The British Lion

by Tony Schumacher

  “What do you want with a Jew?” the corporal tried again.

  “I don’t want anything. I’ve been told to collect them, so I am collecting them.” Rossett turned so he could look into the corporal’s eyes.

  “In this weather?”

  “It appears so.”

  A gust of wind rocked the little Austin, and a few flakes of snow whistled past. The corporal squinted against the cold, and Rossett saw the German shuffle out of the wind and back into the hut, which sat next to the barrier that was blocking the road to Cambridge.

  Rossett returned to looking at the corporal, who was reading the travel warrant carefully, with tiny movements of his lips as he picked his way through the German.

  “I’ll have to check this is valid,” the corporal finally said, half turning away, enjoying his moment of power over the police.

  “Why?”

  The corporal stopped turning and looked at Rossett. “Because I will, that’s why.”

  Rossett stared back, sighed, and went back to looking out of the windscreen.

  He’d known there would be checkpoints on all of the main roads and many of the minor ones. Had the weather been better, Rossett would have skirted them as best he could with back roads and country lanes, but the snow, and the sensation of time ticking away, had forced him onto the main drags and into the arms of bored soldiers.

  So far things had gone well.

  Up till now.

  This checkpoint, less than four miles outside of Cambridge, was the first manned by an Englishman, and the first manned by a pain in the arse.

  Rossett wasn’t certain if that was a coincidence, but he was certain he didn’t want that pain in the arse telephoning London and finding out the warrant was fake.

  “Hey!” Rossett called to the corporal, who was almost at the hut doorway. “I’m sorry, I’ve had a terrible drive over here. I didn’t mean to be rude. I really need to be getting going before it gets too dark. Do you really need to check that thing?”

  The corporal looked at the documents in his hand and then back at Rossett.

  “Yeah.”

  Rossett opened the door of the Austin.

  “Come on, mate, I need to get going.”

  “Stay in the car.”

  Rossett raised both palms in surrender and remained sitting in the car. The corporal stared at him a moment and then entered the little cabin, which was barely big enough for the two men stationed there to stand up in. Rossett watched him through the window of the hut, squeezing past the German, making his way to the field telephone that was hanging on the far wall, next to the tin chimney. The chimney snaked up and out through the flat roof, where an anemic snake of smoke, the same color as the clouds above, sneaked out.

  Rossett climbed out of the car, watched by the German, who was now holding an enamel mug. Rossett took out his cigarettes and approached the hut, checking up and down the road the checkpoint bisected. It was empty, scrubbed of traffic by the heavy snowfall. The road, the fields, the soft rolling hills in the distance, all were wintery white. The only contrast was the hut, the sides of frosted hedgerows that skirted the fields, and the stout trunks of the English oaks, standing up to the winter and its wiles.

  “Car.” The soldier had moved to the doorway and was pointing as Rossett walked toward him, one hand holding the cigarettes, the other patting his pocket.

  “Car, in.” The German pointed, then put his mug down on a shelf just out of sight. He gripped the leather sling of his rifle, shucking it slightly off his shoulder, moving it an inch or two.

  “I need a light.” Rossett was eight feet away now, holding up his cigarettes for the soldier to see.

  The soldier half unslung the rifle, as far as the crook of his arm. Rossett looked toward the window of the hut.

  “Your car . . .”

  Rossett fired once, center of the chest. The soldier dropped backward and down, landing on the seat of his pants, lifeless legs stretched out in front of him. His head lolled to the side, his back against the wall of the hut.

  The English corporal ducked and half turned, one hand still holding the phone, the other dropping to the holster he knew he wouldn’t be able to open. Rossett shot him in the left bicep. The bullet carried through and into his chest cavity.

  The telephone hung limp from its wire, swinging slowly left and right, like the pendulum of a grandfather clock. Rossett remained in the doorway, checking for movement from the men he had just shot.

  A kettle was steaming on the tiny stove.

  “Hello?” A woman’s voice, far away, crackled across the miles. “What’s going on there? Hello?”

  Rossett frowned and fired a round into the field telephone.

  The Englishman shuddered at the sound of the shot and silently watched as Rossett turned off the flame under the kettle.

  Rossett looked down and picked up his ID card and warrant from the floor. He lifted the Englishman’s arm and inspected the wound in his side.

  “Don’t kill me.”

  “Did you give them my name?”

  “Don’t kill me,” fainter this time.

  “Did you give them my name?” Rossett shook the Englishman’s shoulder.

  “Don’t kill me.” Eyes rolling in their sockets now.

  “I already have,” replied Rossett, before he pulled an old, battered Browning automatic pistol from the corporal’s holster.

  Rossett looked at the gun. It was poorly maintained, with nicks and scratches; the grip was loose in the handle and rattled as Rossett shook it.

  “Is this all they’ll trust you with?” He held it up for the corporal to see.

  The corporal struggled to focus on his pistol.

  “It was hardly worth it, was it?”

  The corporal closed his eyes.

  “Did you give them my name?” Rossett rested his hand on the corporal’s shoulder, a gentle shake this time, trying to bring him back.

