And this, even more wonderful and mysterious, is also true: when I read it, when I read what Julie’s written, she is instantly alive again, whole and undamaged. With her words in my mind while I’m reading, she is as real as I am. Gloriously daft, drop-dead charming, full of bookish nonsense and foul language, brave and generous. She’s right here. Afraid and exhausted, alone, but fighting. Flying in silver moonlight in a plane that can’t be landed, stuck in the climb – alive, alive, ALIVE.
Cd B = Château de Bordeaux
H d V = Hôtel de Ville [town hall]
O.HdV.A. 1872 B. No. 4 CdB
O = Ormaie? perhaps A/Annals? Archives B/Box/Boîte 1872 - could be year, Archives 1872 box no 4
—
I SEE IT
ORMAIE TOWN HALL ARCHIVES 1872 BOX No. 4 CHATEAU DE BORDEAUX
We have them. WE HAVE GOT THEM.
—
Our prison cells are only hotel bedrooms but we are guarded like royalty. And also, there are dogs.
these cellars are empty because they are not secure
There are a number of service lifts, dumb waiters for hauling trays upstairs in addition to the great big one for loading crates and things from the main street
—
There’s more – I know there’s more – Engel’s underlined all the instructions in red – red’s her colour, Julie said. The pages are numbered and dated in red too. Julie mentioned Engel had to number the pages. They’ve created it between them, Julia Beaufort-Stuart and Anna Engel, and they’ve given it to me to use – the code’s not in order, doesn’t need to be. No wonder she was so determined to finish it –
Ugh, there is SO MUCH PAPER HERE
here it is –
—
there was an air raid and everybody scrambled to the shelters as usual… for two hours
‘Cd B’ = Château de Bordeaux
as with all the prisoners’ rooms my window has been boarded shut
The Gestapo use the ground floor and 2 mezzanines for their own accommodation and offices
‘H d V’ picked out in red = Hôtel de Ville
through the cellars and out to a little stone courtyard [where there is] a gate to the lower lane
—
We can get in through the cellars, front and back. There is an entrance in the lower lane at the back and a loading lift through the street at the front. The cellars are not secure and they use the bedrooms as cells. During air raids the whole place is left unguarded apart from the dogs. We will have up to two hours. We can pull the fuses, disable the generator and fill the dumb waiters with Explosive 808 when we leave.
Julie put in the great-aunt story because she thought we might have to blow the place up with her inside. That there might be no other way. And she wanted us to do it anyway.
But we won’t have to leave any of the prisoners inside. We can break into the rooms with crowbars and lock picks and get everyone out. The official-looking numbers at the end in red ink are a CITY ARCHIVE REFERENCE. It will be the ARCHITECT’S DRAWINGS for the Château de Bordeaux. We will have a map of the building.
It is coming down. We are still a sensational team.
SOE LONDON – W/T MSG, DRAFT FOR ENCODING
Regret report your organiser code name Paul of Damask Circuit and Flt Officer Julia Beaufort-Stuart both killed in action 1 Dec 1943 STOP request RAF operational flight w/in France route overhead Ormaie this full moon Sat 11 Dec to create diversion enabling Operation Verity
La Cadette collected the drawings. It turns out anyone can go digging in the Ormaie Town Hall archives, it’s like – Nazi contempt for the Occupied country taken to extremes – as though they welcome the locals to come and ransack their own heritage so no one else need bother. You get searched when you enter the building of course, but not on the way out, and they didn’t even look at Amélie’s ID – she said she was working on a project for school, easy peasy. She was supposed to say she was verifying a boundary of the Thibaut farm, but when she saw how easy it would be to get in and out, she made up a simpler story on the spot. She is so sharp.
It took her 20 minutes during her school dinner break, and she left the pages for me to collect so she wouldn’t get caught carrying them around.
It was probably a mistake to tell her to leave them in Engel’s cachette. I think of it as mine, but it’s Engel’s. Also, I think we are supposed to avoid using cafés. I wish I’d been trained for this. It didn’t matter in the end, but oh how my stomach turned over when I walked in and found Engel sitting at the table.
I started to walk past to another table, smiling my stupid plastic smile – makes me feel like a zombie this week – but she beckoned abruptly.
‘Salut, Käthe.’ She patted the chair next to hers. When I sat down she stubbed out her cigarette and lit another two and gave me one. Somehow it was the most heart-stopping thing I have ever done, touching my own lips with this cigarette that had touched Anna Engel’s lips a second earlier. I feel like – I know her so intimately, after reading Julie’s confession. She must feel the same way about me, though I don’t suppose I scare her as much.
‘Et ton amie, ça va?’ she asked casually – How’s your friend?
I looked away, swallowed, couldn’t maintain the plastic smile. Took a drag on the cigarette and choked, haven’t smoked for a while and never those French fags. After a minute or so she figured out that what I wasn’t saying was not a happy ending.
