The Little Book (34 page)

“You wouldn’t talk.”

Dilly nodded sadly. “If caught. Exactly. I had the cyanide pill. I just never thought I’d be caught. I’d been in France before, you know, and operated with ease. I had a lot of confidence in my ability to blend in, to make myself inconspicuous. I could look, and sound, very French, they said. It had worked so well before.” He shook his head in disbelief. “Your mother had a premonition, I guess. She didn’t want me to go back, and I had promised I wouldn’t. But this was a unique situation. The prime minister himself recruited me for it. He showed me the huge army of invasion preparing in England and told me details of how it would come. Thousands gave their lives. It was that important. It just seemed bigger than my promise to your mother. Mr. Churchill himself met with your mother to explain, you know.”

“I know. She told me.”

“Do you think I was foolhardy? Did I have an overblown sense of duty?”

“Those were monumental times,” Wheeler said. “Everyone knew that.”

“Did she forgive me?”

Wheeler smiled. “I think she just missed you. Sort of desperately. Mother figured you were as much a slave to your sense of duty as she was to her own convictions.”

The thought brought a brief smile to Dilly. “I hope so. I felt terrible about betraying her trust. She was such a committed pacifist. But it seemed so very important,” he said, serious again. “We had so much at stake, and there was an obvious need for someone to coordinate things from the inside. I knew the territory.”

He shook his head, slowly and painfully. “Then they caught me. I hadn’t been in France for more than a few days, and they picked me up outside of Lille. It was fast and certain. They seemed to know exactly whom they had. It was as if—” He stopped and shook his head. “I had a pill, and I broke it open and swallowed it, but it didn’t work. It made me pretty much violently ill, which was not the best way to go into what they had in mind for me.”

He paused for a breath. “Then they started in on me. Those people really know how to work someone over. I’ll spare you the details, but it is pretty grim stuff. I had a lot of things to sustain me and to counteract what they were doing. I thought a lot of your mother.” A gentle smile came to his lips. “I just closed my eyes and thought of her beautiful face and the way she used to tease me about my propriety. And then when the pain got so terribly grinding, and I needed something even stronger, I developed the Vienna plot. It was like creating a three-dimensional novel in my head, filled with all this—” He gestured around him. “Music and coffeehouses and your grandmother and ... you. I didn’t know about you being here: that’s a bonus. I created it all in my head, gave it all texture and life. Painstakingly, I worked out each detail, creating colors and words and shapes.

“I convinced myself that if I created it in enough vivid detail, I would travel there. So I worked and worked and shut out more and more of the awful Gestapo headquarters and the awful grinding pain—” He paused again. “The pain. The nausea, the sleep deprivation, and the repetition and the pain. It was a science for them. I never understood how it would wear one down. I really thought I could withstand it, you know, perseverance, stiff upper lip, mind over matter, and all the rest.” He stopped and looked into Wheeler’s eyes, his own filling with tears. “I had never before in my whole life—ever!—come up against a challenge I couldn’t meet.”

He continued looking intently at Wheeler, wanting very much to make him understand. “I think I was a challenge to them. So much had been said about Rouge Gorge and about how he would not talk. The Nazis with their tremendous respect for Aryan willpower wanted to see how far they could push. They put their best men on it, convinced that they could make Rouge Gorge sing, and knowing somehow that I had deep inside me the most valuable information of the war. Not just the names of key Resistance workers, but the actual kernel of information: under all the layers, I knew the exact time and place of the invasion. I should have died with the secret inside me.” He stopped, now looking physically ill.

“They set out to break me. And I dug in to thwart them. Pretty much a battle of wills, you know. Only thing was, it was no contest. This wasn’t Dover or Yale; it was the major leagues. I was a bush leaguer in Yankee Stadium. They searched for the way to get me, and finally—after hours and hours—they found it: drowning!” His eyes were piercing now. “I have this awful uncontrollable fear of drowning. And that was it!”

