by Jenny Lecoat
Dorothea was standing in the front room, tears of frustration in her eyes. The house was a wreck. Chairs had been overturned, the contents of the attic and its hatch cover lay in a heap at the bottom of the stairs. Broken glass glittered everywhere.
Kurt put his arm around her. “How many of them were there? Did they do much damage?”
Dorothea nodded. “Four soldiers. They pulled everything out of the cupboards, upturned the beds. They broke my last teapot—I’ll never be able to replace it.”
Hedy held Dorothea close. “I’m so sorry, you must have been terrified. But we’ll help you put everything back as it was. What matters is they didn’t find anything.” She felt Dorothea shrink, and pulled back. “They didn’t, did they?”
Dorothea’s fingers fluttered to her face, patting her skin to comfort herself. “I’m so sorry... I thought I’d swept everywhere, I thought I’d been so careful... It’s my fault.” Her words began to sputter as the tears quickened, choking her.
Hedy’s bowels twisted and she felt an urgent need to use the lavatory. “What did they find?”
“A button, underneath the kitchen table. A button from a German uniform tunic.”
Hedy looked toward Kurt, whose face had lost all its color.
“It’s not your fault, Dorothea, it’s mine. I knew that button was missing, but I never thought it would be here. Scheisse!”
Hedy pulled the field cap from her head, stroking her shaven neck. “Would they not think it was Anton’s?”
“That’s what I told them, but I don’t think they believed me. He’s been gone for too long.” She blinked up at him, grasping at straws. “It doesn’t prove anything, though?”
Kurt pushed stray hair from his face. “No, but Wildgrube will be onto that in a flash. He’s been searching for months for something connecting me to Hedy.”
“You think they’ll come back? Should we go back out?”
To her relief Kurt shook his head. “Not tonight, but they will be back—tomorrow, or the day after, or next week. And next time we’ll get no warning. What we need is something to put the bastards off the scent for good. But I’m damned if I know how.”
Hedy reached out and touched his arm. “There is one thing that might work.”
* * *
The girl serving behind the bar was young, probably no more than seventeen, but she had the careworn face of a woman fifteen years older. Kurt, swirling the last drops of his brandy round the bottom of a grubby glass, wondered what the circumstances were that had forced her to take this job. Perhaps her father was out of work like so many local men, the family scraping together every penny to pay for black market food. Perhaps her parents were dead and she was trying to support herself and her siblings. Whatever it was, the girl was struggling to hide her contempt for the louche, loud officers who lounged around in here tonight, scraping their chair legs on the parquet floor and letting their cigarettes butts burn holes in the soft furnishings. What was the French expression? Fin de siècle. Kurt watched them as they drank and laughed together at jokes they had repeated a hundred times before. The master race, he thought bitterly as he knocked back the remains of the brandy. What a joke.
Kurt surveyed the scene. Fischer was perched in a tub chair in the darkest corner, deep in conversation with two high-ranking officers from College House; their voices had dropped even lower once Fischer realized that Kurt was trying to catch snippets of their conversation. But those guys were not his focus tonight. Kurt’s target was over by the window, drinking with some secret police cronies. Wildgrube had long ago given up any pretense about the true nature of his job, and now seemed to enjoy flaunting it. The presence of the other spies gave Kurt the confidence he needed—it would make his task that much easier.
Everyone was in this evening. This was the last remaining club for officers and “approved” clientele that still had a regular supply of French brandy, partly because the boss of the secret police, a notorious black marketeer, frequented the place. It was even still possible to get a crust of bread and a little cheese here sometimes, though the portions had more than halved. Kurt watched Wildgrube help himself to another drink, but noticed that he was displaying an unusual degree of decorum and control tonight, sipping instead of gulping, and occasionally throwing Kurt what he clearly considered to be subtle, scrutinizing glances. Kurt banged the glass down on the bar loud enough for Wildgrube to hear, edged his way across the room to the area where the spy was standing, and glared at him.
