Code Name Verity

by Elizabeth E. Wein

  ‘How many hours have you got?’

  ‘Hundreds,’ he said. ‘Over half of them at night. Mostly on Blenheims – that’s what I was flying all the time I was operational.’

  ‘What did you train on?’ Maddie asked.

  ‘Ansons. Lysanders at first.’

  He was watching her intently over his coffee, as though she were conducting an interview and he were waiting to hear if he’d got the job. Of course it was none of her business, and she had no authority. But she’d landed Lysanders herself too many times at that odd RAF Special Duties airfield, you see, even spent a night in the Moon Squadron’s private ivy-covered cottage hidden in a small wood at the edge of the normal airfield (there hadn’t been any other place to put her and she’d been very carefully segregated from the other visitors). She had some idea of the difficulties that peculiar squadron had in finding and keeping pilots. Hundreds of hours’ night flying required, and fluent French, and though they could only take volunteers, they were such a secret operation that they weren’t allowed to actively recruit anyone.

  Maddie has a rule about passing on favours which she calls the ‘Aerodrome Drop-Off Principle’. It is very simple. If someone needs to get to an airfield and you can get them there, by taxi Anson or motorbike or pony trap or pig-aback, you should always take them. Because someday you will need a ride to an airfield too. Someone different will have to take you, so the favour gets passed on instead of paid back.

  Now, talking to Jamie, Maddie thought of all the little things Dympna Wythenshawe had done or said on Maddie’s behalf, things which had cost Dympna nothing, but which had changed Maddie’s life. Maddie knew she could never repay Dympna; but now, according to the Aerodrome Drop-Off Principle, Maddie had a chance to pass the life-changing favours on.

  ‘You should ask your C.O. about Special Duties flying,’ Maddie said to Jamie. ‘I think you’d have a good chance of getting in with them.’

  ‘Special Duties?’ Jamie echoed, just as Maddie had echoed Theo Lyons a few months back.

  ‘They fly dead hush-hush missions,’ Maddie said. ‘Short-field operations, night landings. Lysanders and sometimes Hudsons. It’s not a big squadron. Volunteer for RAF Special Duties, and if you need a reference ask to talk to –’

  The name she gave Jamie was the alias of the intelligence officer who recruited me.

  It was probably the most daring thing she’d ever done. Maddie could only guess at what he was. But she’d remembered his name – or rather, the name he’d used when he bought her a whisky in The Green Man – and she’d seen him more than once on the secret airfield (and he thought he was so clever too). Plenty of odd civilians came and went from that airfield, but Maddie didn’t see many of them, and when she recognised the one she did see, it stuck in her head as a most peculiar coincidence.

  (Bloody Machiavellian English Intelligence Officer playing God.)

  Jamie repeated the name aloud to fix it in his head, and leaned forward to peer at Maddie more closely in the firelight from the library grate.

  ‘Where the devil have you come by that sort of information?’

  ‘“Careless talk costs lives,”’ Maddie answered sternly, and The Pobble Who Has No Toes laughed because it sounded so like his little sister. I mean his younger sister. (I mean me.)

  How I would love to stay in the library at Craig Castle with them all night. Later Maddie slept in my bed (Mother always keeps our beds made up, just in case). It was cold with the window open but, like Mother and Mrs Darling, Maddie left the window as she found it, also just in case. I wish I could indulge in writing about my bedroom, but I must stop early today so von Linden can prep me for this radio interview tomorrow. Anyway my bedroom at home in Craig Castle, Castle Craig, has nothing to do with the War.

  This bloody radio interview. All lies, lies and damned lies.

  Ormaie 20.XI.43 JB-S

  I’m supposed to use this time to make my own notes on the radio interview yesterday – as a kind of backstop in case the actual broadcast doesn’t match up with what v.L. remembers of it. I would have written about it anyway, but BUCKETS OF BLOOD, WHEN DO I GET TO FINISH MY GREAT DISSERTATION OF TREASON?

