Death or Glory III

by Michael Asher

  She’d caught up with the lorry again near the harbour, illuminated by a blaze of mulberry and orange lights. The fear of air raids had receded now: the war had shifted to Tunisia, the blackout was a thing of the past. The wagon turned left: she followed it along the corniche, tasted salt air, took in rainbow gleanings of light on the heavy waters of the Med. She shuddered: the waters reminded her of the last time she’d seen Tom Caine, the night they’d crashed into the Nile. Caine was forever creeping into her mind, no matter how hard she tried to keep him out. She was suddenly filled with a longing for him so intense it stifled her breath. Vivid images of that night flowed through her: the moment when she’d recognized the man at the driving wheel as Johann Eisner: the shock of discovering they were at the mercy of a Nazi spy who’d sworn to see her dead. She shivered again. Eisner was gone, but she’d never forget that face, nor the fact that he’d taken Caine from her.

  She pushed the images away, focused on the lorry’s tail-lights. She didn’t know Alexandria well, but she was aware they were heading towards the royal palace at Ras al-Tin, a rambling labyrinth of colonnades and cupolas standing on the waterfront. She rounded the headland, saw the palace in front of her, lit up like a Christmas tree. About a quarter of a mile before reaching it, though, the lorry took a left up a blueshadowed lane. Two hundred yards further on, it turned right through a broken-down gate. Nolan switched off her lights, drove past, halted the jeep in deep blackness, further along the lane.

  She slung her haversack, slipped out of the vehicle. Her stomach fluttered: she pulled the pistol from her pack, lodged it in the patch-pocket of her overalls. She padded as far as the gate along the base of lichen-covered walls with branches of dead trees hanging over their tops like bony fingers. The gate had been grand once: now its blocks were skewed and crumbling: sculptures of a griffon and an eagle that had probably once stood atop its great posts lay toppled in the dust.

  Nolan squatted at the gate, peeked in. She clocked a rubble-strewn courtyard, grass growing through paving stones, a collapsed ornamental fountain. The lorry was parked in front of what appeared to be the edifice of a ruined palazzo: she glimpsed creeper-covered walls, boarded-up windows, a sprawl of ramparts, turrets, protrusions, spreading over each other, merging with the night. She felt a spasm of uneasiness. There was no visible light, no movement, only darkness and tarblack shadow. Could this really be Calvin’s HQ? No vehicles, no guards, no wireless antennae? Had she been drawn into a trap? Had they spotted her, led her to an abandoned building?

  She heard voices, saw shadows bob, heard wagon-doors bang: the lorry’s engine harrumphed: headlights reamed. Nolan pressed into a recess, waited for the vehicle to growl past. She got a glimpse of faces in the cab: no sign of Brunetto. She stayed where she was until the truck had turned right at the end of the lane, then took another shufti at the palazzo. They must have left Brunetto in there. Whatever the place looked like, this must be where the meeting with Calvin was supposed to take place. She felt a rush of panic. What would happen to Brunetto? The Italian girl had been taken in her place, and she hadn’t done anything to prevent it. She felt the weight of the gun in her pocket: no matter how creepy the place looked, she was tempted to wade in right now. On the other hand, she’d found Calvin’s base, or thought she had: that knowledge might be wasted if she didn’t pass it on to Stocker.

  How could she contact him? She had no wireless, so it had to be by phone. Public phone booths were rare in Alex, but she remembered seeing one down by the harbour. She could be there and back in twenty minutes. In that time, though, anything could happen to Brunetto. Stocker hadn’t been in the office when she’d called him earlier. It might take hours for a support unit to get here. One thing they’d taught her in training was never go in without back-up. She realized suddenly that she was wasting time debating it. She ran for the jeep.

  She made it back in twenty-four minutes: she’d found the phone, got through to FS headquarters, only to be told that Stocker was still away. She’d left an urgent message, described the exact location of the palazzo in Alexandria, reported that she was going in to look for Brunetto. Stocker couldn’t forbid her: he wasn’t there.

  She hovered for a long moment at the gate, drew her pistol with her left hand, took her torch in her right, slung her haversack over her backside so that it wouldn’t impede her. She moved towards the palazzo as softly as a cat. Close up, she felt the presence of the building like a brooding creature, a dark beast with knotted skin covered in creeping serpents, dotted with orifices like haggard eyes. To look at, it was was mostly a black outline, though: Nolan took cues from the way the shadows fell to furnish it with gable-ends, lean-to roofs, turrets, fallen façades, bow windows, terraces and verandahs, broken-down steps with disintegrating balustrades.

