by Wilbur Smith
Hardy Amies had made several of Saffron’s favorite dresses before the war. “Captain Amies, if you don’t mind, Miss Courtney,” he said sternly. “Or ‘sir’ to you.”
“Oh . . .” said Saffron, even more taken aback. “Yes, sir, of course.”
Amies got up, walked around the desk, smiling, and held out his hand. “How are you, Saffron?” he asked, then looked at Mr. Brown. “This young lady was one of my favorite clients. Such a perfect figure! She could take a hessian sack and make it look like Paris couture.”
“Diana Cooper once made that same point to me,” Mr. Brown agreed. “I’ve rarely heard her compliment another woman so fulsomely. Now, if you don’t mind, I’m expected in King Charles Street. The Foreign Secretary wants a word. I’ll leave you two to get reacquainted. Goodbye, Amies, and goodbye to you, too, Miss Courtney.”
“What a funny old man he is,” remarked Amies once Mr. Brown had taken his leave. He sat back against his desk and motioned to Saffron to sit in one of the chairs opposite it.
“No one is ever quite sure what he does, but there are few pies that don’t have his fingers in them and almost no one of any importance he doesn’t know. I think of him as a sort of earthly God because he moves in mysterious ways.”
“I met him in Oxford,” Saffron said, pulling herself together, “though I’d heard of him before that.”
“Ah, yes, your family connection. He did vaguely mention it. Now, first things first . . . I imagine Mr. Brown has referred to this organization by a number of different terms—the Inter-Services Research Bureau, Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, and so on . . .”
“He said its real name was the Special Operations—”
Before Saffron could say the word “Executive,” Amies had raised a hand and snapped, “Hush! That organization does not officially exist, so far as anyone outside this building and a select few in Whitehall are concerned. We refer to ourselves as ‘Baker Street.’ Understood?”
“Yes.”
Amies gave her a look she had not seen before. Instead of a couturier charming a client, he was an officer making it clear to a subordinate that they were not coming up to scratch. It took her a second to realize her mistake.
“Yes, sir,” she said.
“That’s better . . . Now, let me be frank, you currently lack the linguistic skills that are normally regarded as essential for a prospective agent. You cannot operate properly in a country unless you are fluent in its language. We have always looked for recruits who are bilingual, and then trained them in the skills required to survive in the field. But you’re rather different, aren’t you?”
Amies paused, looking at Saffron quizzically, knowing her only as the pretty young thing who used to wear his dresses so elegantly. “You’ve already killed a man.”
Saffron had become accustomed, somewhat reluctantly, to the morbid curiosity her wartime exploits provoked in other people. When war broke out in 1939, Saffron wasn’t interested in punting leisurely along the River Cherwell at Oxford University when all the men she knew were defending their country. She was determined to get involved, even if it was only driving a car or a lorry.
“More than one,” she replied. “While I was serving as General Wilson’s driver in the Western Desert, we were chased by a car filled with Italian soldiers. I shot the driver. The car crashed and, as far as I know, all the other men in it died too.”
It was 1941, and Saffron was a driver for British Army General Henry Maitland Wilson on the North Africa, Greece and Palestine fronts. When his khaki Humber saloon ended up being pursued by an enemy Italian car, Saffron, armed with her Beretta 418 pistol, had put two rounds into the driver’s head.
She paused and added, “And I shot my uncle Francis. He was a traitor. He deserved it.” She thought back to that ghastly affair. Uncle Francis Courtney had become an embittered, cynical man. He had betrayed Saffron and her father Leon to the Germans and they’d both nearly lost their lives. Saffron confronted Francis and, in the scuffle that followed, she’d put a bullet between his eyes. She would claim it was self-defense.
“I dare say he did. Now, your record shows that Wilson mentioned you in dispatches for that desert show. And then you were awarded the George Medal . . .”
“Yes, sir.”
