Gifts of War (41 page)

I could see Greg along the corridor, kneeling, with a body lying on the carpet beside him.

I approached warily. The man beside Greg wasn’t moving, so I gained in confidence as I came closer.

Greg stood up. “I broke his neck,” he whispered. “Quieter than what you did. We’d better go.”

“What about the money?”

He lifted the lid of the silver tureen.

“That’s more money than you’ll ever see again.”

And so, I killed a man. I killed a man. That takes some saying. Yes, I had spent however many months it was in the trenches and had, I am sure, shot several Germans on the other side of no-man’s-land. But they were a proper enemy, in uniform, on a proper battlefield, nearly a
hundred yards away. I had never actually
seen
anyone I had killed, even assuming I had done so. But now I had killed someone I knew, who was not ten feet away from me, wearing a jacket and trousers just as I was. And I had seen him go from living and breathing, looking nervous but still a cocky little Cockney as he had always been, to being slumped in a stairwell, unmoving, his head at an awkward angle to his body, his ankle mangled in a misformed twist, and patches of black-red blood on his shirt and face.

Yes, he was a traitor in wartime and he would have killed me without thinking twice if I had given him the chance. It doesn’t make any difference. I knew next to nothing about Romford, whether he’d ever had a family, a wife, children—people who loved him, who depended on him and would miss him, whose lives would be changed out of all recognition by what I had done to him. Part of me didn’t care, part of me did. I was shocked, exhausted, drained.

Greg and I didn’t hang around after our own little war-within-the-war. Still wearing our white coats, we took the trolley down two floors and, while no one was about, slipped into the men’s lavatory and removed our disguises. We took the bag with the money, left the trolley, and went back into the lift and dropped down to the ground floor. We strolled out by the main entrance.

When we reached the consulate, Greg took me to the Venner and sat me at a table. He gave me a large whisky and murmured, “Stay there.”

He was back minutes later, with Rebecca, who sat next to me and gave me a big kiss. “Well done!” she whispered. “Now I can start to feel clean again. You’ve released me, Hal. I can’t thank you enough.”

I just looked at her. I felt washed out and, yes, now that she had raised it, unclean.

She leaned against me and took my hand in both of hers. “You look beat up.” She turned to Greg. “He can’t go back to his hotel in
this state. I’ll take him to our flat. Liesl and I will look after him to night.”

I thought I saw a flash of envy sweep quickly across Greg’s face but all he said was “Fine by me. I think we got away without being seen. In any case, I’ve got to write up my report, and encode it. Having the office to myself will help.”

Rebecca and Liesl’s flat was obviously occupied by women. It had all those little touches—flowers, photographs, fancy silk cushions, small woollen animals—that only women take the trouble to acquire and spread around in all the right places.

Liesl was already there, and when Rebecca gave her the news about Romford’s death, she came over and also gave me a big kiss. I was made to take a bath, with another whisky to go with it, given a huge toweling bathrobe, and then, for lunch, we all had a bowl of hot soup in the kitchen. Then they put me to bed. Liesl closed the curtains, Rebecca turned out the light, and they quietly closed the door.

It felt odd, going to sleep in broad daylight. It was like being back in childhood when, in summertime at least, Izzy and I were made to go to bed long before it got dark and much to our displeasure. Hearing our parents up and about, even giving dinner parties, was to Izzy and me just about the cruelest thing imaginable, when we were tucked up in boring bed.

I tossed and turned for about twenty minutes, but then dropped off into a profound sleep. I slept for hours and when I woke up I couldn’t at first remember where I was. Then it all came back to me and the sick feeling in my stomach returned.

I had killed someone.

I lay on my back and looked at the shadows on the ceiling. It was a molded surface not unlike the one in our flat in Penrith Mansions,
where the traffic on the Embankment cast moving shadows on the ceiling there too. Would Sam be lying in bed now, wide awake, as I was, and on my side? Would she be reading her psychology books, or would she have Will in bed with her? Had she allowed that habit to grow while I had been away? Was he over his mumps by now? Was he going easy on Whisky?

How I missed home, and what extraordinary things a home is made up of.

How was my mother?

But at least I was now free to go home. Maybe, as I traveled back by the many trains I had arrived on, I would begin to forget that I had killed a man.

