"No, us. It's nothing much. They kicked her and chipped a bone."
Lucien, his mouth acridly turned down at the corners in disgust, touched the bruises on her breasts and between her thighs. "I hope we didn't do this."
"That is the flogging she took from the Germans. The curious thing is this." He unwound the bandage from her thigh, and pulled the thigh open. The flesh was swollen and inflamed. Lucien shone his torch on it and read with some difficulty, "Maximilian von Bernstorff slept here. May 14, 1944."
"Good God!" he said.
"What I can't understand," said the doctor, "is how it was done."
"Perfectly easy," said Lucien. "We kids used to tattoo each other when we were at school. One cuts the flesh with a sharp knife or a razor blade and then rubs ordinary blue-black ink into the cut. The more you do it the more even the design becomes. This was done by an expert. But there's more to it than that. Before the war, I used to lecture at girls' reformatories, and it was the habit of some of the girls to tattoo themselves where Amanda is tattooed now, with the names of their boy friends or girl friends…"
"She must have gone raving mad with pain."
"Perhaps," Lucien ruminated. "Perhaps not." He wanted to change the subject and forget the disturbing thoughts that exercised him. "Who shaved her down there? We did, I suppose."
"I'm afraid so."
"Is there any more?"
"There is probably a lot more, but as I said, the light is so poor, I could only give her a very superficial examination. But I can see she had been raped many times, anally as well as in the ordinary way. Orally too, I've no doubt."
"By us?"
"No, none of the men did that to her. By the Germans. Another thing I find most curious is that she has very recently, say within the last half hour or so, had an orgasm. Probably a reflex from the emetic effect of being lathered and shaved."
Lucien smiled a secret smile in the darkness. Amanda's exploits were surprising him less and less. He was thinking about the tattoo.
He opened the curtain of the van and looked out at Georges, his shoulders hunched in defeat, pissing miserably against a tree. The noise was very loud now. Some of the transports had stopped, and they could actually hear shouting in German.
The van driver leaned out. "Lucien! What are we wasting time for? They will be here in five minutes."
Lucien took a last look around him, sniffing the air, casing the night. "All right," he said. "We have to go." Georges hurried toward the van, buttoning his fly, and Lucien planted a hobnailed boot squarely on his chest, and pushed him onto his backside on the footpath. Georges scrambled to his feet. "What are you doing?" he screamed. "Let me in."
"Find your own way home," said Lucien.
"Lucien, you can't leave me to the Germans."
Lucien, with his right hand, limned a cross of benediction in George's direction. "Domlnus vobiscum," he said.
The van started off, making an uneasy racket in the darkening woods. Georges ran after it, shrieking. "Stop! Stop! The Germans will capture me!"
"They are welcome to you. If you are lucky, they will give you a haircut."
Georges, dwindling behind the van, yelled. "The Gestapo will torture me, Lucien! I'll tell them everything I know, I swear to you! Oh for the love of God stop! I'll inform on you, Lucien! I'll tell them all about you! Dear God, stop!"
Again Lucien made the sign of benediction, his face empty of expression. "Aliquid amplius invenies in silvis quam in libris," he said quietly. Those are the words of Saint Bernard. Pray and your days will seem short. And look what happened to Saint Bernard. He was reincarnated as man's most faithful friend with a barrel of brandy round his neck. It can happen to you, if you are lucky."
Screaming, Georges faded into the distance. Indifferently Lucien watched him, saw him stop suddenly, look this way and that, like a trapped fox, then sprint into the undergrowth at the side of the road.
* * *
Lucien hunched himself in the darkness beside Amanda. He could not see her, only feel her sagging this way and that in delayed, viscous slumps, to the bumping of the unlit lorry on the unmetalled lanes. The answer was in the tattoo. The motto was uttered in English. No such brand could be made by the apparatus of torture. He recalled the girls in the reformatories, in love and unpossessed. The tattoo was a ritual expression of the agony of love, willingly, even joyfully suffered. He had a sudden conviction that the idea was Amanda's, not the German's.
He laughed to himself. "Pauvre Georges. You acted with more wisdom than you knew. But you should have avoided entangling with English womanhood. It is more dangerous than you think."
