Tamar (2 page)

It was Sunday 17th September, the middle of the morning. People were in church. The pulsing downward beat of the noise overwhelmed their hymns. Choirs gave up. In Westminster Abbey the vast sound of the organ was drowned by it. Men, women, and children went into the streets and gazed up, speechless, at the vast migration of mechanical birds that filled the sky. You could not see where it began, nor where it ended.

An army had given up the earth and taken to the air. It was flying to Holland to end the war. The aircraft — bombers, paratroop transports, gliders swaying at the end of three-hundred-foot cables, fighter escorts — set out for Europe in enormous columns ten miles across and a hundred miles long. One of the pilots who survived said later that the air was so packed with planes it looked like you could climb out onto the wings and walk all the way to the Dutch coast.

On a crescent-shaped lawn, part of the grounds of a large country house just north of London, about sixty people watched the vast airborne armada pass. They were a mixed bunch, men and women, some young, some not. Some wore uniforms; others were in civilian clothes. Few were known by their real names. Towards the middle of the lawn, close to a tarnished bronze statue of Eros, two young men lay on their backs watching the spectacle. The Special Operations Executive had given them the code names Dart and Tamar. Although both men were fluent in English, they spoke in their native Dutch.

Dart said, “I think we are witnessing the beginning of the end of the war.”

Tamar saw a heavy glider swing into the path of another and then somehow correct itself. In Holland, flights of German fighters would be taking off. They couldn’t miss so huge a target. He was watching men being flown — being dragged — to their deaths. My God.

“We’ll not go in now,” Dart said. “They’ve been wasting our time. The codes, the parachute jumps, the wireless stuff, all that shit. It was just a damn cover. They were planning this all the time.”

Tamar turned onto his right side. “Listen — even if those poor bastards up there drive the Germans out of our country, that won’t be the end of it. The Nazis have broken everything. There is no organization. There is no trust anymore. Some of our people are collaborators; some are heroes. I’m almost as afraid of liberation as I am of anything else. So don’t imagine there is nothing for us to do, that we have been wasting our time.”

He rolled onto his back and watched the infinite planes cross the sky. “One way or another,” he said, “we’ll be in Holland soon. I’d bet my life on it.”

Dart was arrested in the early hours of the morning. He was awakened by a Luger pistol pressed against his temple and a torch blazed into his face. There were two men, a sergeant and a private in Waffen-SS uniforms. He received some rough assistance getting to his feet, and then a bag or hood was pulled over his head. The Germans half marched, half dragged him along a corridor, the pistol barrel at the base of his skull. They went through three sets of doors and made four turns. Dart tried to retain his sense of direction but lost it. He half fell down a long flight of stairs and at the bottom found himself standing on cold stone. A door closed behind him, and he was forced onto a hard wooden chair. His arms were wrenched behind his back and his wrists cuffed. The hood was removed.

He was in a windowless room that smelled of mould and something else — paraffin, perhaps. A shelf ran along the wall to his right, and one of the things on it was a large toolbox, the kind a carpenter or electrician might use. It was open, and Dart could see the implements it held. The hard light from three unshaded bulbs made the room seem colder than it was. Dart felt his skin contract.

The two SS men went to stand against the wall behind the thin bespectacled man who sat at a table, studying Dart’s false identity papers. He wore the black uniform of a major of the Gestapo. When he looked up, his expression suggested that he disapproved of Dart coming to this interview in his underwear.

“Good morning,” he said.

Unnerved, Dart said, “Good morning,” and by the slight downward shift of the Gestapo officer’s mouth realized he’d already made his first mistake.

The major switched to Dutch. “Who recruited you into the British secret services? Was it Colonel Nicholson? Neave? Perhaps the persuasive Mr. Clements?”

Dart kept his face blank. “I don’t know any of those names. I am a doctor.”

The major, without taking his eyes from Dart’s, tapped the identity papers. “Not exactly. Not according to these. You are not fully qualified, it seems.”

“True,” Dart admitted. “The war interrupted my studies.”

“In other words, you are merely pretending to be a doctor.”

