The phone went dead, and I was about to hang up when it went live again. Dolly’s voice said, ‘Motor Section. Section Officer Wayne.’ Posted. Back downstairs more like. Poor Dolly was back where she’d started: driving men around London in staff cars. She sounded a bit sniffy as we made all the hello, and how are yous – I can’t say I’m surprised: I hadn’t brought her much luck.
‘You’re back downstairs again?’
‘Yes, Charlie. I told you my promotion was only temporary.’
‘Whoever unpromoted you made a big mistake, but don’t take it personally: anyone can make mistakes. Look what happened to me.’
‘You should have never been let in the RAF the first place. Bevin should have bunged you down a mine, and left you there.’
I don’t think that she meant to give me the opening, but I took it. ‘Talking of Mr Bevin, do you remember those two unpleasant visitors he was expecting earlier in the year?’
Pause, then, ‘Yes. Of course.’ Her voice had dropped two registers.
‘A pal of mine saw one of them a couple of days ago.’
‘No! Where?’
‘Less than a mile away.’
‘Are you in England, Charlie?’
‘Of course I am. Back at Lympne.’
I could almost hear her thinking. She was suddenly my favourite old girlfriend again, but that was for the benefit of whoever else might be hearing the conversation.
‘Charlie, why didn’t you say so? We’ve so much to talk about. Can I ring you tonight when I’m off duty?’ I gave her the office number, but told her it was my digs – you can’t be too careful.
‘I’ll be there at about seven, OK?’
I sat in Elaine’s office and waited for Dolly’s call. The office cooled quickly after dark, and I pulled her small new electric heater close to me. The call from Dolly never came because she did instead. I heard a car nosing down from the Lympne Road and went out to the office door to watch. One of Dolly’s big brown staff cars rolled to a stop under the light above the door. Her face looking at me through the windscreen was pale and expressionless. I realized immediately that all the rehearsal in my mind was going to come to nothing: this was going to be a difficult interview. Dolly followed me into the office, and hung her big leather coat on the coat stand. She looked tired but didn’t thank me for saying it.
‘You look fagged out.’
‘Thank you; a girl always likes to be told when she’s not at her best.’ See what I mean?
‘A cup of tea?’
‘Do you have any scotch?’
‘Yes; I have a bottle of scotch.’
‘What are you waiting for then?’ Then she saw the notice on the outside of my own office door, and gave a mirthless little laugh. ‘I don’t think you told me you were actually running this outfit.’
‘It probably didn’t come up.’
I poured us each a couple of fingers of scotch and raised my glass to her. She made no effort to meet me halfway. I said, ‘Chin chin.’
She just nodded. Then she said, ‘Begin at the beginning. Pretend I’m a copper you’ve just met . . .’
So I told her the lot, including my part in smuggling them into Lympne in the first instance, and waited for the jangle of handcuff keys. Eventually she leaned on the visitor’s side of Elaine’s desk, made a steeple of her hands, and rested her chin on them. Piers, our old boss, used to do that. Maybe she’d caught it from him. She said, ‘When you found out that those two Stern Gang members had killed Gus in Berlin you realized that they were probably the same two refugees you’d smuggled into England soon afterwards.’
‘Yes, it suddenly added up . . . but when we flew them we didn’t know they’d done anything wrong. They were just two lost Jews heading for the Holy Land.’
‘You might have told me . . .’
‘I thought about it. I decided not to tell you.’
‘Why?’
‘Does that matter?’
‘I suppose not. Damn you, Charlie!’ She thought for a little and added, ‘Then you saw them again, at an arms fair buying Spitfires, and you informed some friend in the Customs.’
‘He isn’t a friend . . . just someone I’ve met through my job. I thought that was a way of getting something done about them without having to confess to you like this: I didn’t want you involved. I didn’t see that it would do any good.’
‘But now they’re back?’
‘One is, at least. Trying to work out how to steal his Spits back no doubt.’
‘You realize that we’ll both be lucky to get away without being arrested?’
‘I’ve thought about that . . . I suppose that sex is out of the question?’
