World War II Thriller Collection (20 page)

Von Mellenthin put his hands in his pockets and crossed his fingers.

 

Von Mellenthin remembered that moment when, sixteen days later, he and Rommel watched the sun rise over Tobruk.

They stood together on the escarpment northeast of El Adem, waiting for the start of the battle. Rommel was wearing the goggles he had taken from the captured General O'Connor, the goggles which had become a kind of trademark of his. He was in top form: bright-eyed, lively and confident. You could almost hear his brain tick as he scanned the landscape and computed how the battle might go.

Von Mellenthin said: “The spy was right.”

Rommel smiled. “That's exactly what I was thinking.”

The Allied counterattack of June 5 had come precisely as forecast, and Rommel's defense had worked so well that it had turned into a counter-counterattack. Three of the four Allied brigades involved had been wiped out, and four regiments of artillery had been captured. Rommel had pressed his advantage remorselessly. On June 14 the Gazala Line had been broken and today, June 20, they were to besiege the vital coastal garrison of Tobruk.

Von Mellenthin shivered. It was astonishing how cold the desert could be at five o'clock in the morning.

He watched the sky.

At twenty minutes past five the attack began.

A sound like distant thunder swelled to a deafening roar as the Stukas approached. The first formation flew over, dived toward the British positions, and dropped their bombs. A great cloud of dust and smoke arose, and with that Rommel's entire artillery forces opened fire with a simultaneous earsplitting crash. Another wave of Stukas came over, then another: there were hundreds of bombers.

Von Mellenthin said: “Fantastic. Kesselring really did it.”

It was the wrong thing to say. Rommel snapped: “No credit to Kesselring: today we are directing the planes ourselves.”

The Luftwaffe was putting on a good show, even so, von Mellenthin thought; but he did not say it.

Tobruk was a concentric fortress. The garrison itself was within a town, and the town was at the heart of a larger British-held area surrounded by a thirty-five-mile perimeter wire dotted with strongpoints. The Germans had to cross the wire, then penetrate the town, then take the garrison.

A cloud of orange smoke arose in the middle of the battlefield. Von Mellenthin said: “That's a signal from the assault engineers, telling the artillery to lengthen their range.”

Rommel nodded. “Good. We're making progress.”

Suddenly von Mellenthin was seized by optimism. There was booty in Tobruk: petrol, and dynamite, and tents, and trucks—already more than half Rommel's motorized transport consisted of captured British vehicles—and food. Von Mellenthin smiled and said: “Fresh fish for dinner?”

Rommel understood his train of thought. “Liver,” he said. “Fried potatoes. Fresh bread.”

“A real bed, with a feather pillow.”

“In a house with stone walls to keep out the heat and the bugs.”

A runner arrived with a signal. Von Mellenthin took it and read it. He tried to keep the excitement out of his voice as he said: “They've cut the wire at Strongpoint Sixty-nine. Group Menny is attacking with the infantry of the Afrika Korps.”

“That's it,” said Rommel. “We've opened a breach. Let's go.”

 

It was ten-thirty in the morning when Lieutenant Colonel Reggie Bogge poked his head around the door of Vandam's office and said: “Tobruk is under siege.”

It seemed pointless to work then. Vandam went on mechanically, reading reports from informants, considering the case of a lazy lieutenant who was due for promotion but did not deserve it, trying to think of a fresh approach to the Alex Wolff case; but everything seemed hopelessly trivial. The news became more depressing as the day wore on. The Germans breached the perimeter wire; they bridged the antitank ditch; they crossed the inner minefield; they reached the strategic road junction known as King's Cross.

Vandam went home at seven to have supper with Billy. He could not tell the boy about Tobruk: the news was not to be released at present. As they ate their lamb chops, Billy said that his English teacher, a young man with a lung condition who could not get into the Army, never stopped talking about how he would love to get out into the desert and have a bash at the Hun. “I don't believe him, though,” Billy said. “Do you?”

“I expect he means it,” Vandam said. “He just feels guilty.”