“I have a licence to practise under the emergency regulations. It is attached to my identification, as you see.”

The major pushed Dart’s papers away with his fingertips as if they were a particularly grubby work of pornography. “When did you arrive in Holland?”

“I do not understand the question.”

“Yes, you do. You understand the question, and, as a matter of fact, I know the answer.”

Dart was silent. The major shrugged, a dismissive gesture. “I am slightly interested in finding out which resistance organization you are attached to, even though they are all useless. What are you: a royalist, socialist, communist, or some other kind of
-ist
?”

Dart said, “I am a doctor. I have no interest in politics.”

The major leaned back in his chair. “Let me tell you something, my friend. The British are, as they themselves might say, taking the piss. You know that expression?”

Dart said nothing.

“Of course you do. The British send us rubbish like you to waste our time. They persuade you that you are doing something important. That you have real secrets, which you must go to your death before revealing. Their idea is that people like me, who have useful things to do, will waste our time in conversations like these.” He rose and went to stand behind Dart, who, despite himself, twitched.

“Let me tell you something else, Mr. so-called Lubbers. We know your real name. In fact, we know a great deal about you. One of your colleagues gave us this information just before he died. There is nothing for you to protect, except yourself. It would save us both a great deal of time, and it would prevent me getting very, very irritated, if you were to cooperate. Do you understand?”

After an hour, the Gestapo major yawned and looked at his watch. He turned to the SS sergeant behind him and said in English, “Williams? You still awake? Get the cuffs off our friend here and offer the poor sod a cigarette. Give him a blanket too, before he freezes to death.”

Grinning, the sergeant released Dart. “You did all right, boy,” he said. His accent was liltingly Welsh.

Dart said unhappily, “I was lousy.”

The Gestapo major, rubbing his hands together for warmth, said, “Well, not too bad, Dart. Six out of ten, I’d say. Maybe seven. An extra mark for bladder control.”

His real name was Franklin, and for SOE purposes he held the rank of captain. “We’ll talk it through at ten o’clock. I’ll tell canteen to hold a breakfast for you. I expect you might fancy a bit of a lie-in.”

“Thank you, sir,” Dart said. He was dog-tired.

Dart was mopping the grease from his plate with a slice of greyish bread when Tamar came in and sat down opposite.

“I hear you got the early call. How’d it go?”

“I was crap. The first thing he said to me was ‘Good morning’ in bloody English, and I said ‘Good morning’ back to him in bloody English. Christ.”

Tamar grinned. “Franklin. What do you think he was, before the war?”

Dart thought about it. “A solicitor,” he said. “A solicitor with a passion for amateur theatricals.”

Tamar threw himself back in his chair dramatically. “Hey,” he said admiringly, “that is sinister! That is exactly what he was. You are a dangerously good judge of character, my friend. You should work here.”

“God forbid.”

“Amen to that,” Tamar said. He took a folded newspaper from his jacket pocket. “What time’s your debriefing?”

“Ten.”

Tamar looked at his watch. “Twenty minutes. Do you fancy trying to crack the code of the incredibly insane
Times
crossword? I reckon two down is an anagram of
early bat,
don’t you?”

As far as the locals were concerned, Ashgrove House was a convalescent home for Allied officers injured in action. It was odd that no civilians were allowed in, that all deliveries had to be left with the armed guards at the lodge, that the patients were never seen walking the lanes or footpaths. The accepted explanation was that these poor chaps were so badly damaged that it would be bad for civilian morale if they were seen in public. Stories went about of horribly disfigured characters glimpsed in the grounds, and the Special Operations Executive was happy to let these rumours circulate.

Officially, Ashgrove House was known as ST73. Agents, and the officers who sent them there, knew it as “the finishing school.” It was the last place of safety. From here, on a moonlit night, SOE agents would be taken to an airfield in East Anglia, put into the belly of an RAF bomber, and flown across the North Sea to parachute into Nazi-occupied Europe. With any luck, the reception committees that awaited them would not be German.

