by Scott, Manda
The photographer looks more wary now. Tentatively: ‘Can you smile at all?’ She can. In the flaring lens she sees her solemn-cat face with the too-big eyes, the brief baring of teeth that barely changes it, the dark hair flopping over her brow, cropped short like a boy’s at the back and sides, long enough at the front to hide the scar just below her hair line.
Snap-click.
‘Thank you. You’re free to go.’
No indication of what comes next, of why she is different, why she is still in Scotland, when everyone else was shipped down south weeks ago and has almost certainly been dropped into France. He may not know.
He packs up his kit: camera into bag, lights off and left to cool. Never move them when the bulbs are hot; she heard that somewhere.
She opens the door for him. Somewhere beyond is a window and beyond that, a sharp, bright winter afternoon slants towards evening. Clean light floods in; shows up the dust and the unclean floor.
Outside, crows squabble over something too-long dead to be worth throwing in a pot. A car clashes through the gears and stutters away. In the quiet it leaves behind, she hears men call to each other. The intonation is English, or rather, Scots. Her heart aches for it to be French.
The photographer nods his head to her at the doorway. ‘You have a briefing with Flight Lieutenant Vaughan-Thomas in the morning. You’re free until then.’
She walks back along a gravelled drive to the small cottage where they have housed her, within sight of the shore. A short distance away is the big manse, with its high, echoing ceilings and the smell of polish layered on damp wood, with ivy that is never silent, and windows loose enough that you could lift the putty with a kitchen knife and remove the pane, and nobody would know you’d been as long as you stuck it all back properly afterwards.
The officers live there, the ones who teach her the many ways to kill and stay alive. Technically, she is one of them now, a section officer in the WAAF; she can eat with them in the mess on the ground floor. Today, she prefers the solitude of the cottage with the wild sea splintering on the rocks below the windows.
A black telephone in the living room links her to the main house, so that she can order a meal. Thirty minutes later, a FANY orderly delivers mutton stew, potatoes, pie made from canned pears with a thin, watery cream on top. They are good to those who may die soon. Some days, you’d barely know there was a war on.
She washes up and then settles back in a rust-coloured armchair in front of a tiny, almost flameless fire and drinks coffee. She has an idea. She sleeps on it. It is an idea of darkness, and, in darkness, she rises and dresses in her darkest clothes.
As far as she can tell, the men who employ her here in Britain have infinite quantities of money, and they are anxious that their recruits, who may have their lives stripped slowly away when in France, should want for nothing while in training.
So for the first time in her life, she has new clothes. Not only new – these have been handmade to her size by a little Jewish tailor in a back street in London to designs current in France, using textiles brought over by men and women whose lives have been risked to get them here.
His designs, in her opinion, are less than perfect. As an alternative, she brought her own clothes. The tailor didn’t want to copy them, but she is an officer; they have given her a rank. He makes what she wants.
Now, she wears blue-black trousers and a shirt that are modelled on her brother’s. She has dark, rubber-soled shoes and an elasticated belt with a leather pouch that contains all she needs.
You have to make it true. So said the soft-voiced tutors, the ones who never relaxed. Whatever you are doing, whoever you are being, every part of you must believe it. Take the part of your heart that works for us and bury it so deep that even we are not sure it is there. The Boche are not stupid. They smell deceit the way a hound smells fox shit. So know what you are, and make it your truth.
This is her truth, therefore: that she is a cat burglar, a spy, come to steal secrets from the heart of the Firm, and they will shoot her if they catch her.
It is after midnight. The sky is a hard and brilliant black, cut through by the edge of the moon. The air smells of cold, salt, heathland. A fine frost lies like ground glass on the paths, the turf, the chimneybreasts. Paris was never like this, never so quiet, never so night-shiny clean.
She keeps the moon behind her, and the sea. The cottage fades back into the gloom. She walks on the gravel, on the outer edges of her feet, heel to toe, heel to toe, feeling the stones press through the soles of her shoes.