  There seemed to be no door in the cliff of decaying masonry, only a low-arched tunnel. She ducked under it: flying shapes whispered past – bats or ravens, it was too dark to tell. She found a stairwell, paused there, flashed a torch-beam, glimpsed fractured stone steps leading down into darkness. Her heart beat a devil’s tattoo. She kept the torch on, worked her way down, stopped to listen every few minutes. There was a sepulchral smell: dried-out leather and rotting wet rags. At the bottom of the stairs it was as foetid as a tomb: she flashed the torch, found herself in a vaulted passage littered with mouldy fragments of basketry, yellow newspapers, cast-off chairs shedding their innards, tables with amputated limbs covered in dust. The walls were puke-green, scabbed with patterns of flaking paint, festooned with broken switch-boxes, nests of wires, disused light-sockets out of the Ark. There were many doors opening off the passage, rusted iron, with old rivets and enormous locks: she tried several, but they seemed stuck in place.

  She switched off her torch, stood stock still, became aware of rustlings and scrapings, the drap-drap of water, the faint creak of what might have been ancient plumbing, and – somewhere far off – a child’s sobs. The sobbing sound was the only sign of human presence. She couldn’t be certain it was a child – even that it was really human – but it seemed to be coming from a narrow side-passage. Nolan hesitated, turned off the main corridor, headed towards the sound. She must have covered a hundred feet when she heard a door scrape. She stopped, switched off the torch, listened. Someone was coming up behind her in the darkness: she could hear footfalls and wheezing breath. She gripped her pistol, prepared to spin round, heard silence. From somewhere above her came a muffled cranking, like clockwork machinery. She waited: the mechanical sound stopped. Had she imagined the footfalls, the breathing? The darkness was a blank that your mind invested with all sorts of non-existent things. Now, she heard only the lubdub of her own pulse, the tattered edge of her own breathing. She moved on again: the footfalls returned. She halted once more, turned about, felt tempted to demand who was there. Again, she heard nothing. She bit her lip, carried on.

  The sobbing was intermittent, but seemed to be getting closer. The direction was confusing, though: every few steps revealed new openings, doorways, side-corridors – the place was a sprawling underground maze. Then, the sobbing was replaced abruptly by a full-throated, high-pitched scream. Nolan froze, fought back a fresh frisson of fear. That wasn’t a child. It was a woman. Was it Brunetto? What were they doing to her?

  She stroked the safety-catch of her pistol, felt some comfort from the weapon. She hadn’t imagined the scream: it had come from someplace nearby. She started off: the footfalls were with her again. They seemed to be approaching faster now. She stopped a third time, switched off the torch. The wheezing breath – she could hear it clearly. Suddenly there was a dry chuckle, so close that her nipples tightened in terror. Someone was standing right behind her. She swung round, extended pistol and torch together, the way they’d taught her in SOE school.

  She flashed the torch: her finger went tight on the trigger. For a fraction of a second a face was engraved in the torch-beam, a face she knew, a face she’d last seen under a peasant’s headcloth, seconds before their
taxi crashed into the Nile. Johann Eisner. His unquiet eyes contracted in the blare of light, his jaw jutted like a knifeblade, his thinlipped mouth set itself in a vulpine sneer. Nolan pulled iron. The DWOOOOMMMPPPPHHH was deafening in the confined space: the volcano of light blinded her, the gas-stench made her sick. A body blundered into her, knocked her flying, fell on top of her. She hit the wall, took the fall on her soft parts, felt hard male arms grope her, felt barbwire stubble rake her face. She rolled away frantically from the grabbing arms, fired again, heard the whhaangggzzzzzsssssttt of a ricochet as the bullet shattered into fragments, bounced from wall to wall. She came up on to her feet, ran hell-for-leather into the darkness, half blind, ears ringing from the gunshots. She ran straight into a brick wall, staggered back, found a passage on her right, stumbled through it till she was in what felt like a wider space. It was pitch dark: she pressed herself against the wall, panting, strained through the chiming in her eardrums to pick up pursuing steps. She heard only the tom-tom beat of her heart. The shock of the encounter hit her like a rabbit-punch. Eisner’s dead. It looked like him, but it can’t be. It was, though. You know it was. He’s here, in Calvin’s place. What’s he doing here? Is Eisner Calvin? Then she remembered Caine, and her terror was chased out by a hot tsunami of rage. That swine killed Tom Caine.