During the months before their stay at Ashgrove, Tamar, Dart, and the other members of the Rivers group had been put through a training programme that was like a tour of the stately homes of England organized by dangerous psychopaths. At a succession of very grand houses — great echoing places commandeered for the war effort — they had practised concealment, stealth, and sabotage. In splendid drawing rooms, they had been taught to lie and to believe absolutely the lies they told. In deer parks and landscaped gardens, they had practised killing: silently, with knife and wire garrotte; and noisily, with both British and German firearms.

They’d gone to Manchester for parachute training, dropping — if all went well — into the elegant grounds of Tatton Park. Dart found them exhilarating, those steppings-out into the empty air, and was interested to discover that Tamar was afraid, even though he was already an experienced parachutist. He’d never detected a trace of fear in the man until then.

Back in London, in an anonymous office building just off Baker Street, the group spent arduous days practising codes and cryptography. Their instructor was a cocky, brilliant, and very young man who usually had an enormous cigar sticking out of his face. He introduced himself as DCY/M. They never discovered his name. He instructed them in the use of one-time pads. These were squares of silk, about three times the size of a handkerchief, printed with preset codes. He pulled them out of his briefcase and displayed them to the class like a salesman showing off a new line in underwear. He spoke of the strength of these silks and the ease with which they could be concealed. As a last resort they could be folded until they were no bigger than a square of chocolate and swallowed. Tamar put his hand up and asked, straight-faced, whether they might emerge intact “at the other end.” Equally straight-faced, DCY/M assured the class that the inks were designed to dissolve in digestive juices.

During a lunch break Tamar had said, “You know, the best thing about these one-time pads is something our boy with the cigar hasn’t mentioned.”

Dart looked up from his minced beef and mash. “Which is?”

“They make torture less likely. For you wireless operators, anyway.”

Dart placed his knife and fork on the table, keeping his hands steady.
Torture
was a word that threw a shadow across his brain, one that he did not like to look at.

“Do they?”

“Sure,” Tamar said. “Because you use a different line of code for each transmission, right, then you cut that line off the silk and burn it, or eat it, or whatever. You don’t memorize anything. So there’s no point in the Gestapo torturing you.”

“Unless they just happen to enjoy it,” Dart said.

“Yes, there’s always that.” Tamar looked at his watch. “Come on. Just time for a smoke before the boy wonder starts messing up our brains again.”

Later the group divided. The WOs, the wireless operators, were sent to yet another stately home for an intensive ten-week course. Tamar and Dart didn’t see each other again until the group reunited at Ashgrove House, six days before the sky filled with aircraft heading for Holland.

The agents became aware that something was wrong a couple of days before they found out what it was. There was a shift in the atmosphere at Ashgrove, like a change in the weather. Officers who were usually good at smiling seemed to have forgotten how to do it. The busy female clerks flirted less.

At the breakfast table, Torridge said, “You know what I think? I think something extremely bad has happened at home and they don’t want us to know. There’s been a major cock-up, and they are embarrassed to tell us.”

“They’ll have to tell us,” Tamar said, “but they’ll wait until they’ve worked out how. You know what the British are like: ‘It’s not what you say; it’s the way that you say it.’ But you’re right. Something has happened, definitely.”

He pushed his crossword aside and tossed the pencil on top of it. “Shit.”

Tamar and Dart were summoned to the library three days later. There were two men waiting for them: Colonel Nicholson, who had been driven up from London just before dawn; and a middle-aged civilian called Hendriks. Tamar and Dart were told to sit in two of the large armchairs.

Nicholson paced as he talked. “I am going to speak to all teams separately; I can spend only thirty minutes with each. If at any time you wish to ask me a question, make sure it’s a good one.”

He went to the big bay window and stared out at the morning mist lifting from the lawn.

“The airborne forces that you watched pass overhead twelve days ago were part of a major offensive code-named Operation Market Garden. The objective was to seize certain key bridges over the Rhine, which would allow Allied troops to cross from the south of Holland into the occupied north, and from there advance into Germany. I regret to tell you that this operation has failed. You will be briefed on the details later. A decision has been taken that the attempt will not be repeated. Not in the foreseeable future, anyway.”