Weaver

by Baxter, Stephen

  ‘America.’

  ‘Yes. Cut it down at the root! Let the Americans shuffle their tanks and ships around the world; it will avail them nothing. We have a plan, you see, a new plan to do with Christopher Columbus, and the beginning of it all. Believe it or not, our historical research is taking longer than the technical. But we are making progress. And then we will see how it goes for the Reich, in a new and transformed world in which America does not exist at all.’

  And nor would the Reich exist, Ben thought. You unimaginative fool.

  The voices fell silent. Perhaps he had spoken aloud.

  He opened his eyes. The lamps’ glare dazzled him, and he blinked away tears. He could see the three of them standing just outside the glass wall of his chamber, two black SS uniforms, a uniform of the Wehrmacht. Ben tried to see the brother’s face, Ernst’s. He imagined himself as Ernst must see him. His skinny frame lying above the smoothed-out sheets. The shackles that bound his wrists and ankles and neck. The tubes that snaked under his striped prison-issue pyjamas and into veins in his arms and legs, into his penis and into his mouth. The metal cap that had been fixed to his scalp, attached with screws that had been tapped into the very bone of his skull.

  Josef Trojan’s face loomed like a moon. ‘Good morning, little fellow. Or is it good afternoon? You never know, do you? Don’t you have anything to say, Ernst? Remarkable sight, isn’t he - a triumph for modern medical science. He never leaves his little glass room, save in the imagination, of course. He can’t do anything. He can’t even play with his own circumcised, cathetered cock, poor fellow. All he can do is sleep - and I control even that, for by turning this switch I can administer drugs to him at will, do you see? Sleep, and dream the dreams I command through the loudspeakers that surround his pillow. And as he sleeps he guides the teasings of the Loom of history, and by doing so he wins the war for Hitler. What do you think, Ernst? Even you must be impressed.’

  ‘What I see here is cruelty. Arbitrary, pointless cruelty. Such ambition and vanity will bring us down in the end, Josef.’

  ‘If you believe that you really are a fool.’

  But Ben heard uncertainty in his voice. As the months had turned into years, others had expressed similar doubts over Trojan’s elaborate project and the resources it was consuming. It was a long time indeed since Himmler had shown any support, let alone visited Richborough. Trojan had even once been hauled in by the Gestapo for an interrogation. The experience had left him shaken and unsure. But Julia Fiveash was always on hand to stiffen his spine.

  ‘Enough,’ Trojan said. ‘Let’s put him back to work.’ He turned his switch. Ben felt the opiates course into his blood. The brothers and Fiveash walked on around the facility. ‘You should come work with me here at Richborough, you know, Ernst,’ Trojan said. ‘There are Wehrmacht guards here. I’m sure I could fix a transfer.’

  ‘My duty lies elsewhere.’

  ‘Your trouble is you never got over that wretched French girl, did you? It’s muddled your thinking. You always were a fool ...’

  The world spun away, as if he were tumbling down a well, and Ben, trapped inside himself, fell into fragmented dreams.

  III

  18 June

  Mary’s train into York was late.

  When she got to the little tea shop on Low Petergate they were waiting for her, sitting at a window table, drinking tea and eating cake: Tom Mackie, slightly crumpled and donnish as always despite his Navy uniform, and Gary, his own British Army uniform fitting him closely. Both men got up when Mary squeezed her way to the table, hot, flustered, tired. ‘Mom—’ Gary embraced her. He smelled of cigarette smoke, earth, a whiff of cordite, a soldier’s smell. But the arms around her were strong. It made her ache that she would only have a few minutes with him.

  Mackie pulled out a chair. ‘Good to see you, Mary. Tea, is it, a scone or two? You might have to wait a bit, I’m afraid; all these GIs are rushing the girl off her feet.’ He turned and raised his arm, trying to catch the waitress’s eye.

  ‘Thank you. Sorry I’m late.’ She sat, setting her handbag and gas-mask pouch on the floor beside her.