  ‘I thought you’d be here sooner or later,’ a disembodied voice growled, almost in her ear. Nolan jumped, raised the pistol, held her body rigid, eyeballed left and right. The darkness was impenetrable.

  ‘I’ve been expecting you, Maddy.’ It came from a different direction this time: Nolan swept the gun in a ninety-degree arc, saw only blackness.

  ‘Of course, I knew the other girl wasn’t you. She looks like you, but she isn’t in the same class.’ Again, a different place: Eisner must be cruising barefoot.

  ‘I’ve thought a lot about you since I discovered you were alive. I was angry at first, but then I realized that I felt something else. I was glad you were back. It’s true, I swore to kill you. I no longer feel like that, especially since I realized that you had lost your identity. Neither of us is the person we used to be.’

  Nolan wasn’t taking in the words: whatever Eisner said was a decoy. She was listening only to the voice itself. It was near: it seemed to be shifting constantly. She tried to pinpoint the movement, hoped to God she could get off a shot when he came in.

  ‘I talked to the deserters. I know they picked you up after the crash, that you lived with them because you’d lost your memory. That changed everything. Now I believe you could help me. I never felt that before.’

  A woman shrieked suddenly from a place not far away – a heart-rending squeal of agony that made the blood rush to Nolan’s face. ‘What are you doing to Angela, you …?’

  She didn’t even realize she’d spoken until it was too late. A hand closed on her wrist, held it with an iron grip, whipped her arm back so fast that the gun was wrenched out of her hand: an elbow grasped her neck in a vice. She yanked her gun-hand free, turned her head sideways, kicked down into his instep, tried to work the elbow off with both hands. She felt a fingernail of curved steel touch her neck just below the ear, remembered the vicious little knife Eisner had used when he’d cut Mary Goddard’s throat right in front of her. ‘I don’t want to hurt you,’ Eisner whispered. ‘Don’t make me. That’s better. Now, let me introduce you to Calvin. Perhaps I’ll find out the identity of the impostor they sent in your place.’

  49

  It was half past one in the morning when Stocker, Blaney and the rest of the Field Security section took off from LG101 in pitch darkness, in an RAF Dakota. Caine was with them. At first, Stocker wouldn’t hear of his coming to Alexandria. Caine was wounded and exhausted, he said. He’d done his bit and more: now he would have to do what the doctor ordered. Caine stuck his chin out. When Stocker looked as if he wasn’t going to budge, he resorted to moral blackmail. He pointed out that, on his own admission, the major had lied about him to Nolan, causing her unforgivable distress.

  ‘I had no choice,’ Stocker protested. ‘If I’d admitted you were alive, she would never have gone back to the deserters, and we’d never have found Calvin’s location.’

  ‘Steady on, sir. We still haven’t found Calvin’s location,’ Blaney reminded him. ‘We haven’t heard from Brunetto yet.’

  In the end, Stocker had caved in: he’d even told his lads to hand over some clips of .45 calibre ammunition for Caine’s Thompson. Caine felt bad about leaving Copeland in the MO4 aid-post: the sawbones with the crew-cut told him that his chum would be moved to Cairo in the next few days. He didn’t say goodbye to Cope: his mate was still out when he left.

  It was a tense flight, though. Caine was still buzzing on Benzedrine and morphia, but he was terrified that something would happen to Nolan before he got there. She wasn’t even aware that she was dealing with a top-flight Nazi agent rather than an Allied deserter-boss: from what Stocker had told him, Field Security had used her as bait. Last time they’d done that she’d been kept prisoner in a cellar for more than a week, and very nearly ended up getting done in by Johann Eisner.

  The only good thing about it was that they’d sent Angela Brunetto as her minder. Angela had saved Caine’s bacon more than once: for a girl, she was a damn’ good man, he thought. He’d wanted to leave a note about Brunetto for Copeland to read when he woke up, but Stocker had vetoed it. Anything written down was a security risk, he said.

