by Lou Cadle
She had heard, back in training, that there were people who could double code in their minds, most of them crossword puzzle designers and chess champions. Marks himself maybe could do this. But she’d always need a piece of paper to do it. If it were any easier, though, the Nazis would be able to break the codes.
In her safe attic, it was easy to forget for minutes at a time that they were out there. She went to the window at midday, hoping to see one in the distance, a German in uniform, to remind her of her danger. She kept to the side of the window and only looked obliquely through, keeping to the shadowed side of the room.
Only citizens walked the street below. For minutes she watched them, wondering about them, their lives. Where were they going? Why was that one nearly running? Was each one she saw a collaborator or resistance or some other type of person trying to avoid being either? Had they lost anyone? Had they lost everyone, as she had?
She sat again, cross-legged on the mattress, and opened the romance novel. Jane Austen, it was not. But it kept her mind from chasing itself around in worried circles all day while she waited for her next wireless message date with headquarters.
Chapter 7
Genevieve took her to a new place to send her next radio message, a half bombed-out building that had once held a hatmaker’s shop. Three fourths of a staircase led up another floor, and after climbing past the missing section to an intact landing, Genevieve reached down for the radio.
“Careful. It’s heavy.”
The girl snorted, derisive. She pulled up the suitcase with a struggle, and when the floor beneath her did not collapse, Antonia breathed a sigh of relief. It wasn’t the girl’s strength she had been questioning but that of the stairs.
She reached across the gap and levered herself onto the last intact stair, then followed the girl up into the darkness.
“It was an accident, they said,” Genevieve told her. “A shell went off by itself. I don’t believe them. I knew a girl who lived in this building. She died.”
“It could happen, I suppose, an accident.”
She dropped the radio. “They lie all the time.”
“I know,” Antonia said. “You should go now.”
“I helped her.”
“Your friend who lived here?”
“No.”
Antonia realized who she must mean. “The last radio operator?”
“Yes, that one. The stupid one who let herself be killed.”
“I’m sure she didn’t want to die.”
“She wasn’t careful enough.” The girl had clearly taken it hard, just as Claude had said.
Antonia did not press her to leave but began to string out the antenna, wondering what she should say to the girl. But before her mind could begin to invent anything that wouldn’t hurt her, the girl spoke again.
“Maybe she wanted to die.”
“I didn’t know her. I don’t even know her name, but I doubt that.”
“Her code name was Rosine. Her real name was Minnie. What’s yours?”
“She shouldn’t have given you her real name. If that even was her real name.” But there had been a Minnie in one of her classes two or three months ago, a middle-class Birmingham girl.
“You won’t give me your real name?”
“No,” Antonia said, finishing stringing the antenna along the glassless windows. “You should go now.”
“I’m not afraid.”
Antonia nearly said, “Then you’re a fool,” but she stopped herself in time. “You’re a very brave girl. It would help me most if you kept an eye out on the street.”
“If I see the Gestapo coming, I will make sure they see me, and then run.”
“Just signal me—a whistle, if you can—and avoid them. Hide from them.”
“I will run and draw them off. I’m very fast,” the girl said, and then she disappeared back into the stairwell.
Antonia did not want to worry for the girl. She did not want to like her, or Claude, or Madame Charlevoix. All of them could be dead tomorrow, or arrested and tortured. It was better to not care. She should try harder to stay remote, to steel her heart against the slightest affection. One would think she should have learned that lesson by now. But she was weak in this way. She couldn’t stop herself from admiring Claude, from liking Madame C, or from pitying Genevieve.
She had coded her message before leaving and had burned everything but the final message, which she had rolled into a tiny cylinder and taped to the blade of her sleeve dagger. If they captured her and found the knife, that alone might get her imprisoned. The strip of code would tell the whole tale.
It was a longer message than she had sent before. There were two code names, Gaby and Laurent, two SOE agents who were known to have been captured and taken to Baumettes, a prison in Marseille. Four French Résistance fighters had been taken as well, but she had no code names to use so she mentioned only their number. Her message was, in a sense, thrice coded, the two rounds of substitution code and a third means within the message itself, which in plain English was: “Two friends, Gaby and Laurent, will miss the party.” Meaning, they would probably never come home. In fact, they might both already be dead, dead of torture, shot while trying to escape, or dead because they had successfully taken their L-pills.
She touched her own cyanide pill, safe inside the locket at her neck.
Then she took a deep breath and turned on the radio. When it was warm, she checked the time on her watch, a Breguet with a broken chain the costumer had given her in England. She began to key her message. Six minutes and fifteen seconds was all it took. She stretched her shoulders and began keying again. She was on her last sentence when she heard a hiss from below.
“Ssst. Quiet. Gestapo.”
Her throat closed, but she pushed aside the fear and made herself think. The message had gone through. She turned off the torch and her radio. Now it shouldn’t be sending out any signal at all.
