The Iron Shadow

by Stefano Siggia

  Madame Esmond sighed again. “It happens sometimes. They are out of flour and they mix whatever they can get that looks close.”

  “These are dark times, young lad,” Monsieur Edmond said. “The darkest times in recent memory.”

  The three of them finished their last spoonsful of beans and rice. There was not enough food for a second serving.

  Melbourne helped Madame Esmond with the washing up, for which she thanked him for. Upon finishing his chores, he wished his hosts a good night and retired to his room. He sat on his bed, staring at the empty wall before him.

  He was in Brussels, enemy territory. He pulled out the box of matches with the drawing of the brown nightingale on it and played with it with his fingers. That was going to be a start. But could the success of his mission –and the discovery of his brother – really rest on such a thin thread?

  His sleep that night did not come easy.

  XIV

  - 7 days

  Melbourne arose late the next day, having fallen asleep only in the wee hours of the morning. He had tossed and turned in his bed all night, never finding the right position, never being able to close his eyes. When he did finally succumb to Morpheus, his dreams were filled with nightmares of what lay ahead. He had to learn to sleep. The fatigue he felt when getting dressed would lead him to make mistakes.

  Madame and Monsieur Esmond were nowhere to be found within the house, and he imagined they had gone out for some errands. He devoured an apple he found in the kitchen and headed out into the streets of Brussels.

  The neighbourhood in which the Esmond’s lived seemed fairly quiet, with only a handful of people walking around and little sign of the German occupation. He ran into a market a few blocks further down that gave the area a little more life. He opened the map of the city he had brought with him and checked his destination.

  Boulger had given him the address of the house his brother had stayed at while in Brussels. He hoped it housed a treasure trove of clues, perhaps something about the brown-haired girl who had delivered the letter. He folded the map, tucked it into the inside pocket of his jacket, and began walking.

  He caught a nearby tram that led him down to the central area of the city where his brother had stayed. Apparently, he had rented out a single room in a small residential house. The tram zigzagged through the streets, stopping only to pick up people. Melbourne tensed whenever a soldier would enter, and he would distract himself by looking out the window. Once again he noticed the extremely long lines of people forming outside of grocery stores and bakeries. Granted, it was wartime, but it was also wartime in allied France, and he hadn’t seen anything like this. Eyes to the floor, he got up, passed a few German soldiers, and quickly got off the tram.

  The building was fairly large, sandwiched between a decrepit delicatessen and what once must have been a police station but was now turned into an office for the occupying Germans. He pushed open the black, carved metal and glass door and entered the building. The entrance hall smelled musty, old, as if not a single piece of furniture had been changed or properly cleaned in the past hundred years. The lights were dim, casting shadows across the pale green walls. Pieces of the wall were chipped off, exposing the white concrete behind the veil of paint. How on Earth could his brother have stayed there? But at the same time, he knew no one would bother to look at this place twice.

  At the end of the hall was a large wooden counter with a blonde, old woman sitting behind it. Spectacles on her nose, she was concentrated on a book, slowing licking her fingers and turning the pages. She glanced up at Melbourne and lowered her eyes back on the book. “Yes?”

  Melbourne walked over to the counter. “Good morning, Madam. You rent rooms here, I believe?”

  “I know.” She licked her index finger once more and turned another page. Melbourne looked at what she was reading. The pages were brown, old. He felt vaguely disgusted at the thought of having to put your tongue to a finger that had touched those pages.

  “A relative of mine told me a room had been freed up a couple of weeks ago,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  Silence.

  “And… it is free, I suppose?”

  “No, it is not. The Boche are carrying out investigations. Seems like the previous owner wasn’t really on their side. Anyway, these are things you and I should not get into.” She licked her finger once again and turned the page. “Come back in a week or so when those damn people will leave this place alone.”

  It was the most she had spoken yet. Apparently, hatred for the Germans loosened her tongue. “Can I at least see it?” Melbourne asked.