Billy was at an argumentative age. “Guilty? He can't feel
guilty
—it's not his fault.”

“Unconsciously he can.”

“What's the difference?”

I walked into that one, Vandam thought. He considered for a moment, then said: “When you've done something wrong, and you know it's wrong, and you feel bad about it, and you know why you feel bad, that's conscious guilt. Mr. Simkisson has done nothing wrong, but he
still
feels bad about it, and he doesn't know why he feels bad. That's unconscious guilt. It makes him feel better to talk about how much he wants to fight.”

“Oh,” said Billy.

Vandam did not know whether the boy had understood or not.

Billy went to bed with a new book. He said it was a “tec,” by which he meant a detective story. It was called
Death on the Nile.

Vandam went back to GHQ. The news was still bad. The 21st Panzers had entered the town of Tobruk and fired from the quay onto several British ships which were trying, belatedly, to escape to the open sea. A number of vessels had been sunk. Vandam thought of the men who made a ship, and the tons of precious steel that went into it, and the training of the sailors, and the welding of the crew into a team; and now the men were dead, the ship sunk, the effort wasted.

He spent the night in the officers' mess, waiting for news. He drank steadily and smoked so much that he gave himself a headache. Bulletins came down periodically from the Operations Room. During the night Ritchie, as commander of the Eighth Army, decided to abandon the frontier and retreat to Mersa Matruh. It was said that when Auchinleck, the commander in chief, heard this news he stalked out of the room with a face as black as thunder.

Toward dawn Vandam found himself thinking about his parents. Some of the ports on the south coast of England had suffered as much as London from the bombing, but his parents were a little way inland, in a village in the Dorset countryside. His father was postmaster at a small sorting office. Vandam looked at his watch: it would be four in the morning in England now, the old man would be putting on his cycle clips, climbing on his bike and riding to work in the dark. At sixty years of age he had the constitution of a teenage farmboy. Vandam's chapelgoing mother forbade smoking, drinking and all kinds of dissolute behavior, a term she used to encompass everything from darts matches to listening to the wireless. The regime seemed to suit her husband, but she herself was always ailing.

Eventually booze, fatigue and tedium sent Vandam into a doze. He dreamed he was in the garrison at Tobruk with Billy and Elene and his mother. He was running around closing all the windows. Outside, the Germans—who had turned into firemen—were leaning ladders against the wall and climbing up. Suddenly Vandam's mother stopped counting her forged banknotes and opened a window, pointing at Elene and screaming: “The Scarlet Woman!” Rommel came through the window in a fireman's helmet and turned a hose on Billy. The force of the jet pushed the boy over a parapet and he fell into the sea. Vandam knew he was to blame, but he could not figure out what he had done wrong. He began to weep bitterly. He woke up.

He was relieved to discover that he had not really been crying. The dream left him with an overwhelming sense of despair. He lit a cigarette. It tasted foul.

The sun rose. Vandam went around the mess turning out the lights, just for something to do. A breakfast cook came in with a pot of coffee. As Vandam was drinking his, a captain came down with another bulletin. He stood in the middle of the mess, waiting for silence.

He said: “General Klopper surrendered the garrison of Tobruk to Rommel at dawn today.”

Vandam left the mess and walked through the streets of the city toward his house by the Nile. He felt impotent and useless, sitting in Cairo catching spies while out there in the desert his country was losing the war. It crossed his mind that Alex Wolff might have had something to do with Rommel's latest series of victories; but he dismissed the thought as somewhat far-fetched. He felt so depressed that he wondered whether things could possibly get any worse, and he realized that, of course, they could.

When he got home he went to bed.

THE GREEK WAS A FEELER.

Elene did not like feelers. She did not mind straightforward lust; in fact, she was rather partial to it. What she objected to was furtive, guilty, unsolicited groping.

After two hours in the shop she had disliked Mikis Aristopoulos. After two weeks she was ready to strangle him.

