by Sharon Maas
‘No – he will have a suite of his own at the Rote Löwe, along with some of the generals. The dinner, though, will be at the Villa, and the talks as well. The Rote Löwe does not unfortunately have a conference room. But you needn’t worry your pretty little head about that; we military people will make sure you’re safe.’
She’d probed enough; it was time to be sweet bland Marlene Schuster again.
‘Well, I know nothing of politics and all I care about, really, is leading a good, quiet life and raising my family, if I am granted one, in peace. I just want you to stay safe, Wolf. I don’t like the idea of you going to battle again.’
‘That’s a soldier’s life, my dear; that’s the risk, and the risk his family must take. But hopefully this will be the last time, for me at least. I just want this damned war over and done with, so that we can start rebuilding; rebuilding our country, our lives.’
She sighed. ‘Don’t we all.’
Chapter 43
‘Herr Himmler, I’d like you to meet my fiancée, Marlene Schuster.’
Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer of the Schutzstaffel – the dreaded SS, the most horrifying branch of the Nazi Party. Himmler, head of the Gestapo, the brains and the brawn behind the terror that held most of Europe in thrall. Heinrich Himmler, quiet and deadly. He stood before Sibyl and smiled, giving a slight bow as he shook her hand.
He was as immaculately dressed as she had come to expect from her contact with German high-ranking officers: not a speck of dust on his uniform, not a smudge on the shine of his knee-high black boots, the red, black and white swastika armband neatly fixed around his upper arm. Not a hair out of place; not that he had much hair, as it was cropped impossibly short beneath his insignia-emblazoned cap. He wore round rimless spectacles and had rather the appearance, Sibyl thought, of a harmless, chinless academic rather than a ruthless tyrant.
Knowing the truth behind the deceptive appearance, Sibyl was chilled to the bone and it took all her strength to keep her hand from trembling as she reached out to take his. His too was cold.
‘Very pleased to meet you, Fräulein Schuster!’
‘She’s a born Alsatian. We are to be married this month!’ Sibyl was relieved by von Haagen’s interruption; it meant she did not have to speak. Not yet.
‘Well, I congratulate you both! May your married life be blessed and happy! Heil Hitler!’
Already he had moved on to the next sycophantic officer, a major she had met briefly on a previous occasion, who had also brought his girl to be introduced. The heavy thudding of her heart slowed down by the time von Haagen had led her to their table.
‘Awful man. Terrible man,’ he whispered in her ear as he pulled out a chair for her.
* * *
It was after the main course that Sibyl asked to be excused; she needed die Toilette. She had used this a few times in the past; it was downstairs, in the basement. In former times, in the days when she was still Sibyl Lake, the basement had been a place for the boiler room and a laundry, lines strung across a large room where the family had hung their wet sheets and clothing on rainy days. When the children played outside – in the garden, in the lane behind the garden, in the stream beyond the lane – they had returned to the house through that back door, leaving their muddy boots in the basement. There had also been a cloakroom for raincoats and boots, a storeroom for garden tools, and one for trunks and boxes and suitcases belonging to the family. That had all been cleared away for the billeting of German officers, replaced with military paraphernalia of a generic kind. A large cloakroom took up the bulk of the space, with rows of metal lockers, shelves for boots.
And, at the very back, there was a door. And a window.
* * *
She had discussed it all with Jacques and Margaux the day before. ‘There’s a back entrance to the property,’ she said. ‘A metal gate, in a high hedge, leading to a narrow lane, leading to fields, woods, a stream, a ruined cottage. We children used to play there. I remember it well. There’s a steep staircase leading to the basement, and a door. We can get in that way. Well, one of us. The other has to stand guard.’
‘Are you sure there’s no watchman out the back?’
‘I’m fairly sure. There are two sentries at the main gate; probably they do occasional patrols around the back. We’ll have to check. You can check that on Saturday night while I check the door from the inside. And the window.’
Now, she tried the door. It was, as to be expected, locked, with a key that was missing. Not a problem; her training had included the picking of locks. Three bolts, top, bottom and to the side, reinforced the lock. She pulled them all back, with some effort, as they were rusty, and stuck, which was a good sign. It meant the back door was never used and most probably never checked.
