting only to make sure he was out of sight of the Kolhmeyers’ attic window.

  The rain drifted down, he was filthy from the climb and his fingers were numbing with cold, but as he lit a cigarette and relaxed, leaning against the slope of the roof, sheer relief made him as happy as he’d ever been in his life.

  The April evening in that northern latitude was long and cold. Anthony put on his socks and shoes, bitterly regretting the warm coat, hat and gloves which he’d left in Frau Kappelhoff’s hall. He tried to make sense of the noises from the street below. A hubbub of shouted orders came up to him. They were taking Cavanaugh’s body away.

  Anthony didn’t know why Terence Cavanaugh was in Kiel. There were certain questions which simply weren’t asked by people in their situation, but he’d liked the man. He’d had a reckless, to-hell-with-it attitude which Anthony, surrounded by careful Germans, found immensely refreshing. God only knew why Cavanaugh was in the war. He wasn’t, as Anthony was, fighting for his country. He was an American, a neutral.

  Cavanaugh didn’t hate Germany and had mixed feelings about England but he had, as he’d told Anthony, a real nose for trouble. The war was shaping up to be just about the biggest load of trouble anywhere on earth and he wanted to be part of it. Well, thought Anthony, smoking his cigarette down to the butt, he certainly got his wish, poor devil.

  Feet crunched in step below. There were a lot of troops about, an abnormal number, in fact. Kiel, the home of the High Seas Fleet, was always well patrolled, but this was excessive and Anthony wondered why. It was with an odd stab of surprise he realized they were looking for him.

  At long last, when he was thoroughly chilled, the evening turned to dusk. Very, very stiffly he climbed up to the Kolhmeyers’ window. It was closed, of course. Anthony’s first thought was to slip the catch with his pocketknife but his fingers were too clumsy to open the blade. He wrapped his fist in a handkerchief, smashed the glass and, seconds later, was standing in what was obviously, from the sparse furniture, a servant’s bedroom.

  From far below came the sound of a piano. He remembered that Mrs Kolhmeyer was musical. He crept down the attic stairs and gently edged back the door. The music, one of the more rumbustious bits of Wagner, increased. There was no one about, as he had hoped at this time in the evening. With only a bit of luck all the Kolhmeyers would stay in the drawing room. He stole along the corridor to the head of the stairs.

  The sound of the piano swelled and he shrank into a bedroom. Someone had come out of the drawing room. Were they coming up the stairs? A woman said something about coffee. Anthony breathed a sigh of heartfelt relief.

  He couldn’t go out of the front door and the back door was in the kitchen. At least one of the Kolhmeyers’ two servants would be there. He listened intently for a moment, then slipped down the stairs into the hall.

  The door to the drawing room was ajar but the door to the dining room was closed. The piano still played but there was a sound as if a fairly bulky someone had got up from their chair and walked towards the door. Mr Kolhmeyer.

  Mr Kolhmeyer wasn’t built for speed but even if he’d moved like greased lightning it was doubtful if he would have seen Anthony, the rate he got across the hall and into the dining room.

  He stood with his ba
ck to the closed door, looking at the dining room. The room was, thank God, empty. It was dominated by a solid table with a green plush tasselled cloth and smelled of cooked cabbage. In the alcove stood an equally solid bureau. His first thought was to get out of the window but the sight of the bureau made him pause. He opened the oak lid and there, as he had hoped, were the Kohlmeyers’ identity papers.

  Anthony had a twinge of conscience as he pocketed Mr Kolhmeyer’s papers, but the chance to get a genuine pass was too good to be missed. Now for it.

  He pulled back the heavy velvet curtain covering the sash window and waited. He had his hands on the sash when he heard the tramp of feet. Three soldiers marched by. He waited until the sound of their boots had faded, took a deep breath, mentally crossed his fingers that the window wouldn’t stick, and heaved.

  Miraculously, the window shot up with only the smallest of squeaks. He bundled himself outside and walked away.

  TWO

  It wasn’t simple chance which had lead Anthony to pick Frau Kappelhoff’s house. Not only was it near enough to the university to fit in with his role as a visiting tutor, but it was less than three quarters of a mile from the Handelshafen where the merchant ships docked. It seemed, as he walked away quickly from the Kolhmeyers, that even that short distance might cause him some problems. Anthony knew they were looking for him but there were, he thought, a couple of things in his favour. Kiel was poorly-lit because of the wartime restrictions on fuel and he had a good knowledge of the less frequented routes through town.