“. . . for defending a merchant ship against an attack by Stukas. I’m looking at your citation: ‘When enemy fire left one of the ship’s batteries of Vickers machine guns unmanned, Miss Courtney, showing complete disregard for her own safety, ran to the guns and operated them under continuous bombardment. She hit and damaged at least one of the enemy aircraft and remained at her post until the captain gave the order to abandon ship. She then pulled her wounded father to safety and ensured he was rescued by the single lifeboat that survived the sinking. Even then, when unarmed, she stood and waved her fist in defiance at a low-flying enemy aircraft.’
“You’re smiling . . . May I ask why?”
“I’m just remembering the look on the German pilot’s face.”
And also I’m remembering who that pilot was.
“Well, it’s quite a tale you have to tell. Mind you, there’s nothing more unexpected about your situation than there is about mine. It turns out we both had previously undiscovered talents. Mine appears to be for clandestine operations. I speak French quite fluently, so I was in and out of Belgium a few times in the first year or so of the war.”
Even then, without being told anything about Amies’ operations, Saffron had understood that going “in and out of Belgium” would have required extraordinary courage and skill.
“Nowadays my work consists of selecting prospective agents, supervising their training and preparing them for the field. Tell me, did Mr. Brown explain the way we’re organized here?”
“No, sir.”
“In that case, I’d better fill you in. As you may have noticed, the world of armed forces and intelligence services runs on a system of initials. Baker Street is no exception. For example, the men who preside over your fate and mine are known by the initials that describe their rank: CD, D/R, A/CD, AD/E . . . the list is endless. But there is only one man whose name you need to have engraved upon your heart, and that name is Gubbins.”
Saffron giggled, assuming Amies was playing some kind of a joke. “Who is Gubbins?”
“Colonel Colin Gubbins is a small, ferocious artillery man with thrillingly piercing blue eyes, whose precise title is irrelevant because he is, as a matter of fact, the Man Who Makes Everything Happen. He is not in complete charge of Baker Street yet, but he certainly will be one day. My advice to you, Miss Courtney is, ‘Beware the Gubbins.’ Do not displease him. Make him happy to be in your presence. Your future may depend upon it.”
“I’ll certainly try.”
“That’s the spirit. Now, the operational side of Baker Street is divided into sections, each of which is known by an initial, naturally, which also applies to its boss. This may be because these bosses change regularly, so it is easier to remember one letter than an endless series of new names. The French section is known as F, for France, as is its boss. The Dutch section and boss are known as N, for Netherlands. You and I are now speaking in the section covering Belgium and Luxembourg, which is known as T. Do not ask me why. Now, you may wonder why you have been led into T’s embrace. The answer is partly that you and I know one another, but also because your upbringing may help you acquire the particular linguistic skills we require.”
“How so?”
“Because half of Belgium speaks French and the other half speaks Flemish, which is a variation of Dutch. Now, I already knew that you’d been born and raised in Kenya, of course, but I see from your file that you were educated in South Africa . . .”
“Yes, sir, at Roedean in Johannesburg.”
“Pick up any Afrikaans while you were there?”
“A bit.”
“Good. Then you’ll know that Afrikaans is also a form of Dutch. So it shouldn’t be beyond our powers to improve your Flem
ish. That would mean we could put you into play in Flanders. I see that your mother was of German descent and you spent some time in Germany before the war . . .”
“That’s right, sir. One of my closest girlfriends at school was German. I went to stay with her family a couple of times.”
“I don’t suppose you picked up the language at all?”
“Yes . . . I have a little conversational German, too.”
“Well, that’s a start. Most of our work in Baker Street consists of liaising with the Resistance networks in various places, helping them grow, giving them equipment and getting them up to scratch. But we have every intention of taking on an active role in due course: sabotage, assassination, that sort of thing.”
“And you have me in mind for that?”
“I’d have thought so. In the meantime, why don’t I buy you dinner this evening? The Dorchester feeds one as well as can be expected these days, and Malcolm McAlpine, who built the place, swears that it’s bomb-proof.”
“Thank you, sir, that would be lovely,” Saffron said.
“Good. You may call me Hardy while we are at dinner, but I have one condition . . .”
