An Army of One: A John Rossett Novel

by Tony Schumacher

Rossett felt calm and didn’t know why.

  The driver fumbled with a key ring, and then pulled Rossett’s cuffs close. They clicked once, then twice, and then Rossett was free of them. He rubbed at the lines on his wrists.

  “My gun?”

  “Y-you won’t need it.”

  “You might be surprised.”

  “We’re not your enemies.”

  “Then you won’t mind me having it.”

  Iris turned and walked to the set of limestone steps that led up to the nearest warehouse. The driver followed her closely as she struggled to make her way to the door at the top of the steep steps. One of the guards brought up the rear as the driver produced a key and turned a mortise that sounded like it needed some oil.

  The old iron door swung inward on squeaking hinges, and the driver went inside and flicked on a light as Iris and the first guard followed him out of the rain.

  The remaining guard stared at Rossett, then sighed and followed the others into the building.

  Rossett was alone on the street.

  He looked around again, still rubbing at his wrists as another wave of rain blew in on a silver sheet, then passed him by as it headed inland.

  Rossett looked up at the warehouse, then climbed up the steps and shut the door behind him.

  It was a square room, with a boarded-up window and an empty light fixture hanging from the ceiling. It was dark, but getting slightly brighter as one of the guards went around lighting stubby white candles with a long, thin taper.

  The driver was drying Iris’s hair with what looked like an old potato sack. The other guard was on his knees struggling to get a fire burning in a dirty hearth set deep in the stone wall, which was streaked with soot from a century’s worth of burning coal.

  There was a table surrounded by four chairs in the center of the room. The top had more old rings on show than wood, and in its center was the canvas bag that held the guns.

  “Do you want a drink?”

  Rossett looked at the guard with the taper and nodded his head.

  The guard dropped down a few steps, and disappeared down a dark corridor. The driver stopped drying Iris’s hair and smoothed it against her skull, gently, with the palm of his hand. She stood silent, small, like a tired child getting ready for school on an early morning. Her head was bowed, hands at her sides, twitching occasionally, then flexing at the wrist.

  She looked at Rossett.

  “Sit.”

  Rossett remained standing.

  “It’ll be warm soon.” Her stammer was taking some time off.

  Rossett looked at the table, then back at Iris.

  “What’s going on here?”

  “Relax. We can talk w-when we’re warm.”

  “Where is Neumann?”

  “He’s okay. You’ll see him soon.”

  Rossett looked at the bag of guns, inches from him on the table, and then at the others in the room.

  He opened the bag.

  The driver looked at Iris, who had moved to stand next to the flickering fire.

  She nodded.

  The driver reached around to the back of his pants.

  “Hey.”

  Rossett watched as the driver produced his Webley, then walked the four steps across the room toward him.

  “Here’s your gun.” The driver handed Rossett the Webley butt first. “There should be some rounds in the bag. Take as many as you want.”

  The driver started to dry his own hair over by the fire.

  Rossett broke open the pistol, then searched the bag for the rounds. He found a half-full box of shells, loaded the Webley, and emptied the rest into his pocket.

  He placed the gun quietly on the table in front of him.

  “I have to be careful I don’t catch a c-cold.” The fire was building behind Iris now as the guard added a little more coal. “Last y-year I caught pn-pneu—” Her face twisted with the effort of the word.

  “Pneumonia.” The driver filled in the blank.

  Iris flapped a hand toward him while looking at Rossett.

  “Meet Cavanagh.”

  Rossett nodded, and Cavanagh nodded back.

  “We have to look after Iris, now she’s the boss.” Cavanagh put down the drying sack on the table and pulled out a chair for her as she crossed the room from the fireplace.

  She sat and waited for the questions to come.

  Rossett stared at her until, finally, she smiled. “This isn’t a t-trick.” Her jaw flexed. “Just try to relax.”

  “Relax?”

  “As b-best you can.”

  “I’m confused.”

  “I understand.”