  The corporal’s eyelids fluttered, too heavy to lift.

  “Did you give them my name?” Rossett tried again, but it was useless. His countryman was gone.

  CHAPTER 24

  RUTH HARTZ HAD stared at blackboards all of her life. She couldn’t remember a time when her hands hadn’t felt dusty with chalk, or when she had been able to wear a dark outfit that didn’t have white fingerprints on it.

  She could work all day, decipher, decode, and create equations that would make most of the greatest minds in the world scratch their heads.

  But right now, right at this minute, the blackboard in front of her was leaving her confused.

  “Come on, Ruth, we haven’t got long.”

  Ruth turned to Peter Winterbottom, her boss for the last two years, and shook her head.

  “I don’t know, I can’t . . .” She looked back at the board. “What kind of fish is it?”

  “A dead one,” replied the catering lady, who was staring blankly back across the counter at Ruth.

  “She’ll have the soup.” Winterbottom smiled at the catering lady, who shook her head and lifted the tin lid off the soup pan, nudging away the skin with a ladle.

  “I was thinking about the fish.” Ruth looked at the menu blackboard again as the dinner lady plonked a bowl of steaming soup on her tray.

  “Next?” the catering lady shouted.

  Ruth looked at the soup, then at Peter, and then back at the catering lady before finally lifting the tray and walking off to find a table.

  The Cavendish Laboratory canteen at Cambridge University was one of the few locations in England that didn’t have to suffer the rigors of the ration book. Great minds needed great food and great accommodation, and Cavendish had all three in abundance.

  ­People who visited often said it was like the war had never happened at Cambridge University. Life had barely missed a beat as the bombs had
started to fall. If it weren’t for the portrait of the university’s honorary chancellor, Rudolf Hess, on the wall at the far end of the dining room, one could imagine it was 1939 and all was well with the world.

  Ruth stirred her soup and took a roll out of the basket on the table. She tore it in half, then looked over at her colleagues sitting on the other side of the canteen from her.

  Peter held up his forkful of fish and smiled; Ruth smiled back before dunking her bread and eating it.

  “How is the soup?”

  Ruth looked up at the SS captain standing to her left.

  “It is very good, Captain Meyer.”

  Meyer smiled. “You must be the only Jew who gets to eat before the SS.”

  “But not with my colleagues.” Ruth pulled off another chunk of bread, gestured with it to the table on the other side of the canteen, and then popped it in her mouth.

  “We can bend the rules, Fräulein Hartz, but I’m afraid we cannot break them. Jews and Gentiles don’t mix, except when absolutely necessary. Those are my orders.” Meyer smiled and touched the peak of his cap with his fingers. He turned from the table and waved to the small squad of SS soldiers waiting by the door, indicating that they could collect their own lunches from the serving hatch.

  He turned back to Ruth, winked, and walked away to take his place at the head of the queue.

  Ruth looked at the other table, full of scientists and mathematicians. They were chatting, some laughing, enjoying each other’s company. She put down her bread and stirred the soup again, breaking the fresh skin that had formed out of nowhere.

  “I don’t even believe in God,” she said to the soup.

  Unlike the others who were working at the Cavendish Labs, Ruth was glad they only had a half-­hour lunch break in the middle of the day. Being forced to sit alone meant she missed the exchange of ideas over a meal.

  She wasn’t worthy to join in.

  As someone whose parents were Jews, Ruth had been given a set of strict instructions on her arrival at Cavendish, back in 1943, by the German administrator who ran the place.

  “In the lab you will be exempted from most rules governing your unfortunate Jewish background. Outside of those doors your treatment will be the same as any other Jew working in a reserved occupation. You will eat alone and travel alone. You will live in the same building as the other scientists, but you will be housed in a separate part of the residence in secure accommodation. As a gesture, with consideration of your importance to the Reich war effort, you will be allowed to remove the star of David from your clothing while at work, but it must be worn on your outdoor clothing at all times.” The administrator had looked up from the sheet he was reading and removed his spectacles. “I warn you, and take great heed of what I say, that any fraternization with non-­Jews outside of work hours is strictly forbidden. You must not take advantage of your lack of obvious identification as a Jew while indoors to hoodwink unsuspecting Gentiles into fraternization. Is that understood?”

  It seemed like such a long time ago that Ruth had been formally fired from her work at the Birmingham University physics department. It was almost as soon as the invasion had been completed, in the first few days of distorted normality, that she had received her notice to terminate her work in Birmingham’s world-­famous physics laboratory.

  Her notes and research had been taken away as the lab was dismantled around her on that final day.

  One minute she was the youngest doctor working under Rudolf Peierls in the physics department at one of the leading universities in the world. The next she had been placed with her parents under strict house arrest, staring at the four walls of her bedroom like a bored child.