  Stocker also spent a restless flight. He’d gone to tremendous lengths to plant Brunetto among the deserters: he’d trusted her. Since the signal that afternoon, though, he’d heard nothing. If they arrived in Alex without having discovered Calvin’s location, everything would have been in vain. He didn’t relish the prospect of telling Caine that the sweetheart he’d so nearly found again had once more been thrown to the dogs.

  It wasn’t until ten minutes before their aircraft was due to land in Alex that Blaney passed Stocker a signal from Field Security HQ: it had come through on the RAF wireless net. The text was a phone message originating in Alexandria some time earlier. It gave the precise address and location of the palazzo in which it was believed Calvin was based. Stocker sighed in relief.

  ‘Well done, Signora Brunetto,’ he intoned. ‘I knew we could rely on you.’

  Blaney raised a ginger eyebrow. ‘You didn’t notice, sir? That message didn’t come from Brunetto. It came from Captain Nolan.’

  Stocker sat up. Caine, dozing in the next seat, was suddenly wide awake. ‘What’s going on?’ he demanded.

  ‘Calvin’s men made a mistake, sir. Apparently they kidnapped Brunetto instead of Nolan. Nolan must have shadowed her, discovered Calvin’s location, and phoned it in.’

  Caine and Stocker stared at each other. ‘So where is Captain Nolan now?’ Stocker enquired.

  Blaney blushed. ‘It’s in the message, sir. She told our office that she was going into Calvin’s HQ to extract Brunetto.’

  ‘What? On her own?’ Caine stammered.

  Stocker looked worried. ‘When did this message come through to the office?’

  ‘At 1330 hours, sir.’

  Stocker glanced at his watch. ‘That’s approximately an hour ago.’

  ‘Jesus,’ Caine swore. ‘A heck of a lot can happen in an hour.’

  50

  ‘Two for the price of one,’ Heinrich Rohde scoffed. ‘Isn’t that what the English say? “Two birds with one stone”?’

  His voice was more effeminate than Nolan remembered, but no less chilling. It was as if a malevolent female spectre were speaking through his male body – or what was left of it.

  Until Eisner had dragged her on to her knees in front of Rohde, she hadn’t believed what he’d croaked in her ear out in the passage. Calvin is an old acquaintance of yours. One you might not remember: Heinrich Rohde. Even when she’d glimpsed the mass of scar tissue, the distorted features, the dark glasses like discs of polished obsidian, she wouldn’t have recognized him. It was only the hand: those ov
erlong fingers, writhing obscenely like tentacles – a hand that had once inflicted terrible pain on her. The sight filled her with such terror that she almost vomited. She could no more forget those fingers than she could forget Eisner’s face.

  Her hands were tied behind her back. A few feet to her right, Angela Brunetto knelt, sobbing. She was trussed up in the same way, naked from the waist up: her overall-top had been savagely ripped off. Her head lolled against her chest, spilling wild blond hair over breasts whose nipples were livid with vicious burns. Nolan had no doubt of the origin of the screams she’d heard outside. When Eisner had shoved her down next to Brunetto, they’d exchanged a fleeting look. Brunetto had betrayed no sign of recognition: Nolan was certain that the Italian girl hadn’t talked. That gave her courage: Brunetto had as much reason to hate and fear Rohde as she had. She’d been tortured dreadfully, but Nolan guessed she wasn’t in such a feeble state as it appeared: always try to appear weaker and more stupid than you are.

  Rohde removed his glasses, leaned forward out of the shadow of his wing-backed chair. Nolan saw that one of his eyes was a vacant white pit, the other a narrow slot in a puffy mass of red tissue. She gasped. ‘You find me repulsive?’ Rohde enquired. ‘Perhaps you recall the part you played in my disfigurement? Both of you – you and Signora Brunetto here – are responsible for this. I’m happy you’re here. Before I dispose of you, you will discover the appalling cost of your action against me.’

  Nolan had to exercise all the dramatic skills she’d learned in a lifetime to remain composed, to control the twitching of her face, to master the clinging dread in her belly. She’d been prepared for Calvin. Never in her darkest dreams had she imagined that she’d be facing the Nazi sadist she thought she’d seen blown to pieces six months earlier. First Eisner, now Rohde: two men she’d believed dead, who had more reason to do her harm than anyone else on earth. She fought to control her breath, to diminish the birdhouse shrill of fear in her ears.