Early One Morning (35 page)

In the other room he could hear Rose Miller sorting out his belongings. The woman was amazing. She’d cleared the way for his release from the Americans within hours, convinced them that Lock was a legitimate SOE target, managed to produce his Vuitton case, which he suspected she had been travelling with as her own anyway, and taken him through to a hotel around twenty kilometres west of Berlin. The city itself was still in its death throes, the Russians crawling all over the eastern districts like insects, the sounds of their artillery clearly audible. Two or three days and it would all be over. Or at least, the fighting would. There was lots of unfinished business.

‘Do you mind if I put some things of mine in your trunk?’ shouted Rose from the next room.

‘No,’ he replied, puzzled. ‘What kind of things?’

‘I have an Alphachem Zyklon can. Gold dust.’

‘What will happen to Alphachem?’

‘We’ll see. The Degesch directors are to be put on trial. War crimes.’

‘Degesch?’

‘The people who discovered what you could do with the Zyklon B. To people, I mean.’ That snapshot started to form in his brain again, the cattle truck and the faces at the St Just sidings, but it failed to hold, as if the fixing solution were defective. He knew why. He didn’t need those people any longer to remind him where the French poison gas ended up. He had Robert.

‘But Alphachem will plead ignorance,’ Rose continued, mimicking their whinings. ‘How were we to know what it was being used for?’

‘If you’d seen the trains, you’d know.’

‘Well, Alphachem were well aware they had something to hide—you know they buried thousand of tonnes of the cyanide pellets at St Just just as the Americans rolled up?’

‘Christ. And when it leaks?’

‘Ah. That’s another story. For now we nail them for what happened to the canisters you saw going east on the trains.’

‘You want me to testify?’

‘If it comes to it. Although there is a slight problem there.’

‘What?’

‘Get out and I’ll tell you.’

Williams heaved himself from the bath and wrapped a thin, threadbare towel around himself and looked at the collection of hollows that was his face in the mirror. ‘Who are you going to be now, Mr Williams?’ he asked of it.

Towel tied firmly in place he went through and stopped in the doorway to the austere room, with its peeling brass bed and grubby kitchen area. When he saw Rose twenty minutes earlier she had been wearing a WAAF uniform, rank of Squadron Leader, with a flying jacket over it. Now she was just wearing a flying jacket and nothing else.

‘Aren’t you cold?’ he asked.

She laughed, embarrassed. ‘Is that all you can say? Oh dear. Looks like I have lost all my charms.’ She began to pull the sheets round her.

Williams felt blood move in ways and to places it hadn’t for many, many months and his throat was suddenly dry. He took two steps towards the bed. ‘No … I … It’s …’

Rose held her arms out. ‘Shut up and come here.’

Eve Williams paced the clearing, marvelling at how quickly nature had recolonised the ground. A small clump of local farmers waited for her decision, their horses’ breath cloudy in the cool morning air. From her coat pocket she took the telegram and re-read it. Missing in Action. Regrets. She tore it up and threw it at the bushes. Williams wasn’t dead. There was still something inside her breathing, waiting for him. He wasn’t dead.

‘Eve?’

She turned and saw the familiar figure of Wimille. ‘Jean-Pierre!’

He took her by the shoulders and hugged her. She hadn’t seen him since that night when he had escaped from the house, but she’d had messages. He had stayed active, building up weapon stocks for D-day. Nothing flashy, nothing too glamorous. No Gestapo chases, no torture cells, no big explosions. But the guns had been there when they were needed.

‘How did you find me?’

‘Madame Teyssédre.’ Bugatti’s old secretary had survived imprisonment and worse for her efforts. Many of her family and friends hadn’t.

‘How are you, Eve?’

‘They say he’s probably dead. Somewhere called Sachsenhausen.’

‘Robert?’

‘Buchenwald they think. One of …’ She shuddered. ‘One of thirty-seven.’

‘Can I help?’ asked Wimille.

‘Can you dig?’

He laughed. ‘I can dig, why?’

She pointed at the ground. ‘The Atlantic is down there.’

‘Where?’

‘Under your feet.’

‘My God. What state is it in?’

‘We’re about to find out.’

‘Well, if it is even halfway decent, I can clean it up. I’ll have it ready for when he comes back.’

‘He is coming back, you know.’

Wimille kissed her lightly on the forehead. ‘I know.’

Eve took a deep breath, pointed to the ground and said in a loud voice, ‘OK, gentlemen. We excavate here.’