  The further he got, the more his spirits rose. The rain and the cold had cleared all idlers from the streets and he took care to slip into the shadows when he heard anyone approach. There were still large numbers of troops about, but, as he saw with relief, even the Kaiser’s soldiers were ordinary men and preferred, on this dismal evening, to keep their coat collars up and stay, when not under the eye of a superior officer, under what shelter they could find. He knew the places he had to be on his guard and managed to slip by four danger spots unnoticed.

  He was making for The Mermaid on Jensenstrasse off the Katserasse, which ran the whole length of the merchant dock. It was at the corner of the Thaulow Museum, with Jensenstrasse only yards away, that he met his first real obstacle. Two sailors, armed with rifles, were standing forlornly in the rain. After a few minutes of watching them from the shadows, Anthony decided to retrace his steps and approach Jensenstrasse by another route. It was just bad luck that one of the sailors glanced up as he moved.

  ‘Halt!’ the sailor called.

  Anthony reluctantly came into the open. He had no hat, no overcoat and was filthy from his climb over the roofs. His wet clothes clung to him and he looked, he thought, like an absolute scarecrow. His only choice was to brazen it out.

  He swayed gently on the spot as they approached, fixing them with a delighted, glassy beam. ‘Hullo.’

  ‘Your papers, sir,’ said the sailor who had shouted for him to stop.

  ‘Papers. Papers, papers, papers,’ repeated Anthony in an alcoholic way. ‘I had ’em when I came out.’ He saw the sailors swap knowing looks. ‘Never go out without m’papers.’

  He started a painfully deliberate search through his pockets and pulled out an old letter. ‘Here we are. No it’s not.’ He stared glassily at the sailors. ‘M’wife’s a harsh woman. Out, she said. Am I drunk? No. All I had was a tiny little drop, just a tiny schnapps, but out! No coat, no hat, just out! Her and her mother.’

  The sailors grinned, but persisted. ‘Your papers, sir.’

  He laboriously searched his pockets again and this time produced Mr Kolhmeyer’s card. If the theft had been reported he was for it. He stuck his thumbs into the lapels of his jacket in an expansive way, staggered and fell back against the wall. The sailors’ grins increased and Anthony breathed a silent prayer of thanks.

  He’d fallen against a propaganda poster, pasted to the wall, one he’d seen many times before. It showed a caricature of a moustached, jodhpured figure complete with bulldog, a supposedly typical Englishman. ‘He’s the cause!’ the poster screamed. ‘Why is our life controlled by rationing?’ There was a whole lot more, ending with: ‘England is our deadly enemy’ and ‘Victory for Germany!’.

  The sailors, as he had hoped, looked from him to the poster and laughed. Anthony could follow their thoughts as if they’d spoken them aloud. He couldn’t be an Englishman because an Englishman looked like the man on the poster.

  ‘He’s all right,’ muttered the sailor who held his papers.

  ‘I am,’ Anthony agreed with intoxicated earnestness. ‘Only, dash it, I keep falling over. Problems with m’ legs.’ He took back his papers and put them carefully away. ‘Must be off. Bishiness aqua . . . aqua . . . friend. Want to come?’

  ‘I only wish we could,’ said one of the sailors with a laugh. ‘Good night.’

  Anthony wobbled away, swayed across the square, turned the corner, saw the street was deserted and leaned against the wall in utter relief. For a few moments at least, he looked as inebriated as the traduced Mr Kolhmeyer.

  He was on Jensenstrasse. The outer door to The Mermaid stood open, sending a yellow wedge of light onto the wet pavement. Anthony walked into the pub, feeling he had gained some sort of sanctuary.

  He was well known in The Mermaid. Lassen, the landlord, was a Dane, one of the many in this north-eastern corner of Germany. When war was declared, the Germans, who had always treated the Danes with suspicion, ordered all men between twenty and forty-five to enlist. That, in Anthony’s opinion, was a mistake. He knew Lassen, who had two sons in the army, bore a burning sense of injustice. It was too much to say he was pro-British but he was resentfully anti-German and there were plenty of informers who felt the same.