  They really made an effort to make me presentable, as though I were a débutante to be presented to the King of England all over again. It was decided (not by me) that my beloved pullover makes me look too thin and pale, and is also getting a wee bit ragged, so they washed and pressed my blouse and temporarily gave me back my grey silk scarf. I was flabbergasted to find they still had it – I suppose it must be part of my file and they are still hunting for unrevealed code in the paisley.

  They let me put my hair up, but made a lot of fuss over how to fix it because no one trusts me with hairpins. In the end I was allowed to use PENCIL STUBS. MY GOD they are petty. I was also allowed to do it myself because A) Engel could not make it stay, B) she could not hide the pencils as well as I did. And even after soaking my fingertips in kerosene for an hour (who suspected kerosene has so many uses?) they have failed to get rid of the ink stains beneath my fingernails. But that just adds credibility to the stenographer story, I think. Also, because afterwards my hands positively reeked of kerosene, I was then allowed to scrub myself all over with a lovely creamy little bar of curious American soap which floated in the basin when you let go of it. Where in the world did that come from? (Apart from the obvious, ‘America’.) It looked like hotel soap, but the wrapper was in English and it couldn’t have been from this hotel.

  C d M, le Château des Mystères

  Engel did my nails. I was not let to do them myself lest I stab someone with the file. She was as vicious as possible without actually drawing blood (she succeeded in making me cry), but otherwise it is a perfect manicure. I feel sure she has fashion sense lurking beneath the Teutonic Mädchen guise she affects for the Gestapo.

  They installed me at the marquetry table with some harmless dummy documents to work on – finding the best connections between French rail and bus timetables and making a list of them in German. When they brought in the interviewer, I stood up with an artificial smile and crossed the antique Persian carpet to welcome her, feeling exactly as though I were playing the Secretary on the opening night set of Agatha Christie’s Alibi.

  ‘Georgia Penn,’ the radio announcer introduced herself, offering me her hand. She is about a foot taller than me and walks with a stick and a prodigious limp. As old as von Linden, big and loud and friendly – well, just American. She worked in Spain during the Civil War as a foreign correspondent and got very badly treated by the Republicans, hence her pro-Fascist bent. She is normally based in Paris and does a radio show called ‘No Place Like Home’ full of jive tunes and pie recipes and discouraging hints that if you are stationed on a battleship in the Mediterranean, your girl is probably cheating on you back in the States. This rubbish is broadcast over and over to make the American soldiers homesick. Apparently Yanks will listen to anything if it includes decent music. The BBC is too serious for them.

  I shook this treacherous woman’s hand and said coolly, en français pour que l’Hauptsturmführer who doesn’t speak English puisse nous comprendre, ‘I’m afraid I can’t tell you my name.’

  She glanced over at von Linden, who stood deferentially at her shoulder.

  ‘Pourquoi?’ she demanded of him. She is even taller than von Linden, and her French has got all the same broad, twangy American vowels as her English. ‘Why can’t I know her name?’

  She looked back down at me from her colossal height. I adjusted my scarf and assumed the casual pose of a saint stuck full of arrows, hands linked loosely behind my back, one foot turned out before the other with the knee slightly bent, my head cocked to one side.

  ‘It’s for my own protection,’ I said. ‘I don’t want my name publicised.’

  What TOSH. I suppose I could have said, ‘I am supposed to vanish into the Night and the Fog –’ Don’t know what she’d have made of that. I wasn’t even allowed to tell her what branch of t
he military I am serving with.

  Von Linden gave me a chair as well, next to Miss Penn, away from the table where I’d been working. Engel hovered subordinately. Miss Penn offered a cigarette to von Linden, who waved it away in disdain.

  ‘May I?’ she said, and when he shrugged politely, she took one herself and offered another to me. Bet Engel wanted one.

  I said, ‘Merci mille fois.’ He said nothing. O mein Hauptsturmführer! You coward!

  She set about lighting the cigarettes and announced in her brisk, straightforward French, ‘I don’t want to waste my time listening to propaganda. It’s my job and I’m wise to it. I’ll be frank with you – I’m looking for truth. Je cherche la vérité.’

  ‘Your accent is frightful,’ I answered, also in French. ‘Would you repeat that in English?’

  She did – taking no insult, very serious, through a pall of smoke.

