Code Name Verity (33 page)

He picked on the men, mainly, the two who weren't chained, and hauled them to their feet. And seeing that Julie was getting special treatment from the man who was holding her in place with his foot, he hauled her to her feet as well and pushed her over to stand next to the two other standing prisoners – one of them a sturdy workman and one a handsome lad my own age, both ragged and battered.

Julie was ragged too. She was still wearing exactly the clothes she'd had on when she parachuted into France, grey wool flannel skirt and Parisian chic pullover the burnt scarlet-orange of Chinese lanterns, with holes in the elbows now. Her hair shone brassy gold in the artificial light, falling loose and wild down her back. Her face was skin over bone. As though – as though she'd aged fifty years in eight weeks – gaunt, grey, frail. The dead spit of Jamie when I first met him in hospital. But thinner. She looked like a kid, a head shorter than the shortest of the men standing around her. Any of those soldiers could have picked her up and tossed her in the air.

Three prisoners in a line. The soldier in command gave an order, and the guard who'd been holding Julie down took aim at the younger of the captive men and with one bullet maimed him low between his legs.

The lad shrieked and collapsed and they fired at him again, first blowing apart one elbow and then the other, and then they hauled him to his feet again, still shrieking, and made him walk to the lorry and climb in and then they turned to the next man and fired on him low in the groin also.

Mitraillette and I both knelt wheezing with horror, side by side under cover of the undergrowth and darkness. Julie stood cowering, white as paper in the harsh glare of the floodlight, staring straight ahead of her at nothing. She was next. She knew it. We all knew it. But they weren't finished with their second victim yet.

When they shot him in one elbow and then again rapidly in the same place to shatter it, my not-very-reliable control just went and I burst into tears. I couldn't help it, something snapped, like when we went to help the gunner at Maidsend and found the dead boys. I burst into loud, gulping sobs, bawling like a baby.

Her face – Julie's face – her face suddenly lit up like a sunrise. Joy and relief and hope all there at once and she was instantly lovely again, herself,
beautiful
. She heard me. Recognised my fear-of-gunfire blubbing. She didn't dare call out to me, didn't dare give me away, Ormaie's most desperate fugitive.

They fired at the second man again, destroying his other arm, and he fainted dead away. They had to drag him to the lorry.

Julie was next.

Suddenly she laughed wildly and gave a shaking yell, her voice high and desperate.

‘KISS ME, HARDY! Kiss me, QUICK!'

Turned her face away from me to make it easier.

And I shot her.

I saw her body's flinch – the blows knocked her head aside as though she'd been thumped in the face. Then she was gone.

Gone. One moment flying in green sunlight, then the sky suddenly grey and dark. Out like a candle. Here, then gone.

I'll just keep writing, shall I?
Because that wasn't the end. It wasn't even a pause.

The officer pulled another woman up from the ground to take Julie's place. This doomed girl screamed at us in French: ‘ALLEZ! ALLEZ!' Go! Go! ‘Résistance idiots sales, vous nous MASSACREZ TOUS!'

FILTHY RESISTANCE IDIOTS, YOU'RE KILLING US ALL

I knew what she was saying even with my rubbish schoolgirl French. And she was right.

We ran. They fired at our backs and came after us. Paul and his men fired at THEIR backs, swarming over the bridge walls, and they turned to face this rear attack. Carnage. CARNAGE. Half of us, Paul with them, were torn to bits on the bridge. The rest of us made it back to the boats and set off down the river with the five fugitives we'd managed to save.

When we were away from the bank and someone else was rowing and there was nothing more for me to do, I bent over with my head on my knees, my heart in pieces. It is still in pieces. I think it will be in pieces forever.

Mitraillette gently unlocked my fingers from the Colt .32 and made me put it away. She whispered, ‘C'était la Vérité?' Was that Verity?

Or perhaps she just meant, Was that the truth? Was it true? Did any of it really happen? Were the last three hours
real
?

‘Yes,' I whispered back. ‘Oui. C'était la vérité.'

—

Don't know how I kept going. You just do. You have to, so you do.