She swore softly in French, a single violent word of disappointment. Then paused and asked, ‘Elle est morte?’
I nodded. Yes, she’s dead.
‘Viens,’ Engel said, scraping back her chair. ‘Allons. Viens marcher avec moi, j’ai des choses à te dire.’
If she had been about to cart me off to prison I don’t think I could have refused – Come for a walk, I’ve got things to tell you? No choice.
I stood up again in Engel’s cloud of smoke – hadn’t even ordered anything, just as well as it always panics me to have to speak French to strangers. Engel patted the thick wad of paper folded next to her ashtray, reminding me. I picked it up and shoved it in my jacket pocket along with Käthe’s ID.
It was mid-afternoon, streets not too busy, and Engel clicked into English almost right away – popping back into French only when we passed anybody. It’s dead weird talking to her in English, she sounds like a Yank. Her accent is American and she’s pretty fluent. Suppose Penn did tell me she’d been to university in Chicago.
We came round the corner of the back lane and into the Place des Hirondelles, the town hall square, full of armoured vehicles and bored-looking sentries.
‘I’ve got most of an hour,’ Engel said. ‘My dinner break. Not here though.’
I nodded and followed. She kept talking the whole time – we must have looked dead casual, a couple of chums having a walk and a smoke together. She doesn’t wear a uniform – she’s just an employee, she doesn’t even have a rank. We walked across the cobbles in front of the town hall.
‘She was crossing the street, right here, and she looked the wrong way.’ Engel blew out a fierce cloud of smoke. ‘What a stupid place to make a mistake like that, right in the middle of La Place des Hirondelles! There is always someone watching here – the town hall on one side and the Gestapo on the other.’
‘It was the Thibauts’ van, wasn’t it?’ I said miserably. ‘The van that nearly hit her.’ A French van full of French chickens, that’s what she’d said, in the first few pages she wrote.
‘I don’t know. The van was gone by the time I got here. I’m sure that driver didn’t want to get tangled up in an arrest. All Ormaie looks the other way when there’s a beating in the Place des Hirondelles – another Jew dragged out of hiding, or some idiot throwing manure at the office windows.’
She glanced up at the offending windows – no dead bodies hanging there this week, thank goodness.
‘She put up a hell of a fight, your friend,’ Engel said. ‘She bit a policeman. They got me to come and chloroform her, to knock her out, you know? There were four officers holding her down when I came running across the square with the chloroform, and she was still struggling. She tried to bite me too. When the fumes finally overwhelmed her it was like watching a light go out –’
‘– I know. I know.’
We were out of the square now. We turned to look at each other at exactly the same moment. Her eyes are amazing.
‘We’ve turned this place into a real shit-hole,’ she said. ‘There were roses in that square when I was first sent here. Now it’s nothing but mud and trucks. I think of her every single time I cross those cobbles, three times a day. I hate it.’ She looked away. ‘Come on. We can walk along the riverfront for about half a kilometre. Have you been?’
‘No.’
‘It’s still pretty.’
She lit another cigarette. It was her third in about five minutes. Can’t imagine how she manages to afford them all or even where she gets them – women are no longer allowed to buy cigarettes in Ormaie.
‘I’ve chloroformed people before, it’s something they expect of me, part of my job – I’m a chemist, I studied pharmaceuticals in America. But I’ve never despised myself so much as I did that day – she was so small and –’
She stumbled over her words and I had to bite the inside of my cheeks to keep from crying.
‘– So fierce, so beautiful, it was like breaking a hawk’s wings, stopping up a clear spring with bricks – digging up roses to make a space to park your tank. Pointless and ugly. She was just – blazing with life and defiance one moment, then the next moment nothing but a senseless shell lying on her face in the gutter – ’
‘– I KNOW,’ I whispered.
She glanced over at me curiously, frowning, sweeping my face with her sharp, pale eyes.
‘Do you so?’
‘She was my best friend,’ I said through my teeth.
Anna Engel nodded. ‘Ja, I know. Ach, you must hate me.’
‘No. No, I’m sorry. Tell me. Please.’
‘Here’s the river,’ Anna said, and we crossed another street. There was a railing all along the riverbank and we stood leaning against it. Once there were elm trees lining both sides of the Poitou here – nothing but stumps now because over the last three years they’ve all been cut down for firewood. But she was right – the row of historic houses on the opposite bank is still pretty.
Anna took a deep breath and spoke again.
‘When she passed out I turned her over so I could check to see if she was armed, and she was clutching her balled-up silk scarf in her fist. She must have been clinging to it all through the battle, and when she lost consciousness her fingers went lax. I wasn’t supposed to search her properly, that’s someone else’s job, but I wondered what she’d been protecting so doggedly in her closed fist – a suicide tablet, maybe – and I lifted the scarf out of her open hand –’
She held her own palm out against the railing, demonstrating.