Jackdaws (20 page)

They went down a flight of stairs to
a basement. The place was dimly lit and smoky. Flick could see a five-piece
band on a low stage, a small dance floor, a scatter of tables, and a number of
booths around the dark perimeter of the room. She had wondered if it would be a
men-only club, the kind of place that catered to chaps like Mark who were
"not the marrying kind." Although the patrons were mostly male, there
was a good sprinkling of girls, some of them very glamorously dressed.

A waiter said, "Hello,
Markie," and put a hand on Mark's shoulder, but gave Flick a hostile
glare.

"Robbie, meet my sister,"
Mark said. "Her name's Felicity, but we've always called her Flick."

The waiter's attitude changed, and
he gave Flick a friendly smile. "Very nice to meet you." He showed
them to a table.

Flick guessed that Robbie had
suspected she might be a girlfriend, and had resented her for persuading Mark
to change sides, as it were. Then he had warmed to her when he learned she was
Mark's sister.

Mark smiled up at Robbie and said,
"How's Kit?"

"Oh, all right, I
suppose," Robbie said with the hint of a flounce.

"You've had a row, haven't
you?"

Mark was being charming. He was
almost flirting. This was a side of him Flick had never seen. In fact, she
thought, it might be the real Mark. The other persona, his discreet daytime
self, was probably the pretense.

"When have we not had a
row?" Robbie said.

"He doesn't appreciate
you," Mark said with exaggerated melancholy, touching Robbie's hand.

"You're right, bless you.
Something to drink?"

Flick ordered scotch and Mark asked
for a martini.

Flick did not know much about men
such as these. She had been introduced to Mark's friend, Steve, and had visited
the flat they shared, but had never met any of their friends. Although she was
madly curious about their world, it seemed prurient to ask questions.

She didn't even know what they
called themselves. All the words she knew were more or less unpleasant: queer,
homo, fairy, nancy-boy. "Mark," she said. "What do you call men
who, you know, prefer men?"

He grinned. "Musical, darling,"
he said, waving his hand in a feminine gesture.

I must remember that, Flick thought.
Now I can say to Mark, "Is he musical?" She had learned the first
word of their secret code.

A tall blonde in a red cocktail
dress came swishing onto the stage to a burst of applause. "This is
Greta," said Mark. "She's a telephone engineer by day."

Greta began to sing "Nobody
Knows You When You're Down and Out." She had a powerful, bluesy voice, but
Flick noticed immediately that she had a German accent. Shouting into Mark's
ear over the sound of the band, she said, "I thought you said she was
French."

"She speaks French," he
corrected. "But she's German."

Flick was bitterly disappointed.
This was no good. Greta would have just as much of a German accent when she
spoke French.

The audience loved Greta, clapping
each number enthusiastically, cheering and whistling when she accompanied the
music with bump-and-grind movements. But Flick could not relax and enjoy the
show. She was too worried. She still did not have her telephone engineer, and
she had wasted the latter half of the evening coming here on a wild-goose
chase.

But what was she going to do? She
wondered how long it would take her to pick up the rudiments of telephone
engineering herself. She had no difficulty with technical things. She had built
a radio at school. Anyway, she needed to know only enough to destroy the
equipment effectively. Could she do a two-day course, maybe with some people
from the General Post Office?

The trouble was, nobody could be
quite sure what kind of equipment the saboteurs would find when they entered
the château. It could be French or German or a mixture, possibly even including
imported American machinery—the U.S.A. was far ahead of France in phone technology.
There were many kinds of equipment, and the château served several different
functions. It had a manual exchange, an automatic exchange, a tandem exchange
for connecting other exchanges to one another, and an amplification station for
the all-important new trunk route to Germany. But only an experienced engineer
could be confident of recognizing whatever he saw when he walked in.

There were engineers in France, of
course, and she might find a woman—if she had time. It was not a promising
idea, but she thought it through. SOE could send a message to every Resistance
circuit. If there was a woman who could fit the bill, it would take her a day
or two to get to Reims, which was all right. But the plan was so uncertain. Was
there a woman telephone engineer in the French Resistance? If not, Flick would
waste two days to learn that the mission was doomed.

