A Good Clean Fight (58 page)

*   *   *

What convinced Greek George was his reflection. One day the serious little girl brought him a small mirror, much cracked. It was the rearview mirror from an airplane. Not his own. Wrong shape. For the first time since the crash he could see what he looked like. He looked like an Arab. The sun had burned him black and his hair, which was naturally black, was matted and tangled. He had a long nose, slightly bent in the crash, and hollow cheeks which seemed to push his cheekbones up. George was amazed at how Arabic he looked and he decided it was time to leave.

The old man was not happy when George got his message across. There was a lot of rapid talking amongst the party. The old man came back. He used some of the simple words that George had learned, plus some mime and a few symbols drawn in the sand. What it added up to was: not yet. Too many German patrols. Too risky. George nodded, and the serious little girl nodded too. Why take chances? There was time. When God made time, He made plenty of it.

*   *   *

“About your affidavit, old chap.”

“I've given him the letter.”

“I know, but . . . Did you use an Egyptian or an English lawyer?”

“Who cares?”

“The point is, Egyptian affidavits aren't recognized by a British court-martial.”

“OK, so my lawyer was Anglo-Egyptian. Guy named Kelly, Muhammed Kelly, very smart fellow. Satisfied?”

On the other side of the camp, one of the cooks was singing
We'll meet again, don't know where, don't know when . . .

“There never was an affidavit, was there?”

“Just shut up about it. What Lampard doesn't know won't hurt us.”

“I merely asked, old chap. Merely asked.”

*   *   *

Paul Schramm was a fair man. He gave other people the same chance that he gave himself, which was one chance and no more. Either you succeeded or you failed. When he failed, he condemned himself. When people failed him, he wrote them off. He had written off Dr. Maria Grandinetti. She had let him down and so, in his mind, he had wiped her out: eliminated all emotional value she might have had for him. An act of destruction like that was not achieved without heat, and after she had told him, with such appallingly casual frankness, that she had ended the life of Kurt Debratz and several other casualties, Schramm's rage had been intense. Now he believed it had burned itself out. He could walk away from her. Limp away, at least. If he felt frozen, that was just what you would expect when rage went cold. It came as no surprise. It was an old, familiar feeling.

Meanwhile, thank God, there was work to be done.

In the middle of reading a thick report on the Allied jamming of Luftwaffe radio frequencies and Luftwaffe countermeasures to evade such jamming, he suddenly thought of the Takoradi Trail again. Why drive? he asked himself. Just because the SAS drive everywhere, must we always copy them?

He pulled down some technical volumes and checked some figures. He found a large-scale map of the Sahara and studied it. Then he telephoned Captain di Marco.

“Suppose we put extra fuel tanks in a Heinkel one-eleven bomber,” he said, “and flew it at its most economical cruising speed, would that put the Takoradi Trail within its range?”

“It depends. From where to where, exactly?”

“From an airfield near Benghazi to . . . um . . . Fort Lamy in Chad.”

Schramm heard the faint swish of an overhead fan as di Marco thought about it. “Probably yes,” di Marco said. “In fact definitely yes.” Exultation worked on Schramm like a strong drug. “Of course the machine would not be able to bomb Fort Lamy when it got there,” di Marco said, snatching the drug away.

“Why not?”

“Because if you were to add bombs to such a load of fuel, the machine would be too heavy to take off.”

“Oh.” Schramm felt foolish. “I should have thought of that.”

“There is an alternative. It would mean establishing a landing-ground deep in the desert, for instance at Defa. The Heinkel could refuel there. That would save weight. There has been a landing-ground near Defa in the past. I have used it.”

“Look,” Schramm said, “I have no authority to ask this, but would you be willing to act as navigator? If I can get a Heinkel?”

“I might.”

“It would be something, wouldn't it? If we could bring it off.”

Di Marco did not comment. “It would be best if I spoke to Colonel von Mansdorf, I think,” he said. Schramm agreed. “Bear in mind,” di Marco added, “that I have no authority either, and that General Schaefer may not be in the mood to take risks. The last risk he took did not pay off particularly well, did it?”

