The Cipher, page 13
8
Monopoli / Bari, 1943
Olivia sat in the back of a dusty truck along with three other Pianists. After a long arduous journey from Algiers to Bizerta, then across the Mediterranean, she and the others had finally landed at Taranto, and were now on the way to Monopoli, a small town in southern Italy. The women formed an advance group of coders sent to set up wireless radio communications in the new SOE headquarters in the area, which would shorten transmission distance to agents working with partisans in northern Italy, as well as function as a base for Greek and Albanian operations.
Despite the gruelling journey, Olivia was excited. She was finally in Italy, her father’s homeland. It made her feel closer to him and Mamma. She had almost believed they’d be waiting for her at the port. However, although there was no sea between them, or train leaving the station, a more sinister division — the Gustav Line, which stretched north of Naples right across Italy — would keep them apart. . . The train slides out of the station, and I run alongside, for a final look. . .while I memorize everything: the shouts, the laughter, the warning whistle of an oncoming train, the rain pelting the metal roof, Mamma’s soft sobs, Papa’s reassuring words, my own heavy heart beating… Always saying goodbye.
She’d received various messages from Nino, but had not responded. How could she ever trust him? Nevertheless, she’d printed out the last one, and kept it in her purse:
kn yu py oo ry ie
lo ta ul ro it we
ly ei is mu st ai
Sorry. I will make
it up to you.
See you in Italy.
She wished she could speak to her mother. They’d been separated too soon. So many questions unanswered. Be very careful of your reputation… you’re too young to go out with boys… you’ll understand when you’re older… when you’re older… when you’re older. Well, here she was, older, and didn’t understand at all. Two men in different ventricles of her heart: Philip in London, steady and waiting; Nino somewhere unknown, unattainable, yet all her being longed for him.
In Cairo, soon after the incident in the market, she’d been transferred back to Massingham, “for your own safety,” her CO told her. Was she in some danger from Jay? She’d written a report, then scanned through books of photographs of enemy agents, and identified the murdered man. A British MI6 agent, a double agent, perhaps. She wondered why he’d been in Cairo, and what business he’d with Jay, but knew better than to ask questions. Perhaps Jay was the double agent, nervous that she had noticed the MI6 agent twice. She wasn’t sure what to believe, given that the MI6 agent was dead.
In Massingham, she transmitted to agents working with partisans in northern Italy. She wondered if one of these agents was interacting with Aldo. We don’t ask questions here. In Massingham, everyone complained about the old equipment, the poor transmission. Why didn’t they have better equipment? Olivia worried she’d miss a signal that could lead to an agent’s death. As well as interpreting the agent’s “fist” to determine whether he’d been compromised, she had to scan for pre-arranged deliberate errors the agent would make to signal he was working under duress. She had to know all the Q-codes — shorthand for common messages — especially QUG — I am forced to stop transmitting owing to immediate peril. Despite the urgency of it all, Olivia worked calmly and efficiently, as if danger quelled her anxieties.
After the armistice, she’d requested the transfer to Italy, saying she could instruct Italian agents from there.
“Is that the only reason you want to be here?” Claire asked as they rode.
“I’m hoping to go and see my parents,” Olivia said.
“And?” Claire’s eyes twinkled. “Does Nardo figure in all this?”
“You don’t know what happened between Nardo and me,” Olivia said dramatically, then described the walk along the river, the kiss, the urgency, the hotel, her virgin announcement, her sudden panic, ending with, “You have no idea how devastated I was, my heart broken in a million pieces, my sense of self destroyed . . .”
Claire laughed. “You have no idea how maudlin you sound.”
“It wasn’t maudlin when it happened,” Olivia said, embarrassed.
“No, I’m sure it wasn’t,” Claire said. “But surely you wanted to have sex with him.”
Embarassment rose around Olivia like a red cloud. She wondered for a moment whether Nino had taken Claire to that same hotel in Cairo, whether he took all the women there.
