World War II Thriller Collection (113 page)

The station was built like a French château. The grand entrance lobby had a coffered ceiling and chandeliers. She found the phone bureau and stood in line.

When she got to the counter, she told the clerk that she wanted to make a person-to-person call to Arne Olufsen, and gave the number of the flying school. She waited impatiently, full of apprehension, while the operator tried to get Arne on the line. She did not even know whether he was at Vodal today. He might be flying, or away from the base for the afternoon, or on leave. He might have been transferred to another base or have resigned from the army.

But she would try to track him down, wherever he was. She could speak to his commanding officer and ask where he had gone, she could call his parents on Sande, and she had numbers for some of his friends in Copenhagen. She had all afternoon to spend, and plenty of money for phone calls.

It would be strange to talk to him after more than a year. She was thrilled but anxious. The mission was the important thing, but she could not help fretting about how Arne would feel about her. Perhaps he no longer loved her as he once had. What if he were cold to her? It would break her heart. But he might have met someone else. After all, she had enjoyed a flirtation with Digby. How much more easily might a man find his heart straying?

She remembered skiing with him, racing down a sunlit slope, the two of them leaning to one side then the other in perfect rhythm, perspiring in the icy air, laughing with the sheer joy of being alive. Would those days ever come back?

She was called to a booth.

She picked up the phone and said, “Hello?”

Arne said, “Who is it?”

She had forgotten his voice. It was low and warm and sounded as if it
might break into laughter at any minute. He spoke educated Danish, with a precise diction he had learned in the military and the hint of a Jutland accent left over from his childhood.

She had planned her first sentence. She intended to use the pet names they had for each other, hoping this would alert Arne to the need to speak discreetly.

But for a moment she could not speak at all.

“Hello?” he said. “Is anyone there?”

She swallowed and found her voice. “Hello, Toothbrush, this is your black cat.” She called him “Toothbrush” because that was what his moustache felt like when he kissed her. Her nickname came from the color of her hair.

It was his turn to be dumbstruck. There was a silence.

Hermia said, “How are you?”

“I'm okay,” he said at last. “My God, is it really you?”

“Yes.”

“Are you all right?”

“Yes.” Suddenly she could not stand any more small talk. Abruptly she said, “Do you still love me?”

He did not answer immediately. That made her think his feelings had changed. He would not say so directly, she thought; he would equivocate, and say they needed to reassess their relationship after all this time, but she would know—

“I love you,” he said.

“Do you?”

“More than ever. I've missed you terribly.”

She closed her eyes. Feeling dizzy, she leaned against the wall.

“I'm so glad you're still alive,” he said. “I'm so happy to be talking to you.”

“I love you, too,” she said.

“What's been happening? How are you? Where are you calling from?”

She pulled herself together. “I'm not far away.”

He noticed her guarded manner and responded in a similar tone. “Okay, I understand.”

She had prepared the next part. “Do you remember the castle?” There were many castles in Denmark, but one was special to them.

“You mean the ruins? How could I forget?”

“Could you meet me there?”

“How could you get there—Never mind. Do you mean it?”

“Yes.”

“It's a long way.”

“It's really very important.”

“I'd go a lot farther to see you. I'm just figuring out how. I'll ask for leave, but if it's a problem I'll just go AWOL—”

“Don't do that.” She did not want the military police looking for him. “When's your next day off?”

“Saturday.”

The operator came on the line to tell them they had ten seconds.

Hastily, Hermia said, “I'll be there on Saturday—I hope. If you don't make it, I'll come back every day for as long as I can.”

“I'll do the same.”

“Be careful. I love you.”

“I love you—”

The line went dead.

Hermia kept the receiver pressed to her ear, as if she could hold on to him a little longer that way. Then the operator asked her if she wanted to make another call, and she declined and hung up.

She paid at the counter then went out, dazed with happiness. She stood in the station concourse, under the high curved roof, with people hurrying past her in all directions. He still loved her. In two days' time she would see him. Someone bumped into her, and she got out of the crowd into a cafe where she slumped in a chair. Two days.

The ruined castle to which they had both enigmatically referred was Hammershus, a tourist attraction on the Danish holiday island of Bornholm, in the Baltic Sea. They had spent a week on the island in 1939, posing as man and wife, and had made love among the ruins one warm summer evening. Arne would take the ferry from Copenhagen, a trip of seven or eight hours, or fly from Kastrup, which took about an hour. The island was a hundred miles from mainland Denmark, but only twenty miles
from the south coast of Sweden. Hermia would have to find a fishing boat to take her across that short stretch of water illegally.

But it was the danger to Arne, not herself, that she kept thinking about. He was going to meet secretly with an agent of the British secret service. She would ask him to become a spy.

If he were caught, the punishment would be death.

On the second day after his arrest, Harald returned home.

Heis had allowed him to stay at school another two days to take the last of his exams. He would be permitted to graduate, though not to attend the ceremony, which was a week away. But the important thing was that his university place was safe. He would study physics under Niels Bohr—if he lived that long.

