I Can't Begin to Tell You (6 page)

Curious.
The little man with his dry cough was the kind of person whom Felix found himself wishing to protect. Security reasons forbidding them to share their field names, they exchanged code names. ‘Mine is Vinegar.’ He trilled an arpeggio up Felix’s sleeve with his fingers.

He was telling Felix he was a pianist. Well, that was two of them, at least. The section heads had promised that they would send in more pianists as soon as they could train them, but couldn’t make any promises as to when that would be possible.

They warmed their bums in front of the fire, and having been chilly on the drive this made Felix almost too hot.

‘I would kill for a drink,’ Vinegar confided to Felix, ‘but I daren’t.’ They were speaking in Danish. ‘Are you scared?’

‘Yes. You?’

‘Shitless.’ Vinegar articulated the word with great precision. He pointed to the third Joe patrolling the barn entrance with an empty glass clutched in his hand. ‘So’s that one. But he’s choosing to drink instead of owning up.’

Felix smiled. Vinegar was nice.

The dispatching officer was professionally cheerful. ‘No need to worry, you’ve got a top-hole pilot. The best. He’ll fly just above the water and Jerry won’t clock you. Makes the old bus skim like a bird. Not many can do that.’

Ten minutes later they were led out to the waiting Halifax.

The dispatching officer had spoken with a forked tongue. It was a tricky journey flying low over the Skagerrak. They were crammed into the plane’s fuselage. No leg room. Bodies rigid and the plane creaking and shuddering like a haunted house. Wrapped in shock-absorbent Koran fibre, the wireless sets – Felix’s and Vinegar’s – swung like demented pendulums from the strut to which they had been strapped.

Felix could make out Vinegar across the cramped space. As pianists, they had even more in common. To wit: their life expectancies were short. Less than short.

Both
of them knew it.

He had just closed his eyes when the pilot made a ninety-degree turn and sent him crashing into Vinegar. Not a good move. Vinegar groaned, retched and vomited into a bag.

The smell was awful and it wasn’t just the vomit. Petrol. Sweat. Flatulence. Stale burned-engine odours.

Sweat slid down between Felix’s buttocks but his skin was as cold as ice.

Vinegar was glassy and sweating, too, like a pig. ‘Sorry,’ he murmured. ‘Not what was ordered.’

Vinegar retained his precise inflection despite his palpable fear, which Felix judged to be of the knee-knocking, bowel-loosening variety. He cursed silently. That sort of fear was infectious and he didn’t wish to catch it.

Again, without warning, the Halifax lurched upwards.

A shout through the speaker tube: ‘Tracer flak. Hold on.’

A corkscrew dive.

Predictably, Vinegar was sick again. Afterwards, he pulled his knees up to his chin and bowed his head. He was a picture of wretchedness. Felix and the third Joe managed to keep sitting upright.

‘For Christ’s sake,’ mouthed the dispatching sergeant into the speaker tube. ‘Not so low. We’re about to hit the water.’

Up they went again. This time in a scuddery ride across the sky towards the target drop zone.

The red light snapped on.

The dispatching sergeant hooked up the static lines of each of them in turn and jabbed Felix in the ribs to indicate what he had done. ‘Ready?’ Then he lined up the containers which would go in after the parachutists.

The light flared into green.

Vinegar jumped first. A small mercy, given the state of his stomach. His set was pushed out behind him.

Next out was the third Joe who disappeared into the night sky.

Don’t
forget what we have tried to ram into your heads
…

The dispatching sergeant’s hand pressed down onto his shoulder. ‘It’s a go,’ was screamed into his ear.

A push.

Jumping.

My God, he was jumping …

The cold, heavy air slapped away the stinks of the Halifax but the shapes rearing up towards him were more menacing than he remembered from training, the slap and whine of the air in his ears was magnified to a louder roar and the tug on the parachute when he landed was tougher to control.

Moonlight splayed over the turf where he found himself, flat out and tangled up in lines, and he smelled mud and cold grass and just a whiff of brine. Raising his head, he spotted his wireless set with its parachute streaming out like a Portuguese man-of-war. The seconds spun by. Disorientated, head swimming, he thought:
I am home
.

A couple of figures pelted towards him.

Training kicked in. Felix scrabbled for the harness straps and hauled in the parachute. There was no sign of Vinegar or the third Joe.