No, she needed something more sure.
She thought again about Greta. She could not pass for French. The Gestapo might
not notice her accent, since they spoke French the same way, but the French
police would. Did she have to pretend to be French? There were plenty of German
women in France: officers' wives, young women in the armed services, drivers
and typists and wireless operators. Flick began to feel excited again. Why not?
Greta could pose as an army secretary. No, that could cause problems—an officer
might start giving her orders. It would be safer for her to pose as a civilian.
She could be the young wife of an officer, living with her husband in Paris—no,
Vichy, it was farther away. There would have to be a story about why Greta was
traveling with a group of French women. Perhaps one of the team could pose as
her French maid.

What about when they entered the
château? Flick was pretty sure there were no German women working as cleaners
in France. How could Greta evade suspicion? Once again, Germans probably would
not notice her accent, but French people would. Could she avoid speaking to any
French people? Pretend she had laryngitis?

She might be able to get away with
it for a few minutes, Flick thought.

It was not exactly watertight, but
it was better than any other option.

Greta finished her act with a
hilariously suggestive blues song called "Kitchen Man," full of
double-entendres. The audience loved the line: "When I eat his doughnuts,
all I leave is the hole." She left the stage to gales of applause. Mark
got up, saying, "We can talk to her in her dressing room."

Flick followed him through a door
beside the stage, down a smelly concrete corridor, into a dingy area crammed
with cardboard boxes of beer and gin. It was like the cellar of a run-down pub.
They came to a door that had a pink paper cutout star fixed to it with thumb-
tacks. Mark knocked and opened it without waiting for a reply.

The tiny room had a dressing table,
a mirror surrounded by bright makeup lights, a stool, and a movie poster
showing Greta Garbo in Two-Faced Woman. An elaborate blonde wig rested on a
stand shaped like a head. The red dress Greta had worn on stage hung from a
hook on the wall. Sitting on the stool in front of the mirror, Flick saw, to
her utter astonishment, was a young man with a hairy chest.

She gasped.

It was Greta, no question. The face
was heavily made up, with vivid lipstick and false eyelashes, plucked eyebrows,
and a layer of makeup hiding the shadow of a dark beard. The hair was cut
brutally short, no doubt to accommodate the wig. The false bosom was presumably
fixed inside the dress, but Greta still wore a half-slip, stockings, and red
high-heeled shoes.

Flick rounded on Mark. "You
didn't tell me!" she accused.

He laughed delightedly. "Flick,
meet Gerhard," he said. "He loves it when people don't realize."

Flick saw that Gerhard was looking
pleased. Of course he would be happy that she had taken him for a real woman.
It was a tribute to his art. She did not need to worry that she had insulted
him.

But he was a man. And she needed a
woman telephone engineer.

Flick was painfully disappointed.
Greta would have been the last piece in the jigsaw, the woman who made the team
complete. Now the mission was in doubt again.

She was angry with Mark. "This
was so mean of you!" she said. "I thought you'd solved my problem,
but you were just playing a joke."

"It's not a joke," Mark
said indignantly. "If you need a woman, take Greta."

"I couldn't," Flick said.
It was a ridiculous idea.

Or was it? Greta had convinced her.
She could probably do the same to the Gestapo. If they arrested her and
stripped her they would learn the truth, but if they got to that stage it was
generally all over anyway.

She thought of the hierarchy at SOE,
and Simon Fortescue at MI6. "The top brass would never agree to it."

"Don't tell them," Mark
suggested.

"Not tell them!" Flick was
at first shocked, then intrigued by that idea. If Greta was to fool the
Gestapo, she ought also to be able to deceive everyone at SOE.

"Why not?" said Mark.

"Why not?" Flick repeated.

Gerhard said, "Mark, sweetie,
what is all this about?" His German accent was stronger in speech than in
song.

"I don't really know,"
Mark told him. "My sister is involved in something hush-hush."