  She finally looked up at him with a loud sigh. “Did you not hear what I just told you? Come back in a week or so.” She lowered her gaze back to the pages that were close to the state of decomposition.

  Melbourne remained standing in front of her. The woman sat there as if he did not exist. He pulled out a twenty franc note from his pocket and placed it on the page she was reading just as she was about to turn the page once more. Her eyes widened with surprise and her glance moved up to meet Melbourne’s.

  “Perhaps you could reconsider?” he asked.

  The woman picked up the note and studied it under the single light bulb that hung from the ceiling above her. Melbourne pulled out another twenty and placed it in front of her.

  “This would be for keeping the whole deal quiet,” he said. “You know, with the Boche.”

  She picked it up with a quick gesture and looked at it. A smile formed on her lips. “Well, alright. Just a quick glance is fine, I guess.” Her smile faded. “But a quick one. I don’t want one of them coming in here and finding you.”

  She tucked the two bills in her pocket, placed a rumpled, old bookmark in the spot where she was in her book, and slowly, with fatigue, got up from the chair. Her legs creaked as she straightened up. With a hand on the counter and sighing as if it was too much weariness for one day, she moved to the other side and passed by Melbourne. “Follow me, please.”

  The woman led him up a flight of stairs that literally screamed at every footstep. He held onto the hand rail to assure himself that he wouldn’t fall into a chasm if the stairs collapsed under him. He looked at the palm of his hand, it was black from dust.

  The woman crept up the stairs, slowly, sighing from time to time. It felt like an eternity before she finally stopped at the third floor. She moved down the dark corridor until she reached the last door to the left. Fumbling in her pocket, she pulled out a large ring filled with keys. Finding the correct one took forever. At last she had, and with a loud crunching sound she opened the door.

  “Take a peak, look at whatever you must look at, I won’t ask any questions. Just don’t misplace anything. They might get suspicious. And do be quick!” she said. “God knows I could get into trouble for something like this.”

  Melbourne thanked her and stepped into the room as she closed the door behind him. The room was small and looked like it belonged to the most squalid hotels one could find in Manchester. In front of him lay a desk, tattered with tiny holes produced by woodworms, and scratched in various places. A shirt lay on it. Melbourne walked over and looked at it without picking it up. It was his brother’s, he knew it. A sensation of sadness swept over him.

  He swallowed hard and looked about. At the bottom right corner laid a crusted sink with an even more crusted mirror just above it. Next to it was a cupboard, it too rugged and eaten by woodworms. Just by it was the bed, unmade, as if the person that had slept in it had had no time to make it.

  He felt as if his brother had left in a hurry. What happened to him? How did he get in this mess? Melbourne couldn’t find an answer. The feelings of anger and frustration came back to him.

  Why did my brother do this? he thought.

  He walked over to the cupboard and opened it. A few more shirts and a pair of pants lay inside it. He picked them up and looked at them, remembering what the old woman had told him. He shrugged; he didn’t care. They wer
e unmistakably his brother’s size. He checked inside the pockets of the pair of pants but they were empty. He placed them back inside, trying to put them in the position he had found them. There was nothing to search here. He closed the cupboard and moved his attention to the bed.

  He could not believe his brother had slept in there. It all seemed so odd, so bizarre, so unreal. He carefully lifted the sheets but nothing was under them. Sitting down on the bed, he began thinking, looking around the room. There was not a clue. Henry Arthur had left nothing.

  He got up and was about to walk over to the door when an idea struck him. He turned back toward the bed and walked up to it. Getting down, he placed himself flat on the floor and looked under the bed. It was dark, with what at least looked like a good two centimetres of dust covering the entire area. He squinted his eyes.

  There was something down there.

  It was hard to see but he could barely make out something thin lying on the ground. He stretched his arm out and took a hold of it with two fingers. If felt like paper. He pulled it out and looked it.

