Code Name Verity(45)

‘Well, thank goodness for that,’ she said in motherly tones. ‘So I can trust you to give me honest answers –’ She glanced up at von Linden. ‘You know what they call this place?’

I raised my eyebrows, shrugging.

‘Le Chateau des Bourreaux,’ she said.

I laughed rather too loudly again, crossed my legs and examined the inside of my wrist.

(It is a pun, you see – Chateau de Bordeaux, Chateau des Bourreaux – Bordeaux Castle, Castle of Butchers.)

‘No, I’d not heard that,’ I said. And I honestly haven’t – perhaps because I am so isolated most of the time. Shows you how distracted I am that I didn’t think of it myself. ‘Well, as you can see I am still in one piece.’

She really looked at me hard for a second – just one second. I smoothed my skirt down over my knee. Then she became businesslike and produced a notebook and pen while a pale Gestapo underling who looked about 12 years old poured cognac (COGNAC!) for the three of us (the THREE of us – v.L., G.P. and ME – not Engel) out of a crystal decanter into snifters as big as my head.

At this point I became so deeply suspicious of everyone in the room that I could not remember what I was supposed to say. Alibi, Alibi, is all I could think of. This is different, I don’t know what’s going on, he wants to catch me off guard, it’s a new trick. Is the room bugged, why have they lit the fire and not the chandelier, and what does the talking cockatoo have to do with it?

Wait, wait, wait! What else is there to get out of me? I’m GIVING THE GESTAPO EVERYTHING I KNOW. I’ve been doing it for weeks. Pull yourself together, lassie, you’re a Wallace and a Stuart!

At this point, I purposefully put out my cigarette against my own palm. Nobody noticed.

To hell with the truth, I told myself fiercely. I want another week. I want my week and I’m going to get it.

I asked if we could speak in English for the interview; it felt more natural to talk to the American in English, and with Engel there to translate, the Hauptsturmführer did not mind. So then it was up to me, really, to put on a good show.

He did not want me to tell her about the codes I’d given him – certainly not about the, ah, stressful circumstances under which I’d collapsed and coughed them up – nor that the eleven wireless sets in Maddie’s Lysander were all destroyed in the fire when she crashed. (They showed me those pictures during my interrogation. The enlargements from the pilot’s cockpit came later. I think I mentioned them here, but I am not going to describe them.) I don’t entirely follow the logic of what I could or couldn’t tell the American broadcaster, since if she cared to she could have easily found out from anyone in Ormaie about those destroyed radio sets, but perhaps no one has told British Intelligence yet and the Gestapo is still playing the radio game – das Funkspiel – trying to play back my compromised codes and frequencies on one of their previously captured wireless sets.

(I suppose I should have written about those pictures, only I couldn’t – literally couldn’t – it was during those days when I had run out of paper. But I won’t now either.)

I said I was a wireless operator, parachuted here in civilian clothes so I might not attract attention, and that I had been caught because I made a cultural blunder – we chatted a bit about the difficulty of being a foreigner and trying to assimilate yourself into French daily life. Engel nodded sagely in agreement, not while she was listening to me, but as she was repeating it to von Linden.

Oh, how strange this war is, mirabile dictu – the wee Scots wireless set, I mean operator, is still nursing small, hidden, nasty short circuits got during her savagely inhuman interrogation – yet she can keep a straight face as she sits beneath the Venetian chandelier with the American Penn and the Germans Engel and von Linden, sharing cognac and complaining about the French!

It made the right impression though – finding something we all agreed on.

Penn then remarked that Engel’s English must have been picked up in the American mid-west, which left the rest of us speechless for a longish moment. Then Engel confessed that she had been a student at the University of Chicago for a year (where she was training as a CHEMIST. I don’t think I’ve ever met ANYONE with so much wasted talent). Penn tried to make her play the Do-You-Know game, but the only person they had in common was Henry Ford, whom Engel had met at a charity dinner. Engel’s American contacts were all very respectably pro-Germany, Penn’s less so. They were not in Chicago at the same time – Penn has been based in Europe since early in the ’30s.