During those two days he had learned, from Mads Kirke, that the death of Poul had not been a straightforward crash. The army was refusing to reveal details, saying they were still investigating, but other pilots had told the family that the police had been on the base at the time, and shots had been fired. Harald was sure, though he could not say this to Mads, that Poul had been killed because of his Resistance work.

Nevertheless, he was more afraid of his father than of the police as he made his way home. It was a tediously familiar journey across the width of Denmark from Jansborg, in the east, to Sande, off the west coast. He knew every small-town railway station and fish-smelling ferry dock and all the
flat green landscape in between. The journey took the whole day, because of multiple train delays, but he wished it could be longer.

He spent the time anticipating his father's wrath. He composed indignant speeches of self-justification which even he found unconvincing. He tried out a variety of more or less groveling apologies, unable to find a formula that was sincere but not abject. He wondered whether to tell his parents to be grateful he was alive, when he might have met the same fate as Poul Kirke; but that seemed to make cheap use of a heroic death.

When he reached Sande, he further postponed his arrival by walking home along the beach. The tide was out, and the sea was barely visible a mile away, a narrow strip of dark blue touched with inconstant smears of white surf, sandwiched between the bright blue of the sky and the buff-colored sand. It was evening, and the sun was low. A few holidaymakers strolled through the dunes, and a group of boys around twelve or thirteen years old were playing football. It would have been a happy scene, but for the new gray concrete bunkers at intervals of a mile along the high-tide mark, bristling with artillery and manned by steel-helmeted soldiers.

He came to the new military base and left the beach to follow the long diversion around it, welcoming the additional delay. He wondered whether Poul had managed to send off his sketch of the radio equipment to the British. If not, the police must have found it. Would they wonder who had drawn it? Fortunately there was nothing to connect it with Harald. All the same, the thought was frightening. The police still did not know he was a criminal, but now they knew about his crime.

At last he came within sight of his home. Like the church, the parsonage was built in the local style, with red-painted bricks and a thatched roof that swept low over the windows, like a hat pulled over the eyes to keep out the rain. The lintel over the front door was painted in slanting stripes of black, white, and green, a local tradition.

Harald went to the back and looked through the diamond-shaped pane of glass in the kitchen door. His mother was alone. He studied her for a moment, wondering what she had been like when she was his age. Ever since he could remember, she had looked tired; but she must have been pretty, once.

According to family legend Harald's father, Bruno, had been thought by everyone to be a confirmed bachelor at the age of thirty-seven, wholly dedicated to the work of his little sect. Then he had met Lisbeth, ten years younger, and lost his heart. So madly in love was he that he had worn a colored tie to church in an attempt to appear romantic, and the deacons had been obliged to reprimand him for inappropriate attire.

Watching his mother as she bent over the sink, scrubbing a pot, Harald tried to imagine the tired gray hair as it had once been, jet black and gleaming, and the hazel eyes twinkling with humor; the lines of the face smoothed away, and the weary body full of energy. She must have been irresistibly sexy, Harald supposed, to have turned his father's remorselessly holy thoughts to the lusts of the flesh. It was hard to imagine.

He went in, put down his suitcase, and kissed his mother.

“Your father's out,” she said.

“Where has he gone?”

“Ove Borking is sick.” Ove was an elderly fisherman and faithful member of the congregation.

Harald was relieved. Any postponement of the confrontation was a reprieve.

His mother looked solemn and tearful. Her expression touched his heart. He said, “I'm sorry to have caused you distress, Mother.”

“Your father is mortified,” she said. “Axel Flemming has called an emergency meeting of the Board of Deacons to discuss the matter.”

Harald nodded. He had anticipated that the Flemmings would make the most of this.

“But why did you do it?” his mother asked plaintively.

He had no answer.

She made him a ham sandwich for his supper. “Is there any news of Uncle Joachim?” he asked.

“Nothing. We get no answers to our letters.”

Harald's own troubles seemed nothing when he thought about his cousin Monika, penniless and persecuted, not even knowing whether her father was dead or alive. While Harald was growing up, the annual visit of the Goldstein cousins had been the highlight of the year. For two weeks the monastic atmosphere of the parsonage was transformed, and the place was
full of people and noise. The pastor had for his sister and her family an indulgent fondness that he showed no one else, certainly not his own children, and he would smile benignly as they committed transgressions, such as buying ice cream on a Sunday, for which he would have punished Harald and Arne. For Harald, the sound of the German language meant laughter and pranks and fun. Now he wondered if the Goldsteins would ever laugh again.

He turned on the radio to hear the war news. It was bad. The British assault in North Africa had been abandoned, a catastrophic failure, half their tanks lost, either crippled in the desert by mechanical failures or destroyed by experienced German antitank gunners. The Axis grip on North Africa was unshaken. Danish radio and the BBC told essentially the same story.

