I stammered, “But in Belgium there’s unspeak—”
Daphne pressed her index finger to my lips. “Shush,” she said. “Your point is well taken, Tommy. But I shan’t worry the future, for it may turn out well yet.”
Just like Jack—always looking for the bright side of a new moon.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
WE HID OUT BEHIND A BUSH in front of the Sopwith’s mansion. The bush was trimmed into the shape of a shoehorn, which made for the perfect cover from both the front and sides.
“How much longer must we wait?” said Daphne, yawning.
The lights were still on in Lord Sopwith’s study. Lord Sopwith was an aviation pioneer. When people were still in horse and buggies, he was making fighter planes. He was working on an ultra aerodynamic propeller. I knew because I’d sneaked a peek at the blueprints. If he succeeded, the whole course of the war might change: British fighter pilots would move faster through air. His lordship had a million projects like that.
Maybe he was working on a time machine—probably with H. G. Wells himself, who happened to be an Englishman too. We could all get in and jump forward a few years and the war would be over.
I learned about supersonic jets in a Flash Gordon comic book. If anybody was going to make that happen, it would be Sir Thomas Octave Murdoch Sopwith. He might be working on one of them aviation breakthroughs right now, while we waited to borrow his speedboat key.
“I’ll be back in a minute,” Daphne said, “I have to use the loo.” I had no idea what a loo was and asked her to explain. “I suppose I’ll have to give you English lessons,” she said pinching my cheek. “You are as bad as Jack.”
“What? Jack doesn’t talk like a New Yorker anymore?”
“Good gracious, he most certainly does. The man is stubborn as a mule.” She paused and had a dreamy look in her eye—lovestruck is what you call it. “He says that if I dare try to correct his language again, he’ll teach our first-born to speak like a Bronx cab driver.” She started wiggling. “And for future reference: a loo is a WC.” Before I could ask what WC stood for, she’d ducked behind a giant flowerpot.
Meanwhile, I kept a sharp eye on the house. All the windows had blackout curtains, making it near impossible to tell which rooms were lit. I watched as the lights in an upstairs bedroom were switched on and the blackout curtains shut up afterwards. For a split second I’d spotted the silhouette of Lord Sopwith in an upstairs bedroom window. I was positive it was him by the outline of a cigar in his mouth. By the time Daphne returned I was sure all the lights downstairs were turned off.
“Time to move,” I said. “You’d better stay here and keep watch, while I go inside and nab the key.” I looked at her to see if she approved of my plan.
“Fine by me,” she said. “What shall I tell the constable when he arrives?”
I leapfrogged to the nearest bush and then from bush to bush until I was positioned right under the study window. One of the windows was left wide open. Good thing for the Sopwiths I wasn’t a real burglar. Within no time, I was coming back out of the study window, powerboat key in my blue jeans pocket next to my two lucky marbles.
We made our way to the boat dock, where the powerboat bobbed merrily on the water. I found a full gas can in the boathouse and put this in the back seat. Daphne gave me her hand and I helped her aboard. She had a pink suitcase along for the trip, and I passed this to her, along with my duffel bag. Then I untied the rope and took my place behind the wheel.
“Jack learned me how to drive,” I said, letting my grammar slip, what with all the excitement. I should a said taught. Daphne didn’t correct me though, that’s how sweet a girl she was. Or maybe it was because she was as scared as a rabbit being chased by a poacher. She dug her fingernails into the leather dash.
“Jack drives exactly as he flies, pushing 400 miles an hour,” she said. “Please don’t try any of his stunts with this speedboat. You know I can’t swim.”
I calmed her, making out that I’d driven miles and miles down Route 66. To tell true, I’d sat on Jack’s lap as he helped me steer the car down the block and back. “This thing is much easier to drive than a Ford pick-up,” I said, with a lazy-fare shrug. When I gulped it felt like a walnut was stuck in my throat.
