Gone to Soldiers (87 page)

The Resistance had found out, but just as they sent warnings, the SD moved. That ratline was now out of operation. Most of the ratline operators had been taken by the Gestapo, but some had escaped. That was all MI9 knew. Oscar did not talk much but he also seemed to give up sleeping. He was looking gaunt.

June 18 Abra went to find out what had happened to Wilhelm, who had not come to work in two days. He had no phone. As an enemy resident alien, classified type C, benign, he was allowed to remain at large but could not own a bicycle or flashlight. She was always willing to run errands, because she enjoyed getting out of the office and seeing London. He lived in a row of attached houses in a mostly Jewish working-class area, renting a room from a leatherworker's family. She had been there before, as dealing with the exiles who helped OSS involved a certain amount of social work, since they were nearly destitute.

When she came out of the tube at Whitechapel, the broad road was half blocked with lorries flattened like tins and a rapidly running stream from a broken main, although the traffic edged through on one side, with a bobby directing. The sidewalk market was still going on, and she made up her mind after she checked Wilhelm and found out if he was sick or in trouble, she would give a quick cruise for something wearable or edible.

On Wilhelm's narrow street, the uneven row of squalid leaning row houses staggered along as it always had. Just in the middle of the block where several houses had stood including the leatherworker's where Wilhelm rented a room, a crater yawned, big as a pond. Windows were broken all along the street, stoops cracked, cornices toppled and objects pulverized, no longer identifiable. As she approached the gap, she waded through crushed and broken glass that jabbed through the thin soles of her worn shoes. As always there was a stench of sewage, of shit. Standing in midblock where perhaps twenty houses had been, she could plainly see a charred foundry still smoldering across the newly created field, two blocks away. In the field some lost chickens were idly pecking. Everybody with a yard around here had at least chickens and rabbits. What kind of bomb could have done all this damage? She had heard rumors of something called a doodlebug.

She imagined Wilhelm sitting over the table covered with German-language newspapers and commenting, half in English and half in German on the articles relevant to them, dictating to Beverly and claiming he could do anything, anything at all, except write, gesturing with his cigarette between the thumb and index finger.

She called to a woman futilely digging in the rubble in the next street. “I'm trying to find a friend. He was in Number Eighty-four in this street.”

“They was all kilt,” the woman said without looking up. “Twenty-three what lived on this street and two still missing. M'muvver among 'em. Made bloody mincemeat of 'em.”

A phrase came to her out of the manual she had seen on agent recruitment, official OSS policy: “No agent should be recruited without serious thought being given to the means of disposing of him after his usefulness is ended.” Now OSS wouldn't have to worry about the pipe fitter Wilhelm, Jew, member of a splinter left Communist group, creator of bad bilingual puns, admirer of the long-dead Rosa Luxemburg. He had been pulverized. She shuffled back and forth in the wreckage that covered the street and sidewalk to the depth of half a foot, staring at the crater. Gone. She supposed that Oscar or she would have to identify the body, if there was one. What could have made such a hole? Were these the vaunted secret weapons?

In the following days, rumor answered that question long before the government finally announced that rockets were falling on England. What they learned shortly was that the doodlebugs were pulse jet powered cruise missiles carrying a ton of high explosives at a maximum speed of four hundred miles an hour. The blast power was something new. Fashionable London began to empty again, evacuating to country homes; but working-class London felt more crowded than ever and cheap housing was being destroyed so fast, many families were again sleeping in the underground, as well as the barely tolerable shelters.

People seemed to feel it was a duty to try to remain cheerful, but their courage was wearing out like everything else. The scuttlebutt on the rockets was that they sounded like a locomotive when they came through the air above you, but that when they cut out, with a weird greenish flash, and the silence came, you were about to get it.

All the front windows in her flat were broken by bomb blast. She had them boarded up. It was like living in a cave. Her bed suddenly collapsed one night, the pegs having worked their way loose. None of her doors hung properly and none of the drawers would go all the way in. Bombing had warped the furniture. She no longer bothered to go to the shelters. A doodlebug that landed on a shelter would kill everyone inside anyhow. Better to stay home in bed. There was no warning they were coming, and they came as often in the daytime as at night.