She threw Elaine’s heavy glass inkwell at me.
‘I’ll take that as a No, then.’
I can’t remember which of us began to laugh first . . . then she said she’d have a cup of tea after all, if I knew how to make it. She had some telephone calls to make. She used the switches on Elaine’s telephone to put the line through to my office, and went into it to talk to someone – shutting the door firmly behind her. I don’t think that she was all that pleased with me.
When she reappeared she still looked tired, but the tension had seeped away. She reached for the mug of tea, which was still warm, and said, ‘Thanks, love’, as she slumped into the chair opposite me. Love.
‘OK.’
‘Do you know that you’re a jammy little bugger, Charlie Bassett?’
‘We’re all right then?’
‘That’s right, Charlie. I keep forgetting not to underestimate you.’
‘What did they say?’
‘Who?’
‘The people you telephoned . . .’
‘Oh them? . . . Very pleased, surprisingly. They’ll ask Special Branch to deal with it I suppose; the bottom line is that they’re glad to get another chance at those two, and they won’t press me on where the information came from. You’re in the clear.’
‘What about you?’
‘Me too.’
‘But you won’t get your old job back?’
‘It was never mine in the first place. I was just keeping the chair warm.’
‘But you were booted back to the Transport Section because you failed them in Berlin.’
‘No, Charlie. I was booted downstairs for being the wrong shape.’
‘Sorry, I don’t understand.’
‘A man wanted the job, that’s all. My mother told me that exactly the same thing happened after the First War: our land fit for heroes is actually a land fit for male heroes: the girls don’t actually get all that much of a look in. It doesn’t matter if a woman has a brain the size of a battleship – if she doesn’t have the dangly bit, a man is always going to get a job over her.’ The dangly bit. Dolly was herself again.
We slept in adjacent beds in the hut and didn’t touch each other all night: it wasn’t the first time that we’d done that either. She woke me at about six, even though she dressed quietly – I moved my head just as she bent down to kiss me so she got me on the nose, and giggled.
‘Goodbye, Charlie.’
‘Goodbye, Dolly. See you soon?’
‘’spect so.’ And then she was gone. Minutes later I heard her car fire up. I lay on my back, and studied the rust marks around the bolts through white-painted corrugated iron sheets above my head while around me England woke up. Better late than never.
Elaine arrived at half past eight dragging Spartacus behind her on a piece of rope. They didn’t look as if they were enjoying each other’s company
‘Don’t sulk, Elaine.’
‘Maybe I won’t, if you put the kettle on.’
On my last night in Blighty I lay on my back in the dark, and thought about women. I was getting it all wrong, wasn’t I? If Maggs was right maybe I didn’t try hard enough. I thought about Eve Valentine, Dolly and Elaine in England, and Marthe and Frieda back in Germany. Smashing people, but stepping stones to nowhere. The truth was that I’d been useless with women ever since I’d
failed to pin Grace down in 1944 – and it was time I grew up, wasn’t it? I mentally crossed off the ones who had probably had enough of me. That left Dolly and Frieda as current possibles. I didn’t mean anything to Frieda, I thought – no one did. No future there, I was pretty sure of that. Which left Dolly . . . maybe I should try to sign her up before someone else did. I was already packed, even though I would have bags of time before Scarecrow took off for Germany the next day: I’ve told you – that’s a habit of mine. I think that the RAF taught me it, but it could always have been the Boy Scouts. You know: Be prepared.
The temperature in the hut dropped sharply; maybe Marty was coming back for another visit – Spartacus, lying across my feet, growled at something I couldn’t see. I’d lifted the bedclothes from the bed Dolly had occupied, and piled them over my own – they smelled faintly of her perfume. I self-consciously muttered, ‘Go away, Marty. I’m going back to Germany tomorrow, and need to get some sleep.’ Then I turned over and closed my eyes.