I handed over my compass and asked Daphne to be the navigator. It was simple: all we had to do was hug the coast going east until we reached the tip of England.
“We shall look for the white cliffs of Dover,” said Daphne. “They’ll be brilliant in this moonlight, and from there we cross over to Calais. That’s the route the ferry took before the war. I’ve done the crossing many times—once spending an enchanted semester in Paris, at art school.”
“Check,” I said. “After we see them white cliffs we cross over the Channel going southeast. Then we hug the coast of France until we reach Belgium. That’s going to be the tricky part, ’cause if we overshoot our target, we’ll end up in Germany.”
She studied the compass nervously, with her nose pressed against the glass. I turned the key and the boat hummed to life. The gas gauge needle was almost to the full mark. I looked out the windshield and realized I was sitting a little low in the seat and didn’t have very good visibility. I asked Daphne if she minded I use her suitcase as a booster. “Be my guest,” she said, helping me place it on my seat.
Astronomy is one of my best subjects. I looked up at the moon and seen that it was a waning gibbous—the days following a full moon—and it was a cloudless night. We’d be able to see fine with the headlights off. “Hold onto your hat,” I said, pulling back the throttle as we moved clear of the dock.
We were out of the waterway and into open water when Daphne cried out that we were being followed. Sure enough there was a big boat speeding up to ours. I should’ve made a run for it then. But in my confusion I slowed, giving the other boat time enough to pull up next to us. From a megaphone came, “Halt immediately!” Painted on the side of the boat was H M COAST GUARD.
“They’re English, thank God,” said Daphne. “Let me do the talking. But keep your hand on the throttle and be ready to go full board when I give the signal.”
She stood up on her seat and waved. She smiled big and her pearly white teeth gleamed in the moonlight. Her hair blew in the wind. Her skirt flew dangerously above her knees. I heard whistling coming from the other boat deck.
“Hello there!” she shouted.
“Well, hello there to you, miss,” said the man on the megaphone, deepening his voice.
“Everything’s tip-top here, officer. No need to concern yourselves.”
“There’s a curfew on, luv. You need to come in to the shore.”
“Right you are! Tally Ho!” Daphne flopped in her seat and motioned me to give the boat full-throttle. I done as she said and we left them behind in a spray of water. The odometer hit 47 knots an hour. Soon the Coast Guard boat was far behind. Daphne put her hand to her heart. “Brilliant. But if they’d been German—”
“In that case, let me do the talking,” I said. “I might not be pretty as you, but I Sprechen the Deutsch.”
“I’ll stop worrying then.” Daphne laughed. We both were enjoying our narrow escape. She shouted, “Ripping!”
“Ripping!” I repeated, taking my hands from the wheel and thrusting them into the air in triumph. We sped away, the wind whipping our hair and the taste of salt in our mouths.
A couple hours later on we came to the white cliffs and pointed the boat at France. The water became scary choppy and we was both wet before long. I began to feel seasick as we got rocked back and forth by swells, and I’m sure I must’ve looked like a fresh picked pea, but I didn’t let on to Daphne. I was glad when the wind died down, the sea calmed a bit, and my stomach settled.
Daphne began to hark back to happier days, telling me that she’d been to Paris loads of times—not bragging, just stating the facts. She had a great aunt who lived in Paris. The aunt was a spinster who never had children of her own, so she’d sort of adopted Daphn
e. Her aunt Dalia was English, but moved to France years ago to be a food critic. Daphne licked her lips and said, “Oh, I’ve eaten scrummy food in Paris! Chefs pull out all the stops when my aunt steps through the door.”
“Even though she criticizes the food?” I asked.
“You’re funny. But seriously, we’re all worried about my aunt. I wish she’d come back to England before the German invasion. We haven’t gotten so much as a post-card since. And we’ve begun hearing terrible rumors.”
I asked her what kind of rumors, but she didn’t want to talk about it, saying that it wasn’t a good idea to feed your fears.
“Maybe we’ll give your aunt a lift on the way home.”