‘Welcome,’ the first figure said as he loped up. ‘I’m “Jorgen”.’ He grabbed at the parachute and helped Felix to roll it up. ‘We have to get going. The police are moving in. A
stikker
has tipped them off.’

No time for passwords. No time for thinking. Felix was hustled towards the van parked at the edge of the field.

‘The others?’

‘Wind got them. We think they’ve landed a mile or so back. A couple of the men have gone to pick them up.’

At the very least, he needed to know if Vinegar and his set were safe. ‘Can we check on them?’

‘No,’ said Jorgen. ‘Don’t you understand?’

Two other men loaded the wireless set into the van, hoisted in the containers with the guns and explosives which had come
down safely with it, and shoved Felix inside. His legs and torso smarted from the hard landing. The engine choked into life.

He leaned out and said to Jorgen, ‘Let me know about the other two. It’s important.’

Jorgen ignored him. ‘Hurry,’ he said to the driver. Then he turned to Felix. ‘You’ve been away too long,
ven
. Can’t hang around. Everywhere is riddled with
stikker
. You can’t trust anyone.’ He added with menace: ‘The fuckers.’

The A Mark II* wireless set. Three compartments – receiver, transmitter and power supply – complete with headset, the crystal plus a spare, eight fuses, a screwdriver and sixty feet of antenna wire. The total weight when packed into a suitcase was approximately twenty pounds.

Felix looked at it. What had The Firm’s boffins been thinking when they constructed this one? Not only was it cumbersome, but there was nothing quite as obvious as a man in wartime carrying a heavy-looking case.

But he had to deal with it. Having landed in the south of Funen, he was aiming to make for a safe house in Køge run by ‘Jacob’. From there he would make contact with ‘Freya’.

Making his way east, he needed his wits and his training as he was passed down the resistance line – men and women who fed him, sheltered him and handed him onwards – always heading towards Køge and the rendezvous. It took over a week. Days when he experienced fear and distrust – how could he not? – and became reacquainted with profound loneliness. It would be, The Firm’s instructors promised him, an education in the ways of the self.

Do you trust yourself, sonny? Do you believe in yourself?

They knew what they were talking about.

He reached Køge in one piece. A skim of porridge ice was shuffling over the sluggish sea around the port, creaking and groaning with the currents. A thicket of masts poked up inside the harbour. Berthed boats thudded and clinked with the ebb and flow of the water. Apart from a solitary tanker out on the horizon, the sea was empty of vessels.

He permitted himself a moment to gaze up the coast towards
København, only a short train journey away. Once he had established the Køge network, he would dig in there.

Back in London, Felix had been briefed on Jacob, who would be his main contact in the area. Jacob was unmarried and lived alone, which sounded ideal. But you could never be sure.

‘Give me a percentage of how trustworthy Jacob is?’ he demanded of the briefing officer.

‘Reports are good. But you can only go so far with reports. Up to you to judge.’

The question of trust – how much, how little, where, was it plentiful or in short supply, had it run out? – had become everyday currency. It added a depth and provocation to the thought processes.

Located on the western outskirts of Køge, Jacob’s cottage was a traditional building of the type Felix knew so well from his upbringing in Odense, with a slate roof and a large gable. On entering a small downstairs room, he was hit by a familiar stew of smells: tobacco, old rope, wet wool, a hint of sealing wax, wood smoke. In the rudimentary kitchen there were whiffs of salt fish, grease and rancid oil for the lamps – the things necessary for survival. But over and above these was the stink of what he knew so well from his work: grinding poverty, the elements of which he had striven to eradicate in his modern designs. The only thing from that childhood home which was missing in this cottage was the primitive odour of his own fear of his father, who had beaten Felix regularly as he grew up.

Jacob turned out to be in his early twenties: a fair-skinned acne sufferer, thin to the point of emaciation. Over a rough and ready meal of herring and bread, he brought Felix up to date. German and British aircraft had been busy in the skies, propaganda was being dropped by the British, Køge was riddled with
stikker
, local bus services were pretty much suspended and only the rich could afford petrol.

Felix got the message. Jacob was a communist who wanted
to make it clear that Felix was the outsider. Still, he had courage and principle and gratitude was due to him.

Later, Jacob showed him the bicycle Felix could use. ‘Do you know where you’re going?’

Before he left the final training school, Felix had studied the map and the briefing notes.

Rosenlund. Three miles west of Køge. An estate of approximately 3,000 acres with the house at its centre, plus lake with wood.