At the camp the libido went some time after the intangibles—dignity, shame, faith and hope. But disappear it did, as survival of the individual, rather than the species, took precedence. Even as he realised what was happening, part of Williams’ brain questioned what Rose was doing. Was she trying to restore confidence to a starved, damaged man, or was something less altruistic at work?

But those questions got fainter and fainter, and an unfamiliar machinery kicked into action, hormones pumping, blood moving, and even the little voice telling him it was wrong, a mistake, was snuffed out for a while.

Afterwards she lay on top of him, humming a tune he didn’t recognise. Rose looked at him and said, ‘How do you feel?’

The voice was back, the same voice you heard after a long drunken night, admonishing you for the rubbish you talked, the idiotic things you did, making you blush with shame and remorse at the memory. Except this time there was no alcohol to blame. ‘Better and worse. Guilty as hell.’

Rose kissed the end of his nose and rolled him over. Sitting astride his back she began to knead at the thin shoulders, her fingers seeking out the muscles, pushing blood into them. ‘How’s that?’

‘Well the guilt’s still there. But it feels great. Ow. Careful. Where did you learn that?’

‘From my father. Or rather doing it to my father. After he came in from the fields.’

‘What, beating the peasants?’

‘No.
He
was a peasant. A Hungarian peasant.’

Williams half turned but she pushed him down.

‘We came to England in nineteen-thirty. My father knew things were going to get bad. He wasn’t prepared for the prejudice he found even in London. So he told me, the only way to deal with snobbery is to be more snobby than they are. He set up a restaurant in Knightsbridge with his brother. Made some money. I went to Roedean. Learned to speak like this …’ She came down close to him. ‘We are all fakes, Williams.’

Rose rolled off him and scrabbled in her bag, producing a jar of coffee beans and shaking them with glee. ‘Look. How long since you had real coffee?’

‘Even longer than I had a good fuck.’

‘Mr Williams. Language.’

‘Come on, you must have heard worse in the fields.’

She pulled on the flying jacket and went over to the kitchen area, searching for a coffee grinder. ‘You tell anyone else that story and I’ll throw you back to Keppler.’

The name gave him a jolt. ‘Keppler? Is he still alive?’

‘Look in my bag.’

He reached over and unhooked it from the bedpost and rummaged around until he found a framed photograph of a small cottage next to an Austrian lake. ‘This was in Foch.’

‘It was. It’s his bolthole in Austria.’

‘He’s there now?’

She began to grind the coffee and he tried to stop watching the cute way her bottom wobbled as she did so. The windows rattled as something exploded near by and dust sprinkled from the ceiling. ‘How did he get away?’

‘The French had him. There was nothing on him. No torture, no executions. So he walked away, scot free.’

‘That’s absurd.’ Keppler’s little ploy of distancing himself was just that. A ploy. A way of making him seem above all that barbarity, while reaping its reward when need be. He had to pay.

‘Plus, of course, the French are busy trying to forget the number of people who dealt with Foch. Put Keppler on trial, let him list all his informers and it’ll be a can of worms for them.’

‘Talking of worms … Maurice?’

‘Ten years.’

‘He should swing.’

‘You can’t hang every French collaborator. Not enough gallows. Not enough trees.’

Williams looked down at the photograph one more time. ‘Why are you carrying this?’

‘Rat week.’

‘What?’

‘Rat week. Keppler may not have done any killing himself, but he certainly sent dozens, maybe hundreds, to their death. But there is something else you need to know. I said there might be a problem with you testifying against Alphachem?’

She came over with the coffee and he sipped, blistering his lips but not caring because it was so rich and wonderful and pure. She saw the look of pleasure and said, ‘American. I knew you’d like it.’

‘What’s the problem?’

‘Keppler said you were under Gestapo direction for six months after your arrest.’

He felt his throat constrict. ‘What?’

‘Virginia Thorpe confirmed it. Obst, too.’

Williams was speechless.

‘Deuxième Bureau have put a price on your head. You can’t go back. Not yet.’

‘Rose. I—’

‘Don’t say anything. Listen, I read the French interrogation transcripts. Rubbish. I could get more out of him in ten minutes than they did in two days. I had Gestapo officers like him crying like a baby within half an hour, begging to be hanged. But they wouldn’t let me at Keppler. Denazified and sent home, quick as you like.’

‘So what can I do?’

‘FX has a station at Vienna—’

‘FX?’

