I Can't Begin to Tell You (7 page)

Her movements were graceful and a pleasure to watch and gave him a sort of solace. Wasn’t the relish he took in them proof that, if he was to die here in his torn-up homeland, at least he would not do so desensitized by war and violence?

‘The birds could get ill, you know. I’ve looked it up,’ she said.

Her Danish was excellent and the hint of foreign inflection distractingly attractive.

‘I borrowed a book from Arne, my husband’s foreman. I told him that I was thinking of breeding pigeons for their meat.
You know that the Nazis are pinching all our pork and beef?’ She took the pigeon box from Felix and lifted it onto the bench. ‘It’s all right, boys,’ she said in English. ‘You’re safe.’

A pigeon’s protest reverberated around the barn.

‘In the old days, there was a thriving pigeon colony here. It’s in my husband’s records. It was the sign of a gentleman’s residence, apparently.’

The information dropped easily from her lips.

‘Don’t tell me any more,’ he said. ‘It’s best.’

She shot him a look. ‘I see.’

He helped her to undo the buckles and ease off the lid. The interior was divided into two sections, each one containing a bird with bottled water and grain pressed into a hard block.

After the initial flurry, the birds went quiet. Freya reached in and lifted out a big, buff male. The label on his section read: Hector. The second, a darker bird, was Achilles. ‘Hello, Hector,’ she said softly. The bird’s eyes were bright and watchful. ‘Easy now, boy.’ She walked over to the cage and placed Hector inside. ‘The books said they might be panicky and restless so we’ll have to be nice to them and talk to them in English.’ She went to lift out Achilles.

‘Wait a minute,’ said Felix. Extracting a box of cigarette papers, he teased out the one on which he had written a message in code.

Arrived safe. All agencies up and running. Please confirm Vinegar is operational and in place. Mayonnaise

Folding it up, he slipped it into the tiny tube to be fastened onto the pigeon’s leg. ‘It needs to go soon.’

‘They need rest,’ Freya said cheerfully. ‘But I’ll send Achilles off tomorrow morning.’

‘What exactly have you been told?’

Her eyelids lifted revealing misty-grey eyes. ‘Nothing much.’

‘Right.’ He took a decision. ‘I have to hide something.’

There
was a tiny pause, but one he knew was significant – as if she was gathering herself up to step into the shadow.

‘If you mean the wireless transmitter …’ Her gaze held his. ‘I know about that.’ She pointed to the floor. ‘It’s all arranged.’

Dropping onto one knee, she pulled back a tarpaulin. It was so old it was rigid. Underneath, a couple of boards had been slung over a hole in the dirt floor. ‘It’s not brilliant but it will have to do for the time being.’ She assessed the case. ‘It’s not so easy to hide.’

He shrugged. ‘I will be moving it about. But I will have to use it here very soon and, after that, from time to time.’ He touched her arm. ‘That
is
all right?’

She sat back on her heels. ‘Yes.’

‘Sure?’

She nodded and her hair swung against her cheek.

He stowed the case in the hole and, together, they manhandled the boards and tarpaulin back into place. Seizing a broom waiting in the corner, Freya swept dust over the hiding place.

She was breathing hard, her breath audible, nervy.

‘A warning,’ she said, pushing a heap of dirt across the furthest corner. ‘Apparently the Nazis disguise the direction-finding vehicles as delivery vans. They give themselves away because they are always petrol-driven. Many people round here have to make do with gaz. So watch out.’

Again, he gave himself the pleasure of watching her. ‘Is there anything else I should know?’

She considered. ‘Did they tell you in London about the King and Hitler?’

Felix nodded. He had been briefed in as much detail as The Firm could muster. There had been much collective amusement when it was discovered that Hitler had sent the Danish King a fulsome telegram to congratulate him on his birthday in September and the king’s reply had been terse to the point of insult. However, it hadn’t been so amusing when a furious Hitler suspended diplomatic relations as a result and sent in
General Werner Best, an SS man to his last shiny button, to take overall charge of his favoured Protectorate.

Freya propped the broom against the wall and produced a packet of cigarettes from her pocket. ‘Best’s nickname is “Hitler’s Revenge” and he’s not a nice man. But for the consequences, someone ought to kill him.’

Her physical beauty was in sharp contrast to the notion of murder and assassination … her skin, the blondeness, the softness belonged to the mother smiling at a baby. It belonged to the lover. Beauty belonged to the deep, sweet ecstasies of the flesh and to the feelings which promoted life, not death.

