Simon Tolkien - Orders from Berlin

The larger fires seemed to be coming under control, but here and there flames kept springing up, and residents were helping the firemen to put them out, using sand and stirrup pumps. Many of the firemen looked like ghosts with their faces covered in plaster dust from the falling walls and ceilings and their eyes red from the smoke. Trave had to tread carefully to avoid tripping over their tangled, twisting hoses that lay interwoven with the dust and debris, snaking in all directions like the entrails of some gigantic disembowelled monster. In some places he used the fallen masonry as stepping-stones to enable him to keep moving forward. He needed to keep going; he thought he would go mad if he stayed standing still.

He turned into a street of terrace houses that had felt the full force of the blast. Some were still standing, unlike Gloucester Mansions, but none had been left undamaged. It was as if a gigantic tin-opener had wrenched them open, revealing their broken contents to an indifferent world. Trave thought of all the years of hard work and saving, all the scrubbing, and all the pride that had gone into these homes that were now no better than scrap heaps, fit only for the bulldozer.

He was filled with a sudden, intense hatred for the country that had perpetrated this wanton destruction. Not just for Germany and its rulers, but for the German people as well. They had elected Hitler to power; they were responsible for the crimes he was committing against innocent civilians. Now Trave understood the men who had rushed towards the descending parachute, burning with murderous rage. He felt just the same. He wanted revenge.

But there was no outlet for his anger. The enemy planes had disappeared from the sky, and there was nothing to be done. God had turned His back on the world, and this was the end of days. The last war had been a dress rehearsal; this was the real thing. Here among the smouldering ruins, under the smoking red-black sky, amidst the apocalyptic desolation, the young policeman gave way to despair.

And it was then that he saw it. A hand sticking up disembodied out of a pile of broken masonry where there once had been a house. He went over immediately without thinking, knelt down, reached out, and took hold. The hand was warm and he knew straight away that the person below was still alive, buried under the rubble on which he was standing. Not just alive but conscious too — he could feel the fingers wrapping themselves around his. It felt like a woman’s hand. There were no rings on the fingers.

He forced himself to let go and began scrabbling madly with his hands in the dirt, trying to dig down into the wreckage. But he made no progress. He’d come up against two heavy blocks of masonry lying side by side and he couldn’t move them, however hard he tried. The hand was sticking up between them; the rest of the woman’s body had to be lying trapped underneath. Without help there was nothing he could do to get her free.

And there was no one in sight who could help. Further down the street, a few people were picking through what remained of their homes, but Trave didn’t bother calling out to them. He knew that even if they came, it would make no difference. Heavy lifting equipment would be needed to move the slabs that were pinning the woman down.

Trave thought of leaving, going in search of professional assistance, but he knew it would never arrive in time. So he sat down in the dust instead and once again took hold of the hand. He squeezed it gently and felt an answering response, and then he remained where he was, summoning all the love in his soul, trying to communicate it through the medium of touch to the invisible dying woman by his side.

He had no idea how long his vigil lasted, except that it was dark when the hand held his hard for a moment and then relaxed, letting go. She was gone. He could feel it. She didn’t need him any more. He wondered who she was, what her life had been, and realized that he would never know. Yet he felt certain that he had learnt more in the preceding hour than he had done in all his life before he entered the ruined street. And until his dying day, he never forgot the feel of the woman’s hand in his and the knowledge it brought of the transcendent power of human love in the face of certain death.

Earlier the same evening, Seaforth sat alone in the living room of his Chelsea apartment, twirling the stem of a glass of dry white wine between his fingers. From his carefully positioned armchair, he had a beautiful view not only over the canopy of the plane trees in Cadogan Square below, but east too over the rooftops towards the Palace of Westminster, where Churchill was no doubt meeting his ministers, plotting his next move in the war against Germany. A war he was going to lose because he now had less than a week to live. Seaforth knew he might be being optimistic about the timing. The journey of the Portuguese diplomatic bag from Lisbon to the embassy in London could take anywhere from several days to more than a week depending on interruptions to air and shipping routes caused by the war, but he had no doubt that he would receive the go-ahead from Berlin by the end of the month and that Heydrich would provide him with sufficiently appetizing intelligence to ensure another summons to the Prime Minister’s presence.

He had prepared the ‘detailed written report’ on the assassination plan that Heydrich had requested in something of a hurry, distracted by the unwelcome news that Heydrich’s radio message to him had been intercepted and decoded. But he had ended up feeling pleased with his composition. The writing was clear and sharp, and in the days since he’d taken it to the embassy, Seaforth had enjoyed reading the text over to himself in bed before he went to sleep, repeating some of his better phrases out loud as he imagined Hitler considering the same passages in his office in the Reich Chancellery, admiring the daring and brilliance of Agent D.

It was the simplicity of the idea that delighted Seaforth the most. He would receive credit for trying to prevent an assassination that he had in fact committed, and with any luck he would end up taking over Thorn’s job as deputy director as a reward for having shot the poor bastard in the head. Seaforth smiled at the thought of Thorn, patriotic to his backbone, immortalized in death as the ultimate traitor to his country. Commemorated in wax, he could have a special place alongside Guy Fawkes and John Wilkes Booth in the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussauds.

Seaforth wondered why he hated Thorn so much. His own pursuit of Ava had been necessary to cover up her father’s murder, but Thorn’s obvious jealousy, first apparent at the funeral, had added spice, and Seaforth had taken a sadistic delight in observing Thorn’s impotent rage when they passed each other in the corridors at HQ and, best of all, when Thorn found him hiding in Ava’s bedroom. He looked forward with relish to the prospect of putting a bullet in Thorn’s head. Why? Partly, of course, it was because Thorn hated him. But it was more than that. Thorn had come to stand in Seaforth’s mind for that whole class of self-assured, born-to-rule, upper-class Englishmen that this war was on the way to wiping out once and for all.

Seaforth shuddered as he recalled his Scottish border childhood and his father touching his cap as the old squire rode past on his big black hunter; the same toffee-nosed English landowner who made his father pay an exorbitant rent that he could not afford for a tumbledown shack not fit for human habitation. His family had had so little money during the last war that his mother had been forced to work in the scullery up at the big house, washing their expensive porcelain plates and crystal glasses to make ends meet, while her husband and her eldest son fought and died in the Flanders mud to preserve the very system that was grinding them and their kind into the ground.