‘My section.’

‘I thought you were F section.’

Rose laughed. ‘That was the idea.’

‘What was FX?’

‘Best you don’t know.’

Williams spun the possibilities over in his mind. FX. Then he recalled how much she knew about Dublin. ‘You were SIS? A plant in SOE by the secret service?’

Rose took a breath and let it out slowly. ‘Kind of.’ At a bar in Jermyn Street in 1939 a friend of her mother’s had put her on the SIS payroll, while directing her towards employment with MI(R), one of SOE’s prototypes, to keep a weather eye on it. When she joined SOE proper, her loyalty to SIS remained more or less intact.

‘Kind of? Bloody hell. So tell me this. Robert was convinced that SOE sent in its agents willy-nilly in forty-three to bluff the SD and Abwehr into thinking some sort of build-up was taking place. A landing in Pas de Calais maybe. While really Sicily was where the blow would fall. I said SOE wouldn’t do that, wouldn’t sacrifice its agents. But, of course SIS might.’ He thought of that slippery bastard Slade back in Ireland. ‘Why should MI6 give a flying fuck about a few bumbling amateurs being snared. Is that right? Was Robert right?’

Rose drained her coffee, got up and washed the cup. She didn’t turn when she said, ‘Utter bilge. We never sacrificed anyone. My job was to work for SOE to the best of my abilities, except on the rare occasion when it conflicted with an SIS operation.’

‘Bollocks.’

Rose spun round, tears in her eyes. ‘No, not bollocks, the truth. You asked me once what it was like sending people off. People you got to know. Like. Love. It was bloody awful. Every minute of it. Ask Bodington or Buckmaster or Atkins. And I don’t need you making pointless shitty accusations, thank you very much.’

If it was a performance, it was a good one, and Williams muttered an apology. It probably didn’t matter now. They did what they had to to win. In the long run, he guessed the alternative was even worse than what a few hundred agents went through.

‘You were saying. FX.’

She sniffed, recovered her composure and began to get dressed. ‘Obst we’ve lost track of. Thorpe and Keppler, we know where they are. If you pick them up, I … can interview them. Off the meter, you understand. I can get signed depositions clearing you. And we can go dancing in Vienna to celebrate.’

‘And I thought this was a one-night stand?’

‘What sort of girl do you take me for, Mr Williams? You can take my Humber. I’ll get the papers drawn up and weapons issued. They’ll say you’re on War Crimes Tribunal business. Which is pretty much the truth. Can you manage it?’

He thought for a moment. The hatred would get him through it, no matter how weakened he was. He nodded. From her pocket Rose took out the diamond-encrusted Carrier watch and held it out to him. ‘Before I forget.’

And the voice in his head was loud and clear and it was his own, from many, many years ago:
If you were mine I’d never betray you.

Williams watched the diamonds dance and sparkle and said slowly, regretfully, ‘Keep it. I’m finished with it.’

Williams focused the binoculars out on the lake, bringing into sharp relief the face of the man he was after. The two others in the small boat were unknown to him. All were well wrapped against the wind rippling the lake surface, so he couldn’t be absolutely sure he had never seen them before. But he really didn’t care. Keppler was the one.

Awkwardly, like tired old men, they manhandled the steel cylinders that were at the bottom of the craft and heaved them overboard, a dozen in all. There were satisfied smiles all round and Keppler, dressed, rather incongruously, in an old British army greatcoat, restarted the engine and headed off back to shore.

Williams had pulled the Humber over to one side of the road which led down from the mountains to the dark, bowl-like Lake Senlitz where Keppler was depositing whatever records and goods they thought should be hidden from the Allies, yet saved for posterity. The alpine flowers were out, blooming across the upper meadows, where cows, released from winter quarters, were now roaming contentedly. Williams barely registered the stunning backdrop. He only had eyes for ugliness.

Williams ignored the desperate, muffled kicking from the boot and refocused on the party below.

The two unknown men leaped out of the boat as Keppler beached it on the small shingle shoreline that had been carved out of the low cliff that ran round this southern part of the lake. The trio shook hands, and his companions climbed into a battered Skoda and drove off, leaving Keppler to stow the gear. He only had a short walk, maybe two kilometres, to the small cottage so familiar from the photograph. It showed signs of repair—a freshly patched roof, a new coat of paint. No doubt it had been sadly neglected while the owner was off doing the Führer’s work in Paris. Now he had all the time in the world to fix it up.