Rose Under Fire (Code Name Verity, #2)(73)
And we walked down that road in broad daylight, Ró?a lurching between us tucked beneath our arms. There was no one else walking there and we were careful to cower in the weed-filled ditch at the road’s edge, gritting our teeth among last year’s dead stinging nettles, whenever traffic passed. We kept chattering to one another, insulting one another, discussing the weather – anything, like walking through a den of lazy lions and praying they won’t get up. If they raise their heads and keep an eye on you as you pass, that’s a little disconcerting. But as long as they don’t come after you, you’re safe. You know you better not run. Well, we couldn’t run. We had to stop and rest about every quarter of a mile. It was probably a four-mile walk to the airfield.
‘How is Lisette?’ Irina asked.
‘Brave,’ I said.
Ró?a asked conversationally, ‘What is the officer’s name?’
‘Which officer?’
‘The one we all work for. In case someone asks.’
‘Oberleutnant Karl Womelsdorff,’ I answered.
‘Wow, that was fast! Oberleutnant Karl Womelsdorff! I thought you didn’t speak any German, French Political Prisoner Einundfünfzigtausendvierhundertachtundneunzig. You must have a devious streak after all.’
May 4, 1945
Still at the Ritz
Except that I feel like I have never lived anywhere else but this big room and its gorgeous bathroom, this could have happened yesterday. I think it is partly the reason I haven’t even ventured out to find a dining room. The terror of that first day in the open, with the treacherous future yawning in front of us like the Grand Canyon – on foot with no food and no money and no papers in the middle of Germany, eternally at war, probably with people hunting for us – although I’m pretty sure now that if they had been, they’d have already found us for sure. But you don’t think every thing through logically when you have no real future except to plummet over the edge of the Grand Canyon.
We didn’t make it past the airfield. I guess it is a miracle we made it that far. The ground crew who caught us were very kind. They were all airmen and mechanics, not SS guards. Maybe this isn’t fair of me, but I actually think they were smarter than the SS guards – I mean, they were doing skilled jobs, not siccing dogs on starving women. Seems like that must automatically make you a nicer kind of person. Not necessarily, I guess, but it’s a good start.
These guys knew perfectly well what we were and where we’d come from. Irina was still in prison uniform beneath the threadbare coat; Ró?a couldn’t walk; I had no hair beneath my bandanna. And only Ró?a spoke any German.
We got stopped along the barbed-wire fence by the airfield perimeter. There wasn’t any place to hide. It was an unarmed man on a bicycle who caught us – he pulled up alongside Irina and laid a hand on her arm. I saw her assess him, recognise that she couldn’t take him on, and her shoulders sagged. She didn’t try to shake him off. I didn’t run. Ró?a couldn’t, and Irina was caught. There was nowhere to go anyway.
Ró?a tried to feed him a line. I don’t know what she said, but I swear I have never seen her be so charming. When was the last time she sweet-talked anyone – maybe the Gestapo officer who made her watch while they beat her mother to a pulp? Anyway, she was like Snow White convincing the huntsman not to kill her – heart-melting. As well as being the only one of us who could speak German, Ró?a was the only one of us who was actually dressed inconspicuously, since I’d given my coat to Irina. Lisette had combed and braided Ró?a’s hair and twisted it up before we left. If you could look past Ró?a being filthy and skeletal and crawling with bugs, she was lovely, really, in a waif-like, Orphan Annie kind of way.
I remember worrying about how close we were standing to the wire fence, thinking it was probably electrified.
The mechanic on the bicycle didn’t threaten us. He got off his bike so he could walk alongside us, and escorted us back to the main gate and on to the airfield. Over Ró?a’s head, Irina shot me an agonised glance. I spread my hand into a plane and rocked the wings at her. Irina’s mouth cracked into a small, sad, ironic grin and she briefly rocked her own hand back at me.
All right, they are really going to shoot me this time, I thought. And I have completely failed to get Ró?a out safely. Idiot! What was she THINKING? But at least if they kill me with Irina, as a prisoner on a Luftwaffe airfield, I will have died as a combat pilot. My father was a combat pilot and so is Irina and so am I. We are soldiers and I am not going to make a fool of myself.
At the big vehicle gate, the guard in the sentry box made a telephone call, and after a minute a couple of other people came out to meet us. One of them took my arm the way the mechanic had Irina’s. They still let us support Ró?a between us.
They frogmarched us to a bleak, cold maintenance room in the hangar. One side of the room was crowded with a million paint cans and tubs of dope for lacquering fabric aircraft wings, and the rest of the room was stacked with empty buckets and brooms and mops. They took the brooms and mops away in case we might try to use them as weapons, then locked us in and went away. The mechanic whom Ró?a had been charming earlier left her a small canvas bag, like a gas mask bag, that turned out to contain two margarine sandwiches and a thermos of watery beef broth.