Further intelligence revealed that lack of public transport ensured it was pretty much isolated, which made it ideal for Felix’s purposes.

‘Don’t get caught with a map,’ Jacob said, opening the chest under the window. ‘Maps are hard to find, and if you do get caught with one the police will assume you’re a terrorist and hand you over to the
Gestapomen
.’ He shoved over an oilskin, a jacket and overalls. ‘Take these.’

‘Thanks.’ The overalls were too short and smelled of sweat and God-knew-what. But they would do.

When Jacob went to fetch something else, Felix shrugged off his jacket and whipped out his penknife. Slitting open the cuff of the right-hand sleeve, he extracted a leather pouch and checked the contents. Ten diamonds.

Bloody guard with your life. They’re White Africans and a couple are four carat.

The Danish section chief had been precise in his instructions. Again and again, Felix had been made to run through the names of contacts in København to whom he could sell them, then bank the money and use it to fund operations.

He readied himself. It was then Jacob sprang a surprise. Emerging from the lean-to by the cottage’s back door, he thrust at Felix a leather box into which air vents had been cut. ‘Pigeons. They were dropped a day ago.’

‘What
the – ?’ Felix eyed the box. ‘I wasn’t told anything about pigeons.’

Jacob wasn’t having any of that. ‘Apparently your contact is expecting them. I can’t deal with them. The drop yesterday has stirred everything up locally so you would be wise to use them for messages until things have settled down again.’

The bicycle was a boneshaker. With the pigeons stowed in the basket under some carrots and cabbage leaves and the wireless set strapped onto the back he felt conspicuous in a bad way. ‘Poor devils,’ he informed the pigeons. ‘Your life isn’t your own. Neither is mine.’

A wind sliced into his cheek. Even the oilskin offered no real protection against the chill and he was taking time to warm up. Above him Mars was making its early evening debut. The ash trees, the larches, the wind in the pines, the flat fields and the shrieks of the birds … these elemental pieces of Denmark were seeded into the workings of his body and spirit. Without question, this was his country, and with every step, with every rattling cold breath he took into his lungs he was repossessing it.

He was beginning to feel better.

The journey to Rosenlund took longer than expected. His bloody fault. At a crucial junction, he forked right instead of left and was forced to retrace his route. So much for the map study. Half an hour into the agreed waiting period, he slipped into the Rosenlund estate via the gate and pedalled alongside the wood. When the lake came into sight, he dismounted and wheeled the bicycle into the tree cover. The pigeons protested at the jolting. ‘Shut up,’ he told them. All the same, he took pity, slinging the box around his neck to give them a softer ride.

He knew from the map that the wood formed a tongue-shaped clump which ran parallel to the lake. Cautiously – checking, always checking, to the right, to the left, over his shoulder – he manoeuvred through the trees.

Contact: Freya.

London
told him that she had been set up by ‘Odin’ but nothing much more was known. She had to be taken on trust.

A glint of water through the trees rewarded him. So, too, did the figure of a woman waiting between three birches and the solid block of an oak. He clasped the handlebars tight. ‘What are you reading?’

She didn’t reply at once and Felix had a bad moment. Then she said: ‘Steinbeck’s
The Moon is Down
.’ The answer sounded unpractised and there was a hint of a foreign inflection.

He breathed out a long breath.
Thank God
.

They sized each other up. She, awkward and, clearly, feeling her way.

‘I’m sorry I took so long.’

‘My instructions were to wait for three days.’ She was sounding more confident. ‘Then abandon it. I had almost given you up.’

He detected a note of regret. ‘I’ve just made it, then.’

‘We’ll have to wait until the estate workers have finished their work and gone home …’

Again, he detected hesitancy. He propped the bicycle against a tree and settled the birds against his chest. ‘It’s cold.’

Unusually for him, a veteran of the Odense winters, the cold was bothering Felix. Perhaps it was tiredness? The instructors had warned of how low temperatures and too little sleep cranked the body down into second gear and sapped morale.

She glanced upwards. ‘The snow is on its way. I hate to think it won’t be warm again until spring. That’s the worst thing. Not like –’ She didn’t finish the sentence.

He suddenly realized that she wasn’t Danish. The foreign inflection had given her away, and he took a bet with himself that she had been going to say:
Not like England
.