  ‘I’m looking for verity.’

  It’s a bloody good thing he let me have that cigarette because otherwise I don’t know how I’d have managed to conceal that every one of us was dealing out her own DAMNED PACK OF LIES.

  ‘Truth,’ I said at last, in English.

  ‘Truth,’ she agreed.

  Engel came running to my aid with a saucer (there being no ashtrays). I’d sucked the whole cigarette down to the butt, in five or six long drags, composing myself to answer.

  ‘Verity,’ I said in English, and exhaled every last molecule of nicotine and oxygen I had inside me. Then gasped: ‘“Truth is the daughter of time, not authority.”’ And: ‘“This above all, to thine own self be true.”’ I gibbered a bit, I confess. ‘Verity! I am the soul of verity.’ I laughed so wildly then that the Hauptsturmführer had to clear his throat to remind me to control myself. ‘I am the soul of verity,’ I repeated. ‘Je suis l’ésprit de vérité.’

  In amongst the tobacco fug, Georgia Penn very kindly handed me what was left of her own cigarette.

  ‘Well, thank goodness for that,’ she said in motherly tones. ‘So I can trust you to give me honest answers –’ She glanced up at von Linden. ‘You know what they call this place?’

  I raised my eyebrows, shrugging.

  ‘Le Château des Bourreaux,’ she said.

  I laughed rather too loudly again, crossed my legs and examined the inside of my wrist.

  (It is a pun, you see – Château de Bordeaux, Château des Bourreaux – Bordeaux Castle, Castle of Butchers.)

  ‘No, I’d not heard that,’ I said. And I honestly haven’t – perhaps because I am so isolated most of the time. Shows you how distracted I am that I didn’t think of it myself. ‘Well, as you can see I am still in one piece.’

  She really looked at me hard for a second – just one second. I smoothed my skirt down over my knee. Then she became businesslike and produced a notebook and pen while a pale Gestapo underling who looked about 12 years old poured cognac (COGNAC!) for the three of us (the THREE of us – v.L., G.P. and ME – not Engel) out of a crystal decanter into snifters as big as my head.

  At this point I became so deeply suspicious of everyone in the room that I could not remember what I was supposed to say. Alibi, Alibi, is all I could think of. This is different, I don’t know what’s going on, he wants to catch me off guard, it’s a new trick. Is the room bugged, why have they lit the fire and not the chandelier, and what does the talking cockatoo have to do with it?

  Wait, wait, wait! What else is there to get out of me? I’m GIVING THE GESTAPO EVERYTHING I KNOW. I’ve been doing it for weeks. Pull yourself together, lassie, you’re a Wallace and a Stuart!

  At this point, I purposefully put out my cigarette against my own palm. Nobody noticed.

  To hell with the truth, I told myself fiercely. I want another week. I want my week and I’m going to get it.

  I asked if we could speak in English for the interview; it felt more natural to talk to the American in English, and with Engel there to translate, the Hauptsturmführer did not mind. So then it was up to me, really, to put on a good show.

  He did not want me to tell her about the codes I’d given him – certainly not about the, ah, stressful circumstances under which I’d collapsed and coughed them up – nor that the eleven wireless sets in Maddie’s Lysander were all destroyed in the fire when she crashed. (They showed me those pictures during my interrogation. The enlargements from the pilot’s cockpit came later. I think I mentioned them here, but I am not going to describe them.) I don’t entirely follow the logic of what I could or couldn’t tell the American broadcaster, since if she cared to she could have easily found out from anyone in Ormaie about those destroyed radio sets, but perhaps no one has told British Intelligence yet and the Gestapo is still playing the radio game – das Funkspiel – trying to play back my compromised codes and frequencies on one of their previously captured wireless sets.

  (I suppose I should have written about those pictures, only I couldn’t – literally couldn’t – it was during those days when I had run out of paper. But I won’t now either.)

  I said I was a wireless operator, parachuted here in civilian clothes so I might not attract attention, and that I had been caught because I made a cultural blunder – we chatted a bit about the difficulty of being a foreigner and trying to assimilate yourself into French daily life. Engel nodded sagely in agreement, not while she was listening to me, but as she was repeating it to von Linden.

