The Bell and the Blade, page 46
“Yes,” Charlie said. “Devastation for everybody. At least we still had each other, but Mina’s whole family was destroyed. She was originally from Charleroi. Only her parents managed to escape, but that’s because they left the country in 1938, before it all started. But the Germans took everyone—her grandparents, her sister, Esther, her brother-in-law, and Esther’s two children, Benny . . . and Zeus.”
There was a silence.
Fletcher blinked.
“Zeus?”
Charlie gave the smallest nod.
Fletcher sat up against the headboard, trying to catch his breath. “Jesus, Charlie. But how did he . . .?”
“The family separated to survive. The father hid with the older boy. Esther took Zeus. They lived in somebody’s cellar for months. He was eight when they found them. He escaped. I spent nearly a year and a half searching for him. Found him in a Carmelite monastery near Charleroi.”
“How did you know he might still be alive?”
“We knew the mother boarded the train alone, so we kept searching.”
“What about the father and the other boy?”
Charlie shook her head.
For a long time, Fletcher said nothing.
Only her ragged breathing and his light shh, shh broke the silence.
“I remember the date of Train Number Ten quite vividly,” Charlie said, “because it was my birthday, you see. September 15, 1942. I turned twenty-three. The last time we celebrated my birthday was the year before, in 1941. I’ve been like a dragonfly in amber, Fletcher. My real life ended when I was twenty-two. And the new one hasn’t yet begun.”
He pulled up behind her and spooned her. “Charlie . . .” he whispered into the back of her hair.
“Do you have to ask? The Belgian SS officer who put my brother on Transport Number Ten and sent him to Auschwitz was Kurt Vogel.”
68
CHECKMATE
PAOLO FONTAINE.
Charlotte Fontaine.
Fitz Fontaine.
Alder.
His wife Gretchen.
Fragments of these names littered Vogel’s handwritten notes, going all the way back to September, 1942.
And one of these Fontaines had been at Bonaventure Market, selling yellow flowers to Robert Capelle.
It probably wasn’t Paolo—according to Vogel’s entries, he’d been deported to Auschwitz, for reasons unclear.
Floristry was women’s work. A man would have drawn too much attention in an open-air market. That’s why Alder stayed in the fields, while his women drove the trucks and sold the flowers.
Either the mother or the daughter was communicating with Capelle and listing Dossin Floral as the name of their business.
It was the realest fake name Rheinhardt had ever seen.
When he returned to Lillehaven early the next morning and found the farm abandoned, and the trucks and the people gone, he knew he was this close to finding his barrels.
He didn’t go back to Antwerp. Gripped by terrible purpose, he told Hubner to drive with all deliberate speed to Robert Capelle’s house in Jette. Not to interrogate Capelle again—Rheinhardt knew he’d get nothing from that scoundrel. But the Gestapo who guarded him could—and would—be broken.
Upon arrival, he went straight to the captain in charge of the sentry detail and asked to speak to every officer who’d been with Capelle three Saturdays ago at the market in Jette.
It took time to check the logs and round up the ten men.
While he waited, Rheinhardt reviewed the pieces again—and began to put them together.
Someone working with Ngomo Kasonga—who was working with Robert Capelle—stole the uranium off the ship and used Vervaet’s trucks to drive it out of Antwerp. But they had nowhere to hide it—not yet. Rheinhardt knew this because Vervaet told him that the trucks had stayed locked in his yard all day Saturday—the day either Charlotte or Gretchen went to see Robert Capelle. Whatever the woman got from Capelle, it was enough. The trucks left again early Sunday morning—before Vervaet was awake. They were gone all day, and were returned that night—by the same man and young woman who’d taken them in the first place.
Charlotte Fontaine.
They paid Vervaet in gold and diamonds.
The gold coin was a British sovereign.
Rheinhardt wanted to tear the walls down.
Who were these people?
Capelle himself had been very clear: after the invasion of Normandy, he was never left alone for a second. He was always surrounded by a police contingent.
