Here Be Monsters

For Shirley and John Kasik

The Pointe du Hoc, 1944—

HE HAD
been there before, but that other time he had arrived under the protection of darkness, and had departed fearfully in the half-light, with the dawn at his heels. So he had never seen the place before in his life.

What surprised him most was the grass. Somehow he hadn’t expected the grass, although it must have been there then—some of it at least must have survived the
Texas
and the
Satterlee
and the bombers. But all he could remember from the darkness was a dreadful confusion of shell-holes and bomb-craters, occasionally and inadequately illuminated by dim torchlight and the distant flash of battle flickering from Omaha and Utah.

So the grass had surprised him, not the silence—not the silence, even though the sounds of that other time were what he chiefly remembered, far more than the fear and the excitement: the natural sound of the sea on the beach below, the crunch of boots on the pebbles … and the human sounds, of whole men whispering and cursing, and wounded men crying and cursing; and the inhuman noises, of the guns far away on the beaches, and far too close from the undefined Ranger perimeter just up ahead.

But those sounds, although he could still remember them rationally, no longer echoed in his head. They were part of a fading past, unlike the surprising grass.

And it was treacherous grass, too: it had been scuffed and trampled by yesterday’s crowds, so that when he had been tempted away from the path to take an unwise look into one of the larger craters—a foolish, irrational temptation to see just what sort of hole one of those 14-inch shells from the
Texas
had made—he had slipped on the edge, and had sat down painfully on his bottom and slid half-way into the crater, scrabbling with heels and fingers.

Then the boy had appeared from nowhere—of all people, a nice solicitous American boy, just like Ronnie at the same age—just like Ronnie, coming to him down by the lake in front of the cabin, when he had hooked himself carelessly, and cried out, angry with his carelessness—just like Ronnie, just as helpful and vulnerable.

The boy had insisted on helping him out of the crater. And then he had shrugged him off angrily, just as he had pushed Ronnie away, all those years ago by the lake, with the hook still embedded in his flesh.

Ronnie
! he thought. And with that thought all the doubts and the realities—and the unrealities—of the past fell away from him, leaving only his raw determination of the last forty-eight hours.

Ronnie had a good life, with Mary and the children
—
children who were almost indistinguishable from Ronnie himself now, already dating their High School sweethearts, and not at all awed by Grandpa!

And—

And he had done everything that they
—
They
—
had asked of him, so very carefully, over the years
—

The path
(there had been no path then, never mind the grass!)
—
the path was taking him close to the cliff-edge now, even offering him some sort of wooden stairway to the beach below
(By God! That would have been damn useful, back in
‘
44!)
.

But he had to leave the path here, to make their rendezvous.

He looked back. The boy was still there, watching him doubtfully, but he couldn’t bring himself to acknowledge that concern, which would surely increase when he set off along the cliff-edge, instead of descending to the beach—

(He could remember the beach in the dark well enough, anyway: all the wreckage of the assault, and the wounded still waiting for evacuation, before his hair-raising rope-ladder climb up the cliff: he had no desire to see that beach again!)

And there was a man picking up litter around the nearest pill-box, too. And he wasn’t at all sure that he hadn’t been followed; although such matters were outside his remit; besides which, it might be they themselves who were watching over him; and, in any case, it was their business now; and, in the last case of all, it didn’t matter now, anyway—

He had done everything they had asked of him, so carefully, so very carefully, over all the years
—
and, until now, so successfully
…
First, out of conviction; then in doubt, then out of necessity
(even then to protect Ronnie, maybe?);
and finally almost out of habit
—
? But he had done it, anyway
!

But now, when it mattered most or least
(he honestly didn’t know which now),
he had given himself this last instruction of all, which would save everyone a great deal of trouble
—
Them, him, the Central Intelligence Agency, and Ronnie
—
and Ronnie and the grandchildren most of all
!

He just had to find the right place, that was all.

And it had to be out of the boy’s sight—and the pillbox-poking Frenchman’s … and there was someone else, further away, also scavenging among the debris of yesterday’s anniversary celebration …

It had to be the right place: the beach below, memory reminded him, was of pebbles and fallen rocks. But he must get the maximum height, to do it right—

It wasn’t as simple as he’d thought it would be, from the recollection of that original climb, and the dark descent, when he’d had a young Ranger to shepherd him, making light of the hazards which had left him in a hot-and-cold sweat. And the grass was still treacherous and slippery.

But now he was almost out of sight of the boy. And the slipperiness of the grass was in a way a bonus: they would say ‘
Silly old fool! He ought to have known better than to have gone so close to the edge
!’ And the boy could testify that he had slipped once, already—another bonus!

Here, then? He advanced cautiously towards the edge. Beyond it, the empty sea crawled towards the invisible beach far below, from an equally invisible horizon where it joined the grey evening sky. But there wasn’t a sheer drop: the edge had been gouged and smashed by the bombardment of long ago, presenting him with an unsatisfactory descent.

Further along, then. At this rate he would soon reach the place where the actual meeting was scheduled. But that was not for another quarter of an hour (and of course they would be on time; although that was a purely academic virtue now).