  Oh, how strange this war is, mirabile dictu – the wee Scots wireless set, I mean operator, is still nursing small, hidden, nasty short circuits got during her savagely inhuman interrogation – yet she can keep a straight face as she sits beneath the Venetian chandelier with the American Penn and the Germans Engel and von Linden, sharing cognac and complaining about the French!

  It made the right impression though – finding something we all agreed on.

  Penn then remarked that Engel’s English must have been picked up in the American mid-west, which left the rest of us speechless for a longish moment. Then Engel confessed that she had been a student at the University of Chicago for a year (where she was training as a CHEMIST. I don’t think I’ve ever met ANYONE with so much wasted talent). Penn tried to make her play the Do-You-Know game, but the only person they had in common was Henry Ford, whom Engel had met at a charity dinner. Engel’s American contacts were all very respectably pro-Germany, Penn’s less so. They were not in Chicago at the same time – Penn has been based in Europe since early in the ’30s.

  Fräulein Anna Engel, M d M – Mädchen des Mystères

  We looked at my translated bus schedule and admired v.L.’s Montblanc fountain pen, which I had been using. Penn asked me if I was worried about my upcoming ‘trial’.

  ‘It’s a formality.’ I could not help being brutal about this. ‘I will be shot.’ She asked for honesty, after all. ‘I am a military emissary caught in enemy territory masquerading as a civilian. I count as a spy. The Geneva Convention doesn’t protect me.’

  She was silent for a moment.

  ‘There’s a war on,’ I added, to remind her.

  ‘Yes.’ She scribbled some notes on her pad. ‘Well. You’re very brave.’

  All TOSH!

  ‘Can you speak on behalf of other prisoners here?’

  ‘We don’t see much of each other.’ Had to dodge that one. ‘Or, not to speak to.’ I do see them, too often. ‘Will you get a tour?’

  She nodded. ‘It looks very nice. Clean linen in all the rooms. A bit spartan.’

  ‘Well-heated too,’ I said waspishly. ‘It used to be a hotel. No proper dungeon rooms, no damp, no one suffering arthritis at all.’

  They must have taken her round the rooms they use for the orderlies – perhaps even planted a few as dummy prisoners. The Gestapo use the ground floor and 2 mezzanines for their own accommodation and offices, and it is all kept in beautiful condition. The real prisoners are kept on the uppermost 3 storeys. It is harder to escape when you are at least 40 feet above the ground.

  Penn seemed satisfied. S
he heaved a tight smile in von Linden’s direction and said, ‘Ich danke Ihnen – I thank you,’ very grave and formal, then continued in French to tell him how grateful she was for this unique and unusual opportunity. I suppose she’ll interview him too, separate from me.

  Then she leaned close to me and said in confidential tones, ‘Can I get you anything? Send you anything – little things? Towels?’

  I told her I’d stopped.

  Well – I have – and they wouldn’t let her anyway. Would they? I don’t know. According to the Geneva Convention you’re allowed to send useful things to prisoners of war – cigarettes, toothbrushes, fruit cakes with hacksaws in. But as I’d just pointed out, the Geneva Convention doesn’t apply to me. Nacht und Nebel, night and fog. Brrr. As far as Georgia Penn knows I have no name. Who would she address the package to?

  She asked, ‘You’re not –?’

  It was a rather extraordinary conversation if you think about it – both of us speaking in code. But not military code, not Intelligence or Resistance code – just feminine code.

  ‘You haven’t been –?’

  I’m sure Engel was able to fill in the blanks:

  – Can I send you (sanitary) towels?

  – No thanks, I’ve stopped (bleeding).

  – You’re not (pregnant)? You haven’t been (raped)?

  Raped. What was she going to do about it if I had?

  Anyway, technically speaking, I’ve not been raped.

  No, I’ve just stopped.

  I’ve not had a cycle since I left England. I think my body simply shut itself down during those first three weeks. It performs basic functions only now. It knows perfectly well it’s never going to be called on for reproductive purposes. I’m a wireless set.