Code Name Verity(55)

‘France!’

Maddie hugged her knees, reeling with the magic and menace of that stolen flight.

‘You’re not supposed to tell me that,’ Queenie said.

‘I’m not,’ Maddie agreed. ‘I wasn’t even supposed to have gone. But we didn’t actually land there.’

Queenie nodded and examined her cigarette. Maddie had never seen her friend quite so undone.

‘You know what you looked like just now,’ Maddie said, ‘when you came in, with your hair pulled back in that strict Victorian governess way, you looked like –’

‘– Eine Agentin der Nazis,’ Queenie supplied, taking a long, shaking drag on her cigarette.

‘What? Oh. Yes. Like a German spy. Or everyone’s idea of a German spy anyway, fair and scary.’

‘I think I’m a bit small for the Aryan ideal,’ Queenie said, observing herself critically. She stretched her neck again, felt the bruised arm cautiously and raised the cigarette to her lips, more steadily this time.

Maddie did not ask what had happened. She was never so petty. She did not dabble with minnows at the surface when there were thirty-pound salmon swimming deeper down.

‘What,’ Maddie said quietly, ‘do you actually do?’

‘“Careless talk costs lives,”’ Queenie retorted.

‘I don’t talk,’ Maddie said. ‘What do you do?’

‘I speak German. Ich bin eine –’

‘Be sensible,’ Maddie said. ‘You translate . . . What? Who do you translate for?’

Queenie turned towards her again with the narrow gaze of a hunted rodent.

‘You translate for prisoners of war? You work for Intelligence – you translate at interrogations?’

Queenie hid herself in a cloud of smoke.

‘I’m not a translator,’ she said.

‘But you said –’

‘No.’ Queenie was quiet too. ‘You said that. I told you I speak German. But I’m not a translator. I’m an interrogator.’

—

It is ridiculous that you have not already guessed the nature of my Intelligence work, Amadeus von Linden. Like you, I am a wireless operator.

Like you, I am bloody good at it.

Our methods differ.

‘On the job,’ as it were, I am called Eva Seiler. That was the name they used for me throughout my training – we were made to live and breathe our alter egos, and I got used to it – Seiler is the name of my school and was easy to remember. We had to discipline people who called me Scottie by accident. In English I can fake an Orkney accent better than a German one, so we went with that when I was operational – obscurely difficult to identify.

That first day – that first assignment, the very first one – remember how giddy everyone was the morning after, when they handed out all the champagne and perfume at The Cottage? I’d caught a double agent. A Nazi agent masquerading as a French Resistance courier. They’d suspected him and they brought me in to be there when they landed him in England – I caught him off guard at the low ebb of his strength and adrenaline (he’d had a long night being hauled out of France, they all did). He was a known womaniser; he didn’t have the balls to admit he didn’t recognise me when I threw myself at him in that frosty little debriefing room, laughing and weeping and exclaiming in German. The room was bugged and they heard everything we said.

It wasn’t always that easy, but it paved my way. Mostly these men were all so desperate or confused by the time I appeared, with my neutral Swiss accent and comfortingly official checklist, that they were often gratefully cooperative if not wholly bewitched. But not this night, not on the night last April when Maddie flew to France. The man I interviewed that night didn’t believe in me. He accused me of treachery. Treason against the Fatherland – what was I doing working for the enemy, the English? He called me a collaborator, a backstabber, a filthy English whore.

You know – the stupid man’s big mistake was in calling me ENGLISH. It made my fury wholly convincing. A whore, we’ve established that, filthy, it goes without saying, but whatever else the hell I am, I AM NOT ENGLISH.

‘You’re the one who’s failed the Fatherland, you’re the one who’s been caught,’ I snarled at him, ‘and you’re the one who will face trial when you’re returned to Stuttgart –’ (I recognised his accent, a coincidence and a direct hit) ‘– I am merely here doing my job as Berlin’s interpretive liaison –’ (oh yes, I said that) ‘– And how DARE you call me ENGLISH!’