At midnight a flight of bombers crossed overhead. Harald looked out and saw they were heading east. That meant they were British. The bombers were all the British had, now.

When he went back inside, his mother said, “Your father could be out all night. You'd better go to bed.”

He lay awake for a long time. He asked himself why he was scared. He was too big to be beaten. His father's wrath was formidable, but how bad could a tongue-lashing be? Harald was not easily intimidated. Rather the reverse: he was inclined to resent authority and defy it out of sheer rebelliousness.

The short night came to an end, and a rectangle of gray dawn light appeared around the curtain at his window like a picture frame. He drifted into sleep. His last thought was that perhaps what he really feared was not some hurt to himself, but his father's suffering.

He was awakened brusquely an hour later.

The door burst open, the light came on, and the pastor stood beside the bed, fully dressed, hands on his hips, chin thrust forward. “How could you do it?” he shouted.

Harald sat up, blinking at his father, tall, bald, dressed in black, staring at Harald with the blue-eyed glare that terrified his congregation.

“What were you thinking of?” his father raged. “What possessed you?”

Harald did not want to cower in his bed like a child. He threw off the
sheet and stood up. Because the weather was warm, he had slept in his undershorts.

“Cover yourself, boy,” his father said. “You're practically naked.”

The unreasonableness of this criticism stung Harald into a rejoinder. “If underwear offends you, don't enter bedrooms without knocking.”

“Knocking? Don't tell me to knock on doors in my own house!”

Harald suffered the familiar feeling that his father had an answer for everything. “Very well,” he said sulkily.

“What devil took hold of you? How could you bring such disgrace upon yourself, your family, your school, and your church?”

Harald pulled on his trousers and turned to face his father.

“Well?” the pastor raged. “Are you going to answer me?”

“I'm sorry, I thought you were asking rhetorical questions.” Harald was surprised by his own cool sarcasm.

His father was infuriated. “Don't try to use your education to fence with me—I went to Jansborg, too.”

“I'm not fencing. I'm asking whether there's any chance you'll listen to anything I say.”

The pastor raised his hand as if to strike. It would have been a relief, Harald thought as his father hesitated. Whether he took the blow passively, or hit back, violence would have been some kind of resolution.

But his father was not going to make it that easy. He dropped his hand and said, “Well, I'm listening. What have you got to say for yourself?”

Harald gathered his thoughts. On the train he had rehearsed many versions of this speech, some of them most eloquent, but now he forgot all his oratorical flourishes. “I'm sorry I daubed the guard post, because it was an empty gesture, a childish act of defiance.”

“At the least!”

For a moment he considered whether to tell his father about his connection with the Resistance, but he quickly decided not to risk further ridicule. Besides, now that Poul was dead, the Resistance might no longer exist.

Instead, he concentrated on the personal. “I'm sorry to have brought disgrace on the school, because Heis is a kindly man. I'm sorry I got drunk,
because it made me feel dreadful the next morning. Most of all, I'm sorry to have caused my mother distress.”

“And your father?”

Harald shook his head. “You're upset because Axel Flemming knows all about this and he's going to rub your nose in it. Your pride has been hurt, but I'm not sure you're worried about me at all.”

“Pride?” his father roared. “What has pride to do with anything? I've tried to bring up my sons to be decent, sober, God-fearing men—and you've let me down.”

Harald felt exasperated. “Look, it's not that much of a disgrace. Most men get drunk—”

“Not my sons!”

“—once in their lives, at least.”

“But you were
arrested.
”

“That was bad luck.”

“It was bad
behavior—
”

“And I wasn't charged—the police sergeant actually thought that what I did was funny. ‘We're not the joke patrol,' he said. I wouldn't even have been expelled from school if Peter Flemming hadn't threatened Heis.”

“Don't you dare try to minimize this. No member of this family has ever been to jail for any reason. You've dragged us into the gutter.” The pastor's face changed suddenly. For the first time, he showed sadness rather than anger. “And it would be shocking and tragic even if no one in the world knew of it but me.”

Harald saw that his father was sincere in this, and the realization threw him off balance. It was true that the old man's pride was wounded, but that was not all. He genuinely feared for his son's spiritual welfare. Harald was sorry he had been sarcastic.

But his father gave him no chance to be conciliatory. “There remains the question of what is to be done with you.”

Harald was not sure what this meant. “I've only missed a few days of school,” he said. “I can do the preliminary reading for my university course here at home.”

“No,” his father said. “You're not getting off so lightly.”

Harald had a dreadful foreboding. “What do you mean? What are you planning?”

“You're not going to university.”

“What are you talking about? Of course I am.” Suddenly Harald felt very afraid.

“I'm not going to send you to Copenhagen to pollute your soul with strong drink and jazz music. You've proved you aren't mature enough for the city. You'll stay here, where I can supervise your spiritual development.”

“But you can't phone the university and say, ‘Don't teach this boy.' They've given me a place.”