“I don’t think you can blush more than that,” Claire said playfully, then, “Everyone has someone back home. You have someone back home.”
“Not really,” Olivia began.
“Maybe Nardo feels like you about his someone.”
Olivia shook her head. “He told me about her.”
Claire sighed. “Why did you tell him you’re a virgin? It shouldn’t matter. Either you want to sleep with him or not.”
“It’s not so easy for me,” Olivia said. She felt conflicted and foolish after this conversation, and wondered if she could ever feel differently.
After Massingham and Cairo, southern Italy was bleak and anti-climactic. On the drive from Taranto, they stopped three times to change flat tires, and hurried past small town signposts announcing Typhoid And Smallpox. No Stopping. She could now witness firsthand what her Italian instructor in London had said: that the Italian south had been abandoned by Rome. Italy begins at Florence, he says. While money flowed to the more industrial north, the south of Italy was neither developed nor were its people helped.
What a strange attitude, Olivia thought. She wondered if her father’s tax money had built railway lines and factories in northern Italy, while here people struggled for survival. She gazed at castles and churches, knowing this province of Puglia had a storied past, having been invaded by so many cultures, who left behind castles, cathedrals, churches, yet the Monopoli of 1943 was an impoverished town, dirty, and filled with squalor.
The SOE HQ was a tight-knit group, headed by their CO Stan, and comprising an odd assortment: partisan leaders, who dropped in to discuss missions; a forgery expert, released from a British prison, creating false documents in a house up the hill; paramilitary instructors from the training school at Castello di Santo Stefano, a few miles north; various special agents who were kept in “holding houses” so they could maintain their anonymity; British Liaison Officers from the station at Castellana; pilots from the parachute training airfield nearby; W/T instructors from the wireless training school at La Selva a few miles away; as well as agents from Yugoslav partisan boats, who came into port to pick up arms, ammunition, dynamite — and whose debriefings Olivia attended, then typed up verbatim. They were all connected, rejoicing successes, despairing losses.
Olivia and the Pianists settled into Villa Grazia, a stately villa requisitioned by the Allies, and began working twelve-hour shifts, deciphering, encrypting messages from agents dropped behind enemy lines. Nino’s poem ciphers had stopped. Olivia wondered if at any moment he might walk in, and both wished for and feared his return. He was not on her schedule, so she was ignorant of his whereabouts. She didn’t want to think of him in the field where he could be captured, his training useless if parachuted into the waiting arms of German soldiers, as had happened to other agents.
The other girls teased her, and asked her if she’d found Nardo yet. She shrugged away their questions, her cheeks burning. Was he alive? …a shaft of light across the bed, her own rising desire…This is not a good idea, he says. Until we meet again… Perhaps he was in nearby Bari, where SOE had recently established a base, and where in the evenings, officers often went to bars and restaurants, along with some of the Pianists who found plenty of handsome young men to flirt with, and plenty of clean luxurious rooms in the hotels, where they could bathe. Once, Olivia had joined Claire in one of these excursions, surprised by the number of American and British ships anchored in the harbour, laden with food, clothing, ammunition, fuel, medicines, and everything needed to sustain the 500,000 troops fighting in Italy. It seemed impossible that all around, people were starving, scrounging for food, begging for black-market items, yet in Bari, shop windows overflowed with fruits, cakes, bread, anything you wanted if you had the money. She had spent the entire evening glancing at the hotel entrance, in a state of anxiety and excitement, as if she both anticipated and dreaded seeing Nino, and at the end of the evening, she’d left disappointed.
“Olivia,” Stan said one day in late November. “Come with me. I want you to meet someone. ”
“What’s this about?” she asked as he drove them six, seven kilometres.
“You’ll see.” He parked the jeep in front of an old building on the outskirts of town. Olivia followed him around the corner, down a narrow gravelled street, crowded with plant urns overflowing with cacti, palms, herbs, wet clothes strung from balconies, faded banners advertising long-forgotten celebrations.
Stan knocked twice on a door, then turned the doorknob.
