Code Name Verity(91)

FLY THE PLANE, MADDIE





Horrid dream about guillotines. All in French, probably very bad French – never imagined I could dream in French! I was using Etienne’s pocket knife to tighten up screws attaching a cable that lifted the blade, to make sure it would fall cleanly. Sickening – if it was a messy death it would all be my fault. I kept thinking, It works just like a choke – C’est comme un starter –

Aye right, miss, as Jock would say.

If I don’t end up in that foul hotel courtyard with my head in a tin washtub it will be a blooming miracle.

I sat in Amélie’s favourite café for an hour waiting for an old man whose name I don’t know to tell me, ‘L’ange descend en dix minutes – ’ Ten minutes till the angel comes down. That meant Engel had gone to get the car out of the garage so she can take the Gestapo captain to meet his dreadful C.O. Then all I had to do was walk past the front of the hotel just as she was ushering him into the car, and hand her a lipstick with a slip of paper hidden in the sleeve, which tells her where we have arranged her own personal cachette – if she wants to make contact with the Resistance she can leave a note in the kids’ café, folded in a linen handkerchief which is wedged beneath a table leg to stop it rocking.

Of course she can also set a trap for me now, since I will have to collect the note and she knows it.

You know what? If she’s going to rat on me she doesn’t need to set a trap. If she’s going to rat on me I’m already dead.

When I caught up with her this afternoon I knelt quickly at her feet, as though she’d lost something, when really it was me planting it there. Then I stood up and held out the little shiny tube. I smiled like an idiot and spoke half a dozen of the two dozen words I know in German.

‘Verzeihung, aber Sie haben Ihren Lippenstift fallengelassen – ’ Excuse me, you dropped your lipstick.

The captain was already inside the car and Engel hadn’t opened her own door yet. He couldn’t hear us. I wouldn’t be able to understand anything she answered, so I was just supposed to smile sweetly and if she didn’t take the lipstick I was supposed to say ‘Es tut mir leid, da? es doch nicht Ihr Lippenstift war –’ I’m sorry, it wasn’t your lipstick after all.

She looked down at the gold tube, frowning, then looked up at my bland, gormless grin.

She asked curiously, and in English, ‘Are you Maddie Brodatt?’

It’s a good thing I was already smiling. I just sort of let the smile sit frozen on my face. Felt utterly false, as though I had on a mask – like I was wearing someone else’s face. But I didn’t stop smiling. I shook my head.

‘K?the Habicht,’ I said.

She nodded once – like a bow. She took the lipstick, and opened the driver’s door of the Mercedes, and climbed in.

‘Danke, K?the,’ she said before she shut the door. Thanks, K?the. Dead casual. Informal and cheeky, as though I were a little girl.

As she drove away I remembered that K?the isn’t supposed to understand English.





Fly the plane.

I wish I could, I wish, I WISH I HAD CONTROL.

I’m not dead yet and we’ve got Engel’s answer. I collected it myself, getting quite confident about cycling into town as Mitraillette always uses the same checkpoint – they know me now, and wave me through without bothering to check my papers. Engel’s left us Julie’s scarf. I didn’t recognise it at first; it was lying under the table in the café and the lad who sweeps the floors handed it to me. ‘C’est à vous?’ – Is this yours? I didn’t know what it was, at first – a wad of dull grey cloth – but when I touched it I realised it was silk, so I took it, in case it was important. I knotted it round my neck, smiling my idiot’s smile – ‘Merci.’ Thanks.

I sat there for ten more minutes, my stomach turning over with fear and excitement, forcing myself to finish a bowl of the most horrid phoney coffee ever brewed, so I wouldn’t look suspicious leaving in a hurry.

Bicycled home like a demon, pulled the crumpled silk from round my neck and spread it flat on my bed in Etienne’s room. That’s when I realised it was Julie’s Parisian silk scarf –

I was only little when Dad died, but I remember how I used to open the drawer where he kept his ties, before Gran cleared them out, and take a big sniff. And the ties all smelled like Dad, still – like cherry tobacco and cologne and a whiff of motor oil. I loved the smell of those ties. It brought him back.