  The shop was crowded with servicemen, talking loudly, smoking, most of them apparently American. And music played, a sentimental Glenn Miller ballad. It was probably the Promi; you heard it played everywhere for the music, which everybody agreed was a better selection than the BBC’s. She was right in the big picture window; it was a surprise such a window had survived the bombing. Looking along a street crowded with military vehicles and black government saloon cars, she could just make out the angular ruins of the minster.

  ‘You look a bit hot and bothered,’ Gary said.

  ‘The train’s a trial at the moment, isn’t it? Packed with servicemen, en route from A to B.’

  ‘You do get a sense of the mobilisation, don’t you?’ Mackie said. ‘Lots of pieces being moved around the board, ready for the chess game to begin.’

  It was all hush-hush, but it was impossible not to know what was going on. Troops had been pouring into the country for months. In the north and in Scotland farms and villages had been evacuated, vast tracts of land set aside for training. It was said that the US Eighth Air Force had pretty much taken over East Anglia. At night, across a vast swathe of countryside north of the Winston Line, you could hear the rumble of tanks and mobile weapons, of studebakers and jeeps, trundling to their marshalling points under cover of darkness.

  And here was her own son, preparing to throw himself into the cauldron. He seemed so much less boyish than when she’d last seen him. Now he had a man’s heavy body, a thickening neck, even slightly thinning hair like his father’s. And he was full of nervous energy. He kept glancing at a clock on the wall.

  ‘You’ve filled out,’ she said to him.

  ‘Well, I’d hope so,’ he said patiently. ‘Mom, it’s eighteen months already since I got sprung from that lebensborn camp in Kent. They do give us decent rations, you know.’

  Mackie tamped his pipe tobacco. ‘Better in the US Army, I hear. You could always swap sides.’

  Gary shook his head firmly. ‘I started this thing in these colours, and I’ll finish it in them.’

  ‘From Dunkirk to Berlin, eh?’ Mackie murmured. ‘Good for you.’

  The girl came over and took Mary’s order. No older than sixteen or seventeen, she wore rouge, eye liner, lipstick, and what looked like real stockings. Pushing back through the tables she ran a gauntlet of leers, whistles and wandering hands.

  ‘Remarkable,’ Mackie said, watching her go. ‘Here we are not half a mile from the seat of Halifax’s government, and there’s a girl like that, a walking demonstration of the way the GIs have distorted the British economy, with their ration-busting cigarettes and sweets and silk stockings, all pumping up the black market - their rather coarse glamour—’

  Gary laughed and sipped his tea. ‘You sound as if you’d like to be rid of your allies, Captain. How did Churchill put it? You’d carry on the fight until, in God’s good time, the new world, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old“. Well, here we are.’

  ‘Yes, thanks very much. And the sooner we get you lot packed off back to the land of the free the better.’

  ‘I’ll drink to that.’

  ‘Let’s get down to business.’ Mackie said to Mary, ‘We need to talk more fully. But I’ve already given Gary an outline of what we’re up to. And an indication of the role I’d like him to play.’

  Gary eyed her. ‘History books and time machines!’

  Mackie glanced around uneasily. ‘Walls have ears and all that, old chap.’

  ‘Well, all right.’ Gary spoke more quietly. ‘Look, Mom, Captain Mackie got me seconded to his operation, though I have an assurance it won’t be until W plus three.’

  ‘W“?’

  ‘W-Day,’ Mackie said with a cold grin. ‘Operation Walrus. Eats sea lions. One of Churchill’s.’

  Gary said, ‘I’m struggling to
believe that I’ll be more use following up this fruitcake stuff than I would be with my buddies kicking Nazi butt around Sussex and Kent.’

  Mary nodded. ‘I understand. I generally have trouble believing it myself. But I do have evidence, Gary.’

  ‘Historical stuff.’

  ‘Yes. That’s what I’m here to discuss with the Captain, in fact. I’ve spent three years on this now, on and off. The likelihood of this project of the Germans coming off might seem low. But if it did, the consequences could be - well, catastrophic.’

  Gary frowned. ‘If you weren’t my mother I’d walk out of here right now. You hear too much of this guff about Hitler’s secret super-weapons.’

  Mackie said, ‘I’ve made it plain to Gary that he’s under no obligation to carry this through. Indeed he’s under no obligation to return to front-line combat at all.’