She recognized the man inside immediately, though she hadn’t seen him in months…tall, oblong face, blue eyes, and hooded lids, straight teeth, black hair, cut short, and curly… a small mole under the chin on the right side he touches when nervous or lying…
“Hello, Mnemosyne,” Jay said, stubbing out his cigarette in the ashtray. He stood to shake Stan’s hand, and then hers.
“You remember Jay?” Stan asked.
She raised an eyebrow. “How could I forget?”
“I asked for you specifically,” Jay said, and grinned.
“Jay is heading up a rescue mission,” Stan said. “You’ll go with him.”
“Me?” Olivia said, both surprised and pleased.
“We’ll be travelling into German territory,” Jay told her, adding that he was working as a liaison between SOE and the Americans who were supplying air cover. His job was to survey landing strips for drops, and check up on agents who had disappeared or had not been heard of for a time. She’d be expected to memorize locations, maps, and to possibly identify agents and partisans who were supposed to be in the area, but with whom they’d had no contact. “I thought you might need some excitement in your life,” he said. “I hope you’re up to it.”
She scanned through her brain for faces and files she’d memorized back in Massingham. Identifying agents would be simple, but partisans a more difficult task. The dead MI6 agent rose to the forefront.
“You’ll help Jay with identification as necessary, but your main goal will be to carry out a rescue mission for a couple of agents, with whom we’ve lost contact.”
“One of them is your friend Nardo,” Jay said.
Olivia took a sharp breath. Nino. He was alive. She looked from Jay to Stan, to discern what they knew about her and Nino. “For how long?” she asked. Because she had not been assigned to his schedule, she didn’t know when he’d last made contact.
“Several weeks,” Jay said. When the agents had gone to their pickup rendezvous, German soldiers awaited them. They’d been kept in an Italian jail for several days, after which they were handed over to the Gestapo, who put them on a train bound for Germany.
“All this sketchy information comes to us from various sources. We can’t even be sure it’s true,” Stan added.
“Here is the miracle if it is true,” Jay said. “The agents escaped by jumping from the train and were helped by a couple of farmers onto a different train headed for Pescara, where they were met by partisans and taken to a safe house in the hills.”
Olivia frowned, imagining Nino in flight, limbs askew, the slow-motion fall.
“They’re both injured,” Stan said. “Badly apparently.”
She shook her head. It couldn’t be. Or as Jay said, perhaps it was miraculous. While right after the armistice, Italian troops and civilians could travel freely without tickets or encountering checkpoints, by late November, the Germans controlled all passenger travel. “Do you trust the source for all this?”
Stan shrugged. “We have to check it out. And this is where you come in, Viola. You and Jay will cross the Winter Line at night. Jay has contacts and will be surveying for drop locations. When you near Pescara, you’ll switch to bicycle and go up the hill to the town of Chieti. You’ll go in plain clothes, as a school nurse, with papers to match. You will no doubt be stopped and searched at checkpoints, but you’ll carry nothing but medical supplies and identity papers.” He paused. “Your memory is your secret weapon, Viola. We must make good use of it. You’ll be expected to scout the best escape route from the safe house and lead the agents back. Jay will wait to meet you for three days at a pre-arranged location, in case you’re captured or something else goes wrong.”
The words swirled in Olivia’s head: if something else goes wrong. What could possibly go wrong? She could be tortured. She could be shot. Your memory is your secret weapon, she told herself.
“Of course, I’ll go,” Olivia said. “I’ve been waiting for something like this.”
Pescara, one of the most important marshalling yards in central Italy, had been under constant bombardment from the Americans, who wanted to halt supplies from reaching the German troops in the south and those in the north. “You’ll be our eyes and ears on the ground,” Jay said. “On your return, you’ll be expected to make sketches and diagrams of everywhere you’ve been, everything you learned, signalling any permanent checkpoints, any weaknesses that we can exploit.” He handed her a rough sketch of a route and farmhouse. “Memorize this so you can find it.”
