Rose Under Fire (Code Name Verity, #2)(95)

‘Hello? Hello?’ came Chuck’s voice. ‘You still there, Miss Justice? Bet you weren’t expecting to spend the first day of winter on the Adriatic, were you?’

I let out my breath in a gasp. I didn’t cry.

Instead I asked brazenly, ‘Can I bring a friend?’

I shamed Ró?a into coming with me to the airfield.

‘You know the story I used to tell about how my boyfriend Nick was going to come and rescue us in a little plane – he’d land in the middle of the Lagerstrasse and we’d all fly away to the beach? You and I are going to fly to the beach today.’

‘It’s December!’

‘OK, no red bathing suits this time. That’ll have to wait till I can take you to the Conewago Grove Lake. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. We have to do it for Karolina.’

I was brutal. I didn’t hit Ró?a. I didn’t touch her. But I was brutal.

‘Karolina was gassed instead of me, she took my place, she took my number, but she didn’t do it for me, Ró?yczka, and you know it. She did it for you. She did it so I could get you out of Ravensbrück and you could tell the world what they did to you – what they did to Karolina. She wasn’t as permanently damaged as you, but she still got a paper cone full of bacteria sewn into her leg and ended up so swollen with infection she couldn’t walk for eight months –’

Ró?a was clenching her fists.

‘I know what they did to Karolina,’ I went on mercilessly. ‘I know exactly what they did to every single one of the Rabbits. It’s all been recorded by the people you work for, and maybe you haven’t read the specific reports, but I have, because they’re all part of Dr Alexander’s evidence. Karolina could have told the world herself. She’d be making newsreels about it – people would be using her work as evidence too! She could have left me to be gassed with the rest of my transport, and she’d have stood up there in front of that tribunal and showed everybody what happened. But you didn’t. And I’m not blaming you for that, but you are darned well flying to the beach with me. Because Karolina was going to and she’s dead and you’re coming along in her place.’

By the time I’d finished, Ró?a was crouched in a heap on the floor of our room, bent over her knees with her face in her hands. All I could see of her were her round shoulders in their sensible grey wool and the short, fluffy waves of caramel-gold perm. But she wasn’t crying; her shoulders weren’t shaking. She was thinking.

After a few seconds, when she was pretty sure I’d finished, she sat up and looked me in the eye.

‘The Ravensbrück trial in Hamburg’s not over yet,’ she said. ‘Tell the world yourself, Rose Justice! I know, you’ve got all these poems published and you’re doing a story for your magazine, big damn deal. You sit in your room all alone at your typewriter, with no one watching if it makes you cry, and you take it to the post office and no one even knows what you’re sending. How hard is that to do? I could do that. I’ve done that. My written testimony is part of the Lund files too, you know. NO. If you want me to go flying with you for Karolina, you will damn well go to Hamburg for Karolina.’

It was my turn to feel like I’d been punched in the stomach and she saw it in my face. Ró?a let out one of her familiar, maniacal cackles. ‘You won’t even have to take your clothes off!’

‘I’ve already said no,’ I said faintly.

‘Bah. Bribe the judges.’

Which is exactly what Anna had said.

And suddenly it became like so many decisions I’d made during the war: I didn’t have a choice. I had to do it whether I wanted to or not. Not just for Karolina, who was dead, but also for Anna, who was still alive and had no one to defend her.

You only fly straight and level in balance.

Anna and Ró?a are the opposing forces that perfectly balance each other to keep me in the air.

It was harder to get the words out this time than the easy promise I’d made to Anna in the washroom in the Palace of Justice.

‘You’ve got a deal,’ I gasped.

Ró?a and I got up at the crack of dawn and shared a car with a couple of BBC reporters who were heading out that day with a lot of equipment. They wouldn’t let us help them carry anything, and one of them actually went out of his way to take Ró?a’s arm and help her across the churned slush to the makeshift Operations building at the airfield, which meant he had to do two trips – but sometimes you have to just give up being independent and graciously accept the kindness that’s offered you. And anyway, this was without a doubt the sorriest excuse for an airfield I have ever seen, even counting the one they knocked up at Camp Los Angeles right after Reims was liberated. I guess that is our own fault for bombing Nuremberg’s real airfield to smithereens.

I’m painting a scene of gloom, but in fact it was a glorious, glorious day – crystal clear and breezy. There had been another inch or so of snow overnight so folks were frantically clearing a very narrow path up the runway. Chuck produced flight suits for us, which for some reason made Ró?a laugh her head off – her real laugh, which I’d hardly ever heard in all the time I’d known her, bubbly as champagne. ‘Are we going to go skiing?’ she asked.

‘Why skiing?’

‘My mother used to put me in this awful snowsuit – baggy legs just like this, four sizes too big for me, and it was purple. She’d roll up the legs and hold them in place with rubber bands.’