Though if they had triangulated on the signal already, the consequences would be dire. She grasped the necklace with its lethal solution to capture, and the thing burned her hand. She dropped it.
No. Of course it did not burn her. Merely her imagination.
She scooted to the wall with a glassless window facing the street. Pressing herself against the wall, she sidled toward the window until she could see out.
The faint sound of an automobile engine came to her. She peered out, saw nothing, and ducked under the window to try looking from the other side.
There on the street was a German staff car, idling in the dim starlight. She could not see their faces, just a mysterious darkness inside the car window that suggested a head. The car was stopped.
Had they found her this quickly?
No. She couldn’t bear that. Resentment overwhelmed her fear. Miss Atkins had said her life expectancy was six weeks. That had felt like a promise. She had six weeks to accomplish what she wanted, and she hadn’t been here one week yet.
Then she realized she was only looking at a car. There was no electronic equipment on it. They might have business here, but what was the chance the business was her and her radio? Still, Gestapo this close, and her with the radio…it seemed unwise to stay here too long.
Just as she was about to turn away, the German car drove on, a flag on it flapping in the breeze of its movement. She watched until it drove out of sight and then sank down to the littered floor, breathing deeply. Her hands began, belatedly, to shake. It had been nothing. Nothing to do with her.
After recovering a moment, she forced herself to rise, walk back to her radio set, and pack it away. The routine calmed her. She was folding up the last of the antenna when Genevieve entered.
“They weren’t looking for you,” the girl said.
“How do you know?” She agreed, but she wanted to understand how the girl’s mind worked.
“They have a truck for that. This was only the pig returning from a meeting or dinner with other Nazi pigs and taking someone home. A whore maybe.”
“You know the officer you saw?”
“Meyer,” she said, and she spat on the floor.
Antonia had to bite her tongue to keep from admonishing the girl. In England, they’d chide her that spitting wasn’t ladylike. But if there were a French word that carried the same weight as “ladylike,” Genevieve would likely spit at it as well. “Who is Meyer?”
“Do you not know anything?”
“It seems I do not.”
“He is the head of German Gestapo.”
Not all Gestapo, and not of France. Antonia did know that much. “For the town or département?”
“The city?” The uncertainty was clear in her voice.
“Do you know his first name?”
“No.” She sounded chagrined, but then her voice changed to eager. “But I could find out.”
“Not if it puts you in harm’s way.”
“We are all in harm’s way, everyone in France, so long as the occupiers are squeezing our balls.”
Antonia wasn’t quite sure what to say to that.
Genevieve made a disgusted noise. “I should know his first name. But everyone just says Meyer and I never asked.”
“It’s fine. Don’t ask.”
“Ask around, I meant. I won’t walk up to the pig and ask him. I am not a fool.”
Antonia couldn’t help worrying for the girl. It would take a harder-hearted person than she to not be moved by this waif with the bravado. Underneath, surely she was as frightened as any of them. But war had stripped her of her childhood, as it had so many. In that, they shared an experience. “You’ve kept yourself alive for a long while, haven’t you? I’m sure you’ll manage.”
“Why do you need it?”
“I don’t, but if you know his name, it’s information worth sending back to England with my next message.”
“When will the English come to help us?”
“I’m here,” Antonia pointed out. She knew the French must be desperate for an invasion, but she did not know when that might happen—and if by some strange chance she did know, she could hardly speak of it. She had the antenna folded and stowed away. “Is the street clear?”
“I’ll check,” Genevieve said, and she disappeared through the door.
Antonia took out matches and burned the coded message. She left the room, waiting halfway down the stairs until she heard from the girl.
“Sssst,” Genevieve said. “It is clear.” She waited on the other side of the gap in the stairs to be handed the radio, and soon they left the bombed building, Antonia once again carrying her wireless set.
They walked back along empty streets, and at a corner Genevieve surprised her by saying, “You can find your way from here. I’ll see you at the trains.” And she split off and trotted up the cross street.
Antonia walked alone to the boulangerie, wondering what tomorrow night would bring.
Chapter 8
"It is simple,” said Claude, directing his explanation to her alone. “Moving parts on a train need grease. But they need a particular kind of grease. If axles have no grease, they will seize. The train wheel either will stop or, if it is running at speed, will seize and possibly derail.”
A young man named Edgard whom Antonia had met for the first time tonight spoke up. “We will insert the wrong kind of grease, a thicker grease, and this will also happen. If I am caught, I might talk my way out of trouble by saying I am greasing the wheels and rails. This is done often.” Edgard was dressed in a form-fitting light-colored knit shirt and coarse gray trousers, well stained. He looked like a railroad worker and might in fact be one, but wouldn’t the Germans use their own soldiers to repair the trains?
She wanted to ask but knew Claude would have worked this out, and Edgard would not have agreed to do anything that would get him killed outright. She should attend to her part of the job and trust that others would attend to theirs. “And you want me as lookout.”