He squinted down at her. Tall, forty-three, possibly forty-five, wearing woollen trousers, a belted suede jacket plus fur-lined boots. It crossed his mind that it wasn’t fair that Freya looked
fit and healthy while English women were battling with rationing. It kept them slender enough, but the lack of cream and butter meant that their hair didn’t shine nor their skin glow. Plus, those battling English women had to make do with skimpy and badly fitting clothes.

‘The pigeons …’ He directed his thoughts on to the business in hand. ‘Were you expecting them?’

‘Ant –’ She corrected herself. ‘Odin sent me a second message after I got the one about you, warning me about them.’ She didn’t elaborate but glanced at her watch. ‘Not long now. Leave the bicycle.’ She crept forward to the point where the trees gave way to a stony shore.

Felix checked his Browning pistol in his jacket pocket, unloaded the wireless set, laid the bicycle down flat between two tree trunks and adjusted the strap of the pigeon box over his shoulder.

He edged forward.

Freya’s hand shot out and stopped him in his tracks. ‘Don’t move.’

No need to be told twice.

For someone starved of feminine company, the voice in his ear was liquid honey. ‘It’s one of our farm workers taking the short cut home.’

Who was she?

Don’t ask. That was the rule.

It hadn’t taken more than a day undercover for Felix to discover that some of the rules talked up by Home Station were useless, and others hadn’t been thought of. They needed thinking about. He would suggest them when … when he returned. Far more useful probably was the advice given by his instructor who taught him about enemy organizations.

The country you knew before the war will have changed. Spare a thought, too, for what’s going to happen to it when the war is over. It will change again.

The breeze was strengthening and a strand of Freya’s hair
whipped across Felix’s cheek. She brushed it away and, catching a hint of perfume, he felt a stab in his guts. Lust? They had been warned about that, too. Those tough, gifted instructors at The Firm’s STSs had thought about most things.

The body has no discrimination. It muddles responses and very often equates desire with danger.

They moved forward. Felix strained to make out the terrain. He knew from his briefings that there was a large lake with an island more or less at its centre. This had a jetty and some sort of summer house on it. In the distance there were arable fields and cottages and, a mile or so away, a house perched above lawns which sloped down to the edge of the water.

Silence. Felix shifted from foot to foot.

Again, she whispered in his ear. ‘I’m taking you to the pigeon loft. It hasn’t been used in years but it’s out of sight of the house and I’ve readied the cages for the birds. I’ll go first.’

The path which she led him down wound away out of sight of the house and felt rough and little used under foot. After five minutes, they came to a row of outhouses, a couple of which were not in good condition. Freya ignored them, slipped past rusting machinery housed under a lean-to and halted by a barn-like structure at the end of the row. Picking up a bucket, she tussled with the door and disappeared.

Felix checked to the right, to the left and over his shoulder.

Keep checking. Checking should be like breathing. Trust no one, sonny
.

He followed her.

Inside, a bare bulb hung from a crossbeam and struggled to illuminate hay bales and a litter of farm equipment. Ancient pigeon dung smeared the mud floor below a couple of pigeon cages.

With her back to the door, Freya was scrubbing the top of the wooden bench. He sized her up. With delicate features and with a faint air of command, Freya did not look the kind of woman who did much scrubbing, rather the reverse. Felix set down the case. ‘You know, you must always keep a watch on the door.’

She
glanced round. ‘Is that spy-speak?’

‘Elementary security.’

‘Listen –’ she scrubbed harder ‘– I’m just helping out a friend. I’m not like you.’ A sliver of soap dropped onto the floor and she bent down to deal with it. ‘I’m just doing him a favour.’ There was a pause. ‘This is the only time.’

He was tempted to say that it didn’t work like that. Once in, once you had stepped into the shadow, you were in it. It was a state of mind.

‘I meant to do this earlier,’ she said. ‘If we are to have the birds, it has to be clean.’

The door was damp and took some forcing shut. He leaned back on it and observed Freya at work. In the end, he had gone into this war for a principle that had proved stronger than his pacifism. The need to fight evil, to save Europe and for the honour of Denmark. These were the big concepts which would, he hoped, offer something to cling to when things got bad – when faced with pain, gut-loosening fear or extinction. Even so, if he ever got back to London he would tell them that the big concepts weren’t the whole story. It was small things that got you through long, lonely uncomfortable hours. The warmth of the sun after hiding for hours in the dark, the small kindness of a bag of heated cherry stones handed up to him while freezing in an attic, a bed with a mattress. For a man in his thirties, watching a good-looking woman such as Freya would also be high on that list.