Which meant Charlotte Fontaine knew this and knew enough to lure Capelle to her table with yellow flowers—like yellowcake, like the narcissus on the La Fortuna flag—and in the span of a five-minute sale, extract from him where to hide the uranium.
How did she do it?
Rheinhardt was going to come at the King a different way, he decided.
He would corner him with his lowliest pawns.
Once he isolated the ten men who had gone to the market with Capelle that Saturday, he sat them down and asked each of them to recount every syllable Capelle had said to the young woman who sold him the yellow flowers.
The officers—in true pawn fashion—remembered nothing.
No amount of prodding could get them to recall what they either didn’t hear or couldn’t recall.
Rheinhardt stared at them—ten men in black uniforms, blank-faced, slack-shouldered, eyes flicking between each other like schoolboys at the front line. They were useless. Dolts. They were the reason operations failed. Men—incurious, oblivious, unworthy of the ranks they wore.
“I’m asking for a word,” Rheinhardt said. “One word.”
They shifted in their upholstered chairs. One of them scratched the back of his head. Another dared reach for a cup of tea, as if this were a briefing and not a tribunal.
Rheinhardt turned to Hubner. “If one more man touches anything on that table, shoot him.”
Silence dropped like a guillotine.
Now they sat frozen, brains paralyzed. Not one of them could utter a single meaningful syllable.
“What I need,” Rheinhardt said, “is a noun. A name. It doesn’t have to be unusual. It can be the most ordinary thing—a market, a street in Brussels, a person, a warehouse, a cave, a farm. Any proper noun spoken that day by the man you were assigned to guard in order to ensure he would not do precisely what he did—under your noses—while you stood around twiddling your thumbs and counting butterflies.”
They gave him details about the flowers. The price. The length of the girl’s hair. How long they had loitered at the stall. How carefully she wrapped each bundle. One man described how hard they were to carry. One remembered the types: coreopsis and black-eyed Susans.
Rheinhardt slammed his hand against the table.
“God in heaven—you remember petals but not places? Are you even men?”
A long silence.
Finally, one of them spoke.
“Abbey,” he said.
“What?”
“It was a throwaway line,” the guard said. “Capelle mentioned some abbey he used to visit as a child with his mother. Honestly, the way that man prattles on about nonsense, I paid him absolutely no mind.”
“What was the name of the abbey?”
The officer chuckled. “I don’t remember that.”
“Do not delude yourself, Captain,” Rheinhardt said. “This is not a conversation. It is an interrogation. Now—what was the name of the abbey?”
“Sir . . .”
“Where was it?”
“I have no idea. I do not know. I don’t remember.”
Rheinhardt stepped away from the table and exchanged a mute glance with Hubner.
One of the men, younger than the rest, twitched. When he spoke, his voice was tight. “Mein Herr . . . respectfully. The man who knows the name of the abbey lives in this very house. He’s probably having his morning tea. If you need the name, surely, Capelle remembers?”
The silence that followed was Arctic.
Rheinhardt tilted his head slightly, weighing whether to dignify the suggestion with a response. Above all else, he could not allow the illusion of power to slip—not for a second. “And yet I’m not asking him, am I?” he said with clinical finality. “I’m asking you.”
He placed his gloved palms on the table.
“Let me make perfectly clear what’s at stake,” Rheinhardt said. “If I walk out of this house without the name of that abbey, all ten of you will be sent to Breendonk and put in cells with the same Belgian men you’ve spent the last four years terrorizing. You’ll be charged with deliberate obstruction of a war operation. I will sign the papers myself.”
There was a collective stiffening.
“But,” Rheinhardt said, lifting a gloved finger, “whoever remembers even part of a name—a syllable, even—will be documented as having materially advanced the Reich’s most important classified mission. That means commendation, reassignment, and exemption from transfer.” He let the silence drag.
From the hallway behind him, a doorway creaked.
Rheinhardt turned his head.