The original idea, when we hoped we'd have 24 extra people to move and hide, was to ferry them to the opposite bank where we'd divide them into smaller groups of 2 or 3. Then we were going to split up our own team to guide them cross-country towards various sheds and cow byres for the night before the more complicated task of smuggling them safely out of France across the Pyrenees or the English Channel. But now we only had 5 fugitives to hide and there were only 7 of us left so there was room for everybody to make a single trip back to the riverside villa. Mitraillette made the decision to keep us together. Don't think I'd ever noticed – so absorbed in my own fears and worries – but she was Paul's second in command.

Not sure we'd have pulled it off without her either. We were all just
so dazed
. But she drove us like a demon. ‘Vite! Vite!' Quickly! Orders whispered sharp and quiet – boats hauled back on to their racks, oars put away, all of it carefully dried off with dust sheets which we hid beneath the floorboards afterwards. You can work in a daze. If someone gives you a mindless job to do you can do it automatically, even if your heart is in pieces. Mitraillette thought of everything – perhaps she's done it before? We brushed the oars and hulls lightly with handfuls of ancient straw from the stables, leaving a fine layer of dust over everything. The 5 men from the prison bus worked silently and willingly alongside us, anxious to help. The boathouse was perfect when we left – looked like it hadn't been used in years.

Then the Nazi search party arrived and we spent an hour lying in the mud along the riverbank, hiding in the bulrushes like Moses, waiting for them to leave. Could hear them chatting with the groundskeeper. He came back later to lock up the boathouse and give us the all-clear – such as it was – now there were Nazi guards posted on the front drive, so we'd not be getting the Rosalie out any time soon. But the groundskeeper thought it would be safe for a couple of bicycles to leave by the river path on the opposite bank. Benzedrine handed out all round. Got one of the canoes out again and ferried 2 of the bikes, 2 of us and 2 of the escaped prisoners over the river, and saw them off into the fog.

At this point one of the remaining lads from the bus collapsed in a shivering heap and Mitraillette sort of stalled.

‘Nous sommes faits,' she said. We've had it.

We bedded down in the stables with the bicycles. Not the safest place in the world.

I wonder where that is right now – the safest place in the world? Even the neutral countries, Sweden and Switzerland, are surrounded. Ireland's stuck with being divided, they have to mark the neutral bit ‘IRELAND' in big letters made of whitewashed stones hoping the Germans won't drop bombs there thinking it's the UK side of the northern border. I've seen it from the air. South America, perhaps.

We were all still wide awake when it grew light. I was sitting with my arms wrapped round my knees, side by side with one of the lads who'd escaped when I shot his chains apart. The men who'd been chained had to stay with us because they'd got to get rid of the fetters on their ankles before they could go anywhere.

‘How did they catch you? What did you do?' I asked, forgetting he was French. He answered me in English though.

‘Just what you did,' he said bitterly. ‘Blew up a bridge and failed to stop the German army.'

‘Why didn't they just shoot you?'

He grinned. All his upper teeth had been savagely broken. ‘Why do you think, gosse anglaise, English kid? They cannot question you if they shoot you.'

‘How come only some of you were chained?'

‘Only some of us are dangerous.' He was still grinning. I suppose he had reason to be optimistic – he'd been given a second chance at life, at hope. A slim one, but better than he'd had 12 hours ago. ‘They chain you if they think you are dangerous. The girl whose arms were tied behind her, did you see her? She wasn't dangerous, she was a – collaboratrice, collaborator.' He spat into the disintegrating straw.

The shattered pieces of my heart went cold. I felt as if I'd swallowed shards of ice.

‘Stop,' I said. ‘Tais-toi. SHUT UP.' He didn't hear me, or didn't take me seriously, and carried on relentlessly: ‘Better off dead, that one. Did you see her, even lying in the road last night, sweet-talking the guards in German? Because her arms were bound, someone would have had to help her, on the way to wherever they were taking us – feed her, help her drink. She would have had to offer favours to the guards to get them to do it. None of us would have done it.'

I am dangerous too, sometimes.

That morning I was an anti-personnel mine, a butterfly bomb, unexploded and ticking, and he touched the fuse.

I don't actually remember what happened. I don't remember attacking him. But the skin of my knuckles is torn where my fist connected with his broken teeth. Mitraillette says they thought I was going to try to dig his eyes out with my fingers.