He drew down the blankets that covered her, and went berserk. He savaged and worried the bloated nipples with his teeth, like a dog. Fingernails sharpened by gun oil and cotton waste sprang like claws and sank into the depths of her navel. Ignoring the grinds of the gears in front, the pauses, stops, and noiseless clamour of omnipresent danger, he rammed himself blindly through the flimsy barrier of a slack, half-open mouth, and the supine, wholly unaware body. Afterward, trembling and weak from his appalling effusion, he covered the girl and blessed the night for its darkness. Then the van stopped and the ignition was switched off.
Lucien parted the curtains and climbed unsteadily down. Shadowy forms closed in on him with guns and transmitters, hissing urgencies at him.
"Five minutes…"
"…Boches… aircraft… rendezvous…"
One called "Lucien," and repeated it, adding in English, "you old son of a gun." He was grabbed, his hand wrung, his back pommelled. Lucien squinted in the gloom. "O'Donovan!" O'Donovan was still in peasant dress, the front of which was stained with blood, his face as bruised as a beaten boxer's. "O'Donovan!" Lucien shook his hand and punched his shoulder, delighted. "How did you get away? Where's the Canadian?"
O'Donovan was in a state of high nervous excitement, bordering on hysteria. "Long story. Jumped off a Boche lorry. Hid six hours in a sewer pipe. Shit from all sides. Mazursky's been shot, I hope. Yellow bastard. Better shat on than shot, I always say. Made contact. London said get the hell back immediately. But where the devil is Amanda? London is going crazy and screaming blue murder about her. All her big pals in Downing Street and the Cabinet are on the warpath."
Lucien indicated the lorry. "She's in there. Who beat you up?"
"Safe too? Thank the Lord! Some German bastard who interrogated me in the schoolhouse. Great brute called Bimbo, or some such ridiculous name." He called into the lorry. "Amanda! I mean Yvette! Guess who this is. Where is the little firebrand?"
Lucien said nothing. He pulled the curtain aside and let him see for himself. The weariness in his own loins held him shriven of alibis. The doctor and the driver were wrapping her tightly in blankets. Around her head they had tied a scarf, to keep her head warm in the night air. She was laid down with great care on the cool grass. Above, a light plane engine droned and faint lights like gloworms dotted the field.
O'Donovan peered, white, into Amanda's battered face. "What swine the Germans are," he said.
"Yes," said Lucien. "Aren't they."
"Christ, I hope she wasn't left to the mercy of that brute, Bimbo. He wasn't a man. He was a monster."
"What was his real name?"
"Bernsdorf, or something like that."
Lucien thought of Amanda's tattoo and marvelled at her proneness to strange exterior applications of the senses.
"Bimbo's dead," said Lucien. "Our boys killed him."
O'Donovan whooped with joy. "God, you Maquisards are wonderful," he cried. They really are the finest fighting men I have ever worked with. I can't tell you what they did for me when I joined up with them."
"There's good and bad among them," said Lucien.
They regarded Amanda who was breathing evenly. The form of her thighs and bosom could be made out inside the blankets. "What is she wearing?" O'Donovan asked suspiciously. "Anything?"
"How should I know?" said Lucien.
O'D
onovan muttered, "Doesn't look as though she is wearing anything at all. Doesn't matter. The blankets will keep her warm in the plane." He mumbled something to himself and Lucien regarded him almost with dislike.
The Lysander clacked in with a rush of wind, looking so much like a giant dragonfly it could almost have been snatched out of the night air by King Kong. The little group of Maquisards ran forward; two of them stumbled behind, carrying the prone Amanda. Fawcett's voice could be heard above the whirring propeller. "Leave all R.A.F. property inside. Get out quick. Good hunting. Kill a Kraut for me."
"Wait," Lucien shouted. "You have passengers."
Three figures, shrouded in darkness, leaped from the aircraft to the ground, tremulously, as though they were leaping from a sinking ship in heavy seas. They flashed noms de guerre and passwords like Verey lights. Fawcett's eyes bulged almost luminously from inside the plane and his handlebar moustaches wiggled like antennae. Amanda's body was passed up and borne to the rear, while Fawcett uttered a stream of inadequacies. "I say this is a ropy show. You sabotage types couldn't be back already. What's the griff? What on earth has happened to Mrs. Nightingale. Has she gone for a Burton or something? Everything was wizard when I dropped you. Has the other type copped it? I say what a bloody awful bind."