The noises and the ambient light told me two things: it was night and it was raining. I didn’t know how late it was so I got out of bed and went to stand by the window, to catch the light from nearby streetlamps. From my watch I could see it was just after midnight.

As I gazed down at the wide boulevard that Rebecca and Liesl’s flat overlooked, I heard a sound. It was softish. Were the women still up, or was there an intruder in the flat? Surely not? With a jolt I was suddenly afraid all over again. Had someone on Romford’s side found out where I was recovering and come for revenge?

I opened the door to my room and peered out. The corridor was empty. There was light coming from the doorway to another room, but from its intensity it was probably a streetlamp from outside.

I heard a whisper.

Now thoroughly alarmed, I eased out into the corridor. I had on the terry-cloth robe, and my bare feet made no sound on the carpet that ran the length of the passageway. What was I going to do if I
was
being stalked and there
was
someone in the flat bent on revenge? I had left the gun with Greg.

As I passed the second door I froze.

Light from the street outside streamed amber across the room. Liesl, totally naked, lay on her back on the bed. A shaft of light fell across her breasts, leaving her stomach in shadow. She had her eyes closed but was whispering.

“Yes … oh yes … there, please,
there!”

In deeper shadow, Rebecca had her head between Liesl’s thighs. She was naked, too, half on and half off the bed, the runnel of her spine visible as a still darker shadow down her back.

I shouldn’t have been there. But Liesl was very beautiful, in the half-light, her skin smooth and honey-colored in the glow from the street. She moved languidly—her shoulders, the swelling of her breasts, the backward arch of her throat as she sobbed in pleasure, the way her lips closed and opened, the flat smooth expanse of her belly. I was transfixed.

I didn’t notice that she had opened her eyes and was looking at me. When, finally, I did realize that she was gazing straight at me, I blushed, though I doubt she could see that in the dim light. But she hadn’t moved. Instead, she raised one arm and, with her fingers, beckoned me into the room.

Sensing movement, Rebecca turned her head in my direction. She smiled. “You slept for ages,” she said softly. “We wondered whether to wake you. Come in.”

She moved up the bed, turned, and lay next to Liesl, her arm around the other woman’s shoulders.

Two very beautiful women, naked, lying there before me on the bed, in the dim glow thrown by the streetlamps. A gentle rain falling outside.

I had stopped blushing but my face still burned. My whole body burned. It was an exotically erotic scene and the juices in my body were flooding my system. But, suddenly, it was Sam I was longing for. Longing? The German word,
Sehnsucht
, says it much better. It was Sam
I wanted, Sam’s flesh I longed to … People back home might disapprove of us living together, but what did they know? I wanted Sam, violently.

Liesl ran her fingers up the inside of Rebecca’s thigh and she moaned. She opened her legs slightly and as she did so her arm fell over the side of the bed, in an attitude—in that light—reminiscent of Romford’s arm in the stairwell earlier in the day, after I had shot him.

I gripped the doorknob with my clammy hand. “Thank you,” I whispered. “Good night.” I closed the door behind me and returned to my room.

At breakfast the next morning, Liesl wore a silk kimono as a dressing gown, Rebecca a long man’s shirt. No one referred to the events of the previous night, but they were exceedingly affectionate toward me, lavishing attention on me, touching my hand or cheek in very tender ways. Rebecca was taking real risks for her country and what she had done with Romford had been a terrible ordeal, and they wanted me to know that in killing him, I had put something right with the world— with their world anyway.

I stayed in Zurich a few more nights, to allow time to elapse between the killings at the Bar au Lac and my departure. Von Maltzen had been a Swiss citizen, after all. The maid at the hotel who had looked so doubtfully at us could have given the police a description. Had she noticed my slight limp, the accents with which Greg and I spoke German? Would some clever Zurich detective put two and two together?

But no one came looking for us and, after the best part of a week, we judged it safe for me to leave.

The last night I spent in Zurich, I took Liesl and Rebecca to a
very smart restaurant by the lake. We had too much to drink and we all, I think, got a little maudlin. At one point Rebecca kissed my ear, then nibbled it, and said, “Have you ever been to bed with two women, Hal?”

“No.”

“Do you want to tonight?”

