Tightrope Read online

  ‘What about Le Verger?’ Marian asked. ‘Orchard Court.’

  Colonel Buckmaster gave a little resentful laugh. ‘Had to get rid of it. No further use. Now they’re trying to push us out of this building as well. It seems they don’t want to know us any more. Anyway, you’re looking damn good, considering. The medics given you the once over, have they? Everything all right?’

  ‘I suppose so.’ She searched for something more to say, thinking of the Orchard Court flat, the meetings with agents that went on there amid the relics of luxury, the constant coming and going overseen by Parks the butler who always tried to separate one operation from another. She and Benoît had found refuge in the bathroom to rehearse their cover stories. She had perched on the edge of the bath, he on the bidet. ‘Come on,’ he’d said after a while, grinning at her as though the whole thing was a huge joke: ‘Let’s get out of here and go for a walk.’ And they’d walked in Hyde Park and talked and talked and she’d never been happier in the whole of her life.

  ‘What happened to Benoît?’

  Colonel Buckmaster looked puzzled. ‘Benoît? Do you mean Major Cowburn? How do you know Major Cowburn?’

  ‘I don’t know Major Cowburn. I’ve no idea who Major Cowburn is. I’m talking about Benoît …’ But she had forgotten his surname. Memories came and went without pattern or logic, as though a premature old age had descended on her. ‘He was part of WORDSMITH. We dropped together. And …’ And what? What should she say? That they slept together? That they were lovers? That he was the man who took her virginity, in that other world where virginity was a concept that meant something, where pudeur was still possible and you weren’t forced to stand naked in a crowd of naked women while the guards looked on and laughed. ‘CÉSAR. His field name was CÉSAR. He hated it.’ She tried a shrug but she had lost the knack of it. It felt like some kind of exercise, elevating her bony shoulders to achieve some physical advantage. ‘We were friends, that’s all.’

  ‘CÉSAR, you say? Let me see.’ Buckmaster leafed through some pages in a folder on his desk. ‘WHEELWRIGHT … WIZARD … WORDSMITH. Ah, Bérard, is that the fellow?’

  ‘That’s right! Benoît Bérard.’ Just knowing the name brought excitement. And memory of a kind, a sensation of delight and surprise that had lain dormant for so long. Benoît with his shameless smile. Benoît standing in the bedroom of the flat in Toulouse, stark naked. Benoît lying with her, clinging to her – who was clinging to whom? – calling her Minou and kissing her neck and telling her how lovely she was, how lovely she was, how lovely she was. Benoît deep inside her.

  Buckmaster looked up. ‘I’m afraid he was killed. In June 1944, just after the invasion. In action.’

  ‘Oh.’ The possibility had not occurred to her. She considered it for a moment. Benoît dead. Should she weep? Should she give vent to all those tears unshed for months, the tears that had been impossible when death was a commonplace? But there weren’t any tears. None. She was as dry as bone. ‘What about the others? What about Le Patron? And the pianist. GEORGETTE, was that her field name? Louise March, wasn’t it? What happened to her?’ But she didn’t care about the others. Benoît was dead. She was indifferent to the fact that WORDSMITH had been a great success, the circuit achieving what had always been intended, harrying the German forces in the southwest in order to prevent their moving northwards towards the Normandy beaches, contributing to the Allied victory by attacking convoys, blowing railway lines, cutting communications. And Benoît killed somehow – Buckmaster didn’t know how – in one of those vicious little engagements, the great bull of a Panzer Division being stung by gadflies. Occasionally the flies got swatted. But at least Le Patron and GEORGETTE survived, repatriated in September after triumphant scenes at the liberation of Toulouse. ‘That’s what they were there for,’ Buckmaster said. ‘Mission accomplished.’

  But what had her own mission been? And had she accomplished it? And Benoît, what about his?

  ‘Yvette? Do you know anything about her?’

  ‘She would be—?’