She held out the packet of Escorts. ‘Want one?’

Actually he did, more than anything, but he pushed the packet away. ‘Not here. Smoke is a giveaway.’

Her gaze flew up to meet his.

Again, he felt that she was positioning herself. Pushing her mind towards acceptance? Readying herself for something which, she sensed, was inevitable?

Finally, she said, ‘It seems I have a lot to learn.’

Was she telling him she was in?

Her gaze veered towards the door and the moment passed.

‘I’ll be back,’ he said. ‘Tomorrow.’

The bicycle ride back to Køge took it out of Felix. His body ceased to pump adrenalin, and the stiffness in his muscles slowed him down.

The priorities. Contact London. Check Vinegar and other Joe in place … He hoped to God that Vinegar had made it and was safe. Check safe houses. Hide weapons. Begin recruiting.

The list was a long one and the cold nearly bested him.

Doubt was a condition of life – his life at any rate. But he had learned to deal with it. Doubt was a spur. It made action leaner and fitter. More effective. Even so, on that hard journey back, Felix found himself asking:
Am I up to this?

Hidden in the back of Jacob’s cottage, and almost felled by some hefty slugs of schnapps, Felix dozed on and off.

He was back in training at The Firm.

‘My name is Major Martin …’

Major Martin, or DYC/MB, as he signed himself on his messages, welcomed Felix into a stuffy, cramped room, not much more than a cupboard really, in the building used by The Firm’s Danish section, somewhere near London’s Marylebone Road.

Felix was not a natural observer of human beings – he preferred buildings – but Major Martin’s very dark brown, almost black, eyes made an instant impact. These rested on Felix thoughtfully. ‘You are probably not going to love me much.’

During his training, Felix had become better acquainted with English humour, which took getting used to. ‘Probably not,’ he answered.

Major Martin indicated a chair. ‘So why have we met? Because, as an agent in the field, you will need to send messages back here. In code, obviously. These will be picked up by our signals clerks in one location, decoded by our decoders in another and then analysed in yet another. For security reasons, none of the departments are allowed to communicate with each other. So we have to try to make it all work. I am responsible, along with others, for the coding part and I am going to teach you how to do it.’

‘Black days,’ said Felix.

Major Martin tapped his finger on the table as if to say:
Steady on
.

‘We
use the poem-code system here,’ he said, and Felix picked up an undercurrent, a reservation in the tone. A scepticism? ‘Put simply, the code sender selects words from a previously agreed poem, numbers the letters of those words as the key and buries the message in a grid that combines the numbered code letters with a lot of useless letters.’

Felix was relieved. ‘That sounds reasonably straightforward.’

The major then went on to give a detailed explanation of the system, describing the encryption, the transpositions, the indicator groups, the laying of traps in case the message was intercepted, the feints to fool the enemy, the counter-feints …

‘Christ,’ said Felix.

‘Sending messages also requires you to include two security checks. A bluff one which you can use to fool the enemy and the real one which …’ the major’s voice held steady, ‘we hope the enemy never get hold of. No one else will have yours.’

Rummaging in his briefcase, Major Martin produced a piece of paper. ‘First off, I’m going to give you a poem.’

‘I thought agents chose their own poems.’

Major Martin glanced up at Felix. ‘Let’s see … If you asked me to predict your choice I would plump for something from your Danish national poet. Failing that, Kipling’s “If”, because it’s likely to be a British poem that you’ve heard of.’ He sounded ultra dry. ‘Good thinking. But if you have heard of it, so will the enemy.’

At this point, both of them lit up cigarettes.

Major Martin balanced his on the ashtray. Smoke rose between them. ‘Why is it the intelligence services, not so aptly named, refuse to understand that the enemy reads poetry too? In fact, more than we do.’ He sent Felix a wintry smile. ‘But we are getting around this with our very own Ditty Box.’ He pushed the paper across to Felix. ‘We have fine minds working on them. Some of the ditties can be read by a maiden aunt without a blush. Most of them can’t. Sad but true. It’s easier to remember a filthy poem.’

Felix
read aloud.

Do you wish for a silver fish

To leap through the stream?

Do you wish for the light

To shine on yours and mine?

Do you wish for the peace of my kiss?

He grinned. ‘Can’t I have a dirty ditty?’

‘They’re all in use. But I’ll get the FANYs on to it. They’re ace.’ Major Martin glanced at the ditty. ‘Sorry, not one of our finest. But it was composed in the small hours. Could you memorize it?’