Chapter Twenty-four
Told you before: God sends me these little messages, but I never work out what they mean in time. The auguries for me in Germany were never much good from the start. The Scarecrow was shitty about the start-up of one of her serviced engines which, when it fired up, eventually blew out a plume of black smoke before it settled down. The engineer’s dials said that everything was OK, but you should never completely rely on what an aircraft is telling you. Even less on engineers: they are the world’s last optimists. This engineer, Giz, had a three-way confab with Chiefy and Hardisty, and eventually they decided to go. Giz had had a French father somewhere down the line and had been named Giscard: I only ever heard him called Giz or Gizzy, the same as everyone else. He was tall, slow-speaking, deceptively well read and reliable. He always wore an immaculately clean pair of white overalls: to be honest, that sometimes irritated me a bit . . . for an outfit at our end of the market it was a trifle dandyish.
The engine had another strop half an hour before we raised Frankfurt, so we arrived with a feathered propeller freewheeling in the stream. It wasn’t that bad; Lancastrians could always fly on three engines, it’s just that you’d rather not.
We had to go into the circuit and hold for an American Skymaster that was coming in from somewhere far away. I was up in the office behind Hardisty and Giz, and watched its approach low over the miles of dense black pine: it occurred to me that I’d been watching bloody aeroplanes for half my adult life. It looked OK to me, but then about a mile from the Frankfurt field it began to slow-roll. You don’t slow-roll a four-engined job that close to the ground when you’re getting the air speed off her. The only thing I could think was that something had gone terminally wrong with the pilot. When she went through ninety degrees of roll we all began to talk at once.
‘What in hell’s name is . . . ?’ Hardisty.
‘What the?’ from Giz, and just,
‘No,’ from me.
Spartacus whined: he must have known what would happen next.
When they hit the tarmac just inside the airfield they were fully inverted. There was an immediate huge detonation: the sort that no one walks away from. I saw a main wheel flung high into the air, and could momentarily see the shock wave from the blast. Hardisty was wrestling with Scarecrow, which was thrown up and sideways by it. Giz held on to the combing below the cockpit glaze to steady himself. He said, ‘Whoa!’ Then, ‘They must have been ferrying munitions.’
Behind me I could hear our radio op talking to the Control. They told us to stay in the circuit. When we told them that our fuel situation was iffy, and we were down to three engines anyway, the Controller diverted us to an emergency field at Nierstein, about ten miles away. There they had Hardisty taxi Scarecrow into a dispersal area and immediately had a group of GIs come up and throw a camouflage net over her. Once I was on terra firma I looked around and noticed that she wasn’t the only camouflaged hump on the ground, there were lots of them – although most of them were smaller . . . probably fighters. I suppose that if you are trying to pretend that something is not an airfield a fat red monstrosity like Scarecrow sitting in the middle of it would have been a bit of a giveaway . . . not that the troublesome port outer’s casing was red any longer anyway: it was glistening black with oil which had also streaked back across the wing . . . and made a nice shiny puddle on the concrete underneath.
‘Oil seal,’ Giz told us. ‘I’ve seen that before. We’ll have to have the bugger out again.’
‘How long?’ I hated sounding like a manager, but it was my job.
‘Two days, boss, if I can get replacement gaskets. You can have her back on Tuesday.’
Even though we had messed up their airfield the Yanks were very hospitable: they always are. They arranged transport for us back into the city centre and the army of occupation administration buildings. We left Giz behind organizing a makeshift ground crew to work on an unfamiliar airframe . . . bloody funny folk these engineers: he was in his element, and grinning from ear to ear. Hardisty and Spartacus made for an SAC club.
I paid off the cab outside the club in Kaiserstrasse. Even although it was only late afternoon there was a party going on, and a bouncer on the door. He was about eleven feet high and broad and had polished dark brown skin. It looked like the brown Americans had graduated from carrying boxes since my last visit. The hand he placed against my chest was bigger than my head – and he had to bend forward slightly to do it.
‘Private party, son.’ I’ve already told you about people calling me son.
‘Is Tommo around?’
‘Never heard of him. Who’s asking?’
‘Charlie Bassett.’