  ‘Yvette Coombes. MARCELLE was her field name. She betrayed me. I think she betrayed me. Or Gilbert did, the one who arranged the pick-up.’ She shrugged. ‘Someone did, anyway.’

  The mention of betrayal brought its own reward: a stillness, a clearing of a nervous throat. Treachery and the fear of treachery stalked the corridors of the headquarters. There were accusations, there was complicity, there was the desperate scurry of people covering their tracks like cats covering their shit. ‘Ah, yes. Of course. MARCELLE.’ Miss Atkins was consulted. Was anything known of the fate of Yvette Coombes, wireless operator for the CINÉASTE circuit?

  Nothing.

  Marian nodded, and stared vacantly out of the window at further windows on the other side of Baker Street. Lives went on there behind other panes of glass, lives that meant something precise and precious to each owner. It was difficult to imagine what was involved, though. Going to the office, writing papers, making assessments about things, recommendations, decisions, going to lunch, having meetings, returning home in the evening. Greeting the children. Greeting the wife, greeting the husband. The small triumphs and tragedies of domestic life. What people do. Not what Benoît did. Not what Yvette did in the cemetery of Père Lachaise, waiting for her to come while the Gestapo gathered. Not what she herself did, hurrying through the streets of Paris with the wolves all around.

  ‘What are your plans now?’ Buckmaster asked, ludicrously. Plans hadn’t occurred to her. Plans were what you made when you controlled your own life, not when you lived at the mercy of others.

  ‘I just want to get things back to normal.’ But even that was a deception because she didn’t know what normal was. She had been a girl barely out of school, and then a trainee, and then a trained agent, and then a killer and then a prisoner in the purlieus of hell. Normality was so long ago that she could barely recall it and certainly couldn’t aspire to recovering it.

  ‘By the way,’ he added, ‘we’ll be putting you up for an award.’

  ‘An award?’

  ‘Can’t give women medals, I’m afraid. Because they’re not recognised combatants. FANY and all that. So we have to go for a civil list gong. OBE or something.’

  ‘What’s an OBE?’

  ‘Officer of the Order of the British Empire. Great honour.’

  She contemplated great honour in silence while Buckmaster smiled his oily smile and clapped his hands on his knees. ‘Well, I won’t keep you any longer, Marian. I’m sure other people want to see you.’

  ‘I really don’t think I want an award.’

  Did she say that or merely think it? Thoughts seemed to take on the strength of spoken statements, as though she had said to all these people what she was thinking – that they were part of a world that had ceased to exist, a world of bumbling possibilities, of meaningless plans and fatuous ideas. She lived, she died, she was resurrected into the real world, which was grey and drab and pointless. In pursuit of pointlessness her round of the offices continued. The finance officer wanted a quick meeting. There were monies due to her – a year and seven months of field pay at the rate of three hundred and fifty pounds per annum, which came to a grand total of five hundred and fifty-four pounds three shillings and fourpence. ‘Mustn’t forget the fourpence,’ the accountant said and she wondered why it was so important to remember the fourpence, before understanding that it too was a joke and she must at least smile. ‘Shall I give instructions to have it paid into your bank account? Of course now that you are back with us, you will continue to be paid at the normal rate. As long as you are on the strength.’

  He looked round, as though there might be eavesdroppers, then leaned secretively towards her. ‘I believe there is also some talk of an ex gratia payment in view of the hardships you have faced but as yet nothing has been decided. I’ll let you know.’

  He handed her on to Miss Atkins, Vera Atkins, the queen bee sitting in the midst of a hive that was being dismantled around her. Vera
was immaculately turned out and yet there was something tawdry about her, as if she had been dressed by the wardrobe department of a repertory theatre and wasn’t quite the genuine article. Nicotine-stained fingers shuffled papers on her desk. Smoke and floral perfume clung to her ‘You’re already looking so much better,’ she said. ‘Are they looking after you properly?’

  ‘They suggested some kind of convalescent home, but I’m not ill.’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘So I’m staying with my brother for the moment. In Bloomsbury.’