Schramm tried to get back to work on Allied jamming. He was not a radio expert, but it was important for anyone in Intelligence to understand at least the basics of all things connected with air combat. He slogged on through the report and he was skimming its conclusions when the phrase
garbled signal
tripped a circuit in his brain and abruptly swamped his memory with the desperate struggle to wade through a bloody-minded railway station for a train he could never catch. The whiff of desperation was so strong that he had to put down the book, get up, walk around the room. The scene was as sharp and clear in his mind as a film in a cinema, a black-and-white film, because the train was white. All white. An all-white train.

He went down the corridor to the lavatory and washed his face. Something felt wrong: either the water was too slippery or his skin was oily; whichever it was, his hands seemed remote from his face. He went back to his office and wrote
Hospital train
on a piece of paper. The only white train he had ever seen had been a hospital train. Why had he been so hell-bent on getting on a hospital train? He tore up the paper and burned the scraps in an ashtray. He threw the ashes out of the window. He put the ashtray inside a desk drawer. He was thinking of washing his hands when he heard a faint flicker of laughter that made him stop breathing. It came from somewhere in the building and it could not possibly be anyone but Dr. Grandinetti.

It was not repeated, and soon his lungs demanded more air. He was excited—by fear, anger, delight, revenge? He
didn't know which. Maybe some, or all, or none; maybe something else altogether. It was foolish to stare at a wall, so he went into the corridor. Empty. He ran to one end and listened hard. Nothing. He ran to the other end. Someone's telephone rang. Someone answered it. Otherwise, the day was a vacuum.

The outside doors swung open and Max came in. “Hallo!” he said. “We tried to find you but you weren't in your office.” He came closer and cocked his head. “There's a bar in Bremen that makes a drink called a Suffering Bastard,” he said, “and you look as if you could do with about seven of them.”

“What's going on? What's she doing here?”

“Came to say goodbye. They're sending her back to Italy to run a new hospital in Milan. If you hurry you might—”

Schramm hurried. She was not outside the building and he ran as fast as his idiot leg would let him. It was fast enough. She was around the corner, talking to Hoffmann. Her car was nearby, the red open-top Alfa tourer. He went and sat in it.

Eventually Benno kissed her, a brotherly-sisterly kiss on each cheek, and she got into the car.

He risked one long, direct, eye-to-eye look. Same old Maria. Same old speculative glance. Same old almost-smile. If she went to Milan this might be the last time they would ever meet. There was, of course, no possibility that she might embrace him: not here, not in uniform, not in public. Even for her to take his hand was more than he could expect; what if some passing airman observed them? So she was a doctor; so what? How could she possibly know that he was wading in blood from a self-inflicted wound? He had one chance to say that meeting her had been the most astonishing experience of his life, to say that love was obviously futile and irrelevant in wartime, to say that simply knowing her was astonishing and exciting. Damn. He'd used “astonishing” twice. “Killed anybody today?” he asked.

“Have you?”

“None of your business.”

“Same here.”

“Look . . .” He was shocked by what they had said. “I'm not really angry with you.”

“Of course you're not.” She leaned across and used her fingers to smooth his brow. “Stop frowning. It makes you look like a walrus. Why are you so bad-tempered, Paul?”

Schramm gave up. He slumped in his seat. “God knows,” he said. “You've been playing God lately. You tell me.”

“All right, listen. You're angry because you know you're wrong. You keep denying this, but you're too honest to get away with it. Last time we met you weren't just angry, you were
furious.
You were in a rage with me. Why? Because I did what you had always wanted to do.”

“Kill helpless patients? Not me, doctor. Not me.”

“You wanted to be rid of Kurt Debratz. I saw it in your face. Kurt Debratz disgusted you. He was squalid, stinking, maimed, deteriorating, hopeless, useless, and full of pain, and he wasn't dying fast enough for you. You wanted to kill him. Isn't that the truth?”

“It wasn't my job,” Schramm muttered. “He wasn't my responsibility.”