He had to stop. His head was down, moving slowly from side to side, recalling the grueling struggle and all the horrible pain it brought with it. “I got away. My Vienna strategy worked. I created such a believable place in my mind that I slipped away from them into it. Here I am, with you. But before I went, when the pain was at its worst and the terror began. I was so very tired—” He paused for a long moment. “That’s what you don’t count on,” he said wearily. “Being so worn down it gets to the point where all you want is for it to be over. Head held down in the tub of water. And you know there is only one way to get there.” When he looked up finally, his eyes were filled now with tears. He shook his head.

“I have always succeeded in everything all my life,” he said. “I have never failed. I have never let anyone down.” There was now a wild desperation in his eyes, and he was struggling with words and a long dark pause, the darkest. “I talked, Stan,” he said finally. He closed his eyes and continued to shake his head, holding back things that had weighed on his soul for so long. And then for the first time in his life Dilly Burden began to sob. “The great legendary Rouge Gorge
chantait
,” he cried out between sobs. “I sang. I spilled my guts and told them everything I knew.”

Wheeler just looked at his father, shocked and speechless. This just never occurred to him, not to him or to hundreds of other St. Gregory’s boys.

“Not possible,” Wheeler stammered involuntarily.

“I’m afraid so,” Dilly gasped. And he just kept shaking his head, spewing out the agony. “And then they just left me lying there. Alone with my shame for hours and hours, waiting for death, the only thing I wanted then. That’s when it started,” he said. “That’s when the plan kicked in and started to actually work.” Then he stopped abruptly.

“What plan?” Wheeler said.

Dilly went silent, shaking his head. “Escaping to Vienna,” he said finally, but Wheeler had a feeling there was more to the story.

Wheeler looked at his father. “Why Vienna?” he said. “Why here?”

“It is such a relief to know that the invasion was successful. I have been feeling that I caused the failure single-handedly. Imagine knowing something that important.”

“You think they believed you?” Wheeler said.

“They knew they had the truth. They kept going out and checking. They knew they had the plan all right.” Dilly’s quick mind was working now. “That’s why they started the rumor that I didn’t talk. They didn’t want anyone to know they knew. All the names I mentioned were safe, I’ll bet you’ll find. They didn’t want anyone to know that I’d told everything. They didn’t want anyone to know what they
knew
. All because of me.”

“As I said, I’m not a historian, but as far as I know the Germans were caught by surprise, as if they were expecting the invasion somewhere else,” Wheeler said in his most reassuring voice. “Whatever you are afraid of didn’t make much difference.”

“You are just trying to console me, and I appreciate that. It was a terrible betrayal. I’m just glad it didn’t ruin the whole thing,” he said soberly. “What I spilled to them was too specific. And I knew when I said it, it was going to cost thousands and thousands of lives, and cause the invasion to fail, but I was just too run-down—afraid of more drowning, don’t you know? They won, and they knew it. And it would wipe out the advantage of the Normandy Feint. I knew it all, but I just couldn’t hold back any more.” He shook his head slowly; his face looked drained, all the famous Dilly Burden spunk gone. “You get so tired, too tired, and don’t want any more. You just want to die in peace.” He looked up, struggling with the memory. “You don’t know what it is like,” he closed his eyes again and said slowly.

Wheeler was still back on something his father had said. “Normandy Feint,” he repeated, slowly recalling the article he had been forced to read in his Harvard days in
The Cambridge Voice
. “What is the Normandy Feint?”

“You know, that the invasion on the Normandy beaches was going to look like the big one. Hitler would move all his forces to Normandy. Then Patton would hit with the real big one: one million men storming in at Calais.”

Slowly it was all coming back to Wheeler. “A bigger one was coming a few days later somewhere else, right?”

“Of course. You know, Calais, where it happened,” Dilly said matter-of -factly, looking at his son as if to say,
boy, you really aren’t much of a historian.
“Patton’s army, waiting for the killer blow. Across from Dover Beach, the logical and obvious place where the Channel is the narrowest. And the Krauts knew it because of me.” He stopped again and looked away. “Damn!”

Wheeler shook his head, suddenly aware of the powerful new information. “I don’t know how to break this to you, Dilly Burden, but you were snookered.”