  ‘How convenient.’ Vera wasn’t really the kind of woman for pleasantries or chit-chat. In contrast to Buckmaster’s languor she showed a sharp desire to get on with things. ‘Tomorrow you’ve got a meeting in Bayswater with someone from the Security Directorate. If you’re feeling up to it.’

  ‘The Security Directorate? What’s that?’

  ‘They’ll want to know about your arrest, I expect. All very tiresome but they insist. A car will come and pick you up, if you give me your brother’s address. And there’s this.’ She slid a typewritten sheet across the desk. It was a list of names, some of them familiar, some unknown, Yvonne Rudellat’s with Jacqueline Gautier. February left Ravensbrück. Bergen-Belsen? scrawled in pencil against it, another with Ravensbrück against it; and Marian’s own was there in the middle. Returned from captivity, 16 April 1945.

  ‘Our missing girls. You’re the first to come back, as you can see. You mentioned Yvonne. We’ve now got a report that she may have been moved to Bergen-Belsen. We’re looking into that now. I’d like any further information you may recall. Just so we can contact people in the right place. And so that I know where to look when I can get over there.’

  ‘You’re going to Germany?’

  ‘Oh, yes, I’m going to find them.’

  Paris, November 1943

  ‘I want you to meet someone,’ the gentle man says. She knows his name now. He’s called Freund. At least that is what he has told her to call him, but whether he just means that she should see him as a friend, she doesn’t know. Although he smiles reassuringly, a part of her – a suppressed, ignored fraction of the frightened mess that is Marian Sutro – knows that he is not a friend, that every suggestion is a threat, every move a potential trap. Despite that she clings to him, feels a leap of delight when he visits her, wants him to touch her, wants him to talk to her and be with her and bring her comfort.

  ‘Who?’

  He smiles his lovely smile. ‘You’ll have to wait and see.’

  They take her downstairs. There’s a small room, empty but for a chair and a table. She is told to sit and wait. The waiting is the worst thing. Reality is brutal or painful or frightening, but waiting is a distillate of fear that corrodes and dissolves. She wonders who it will be. Her mind goes round the people who know of her presence in the city: Gilbert, insouciant, careless, apparently at ease with everything he does. Our air movements man in Paris. Capital fellow. Or Claire, his assistant, with the remnants of beauty in her face and a hardened cynicism in her heart. Or dull, defensive Marie, the maid who mans the barricades of the Pelletier apartment and goes home every afternoon to attend to her ageing mother. Or Yvette.

  Yvette, she decides. Yvette whom she ought to hate for her betrayal, but still loves for her fragile stupidity.

  Or Emile, whom she knew in training, perhaps even tiresome Emile who is languishing somewhere in captivity like all the others of his circuit. Any one of these might step through that door.

  Or perhaps it is one of the agents who came in with the Lysander – David or … the other name escapes her if she ever knew it. Looked like a bandit. Unshaven, moustachioed, wearing a beret.

  Or maybe – her imagination shudders at the thought – maybe Clément himself, battered and bruised after being dragged from the wreckage of the plane that was intended to carry him to England. Perhaps that, the ruins of her mission flaunted in her face.

  Or even Benoît. How could they have Benoît? Benoît is hundreds of miles away in Toulouse. How could they have him?

  But they can do anything, can’t they? They have power absolute.

  Fantasy plays its callous game, changing one option for another, shuffling the cards, dealing a different combination each time, each one a losing hand.

  Yvette. She decides it will be Yvette.

  Then the door opens. Even though she is expecting it, the fact of its opening is sudden, a surprise, an abrupt enlargement of her own circumscribed world, giving her a glimpse of the corridor outside. But most of the view is taken up by the three men standing in the opening. A triad, a hybrid beast, a trinity, a crucifixion with the middle man strung out between two thieves, his arms outstretched, his head hung down. His hair is wet, his shirt and trousers sodden with red. His feet drag behind him like the flippers of a beached fish.

  She feels pain, a physical pain at the core of her belly, in her womb.

