Code Name Verity(44)

Engel did my nails. I was not let to do them myself lest I stab someone with the file. She was as vicious as possible without actually drawing blood (she succeeded in making me cry), but otherwise it is a perfect manicure. I feel sure she has fashion sense lurking beneath the Teutonic M?dchen guise she affects for the Gestapo.

They installed me at the marquetry table with some harmless dummy documents to work on – finding the best connections between French rail and bus timetables and making a list of them in German. When they brought in the interviewer, I stood up with an artificial smile and crossed the antique Persian carpet to welcome her, feeling exactly as though I were playing the Secretary on the opening night set of Agatha Christie’s Alibi.

‘Georgia Penn,’ the radio announcer introduced herself, offering me her hand. She is about a foot taller than me and walks with a stick and a prodigious limp. As old as von Linden, big and loud and friendly – well, just American. She worked in Spain during the Civil War as a foreign correspondent and got very badly treated by the Republicans, hence her pro-Fascist bent. She is normally based in Paris and does a radio show called ‘No Place Like Home’ full of jive tunes and pie recipes and discouraging hints that if you are stationed on a battleship in the Mediterranean, your girl is probably cheating on you back in the States. This rubbish is broadcast over and over to make the American soldiers homesick. Apparently Yanks will listen to anything if it includes decent music. The BBC is too serious for them.

I shook this treacherous woman’s hand and said coolly, en fran?ais pour que l’Hauptsturmführer who doesn’t speak English puisse nous comprendre, ‘I’m afraid I can’t tell you my name.’

She glanced over at von Linden, who stood deferentially at her shoulder.

‘Pourquoi?’ she demanded of him. She is even taller than von Linden, and her French has got all the same broad, twangy American vowels as her English. ‘Why can’t I know her name?’

She looked back down at me from her colossal height. I adjusted my scarf and assumed the casual pose of a saint stuck full of arrows, hands linked loosely behind my back, one foot turned out before the other with the knee slightly bent, my head cocked to one side.

‘It’s for my own protection,’ I said. ‘I don’t want my name publicised.’

What TOSH. I suppose I could have said, ‘I am supposed to vanish into the Night and the Fog –’ Don’t know what she’d have made of that. I wasn’t even allowed to tell her what branch of the military I am serving with.

Von Linden gave me a chair as well, next to Miss Penn, away from the table where I’d been working. Engel hovered subordinately. Miss Penn offered a cigarette to von Linden, who waved it away in disdain.

‘May I?’ she said, and when he shrugged politely, she took one herself and offered another to me. Bet Engel wanted one.

I said, ‘Merci mille fois.’ He said nothing. O mein Hauptsturmführer! You coward!

She set about lighting the cigarettes and announced in her brisk, straightforward French, ‘I don’t want to waste my time listening to propaganda. It’s my job and I’m wise to it. I’ll be frank with you – I’m looking for truth. Je cherche la vérité.’

‘Your accent is frightful,’ I answered, also in French. ‘Would you repeat that in English?’

She did – taking no insult, very serious, through a pall of smoke.

‘I’m looking for verity.’

It’s a bloody good thing he let me have that cigarette because otherwise I don’t know how I’d have managed to conceal that every one of us was dealing out her own DAMNED PACK OF LIES.

‘Truth,’ I said at last, in English.

‘Truth,’ she agreed.

Engel came running to my aid with a saucer (there being no ashtrays). I’d sucked the whole cigarette down to the butt, in five or six long drags, composing myself to answer.

‘Verity,’ I said in English, and exhaled every last molecule of nicotine and oxygen I had inside me. Then gasped: ‘“Truth is the daughter of time, not authority.”’ And: ‘“This above all, to thine own self be true.”’ I gibbered a bit, I confess. ‘Verity! I am the soul of verity.’ I laughed so wildly then that the Hauptsturmführer had to clear his throat to remind me to control myself. ‘I am the soul of verity,’ I repeated. ‘Je suis l’ésprit de vérité.’

In amongst the tobacco fug, Georgia Penn very kindly handed me what was left of her own cigarette.