  Rossett breathed through his nose and looked around the room again.

  “Please, sit.” She smiled at him.

  Rossett deflated slightly, considered his options, and took a seat at the table.

  “I keep hearing about gold.” He placed one elbow on the table and sat side-on, the Webley within reach.

  “Y-yes.”

  “Tell me about it?”

  Iris looked across at Cavanagh, so he obliged by doing the talking from where he was standing and steaming with his back to the fire.

  “At the start of the war, maybe even before the start, the government realized that if the Germans were to invade they would plunder the country of anything valuable.”

  “And?”

  “And there is nothing more valuable than a country’s gold reserves. What made the situation even more dangerous was that the Bank of England vaults are in London. So even if the Germans only managed to secure the southeast of England temporarily with a bridgehead out of the channel, they would secure London long enough to empty the vault.”

  “So the government hid the gold?” Rossett looked at Iris.

  “No. They m-moved it out of the country.”

  “They moved most of it.” Cavanagh left his spot by the fire, and came and sat down next to Iris. “It was called Operation Fish. They emptied the vaults bit by bit and sent the contents north to be loaded on ships bound for Canada. On paper it was a great plan. Who is going to invade Canada?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Nobody is going to invade Canada,” Iris said.

  Cavanagh smiled and then continued. “How much gold do you think there was?”

  Rossett shrugged. “Tons?”

  “Try again.”

  “Twenty tons?”

  “Again.”

  “Fifty?”

  “You’re not very good at this, are you?”

  Rossett looked at Iris in frustration.

  She smiled. “Seven hundred tons.”

  “Of gold?” Rossett leaned back from the table.

  “Of gold, maybe even more than that.” Cavanagh smiled. “They had ships, pretty much most of what we had left after the evacuation from Dunkirk. Most of the gold had been moved north prior to the invasion. Some to Scotland, some to Liverpool. It was stored, waiting to go, and then the Germans came.”

  “F-fast,” Iris chipped in again.

  “Lightning fast,” Cavanagh continued. “Most of it got out on the last few ships, but plenty of them were sunk or intercepted en route to Canada.”

  “But not all of it left Liverpool.” Rossett filled in the details.

  Cavanagh nodded. “There were rumors, a lot of them old wives’ tales . . .”

  “Or old d-dockers’ tales.” Iris smiled.

  “But then about six months ago, one of the men who had been tasked with the original safekeeping of the gold came to us.”

  “He’d not made contact before?”

  “No. He was sworn to secrecy, and he took his oath seriously right up until he started to cough up blood a few weeks before he found us.”

  “Lung cancer,” Iris said quietly.

  Cavanagh nodded. “He’d worked for Martins Bank in Liverpool. Their vault had been used by the government to store some of the gold while it was waiting to be loaded onto the ships, and he was one of the senior clerks in charge of m
aintaining the inventory. During the siege, as the last ships were leaving, the remaining gold was loaded onto trucks and sent down to the docks in a panic. The bombs were falling and the Germans were squeezing the perimeter, so most of the army drivers had to start fighting in the last stand to buy the ships some time. That left it to members of staff at the bank to drive the trucks. Our man’s truck was one of the last ones, and he ended up cut off from the docks. Sooner than hand it over to the Germans, he hid it.”

  “Where?”

  “Initially he just parked it in a side street. The load was covered with a tarpaulin, and the streets were quiet for a week or two before people finally started to emerge from the rubble. He eventually moved it to one of the disused railway tunnels down by the docks.”

  “And it sat there all this time?”

  “Yes. He couldn’t move it, and even if he could, where was he going to take it? Most of those old tunnels have no use anymore, especially the ones damaged by bombing, so he knew it was safe. He checked on it every now and then, but he had no choice other than to wait it out until the political situation here improved, or he got the opportunity to contact someone who could get it to Canada.”

  “And then he got cancer,” Rossett said quietly.