Liesl leaned forward and put her hand on my thigh. “Our farewell gift.”

“I’m flattered,” I replied.

“You weren’t flattered the time before. You turned us down.”

I didn’t take that up either.

What I did do was tell them about the Christmas truce, my meeting with Wilhelm, the business with the cigars and the Christmas pudding, the photograph he gave me, my meeting with Sam, what I had done and not done—everything. I told them I had almost confessed all to Sam that day in Hyde Park, how I had made a mistake in referring to the fact that Wilhelm came from Mannheim—I got it all off my chest. I was never going to see them again, they would never meet Sam, and it was good—cleansing, purgative—to be able to tell someone, to listen to myself tell the story and see their reaction.

They didn’t judge me. I suppose I knew they wouldn’t, and that’s why I felt able to talk to them. They didn’t judge Sam, either.

“Look at me,” said Rebecca. “I’m sleeping with the enemy, too. Liesl’s half Austrian.”

I shook my head. “You’re not deceiving each other. Everything between you is honest, out in the open… clean.”

“But it wasn’t always,” said Liesl. “You can’t think it’s easy, being a lesbian. Zurich’s only tolerant now because so many extraordinary people are sitting out the war here. It’s only become bohemian recently.”

Rebecca put her hand on my knee. “Find your happiness where you can, Hal. It’s a pity Romford wasn’t Wilhelm. You could have solved everything in that stairwell.”

“I couldn’t have killed him, if he’d been Wilhelm.”

“How do you know? What has happened, has happened. Make the most of it. War allows you to … to step outside the normal boundaries. We did.”

They were different boundaries, of course, but I didn’t say so. We drank more wine and went on to the Pantagruel, where we smooched on the dance floor and kissed and drank some more.

I was sorry to leave them. They were good for me. The next day they came to the station to see me off, and Rebecca slid a small package into my hand as I stepped onto the train. They then stood on the platform, waving as the train pulled away. Those wartime friendships were very intense, as Izzy had warned me.

As the train for Geneva picked up speed, I settled into the carriage and unwrapped the package Rebecca had given me. It was a book and fixed inside it was a note: “I never told you about this. I stole it during my ordeal with Romford. Maybe it will help. xx R.”

Puzzled, I opened the book. It was, to my surprise, a sketchbook. Romford, it appeared, liked to make sketches as he went along—and he wasn’t bad, not bad at all, revealing a hidden talent I’d never dreamed he had.

The book fell open at a sketch of Rebecca; he was good enough with his likenesses that there was no doubt as to who it was. Rebecca, asleep in bed, naked, her breasts visible above the sheets. Is this what she meant? Was this drawing in some way intended to help me? Did she think the drawing indicated a deep lust or love for her, on Romford’s part, and that had I not done what I had done, she would have been tormented by him until she went out of her mind?

I leafed through the book, backward toward the beginning. Scenes
of Zurich, scenes of London, scenes that I recognized as Stratford-upon-Avon.

And then I saw what she meant.

A drawing of me. There was no mistaking who it was: me on my motorcycle. Except that Romford had made a caricature of my features. My teeth were fangs, my fingers—gripped around the cycle’s handlebars—were talons, and there were two small horns sticking out from my forehead. It was a drawing filled with loathing.

I snapped the book shut. Romford had been a traitor and a boor, but in his sketch of me was he entirely wrong?

The train was picking up speed now, as it hurried along a narrow valley between two mountains.

Though Rebecca and Liesl had done their best to reassure me, my behavior in Stratford and Middle Hill still troubled me, still hovered at the back of my mind. My deception hadn’t eaten at me enough yet to prompt me to tell Sam the whole story, from Plumont to Sedgeberrow to the change of plan that had formed in my mind that day when I had sat in the Lamb in Middle Hill, after I had seen her on playground duty. But nor would the cloud that shrouded my conscience go away completely. My position was so … so ramshackle. If, during the weeks I had been away, Sam had looked in my briefcase, she would have found Wilhelm’s photograph, and my whole deception would—even now—be exposed. I might be going home to a bloodbath. But that was my own fault. I had no choice but to live with the lie I had manufactured. It had brought me great happiness but a happiness that could be destroyed— vitiated, ravaged—in a moment, in a flash, at any time.