  It was a slice of paper, ripped off from a larger sheet, its contours burned as if lit by a match or something similar. He read the words that were visible on it.

  Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,

  With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,

  They were part of a poem, a different one. He could not guess which poem the stanzas belonged to. He thought of another code, something hidden within these lines, within the poem itself. His brother had burned it; he imagined he knew someone had discovered what all this meant. He lowered himself flat on the floor once more to see if he could find anything else. Something occurred to him. What was under the bed was not dust, it was ash. His brother had burned the poems in a hurry and hidden them under the bed. Why?

  Something caught his eye: there was another small piece of paper hidden in a dark corner. He got up, walked to the other side of the bed and picked it up. It was an even smaller fragment, badly burned with only a few words visible.

  The shrine of Flora in her

  It was all he could read. What if there was something under the cupboard, he thought. He moved swiftly towards it and placed his hand in a small opening and searched blindly for something.

  That’s when he started hearing the voices.

  He stopped and listened. They were coming from the corridor, nearing his brother’s room. He could hear the croaking voice of the old woman. And also a man’s.

  He cursed and searched quicker until his fingers found something. He pulled it out. Another part of a page burned and blackened.

  What the hammer? what the chain?

  In what furnace was thy brain?

  He had no time to think. He tucked the pieces of paper he had found safely in a pocket and looked about him. The voices were coming closer. He would be found if he hid under the bed or in the cupboard. There was only one way out.

  He rushed to the window that stood between the desk and the sink and opened it. It emitted a loud screech and Melbourne winced. He hoped no one had heard it. He looked down and saw a little street under him. Not a soul was about. He jumped up on the window sill until he realised he had no idea how he was going to get down. The voices were so close. He could see shadows moving underneath the door.

  A stained and rusted pipe ran down one side of the exterior wall. He carefully moved towards it, gripping it with both hands.

  There was that crunching sound again. Someone was turning the key in the keyhole.

  He threw his entire body on the pipe. He almost let out a scream as he began sliding down it rapidly. His hands burned terribly as they rubbed fast against the crusted metal. At the first floor he finally halted his fall with his right foot, placing it on the stone stool of the window. He heard the old woman’s voice.

  “Alright, alright. I just opened it five minutes to give this room some air. It smells like dead people in here.”

  He heard a man’s voice protesting.

  “Alright!” said the woman. “I’m closing it! A little patience, mister.”

  He quickly slid down the rest of the tube which abruptly stopped after a metre. Melbourne fell hard on the stone ground. He was in a dark and damp alleyway. Not a person was around except for a few stray cats that looked at him with surprise and suspicion. He got back up and began walking away, dusting himself as if nothing had just happened.

  XV

  Melbourne sat at a table that belonged to a typical café in the centre of the city. He finished his last spoon of soup and pushed the plate away. At seven in the evening the sun had already set and a cold chill descended on the city. He started to regret the idea of eating outside. The only other table apart from his was occupied by another man who bobbed his head up and down, woozy for the close to finished wine bottle in front of him. The streets were turning empty as if some secret curfew had been instilled. Melbourne could only fantasise on what Le Lion D’Or must have looked like that night. He took a big bite of the dry lump of bread that was given to him with the soup and turned his attention to the strips of burned paper he had found in his brother’s old apartment.

  He thought about the old woman and how she had not said a word about him to the German man. That extra twenty franc bill had done its job correctly.

  He looked over the strips in his hands, careful not to damage the already delicate crisp paper. He poured over every word, intensely, with great attention. While he did not recognise what poems they belonged to, he knew they were connected to his brother’s fascination for the Romantics. He had seen them, knew them from somewhere. He thought hard but could get nowhere.

  That’s when he saw it.

  It was hard to see, but with the light emanating from the nearby gas lamp it was almost unmistakable. In one of the strips of paper was a faded, brown circle around one letter of a word.

  The code.