  ‘I don’t want a damn staff job,’ Gary said fiercely. ‘That would kill me off faster than any Nazi bullet.’ Mary flinched, and he was instantly regretful. He covered her fingers with his. ‘Mom, I’m sorry. But you can see how it is. Especially as we’re so close to the off. Or so I heard.’ He drained his tea, and swept up the last of the cakes from the plate and stuffed them in his pocket, an old prisoner’s reflex. ‘Listen, I got to go. I do wish we could have had more time, Mom.’ He leaned over to give her another hug; he let her hold him for a long minute. When they broke he said, ‘I’ll tell you what. If I were going to go back and fix the past to resolve this damn war, I know where I’d go.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Versailles. The lousy settlement after the first war. You speak to any German, and I spoke to enough in the stalag, and he’ll tell you that’s where it all began. A just peace and you’d get no Hitler.’

  Mackie murmured, ‘I’ll take it on advisement.’

  ‘You do that.’ Gary stood and took his gas-mask pouch from the back of his chair. ‘Good day, Captain. Mom.’

  ‘Godspeed, son.’

  He walked away. Once outside the shop he fixed his cap on his head, straightened up and marched off. She watched him until he was out of sight.

  Mackie waited patiently. ‘He’s a good young man. I’m sure he’ll fulfil the mission we have for him.’

  ‘I just want him to get through all this without getting shot up again.’

  He tapped his saucer with a clean fingernail. ‘Look, let’s wait for your tea. Then perhaps we should get out of here. I think I’d feel more comfortable if we talked on the hoof, so to speak.’

  Mary sat back. ‘Come on, Tom. You can’t seriously believe there’s a German spy in here. We’re surrounded by GIs!’

  Mackie grunted. ‘Believe you me, there are circles in the British government who are more wary of our allies than our enemies. No offence. Where is that girl?’

  IV

  So they walked, heading through the heart of the city towards the minster.

  It was a hot June day, a little after three. In the centre of the city the shops were busy, the place bustling even on a Friday afternoon, full of military and pinstripe-suited civil service types. A British Restaurant, a self-service café ostensibly for the use of the bombed-out, was doing brisk business. Mackie and Mary, both bookish, paused by a W.H. Smith’s whose window was piled high with Penguin editions of Graham Greene and Agatha Christie novels, and pot-boiler crime and romance.

  It was the GIs who caught the eye, though. You saw them everywhere, hanging around on street corners like unruly kids, endlessly chewing gum, and ostentatiously smoking their Camels and Lucky Strikes at a time when smokers in England mostly had to put up with foul Turkish brands. They had a kind of loose casualness about them that was just this side of slovenly, and it made you realise how prim and proper most British servicemen looked by comparison. In England’s cities and towns, 1943 would always be remembered as the GI summer, Mary thought.

  York was busier than most towns in free England, because it was the emergency seat of government. But it shared with the rest the marks of the long war: the ack-ack gun emplacements, the pillboxes, the sandbags around the public buildings. The major air campaigns had been abandoned after those frenetic months of the invasion in 1940, but because it was the seat of government York had taken more than its share of the sporadic Luftwaffe raids - the Brits called them ‘tip and run’ raids. So there were gaps in the streets, marked by stubs of walls and broken pipes, the rubble cleared away and piled up in vast mounds in the parks. Some of these bomb sites were four years old and were choked with greenery; the weeds loved the brick dust and the ash. Mary supposed glumly that when W-Day came the bombing would resume in Britain, just as it was about to resume, so she’d heard, in the heart of Germany, and that York and other cities would soon have fresh scars to add to the old.

  Some of the changes wrought by the war seemed positively medieval. Every park, playing field and flower bed was given over to growing crops or raising pigs: it must have been five hundred years, Mary mused, since the farmyard had penetrated the city in such a way. And there was a pervasive atmosphere of neglect. The city was stripped of railings and lamp-posts, the metal turned over to the armaments industry. After nearly four years without a lick of fresh paint the homes and shops and offices looked shabby, slowly decaying, their blacked-out windows like closed eyes. Mary thought she saw a similar round-shouldered shabbiness in the people, in their patched-up clothes and shoes, now enduring the fourth year of a war that had become, worse than grinding, boring.