Ahead, the mansion headquarters presses its high, hard angles against the sky. She has visited it twice in the three days since she arrived here and it is her opinion that the back door offers the easiest entry. In the starlit dark, she walks round the side.
In her pouch, she has a plastic protractor, the tool of a schoolchild: innocent. If she were caught with one of these in enemy territory (which is to say, her homeland), it would not give her away.
As she has been taught, she leans on the door, slides the curved edge between the lock and the jamb, feel-hears it push down on the snib and forces it back.
In.
And now up.
A set of servants’ stairs leads up from the back door to the first floor. The third, fourth and twelfth treads creak. She steps on the very outer edges, letting her weight bear down slowly, evenly. She is quiet. She is not soundless. Nobody comes to stop her.
She reaches the head of the stairs. Her target is on the second floor, on the western side of the building. The falling moon spins long, lean shadows through the windows. Ghost-like, she follows them past locked doors behind which sleeping men may, or may not, lie. She presses her ear against the wood of the first two, hears nothing, carries on, turns left and comes to the corridor’s blind end, and the final locked door that is her goal.
This one won’t give to the protractor. In her pack are half a dozen hairpins, a paper clip, a small pair of women’s tweezers and a torch of a small enough size that she can hold it between her teeth.
The lock is harder than any of the test ones they gave her on the course, but not impossible. She thinks no lock will ever be impossible now, which is doubtless what she is meant to think: above all else, the English training fosters a sense of invincibility and immortality in those who complete it.
She has seen precisely this over-confidence kill them, but here, tonight, the lock yields to her soft insistence and she is in.
Into a heady fug of stale cigarette smoke, gun oil and sweat. Her torch stabs the dark. The office is not huge, but the only window is shuttered for the blackout and the resulting unlight is far denser than the night outside.
Closing the door, she resists the temptation to switch on her torch. She knows roughly where she’s going. Four paces forward is the desk and to its left, set back against the wall, is a locked filing cabinet. She navigates to it by touch.
Still in the dark, this lock yields to the hairpin in under a minute. She gives a small hiss of satisfaction and now she does switch on her torch. She has taped cardboard over most of the face, so that the beam is pencil thin and will not give her away. Holding it between her teeth, she starts a methodical search.
The top drawer is full of lecture notes; the middle contains plans for ‘schemes’ by which students may be tested physically, mentally, emotionally. She knows them all.
Here in the bottom drawer, though:
She riffles through the Fs. They’re ordered by the date of their progress through the training, not by alphabet. Fleming: ’41, Fortuyn: ’42, Fuentes: also ’42, Fairburn-Drummond: ’43 – ha! – Fabron: ’44.
The other files have photographs; hers does not. The young man with the neat eyes has not developed the pictures he took in the afternoon. She feels naked, somehow, un-named. Her palms sweat.
She leafs past the front pages and the minutiae of her life story, past the chain of improbabilities that has brought her here.
And then, on the third
page, this:
Unstable.
Unstable? Jesus Christ …
Eyes closed, she lays the sheet down on the floor, rocks back on her heels. Words float past her half-closed eyes: adequate, satisfactory, elementary mistakes. Elementary?
Fuck them. This is not how it is supposed to go. This is her truth: she is a spy, and an angry one.
She could set fire to this place, then see if they like that. There will be cigarettes somewhere, and a lighter: no office is without them. She searches swiftly. Not on the desk, not in the top drawer, but – ah! – here, under a cardboard file, which in itself would burn swiftly if one were to crumple the top page and—
‘I wouldn’t, if I were you.’
Merde!
Spinning, her elbow … the edge of her hand … Nearby, a man’s throat, low down: sitting … a blue-grey uniform … the shine of pips on a shoulder … Eyes that rest on her face, pale in the shine of her torch. They glance down and back up. She glances down with them, and sees a standard-issue Enfield revolver. Above it, sun-gold hair and a lazy smile that is burned on her memory.