The shop itself was fine. She liked the spicy smells and the rows of gaily colored boxes and cans on the shelves in the back room. The work was easy and repetitive, but the time passed quickly enough. She amazed the customers by adding up their bills in her head very rapidly. From time to time she would buy some strange imported delicacy and take it home to try: a jar of liver paste, a Hershey bar, a bottle of Bovril, a can of baked beans. And for her it was novel to do an ordinary, dull, eight-hours-a-day job.

But the boss was a pain. Every chance he got he would touch her arm, her shoulder or her hip; each time he passed her, behind the counter or in the back room, he would brush against her breasts or her bottom. At first she had thought it was accidental, because he did not look the type: he was in his twenties, quite good-looking, with a big smile that showed his white teeth. He must have taken her silence for acquiescence. She would have to tread on him a little.

She did not need this. Her emotions were too confused already. She both liked and loathed William Vandam, who talked to her as an equal, then treated her like a whore; she was supposed to seduce Alex Wolff, whom she had never met; and she was being groped by Mikis Aristopoulos, for whom she felt nothing but scorn.

They all use me, she thought; it's the story of my life.

She wondered what Wolff would be like. It was easy for Vandam to tell her to befriend him, as if there were a button she could press which made her instantly irresistible. In reality a lot depended on the man. Some men liked her immediately. With others it was hard work. Sometimes it was impossible. Half of her hoped it would be impossible with Wolff. The other half remembered that he was a spy for the Germans, and Rommel was coming closer every day, and if the Nazis ever got to Cairo . . .

Aristopoulos brought a box of pasta out from the back room. Elene looked at her watch: it was almost time to go home. Aristopoulos dropped the box and opened it. On his way back, as he squeezed past her, he put his hands under her arms and touched her breasts. She moved away. She heard someone come into the shop. She thought: I'll teach the Greek a lesson. As he went into the back room, she called after him loudly, in Arabic: “If you touch me again I'll cut your cock off!”

There was a burst of laughter from the customer. She turned and looked at him. He was a European, but he must understand Arabic, she thought. She said: “Good afternoon.”

He looked toward the back room and called out: “What have you been doing, Aristopoulos, you young goat?”

Aristopoulos poked his head around the door. “Good day, sir. This is my niece, Elene.” His face showed embarrassment and something else which Elene could not read. He ducked back into the storeroom.

“Niece!” said the customer, looking at Elene. “A likely tale.”

He was a big man in his thirties with dark hair, dark skin and dark eyes. He had a large hooked nose which might have been typically Arab or typically European-aristocratic. His mouth was thin-lipped, and when he smiled he showed small even teeth—like a cat's, Elene thought. She knew the signs of wealth and she saw them here: a silk shirt, a gold wristwatch, tailored cotton trousers with a crocodile belt, handmade shoes and a faint masculine cologne.

Elene said: “How can I help you?”

He looked at her as if he were contemplating several possible answers, then he said: “Let's start with some English marmalade.”

“Yes.” The marmalade was in the back room. She went there to get a jar.

“It's him!” Aristopoulos hissed.

“What are you talking about?” she asked in a normal voice. She was still mad at him.

“The bad-money man—Mr. Wolff—that's him!”

“Oh, God!” For a moment she had forgotten why she was here. Aristopoulos' panic infected her, and her mind went blank. “What shall I say to him? What should I do?”

“I don't know—give him the marmalade—I don't know—”

“Yes, the marmalade, right . . .” She took a jar of Cooper's Oxford from a shelf and returned to the shop. She forced herself to smile brightly at Wolff as she put the jar down on the counter. “What else?”

“Two pounds of the dark coffee, ground fine.”

He was watching her while she weighed the coffee and put it through the grinder. Suddenly she was afraid of him. He was not like Charles, Johnnie and Claud, the men who had kept her. They had been soft, easygoing, guilty and pliable. Wolff seemed poised and confident: it would be hard to deceive him and impossible to thwart him, she guessed.

“Something else?”

“A tin of ham.”

She moved around the shop, finding what he wanted and putting the goods on the counter. His eyes followed her everywhere. She thought: I must talk to him, I can't keep saying, “Something else?” I'm supposed to befriend him. “Something else?” she said.