  Lassen was careful not to be curious about Dr Etriech who frequented The Mermaid. Perhaps, for men had learned to avoid awkward questions which could lead them to still more awkward truths, he simply accepted that the doctor liked conversations with all classes and types of customers. If he noticed that those customers were frequently better off as a result, he never mentioned it. Anthony didn’t pay much but any extra, in this time of great hardship when even the bread on the table – the miserable gritty K-bread, part flour, part potatoes – was rationed, was welcome.

  Anthony made his way to a table close to the stove. The heat made him wince as the circulation returned to his frozen fingers. For a few moments he could think of nothing but warmth and would have given anything for a hot bath and a change. His clothes had begun to steam in the heat before he could bring himself to turn away from the stove.

  Lassen stood behind the bar, quietly polishing a glass. ‘What can I get you, Herr Doktor? You look as if you need something to keep out the cold.’

  ‘I’d like some coffee and an aquavit,’ Anthony replied. ‘And . . . er . . . would you take a drink with me, Herr Lassen?’ He nodded at the chair on the other side of the table.

  ‘I’ll bring the drinks round,’ said Lassen.

  Anthony dropped into the chair. He recognized most of the men in the room. The Mermaid was a comfortable, homely place, smelling of fish, engine oil and wet wool, with its pine boards turned the colour of oak by years of placid clouds of tobacco. It was quiet, with the murmur of conversation broken by the occasional click from a game of draughts and the scrape of chairs on the wooden floor.

  Lassen put the tray on the table and pulled out a chair. ‘Trouble?’ he asked softly.

  ‘Yes.’ Anthony picked up the aquavit – an acquired taste – and drank it at a gulp, feeling it sting his throat. No one was paying them the slightest attention. ‘I have a passenger for Captain Johannson.’

  Lassen stroked the stubble on his chin. ‘Yourself?’

  Anthony nodded.

  ‘A private passage?’

  ‘Very private.’

  ‘I see . . .’ Lassen took his pipe from his apron pocket. He didn’t seem remotely surprised. He studied his pipe for a long moment. ‘You can pay?’r />
  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Captain Johannson will not be here for two or three days. Is that a problem?’

  Anthony bit his lip. He’d been afraid of this. ‘It could be a great problem.’

  ‘I see,’ said Lassen again. He picked up his beer, drank some, then filled his pipe thoughtfully. Anthony was anxious for him to speak, but knew better than to hurry him. ‘I can pay for accommodation,’ he added, watching Lassen closely. ‘Pay well.’

  Lassen lit his pipe. ‘That would be helpful,’ he said after a time. ‘Drink your coffee, Herr Doctor. Take your time. Then say goodnight as you leave, as you always do, but go down the alley to the left, to the back of the house. Be careful you are not seen. When it is safe, come to the white door. It will not be locked. We’ll arrange what happens next when you are safely inside.’

  Lassen stood up and went back behind the bar. Anthony felt the reaction from the strain of the escape to The Mermaid set in and he shook himself awake. This was dangerous. The quiet murmur of voices and the chink from the draughts pieces combined to an almost hypnotic drowsiness. He picked up his coffee, but it was nearly scalding. He could feel himself drifting once more. His head grew incredibly heavy and he rubbed his face with his hands.

  Then he was completely awake, every sense on edge. The door slammed back, there was a shout of command and four soldiers marched in. They grounded arms and stood to rigid attention as a senior officer, an Oberstleutnant entered the Mermaid.

  Just as the Germans caricatured the English as John Bull, the English depicted the typical German officer as a Prussian with a monocle, a duelling scar, a bald head and rolls of fat round his neck. This man was no caricature, thought Anthony warily. He was wiry and fair-haired with a long, intelligent face and more threatening than any propaganda bully.

  There was a rustle of unease, followed by silence. Anthony guessed he wasn’t the only one with good reason to be wary but, still wearing his battered formal clothes and dark tie, he stood out like a sore thumb in that roomful of men dressed in seamen’s jerseys and pea-jackets. He decided to play the drunk once more, knowing the generous latitude given to drunks, and only wished he had something more convincing than black coffee as a prop.