There, at the far end of the corridor, stood Robert Capelle, hands folded behind his back. The old fox had been listening the entire time. He did not speak. He did not blink. He simply held Rheinhardt’s cold gaze with his own.
Then he turned sharply and walked away. His confident footsteps echoed down the hall.
Rheinhardt exhaled slowly and turned back to his audience. “Now,” he said, “let’s begin again. What was the name of the abbey?”
69
EASY RED
“WHEN I HIT THE BEACH,” Fletcher said to Charlie, “Lucas was already dead. I didn’t move—I’d passed out. I was drowning in six inches of water. But as I lay there, I slowly came to and started to breathe again. Horrendous fire all around me, just the most brutal assault from the hill. The bluffs were so close. In our recon photos, they looked farther away, but we were right in front of the firing line. It was low tide, yet all we had was a few yards of sand. Then the dunes. And their fucking machine guns trained on us. We were in the open, with them above us in the hills. When I saw how close they were, I thought, How are we getting off this beach?
“And as I lay there pretending to be dead, I realized that we were never getting off that beach. I watched other soldiers creep in the wet sand to get behind Rommel’s Atlantic Wall—a wall of steel obstacles, built to keep our landing craft, ships, and tanks off the beaches. All the way to Belgium, even. They were called hedgehogs. Large X-shaped barriers. I watched my guys creep to them, trying to hide, to get just a little cover from the fire, because without them, there was absolutely nowhere to fucking hide. But here’s what happened: as soon as our men moved behind the hedgehogs, the Germans picked them off, one by one! Our men thought they could hide, but the Germans—as soon as they saw two men together—focused all their fire on them until they both lay dead.
“We were getting annihilated,” Fletcher said. “There’s no other way to put it. All the men in our boat were killed. “Nineteen of us.”
“You weren’t killed,” said Charlie.
“No,” Fletcher said. “Not me.” He paused. “I could see the Germans on the shingle wall, formed naturally by the tides, and I saw the men I served with lying in the sand, not moving, and I was only spared because I played dead, bobbing beside the body of my best friend, the guy who depended on me to cover him, and I said, How the fuck am I going to get off this fucking beach?”
“But you did,” said Charlie.
“I felt so hopeless, like there was no way out. Like I wasn’t going to make it.”
“But you did. You did make it.”
“Because of Rafael.” Fletcher nodded. “He and his commando squad came at the Germans from the flank and pulverized them. They’d landed east of us, on Dog Green, and he and a few of his guys managed to survive and make it up the bluffs. Rafael fought them hand to hand, shot them, knifed them.” Fletcher almost smiled. “His knife-throwing skills really came in handy. He lost a few more of his guys. But they bested the bastards. He distracted them just long enough for me to hoist Lucas out of the water and run with him to the dunes. I laid him down in a dry patch of grass and covered his face with his helmet. Then I took his rifle and pistol and knife, and his canteen, and I ran up the hill.”
“Fletcher,” Charlie whispered, “are you telling me this now to show me that there’s always a way out?”
“Yes,” he said bluntly. “I didn’t want to remember it—that it was Rafael coming to my rescue.”
“Oh, that part I don’t need explained.”
“But seeing him on top of that hill? It was the best sight of my life. Because it meant, for however many minutes, I still had a little life left to live.”
She got up, walked to the far end of the dark room, stayed there for a while, quietly, then came back to bed.
“Rafael told us that story a different way,” Charlie said, pressing her face into his chest—into his heart—kissing his jaw, his neck, his shoulder, then tucking herself under his arm. “He told Louise and me—and the other girls. By the fire.”
“Where was I?”
“Doing your Fletcher things.”
“What did he say?”
“He told us about the part you forgot,” said Charlie. “That after you carried Lucas’s body to the dunes, you returned to the water. You ran back across the beach to pull your men out. Yes, most of them were dead. But Rafael said there were three or four wounded, and you saved them. It was a wide beach, he said. It was a long run, but you made it, carrying them on your back one by one, or dragging them along the sand. He could see the tracers whizzing by you. The Germans shot the heel off your shoe. They hit your canteen. Shot through your pack. But they never touched you. You call Easy Red your doom. But Rafael said it was your salvation.”
