by Lou Cadle
She shuffled along in his wake, and when he took out a key and opened the door, she could see a hint of light in there—the moonlight shining in the uncovered windows. He let her go ahead, shutting the door behind them.
Speaking softly, he said, “I’ll stand guard in the building’s entrance. If there’s trouble, I’ll call out ‘Pierre!’ as if to a friend. Yes?”
“I understand,” she said. “I’ll need about a half-hour.” Five minutes to set up, twenty-one or twenty-two to send, and five minutes to repack.
“Okay,” he said, and he slipped back out the door.
There was enough moonlight to do the set-up, but she would need more light to read her own code. As many times as she’d practiced it earlier, she hadn’t been able to memorize even a line of it.
Her candle stub was in the case. There was no furniture, so she sat on the floor with the radio, her back to the window, hoping her body would block most of the candlelight from any passerby on the street below. Few people ventured out after midnight, mindful of the curfew the Germans had set for them.
She took a deep breath, lit the candle, and began keying, starting with the codes that would identify her and tell them back in England it was she who was transmitting, and not some Nazi who had seized SOE equipment. First came the news about Monk Circuit, and then the report on Hesse, the engineer. She took no time between one message and the next, just repeated it all from beginning to end. She had reached the point where, she knew, she was saying, “Advise in 24 hours” when she heard Leonce shout, “Pierre.”
Quickly, she blew out the candle and went to the window to look out.
In the moonlight below, she saw a sight she had hoped to never see beyond the photos she’d been shown at the SOE. A German radio truck, its double circle of antenna rotating, moonlight flashing off it.
She dove for the radio and slammed the off switch. Her body’s response was late in coming. Only then did her heart begin to race, feeling like it was trying to claw its way up her throat.
She lay frozen for a second, her mind spinning. But then she caught hold of it and made herself slow down and think. You must see if they are coming for you. If they are, break the radio. If they are, destroy the message. And run like the wind.
Back to the window. The truck had stopped just beyond the building. She could see Leonce stagger into the street.
“Halt,” a voice called.
Leonce ignored it. “Pierre,” he called, too loudly. And then he spun in a half circle and staggered again, coming to a halt and giggling. He was pretending he was drunk. A soldier jumped off the truck and ran for him.
Her fault. She couldn’t stop the thought. If only she’d been able to shave another minute off the message.
“Pierre?” Leonce said, throwing his arms up as if to hug the approaching soldier.
The soldier reeled back. He shouted back to the truck, “He is drunk. He stinks of wine.”
She was surprised she could understand the German, but then realized the words in that sentence were not far off the English words.
An order was shouted back, and the soldier grabbed Leonce and dragged him toward the truck.
She couldn’t help him now. She’d have a hard enough time helping herself.
Save the radio if she could. Destroy it if she couldn’t. She backed away from the window and, using only the silvery moonlight, packed up the radio as quickly as she could. She tore down the antenna too fast and felt something snap. Deal with it later, if she had a later.
The antenna fought her when she tried to tuck it away. She made herself slow and take the extra seconds to do it right. Then she shut the suitcase and locked it, lugging it to the apartment’s doorway and opening the door a crack.
She had to see again what the situation was outside.
Before she made the window, an angry voice barked out an order she didn’t catch a word of. She strained to hear more.
“Verdammt. Das Signal est weg,” a new voice said. The signal is—what? Gone, she hoped.
She had to get out of here before they began to search the buildings. They had known someone was broadcasting and had been narrowing their search, the truck coming closer and closer to her, though she had not known it, tracing her with their machines like a predator sniffed out its prey. They had gotten this far, knowing this was the block, so they knew they were close. But they may not know exactly which building she was in.
Worried for Leonce, she sternly reminded herself that she couldn’t help him any longer. Save herself, the radio, and the mission. That was the priority. She wrenched her mind away from his situation and grabbed the radio on the way out the door. She ran down the steps, worried less about noise right now than about moving too slowly. If there was a collaborator in one of these flats, he might call out to the Germans, but she couldn’t change that.
A back door. Was there a back door? The landing at the ground floor was so dark, she couldn’t see, so she felt around, moving back, back, coming to a dead end, a blank wall with gritty wallpaper on it. Panic clawed at her, but she kept moving, kept feeling along the wall.
A hinge.
She moved her palm until she felt the door jamb on the other side, and then down until she felt a door knob, and twisted.
Locked.
She pulled, she pushed, and she threw her weight against it. But nothing worked.
Her dagger. Maybe that would do it. She set her radio down against the door, reached inside her jacket and shirt, and found the handle of the dagger, then the snap that would release it. The dagger hilt was back in her hand, and she yanked it out.
Feeling again for the crack in the door, she pushed the blade in and wiggled it, trying to find the catch. She found it, but it didn’t give. She pushed harder, her hand slipped, and she dropped the knife. Dropping to hands and knees, she felt around for it. There, on this side of the radio case.