  Cavanagh nodded. “He knew he didn’t have long, and he didn’t want to pass the responsibility on to his family, so he tried to make contact with us.”

  “Tried?”

  “It isn’t as easy as it seems. If you aren’t connected to the kind of people who live in the shadows, it can be difficult to see in the dark.”

  “So he found you, but how did the Bear get involved?”

  “He eventually found us, but in doing so, he’d asked a lot of questions. Liverpool is a small city; when an old banker suddenly wants to find the resistance, people talk, rumors start. It was the kind of thing the Bear listens out for. So he came hunting.”

  Rossett looked at Iris. “So he killed the banker and took your gold?”

  “Y-yes,” Iris said quietly. “And then he killed my father.”

  “And the man he’d contacted to help us get it out.” Cavanagh looked at Iris, and then back at Rossett.

  “The consul?”

  Cavanagh nodded.

  Rossett leaned back in his seat and shook his head. “If the Bear took the gold, why did he have to kill your father and the consul?”

  Cavanagh and Iris looked at each other, then Cavanagh replied.

  “When he realized the Bear had the gold, Iris’s father reached out to Dannecker.”

  “He reached out to the SS garrison commanding officer?”

  “Yes.”

  Rossett looked at Iris. “That was a hell of a risk.”

  “He had no choice.”

  Rossett turned back to Cavanagh. “What happened?”

  “We’d heard Dannecker was unhappy and a little . . .”

  “Unstable,” Iris helped him out.

  Cavanagh continued. “Once Dannecker was sure our offer was genuine, he jumped at the chance.”

  “What was the offer?”

  “Get the Bear to give us the gold, and you can ride out of town a rich man with it.”

  Rossett didn’t say anything, so Iris filled in the silence.

  “My father had no choice.”

  Rossett looked at her. “I’m in no position to judge.”

  “You’re right, you’re n-not.”

  “We think, although we can’t be certain,” Cavanagh continued, “that the Bear either witnessed or got wind of a meeting between Dannecker and our organization.”

  “He rumbled your plan?”

  “Which meant he knew Dannecker was going to betray him.”

  “Which meant he wanted to kill Dannecker,” Rossett supplied.

  “No.” Both men looked at Iris. “It m-meant he wanted to destroy Dannecker. Killing him would be too easy.”

  “My father died moments after the meeting that set all this up, along with the consul and some of our men.”

  “And that is where you and Neumann came in.” Cavanagh looked at Rossett.

  “D-Dannecker couldn’t kill the Bear b-before he knew the location of the gold, and you and N-Neumann showed up before he could get it.”

  Rossett leaned back from the table and looked around the room as he processed the information he had been given. It took him a moment to ask the next question.

  “The bomb, the attack on me and Neumann?”

  “W-we couldn’t let you take the Bear out of the city.”

  “You could have killed us.”

  Cavanagh lifted a hand and shook his head. “We do this for a living, Inspector. We needed the Bear alive.”

  “But not me and Neumann.”

  Cavanagh shrugged. “You’re alive, aren’t you?”

  Rossett stared at him.

  “You’re n-not our enemy,” Iris said quietly.

  “And we know he didn’t tell you where it is.”

  “You know?”

  “W-we know,” Iris again.

  Rossett glanced at her, then down at the floor. “The Bear is mad,” he said. “I’ve spoken to him. He’s either been in the field too long and it has sent him over the edge, or he was always a killer, and the war gave him the cover he needed. Either way, he is crazy.”

  “C-crazy, and he has our gold.” Iris lifted a hand and smoothed her hair again. Her fingers were tight, overextended, and the arm moved as if held up by wires.

  She shifted, struggled to pull the chair closer to the table, and finally settled.

  Her left hand folded over her awkward right on the wooden tabletop, like a wrestler trying to subdue an opponent. She looked at them like she was expecting them to surprise her.

  “I know you h-have no connection to the resistance. I know also what you have done in the past.”

  Rossett didn’t reply.

  “We are your friends, John; w-we aren’t a threat.”