Saffron remembered that she had felt a little uneasy. Everything about SOE was so mysterious that she hesitated to speculate what might be demanded of her. “What’s that, sir?” she asked.
“I insist that you wear one of my dresses.”
“Oh, I think I could manage that, sir,” Saffron had assured him, delighted by his command.
She had gone back to the flat that her father had bought before the war, in Chesham Court, a modern block in one of the smartest parts of London, half way between Knightsbridge and Sloane Square. Rifling through her wardrobe she felt she was looking at another woman’s clothes: the woman she had been before the war, the one who had fallen in love with Gerhard von Meerbach.
That night in London with Amies, Saffron had thought about Gerhard as she picked out a cocktail dress in midnight-blue silk, just as she thought about Gerhard now, as she sat slumped in the cold, stark cell.
No! Don’t! she berated herself. It hurts too much. Think about that outfit, that night with Hardy, nothing else.
Amies had created the dress in his role as chief designer for the house of Lachasse. Its fabric was so beautiful, its cut so exquisite, that it forced any woman who wanted to wear it well to match the high standards that it set. Before she put it on, Saffron made the kind of effort with her appearance that was once normal, but had now disappeared from her wartime life.
Naked and horribly exposed, struggling to stop herself shivering, with her flesh pressed against a cold damp concrete floor, Saffron relived every lovely, indulgent moment of her preparations that night. In her imagination, she was lying in her bath, watching her skin go pink in the piping-hot, scented water. She patted herself dry and soothed her skin with rich lotions, enjoying the feeling of her fingers spreading the slick, creamy concoctions over her soft, smooth body. She put on her satin dressing gown, walked into her dressing room and chose her prettiest underwear and silk stockings.
It had mattered so much that her hair and make-up be perfect, and that every detail of her jewelry, shoes, coat, gloves and hat should suit one another, herself and the occasion. She felt like a new recruit, preparing his full dress uniform for inspection by a sharp-eyed, unforgiving sergeant major. These delicate touches were her uniform and the Dorchester would be her parade ground.
Before leaving the flat, Saffron had examined herself in the full-length mirror. She knew that people found her beautiful, because she had been told so all her life. But there was no vanity in her appraisal. Her intention was not to congratulate herself, but to spot all the mistakes, the flaws and imperfections. Her hands, for example, had spent most of the past year gripping the steering wheel of Jumbo Wilson’s staff car. As his driver she was also, as often as not, his mechanic. A woman who had to be ready at a moment’s notice to change a tire, replace a spark plug, or improvise a fan belt from one of her own stockings could not bother with long painted nails or regular manicures, particularly when she was working in the dust and grit of the Western Desert.
Saffron held her fingers out in front of her, looking at the back of her hands and then turning them over to look at her palms. She had done her best to rub all the calluses away with an emery board and cover her short, cracked nails with paint, but still she sighed to herself. They’re a disgrace.
She frowned too at the hang of her dress. She had never been overweight, but war appeared to have made her even slimmer, because the skirt was a fraction loose around her waist and hips. No normal man would notice, but Hardy would spot it in an instant.
And of course he did. “You look utterly ravishing, darling,” he had said when they met in the foyer of the Dorchester. He opened his mouth to speak again, but then shook his head. “You should give that dress to me in the morning, so that one of my seamstresses could take it in an eighth of an inch at the waist and a quarter round the hips.”
“Do you still have seamstresses? What with the war and everything . . .”
Amies smiled. “Oh yes. I still design collections. But only for American ladies, I’m afraid.”
“But what about us, here in England? Why can’t we get your dresses?”
“Because you don’t pay in dollars, my dear. The country desperately needs them to refund America for food and military kit. The Board of Trade has commanded Norman Hartnell and me to come up with chic designs that can be packed off to America. I often sketch while I’m working at Baker Street, actually. Helps me think.”
As they walked toward the hotel restaurant, Amies had continued, “Now I shall tell you something about Baker Street that is of particular relevance to you. We are the most savage, lawless outfit this country possesses. Our task is to play dirty, harm the enemy by any means possible and ignore all the rules. That’s why the stuffier War Office types despise us. And yet despite that, or possibly because of it, Baker Street has more women doing more interesting work than any other branch of the services.”