70
THE UNHAPPY FEW
THE DAY AFTER THEY’D picked up the munitions at Schriek, Fletcher returned to the arms dump and sent a quick, desperate message to Jonathan Reed, asking for more men.
JONQUILLE MORTE STOP OUTNUMBERED STOP OUTGUNNED STOP ATTACK IMMINENT STOP REQUEST REINFORCEMENT ASAP STOP COORDINATES FOLLOW STOP
Days passed without an answer.
While his men prepared the woods around the abbey for a possible assault, Fletcher, with Hawk on cover, walked the five kilometers back to Schriek each day to set up the radio during the three o’clock communication window. Hoping. Waiting.
For four days, there was nothing.
But on the fifth day, what came was worse.
When Fletcher returned to Kasteel de Velde, his face was gray. “No one’s coming,” he said. He couldn’t bring himself to relay the full brutality of Reed’s reply.
TRIED BUT IMPOSSIBLE STOP AIRSPACE TOO HOT STOP PRIORITIZE FIRST OBJECTIVE STOP SECOND OBJECTIVE STANDS STOP FIELD DISCRETION STOP GODSPEED STOP
Fletcher couldn’t raise his eyes to Ngomo.
Ngomo nodded slowly, as if he didn’t have to be told.
“I thought we were supposed to get Ngomo to safety,” said Wolski. “How can that still stand if we’re stranded?”
Ngomo was the one who answered. “That’s not quite it, Wolski,” he said gently. “The second objective is Ngomo must never be captured by the Nazis. Isn’t that right, Lieutenant?”
Fletcher didn’t speak or nod. He just stared at the ground.
And after a long exhale, so did everyone else.
“Commander,” Ngomo said quietly, “let me fight by your side. You don’t have enough men. You’ll need my help. And in return, I give you my word, on my sacred honor, if all is lost, I will not be taken alive.”
Fletcher’s throat clenched. He still couldn’t look at him, not even when he nodded. Especially not then.
There was silence.
“Well. Merde,” said Rafael.
“We’re really on our own?” said Briggs.
“Just us,” said Fletcher. “The unhappy few.”
“So not only is nobody coming,” Rafael said, “no one will even know we were here.”
“Funny,” Briggs said. “We spent all this time trying not to fucking die, just to run headlong into it.”
“We’re not running into it,” said Wolski.
“I am,” said Rafael. “Let’s fucking go.”
Louise burst into tears.
Louise heard Hawk playing the piano downstairs, each melody more wrenching than the last. The music was tearing her heart apart. Now Hawk was playing Schubert, the melancholy “Ständchen.”
“Loosha, why are you crying?” Rafael said soothingly. “Don’t cry, mon amour.”
“You know why,” she said into the pillow.
In the middle of the night, naked both in body and soul, they were soaked like glad rags in empty bottles, setting themselves on fire again and again. Louise was weeping; she couldn’t help it.
“What are we going to do?” she whispered.
“This again,” he said. “But give me five minutes.”
“After this.”
“There’s only this.”
“And then?”
“There is no then.”
“Rafa, but I want there to be a then. I want there to be an us.”
“There will always be an us.”
“I mean forever.”
“There will be an us forever,” Rafael said.
Louise didn’t bother to wipe her face. Her breasts trembled with every moan, and his hand moved between them. “Charlie was right.”
“Charlie is never right about anything,” Rafael said.
“Better for me never to have known you. Never to have felt this.”
“You’d rather have nothing than have this?” He caressed her nipples, the hollow of her belly, the white of her thighs.
“Yes,” she said, even as her body was curving to him. “So I’d have nothing to lose.”
“Don’t say that,” he said, pulling away from her. “Even in jest.” He sat up, stopped touching her.
