The House at Mermaid's Cove(40)
The music faded out and a man, speaking in French, began reading out what sounded like messages of greeting sent in by listeners: birthdays, wedding anniversaries—that sort of thing. “That’s how we do it.” Merle inclined her head toward the set. She took a piece of paper from the pocket of her skirt and handed it to me.
I read the handwritten message aloud: “‘Bonjour à Tante Marie et Oncle Pierre de la part de tout le monde à La Maison de La Sirène.’” I looked up, mystified. “Good day to Aunt Marie and Uncle Pierre from everyone at the House of the Mermaid?”
She nodded. “That’s the code name for this place. Aunt Marie and Uncle Pierre are the aliases of the Resistance people organizing the pickup.” She turned off the radio. “All being well, your fishing trawler will drop anchor offshore in the early hours of Monday morning. The men you’re going to collect will be waiting in the dark, on the beach. You and the agents will go ashore in a dinghy, along with weapons, ammunition, and medical supplies. Once everything’s been unloaded, the others will climb in and row back with you.”
She made it sound so simple. “How long has this been going on?” I asked.
“Only for a couple of months,” she replied. “This’ll be our third operation. I suppose you heard what happened last time?”
I nodded.
“The men who were shot were all pilots—three British and one American. If the Germans had turned up just five minutes earlier, it wouldn’t have happened, because the agents would have been in the dinghy, and they all spoke fluent French. But they’d just been dropped, and the dinghy was on its way back.” She paused, her eyes on mine. “That’s why we need you there.”
She went back over to the table where the Morse code machine sat. She slid her hand under the machine and pulled out an envelope. “For the purpose of the mission you’ll have a code name. We use names from Shakespeare. The Tempest. Yours is Ariel.”
“Ariel.” It was the second time in as many weeks that I’d taken another name.
“That’s what you’ll be called while you’re away from here. Everyone else on board will be going under an alias, too.”
“What do I call Jack?”
“He’s Prospero,” she said.
I wondered if Jack had chosen his name and mine. Ariel had been imprisoned in a tree by a witch, and Prospero had set him free. In other circumstances that would have made me smile.
Later that afternoon Jack took photographs of me for the fake documents I would need. Then he took me down to the woods to show me how to use a pistol. I didn’t want to carry a weapon and I told him so.
“I do understand,” he said, as we walked through the walled garden, past the chickens scratching around the roots of the fruit trees. “The idea of killing another human being goes against everything you believe in. But try to imagine how you might feel if a German pointed a gun at someone you cared about.” He turned his face to me as we wound our way past the beehives. “Remember the other day, when you were on the beach with the children and I appeared with Brock?”
I nodded.
“Ned was clinging to your legs, wasn’t he? I think he wanted to stay and play with you instead of going back with the others.”
“Yes, he did.” I looked at him, puzzled.
“Imagine if I’d been a Nazi—just landed on the beach and wielding a gun. How would you have felt if I’d pointed it at Ned?”
The question took me by surprise. “I . . . I’d have thrown myself on top of him—Ned, I mean.”
“But once I’d shot you, I could have killed all the others.” Jack paused to open the gate that led to the path through the palms and tree ferns. “What if you’d had a gun?”
I didn’t reply at first. I knew that he’d argued me into a corner. “You can’t use Ned as an example. If someone was going to kill a child, I would have to shoot them. Any right-thinking person would do the same—but that’s not the same as using a gun in the kind of mission you want me to go on.”
“Why not? Weren’t those men who got shot last month just as worthy of protection? If they’d lived, they would have gone back to fighting the Nazis, gone on trying to bring this war to an end.” He kicked a fallen palm frond out of the way. “I’m not saying you’ll ever have to use a gun; the reason we want you out there is to diffuse any confrontation before it escalates to that level. But—please forgive me for saying this—if you’re going to help us, you need to stop thinking like a nun.”
What could I say? Ever since I’d been washed ashore, I’d been trying to do exactly that. But it was one thing to set aside the rituals that had governed my life—and quite another to contemplate breaking one of the Ten Commandments.
Thou shalt not kill. There was no qualifying sentence following those words: nothing to say that it was all right to take someone’s life in certain circumstances, that taking one life was justifiable if it saved many others. And yet thousands of Christians were out there fighting the Germans. They had taken the same moral position as Jack—that defending against evil was justified, even if it meant killing people.
I followed him in silence as he led me away from the path, through overgrown camellia bushes whose branches caught my scarf as I ducked underneath them. Through the flowers and foliage, I glimpsed a wooden structure standing in a clearing. It was a dilapidated summerhouse with a thatched roof, parts of which had slid down the eaves, giving the place the look of an old man in need of a haircut. There was no glass in the windows, and the door was hanging open at a crazy angle, as if it could fall off in the slightest breeze.