It had been a cutting of some kind up which he had originally scrambled finally, and down which he had descended later, so far as he could remember; it might even be the same cutting. There had been a dead German in it, half-way up, on whom he had nearly trodden, and a row of dead Rangers at the top. He could have joined them that night, quite easily: it had happened to a good many of them that day, and probably more than half those who had survived had died in a thousand other ways in the thousands of days since then; he was really doing no more now than joining that majority, bowing to their vote.

And here was that cutting, surely. But, most annoyingly, there was a young French couple tightly embracing each other at the head of it, the girl’s long legs pale in the grass, the man’s hand on her breast. That wouldn’t suit his contact at all! But, then, that hardly mattered.

Rather than disturb the couple, even though the climb-down taxed his strength considerably, he negotiated the steep side of the cutting, until he came breathlessly to the bottom of it, close to the edge of the cliff again. Only when he reached it, he felt a stab of pain under his ribs as he saw the steepness of the other side, which he now had to ascend; and as he tried to catch his breath the thought came to him:
Why not here, then
?

Once again he explored the cliff-edge. There was, at last, a perfectly clean drop: the pebbles and boulders were perhaps fifty feet below him.

But was that enough?

He stared down, suddenly fascinated by what he had never seen in daylight, remembering the torchlight glimpses of wrecked equipment and dead men’s boots protruding from under blankets on that same margin between the cliff and the sea.

Did he really want to die? It had seemed so easy and so logical, these past few days
—
why did it seem so difficult now?

He looked out towards the darkening horizon. He had done everything that they had asked of him, even down to that meeting with the Englishman. They would keep their promise now—of that he was sure. So why not—

He heard a shout behind him, and turned towards it in surprise.

The young Frenchman was running down the cutting towards him—

‘M’sieur! M’sieur!’

The old man glimpsed the girl higher up, smoothing down her rumpled skirt as she looked around her. The skirt had a floral pattern, and she was wearing a white sleeveless blouse. And she was dark-haired, and although he couldn’t see her face clearly he was sure that she was pretty. And he was suddenly overwhelmingly glad that the young man was coming to rescue him.

He opened his mouth to say something, without quite knowing what he was going to say. But the young man caught his arm fiercely before he could speak, and swung him round so that he was facing the grey blankness of the sky. Then he had no more time at all as the young man broke his back expertly and propelled him outwards over the cliff.

ELIZABETH EXAMINED
herself dispassionately, first close-up in the large mirror over the washbasin, and then cap-a-pied in the full-length mirror on the wall to her left, beside the window.

As usual, the splendid view from the window diverted her attention away from herself. It was so much better than the forbiddingly administrative outlook from her own office, which was on what Paul referred to as ‘the Lubianka side’. In fact, the ladies’ room as a whole was better than her office, in view and size and furniture, as well as in the fragrant cleanliness which Mrs Harlin required. The very existence of such a palatial ladies’ room, catering for the needs of only two ladies, had to have originated in some architectural accident or plumbing exigency. But it nevertheless also inhibited her from complaining about her own broom-cupboard office: no one could accuse a department with a ladies’ room like this of sexism.

She returned to the consideration of herself. No one, either, could quarrel with that hair or that figure, or the clothes. It was the face which was the problem.

The door opened behind her, and she caught a glimpse of Mrs Harlin’s head and shoulders in the mirror before she turned.

‘Oh—there you are, Miss Loftus!’ Mrs Harlin always addressed her formally, even in the sanctuary of the ladies’ room, as though they were on camera there too.

Elizabeth smiled gratefully, almost honestly, as to an important ally in the game of life. ‘Oh, Mrs Harlin—‘ she touched her hips lightly ‘—is this really right for me? What do you think?’

The question sucked Mrs Harlin fully into the ladies’ room, her duty momentarily forgotten. Instead, her official face became sisterly-motherly, as it always did on appeal. ‘Is it washable?’

‘So they say. But it was a tremendous bargain,’ lied Elizabeth, sorting her real questions into the right order, but holding back from them.

‘It’s a beautiful dress—quite beautiful.’ With her widow’s pension as well as her salary, Mrs Harlin wasn’t short of a buck (as Paul was wont to observe so coarsely), but she also had a natural dress-sense almost as infallible as Madame Irene’s. So what gave this ploy substance was that her advice was always genuinely worth having.

‘But the colour, Mrs Harlin—this shade of green?’ Elizabeth held steady. ‘For me?’

‘Oh … yes, Miss Loftus—‘ Mrs Harlin’s eye swept upwards inexorably ‘—with your hair. And that sculptured style is
so
becoming.’

She had almost managed to miss the face, thought Elizabeth, turning back to the mirror. That face—that damned hereditary face, which had somehow contrived to jump back more than two centuries on the maternal side, skipping women who had usually been handsome and recently even beautiful, to reproduce exactly the features of the eighteenth-century Varney who had been an Admiral of the Blue in the West Indies and whose oil-painted features—brutal chin, buck-teeth and arrogant nose—no doubt off-put visitors to the National Portrait Gallery now as much as they had once done his crew, and probably his Franco-Spanish enemies too.