“Well, if it’s not the big man himself.”
Wildgrube looked Kurt up and down, getting the measure of his mood. “Lieutenant...”
“Made any good arrests lately?”
Wildgrube glanced around, already seething at this disrespect. “I beg your pardon?”
Kurt stepped closer, using the height difference to intimidate the spy. “Don’t be coy, Erich. I thought you were proud of your work?”
Wildgrube delicately stepped backward a little, trying to gain some distance. “I’m sure we are all proud of how we serve the Reich.”
“So, spit it out. Turned over any good houses? Smashed up anything? Because I know how much you guys love doing that.”
Wildgrube’s mouth set in a tight, thin line. His lips were too rosy pink for his pale face—it gave the impression he was wearing lipstick. “If you have some issue with my department, Lieutenant, I suggest you go through the proper channels.”
“No, I think I’d rather say it to your face. Must be an exciting time for you, now that we’re shut off from the rest of the world. Chance to get properly stuck into the locals. Doesn’t really matter whether they’ve done anything, does it? We’ve got to show them who’s boss, isn’t that right?”
“I mean it, Kurt. This is not the time nor the place. I suggest you go home before you get yourself into real trouble.”
Kurt leaned into his face, so close he could smell the man’s pungent breath. “I’m going. Don’t much like the atmosphere around here. But I’ll be watching you, Erich—very, very closely.” And with that, Kurt spun on his heel and marched from the room, pushing a young officer out of the way as he went.
Once outside, Kurt took a deep breath of night air, then sneaked into a nearby doorway to light a cigarette. He waited another thirty seconds, then set off down the road at a moderate pace. At the corner, he looked both ways for traffic—there would be few official vehicles out at this time, but it gave him an excuse to glance backward. There, exactly where he knew he would be, was Wildgrube, cap jammed neatly under his arm, staying close to the shadow of the buildings to keep himself hidden. At his side were two heavily-built junior officers, all of them waiting for Kurt to get a little further down the road.
Kurt set off in the direction of Cheapside, resisting the temptation to look back again. His heart was hammering. Beneath his tunic, sweat was prickling his skin and running in itchy rivulets down his back. In his mind he felt calm and precise, but his body was taking delight in reminding him that when it came to abject fear, the body always gets the upper hand. He thought of Hedy, and allowed himself a small, black chuckle. Love. The desperation it pushed you to. For this, without doubt, was true desperation.
* * *
Hedy closed her eyes, breathed in deeply, and tried to focus on a comforting thought. But choosing one was harder than she’d anticipated. The warm kitchen at her old family house was too painful a picture...the coastal walks she’d taken with Anton too harsh a reminder of what was lost. In the end she settled for her and Kurt tucked up together in a warm bed, in some vague, undefined room, sometime in the future, the smell of him in her nostrils, his arms scooping her into his body. If she could focus on that, she told herself, perhaps the physical pain and horror might fade into her subconscious.
She twisted her body a little, trying to ease the pressure. The space was cold and damp. There was little more than five centimeters above
her head, the boards trapping her, coffin-like, in one position. Even the slightest movement caused a joist to press into her flesh, or a sharp splinter to push through her clothes into her skin; it also increased the risk of her falling straight through the plaster of the ceiling below. Stretching out a leg, or her spine even a little, was impossible. When Dorothea had announced that it was time, and had screwed the last floorboard into place over her head, the pitch black and confinement sent her into such a panic that for several moments Hedy truly thought she might die of fright. But she told herself over and over that it wasn’t really that different from the darkness in the attic she’d learned to contend with for the last ten months; if she could control her breathing and keep the dust out of her nostrils, she would be all right.