She rose, heard a door overhead open, and her panic rose another notch. Don’t let it make you stupid. Think.
She felt for the doorknob again, but her hand hit the plate too low.
There was a key there. All this time, there had been a key.
Idiot. Think!
She shoved her dagger into her pocket, turned the key, grabbed up the radio case again, and slipped through to the outside.
There was almost no light back here, in what must be an alley. She sidled along the wall until she was at a corner, then looked both ways. A narrow street or alleyway, some trash, an abandoned sofa down that way to her right.
She made for that, as the sofa was potential cover from searching eyes. Either direction seemed equally as perilous if the Nazis were quartering the streets.
Making it to the old sofa, which stank of mildew and cat piss, she paused, looked behind her, saw no one. A dim light shone in one window above her, but not in the building she had been in.
Forward, into the alley, toward the cross street. She made it to the corner, paused, and listened, holding her breath. Somewhere, many blocks away, a dog barked.
You will need to stick your head out there and look.
She felt as timid as a child, and that attitude needed to stop now. Leonce had been brave. She needed to be as brave.
She stuck her head out and pulled it back so quickly, the view of the side street was only a blur. But she hadn’t caught sight of a person on it. So she eased her head out again, looked both ways, and saw the street was empty. Good. She stepped out and walked briskly, in the direction away from the street where she’d last seen the radio truck. The corner ahead drew nearer, and nearer. Making a second turn would be good. A third turn would be better. Make five turns, get five blocks away, and she’d breathe easier.
Her confidence began to return. She’d done well at these exercises in training. She knew how to change directions, how to throw off pursuit. She needed either a clever hiding place or a crowd. Either would do, though with her carrying the case containing the radio, a hiding place she could stay in until morning would b
e best.
The corner was coming up, coming up. She stepped past the final building’s corner and saw, down the street to her left, a figure.
She hopped back, took a shaky breath, and looked again, cautiously.
God damn it. It was a German soldier, standing in the middle of the next intersection, looking up into the buildings, turning slowly, a rifle in his hands.
Before he turned her way again, she drew back. She looked behind her, and there, crossing the intersection two blocks back, was the radio truck. She hoped it was the same one. If there were two, she was in worse trouble.
She pressed herself against the nearest wall, making sure she was showing them no silhouette. It was the best she could do for now.
The truck prowled on through the intersection. They seemed not to have seen her.
A string of curse words in three languages passed through her mind.
Okay, back the way she had come seemed safest. Without checking on the lone soldier again, she reversed course and moved toward where she’d seen the truck last. No one was in the alley where she’d just been. She took it as a sign that things were improving for her, for she needed to cling to some hope.
She arrived at the street where the radio truck had been and slowed. This was a delicate moment. She needed to see, and she needed to not be seen.
She glanced around, and then up. And there was an outdoor staircase, a fire escape, on the building to her left, facing the street she stood on. The bottom end of it was over head-height, but she thought she could reach it with a jump.
She carried her radio over and pushed it against the side of the building, leaving it in the shadow there. Her dagger was still in her pocket, she realized, and so she tucked it away in its sheaf. Then she squatted and sprang up, catching the lowest rung of the staircase with her bare hands. The metal was rusty, gritty, but the sound she had made was muffled. She’d have to watch the noise going up.
Pulling herself up took more seconds than it had back on the exercise courses. Claude had been right—she should have been doing these sorts of exercises all along in the attic. But she finally wrestled herself to the point where she could hook an ankle on, and then the opposite knee was up, and she heaved herself upright.
She took off her shoes then, and tied them together and then looped the laces around her neck. In stocking feet, she trotted up a half flight and checked the street in both directions. No Nazis on this side street.
They might be looking for her, but they were less likely to look up for her. She attained the top of the staircase, realized it did not reach the roof—which was what she had been hoping, for it would give her another possible escape route—and backed off from the apartment window where the metal stairs ended. She saw that she could not lean far forward enough to see the cross street.
She should have thought of that before she climbed.
But wait, there, just below her. The window on that apartment had a fairly wide ledge over the top of it. She might be able to sidle out onto that.
She slipped the shoes from around her neck, took off her socks, and put them down gently on the metal landing. She wanted nothing shifting her balance—and nothing dropping noisily to the pavement below. She lowered her bare feet to the top of the window, holding on to the edge of the fire escape as long as she could. The building was built of large stones, mortared. She put a finger into the mortar line and tried to find a way to hold on to the stone before she let go with the other hand.
No. Not very helpful. But about three feet ahead was the front corner of the building and it had a decorative edging right at the corner that might work as a handhold. She’d have to trust her balance on the ledge of the window and lean out for the last handhold. And if she was good, and lucky, she could grab that. Basically, it was a controlled fall, to be stopped by the decorative molding, so she had better not miss it.