"I'll explain," Flick
said. "But first, tell me about yourself. How did you come to London?"

"Well, sweetheart, where shall
I begin?" Gerhard lit a cigarette. "I'm from Hamburg. Twelve years
ago, when I was a boy of sixteen, and an apprentice telephone engineer, it was
a wonderful town, bars and nightclubs full of sailors making the most of their
shore leave. I had the best time. And when I was eighteen I met the love of my
life. His name was Manfred."

Tears came to Gerhard's eyes, and
Mark held his hand. Gerhard sniffed, in a very unladylike fashion, and carried
on. "I've always adored women's clothes, lacy underwear and high heels,
hats and handbags. I love the swish of a full skirt. But I did it so crudely in
those days. I really didn't even know how to put on eyeliner. Manfred taught me
everything. He wasn't a cross-dresser himself, you know." A fond look came
over Gerhard's face. "He was extremely masculine, in fact. He worked in
the docks, as a stevedore. But he loved me in drag, and he taught me how to do
it right."

"Why did you leave?"

"They took Manfred away. The
bloody fucking Nazis, sweetheart. We had five years together, but one night
they came for him, and I never saw him again. He's probably dead, I think
prison would kill him, but I don't know anything for sure." Tears
dissolved his mascara and ran down his powdered cheeks in black streaks.
"He could still be alive in one of their bloody flicking camps, you
know."

His grief was infectious, and Flick
found herself fighting back tears. What got into people that made them
persecute one another? she asked herself. What made the Nazis torment harmless
eccentrics like Gerhard?

"So I came to London,"
Gerhard said. "My father was English. He was a sailor from Liverpool who
got off his ship in Hamburg and fell in love with a pretty German girl and
married her. He died when I was two, so I never really knew him, but he gave me
my surname, which is O'Reilly, and I always had dual nationality. It still cost
me all my savings to get a passport, in 1939. As things turned out, I was just
in time. Happily, there's always work for a telephone engineer in any city. So
here I am, the toast of London, the deviant diva."

"It's a sad story," Flick
said. "I'm very sorry."

"Thank you, sweetheart. But the
world is full of sad stories these days, isn't it? Why are you interested in
mine?"

"I need a female telephone
engineer."

"What on earth for?"

"I can't tell you much. As Mark
said, it's hush-hush. One thing I can say is that the job is very dangerous.
You might get killed."

"How absolutely chilling! But
you can imagine that I'm not very good at rough stuff. They said I was
psychologically unsuited to service in the army, and quite bloody rightly. Half
the squaddies would have wanted to beat me up and the other half would have
been sneaking into bed with me at night."

"I've got all the tough
soldiers I need. What I want from you is your expertise."

"Would it mean a chance to hurt
those bloody flicking Nazis?"

"Absolutely. If we succeed, it
will do a very great deal of damage indeed to the Hitler regime."

"Then, sweetheart, I'm your
girl."

Flick smiled. My God, she thought;
I've done it.

CHAPTER

SEVENTEEN

IN THE MIDDLE of the night, the
roads of southern England were thronged with traffic. Great convoys of army
trucks rumbled along every highway, roaring through the darkened towns, heading
for the coast. Bemused villagers stood at their bedroom windows, staring in
incredulity at the endless stream of traffic that was stealing their sleep.

"My God," said Greta.
"There really is going to be an invasion."

She and Flick had left London
shortly after midnight in a borrowed car, a big white Lincoln Continental that
Flick loved to drive. Greta wore one of her less eye-popping outfits, a simple
black dress with a brunette wig. She would not be Gerhard again until the
mission was over.

Flick hoped Greta was as expert as
Mark had claimed. She worked for the General Post Office as an engineer, so
presumably she knew what she was talking about. But Flick had not been able to
test her. Now, as they crawled along behind a tank transporter, Flick explained
the mission, anxiously hoping the conversation would not reveal gaps in Greta's
knowledge. "The château contains a new automatic exchange put in by the
Germans to handle all the extra telephone and teleprinter traffic between
Berlin and the occupying forces."