The news from Normandy was all right, for the Allies were holding even if they had failed to advance much. Then Oscar got a letter from Louise saying his daughter had eloped with a bombardier. He exploded and pulled all the strings he could to try to call the States. A week passed and he was still trying vainly to reach Louise in Washington.

Monday while they were working on the final version of the ball bearing report, Oscar's phone rang. “Louise!” he barked into the phone. “I've been calling you every day. What are you doing about Kay?” He listened and then rose to his feet motioning her wildly out of the room.

Furious, she shut the door and sulked in the outer office until he appeared sometime later. “Louise is in town,” he said mildly. “We're having supper with her. She specifically asked for you.”

“Here? What's she doing here?” Abra was dismayed.

“She's a war correspondent, waiting to go to France.”

“Her, a war correspondent? What qualifies her? Are they trying to turn the second front into a romance?”

Oscar gave her a look intended to wither. “Louise has been writing serious articles for ten years. Of course they won't send her into combat, but there's a lot of the war in London and behind the lines she can sink her teeth into.”

She was never allowed to criticize Louise, who was supposed to be on some other plane than herself. It galled her. What happened to freedom of speech? Didn't Louise's carrying on with Daniel bring her stock down any?

They ate in the Grosvenor Hotel mess. Louise was an officer too. Oscar did not outrank her. Louise had, as she said with amusement, a theoretical rank of captain, in case she was captured. Abra was glad she was at least a second lieutenant. Louise looked radiant, Abra thought, and asked maliciously, “How's Daniel? Didn't he mind your coming over here?”

“Nobody enjoys all these wartime partings, do they?” Louise asked blandly. Oscar kept staring at her and asking far more questions about Louise than he did about Kay, who was the pretext for this get-together. Abra did not find the dinner a great success.

JEFF 8

The Die Is Cast

“I used to let myself be distracted,” Jeff was explaining to Jacqueline as they lay curled into each other like nested S's in the old bed, upstairs in a farmhouse in the Lacaune Mountains. “I was always getting into affairs I didn't really want, because I wanted something. Do you understand?” The farmhouse had been deserted since an old woman had died the year before, her sons off in North Africa. They had fixed the roof and cleaned out animal debris. In their room, they could always hear the Agout, a white water stream plunging over the rocks outside.

“Half and half.” Her cheek lay against his palm so that he could feel as well as hear her voice. A scent of roses seeped through the open window. Swallows nesting in the barn swooped by, madly twittering. Now that June was upon them, almost everybody took a siesta after lunch, but they were considered blatant, shocking, because he insisted they not bar the heavy plank shutters to the world. In the south in the daytime, houses looked blinded to him, sinister, mourning in darkness within, although he knew that habit enabled them to hold daytime meetings in Toulouse with perfect impunity behind closed shutters. She lifted her head to say, “I recognize the phenomenon. My friend Céleste used to get involved with men that way.…” She fell silent and he felt her muscles contract.

“Did you forget to do something?”

“I have so many friends who may be deported, who may be dead and I don't know.” She shook herself, nestling closer into him. “Anyhow, the phenomenon is familiar to me, but not personally. I have more resisted than sought out connections. I feared losing myself.”

“Your self is the one thing you can never lose, even when you want to.”

“Observe the married women you meet!” She imitated an affected voice. “Oh, mon mari, my husband would never
permit
me to work. My husband would never let me go off by myself on a trip. Oh, we used to be friends, but that was before I married.… My own mother was never like that.”

“Women give up less than you think. I always found them working hard to make me into the husband they wanted.”

“You always speak as if you had had thousands of women.” She poked him in the belly. “Like Don Juan in the opera, with his servant's lists, which of course he keeps to flatter the Don.”

“Not thousands, but I imagine a good hundred.”

“Ugh. And you loved all of them?” Her voice was round with scorn.