All this in the time it takes to complete the turn. Her hand stops just short of his throat. She spits out the torch. ‘You!’
‘Who else?’
It’s him: Laurence Vaughan-Thomas, the officer she is supposed to meet in the morning, but he is also – fuck you – the Aryan blond one of the two interrogators in Glasgow, the one who threw iced water on her. Here, the uniform is RAF, not SS. The difference is cosmetic. He still wears his gloves. Idiot.
Three feet separate them. A chair stands to her left, the door is to her right, easy on its hinges, but still pushed closed. He hasn’t entered on silent feet; he was always here. She didn’t check the room.
… inclined to make elementary mistakes …
Fuck them.
Archly, she says, ‘You are a Boche spy?’
He runs his tongue around his teeth. ‘If I were, I think Germany would have won the war by now. Certainly, we would have no functioning networks in France. So no, I am not a spy. I, in fact, have good reason to be here. You, however, are about to be an arsonist, which will certainly terminate your career.’
‘What career? It’s already over.’
‘Possibly. You can certainly ensure that it is.’ He nods to the file that lies on the floor between them. ‘Were we unfair?’
That’s not worth an answer. She has no gun, but there’s a knife in the front of her pack. She leans back against the desk and lets her hands drift behind her.
He laughs, or perhaps it’s a sigh: she can’t see him well enough to decide. She says nothing, but, as if at her request, he stands up, strolls to the door and flicks on the light switch. The bulb is feeble and stained with fly dirt. The darkness doesn’t recede much; the shadows just become less distinct.
Returning, he pulls a pipe from his pocket and devotes himself to filling it, tamping it, lighting it. Blue smoke blurs the air and she adds to her internal list of stupid mistakes the fact that the gun oil she smelled on the air was fresh while the smoke was stale, and it was not from cigarettes alone. Both should have told her he was there. This mistake is hers.
She is not the one making mistakes now. In the few seconds in which his back was turned as he walked to the light switch, she transferred her knife from her pack to her pocket. She is fairly sure he didn’t see.
Back at his chair, he regards her, flatly. ‘Shall we stop playing games? You are Amélie Fabron. You were born in Paris on the fifth of January 1926. Your mother was English. She served as a nurse near the front line of the Somme. Your father was amongst the many injured. She tended him back to health. Am I right so far?’
She doesn’t move. This is like the interrogation practice. He sighs, noisily, and runs his tongue round his teeth again. The front two are very slightly crooked, his only flaw. She focuses on the place where they cross.
‘What is not on the record is this: your parents were both active in the very earliest days of the Resistance. They were betrayed by an informer and shot during a raid on one of their first meetings. This was August 1941.
‘After your parents’ deaths, you were taken in by your neighbours, the Monins, who shared their views. You lied about your age and began to train as a nurse, in the way your mother had. You became close with their son, Alexandre, who was an active member of the Communist Resistance in Paris. He was convicted of taking part in the killing of Colonel Wolfgang Koch of the Sicherheitsdienst on the eighteenth of February 1942. He was put before a firing squad on—’
‘March twenty-fourth.’ Some things will make her speak and this is one of them. The date is etched on her mind, and the words of his last letter. My love, today I will die. This is war. Many men will die, but I have the privilege of knowing the hour and the means. My joy is that I can think of you as I take my last breath. Do not give up the struggle …
‘Did you love Alexandre?’
Love? Do you even understand what that means? She is eighteen years old and knows without question that she has plumbed the full depths of love; that she will never love again. She spits on the floor.
He sucks on his pipe. ‘Your romantic enthusiasms do not interest me. What I care about is your motivation. Let me go on. After Alexandre’s death, certain members of the Resistance contacted you and certain arrangements were made. By the summer of forty-two, at the age of sixteen, you were an active member of one of the équipes de tueurs that ply their trade in the area around the Passy metro station in Paris.’
He leaves a gap. She doesn’t say no.