“Paris is very far from Belgium,” she said. And by the way she pronounced Paris, I knew she missed the place. “Paree is my favorite city on earth. I’d always thought I’d spend my honeymoon there, but by the time I met Jack the Nazis had taken the country. We’re going to have to settle for Brighton and that’s hardly the same. The Nazis have probably replaced Coq Au Vin with weinersnitchel and Champagne with beer.”
“Jack likes beer though,” I said, and Daphne laughed.
“There’s nothing I’d like more than to be sitting right now with Jack in a nice cozy pub.” She was silent for a minute and then said: “All those lovely paintings at the Louvre. What’s to become of them? Do you know that Hitler is a frustrated artist? Turned down for art school. That’s what this war is all about. He’s getting back.”
I’d never heard that theory before, not even from Edward R. Murrow on the nightly radio news. It was an interesting angle. “Fascinating,” I said.
Daphne’s face was in shadow, but her voice was lit with fire. “He’s getting back at all the lovely and gifted people: at the artists and scientists, the philosophers and poets, the musicians and composers. Why, this war is a very battle for everything lovely in the world. That terrible man would snuff it all out if he had his way.”
Right then I made out white sand along the distant shore, which I figured must be France. In my months of planning I’d never thought further than this point. I didn’t want to let on, so I said: “I’ve got my ideas but let’s hear yours first.”
Daphne said the first step was to find Jack’s airplane. She’d heard he went down somewhere along the train line between Oostende and Bruges. Once we located the Spitfire, we’d have a better idea where to go from there. It made sense to me. “Jack’s boot prints might lead us to him,” I said. “Same thing happened in The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet.” She patted my knee, impressed that I’d read Sherlock Holmes. Her plan was to ask around with the locals and also get in touch with the Belgian Resistance. It wasn’t a bad plan, as plans went, but it had obvious flaws. Weren’t the Resistance hiding out underground? Wouldn’t they be hard to find? These—plus all my other worries, big and small—came pouring out.
“Let’s take one step at a time,” she said, “find Jack’s airplane and go from there. ‘Keep calm and carry on,’ that’s the slogan.”
I’d seen the slogan myself, glued with flour paste to every brick wall in London. But most were torn by shrapnel, peeled and faded. Other posters showed Nazis snatching little children; warned mothers to get their kids out of bomb-riddled London; reminded people to carry their gas masks. Sort of worked against the calm message, didn’t it?
Nearing the shore, I let the throttle slack and the boat go quiet. We got silent and I seen we both was jittery. Daphne pointed southwest. “I recognize this. That’s the ferry station. Oh, it used to be lovely to come over.”
“I’ve never met a Nazi, have you?”
“Never,” she said, “and I’d hoped never to.”
“Over there,” I said, pointing to the shore, “are real live Nazis. They’re eating food that ain’t theirs and sleeping in beds that aren’t theirs.”
“Speaking of which,” said Daphne, “I’m awfully knackered. It’s near dawn and we haven’t eaten a bite or slept a wink. I know a pensione in Calais where they serve wonderful crêpes.”
“I think we’d better press on to Belgium, Daphne, don’t you? We can’t take the chance of getting caught in France.”
She got my point. I gave the boat more throttle and we continued along the coast, staying far enough out so we wouldn’t be seen from the shore. Daphne asked how we’d know when we reached Belgium and I told her: “I’ve studied the maps some. The next large town we see should be Dunkirk—that’s still in France. The next city will be Oostende, about 30 miles along. That’s where we need to land. Shouldn’t be too hard to find.”
We travelled slow, looking for a build-up of lights along the shoreline, signaling a city. Problem was, there were very few lights on anywhere, and so we owed everything to the glow from the moon and my phenomenal night vision. Finally we came to a place that looked like a large town and Daphne pointed and said, “Dunkirk.” I tried calculating our speed and the time it would take to travel another 30 miles, only my mathematical skills came up short.