There was one salvation: the tiny gaps between the floorboards allowed her to hear some of what was going on in the bedroom above. It gave her a sense of connection to the world, and calmed her claustrophobia. And she knew she would not have long to wait. Somewhere down on the ground floor, she heard the opening and closing of the front door. Then there were footsteps on the stairs, followed by the indistinguishable sounds of people moving around a room. A moment later, she heard the ancient springs of Dorothea’s bed creak and groan as they contracted under the weight of a human body. There was some whispering—short nervous sentences exchanged in pops and crackles—then all went quiet again. Everyone, it seemed, was listening.
Hedy closed her eyes, trying to guess how much time had passed. She used to play this game as a child in her schoolroom, forcing herself not to turn and look at the clock on the wall, betting with herself. If she guessed the right time within a five-minute margin, then Papa would take her for ice cream on Sunday; if she got it wrong by more than ten, she’d have to walk home through the nettle patch at the side of the school road. She’d got pretty good at it. Now she calculated that a good half hour had passed since the last discernible noise. Surely it couldn’t be much longer? If this idea was going to work then they...
CRASH.
The sound was so shocking it caused Hedy to jump, jarring her body against the joists. Her heart pounding like a kettle drum, she squeezed her eyes even tighter shut. They were here.
* * *
The noise of the door being forced must have been audible four houses away. Kurt propped himself onto his elbows, his head against the bars at the top of the bedstead, and glanced across at Dorothea, whose ashen face was almost indistinguishable in color from the pillow behind it. Instinctively she pulled the blankets higher and tighter around her upper body, horrified at her own nakedness, her eyes huge with terror. Kurt checked that his trousers were correctly heaped in the center of the floor, then glanced down at the space between them. With an apologetic twist of his mouth he eased himself a little closer to her body, and Dorothea nodded her understanding. No point going this far and not making the final image realistic.
They lay perfectly still, listening to the thumping footsteps running through the downstairs then bounding up the staircase. Kurt closed his eyes for a second, and took a deep breath as the bedroom door burst open. Wildgrube was standing in the doorway, the shadows of his two huge assistants falling behind him. His cheeks, pink from the night air, highlighted the twinkling triumph in his eyes. How long had he dreamed of this moment, Kurt wondered—fantasized about clicking the cuffs around Kurt’s wrists and dropping the completed file on his boss’s desk. But even now those eyes were zooming in on Dorothea, comparing her to the photograph of Hedy that the spy carried in his head, and sensing that something had gone terribly wrong. His face reminded Kurt of a flip book he’d had as a child, where a visual story magically emerged by running the pictures together quickly with one’s thumb; in the space of three seconds Kurt saw the shift from delight, to confusion, to disappointment, and finally, plain anger.
“You, whore! Where are your papers?” Dorothea, in a panic that Kurt knew was no act, whimpered and pointed to the chest of drawers in the bedroom alcove. “Get up and bring them to me.” Dorothea obeyed, dragging the blanket from the bed to hold around herself, leaving Kurt naked on the mattress. Wildgrube made a performance of scanning Dorothea’s identity card, but there was no doubt in Kurt’s mind that the spy’s subtle, involuntary peek at Kurt’s exposed genitals, when he thought no one was looking, lasted a fraction longer than natural curiosity demanded.
“You, Lieutenant—put your clothes on!” Kurt silently did as he was told. “So, this is how you honor a fellow servant of the Reich, a soldier fighting for our country? You come into his house and screw his wife?” Kurt looked as ashamed as possible. “How long has this business been going on?”
Kurt sighed, as if reluctant to confess this final indignity. “Since her husband left.” He risked a glance into Wildgrube’s eyes, and knew that the spy was calculating backward, remembering some of Kurt’s suspicious behavior, believing he was piecing it together. The man’s face contorted into a sneer of repugnance, but not before Kurt had caught one more brief emotion upon it—admiration.
“If there were any law available to me,” Wildgrube opined, “I would arrest you both now. As it stands, you will be amply judged when this war is won. You both disgust me,” he added, before turning with what he clearly imagined to be dramatic effect and sweeping from the room. Kurt, wearing only his trousers, and Dorothea, still wrapped only in a blanket, remained motionless in the center of the room until the footsteps reached the front door, listening to it open and bang shut. Even then, it was another full minute before either of them dare make a sound.