Claude had brought her a heavy black jumper to wear with her own dark trousers, saying, “It will be a cold night, and you can move more easily in this than in your jacket.” The jumper was too big for her. There was also a black knit cap for her. Now he said, “Four of us are on lookout. Genevieve will be nearest the loading platform. Then you, then Leonce”—he indicated a man who he said had been there when she landed, though she had not seen his face until this evening—“and I will be nearest Edgard. All you have to do is signal if a guard is coming if that happens, to give Edgard a chance to hide.”
“It’s important, tonight,” Leonce said. “They will be bringing many kanones into town tomorrow, loading them, and shipping them.”
“To where?” Antonia asked. This was the kind of information crucial to send back to England.
“North on the rail line,” said Claude. “That is all we know for certain. The rest is mere speculation, or I would have told you.” He checked a watch. “We move in twelve minutes. I’ll review the signals again, quickly. Then you prepare yourselves.”
They were meeting in the back room of a business in town, in an office, though in the darkness Antonia hadn’t been able to read the sign in the front window, and there was no equipment in this room to give her a hint what sort of business. The windows were painted black, but nonetheless they only burned one thin candle, wary of showing a light to any passerby.
After the review of their communication signals, Antonia used the WC next to the office. On the way out she nodded to Leonce, who was waiting his turn.
“Five minutes,” Claude said.
Antonia remained standing, her nerves growing too tight to allow her up to sit again without fidgeting. She tried to imagine how it would feel, lying on the ground in a ditch by the rails, waiting and listening. She wondered how a patrolling soldier would feel if he caught the glint of her eyes. While she imagined trying to run from a guard, the center of her back tingled, as if awaiting the bullet he would most certainly fire.
Claude rose and walked to her, handing her a box small enough to fold her hand around—a snuff box, perhaps? “Ashes. For your face and hands.”
She started to open it.
“No, not before we walk through the streets, in case we are stopped. When we reach the rail line—then.”
Antonia nodded and pocketed the little box.
The last minutes ticked off slowly. Claude didn’t check his watch but stood waiting, apparently not nervous as she was.
He said, “Let’s go. Rendezvous at the rail line.” He named a street she wasn’t familiar with. “Beatriz, you’re with me.” He blew out the candle.
The others left one by one, shadows moving out the door, like background characters in a dark Fuseli painting, until it was only her and Claude. “Are you ready?” he said.
“Yes.”
“The tension is bothering you?”
“A little,” she admitted. But admitting it made it ease. “I’ll be fine.”
“I believe you will,” he said, and he opened the door for her. They emerged into the starlit back street. In a few days, the moon would be back, lighting up the night. It wouldn’t end the circuit’s nighttime sabotage activities, but it might make them more dangerous.
Weaving down the narrow side streets, they encountered no one. At the main road, they waited, listening, but no sounds broke the night’s silence until a distant cat yowled. They made their way across town until they came to the rail line. The others were all waiting just off the road.
Wordlessly, they tramped along the black ditch at the side of the rails. Antonia lifted her feet in an exaggerated way so as not to trip on anything. Claude hissed and they all stopped. It took Antonia a few seconds to see he had taken out a box of dirt, like the one he had given her, and began to rub it into his hands, which she could barely make out in the starlight. As he rubbed them, the hands disappeared entirely from view.
She took out the little box he had given her and did the same herself with the ashes. When finished, she held up her hands to study them. It had worked,
and even wiggling her fingers could not allow her to see them. Her face was next, and her neck. She took the black knit cap from her trouser pocket and pulled it on over her hair, tucking in the loose tendrils by feel. Her hair was dark, but not as dark as the cap. She made sure she rubbed the ash in all the way to her hairline.
When she looked around again, the only person she could see was Edgard, his face and his lighter-colored sweater, and the hump of a satchel over his shoulder that held his equipment. He nodded at them all, and then he led the way down the tracks.
Someone—Claude probably—held her back by the sleeve, letting the others draw ahead for twenty steps, and then he let her go. They trailed Edgard. Soon she could see light ahead. She hadn’t thought about lighting. Was it for security? No, that made no sense. In a war where there were bombing runs, no light meant more security. Or were they doing work there, already loading their train cars?
As they neared the lights, they left the train tracks, pushing past a line of bushes still bare of their leaves. She could hear something now, hear the clanking of metal and a single shout in German.
Her throat went dry, and she suddenly realized what the guttural sounds of the language had done that to her over her days in France, that she was being conditioned to it as if the sounds of the language itself held some terrible power to hurt, to kill.
A hand was held up in a signal to halt, silhouetted against the glow of artificial light.
She stopped and took a deep breath. A mouldy odor hung in the ditch, and a hint of some sap rising came from the bushes, but only a hint. She reached out and ran a finger along a branch, feeling for a bud, automatically doing it as if it was a normal year and she was curious about when the leaves would appear. Before she found one, the silhouetted hand lowered and her group began to move again.