“No, but he upset you, didn't he? Believe it or not, I ended his life because I loved him. I did what you wanted to do, but you couldn't admit that to yourself. In fact you hated yourself for wanting it, so you turned your anger on me instead. You couldn't afford to hate yourself, so you hated me. Simple, isn't it?”

Schramm felt pummeled. “We've been through all this before, haven't we?” he said.

“We have.”

“Do I really want to kill people? Have I got such an
appetite
for death?”

“Don't ask me. Ask yourself. That's where the answer
is. That's where it's always been. And consider yourself lucky there's a war on so you can find the truth without getting hanged for murder.” She started the car. “That will be fifty thousand lire. You can buy me lunch and then we'll go swimming.”

*   *   *

Malplacket found a shady spot in the wadi and sat down to write his will.

He had little to leave: a small house in London, slightly blitzed; a few paintings, now being looked after by a cousin in Anglesey and therefore almost certainly mildewed; an Aston-Martin on blocks in a garage in Devon, where it had run out of petrol. In any case, his wife would automatically inherit everything. Still, it gave him quiet pleasure to send a few kind words from beyond the grave. “To my wife,” he wrote, “without whose mind-numbing conversation I would never have been driven to travel so widely; without whose grudging access to her loins I might have exhausted myself in lust; and without whose few but stupefyingly tedious friends the rest of the world would have seemed to me only half as colorful, I leave everything, confident in the knowledge that my children will grow up to be inept, inane, ungrateful and greedy.” That wasn't right. “Henry,” he called, “what's a good two-dollar word that means ‘greedy'?”

“Covetous.”

“Perfect.” He made the alteration. “Many thanks.”

“What are you doing?”

“Making my will. Perhaps you would be so kind as to witness it.”

Lester came over and signed it. “Maybe I should change mine,” he said. “Ah, who cares? She'll get everything, whatever I do. The hell with it.”

They were not allowed to attend the briefing at four-thirty p.m.

“Beda Fomm,” Lampard told his patrol. “It's a big operational airfield. Not training, not transport, not repairs. Operational. Sergeant Davis and I saw at least one squadron of Me 109s and given the size of the place there could well be two. We discovered how to get in and, more important, how to get out afterward. There are only two approaches to Beda Fomm: one is overland, using tracks and trails. That's hopeless at night. We'll use the other way, the coastal road.” Gibbon had the map spread out. Lampard took them over the route. “Study it, memorize it. Any one of you might end up in command. Now the whole point of this raid is
speed.
I want to be in and out in twenty minutes. All your pencil-fuses will be long—sixty minutes. By the time the balloon goes up, we'll have vanished, be back in the Jebel, I hope. We'll take five vehicles. Three jeeps, the Mercedes and the Ford. Splash plenty of mud on it. There are lots of captured Fords on the roads back here. Clear so far? Good. That's the broad outline. Now here's the detail.”

Lampard talked for ten minutes. There were few questions. The patrol had rehearsed this kind of raid many times.

“Grub,” Lampard said. “Eat hearty. You never know when you'll get another chance.”

Malplacket took his loaded mess tin and sat beside Lester.

“Are we absolutely convinced that we want to go ahead with this?” he asked. “I mean, are we quite certain of its merits?”

“I am. This is my big crack at the Pulitzer. ‘I Walked into Hitler's Desert Fortress.' Isn't that a headline you'd kill for?
Life
magazine will beat me senseless with their checkbooks.” He batted the flies away and ate a chunk of Spam, fast, before they regrouped.

“On the other hand,” Malplacket said, “there's no point in taking unnecessary risks, is there?” He pointed his fork
at the German pistol tucked into Lester's belt. “That's purely decorative, I hope.”

“Don't worry. Any shooting I do will be with a camera.” He ate some baked beans. “You never know, I might get a close-up of Rommel.”

“Blanchtower would be thrilled, I'm sure,” Malplacket said.

Corky Gibbon, Sandiman, the doctor and two fitters stayed at the camp. The rest—Lampard with twelve men in five vehicles—set off just before sunset. Malplacket and Lester went with them, driving their bit of booty. Lester was whistling “Yes Sir, That's My Baby.” “Try not to do that in Benghazi, old chap,” Malplacket said.