Felix was warming to Major Martin. ‘I may be cold, hungry, in the dark and surrounded by the flower of the Gestapo closing in, but I promise to remember The Firm’s second-best poem. But I have to say, it’s not even a second best …’

‘I apologize, I really do, but the enemy won’t know it. Bonus?’

Felix dragged on the cigarette. The major watched him.

‘Does it help to know that we will keep your test coding exercises? If you make a muddle and we can’t decode the message – we call those the indecipherables – we will crawl all over your test coding exercises. They reveal your weaknesses, your lapses of speech, so to speak. We will use them to help us work out what has gone wrong.’

‘Even if they’ve captured me and are making me send messages?’

A small silence.

Major Martin was wise enough not to comment. ‘I’m here to persuade you that you possess the skill and competence to send these messages. In return, you must allow me to understand how you work.’ He pushed another piece of paper in Felix’s direction. ‘Being Danish you might know about ice hockey.’

‘A little.’

‘I want you to tackle the exercise I am about to set you as if you were assembling an ice hockey team.’

‘Major
Martin, this gets better and better.’

Major Martin smiled. Again, there was a suggestion of deep anxiety behind the easy manner. He worries about us, Felix thought. Major Martin is responsible for sending us lot out into the darkness armed with not much more than doggerel, and he knows it.

‘You have twenty minutes,’ he said. ‘Choose your words from the poem and encode: “Send explosives, guns, chocolate
stop
”.’

It was hard work and Felix found himself sweating. Some idiot had suggested to him that there was poetry in encryption, in the silent stalking down of words, in transforming them, but for the life of him he couldn’t see it.

Major Martin assessed the result. ‘I detect a case of coding paralysis,’ he commented. ‘A word of advice. Always go back to the beginning.’

The session was proving to be a humiliating one.

‘Stubborn is the word,’ said Major Martin.

‘Stubborn it is …’ The words issued through Felix’s gritted teeth.

Major Martin eventually wrapped it up. ‘Good. But you have forgotten something vital.’

‘The security checks.’

‘Correct,’ said Major Martin. ‘If I, or one of my formidable team, read this message we would assume you and the set
had
been captured.’

‘What about the decoding?’ asked Felix.

‘Decoding will be for another session. Coding and encoding are different animals. It’s rare to be good at both. Odd that, isn’t it? But I’m going to make you practise until you beg for mercy. A few tips: free your language, vary your transposition keys.
Don’t
fall into set patterns. Code as if you are … er … making love.’

Felix was shaken awake by Jacob shouting in his ear. ‘Go, go. Police in the street.’

For precisely that reason, Felix had not undressed. It took
only seconds to snatch up his boots, jacket and peaked hat and let himself out of the back of Jacob’s cottage.

He wheeled the bicycle into the street, jammed on the cap and set off in the direction of the town centre, keeping the pace deliberately leisurely. At Sankt Nicolai Kirke he pushed the bicycle behind a bush, went inside, selected a pew at the back and bowed his head. For twenty minutes or so, he would sit it out in the church.

What he wouldn’t give for a hot bath. For clean and basic things. For water washing between his legs and toes. For the smell of a good soap. This thought surprised him, for when had he ever cared about scented soap?

Jacob’s overalls were too short in the crotch and, for all that he had extended the shoulder straps, they bit into his balls. Felix grinned. His first task in the service of Denmark? Save his balls.

Early morning light streamed in through the arched window above the high altar, glossing the circular altar rail. He noted how the arch was there to support the breadth of the wall, the keystone taking the strain while the Gothic line was meant to express the human aspiration to reach heaven …

Architectural vocabulary was second nature to him. Less so, the architecture of resistance. At the STS they taught the structures of an underground army and explained how it was modelled on the interlocking cells of a bee colony, which was the strongest and most efficient exemplar in nature. There would be one overall leader – himself – and three or four group leaders who knew nothing of each other. Their task would be to move around this area of Zealand, recruiting and training, but no action was to be taken without the overall leader’s permission.

His ruff a startling white above his billowing black robe, the pastor walked down the aisle. His gaze rested on Felix.
Hostile?

It was an error to assume that religious men would be on the side of the angels.

Get the hell out.

He
abandoned the bicycle and made for the street running behind the
Torvet
– the main square. Here, the half-timbered houses, painted ochre or bull’s-blood red, and the grey paving stones looked as serene as they must have done in peacetime. He bought a newspaper, found the café which Jacob had told him was a rendezvous, and settled at a window table with a coffee and a
kringle
pastry. Both were of bad quality but, his body craving fuel, he got them down.