‘What we do have, Charlie Bassett, is a book with the names of acceptable people in it. Excuse me for turning my back to consult.’ It wouldn’t have mattered anyway: his back was as large as his front, and I couldn’t have wriggled around him. When he turned back he was less hostile, ‘I think you’d better go through to the office, Mr Bassett; you know the way?’
They were having what I thought of as an American party. What happens at an American party is that the booze doesn’t stop coming, the music is loud, and the dames don’t keep their clothes on. They had redecorated the place, and had papered the walls with Allied newspapers from the last six years. I stopped to read a page from the Daily Mail from a couple of months after D-Day. 7 Shillings for a Loaf of Bread in Brussels one headline shouted; ‘Witch’ Trial of Widow, Aged 70 said another. The paper was already yellowing, and I could smell cigar smoke from it. I glanced back at the bouncer. He was still watching me, and waved me on. I nodded. I could smell sweat and make-up from the dancing girls I had to push between. The brassy jazz music to which they moved clapped at my ears like thunder. What Dolly would have called their jiggly bits jiggled, and they were pretty, but somehow the whole thing was sad. Someone explained to me once that the audience at a striptease was more degraded by the performance than the performer. I was beginning to get that.
I remembered the office door as being around the end of the bar and through a bead curtain into a small corridor. There was another big fellow behind the curtain. He was in a civvy suit, but wore a Luger pistol in a grey canvas holster openly at his waist. He patted me down as I passed him, and relieved me of my little piece.
‘You get it back if you come out again, bud. OK?’
I shrugged, although the word if had not escaped my attention.
The inside of Tommo’s office was dangerous to your health, heavy with yellow-grey tobacco smoke. The aroma was wonderful, but it stripped the lining of your lungs inside of five minutes. The small room was crowded because Tommo and three other guys sat around his desk playing poker. Each had a personal cheer leader behind him, and most of the cheer leaders were missing a bizarre variety of items of clothing. The chips these people were playing for were cut precious stones – I couldn’t believe the size of some of the gems. Tommo was wearing a croupier’s eyeshade, and one of his fat black cigars. He look
ed up as I was let in, grinned . . . and folded the hand he was holding.
‘Hi ya, Charlie. When d’yer get in?’
Before I could answer an older sergeant opposite growled at the girl behind Tommo, ‘Let’s see yer legs, honey . . . get ’em off.’
‘Chip an’ strip poker,’ Tommo explained to me. ‘Ya lose twice when ya lose: you lose the stake, an’ someone tells ya girl to get her clothes off.’
‘So the girls lose as well?’
‘Don’t get picky with me, Charlie; I told you before not to get picky.’
The other two guys in the game were also sergeants. They had a small fortune in stones in front of them, and didn’t look best pleased to see a stranger in the camp. They probably didn’t like picky people either.
‘This is Charlie,’ Tommo told them. ‘He’s English, an’ he’s been my partner since I was in England in ’44.’
That seemed to do the trick. The players relaxed, and even the girls looked at me in a different way I thought. One of the sergeants asked, ‘Fancy a hand or two, Limey?’
I laughed and shook my head. What I meant is I’m not that stupid. What I said was, ‘I’m unlucky with cards. Besides, I don’t have a woman.’
‘We’ll sell you one,’ one of them offered.
They would have too. I shook my head again, and said to Tommo, ‘I can see you after the game if you like. Mind if I sit outside and read the papers while I wait?’
The party outside was beginning to bop. The men, a mixture of rank, nationality and service I couldn’t put a name to, had imbibed enough to overcome their inhibitions. Many of them were dancing with a mostly naked woman in their arms, driven around the small dance floor by the noisy jazz combo blowing out a storm. They didn’t seem to mind bumping up against other couples. Nor would I.
There was a scantily dressed brown girl on a bar stool not five feet from me. She wasn’t wearing much other than an expensive smell, and was smoking a long untipped American cigarette in a tortoiseshell cigarette holder. She was pretty, but snooty-looking, and looked as much out of place as me. She asked me, ‘Want to dance?’
The Hidden War Page 35
