Code Name Verity(34)

3) When Queenie was sent up to Oakway for parachute training. And they weren’t allowed to talk to each other that time.

That should be a separate section, ‘SOE Parachute Drops’. But I have not got to that bit yet and now von Linden is just arriving, and I will have to translate what I have written today for him myself, since Engel is not here.

—

I am alone. O God. I have tried to undo Thibaut’s knots, but I can’t reach them with both hands. I was translating today’s writing for von Linden, my elbows on the table and my head between my hands, not daring to look at him. I’d already asked him for more time and he’d said he would consider it after he’d heard today’s material. And I know I have given him nothing today. Nothing but the events of the past two weeks, which he already knows, and the Green Flash. Almighty Christ. After I’d got to the bit about the cook feeling me up – so embarrassing, but if I’d skipped it and v.L. found out later I’d pay for it in blood – he came over and stood by me. I had to look up. When I did, he took a handful of my hair and held it lightly off the back of my neck for a moment.

He never smiles or frowns or anything. I could feel my face flaming. Oh why did I have to put down that coarse, filthy sarcasm about choosing between the cook and the inquisitor? I could not tell what he was thinking. He rubbed my hair gently between his fingers.

Then he said one word. It sounds the same in English and French and German. Kerosene.

And he left me here with the door closed.

I would like to write something heroic and inspired before I go up in fireworks, but I am too stupid and sick with dread to think of anything. I can’t even think of anyone else’s memorable defiance to repeat. I wonder what William Wallace said when they were tying him to the horses that would rip him into quarters. All I can think of is Nelson saying ‘Kiss me, Hardy.’





Ormaie 17.XI.43 JB-S

They have WASHED MY HAIR. That was what the kerosene was for this time. FLAMING HEAD LICE. Now I stink of explosive, but I have not got nits.

Just after the Hauptsturmführer left me last night, there was an air raid and everybody scrambled to the shelters as usual. I sat weeping and waiting for two hours, just as I did sometimes during that week of interrogation, begging God and the RAF for a direct hit that they NEVER DELIVER. After it was over, no one came back for another hour. THREE HOURS without anyone telling me what was going on. I expect v.L. was hoping that in my panic I would write something more productive as a last resort, only I struggled so much trying to get my legs free that the chair I was tied to fell over. Needless to say I could not write in such a state (and did not even consider calling for help). Eventually a number of people came in and found me doing a frantic imitation of an upside-down tortoise.

I had managed to drag myself and my chair over to the door and prepared an ambush that sent two guards sailing head over heels as they tripped on me when they came in. Von Linden really should know me well enough by now to realise that I am not going to face my execution without a fight. Or with anything remotely resembling dignity.

When they had got me resurrected and pulled up to the table again, von Linden came in and laid a single white pill in front of me. Like Alice I was suspicious. I still thought I was about to be executed, you see.

‘Cyanide?’ I asked tearfully. It would be such a humane way to go.

But it was not a suicide tablet, it turns out. It was an aspirin.

Like Engel, he does pay attention.

He has given me another week. But he has doubled my workload. We made a deal. Another one. Truly I thought I couldn’t possibly have anything left of my soul to sell to him, but we have managed to strike another bargain. He has got a tame American radio announcer who does Nazi propaganda in English aimed at the Yanks – she works from Paris for Berlin’s broadcasting service, and she has been badgering the Ormaie Gestapo for an interview. She wants to give her American battleship audiences a sugarcoated, inside perspective on Occupied France, how well prisoners are treated, how stupid and dangerous it is that the Allies force innocent girls like me to do dirty work like mine, blah blah blah. Despite her shining, legitimate, Third Reich radio credentials the Ormaie Gestapo are reluctant to respond, but von Linden believes he can use me to make a good impression. ‘I would not be here if my own government were not so ruthlessly inhumane,’ I will tell her for him. ‘By contrast see how humanely the Germans deal with captured agents, see how I am doing translation work, neutrally occupying myself while I await trial.’ (A joke – they will not give me a trial.)