He goes on. ‘So, these équipes – correct me if I go wrong, our information grows a little hazy here – there are three of you in each team: young men and women, often students, highly motivated. You know only each other. Your names are not on any lists, for which you should be duly grateful because if one thing is killing your compatriots by the dozen, it’s their habit of writing down long lists of each other’s names in the mistaken belief that the Boche will never read them.’
‘And what is killing your compatriots is their habit of sitting in Parisian cafés talking English amongst themselves in the mistaken belief that the Boche will never hear them.’
‘Touché.’ He looks down, and then up again. A smile is hidden in that movement. In her mind, her knife slices his throat and his blood wipes away all smiles.
‘Anyway, those of you in the teams have no role in day-to-day Resistance work, and in this way, you remain above suspicion. You act only when someone brings information of a Frenchman who has betrayed one of your own to the Boche, at which point you kill him – or her – within the next forty-eight hours. Your team’s score over the eighteen months of its activity, so I am told, was nineteen, two of them women. Six of these kills are attributed to you alone. You were proficient with a gun and our instructors inform me that you are one of the best shots they have ever trained. The knife, however, was your favoured weapon. You cut out the tongues of those who had informed against their countrymen. There is a rumour that you did so when they were still alive.’
He leaves another heavy pause. What does he want? An apology? This is war: you choose a side, you take a risk. In the cells of the Avenue Foch, they gouge the eyes out of living Résistantes with a fork to make them speak. Taking a tongue is nothing.
He is watching her, his eyes stitching the lines of her face. She wishes she knew what he was seeing. He says, ‘Do you know how many kills you have to make before you’re accounted a fighter ace in the RAF?’
Don’t know. Don’t care.
‘Five.’ He touches something on his jacket; it may be the mark of an ace. She doesn’t care about that, either. ‘Five Huns down and you’re considered the best. There are not many aces flying the skies of Europe. Even in the army, half a dozen accredited kills is viewed as exceptional. There are men who go through an entire war and never draw blood. There are others who kill one man and never sleep properly again. Few and far between are those who can kill
at close quarters without remorse or regret or recriminations afterwards. The army that can recruit such men – or women – to its side is the army that has an advantage. Just one, in the right place at the right time, can turn the course of a war.’
Something is happening beyond the words; beneath them; behind them. She is being tested. She doesn’t know for what. She sits very still.
The blond Englishman blows smoke at her. ‘You were doing well. Why did you leave Paris?’
Her mouth dries on old, bloody memories. She lets out a slow breath. Careful now, careful. Here is her truth. ‘We were blown. Emile Gaubert brought us a new target. He had been caught and turned. That’s what they’re good at: find a weak one, take him, turn him fast and send him back before anyone notices he’s gone.’
‘Or her.’ That’s not worth an answer. He smiles at her obduracy. ‘So Gaubert sold you? What happened?’
‘The Boche were waiting. There was a shootout.’ In her mind, the rattle of automatics, the crack and whistle of rounds on stone, the stench of blood, the feel of it, hot and slick on her hands. Run. Run. Run!
In the room, the cold, grey eyes, watching, testing her truth. ‘Your two team members were killed in that ambush. Only you escaped. How?’
‘I don’t know.’ How many nights has she lain awake, asking this question, searching for an answer that makes sense? ‘I think they weren’t expecting a girl.’
It works. He nods, dryly. ‘I expect they weren’t. Nor was Gaubert, evidently, when you went back two days later to cut his throat.’ He takes another suck on his pipe. His eyes are the grey of the sea, and as flat. ‘How did you get to England?’
Four weeks of hell, through autumn and into winter, nights spent lying in the open, waiting for boats that didn’t come, days spent in terror, hiding in barns.
Does he want to know this? She thinks not. She says, ‘My mother’s cousin lives in Brittany. I went to visit her. She knew some men, who knew of a boat.’
He blows a thin stream of smoke down his nose. ‘Look in the files. Go to D and find a Frenchwoman.’