He pulled O'Donovan aboard. "I say, old boy, you look as if you have walked the wrong way through a swing door. Did some German oik ruffle your feathers? You look brassed off. No time for good-byes," he called resonantly to Lucien, more at ease with authority than speculation. Lucien tried to catch O'Donovan's eye in a warning stare but O'Donovan avoided it. The door closed precipitately and the plane slid away. Lucien followed it with his eyes, ignoring the new arrivals who hailed him with anxious questions. He thought of the slogans cut into Amanda's flesh. "O'Donovan," he said to himself. "You are in for a shock when you get inside those blankets. You Irish bastard."
And he led his charges to the sanctuary of the woods, which dawn was just beginning to paint a translucent lavender.
* * *
An N.C.O. hurried up to Mueller, agitated. He was a thin, pale young man in glasses. "Captain. The Gestapo have caught a Frenchman."
Mueller looked at Krug and made a sour face. "Anybody we can identify?"
"I don't know. He was called Georges. I saw only the body."
"Body? Is he dead?"
"Yes. The Gestapo shot him. Heavy fellow with a big purple nose."
"What did he tell them? Did they torture him? Do you know?"
"Yes. I asked one of the corporals there. It seems they gave him the works."
"That would be in character. But what did he say?"
"I gather that no matter what questions they asked him, all he would say, was 'Vive la France'."
"What was that expression again?"
" 'Vive la France'."
"That's what I thought you said." Mueller grinned and dismissed the N.C.O. with a "Good work." The corporal wheeled and saluted.
"What do you make of that?" he asked Krug.
"Well, I had a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach because I thought the Gestapo had caught the girl."
"I don't mean that. I mean what do you make of a Frenchman who will open his mouth only to say, 'Vive la France'?"
"Nothing wrong with it, I suppose," said Krug. "So long as you are a Frenchman, of course. It would sound a bit queer coming from a Bulgar."
Mueller looked at the doctor with his head on one side, a sardonic smile spreading over his face. "Vive la France! I ask you. Can you see an Englishman die with the words, 'God Save the King' on his lips? Or 'Rule Britannia'? Of course not. He would be too embarrassed. No Englishman wants to die embarrassed."
Krug helped himself moodily to cognac. "I have heard Russians shouting 'Stalin' when they went into attack. And plenty of our boys shout 'Heil Hitler'."
"Yes, but we and the Russians are primitive peoples. The French call themselves the most civilized and sophisticated people in the world. 'Vive la France' indeed! If I were a Frenchman at the execution block, I should like to hope that my last words, before they shouted 'Fire! would be 'Vive le Château Lafitte, 1937."
"The trouble with you, Mueller," said Krug, "is that you are just an incurable romantic."
None of them heard the faint drone of the Lysander rising to the skies.
Chapter Thirteen
The room glowed orange like the inside of a pumpkin. Outside the sun in the full fury of meridional summer beat and breathed against the curtains drawn across the window. Guy Nightingale lay on top of a huge bed trying to fill the holes in the blackout of his memory. He wore nothing except his khaki army shirt, minus collar. He was sufficiently aware of his condition to know that the slightest cerebral movement would create discordances in his skull as cacophonous as those made by pneumatic drills.
He reached out to the little radio oft the bedside table and switched it on, listening to a babble of words in cowbell language. He knew little Italian, despised the tongue, but from words like vittoria and Monte Cassino and caduta, he got the message that Naples had been expecting for the past forty-eight hours. Cassino had fallen at last, after all these long, sodden, bloody months. The stupidest campaign of the war was over. Passchendaele-thinking was at last proven right. Passchendaele-thinking, according to the military interpretation of Major Guy Nightingale, M. C. held that if a strategy fails, the worst thing in the world is to change it. Instead, one intensifies the error. If ten thousand men fail to take a monastery, throw in twenty thousand. When they are all dead, add another thirty thousand. Englishmen, Americans, Poles, Frenchmen, New Zealanders, goums, chuck 'em all in, and the more the deader. The enemy is always at his "last gasp". Another forty thousand will do the trick. Why does the enemy always lose more than we do? Bombing is Passchendaele-thinking too; the ultimate expression of failure. What good had it done the Germans during the Blitz on London in 1940? The idiots couldn't even hit Amanda in Bryanston Square; and they were probably paying dearly for mat miss now, wherever she was. We have been bombing Germany into the ground for three years and where are the Germans now? On top of Monte Cassino, at least they were until a few hours ago. Bomb them to hell and show you're licked. The bomb holes obstruct the poor soldier's advance and make better shelter for the enemy than the original buildings. But bombing isn't strategy these days; it's religion, the most absurd religion since Christian Science. Guy thanked God he had opted for the Army and not the R.A.F. Better mud on his boots than the monastery of Monte Cassino on his conscience. How is it that sergeants are invariably wiser than generals? Why are all colonels bastards? Why are all captains socialists? When in doubt, bomb. If that fails, as it always does fail, bomb harder. At least a lot of bomber pilots get killed, which isn't a bad thing, even if it does create a shortage of Barclay's Bank clerks, elementary school science teachers, and professional cricketers after the war. Monte Cassino, one of the jewels of Christendom, what does it matter if we bomb it into the ground? It is occupied by the forces of evil. Fat lot of good it does a German soldier, lying dead in the rubble of the monastery, to have Gott Mit Uns on his belt. He's part of the forces of evil and he can like it or lump it. Ha! Ha! Ha! Very funny that. Guy sniggered. It was, he guessed, some time in the afternoon of the fourth day of his leave. Or might have been the fifth. His leave would not, if he had interpreted the news bulletin correctly, last very much longer. Recall to his company must be imminent.