Below her two and a half stories was the pavement. It would hurt to fall. It might even kill her.
A better way to die than being shocked between the eyes.
No more hesitation. She let go of the metal railing, took two sliding steps along the window’s top edge, and let herself fall.
It took an eternity. And yet it couldn’t have been a half a second until her palm touched the corner of the building and grabbed on to what might have been a carved flower design. She wasn’t at that dangerous an angle, though it would be harder to get back than it was to get out here.
Do what you came to do.
She craned her neck and looked over at where she’d last seen Leonce. There was a soldier standing there too. But no Leonce, no truck. He must have been pulled into the truck.
In the other direction, the truck was on the move, another block and a half away, its antenna still moving, around and around. The truck moved slowly, some terrible lumbering predator. Searching for her, if they only knew it. But it was moving off.
Time to get back on the metal stairs if she could.
She had to lean even farther off-balance to bend her elbows enough to give her push some force. Always aware of the yawning space beneath her, she let her body’s angle increase, then pushed hard. Her left palm instinctually tried to cling to the stones, but it only slid across, scraping her palm.
She was moving the right direction until she wasn’t. The best she could do was adjust her muscles so she fell forward again, and she once more grabbed the corner of the building. Her arms were shaking now, from fear, or the muscle strain, it didn’t matter which.
But she didn’t lose her grip. Her bare feet were still on the window’s frame, and she had a solid hold of the corner bit again.
One last time. If she didn’t make it this time, she wouldn’t be likely to improve her effort a third time. She let herself ease forward again, forcing herself to bend her elbows a bit more than last time, and then hurled herself backward with a hard shove. At first, she thought she had failed again, and then her weight reached some critical balance point, and she was fully upright, on the window.
And then she was falling backward, toward the stairs.
She twisted, grabbing for the metal rail, and found it just as her feet slid off the top of the window, swinging down free beneath her as her hands gripped the gritty railing.
Swearing to herself she’d do her exercises every day, twice a day from now on, once again she pulled herself back onto the stairs, making more noise than she wanted to.
Better to make noise than feel herself in free fall, like parachuting but without a chute. And with a much more painful landing.
She grabbed her shoes and socks and stole down the fire escape, jumping lightly to the pavement when the metal stairs ran out. Her radio was still where she had left it.
She took it up and crossed the street so that the soldier outside the building where she’d transmitted would be less likely to see her. She was nearer to him, but she wanted to see if he had moved.
She peeked around, and he wasn’t looking at her. She took a second to look down the street the other way.
The truck was continuing to move away. If she had understood her training correctly, there was another truck somewhere, and they were communicating to each other about the direction of the signal from their positions. Why they were still moving after her signal had stopped, she couldn’t explain. Perhaps they were hoping for it to restart.
In any case, she needed to be away from here. They had come close enough to identifying her position. The circuit may have lost Leonce. They couldn’t lose their radio operator too. She, personally, did not matter. Her function did.
Darting a look around the corner every few seconds, she kept an eye on the soldier, who fidgeted while he stood with his back facing the building that she’d been in. He didn’t see the edge of her face peeking around the corner. When he bent down to tie his boot, she risked a look the other way. The truck was down another block. At the end of the block, it stopped. For several seconds it sat there, not moving. And then it turned to the left.
&
nbsp; When she glanced back at the soldier, she saw he had finished tying the boot. He moved down to the next building and turned to face it. He shifted so that his head was turned away. Was he entering?
It took her a second to realize what he was doing. Relieving himself.
Still in bare feet, she sprinted across the intersection while he wasn’t looking her way. Her body was tensed, expecting a shout to halt, but that shout never came. She was behind the next block of buildings and out of his sight within seconds. She resumed a quick, purposeful walk. She was a woman with a destination, brisk but not panicked—or so she wanted any stranger glimpsing her to think.
Antonia made it one block, and then a second block. The skin of her neck crawled, but she did not look around, not until another alleyway appeared and she turned down it. Then she risked a look back. No one was following her. She put down her radio for just long enough to don her socks and shoes again.
She kept weaving through the streets and alleys of the town, keeping to shadows, until she had turned in a semicircle and was headed back toward the boulangerie, well away from where the radio trucks had been searching for her. She had no way to contact Claude directly about Leonce except the emergency message drop. Claude wouldn’t be able to do anything about it, but there might be a family to tell. A wife. Children.
The thought was like a cold hand wrapping around her heart. She hoped there were no children. It was possible, just possible, that Leonce would find his way out of the mess.
As she approached the boulangerie, she knew she should explain to Madame Charlevoix what had happened. It was only fair. If Leonce was suspected of spying and tortured, he could reveal the location of the English radio operator. And then the boulangere would be at risk.
