Code Name Verity (35 page)

The Gestapo use the ground floor and 2 mezzanines for their own accommodation and offices

‘H d V' picked out in red = Hôtel de Ville

through the cellars and out to a little stone courtyard [where there is] a gate to the lower lane

—

We can get in through the cellars, front and back. There is an entrance in the lower lane at the back and a loading lift through the street at the front. The cellars are not secure and they use the bedrooms as cells. During air raids the whole place is left unguarded apart from the dogs. We will have up to two hours. We can pull the fuses, disable the generator and fill the dumb waiters with Explosive 808 when we leave.

Julie put in the great-aunt story because she thought we might have to blow the place up with her inside. That there might be no other way. And she wanted us to do it anyway.

But we won't have to leave any of the prisoners inside. We can break into the rooms with crowbars and lock picks and get everyone out. The official-looking numbers at the end in red ink are a CITY ARCHIVE REFERENCE. It will be the ARCHITECT'S DRAWINGS for the Château de Bordeaux. We will have a map of the building.

It is coming down. We are still a sensational team.

SOE LONDON – W/T MSG, DRAFT FOR
ENCODING

Regret report
your
organiser
code name
Paul of Damask Circuit and Flt Off
icer
Julia Beaufort-Stuart both killed in action 1 Dec 1943 STOP request RAF operational flight w/in France route overhead Ormaie this full moon Sat 11 Dec to create diversion enabling Operation Verity

La Cadette collected the drawings. It
turns out anyone can go digging in the Ormaie Town Hall archives, it's like – Nazi contempt for the Occupied country taken to extremes – as though they welcome the locals to come and ransack their own heritage so no one else need bother. You get searched when you enter the building of course, but not on the way out, and they didn't even
look
at Amélie's ID – she said she was working on a project for school, easy peasy. She was supposed to say she was verifying a boundary of the Thibaut farm, but when she saw how easy it would be to get in and out, she made up a simpler story on the spot. She is
so sharp
.

It took her 20 minutes during her school dinner break, and she left the pages for me to collect so she wouldn't get caught carrying them around.

It was probably a mistake to tell her to leave them in Engel's cachette. I think of it as mine, but it's Engel's. Also, I think we are supposed to avoid using cafés. I wish I'd been trained for this. It didn't matter in the end, but oh how my stomach turned over when I walked in and found Engel sitting at the table.

I started to walk past to another table, smiling my stupid plastic smile – makes me feel like a zombie this week – but she beckoned abruptly.

‘Salut, Käthe.' She patted the chair next to hers. When I sat down she stubbed out her cigarette and lit another two and gave me one. Somehow it was the most heart-stopping thing I have ever done, touching my own lips with this cigarette that had touched Anna Engel's lips a second earlier. I feel like – I know her so intimately, after reading Julie's confession. She must feel the same way about me, though I don't suppose I scare her as much.

‘Et ton amie, ça va?' she asked casually – How's your friend?

I looked away, swallowed, couldn't maintain the plastic smile. Took a drag on the cigarette and choked, haven't smoked for a while and never those French fags. After a minute or so she figured out that what I wasn't saying was not a happy ending.

She swore softly in French, a single violent word of disappointment. Then paused and asked, ‘Elle est morte?'

I nodded. Yes, she's dead.

‘Viens,' Engel said, scraping back her chair. ‘Allons. Viens marcher avec moi, j'ai des choses à te dire.'

If she had been about to cart me off to prison I don't think I could have refused – Come for a walk, I've got things to tell you? No choice.

I stood up again in Engel's cloud of smoke – hadn't even ordered anything, just as well as it always panics me to have to speak French to strangers. Engel patted the thick wad of paper folded next to her ashtray, reminding me. I picked it up and shoved it in my jacket pocket along with Käthe's ID.

It was mid-afternoon, streets not too busy, and Engel clicked into English almost right away – popping back into French only when we passed anybody. It's dead weird talking to her in English, she sounds like a Yank. Her accent is American and she's pretty fluent. Suppose Penn did tell me she'd been to university in Chicago.

We came round the corner of the back lane and into the Place des Hirondelles, the town hall square, full of armoured vehicles and bored-looking sentries.

‘I've got most of an hour,' Engel said. ‘My dinner break. Not here though.'

I nodded and followed. She kept talking the whole time – we must have looked dead casual, a couple of chums having a walk and a smoke together. She doesn't wear a uniform – she's just an employee, she doesn't even have a rank. We walked across the cobbles in front of the town hall.

‘She was crossing the street, right here, and she looked the wrong way.' Engel blew out a fierce cloud of smoke. ‘What a stupid place to make a mistake like that, right in the middle of La Place des Hirondelles! There is
always
someone watching here – the town hall on one side and the Gestapo on the other.'