I do remember 3 people holding me back, and I re­mem­ber screaming at the boy, ‘You wouldn't have helped her EAT AND DRINK? SHE'D HAVE DONE IT FOR YOU!'

Then in panic, because I was making so much noise, they sat on me again. But as soon as they let me go I was back on top of him. ‘I FREED YOU! You would still be IN CHAINS and packed in a stinking freight wagon LIKE A COW by now if it wasn't for me!
You wouldn't have helped another prisoner EAT AND DRINK?
'

‘Käthe, Käthe!' Mitraillette, weeping, tried to take my face between her hands to comfort me and shut me up. ‘Käthe, arrête – stop, stop! Tu dois – you must! Wait – Attends –'

She held a tin cup of cold coffee laced with cognac up to my mouth – helped me. Helped me drink.

That was the first time she KO'd me. It takes 30 minutes for the drug to work. Suppose I'm lucky they didn't hit me over the head with a bicycle to speed it up.

—

When I woke up they made me go with the chauffeur up to the villa. I felt like hell warmed over, stupid and faintly sick and absolutely famished, and I think I probably wouldn't have cared if the old woman who lived there had turned me over to the police. ISN'T THAT WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU KILL YOUR BEST FRIEND?

But no, the chauffeur took me into a dark and elegant oak-panelled hall and the woman came to meet me – she is one of those beautiful, porcelain-perfect people of the last century, with snow-white hair done up in exactly Julie's chignon – I noticed that. She took my hand without saying a thing and led me upstairs into a bathroom the size of a ballroom, where there was a dead boiling bath drawn up and waiting, and she sort of pushed me into the room and left me there to get on with it.

I thought about putting Etienne's pocket knife to use by slitting my wrists, but it seemed rather unfair on the frail, heroic woman whose house it was, and also – ALSO I WANT REVENGE, BLAST IT

So I had a bath. Which, I confess, was heavenly. Dried off in a huge fluffy towel obviously left for me, feeling sinful. And a bit unreal.

The old woman – I should say elderly, not old, she is a refined sort of person – she met me at the door when I came out. I was clean underneath, but my hillwalking trousers were caked with mud and my wet hair was standing on end and I felt shabby as a street urchin. Didn't seem to matter – once more she took me by the hand, and this time led me to a small parlour where she had a fire going, and a kettle on the hob. She made me sit down on the frayed silk of her eighteenth-century settee while she made me a little supper, with bread and honey and coffee, and tiny yellow apples, and a boiled egg.

The tray went on a small, marble-topped side table and she knocked the top of the egg off for me with a pretty silver spoon as though I were a baby and needed feeding. Then she dipped the spoon into the egg and the yolk came up golden like the sun popping out of a cloud bank. It made me think instantly of eating supper with the Craig Castle Irregulars the first time I went there. Then I realised that Julie and I had never been there at the same time and now we never would, and I bent over and began to cry.

The old woman, who didn't know who I was and whose life was in danger just because she had me in her house, sat down beside me on the old settee and stroked my hair with thin, wrinkled hands, and I sobbed hopelessly in her arms for nearly an hour.

After a while she got up and said, ‘I will make another egg for you, three minutes only – how the English like it. This one is cold now.'

She did another and she made me eat it while she ate the cold one herself.

When I left to go back to the stables she kissed me on both cheeks and said, ‘We share a terrible burden, chérie. We are alike.'

I am not sure what she meant.

I kissed her cheeks too and said, ‘Merci, Madame. Merci mille fois.'

A thousand thanks is not really enough. But I haven't anything else to give her.

—

Her gardens are full of roses – sprawling, old, tangled bushes, quite a few of them autumn-flowering Damasks with their last flowers still nodding and drooping in the rain. The old woman is the one the circuit is named for. Mitraillette says that before the war the woman was quite a noted horticulturalist and that the chauffeur/ groundskeeper is in fact a skilled gardener, and she has bred and named a few of the roses herself. I hadn't noticed the roses when we arrived last night, or even walking up to the villa in daylight in a stupor, but I noticed them on my way back to the stables after my bath. The flowers are sodden and dying in the December rain, but the sturdy bushes are still alive, and will be beautiful some day in the spring, if the German army doesn't mow them down like the ones in the Ormaie town square. For no good reason they made me think of Paris and ever since then I have had that song stuck in my head yet again.