  Someone grabs the crucified man’s hair and pulls his head upright for her to see him and, presumably, him to see her. As far as he is able.

  She looks into the ruined face of the man she knows as Julius Miessen. A potato face. Eyes swollen, cheeks bruised, lips split. Nevertheless she recognises him. His left eye watches her through a slit of swollen tissue.

  Freund is there to ask the questions. ‘Do you know this man?’

  ‘No.’ Which is truth of a kind, a white lie, the kind that carries with it no penalty. She always wondered about that. It seemed like deceiving God.

  ‘Are you certain?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘This man is a murderer, Marian. Do you know that?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, he is. He has confessed as much. He killed two members of the security forces. In Belleville, a week ago. Shot them down in cold blood.’

  Miessen’s single eye watches her through its narrow slit. A soul gazing out at someone else in hell. Slowly, lizard-like, he licks his lips.

  ‘He will, of course, be executed for this crime unless new evidence comes to light.’

  ‘I don’t know what you are talking about.’

  ‘You were in Belleville that day, weren’t you, Marian?’

  The lizard eye watches her.

  ‘You were running away from the police. And this man was arrested there, shortly after two policemen were murdered.’

  ‘I don’t know what you are talking about.’

  ‘They were shot down in cold blood. Nine millimetre bullets, one through the left eye, one in the chest. The second man was dispatched with a bullet through the forehead. Expert shooting.’

  Twice in her life she has held power of life or death over someone. Once standing there in the impasse in Belleville, facing the two men; and now, facing Julius Miessen. ‘I don’t know what you are talking about.’

  Freund looks at her carefully. He turns from her to Miessen, looking for a glimmer of a clue, then back to her again. ‘Marian, you must be honest with me. Are you certain you know nothing about this killing?’

  ‘I am certain.’

  Miessen’s single eye watches her, a small jewel of pale blue gleaming between the swollen lids. Can an eye alone have expression? What is it asking, what is it saying?

  ‘What about you?’ Freund asks the crucified wreck. ‘Do you know this woman?’

  There is a pause, as though the question has to go down labyrinthine passageways before it reaches his inner core, and then the answer must retrace the same pathway to register as a reply. His tongue moves to moisten his lips.

  ‘No.’

  ‘So why did you shoot the two police officers?’

  Again the long and painful pause. The voice that comes out has a strange dignity to it, as though this is something formal, the kind of thing you might prepare in order to speak before a court. ‘It was an act of war.’

  ‘An act of war.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you don’t know this woman?’

  ‘No.’

  Freund gives a slight nod an
d the wreckage that is Julius Miessen is dragged out of the room. The door is closed behind him and she can breathe again.

  ‘What will happen to him?’

  ‘What I said. He killed two agents. He will be executed. What do you expect?’

  ‘How do you know it was him?’

  ‘Because he admitted it.’

  ‘You can get someone to admit to anything with your methods.’

  ‘Do you doubt his confession?’

  She hesitates a moment. Hesitations are what he thrives on, the small intervals of mendacity. Will he read this hesitation aright and see her lie? ‘I don’t know anything about it.’

  Ned

  Her brother’s flat was just as she remembered it. There was the same sense of impermanence and decay, as though he had bought things hurriedly from a junk dealer and was prepared to get rid of them at a moment’s notice. Papers and books were strewn everywhere, records were scattered on the floor beside an ancient gramophone, the remains of a meal littered the dining table. Entropy tends towards a maximum, that was what he always said by way of explanation.

  They made themselves some supper – omelettes made with dehydrated egg, a plastic substance called cheese, vegetables called greens. Somehow Ned had managed to conjure up a half bottle of red wine that announced Bordeaux on its label. The wine was brown and oxidised but the alcohol did its trick of lulling her into a sense of security. She talked, more than she ever had done or would do with her parents. Perhaps because it would interest Ned, she talked of the work she had done in the factory attached to the camp, the Siemens factory where they had made, the rumour had it, parts for flying bombs. Ned grew excited, of course.