Automatically, he kept a watch on the street. Automatically, he checked that there was a back entrance to the café.

Second nature, now.

A fishmonger pushed his cart heaped with herring and pink roe past the window. The sight reminded him powerfully of the time when his parents were still together and they still had a family life of sorts.

Remember Anders, Pastor Neuman’s son and his best friend? What games they had played. Lanky pests, the pair of them, running alongside the fish carts, imitating the cries of the mussel vendors – and frequently having to scarper, hiding up in warehouses, watching the fishing boats go in and out of the harbour and taking bets on which one would get stuck on the sand bank. One sun-flecked summer’s day they had built a fleet of Viking long ships with mussel shells and corks and sent it over the sea to Valhalla.

Sometimes, in the spring, he and Anders cycled past the hanging birches at the end of the street, past the red church and into the countryside. In the rye fields the larks sang, the cherry trees at their edges foamed white and blush-pink and the pair of them talked themselves hoarse. When the cold returned, they switched operations and went searching for treasure on the shoreline, the sea painting white salt hems on to their boots and, above them, gulls wheeling in big, watery skies.

Enough.

Felix read the paper thoroughly. There was news of the curfew in København, complaints about the lack of merchandise
in the shops and the scarcity of cigarette papers. An editorial argued for keeping the peace. ‘We don’t want, or need, uprisings or sabotage.’

When Felix next looked up, Jacob was seated at the next table. Through dry, bitten lips, he said: ‘Police everywhere. My neighbour, Lars, was found trying to make a gun in his house. They shot his daughter.’

‘Dead?’

‘She’ll survive but minus her leg. Don’t come back to me. They’re watching.’

The waitress placed coffee and a pastry in front of Jacob and Jacob fell on them, licking his finger to scoop up every crumb and draining every drop of coffee like a man who was famished.

Some hours later Felix wheeled the bicycle into the Rosenlund estate, pushed it into some bushes and waited under the cover of the trees for dusk to fall. Out here, the silence was almost disconcerting, and the ground under his feet, layered with leaf mould, was heavy going.

The initial exhilaration at being back in his homeland had leached away. He ached all over. He was tired and he wasn’t sure where he was going to hide up for the night.

Having made it to the pigeon loft, he found Freya was already waiting for him. This time, she wore a jacket with a fur-lined collar which framed her face. Like Anna Karenina, he thought.

Her greeting was friendly, and she touched him on the arm. ‘Achilles went this morning.’ She sounded a touch wistful. ‘He seemed glad to go.’

Watched by a beady-eyed Hector, they dragged back the tarpaulin where the wireless set was hidden. ‘Time’s a bit tight,’ he warned.

‘Then I’ll help you.’

‘You should go. It’s dangerous.’

‘I know,’ she said, calmly and without fuss. Even so, when she raised her eyes to his he caught a hint of turmoil.

Together,
they set up the equipment on the bench and, on Felix’s instruction, Freya looped the antenna wire over a rafter. ‘You’re a natural,’ he said.

She gave a short laugh. ‘Someone else said that to me.’

Felix plugged in the valves and headset, selected the correct crystal and connected the power pack. Using the calibration curve pasted into the lid of the case as a guide, he feathered the dial. ‘Got it.’ He had hit the correct frequency and a neon light glowed. He looked up at Freya. ‘Last chance to leave. The German listening stations will be fixing on us this very moment. Somewhere in Berlin, or Augsburg or Nuremburg or –’

‘Stop, Felix.’

She appeared to be torn between wanting to flee … and something else. What? A curiosity and an excitement which kept her rooted to the spot?

‘You are about to talk to England,’ she said. ‘God only knows how it’s possible but it’s so good to know. A miracle of science.’

With the arrowhead pointing to ‘Transmit’, he waited until the bulbs glowed ever brighter and tapped out his call sign.

Immediately, scything through the ether, came the response: QVR.
Ready to receive
.

Home Station was there. Back in England, someone was listening out for him.

QTC1, he tapped.
I have one message for you
.

MESSAGE NUMBER 4
stop
SITUATION QUIET
stop
RESISTANCE MINIMAL
stop
REQUEST WIRELESS SETS, SMALL ARMS, EXPLOSIVES
stop
PLEASE CONFIRM VINEGAR SAFE AND OPERATIONAL
stop
REPEAT CONFIRM VINEGAR OPERATIONAL …

Twenty minutes later he signed off: QRU.
I have nothing further for you
.