“I loved none of them.” He held her tighter. “I loved some a little, but none enough. It was an enormous waste of time, all that energy finding a woman, making her love me and then getting rid of her.”

“Ah, do you want to be rid of me? I could disappear in fifteen seconds.” She made as if to sit up, naked as she was. They had not even a sheet over them, as the afternoon was warm. They had been up most of the night. Soon he had to drag himself from the cosy bed and go over the information he had collected from his agents that week, collate it, encapsulate and code it for transmission, a tedious job that took the better part of a day. Tomorrow he must go into Toulouse and pick up new reports. London was pushing him hard for fresh information.

“I want to hold on and on. I'm just explaining to you exactly why I am going to be a much better painter after this war ends than I ever was before. I wasted too much energy being bored. I moved every few months. Now I want to sink roots and never budge, oh, except maybe once in a while to see the shows in Paris and attend one of my own with a fancy opening.”

“Bah, you're going to have to put up with Paris for a while. I have to get a degree. Unless I simply go on blowing things up. I prove to have talent for that.”

“I think the prospects for advancement are limited.” He sighed, sitting up on the bed's edge to lean out the window. “There's Lev, teaching the older Faurier girl how to shoot. Isn't she a little young?”

“They deport them younger than that and kill them younger.”

The sunlight fell on her hair, grown out to its own color, bushy on her shoulders like a cloud of fine metallic yarn spun around her face. Her shoulders were delicate but strongly shaped, with little hollows just to the side of her full breasts with their purplish nipples. Ah, she was thin, small boned but wiry, amazingly strong for her size. Every day she walked or pedaled many kilometers, hauled heavy loads on her back. After the war, she would lose that cat's wariness, that sense of being about to bound off or change direction in midair at a strange sound. He found that nerviness attractive, but he could dispense with it.

They had an extensive garden up here. Several of the men hunted, including Lev who showed an aptitude for tracking. Trout lurked by the rocks in the river, where Daniela fished almost every day, saying the water soothed her. They had acquired two small but productive cows, three goats and a flock of darkly burnished chickens. They were healthier. They lived in less fear. They slept better and they were all in fine fettle and excellent humor: a good little group of maquis, seventeen strong scattered through the area, including six boys in a forest camp where many of their supplies were buried. For sabotage, they were a high-quality weapon. He did not count the older Faurier girl, Sophie, although Lev was training her. Of the seventeen, thirteen were men and four, women, all except for Mme Faurier at least as useful as the men.

Mme Faurier had her uses too: she cooked and foraged. Since she had revealed herself unable to refrain from wincing when she fired and thus misdirecting every shot, the possibility of turning her into a sniper had finally been abandoned even by Lev. She kept the books for them, and she was learning to process agent intelligence. Again Jeff was doing something unorthodox and contrary to procedure, but he did not see why he should remain the only operative in the group able to code and decode transmissions. If he were knocked out of action, how would they transmit to London or Algiers? Notions of security in London did not always prove out in the field. He felt he had to back up his expertise.

She wore her hair in braids wrapped around her head, perched on a short neck above a body that could be rendered by a stack of circles. She was gap-toothed and easy to provoke into laughter, but always wary, always with an ear or an eye alerted for her girls. Even while Lev was instructing Sophie, having her shoot at bottles set up on a stump, Mme Faurier was within view shelling peas.

Once he had disliked her, for no better reason than that she seemed to protect Jacqueline from him; now he liked her very much indeed, along with her husband who was their precious mechanic, fixer of all machines that could be fixed and cannibalizer of those hopelessly smashed.

He became aware Jacqueline was speaking. She was sitting in the middle of the bed with her legs crossed and her hands knotted together staring dreamily out into the blinding sunshine and talking about placing charges. “I like to use the smallest amount for doing the job and set it exactly at the point where it will do the most damage. Sometimes it's only a matter of timing so that we hit cars seven and eight, but let the earlier cars go through safely, since they have civilians on them. But with a turntable, with a bridge, placement is everything.… Sometimes I think of being an architect or a civil engineer.”