Dilly looked at him uncomprehendingly, and a little miffed. “You are going to have to explain.” But from the look on his face, Wheeler could see that Dilly was figuring it out for himself.

“There was no Normandy Feint; it was a ruse. Normandy was the whole invasion. Utah Beach, Omaha Beach, they called them. The whole Allied force landed there and fought its way across France and into Germany. There was no second invasion in Calais.”

Dilly looked even more confused. “No,” he said, trying to get a grip on what he was hearing. “You just don’t remember. It was Patton’s army. They were built up in East Anglia, across from Calais. A million strong—”

“There was no army there,” Wheeler interrupted. “It was an elaborate hoax. It was blow-up rubber tanks and trucks and equipment under fake nets, created to look like an army in waiting. They are writing spy thrillers about it now—in the 1980s. The Allies wanted to create the illusion that a second invasion was coming after Normandy, so that Hitler would not move his Panzer divisions, his real tank power, out of Calais until
after
the invading forces had a chance to build up their strength.”

“No,” Dilly said again emphatically.

“It’s true,” Wheeler said with a shrug. “It all happened at Normandy. ”

“It’s not possible.”

“It is how it happened.”

Dilly sat shaking his head. “I just can’t believe it,” he said. “There is just too much information. Too many details. All that Winston Churchill and the admirals’ men showed me.”

“That was part of what they called the bodyguard of lies.”

“I still don’t believe it,” he said, but his voice had lost its conviction. Dilly Burden was running enormous changes through his head.

“There’s more,” Wheeler said. “If it’s true, it made convincing you as important as convincing the Nazis. And I’m just going to tell it to you straight.” He pulled his chair closer and leaned both elbows on the table, closer to his father. “The whole world after the war—or at least most of it—thinks that you died heroically with your information about the time and place of the invasion sealed inside that legendary strong will of yours. But a story came out in an underground newspaper back when I was at Harvard. It claimed to have come from information from a former aide of Churchill’s and it said this—”

Wheeler told his father how, according to the exposé, the British had wanted to convince the Nazi high command that a huge invasion force, under the direction of the infamous General George Patton, was being readied for a secondary assault on France. In order to do this effectively they had engineered the famous “bodyguard of lies,” which included various intentional plants of inaccurate intelligence information in the hands of the Germans. One of the most effective means, according to this underground article, was to send the Gestapo an impeccable source, someone whose dying testimony would be absolutely believable for two reasons. First, because of his already established reputation as Rouge Gorge—who would never talk—and second because he himself would really believe the information to be accurate, thinking as he was broken to the point of talking that he was actually divulging monumentally important information. “There is a no more convincing liar,” Wheeler said in concluding, “than one certain he is telling the truth.” Wheeler let his message sink in. “You saved thousands and thousands of lives,” the son said, himself adjusting to the new twist of the Dilly Burden story he was only now absorbing. “Because of you those dreaded Panzer divisions never arrived. Because of you—” He paused, stunned by what he himself was realizing. “Because of you, the whole thing was won, the invasion, the war, everything.”

Dilly remained sitting, in stunned silence, struggling not to believe, but at the same time grabbing at the ironic fact that his giving the Gestapo information had
saved
, not destroyed, thousands of lives. “You are saying that I was plied with false information, then purposely turned over to the Gestapo for torture.”

“That must be what happened. The cyanide pill was fake. You were sacrificed. The British had been working on the plan for three years. You were their trump card. The legend of Rouge Gorge carried the final bluff.”

“And all because I was ‘so damned bloody heroic.’ ”

“I didn’t tell you this, but Mr. Churchill had a second meeting with Mother. It was after the invasion, after she had returned from France and knew what had happened to you. She was preparing to leave with me forever, to go start her life over again in California. He called her in to tell her how sorry he was about what had happened to you. He told her that he couldn’t give details but that your mission in France had been the most important single sacrifice in the whole enormous business. He gave Mother a medal, something very big. Winston Churchill was not one to show his emotions, you know, but Mother said that he cried with her when he told her that he thought of you as his own son, that you were his Isaac. It wasn’t much consolation to Mother at the time, because she wanted you alive and with her.”