Now for the window. It was a small one, high up on the wall. Big enough for her to crawl through, if need be, but too high to reach now, too high to unlock. It would have to be the door.
She returned to the dining hall. On the way she tried the door to the conference room, next to the dining room. It, too, was locked. Not a problem.
She walked across to her table, sat down, and spent the rest of the evening making small talk with their table companions; as usual, a group of rather uncouth Wehrmacht officers, many of whom she had met before. Some of them had women, girls, with them. As von Haagen had promised, respectable girls. Alsatian girls. Collaborators. The women all eyed each other up suspiciously, and spoke only to their men, in guarded whispers, rubbing their arms, batting their eyelashes, twirling tendrils of their hair.
Heinrich Himmler sat at a table prominently located in the bay window, together with several SS generals. There were no women at his table.
‘Those are some of Hitler’s best generals,’ von Haagen whispered to her. ‘All sent here specifically for Operation Nordwind.’
Operation Nordwind. So that was it. Hitler’s last stand in France. But not if she could help it.
Chapter 44
‘Are you sure the talks start on Monday?’
‘Absolutely. Once Wolfgang started talking he couldn’t stop. It was like a broken dam. Three days of strategy talks, starting on Monday, in the conference room.’
‘And Acrobat has given the green light?’
She nodded.
‘Assassination is not really in my remit. Even Intelligence is not in my remit; Special Operations is mostly about sabotage. But there’s this rivalry with MI6, who kind of look down on us. SOE’s keen to show we can do more than just blow up bridges. It’s not terribly complicated. All I have to do is find a place for the PE.’
‘Doesn’t he have bodyguards? Such a high-ranking dignitary?’
She shook her head. ‘Himmler created the Schutzstaffel, the protective guard, but it was all for Hitler’s benefit. To protect the Führer. Even then, the two attempts on Hitler’s life only failed by accident – in both cases, it was a lucky escape and the SS had nothing to do with protecting him. It all seems terribly lax, considering. Himmler doesn’t have a bodyguard.’
‘So it’s just a matter of placing the PE, and then – boom.’
‘That’s about it.’
‘And your Wolfgang will go boom too.’
‘Yes.’
‘And after all the…’ Margaux paused. ‘All the intimacies you have exchanged, you can just blow him up, just like that?’ She clicked her fingers.
‘It’s my job. It’s what I was trained for. Listening to him tell all was just my job.’
Margaux shook her head slowly.
‘You Anglaises… talk about sangfroid!’
Sibyl shrugged. ‘It has to be done.’
‘Well, anyway. Jacques will be there to back you up. And so will I.’
* * *
Margaux, true to her word, not only was there, she provided black clothes for both Sibyl and Jacques, a black cap for Sibyl. Black gloves. She dropped them both off near the lane that backed on to Villa Schönblick.
‘Good luck. I’ll be waiti
ng.’
The night was appropriately, thankfully, dark; at 2 a.m. it was all black. Sibyl and Jacques were no more than shadows as they sprinted silently along the unpaved path that led to the villa. To their left were the high laurel hedges that protected the villa from prying eyes; the back gate was almost concealed in such a hedge, overgrown with ivy, and, like the bolts to the back door, rusted. Sibyl cut through the tangle of vines in no time and picked the lock. The gate creaked silently as she slipped through the opening. She nodded to Jacques in a signal to wait, and slunk over to the dark looming bulk of the building.
The outside steps leading down to the basement were steep and narrow and covered in moss. She moved soundlessly down to the back door and in a few seconds had picked the lock. Like the gate, the door creaked on its ancient rusty hinges. She stopped after slipping through it and listened.
The basement lay in darkness. Upstairs, on the ground level, a single light burned, casting a dim glow down the stairway. She wondered if she should turn it off; but no. The sentries outside at the front gate might come to investigate. Better to risk working in the glaring light, uncomfortable though it was. She felt naked, exposed; but there was no choice.