An hour later, we came to another large town.
“Oostende,” I said. “Let’s bring the boat in while it’s still dark.” I turned the wheel and we headed toward the shore. We spotted other boats—some fishing boats, some small sport crafts, and a few sailboats. Several capsized. What troubled us was that along one stretch of the shore we seen German submarines, maybe six of them, all above water. Even worse, we made out the silhouettes of rifle-toting soldiers patrolling the docks. Also along the coast we sighted huge artillery guns, mounted on concrete bunkers and pointed to the sea. And us.
“Good God Tommy,” said Daphne. “Did we bring any weapons?”
“A slingshot, a boomerang, darts, and a bow and arrow. Back in East Hempstead it seemed like quite an arsenal.”
“Well, bugger it all. I’m a pretty good archer. Give me the bow and arrow.”
I riffled through my duffel bag and handed them to her. She held the bow to her eye, strung the arrow, squinted, and took aim. She released the tension and said, “It will have to do.”
As we came closer to the shore, we saw in the moonlight that buildings along the waterfront were blown to smithereens, some were piles of rubble.
Daphne looked teary. “The place has suffered worse than London during the Blitz. One wouldn’t think it possible.”
“Jack’s been here,” I said proudly. But she corrected me. From what she heard tell, the Germans did most of this damage when they’d invaded Belgium.
“Jack and the RAF target German military posts: depots, train lines, factories and the like. They don’t want to do any more harm to the Belgians, poor wretches.”
My eye caught something moving in the water. What the red devil?
Daphne looked over the side of the boat too, and we watched a periscope rise out of the water. “We’d better make for shore,” she said, wide-awake.
I pointed the speedboat away from the submarines, to a stretch of dimly lit coastline. We pulled alongside a wooden dock and I killed the engine. “This is it,” I said. “No second thoughts?”
She yawned. “A trifle late for that. We ought to find a place to rest. We’ll be able to think clearly once we’ve slept a bit.”
Taking Daphne’s hand, I helped her climb onto the dock. As my sneakers stepped onto solid land, I prayed for the first time in many months. Then I crossed myself. If my ma could’ve seen me then—boy oh boy—she’d be jumping for joy.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Somewhere else in occupied Europe
TWO MEN STAND AT A STREET CORNER. One is wearing the uniform of an SS Waffen Truppführer; the other is a Frenchman in plain clothes. They watch a café that stands across the street—a small cobblestoned backstreet without much traffic. It’s night and the two men are sheltered inside the entrance way to an apartment building, because it’s raining, and also because they don’t wish to be observed.
The Frenchman removes a pair of binoculars from his satchel and hands them to the Truppführer. “Can you se
e him? The one seated near the door to the kitchen.”
“Yes, and you’re right. The spitting image.”
“You wanted a way out of your situation, well—there it is.”
The Truppführer adjusts the focus to get an even clearer view. The man in his sights is tall with dark hair, square chin with a cleft, an almost perfect nose.
“He comes every night,” says the Frenchman. “About the same time. He’s a creature of habit, always orders a ham and cheese baguette and a glass of wine. Always flirts with the waitress—bragging about his prowess, suggesting she invite him back to her place. So far, unsuccessfully.”
The Truppführer focuses the binoculars on the waitress. “Understandable,” he says. “And after his dinner, where next? Is there a pattern?”
“Like I said, he’s a creature of habit. From here he’ll go to a bar around the corner. On a weeknight, it’s not very crowded. He stays some nights at a townhouse in the 16th.”
“Still, it’s a bit crazy,” says the Truppführer. “And not without risks.”
“It’s your call. All I’m saying is, I don’t mind helping to see the man off to his Maker. That’s what I’m here for. I’ll help with that part, the rest will be up to you.”
“So perhaps the SS will be paying him a visit tomorrow night.” He laughs. “Now point the way to this bar, and I’ll happily buy you a drink.”
Telegram For Mrs. Mooney Page 9
