James Herbert - ‘48

The guise she’d adopted in order to survive had fallen away like a cloak worn for warmth and not for taste, and that disloyalty – the choice Muriel had made – was something Cissie could not understand. The truth of it was – and I tried to make Cissie understand this – that the bitch had been loyal, but it was to her own class, to people of her own persuasion. Hell, Cissie had been there when Hubble had mentioned that Edward, England ’s abdicated king, demoted to dukedom, had aligned himself with the Nazi ideologies, along with certain others of the so-called British aristocracy. Before the war their persuasions were no great secret, according to other pilots I’d spoken with, and only the formal outbreak of hostilities had hushed them. Breeding above principles, was their warped philosophy. Their own ideals were more important to them than their own countrymen. It was a decadent and self-serving system, one that flourished throughout England’s history, and something my own mother had been glad to leave behind when she made her home in America, even though she loved her birthplace, and these ‘wrong-sorts’, as she put it, were only a small minority. Muriel, I’d assured Cissie as I’d brushed her curls away from her grubby face, had only remained true to her own conditioning, and her double-cross amounted to little more than a natural alliance.

None of it seemed to help Cissie much, but maybe some of it eventually got through, because after a while she ceased her weeping, wiped her cheeks and nose with the back of her hand and started to talk…

‘Wilhelm wanted you to know he was sorry.’

There was a hollowness to her voice in this bleak room, its only furniture the bed we lay on and an armchair with wooden arms, a pile of boys’ clothing – different sizes, so I knew they’d belonged to more than one – resting on its cushioned seat I turned my head and her dirty face was not unlike a child’s itself in the pale, morning light, only shadows beneath her eyes indicating the trouble she’d been through.

‘He managed to talk?’

‘Towards the end. I think the pain lessened, but because of that he knew he was dying.’

‘Why sorry?’

‘Oh, not for what he’d done. He said he’d only been fighting for his country during the war, carrying out his duty, just like us.’

‘Yeah, his duty.’ I dragged on the cigarette, then took it from my lips, hanging it over the edge of the bed, smoke curling up between my fingers.

‘He was apologizing for Germany ’s final action, not for his role as a soldier.’

‘He was a spy.’

‘Soldier, spy – it was all the same to him. But he was deeply ashamed of what Hitler did to his own country and the rest of the world. He said Germany ’s inevitable defeat should have been accepted with honour. He didn’t want you – us – to judge his race by the mad dogs who ruled them. Only the High Command had known about the rockets and what they were capable of.’

‘What’s it matter? Nothing can change what happened.’ My eyes closed. Yet, weary though my body was, my mind refused to shut down: it was still buzzing with everything that had happened since yesterday.

‘He just wanted you to know, Hoke, that was all.’

‘I figured him right and got him wrong. I didn’t trust him, but he saved my life.’

‘Wilhelm understood that. He didn’t blame you for your suspicions, Hoke.’

‘Did he manage to tell you what his mission was over here during the war?’

‘He found it difficult to speak towards the end – he was choking on his own blood. But he tried…oh, he tried so hard…’

I thought the tears would start again as she cast her eyes downwards, but she straightened, her mouth set tight.

‘He wanted to set the record straight between you and him, something about honour among enemies. I think he wanted to die with your respect, Hoke, not your hatred.’

‘He’d already earned my respect.’ I lifted the cigarette again and held it over my lips for a moment. ‘So what was he up to?’

‘He told me his plane was shot down, but it wasn’t over the East Coast, it wasn’t a Heinkel, and it wasn’t in 1940. It happened one night, in ‘44, a few weeks before D-Day, and the aeroplane was a…what was it?…a Junkers. Yes, he said it was a Ju 188. It was gunned down over the Solent and the seven others on board with him were all killed. He managed to bale out before the burning plane crashed.’

Her gaze went past me towards the window and the oncoming day was reflected in her hazel-brown eyes.

‘His clothes were alight when he jumped, and – absurdly, he said – he was more worried about the fire becoming a beacon in the night sky than burning to death. The rushing air put out the flames, though.’

I thought of the scars on the German’s back and neck and wondered at his courage. To parachute into enemy territory in the middle of the night then to hide himself while search parties scoured the countryside for survivors, badly burned and alone, well, that took a rare kind of guts. Another thought occurred to me.

‘He told you there were seven others with him in the Junkers? That kind of bomber only carried a crew of four.’

‘It wasn’t a normal crew. They all had official papers on them giving them Slavic names, not German. If they got caught their cover story was to be that they were Polish and Czech freedom fighters who’d stolen the plane to escape to England so they could carry on fighting with the Allied Forces.’

I clicked my fingers. ‘Exbury Point.’

‘What?’

‘I remember hearing something about a mysterious German bomber crashing at Exbury Point, near the Beaulieu River where assault landing craft and barges were being made ready for the invasion of Europe. Rumours were that all kinds of secret activities were going on there -’

‘Yes, that was it. He said German Intelligence had learned that pilotless rocket aircraft were being tested along the inlet from the Solent and it was his job to discover how far ahead the British scientists were with their experiments. Only three men on the Junkers were meant to parachute into the area – the rest were crew members, but with the same kind of papers as the spies in case the worst happened.’

‘And it did.’ The end of the cigarette glowed brightly as I drew on it. ‘But how the hell did Stern get by after he’d jumped?’

‘He hid for two days, then was able to reach his contact in the New Forest when the commotion died down.’

‘But his burns

‘He was a bit special, wasn’t he?’

And some, I thought, guilt over my treatment of this war ace nagging at me. ‘What happened to him?’ I asked.

‘Well, he stayed in the area feeding back information to his bosses until the invasion took place. He said it was important for you to know that he did very little harm to the Allied Forces’ efforts down there, because once the counter-invasion of Europe had started – which was very soon after he’d arrived – his intelligence reports had hardly any value. All he could do was try and survive himself.’

I blew smoke and crushed the cigarette stub against the bare board floor, my fingers brushing against the pistol lying there. When I rolled back, Cissie was propped on one elbow, looking down at me. Her curls fell loose over her face again.

‘Hoke?’

I didn’t answer, just stared back into her eyes.

‘We imagined they were all evil, didn’t we? The enemy, the whole German race, I mean. We thought they were all the same.’

‘They started the whole goddamn thing.’

‘Hitler started it.’

‘And the German people went along with him. People like Stern.’

‘We bombed their city first.’

‘Your country only retaliated for their first raid on London.’