Jack Ludlow - The Burning Sky

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His suspicions were heightened by the way they failed to respond, it being a mark of polite behaviour for Germans to do so, while the impression of faces too bland was fleeting, of hands a bit too white and teeth that seemed too even. Likewise the clothing had none of the wear that came from doing a lousy job for low pay. The hairs were standing on the back of his neck when he passed the cab, yet he dare not look back to see if they were watching him.

In such building-created canyons, sound travels, and though he could not see it, he heard the distant start of a car engine, as well as that particular whining noise one makes when reversing. As he came to the first junction, to a road running away from the dockside, he looked along it to observe it was empty; had the car been there and so obviously official-looking it had needed to be withdrawn? How many bodies did they have on this job?

His heart jumped when the lorry engine started, a deep throbbing note as it idled, then the pitch of the engine rising as it revved and moved, that mixing with the crack of his heels on the pavement. Gears and engine pitch changed twice, then the noise became a diminishing echo, fading eventually till his shoes were making the only audible sound. The combination of that car noise and a lorry, hitherto stationary too long, indicated they were either police or Gestapo. It made no odds which, they had moved because of him and that had to mean he was being tailed; good for his refugees, not so hot for him, given he had no idea of the resources they had employed for the task.

The street being long and straight, he saw the Auto Union coupe, hood up, coming towards him at quite a distance, moving slowly on the cobbles, which made it buck and sway, the jarring of its body as the springs failed to cushion it properly indicating the car was carrying too heavy a load. The first clue to it being the Ephraim family was the sight, in the driver’s seat, of the man Lanchester had called his blue-eyed boy, both hands on the wheel, staring straight ahead, while alongside him sat the father with a worker’s cap pulled well down, hiding his grey hair.

Jardine saw blue-eyed boy’s lips move and guessed it was an admonishment not to look in his direction, the coincidence of their arriving as he was departing as good a way as any to let them know of possible danger. As the car passed, it being natural for him to glance in its direction, he saw five people crowded in the rear, the daughter and youngest son sat on laps, then the suitcases strapped onto the jump seat, too many to his mind, which produced a flash of irritation which grew as he crossed the road behind it, halting at a bus stop and able to look back the way he had come and see the vehicle drive on past the doorway from which he had emerged.

That luggage rankled: it was always a problem to get people to leave things behind, items they had probably not even noticed for years suddenly taking on huge sentimental importance. Valuables he could comprehend; it would be a fair bet that Papa Ephraim had stuff on his lap and all around his feet, old master and modern art paintings in leather tubes, a case of precious objects that had to include heirlooms and, inevitably, a solid-silver seven-branch candlestick for Friday night prayers. It did not matter what he made of the car and it being overloaded — it only mattered if those on his tail, and they had to be there even if he could not see them in the gathering gloom, were made curious.

Blue-eyed boy would not stop until he was out of sight: the ship was not due to sail until first light, so a way would have to be contrived to get the family into that tunnel entrance in the dark. It was no longer his problem; he just had to keep the watchers watching him and then he had to get clear and out of Hamburg and Germany by a different route, the first stage of that to get on the approaching bus.

Jardine knew with night coming his best chance was to return to St Pauli, though not to the bar in which Lanchester had found him — the red-light district was busy in the hours of darkness and there were streets there that would make it near impossible for anyone to follow. Once in his old stamping ground, his way out he already knew, the only problem he had was of being picked up before he could get there.

Many times throughout his life Callum Jardine had been in a position of danger in which he could do nothing to alleviate it; people now saw the last campaign of the Great War as a walkover, the German army retreating and the Allies dogging their heels. It was nothing like that: in retreat the Kaiser’s army made the advancing Allies fight for every pre-prepared trench system and they had been constructed in advance and in depth.

The only way to take them, tanks rarely being available, was by infantry attack, and if the tactics had improved since the bloodbaths of Verdun and the Somme, it was still hard pounding, while to that was added the feeling, with things hopefully coming to the end, that no one wanted to be the last one to stop a bullet.

Sitting on the first bus, which took him to the Hauptbahnhof, followed by another from the main railway station to St Pauli, Jardine was aware that he was sat in well-lit seats and easily observed, a bit like a target in a shooting gallery. That feeling did not diminish when he was finally on foot and he had to remind himself of those times, the occasions when, as a soldier in battle, you come to terms with the possibility of death, allied to the knowledge it is not in your hands to avoid it. The hardest part was to keep his watchers feeling he was unaware of their presence: never spin round, don’t do that stopping-to-look-in-a-window trick so you can see if anyone else halts too — let them think they are secure and potentially you are unknowingly leading them to something significant.

The Reeperbahn was, by the time he got there, its usual Friday night self, full of locals drinking in the bars, of sailors and visitors from more straight-laced communities come to sample the liberal streets of the famous red-light district. In the many iffy places Cal Jardine had been since he left the army he had learnt that setting up a way out was of paramount importance, one of the first things to be worked out before indulging in any activity, and Hamburg was no different — it was just easier than most.

He suspected his tail knew they were in trouble when, after talking to a streetwalker, he dived into the Herbertstra?e: first they lost sight of him because of the high metal panels that shut off the street from public view. When they, too, pushed their way through the unlicensed whores who congregated at each end of the street, passing the big sign saying ‘Women Prohibited’, they entered a narrow, crowded and garishly lit alleyway, full of men either just staring, or bargaining with the scantily clad women sitting in the brightly lit windows.

The narrow alley Jardine made for had more than just a raised window beside a doorway; it was an apparent dead end, but a special one, and as he entered he spied Gretl, the woman who worked there, deep in discussion with a drunken, noisy quartet who, by their colouring and dress, looked to be seamen and Dutch. Jardine had passed several windows in which sat young and attractive women, scantily clad and available for business; this was a different kind of establishment altogether and the way Gretl was dressed underlined that.

A big lady in every respect, tall and far from young, she had on red lederhosen, a waistcoat of similar leather material which hardly managed, so tight was it laced, to contain her huge bosom, and on her head a horned helmet that barely contained her brassy fair hair. This outfit was set off with a pair of black, shiny thigh boots with spiked heels, while in her hand she held a riding whip.

Gretl had worked the Herbertstra?e for decades to become a feature of the place. Most of the window girls came for a few years and many from country towns and villages, not Hamburg. They saved up the money they made from selling their bodies, overseen and kept medically clean by the municipality, then retired back to their locality, no doubt without their neighbours being aware of their past, to set up a shop or some kind of business, or merely to become a marriageable catch with their nest egg — in some senses a more morally upright bunch than those they served.

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