“I did see an awful lot of girls my sort of age when I came to your office.”
“The place is filled with them: smart, bright, young, fierce creatures. Gubbins swears by them. But still . . .” Amies had paused a few yards from the restaurant door, stepped back and examined Saffron like a connoisseur in front of a work of art. “There’s not a woman in Baker Street, indeed in all of London, lovelier than you tonight.”
Saffron wrapped her arms tighter around her knees, desperately trying to silence her chattering teeth. But she smiled at the recollection of how glorious it had been to feel feminine, pampered and admired again, after all the months of work and war and death. Amies had ordered champagne and entertained her with a hilarious account of his officer training.
“As you can imagine, my dear, they hardly expected a pansy dressmaker, who was far from the ideal of the big, tough, manly secret agent, to last the course. But I’m proud to say that I passed with flying colors. I saw my report once they let me join Baker Street. It said . . .” Amies raised his head in the manner of a Shakespearian actor about to deliver a soliloquy and intoned, “‘This officer is far tougher both physically and mentally than his rather precious appearance would suggest.’”
Saffron giggled.
“I know!” Amies exclaimed in an exaggeratedly effete voice. “I may say, I was deeply hurt. Honestly, darling . . . Precious? Me!”
He let Saffron’s laughter subside and then went back to his recital. “‘He possesses a keen brain and an abundance of shrewd sense.’ I had no objection to that bit, as you can imagine. Anyway, it concluded that: ‘His only handicap is his precious appearance and manner . . .’”
He glanced at Saffron, “I know, dear heart, why did he have to be so beastly all over again? But there was a nice twist at the end: ‘. . . and these are tending to decrease.’”
“Well, I should think they were. One thing a couturier does understand is the notion of comm
e il faut. In the Army one has to be butch and there’s an end to it.”
•••
Saffron slipped deeper into the memory of that happy evening. After dinner, Amies had taken her dancing at the Embassy Club on Bond Street. Dreamily, between wakefulness and sleep, she recalled how wonderful it had felt to be arm-in-arm with Hardy Amies, wearing her lovely silk dress and doing the foxtrot, knowing that she did not have to worry about fending off a clumsy pass, for he would never ask for anything more than a dance and a chaste kiss.
The door to her cell slammed open. A squat, hatchet-faced woman walked in, wearing a man’s boilersuit, with a belt straining against her spreading waist, and threw a bundle of filthy rags at Saffron’s feet.
“Put this on!” she barked.
Saffron reached for the rags, which turned out to be a hessian smock in a drab, pale gray. There were brown marks down the front.
“Bloodstains,” said the woman. “They don’t wash out.”
Saffron pulled the smock over her head and stuck her arms through the short sleeves. The material was rough against her skin. That’s the least of my problems, she thought.
The woman turned toward the corridor that ran past the cell and called out, “The prisoner is ready!”
Two soldiers entered. One of them handed the woman a piece of black cloth, which she tucked into her belt. Then he gave her a pair of handcuffs.
“Hands!” she commanded.
Saffron stuck out her arms, with the wrists together, and made no attempt to resist. From now on her aim was to be as passive and mute as possible: to give the enemy nothing.
The woman took the black cloth from her belt. Saffron saw that it was a hood, and the next thing she knew it had been slipped over her head, covering her face and leaving her blind.
She felt the woman grab her shoulders and turn her toward the door.
“Walk!”
Saffron stepped forward a few paces, hesitant for fear that she might hit a wall or the doorframe.
“Stop! Left turn! Walk!”
The commands continued as Saffron was marched out of the cellar of the house and into the cold open air. She felt chilly stone against her bare feet and then painful gravel chips, and then a long stretch of frosty turf. The icy wind cut through her smock, as if she were still naked. She had had no food or drink for many hours and try as she might to remain mentally alert, she was giddy with exhaustion.