Olivia nodded, thinking of the life schematics in her brain. . . Olivia, this is not a good idea. . . I love you. . . retribution. . . the train disappears into the cutting. . .
“We’ll need to leave almost immediately,” Jay said, “before the lines become impossible to cross.” With winter coming, German troops had been hunkering down, searching for escaped prisoners, threatening and bribing Italian civilians and Fascists to become informers. The Germans operated in plain clothes, and once again, Italians were subjected to interrogations, reprisals, destruction of property, executions.
Back at Villa Grazia, Olivia packed a few essentials, reeling with the thought that she might soon see Nino. She pushed him from her mind, telling herself it was useless to speculate, to hope. She wished she’d answered his messages. She wished she’d made love to him, instead of denying what she wanted, and regretting it afterwards.
As soon as her forged papers were ready, she and Jay were in the jeep, both in uniform for the first part of the journey, so if captured they would be treated as POWs. Olivia wondered what would happen if she were captured. Would Nino come to find her? What stupid romantic fantasy was this? she thought, shaking her head. Capture was not something to take lightly. One of the women agents who had been sent to France was captured and had had her fingernails and toenails ripped out. Barbara’s shadow flitted across Olivia’s mind.
As they drove, Jay carried on a light conversation, explaining that his brother was at the front, and that he was looking forward to seeing him.
“Can I see the agent and partisan list?” Olivia said, and Jay passed it over. She glanced at it, searching for Aldo’s name but didn’t find it.
“Are you looking for someone?” Jay asked.
She shook her head. “You can destroy that list, you know,” she said. “I’ve already memorized it.”
He looked at her with a half frown, then grinned, reminding her of the Jaybird she knew back in Cairo. “I’m counting on you.”
Soon they arrived at a railyard just behind the front line. They located the captain in charge, who invited them for lunch while bullets ricocheted around them. The air smelled of gunpowder and sweat. Jay pressed his hand into Olivia’s back, and they ducked into a dugout built into the side of the trench.
Jay unfurled a silk map and the three of them pored over it, the captain pointing to possible landing and dropping spots. Olivia noted everything on the map in her head. Then Jay gave the captain the list of people working in that area, and the captain verified those who were authentic partisans or Italian agents. Often, he said, when they occupied a town, half the population would pretend to be partisans, while they were actually fascist sympathizers, so everyone had to be verified. “Olivia can verify the Allied agents,” Jay said. “She’ll be in contact with them soon.”
While they spoke, Olivia marvelled at how calm Jay and the captain were pouring tea, and speaking in normal voices through the wild gunfire, while she flinched at every sound. She thought perhaps that one would get used to it, not hear it any more. Perhaps listening was the same as seeing, in that one saw what one expected to see rather than what was there. If one did not expect to hear gunfire, one wouldn’t. She tried to block out the noise, but each sound still made her start.
“Sit tight,” the captain said when lunch was over, “I’m going up over the trench to see how things are shaping up.”
Jay nodded. He touched Olivia’s arm, smiling to reassure her. “I’m going to look for my brother. Wait here and don’t venture out.”
Jay disappeared along the trench. Olivia stroked the buttons of her uniform from collar to hem and watched the captain climb a ladder to have a look. A bullet whizzed by his head. Olivia caught her breath. How easily one died here, how casually. The captain laughed and ducked into the dugout. “Well,” he said, “you can’t go back the way you came. Germans have taken over the route.”
She shrugged, her mission secret. “Aren’t you afraid staying here?”
The captain laughed again. “The Germans can’t be bothered to take prisoners,” he said. “We’d be nothing but a nuisance. They’ll either kill us or leave us here.” He shrugged. “You can only die once.”
“Hopefully, it won’t be today,” Olivia said.
When Jay returned, he was sombre. “My brother is a careless fool,” he said. “He’ll get himself killed unless he’s sent home.” He folded the silk map into tiny pieces and placed it in his breast pocket. Olivia hoped he wouldn’t have to swallow it as others had done when discovered.
