Lost Among the Living(77)

The rain had thinned, but still it came down in cold drops that dripped from the trees and pelted the umbrella. There were a few people about in Anningley, and Alex made a stir—shopkeepers idling on their front steps nodded to him, women doing their shopping craned their necks, curtains in upper windows twitched. Alex ignored all of it. Instead, he leaned close so no one could hear him and spoke to me.

“I told you Mabry plays a dirty game,” he said. “I couldn’t fight anymore, anyway—I’d pressed my luck as a pilot for too long. I applied to be sent back to England as an instructor, since the RAF was short on men who had lived long enough to gain the experience to teach. I was perfectly qualified to do it, but my request was stonewalled. I didn’t have to spend much time wondering why.”

I closed my eyes briefly. Alex could have come home, could have instructed other pilots from the safety of England? “Go on,” I managed.

“It was a death march,” Alex said softly as the rain pattered the umbrella. “Most pilots lived for two months—I had managed to live for two years. I could come home in a box and leave you a widow, or I could become Hans Faber. Those were my choices.”

“So you agreed.”

“In the original plan,” Alex said, “Hans Faber was to be a well-to-do traveling businessman with a heart condition that kept him from fighting. He would travel the country, ostensibly in the business of supplying cameras and film to the German army for use in reconnaissance and surveillance. He would carry a full set of identity papers, an authentic set of documentation for his heart condition, and a camera kit that was his sales sample. A German citizen, going about his business while quietly taking photographs for England.”

“The camera,” I said, “and its expensive case.”

“Yes. But by the time I agreed to the assignment, things were more difficult inside Germany, and the plan had to change. You were right, Jo. When I left you that last time, I went to Reims again, for more advanced training in undercover work. They gave me Hans Faber’s papers, though this time I didn’t have the heart condition. I went back into Germany in 1918 as an enlisted man.”

I felt like every set of eyes in Anningley was watching us, starting with the people we passed. I began to wonder how many of them could hear us. We were passing the lending library, and I pulled his arm. “Inside,” I said. “Let’s go.”

There was no one else here but the librarian at her desk. Alex folded the umbrella closed. “At least it’s out of the rain,” he whispered. “Do you actually want a book?”

“This way,” I said, whispering myself. I led him to the back, to my favorite set of shelves—containing mostly lowbrow novels and melodramas—and pretended to browse.

“Do you read these?” Alex asked curiously, looking over my shoulder.

“None of your business,” I replied. “Keep talking.”

He glanced at the librarian, who was napping soundly in her chair, and continued, pretending to look at books over my shoulder. “When we finally did the operation,” he said, “it went off without a hitch. I flew over enemy lines and parachuted from the plane with my papers and my German uniform in my pack. As the plane crashed, I landed and quickly changed sides. I walked out of the woods as Faber and hailed the first man I saw in flawless German, telling him I’d seen a plane go down while on the way to join my regiment. No one questioned me for a second.”

I shuddered. “Alex, that was bloody dangerous,” I said. “You could have been killed.”

He was silent for a moment, behind my shoulder, and then he placed a fingertip behind my ear, drawing it along the edge of my hairline. “I’ve made you use terrible language,” he said.

Flustered, I grabbed a book called Molly of the Plains from the shelf. It seemed to be about a young girl kidnapped by Indians. “Hans Faber wasn’t in a real regiment,” I said. “How did you do it?”

“There is chaos on the ground in war,” Alex said in my ear. “There are giant masses of men being moved this way and that. My cover was as a messenger, so I was always on the move. I pretended I always had to be on my way to one place or another, urgently. With enough plausible details, I made it work. And when I had the chance, I radioed information back to England about who was moving where, using which supply lines and which routes.”

I couldn’t imagine it, living like that from day to day. “Was it better than being in the RAF?” I asked. “Or worse?”

He was quiet so long that I didn’t think he’d answer. Then he said, “It was both better and worse, I suppose. Worse, because I had to keep the story straight and sleep rough most of the time—I barely slept for months. Because I knew you were home thinking I was missing in action. Better, because instead of being blown into bloody pieces, I had a shadow of a chance to come home.”

I bowed my head and stared blindly at the book in my hands. “It worked too well, didn’t it?” I said. “That’s why you didn’t come home.”

Ever so gently, he put his palm on the back of my neck, touching my hair almost with reverence. “Yes,” he admitted. “After the war, they wouldn’t let me go. Hans Faber became a traveling businessman again. He traveled Germany, Austria, Serbia, Belgium. They needed information to pass to the diplomats at the Treaty of Versailles. They needed to know what was happening to the Kaiser in Berlin. They needed to know what was happening in Italy. They always needed something, one thing after another. It was important work, they said. Work that influenced the lives of thousands of people, instead of the life of one man who wanted to go home to his wife.”