  The most spectacular bomb site of all was the minster itself. In one week in the summer of 1942 the Luftwaffe had launched a series of particularly spiteful raids against the grand old building, evidently meaning to make a symbolic strike against Halifax’s seat of power. When they reached it, Mary and Mackie stepped cautiously through the main entrance on the northern side, with flags of St George, Britain, the United States, Poland and France flying over their heads, and into the shadow of ruin. The central tower had been pretty much demolished, and the rest of the roof was blown in, the stone floors smashed to shrapnel. But the minster was still a working church. A small open-air altar had been set up beneath the Great West Window which had, by luck or a miracle, survived the bombing. But most of the interior, cleared of rubble and swept for unexploded shells, had been dug up to form allotments. Today squads of Land Girls toiled in the shadows of the broken walls.

  Mary and Mackie sat on a fallen pillar in the shade of the ruined north transept, their feet in the long grass, and watched the girls working. They were cheerful enough, their young voices echoing from the stone walls.

  Mary said, ‘Looks as if they are fighting a losing battle against the rosebay willow herb.’

  Mackie shrugged. ‘I’m told it’s more a symbolic effort than anything practical. Morale booster, you know. I mean it’s rather too shady in here to grow anything worthwhile. Of course the archaeologists have been crawling all over this place since Hitler conveniently blew it up for them.’

  ‘Well, they would. There are roots here going back to a Roman military headquarters, the centre of power in the whole of the north of England.’

  ‘And now York finds itself the locus of a world empire. Remarkable how things come around. I wonder what archaeologists of the future will find of our time. A layer of ash, I suppose. Rubble and bones.’

  ‘Geoffrey Cotesford visited the city many times, according to his memoir. In fact his first monastery was just outside the walls.’

  ‘Ah, our friend Brother Geoffrey! I thought he might have done. So to business, Mary.’ He dug out his pipe and began the usual rather theatrical business of filling it, shred by tobacco shred. It occurred to Mary that she hardly ever saw Mackie without the pipe. Perhaps he needed this prop for reassurance; perhaps he was less calm than his urbane British surface would have led her to believe. ‘Tell me first how you are getting on with your counter-history. What was your hinge of fate?’

  ‘Dunkirk,’ she said immediately.

  This was an exercise the two of
them had set themselves. In an effort to delve into the minds of history-meddling Nazis, Mackie had proposed that they try to devise their own ‘counter-histories’. If you had a Loom, what tweaks to history would you consider making? It was not so much the results that were of interest, he argued, but the habits of thinking and the types of research, a bit removed from the conventionally historical, that he wished to understand.

  Mackie nodded sagely. ‘Dunkirk. I should have guessed you would wish to spare your son the consequences of living through that horrendous defeat.’

  She said fiercely, ‘Let it be done to someone else’s son, not mine.’

  ‘Fair enough. How could that calamity have been averted?’

  ‘If Hitler had hesitated ...’

  She had had access to remarkably thorough briefings. Mackie’s MI-14 had moles that penetrated all the way, it seemed, to the top of the Nazi Party. And she had learned that in those dark days of May 1940, when the BEF and the remnant French forces were trapped on the beaches, it had been a full day before Guderian had been authorised to unleash his Panzers for the final assault and his resounding victory. The delay was obvious even to the allied soldiers on the beaches; Gary had spoken of it.

  ‘There seems to have been a debate at all levels within the military and the Party,’ she told Mackie. ‘Guderian himself had some concerns about the nature of the ground they would have to cover. The blitzkrieg had advanced so fast he was short of proper intelligence.’

  ‘Ah,’ Mackie said around his pipe. ‘Germans never did like a heavy pitch.’

  ‘Meanwhile Guderian’s superiors were well aware that France was not yet conquered. The BEF was beaten; so let it go, and keep back Guderian’s forces, let them rest and re-equip for the French campaign. And then Hitler was still dreaming of peace with England. He thought that sparing the BEF from slaughter might demonstrate to you Brits that he was a civilised kind of guy after all. But in the end they concluded that the destruction of the BEF was too good an opportunity to miss.’