  A week went by before she was separated from her dear mother and father and put on a bus heading south for London. Once there she had been placed in a barracks with hundreds of other Jews, all of whom worked in the arts, sciences, media, or politics. Ruth hated to admit it, but that had been one of the most exciting times in her life. It was as if the previous twenty-­eight years had led to immersion in a vast pool of intellect and talent. Night after night, the conversation soared in the updrafts of intellect from those gathered around the heating stove. Genius rose to the rafters with the smoke from the tin chimney.

  Each morning, roused from their beds, breath hanging the cold air, they had been sifted, separated, and interviewed. New faces came and went like ingredients in a great intellectual stew, simmering with wit and wisdom. Days passed, then weeks, and then Ruth started to notice that the empty beds in the dorm were no longer being filled. ­People were being moved on, to God knows where.

  One by one they had been interrogated and removed. First the politicians, then the actors, then the musicians, then the writers: all gone.

  Suddenly the room no longer echoed to the sound of genius. Now it simply echoed.

  Although she was only twenty-­eight years old, Ruth was already known as one of the great theoretical and applied physicists of her generation. Her work at Birmingham had produced papers that had stirred the scientific world, marking her out as one to watch.

  Unfortunately, the ones who were watching were the Nazis.

  The quiet German professor in the shabby woolen suit who eventually came to London especially to meet her had been polite, nervous, even a little in awe. Sitting next to a stiff SS colonel in the tiny interrogation room, he had said, “We are assembling teams around Europe to work separately, and eventually together, on a project you will find of great interest. We have facilities and resources beyond your wildest dreams, and some of the scientists we have on board are extremely keen to work with you. It will be an honor to have you on the Cavendish team. Please, I beg you, say you will join us?”

  Ruth had wondered if the quiet man in the suit understood her situation when he begged her.

  He didn’t have to beg.

  She had no choice.

  She had arrived in Cambridge accompanied by a team of guards led by two officers, Captains Meyer and Frenz.

  It had taken her some time to settle down. Her notes had been sent ahead and her position in the lab explained, but try as she might, Ruth was the outsider.

  The Jew.

  All over Britain, posters had started to appear warning of the threat from “the Jew.” In cinemas, cartoons and newsreels featured crude caricatures of grubby, greedy, dirty-­faced scoundrels and louse-­infected moneylenders, while national newspapers talked about “Jewish profiteering and Bolshevik subversion” on an almost daily basis.

  Ruth had seen her first crudely painted star of David on a shop window as she drove from London to Cambridge. She had twisted in the seat when she saw a solitary old man, disheveled, lost, and lonely, standing on a street corner in the rain staring at the yellow paint pooling on the windowsill.

  He had held out his hand as they waited at traffic lights, bony fingers brown with dirt, hovering outstretched and then pointing at the glass as Captain Meyer had looked at him from the front seat.

  He didn’t seem to want anything more than an explanation.

  He didn’t get one.

  They drove away as if nothing had happened.

  When Ruth arrived at the university, it seemed as if the other scientists already there didn’t want to be associated with her. She wondered if it was for fear of being marked out as Jewish sympathizers by their new bosses. Ruth hated them for it, but guessed that she would probably do the same if she were in their shoes.

  She couldn’t blame them for not being brave.

  She worked at Cavendish but lived a few miles out, in the same centuries-­old hall as her colleagues, in the tiny village of Coton. She had her own plush apartment, but she never saw the others.

  Rules were rules, and they even followed her home.

  She had written long letters to her parents complaining about her loneliness and the pain of her betrayal. The country that
had sheltered her mother and father when they had arrived battered from the horror of the Russian pogroms had now raised its own hand against them.

  Ruth felt betrayed by the cowardice of a country that had spent so long pretending it was better than the rest.

  Things had improved for her slightly as time went by. Her almond eyes and auburn curls made soldiers smile when she walked past. Ruth knew she was pretty; she understood facial symmetry and the theory of beauty, and she knew that she possessed it.

  She just didn’t care.

  At least not until the night Captain Horst Meyer had stopped and chatted to her in the dining room. It was only idle chitchat, but it was like water on the lips of a dying man. A spark of humanity in an SS uniform: the irony wasn’t lost on her, but she found herself playing with her hair and smiling under her fringe whenever he passed by.

  He smiled back, and the spark began to flicker at the back of her mind and deep in her heart. Even though she knew she was doomed if she dreamed, she dreamed anyway.

  Dreams provided release from her work, away from her burden, her consciousness of what she was doing.

  Ruth was working to destroy the world. The papers she wrote were written in the blood of the millions who would die, should she and her team succeed.

  She felt shame.

  She was selling the lives of millions to buy time for her own.

  She was angry with herself.

  It was a small mercy that she didn’t believe in God, because she had no wish to face his judgment.

  She wrote letters to her parents that told of that guilt.

  They never replied.

  She guessed that the letters never left the halls she was locked up in, but she didn’t care. They allowed her to confess, to share her guilt with the ones who still loved her, even if they never got to read them.

  One night, almost three years into the project, Captain Meyer had knocked softly on her door. She had let him in, and he had whispered that he had received word her parents were dead. He gave her a flimsy piece of paper, headed with a swastika-­clutching eagle whose head was turned, unable to look her in the eye.