  He smiled to himself. Whoever sent him the letter was using the code along with his brother. And whoever sent him the letter was in the city. He wished his brother, or whoever had done it, had not burned every poem to brittle.

  Melbourne looked up and saw the two German soldiers approaching the café, their spiked, golden helmets slightly glinting. He carefully tucked the pieces of poems into his jacket and took another bite of the bread that almost hurt his jaw for how hard it was. At least he was happy no chalk was in it.

  He decided to leave and fumbled through his pockets for a few coins to place on the table. That’s when his fingers hit the box of matches and he remembered Le Rossignol Chantant. It was worth a visit, he thought. The faster he found more clues, the faster he could find the mysterious girl who had sent the letter, which meant the faster he could get out of this godforsaken city.

  Strangely enough, he felt safer in an airplane, two-thousand metres in the air, with no safety measures, and with incoming enemy aircrafts, than wandering around alone in a city he did not know and filled with German soldiers at every corner. His thoughts drifted to the Squadron. He wondered what they were doing, who was safe, who had not made it back. Espionage was a lonely, lonely business. He missed the comfort of a team.

  Having found the coins, he tossed them on the table and took out the box of matches. The address was clearly written on it and he headed out to find it.

  He made his way around the centre of the city, through gloomy streets, the Grand Place, and into the Gallerie du Roi. He held his breath as he entered it. The gallery consisted of a long, straight road which must have gone on for a good hundred metres, lined with shops at its sides, most of them empty. What stood out the most was the glass-paned roof which stretched all the way across the gallery a good fifty metres above. Melbourne could not dare to count how many glass tiles there were. He guessed thousands.

  He made his way across the long stretch, marvelling at the beautiful and intricate architecture of the place. A set of columns at the far end of the gallery marked the passage between the Gallerie du Roi and its continuation, the Gallerie
de la Reine. It was cut through by a road. Melbourne could hear laughter and talking at the right side of the street. He looked over and clearly saw it.

  Hanging above a café was a sign which depicted a brown bird with musical notes emanating from its mouth. It was the very same design on the box of matches.

  Le Rossignol Chantant.

  Melbourne walked up to the door where he was greeted by a few drunken men with their backs against a wall. He walked in and was mesmerised by the angelic voice that filled the entire place. He took a glimpse of his surroundings.

  The entire café was packed to its very brim.

  Each and every table was full and not one empty chair could be found. Many had to stand, some squashed against the walls. The interior wasn’t very large and not too different from Le Lion D’or. The bar, a rustic, long mahogany counter, big enough to have five people sitting down for a drink, was to the entrance’s left. Empty bottles of beer and wine decorated the counter as well as the back bar behind it. Melbourne descended a few steps down towards the centre area where the tables were to be found. He noticed that there was an upper tier with more tables, accessible by the steps he had just descended. Everything was mahogany coloured. A squalid chandelier that most likely hadn’t been cleaned since it was first created hung from the ceiling giving off a pale light. But it was the heat inside the club coming from all those excited people that felt almost unbearable to Melbourne. The audience, made up entirely of men, cheered and whistled at the show that was being performed on a little stage in the back of the café. He looked at some of their faces. They were completely captivated.

  He stopped to listen. It was a woman’s voice, strong, yet sweet and comforting. It had a beautiful, deep timbre to it.

  He made his way through a wall of people at the entrance to get a glimpse of the woman singing. When he finally did, his heart skipped a beat.

  She was one of the most gorgeous girls he had ever seen.

  Perched up on a small stage was a band playing consisting of a pianist, a violinist, and an upright bass player. She stood in front of them, as she sang with all her heart to the microphone. Her long red dress fell down to the floor and wrapped itself around her slim physique. Jewellery of all sorts adored her body. A cascade of blonde hair fell below her shoulders. Blue eyes shone bright on her beautiful face. She must have been in her mid to late twenties, he guessed. Her red moving lips had Melbourne completely hypnotised. She was quite a sight.