‘It was the Thibauts' van, wasn't it?' I said miserably. ‘The van that nearly hit her.' A French van full of French chickens, that's what she'd said, in the first few pages she wrote.

‘I don't know. The van was gone by the time I got here. I'm sure that driver didn't want to get tangled up in an arrest. All Ormaie looks the other way when there's a beating in the Place des Hirondelles – another Jew dragged out of hiding, or some idiot throwing manure at the office windows.'

She glanced up at the offending windows – no dead bodies hanging there this week, thank goodness.

‘She put up a hell of a fight, your friend,' Engel said. ‘She bit a policeman. They got me to come and chloroform her, to knock her out, you know? There were four officers holding her down when I came running across the square with the chloroform, and she was still struggling. She tried to bite me too. When the fumes finally overwhelmed her it was like watching a light go out –'

‘– I know. I know.'

We were out of the square now. We turned to look at each other at exactly the same moment. Her eyes are amazing.

‘We've turned this place into a real shit-hole,' she said. ‘There were roses in that square when I was first sent here. Now it's nothing but mud and trucks. I think of her
every single time
I cross those cobbles, three times a day. I hate it.' She looked away. ‘Come on. We can walk along the riverfront for about half a kilometre. Have you been?'

‘No.'

‘It's still pretty.'

She lit another cigarette. It was her third in about five minutes. Can't imagine how she manages to afford them all or even where she gets them – women are no longer allowed to buy cigarettes in Ormaie.

‘I've chloroformed people before, it's something they expect of me, part of my job – I'm a chemist, I studied pharmaceuticals in America. But I've never despised myself so much as I did that day – she was so small and –'

She stumbled over her words and I had to bite the inside of my cheeks to keep from crying.

‘– So fierce, so
beautiful
, it was like breaking a hawk's wings, stopping up a clear spring with bricks – digging up roses to make a space to park your tank. Pointless and ugly. She was just – blazing with life and defiance one moment, then the next moment nothing but a senseless shell lying on her face in the gutter – '

‘– I KNOW,' I whispered.

She glanced over at me curiously, frowning, sweeping my face with her sharp, pale eyes.

‘Do you so?'

‘She was my
best friend
,' I said through my teeth.

Anna Engel nodded. ‘Ja, I know. Ach, you must hate me.'

‘No. No, I'm sorry. Tell me. Please.'

‘Here's the river,' Anna said, and we crossed another street. There was a railing all along the riverbank and we stood leaning against it. Once there were elm trees lining both sides of the Poitou here – nothing but stumps now because over the last three years they've all been cut down for firewood. But she was right – the row of historic houses on the opposite bank is still pretty.

Anna took a deep breath and spoke again.

‘When she passed out I turned her over so I could check to see if she was armed, and she was clutching her balled-up silk scarf in her fist. She must have been clinging to it all through the battle, and when she lost consciousness her fingers went lax. I wasn't supposed to search her properly, that's someone else's job, but I wondered what she'd been protecting so doggedly in her closed fist – a suicide tablet, maybe – and I lifted the scarf out of her open hand –'

She held her own palm out against the railing, demonstrating.

‘On her palm there was a smear of ink. On the scarf was the perfectly reversed imprint of an Ormaie Town Hall archive reference number. She'd written the number on her palm and tried to rub it out with the scarf when she was caught.

‘I spat on the scarf – as though in contempt of her, you understand? – and wadded it into a ball which I pressed back into her hand. But I rubbed the damp silk hard against her palm to blot the numbers out and closed her limp fingers round it, and all anyone ever found there was an ink-stained wad of cloth and
no one ever asked her about it
because she'd been filling out forms in the ration office just before she'd been caught, under the pretence of an errand for some made-up, elderly grandmother, and her fingers were covered with ink anyway.'

A flight of hopeful pigeons settled on the pavement around our feet. I am always so amazed at the way they flare and touch down – never a bounce or a prang, no one teaches them, they do it instinctively. Flying rats, but how beautifully they touch down.

‘How did you know what she wanted the number for?' I asked at last.

‘She told me,' Anna said.

‘No.'

‘She told me. At the end, after she'd finished. She was writing nonsense. I took hold of her pen to stop her, and she let go without a fight. She was tired. We'd worn her down. She looked up at me without hope – there'd be no more excuses now, no more reprieves. Ferber's orders are all supposed to be cloaked in secrecy, but we both knew what he'd tell von Linden to do with her. Where they'd send her.'

Anna hit the back of her hand lightly against the railing for emphasis and demonstrated with her cigarette, holding it as though it were a pen.

‘In the palm of my own hand I wrote: 72 B4 CdB.'