She walked silently upstairs and crossed the ground floor hall to the conference room. This room had once been a library and a downstairs guest room, which had been knocked into one; the two doors were still in place, both locked. Sibyl guessed that the door nearest to the front would be used, and so chose the far door for her own entry. For the third time that night, she picked a lock. This time, the door opened easily and without a squeak. She closed the door behind her. The room immediately became pitch black; and that was so much more comfortable than the glare outside in the hall. She removed the torch from her pocket, switched it on, cast it around the room.
At one end was a large fireplace, at the other a long sideboard placed between windows; a small table sat near the door with a tray of upturned glasses and an empty water jug. In the middle of the room was a long, oval, magnificent conference table reaching from one end of the room to the other.
Three possible hiding places at once leaped out at Sibyl: the fireplace, the sideboard, the table itself. The decision was instant and conclusive: the table. It was obvious, too, where Himmler, as chairman of the meeting, would be sitting: at the head of the table. Where would von Haagen sit? Somewhere along one of the sides, no doubt. It didn’t matter. Wherever he sat, he’d be toast.
She moved aside the chair at the table’s head, removed her backpack, dropped to all fours, crept under the table and shone the light to its underside. The table was supported by two heavy, ornately carved clawfoot pedestals at each end. A three-inch wooden skirt ran all around the edge of the table, and at the backside of this skirt was the stub of a ledge, that too running all around the underside of the table. She shone the torch into her backpack, removed the plastic explosive, yielding as a lump of putty. She pressed it into the ledge beneath the table.
What was that? A floorboard above her head squeaked. And another. Footsteps. She froze, her heart pounding so hard she felt sure it must echo all through the house. The rest of her body was still, a statue, her hands still reaching up, her fingers still pressing the explosive. Listening, hardly breathing. Footsteps, definitely, but so soft their owner was most definitely barefoot. Or wearing socks. Did German officers sleep in their socks? In the December coldness, probably, yes. Silence. No steps on the staircase; a good sign. She breathed slowly, collectedly. In, out. Her heart seemed to have slowed as well. Still she did not move, her entire body on high alert, like a cat about to spring. A while of silence and then – the flushing of a toilet. The plumbing must be ancient: it roared through the building. She almost smiled to herself – did men really flush after a night-time pee? Apparently yes.
She was just about to return to the job at hand when a piercing male scream jolted her into a panic so intense she almost dropped everything to flee. Another scream and then a scream that took voice, and the voice was calling, calling her name: Marlene! Marlene! MARLENE! Hilf mir, hilf mir! Marlene! Help me, help me!
Without a second thought she sprang to her feet with the silence of a cat, drew the gun from her belt, slipped the L-capsule from her pocket and into her mouth, between her gum and her lip. Did Wolf somehow sense her presence in the house? Would they all come storming down? An unlikely, irrational, panicked idea but this was not the time to weigh the rationality of an outcome. She cocked the pistol and hid behind the door, even as other voices, shouts, echoed through the house: Halt die Klappe, Wolf! Schlaf wieder! Halts Maul! Ruhe! Shut your gob, Wolf! Go back to sleep! Quiet!
The screams stopped as suddenly as they had started; there was motion upstairs, as if men were moving around, going from bed to bed; and then, at last, silence once more.
It was over. The terror, the dread, the panic. The pounding of her heart. The nightmare. She removed the L-pill from her mouth, put it in her pocket.
She returned to the table, crouched to the floor, set the timer.
It would go off at ten the next morning. The strategy talks would be in full swing by then. Everyone would be there. The entire Colmar high command. Heinrich Himmler. Commander of the forces in Alsace.
She crept out the way she had come, closing all doors as she left. Flitted across the back lawn, out the back gate. Jacques was waiting in the lane. They sprinted off into the night, down into the street where Margaux waited, not in the van, this time, but in the inconspicuous black Renault.
‘Let’s go home now,’ she said. ‘And back at nine. We need to witness this.’
* * *
As promised, they were back soon after nine, again in the Renault. Margaux did not drive past the villa; instead, she looked for a spot quite far down the street and parked on the roadside, behind another car. The villa was not visible from here. The explosion would be.