He had drunk far too much Frascati at lunch, and it was a disgusting wine anyway, sweet and syrupy like everything else in southern Italy, the land of bad taste in all things, prominently including women. He had followed it with too much of that sugary green liqueur called Strega which tasted like perfumed armpits and about which he had developed an interesting theory: that if drunk in sufficient quantities it turned the drinker its own Colour, like the dog that comes to look like its master. That is what had undoubtedly happened to him. He was probably bright green at this very second. His mouth tasted vile. He had not shaved in
two days; and he shuddered to think how bad his breath must be. Where the devil was Luba? Luba would know if it was the fourth or fifth day of his leave. Luba knew everything. Luba had even learned how to survive in a war, which was a damn sight more than he was likely to do. Luba probably knew when God was going to die. But supposing God was already dead? There was a thought for Amanda's father to mull over. Eternally decomposing in Heaven, while Jesus and the Holy Ghost, having meekly fought to inherit the earth, decided they did not carry enough guns and handed it over to the Virgin Mary to turn it into a matriarchy, just the way Pins XII wanted it in the first place. Luba would know when his leave was up. And when it was up, Luba, good old mother earth herself, would clean him up like a cat and return him, neat and spruce, to combat, so that he could die like an English gentleman and not like some foreigner or other.
Guy rubbed his unshaven chin and decided that it probably rasped less than his tongue did. Luba had done pretty well for an whore. There was obviously not enough left, out of a British major's pay, to look after her in the style to which she had become accustomed. Only an American could do that. What he could offer Luba were only his social and military contacts. He was under no illusion about that. As long as Guy had social friends in the United States Army and the military Establishment, Luba would continue to grant him her favours and turn over the revenue to her Rumanian pimp, who could then get black market petrol and American food.
Guy grinned blearily to himself. Luba pretended to be wildly on the side of the Allies, whereas he knew, and she knew, she could afford to be on one side only, her own. Whomsoever she could grasp and hold on to for her survival would be her friend, German airman, British soldier, Rumanian pimp. Guy looked around the bedroom in amusement. It was elegant in the worst possible taste, "middle Mussolini" he described it to himself, opaque glass doors edged in wrought iron, highly polished floors with bear rug, a cocktail cabinet that lit up in pale-blue fluorescent lighting, and reproductions, from the Upim stores, of Marie Laurencin paintings on the walls. It must have cost the Rumanian pimp a fortune to assemble all that trash in wartime. Guy thought of the apartment he shared with Amanda in Bryanston Square, decorated in the colour of doves, and reflecting Amanda's supremely correct taste of things and life; cool, cool, the very thought of her made his ear lobes cold. If one regarded two women, Amanda and Luba, with detachment, there could be no doubt which of the two an intelligent sensualist would choose. Amanda was beautiful, perfectly made (except for those thighs) and aristocratic. Luba was indifferent in looks, imperfect in shape, and a petit bourgeois in upbringing. But Luba was all woman, all life and anxiety and human frailty, exciting and erectile; and Amanda was a pillar of semi-precious stone, inanimate, her orgasm as far beyond the reach of man as the peak of Mount Everest. Whenever he thought about Amanda he wondered why the Greeks made so much fuss about getting the Elgin Marbles back from the British Museum.
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