William Boyd - Waiting for Sunrise

He lay there on the ground for a moment, his breath coming back, looking up at giants standing over him — bearded filthy men in dirty blue uniforms, all of them smoking pipes, bizarrely. They stared back at him, curious.

“ C’est sûr ,” one of them said. “ Un véritable officier anglais .”

♦

He was sitting in a dugout in the support lines, an enamel mug of black unsweetened coffee in his hand, experiencing a level of exhaustion that he’d never encountered before. It was all he could do to raise the mug to his lips, like lifting a heavy boulder or lead cannonball. He put the mug down and closed his eyes. Sleep. Sleep for a week. He had handed the sealed letter from his pack to the officer whose dugout this was — where the bearded blue giants had led him. Cigarette, that’s what he needed. He patted his pockets — then remembered he’d left them behind in Dodd’s dugout. Dugout Dodd. Wiley and Gorlice-Law. Was that Gorlice-Law’s shout for Foley? He just hoped that all –

“There he is. Our bad penny.”

He looked round, blinking. Fyfe-Miller stood there in the doorway. Smart in a jacket with leather cross-belting, jodhpurs and highly-polished riding boots. The French officer stood behind him.

“ Notre mauvais centime ,” Fyfe-Miller translated for the French officer, making no attempt at an accent. He helped Lysander to his feet, grinning his wild grin. Lysander felt like kissing him.

“Phase one completed,” Fyfe-Miller said. “That was the easy bit.”

The ferry from Thonon nosed into the quayside at Geneva, then its engines were thrown into reverse to bring its stern round and the whole little ship shuddered. Lysander — Abelard Schwimmer — almost lost his footing and held on tight to the wooden balustrade on the top deck as thick grey ropes were slung out on to the dock and seamen hitched them to bollards, making the ferry hold fast. The gangway was lowered and Lysander picked up his tartan suitcase and found a place in the disorderly queue of people hurrying to disembark — then it was time for him to move down the wooden incline and take his first steps on Swiss soil. Geneva lay in front of him in the morning sunshine — big apartment buildings fronting the lake, solid and prosperous — set on its alluvial plain, only the bulk of the cathedral rising above the level of the terracotta and grey rooftops, reminding him vaguely of Vienna, for some reason. Low hills and then the dazzling snows of the mountains beyond in the distance. He took a deep breath of Swiss air, settled his Homburg on his head and Abelard Schwimmer wandered off to look for his hotel.

♦

After they had made their way from the front line to the rear, Lysander and Fyfe-Miller had been driven to Amiens, where a room had been booked for him in the Hôtel Riche et du Sport. He went straight to bed and slept all day until he was shaken awake by Fyfe-Miller in the evening and was informed that he had a train to catch to Paris and then on to Lyons. He changed into Abelard Schwimmer’s clothes — an ill-cut navy-blue serge suit (that already felt too hot), a soft-collared beige shirt with ready-knotted bow tie and clumpy brown shoes. If Fyfe-Miller had been planning to offend his dress sense, Lysander thought, then he had done a first rate job. He was given a red tartan cardboard suitcase — with some spare shirts and drawers in it — that also had, hidden behind the lining, a flat bundle of Swiss francs, enough to last him two weeks, Fyfe-Miller said, more than enough time to finish the job. The outfit was completed by a Lincoln-green raincoat and a Homburg hat.

“Every inch the ‘ homme moyen sensuel ’,” Fyfe-Miller said. “What a transformation.”

“You’ve an appalling French accent, Fyfe-Miller,” Lysander said. “The Hhhhom moyn senzyul — shocking.” He repeated it in the Fyfe-Miller style and then as it should be correctly pronounced. “The ‘h’ is silent, in French.”

Fyfe-Miller smiled, breezily.

“ Quel hhhhorreur . I can make myself understood,” he said, unashamedly. “That’s all I need.”

They shook hands on the platform at Amiens.

“Good luck,” Fyfe-Miller said. “So far, so good. Don’t delay in Paris — you’ve forty minutes between trains. Massinger will meet you in Lyons.”

“Where’s Munro?”

“Good question…In London, I think.”

Lysander travelled to Paris, then to Lyons, overnight and first class — a railway engineer’s perk, he assumed. He shared a compartment with two French colonels who looked at him with overt contempt and never addressed a word to him. He didn’t care. He nodded off and dreamed of throwing his bombs into the sap — seeing the two startled faces of the signallers looking up at him before he switched his torch off. When he woke at dawn the colonels had gone.

Lyons station was crowded with French troops about to entrain for the front. Lysander was reminded that the front line was still not far away, extending down through Champagne and the Ardennes, curving in a meandering doodle from the North Sea to the Swiss border, almost five hundred miles, of which the British Army was responsible for about fifty. Massinger was waiting for him at the station buffet — drinking beer, Lysander noticed. They took the stopper train all the way to Lake Geneva, to Thonon on the south bank, and checked into the Hôtel de Thonon et Terminus, conveniently placed for the station in the lower town.

Massinger’s mood was fractious and ill at ease. When Lysander started to tell him about his fraught night in no man’s land he seemed only to half-listen, as if his mind were on more pressing matters. “Yes, yes. Indeed. Most alarming.” Lysander didn’t bother explaining in more detail, told him nothing about the bombing, about watching the dawn rise over the German lines as he crouched amongst the rushes of the drainage ditch.

They dined together but the atmosphere was still unnatural and forced. They were like vague acquaintances who — as ill luck would have it — found themselves as the only two Englishmen in a small French town. They were polite, they feigned conviviality, but there was no denying that, given the choice, they would far rather have dined alone.

Massinger at least had more information and instructions to give him about his mission. Once Lysander had arrived in Geneva and had settled in his hotel he was to go to a certain café everyday at 10. 30 and again at 4. 30 and stay for an hour. At some stage he would be approached by Agent Bonfire, they would exchange the double password and new instructions would be given, if Bonfire felt that the moment was opportune.

“Bonfire seems to be calling all the shots,” Lysander said, unthinkingly.

“Bonfire is probably our key asset, currently, in our entire espionage war,” Massinger said with real hostility, his raspy voice even harsher. “Bonfire reads all the correspondence going in and out of the German consulate in Geneva — how valuable do you think that is? Eh?”

“Very valuable, I would imagine.”

“Just make sure you’re at the Taverne des Anglais at those hours, morning and afternoon.”

“Taverne des Anglais? Don’t you think that’s a bit obvious?”

“It’s a nondescript brasserie. What’s its name got to do with anything?”

They ate on in silence. Lysander had ordered a fish, under a local name he didn’t recognize, and found it overcooked, bland and watery. Massinger had a veal chop that, judging by the effort he was deploying to cut it up, must be extremely tough.

“There’s one thing that’s worrying me, Massinger.”