They waited. Sibyl checked her watch every few minutes. They did not speak. The insides of her mouth felt dry, her saliva tasted bitter. Inside her, something was building, swelling, a nameless lump of – something. Something bad. Something big: enormous, heavy, monstrous. Vile.
The second hand on her watch jerked forward bit by bit, dividing the free flow of time into increments. Ten minutes to go. They should not have come so early. Waiting here for so long – a waiting car was suspicious. There was little traffic and fewer passers-by, but still. Three people waiting in a car? It’s something a passer-by would surely notice, remember, once an investigation started. A silly mistake. On the other hand…
‘One minute to go,’ whispered Margaux. Sibyl took the deepest breath in her life, held it, and – a blast tore the air, literally ear-splitting, in that afterwards she was momentarily deaf. Ahead, a giant ball of fire and smoke rose from between the stately buildings lining the road.
‘Got ‘em!’ cried Margaux, exultation in her voice, and in that moment switched on the ignition and the car plunged away, not towards the explosion but away from it, far away from it, through the town and out into the country and Sibyl’s hearing returned and what she heard was laughing, loud, raucous laughing and triumphant yells of We did it! We got ‘em! from Margaux and Jacques. She herself said nothing. The lump of whatever it was in her innards had grown to bursting point, filling her, strangling her throat, erupting.
She was crying. Not just crying, bawling. Ugly, violent, virulent weeping racked her body. She couldn’t help it, couldn’t stop it. She wailed in the agony of that weeping, bawled at the top of her blubbering voice, bellowed with anguish, howled and roared. Noises exploded from her that weren’t even human, the lamenting of a beast, and it was her.
She felt nothing, saw nothing, heard nothing in that first eruption of anguish but then the noises slowed down to a wail and then into quiet weeping and she felt Jacques’ hand on her back, Jacques leaning forward from the back seat, and she heard Jacques’ voice trying to comfort her, and then Jacques and Margaux talking about her as if she weren’t present, as if s
he was a patient in a mental hospital.
‘It’s all the pressure of the last few weeks,’ Margaux said in a hushed voice as she drove. She was nodding her head, agreeing with her own diagnosis. Sibyl saw her through the tears.
‘The first time you actually kill people, I mean, directly, deliberately, it’s a big thing. I remember myself,’ Jacques agreed. ‘I had a meltdown too.’
‘It’s good she can release the tension this way,’ said Margaux. ‘She’ll be fine by the time we get home.’ And, in a louder voice, ‘That’s right isn’t it, Sibyl? You’ll be fine. Let the tears come. It’s a good release.’
‘It’s all right. You did right. They’re all gone, the bastards. It’s for France. For freedom.’ He handed her a handkerchief; a dirty one, and a little late, since the tears no longer flowed. She turned her head away from them and gazed out of the window at the vineyards fleeting past, dry-eyed now, but her nose full of snot. She took the handkerchief and blew into it.
They don’t understand. They never will. He put his life, his heart in my hands. He trusted me. He loved me. I betrayed him. I killed him. He’s dead, and I killed him, and it was an act of betrayal. My job, indeed. But on a human level, an act of betrayal.
They would never get it. She could never say it out loud.
* * *
Later, they all celebrated; Sibyl, quiet now and dry-eyed, tried to smile and be part of the general jollity, tried to take part. Victoire was there, and Pierre, and Oncle Yves, and Elena, all excited and delighted, patting her on the back, congratulating her. Margaux popped a bottle of her best crémant; it frothed up over her hand and onto the kitchen floor. ‘Vive la France! Vive L’Alsace! Vive la Liberté!’ they all cried, but she had heard it all before, at the fall of Strasbourg. But this, apparently, was bigger, because with Heinrich Himmler and all the generals in the plan for Operation Nordwind dead, the German forces in Alsace would be leaderless, a headless animal. There was no other option, now, but retreat, as Margaux explained again and again. That was why this was, in effect, the very last stroke for a free France, and she, Sibyl, had dealt that stroke. The honour was all hers. She’d probably get a medal.