Eventually Dorothea let out a nervous giggle. “I think it worked!”
Kurt nodded. “I think it did.” Suddenly embarrassed, he took her dress from the bottom of the bed and passed it to her. “Put this on quickly, you must be freezing. I need to get this floorboard up quickly.”
* * *
Hedy stooped over the bowl, soaking then squeezing the cloth, moving it carefully over her body. Trickles of water ran down her arms, her chest and in between her breasts, making tiny pathways through the dust and grime then vanishing beneath her slip. She was painfully aware of Kurt watching her, especially conscious of her scalp with its uneven tufts sprouting where her hair had once been and her body so thin she looked like a young boy. But when she looked across at him he was gazing at her with adoration.
“How are you feeling now?” he asked. She nodded, trying to indicate an improvement, though every joint in her body still ached, and it had taken her a full half hour to stop shaking after they’d pulled her out. “You were so brave, you know.”
“You must have put on a pretty good show yourself. Tell me again what happened in the club?” He had already described the whole event to her twice over, but she felt like a child with a bedtime story.
He sat down on the chair opposite. “I knew it was the perfect night. He’d had a little to drink, but not too much, and he was virtually pawing the ground, desperate for a chance to catch us together, prove his theory. Like you said, all I had to do was convince him this was the perfect opportunity.”
She smiled at the thought. “You really shouted at him?”
“Just enough to humiliate him a little, stir his instinct for revenge. Not hard with men like that.” The door clicked open, and Dorothea slipped in like a ghost. Hedy noticed that she avoided Kurt’s eyes and kept her body turned away from him as she fussed around the kitchen, tipping more hot water into the bowl. Hedy threw Kurt a meaningful stare—it was going to be up to him to repair the damage. “And as for Dory,” Kurt continued seamlessly, “that performance deserved an Oscar! I started to believe it myself!”
Dorothea blushed pink to her roots. “I just knew that it had to look good.”
“I really didn’t see anything, you know,” Kurt assured her. “I kept my eyes shut as you were getting into bed.”
Dorothea’s cheeks were still flushed, but she managed a smile. “It’s fine, honestly
. I know that Anton would understand if he were here.”
“More than that,” Hedy assured her, “he’d be proud of what you did. Of all of us.” Taking a small towel to dry herself, she turned to Kurt. “But is it enough to put the authorities permanently off the scent?”
Kurt nodded with genuine confidence. “It would seem like a personal grudge for Wildgrube to continue pursuing me for such a private matter. He’d be made to look a fool. God knows there’s enough going on in this island to keep him busy.”
“So we’re safer now?”
He pressed his lips together. “Safer, but not safe. We still need to be careful. Though to be honest, I don’t think the secret police are our biggest problem anymore.” Hedy and Dorothea both looked at him, willing him on. “The islands could face starvation in the next few months. Fischer was at the club with some officers, and I overheard them say that Churchill is refusing to permit the Red Cross to send relief.”
Dorothea’s eyes widened in horror. “But why?”
“Probably thinks the Germans would take the parcels for themselves. But from what they were saying, it might be revenge—a payback for what Churchill sees as collaboration.”
“Collaboration?” Hedy stopped drying herself and threw the towel onto the back of a chair. “Why would he think that? Churchill has no idea what’s gone on here!”
“Apparently the British Government is under the impression that we’ve all been scraping by, and that things haven’t been too bad till now.”
Hedy looked back toward Dorothea and watched the now familiar fury begin to rise.
“What were we islanders meant to do, fight the German army with our bare hands?”
“Just telling you what I heard.”
Hedy’s eyes slid automatically to the larder, calculating exactly what was in there to last her and Dorothea the rest of the week.
