Code Name Verity(103)

‘He believed that?’ I asked, astonished.

She shrugged. ‘No choice. She’ll suffer for it – milk and eggs cut to a limited supply strictly for her lodgers – the whole family under curfew in their own house, so they can’t sit up in the evening, bedtime straight after supper. She has to do all last night’s dishes in the morning before she makes breakfast for the guests. The children have all been strapped.’

‘Oh NO!’ I burst out.

‘They’ve got off lightly. The children could have been taken away. Or the woman sent to prison. But von Linden’s a bit soft on children.’

I’d left my bicycle in a street leading to the square. Just as I was taking hold of the handlebars Anna put her hand over mine. She pressed something heavy and cold and thin into my palm.

It is a key.

‘They asked me to bring some soap to scrub her up with when she had that interview,’ Anna said. ‘Something scented and pretty. I had some I’d got in America, you know how you save things sometimes, and I managed to make a print in it of the key for the service door at the back. This is a new one. I think you have everything you need now.’

I squeezed her hand fiercely.

‘Danke, Anna.’

‘Take care, K?the.’

At that moment, as though she’d called him up by saying his name, Amadeus von Linden himself turned the corner of the street, walking towards the Place des Hirondelles.

‘Guten Tag, Fr?ulein Engel,’ he said cordially, and she dropped her cigarette and crushed it out with her foot and straightened her back and her coat collar all in a rush of practised panic. I dropped my cigarette too – seemed the right thing to do. She said something to him about me – she linked arms with me quickly, as though we were old chums, and I heard her say K?the’s name, and the Thibauts’. Introducing me, probably. He held out his hand.

I stood there absolutely frozen for about five seconds.

‘Hauptsturmführer von Linden,’ Anna prompted gravely.

I put the key in my coat pocket with the architect’s drawings and my forged ID.

‘Hauptsturmführer von Linden,’ I repeated, and shook hands with him, smiling like a lunatic.

I’ve never had a ‘mortal enemy’. I’ve never known what it meant even, something out of Sherlock Holmes and Shakespeare. How can my whole being, my whole life up to this point, be matched to one man in deadly combat?

He stood gazing through me, distracted by his own colossal problems. It never occurred to him that I could tell him the secret coordinates of the Moon Squadron’s airfield, or give him the names of half a dozen Resistance operatives here in his own city, or that I was planning to send his entire administration up in flames in five days. It never occurred to him I was in every way his enemy, his opponent, I am everything he is battling against, I am British and Jewish, in the ATA I am a woman doing a man’s work at a man’s rate of pay, and my work is to deliver the aircraft that will destroy his regime. It never occurred to him that I knew he’d watched and made notes while my best friend sat tied to a chair in her underwear having holes burnt in her wrists and throat, that I knew he’d commanded it, that I knew that in spite of his own misgivings he’d followed orders like a coward and shipped her off to be used as an experimental lab rat until her heart collapsed – it never occurred to him that now he was looking at his master, at the one person in all the world who held his fate right between her palms – me, in patched hand-me-downs and untrimmed hair and idiot smile – and that my hatred for him is pure and black and unforgiving. And that I don’t believe in God, but if I did, if I did, it would be the God of Moses, angry and demanding and OUT FOR REVENGE, and

—

It doesn’t matter whether I feel sorry for him or not. It was Julie’s job and now it’s mine.

He said something polite to me, his drawn face neutral. I glanced at Anna, who nodded once.

‘Ja, mein Hauptsturmführer,’ I said through clenched teeth. Anna gave me a sharp kick in the ankle and leaped in to make an excuse on my behalf. I put my hand in my pocket and felt the crackle of thick paper 70 years old, and the new key weighing heavy in the seam of the threadbare woven wool.

They nodded to me and walked on together. Poor Anna.

I liked her very much.





K?the’s gone back to Alsace and I’m waiting for the moon again – everything in place and we’ve had confirmation of a bomber fly-past planned for Sat. night – whether or not Op. Verity is successful they’re sending a Lysander for me, at the field I found, on Sunday or Monday – all of it weather permitting and of course assuming we can collect the Rosalie. Jolly difficult to sleep and when I do I just have nightmares about flying burning planes with faulty chokes, being forced to cut Julie’s throat with Etienne’s pocket knife, etc. If I wake up yelling three times a night there’s not much point in trying to hide. I am flying alone.