  “Royalist?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who told you where I was tonight?”

  “Most probably the B-Bear himself.”

  “You know him, have contact with him?”

  She shook her head.

  “But he knows you?”

  “He knows how to c-contact us.”

  “How?”

  She shrugged. “He just does. The question is why?”

  “He wanted to see if I could fight my way out, if I could survive.” Rossett finally turned his chair to face the table.

  Iris looked at her hands again, then up at him.

  “He thought we were going to kill you.”

  “I thought you were going to kill me. Why didn’t you?”

  “B-because unlike you, I don’t do w-what the Germans want me to do.”

  “After what I saw today, I won’t be doing what the Germans want me to do either.”

  “You t-took your time, Inspector, but welcome to the club.”

  Rossett looked away to the fireplace. “The execution today, down by the river?”

  “Yes.”

  “Some people escaped.”

  “Th-they did.”

  “There was a boy, just a kid . . .” Rossett turned back to Iris. “Do you know if . . .”

  Iris looked at Cavanagh.

  He shrugged.

  “Probably not,” she said quietly.

  Rossett nodded, then ran his hand down his face.

  “N-Neumann is here.”

  Rossett didn’t reply.

  “Y-you can talk to him, if you’d like to?”

  Rossett didn’t move.

  Iris waited for Rossett to speak as the crackle of the fire kept them company.

  Finally, Rossett spoke.

  “He was scared.” Rossett looked at Iris. “The kid . . . he was scared.”

  Iris nodded.

  “He looked about ten. I don’t know where his parents were. He looked at me, I could see he was panicking, but I didn’t do anything.”

  The second guard placed a mu
g of steaming tea in front of him. Rossett looked up and nodded thanks before wrapping his hands around it and letting the steam wash his face. He was silent for a while, watching some stale milk circle before it finally dipped below the surface and out of sight.

  Rossett looked up at Iris. “The poor kid just wanted someone to hold his hand, that’s all. He needed someone to hold his hand because he was scared, and I didn’t do it.”

  “There wasn’t much anyone could do.” Cavanagh said it quietly.

  “I’m supposed to be a policeman.” Rossett looked at him. “I’m supposed to look after people who can’t look after themselves. These last few months, I’ve been pretending that I’m a copper again. But when it came down to it, when I was supposed to do the one thing a policeman is supposed to do, protect the innocent . . . I didn’t.”

  “Drink some tea,” Iris said softly. “It’ll make you feel better.”

  It was dark. The corridor was much longer than Rossett had imagined it to be. There were doors running down both sides, and nearly all of them opened onto rooms filled with nothing but damp and dirt.

  The wooden floor creaked with every step, while up on the ceiling ghost train cobwebs hung low enough to float in the draft made by the passage of people. Rossett walked maybe sixty feet before they came to a staircase, set at a right angle, which led down to even deeper darkness.

  Cavanagh stopped and waited for him.

  Somewhere to Rossett’s right he could hear water dripping into what sounded like a tin bucket. He looked down the staircase, then at Cavanagh.

  “I like what you’ve done with the place.”

  Cavanagh smiled.

  “We don’t normally let people take weapons down there. Will you be careful with yours?”

  “I’m always careful with guns.”

  “So I’ve heard.” Cavanagh leaned out over the top stair and called down. “Norman?”

  A second passed, then a voice called back.

  “Yeah?”

  “Two of us—coming down.”

  “Yeah.”

  Cavanagh set off, and Rossett followed.

  It got colder.

  The kind of cold that you could feel burrowing into you as you moved through it.

  A lamp clicked on.

  Twenty watts, but bright enough to make Rossett squint and hold up a hand.

  Norman was seated behind a cube of sandbags.

  He was well wrapped up against the cold, with a fur hat pulled down so far it would have reached his waist if it weren’t for the two coats he was wearing. On top of the sandbags was a thermos flask, a mess tin, and a pump-action shotgun, which was pointing at Rossett.