Petty Magic Page 8

  Through the month of October he sends postcards to Helena’s house. On the first postcard he tells me Fawkes will be all right, but it may be several weeks before he’s well enough to fly home; Justin rises early to go picking at the flea markets and visits Fawkes at the hospital in the afternoons. On the postcards that follow he only scribbles a line or two, things like Hope you haven’t forgotten about me and I finally found that beer mat inside my copy of American Gods. HOW DID YOU DO THAT and how did you know I would bring THAT book to Budapest?! and he doesn’t sign them. Some of the postcards are from the Hungarian National Gallery. The last one has a naked girl lying in a field under a blue sky with scudding clouds, head tilted to watch a bird wheeling overhead, and on the back all it says is This painting reminded me of you.

  No postcards at all the month of November. Fine, then; I’ll just have to forget about him. Wouldn’t be so besotted but for the resemblance, anyhow. I resolve to make pretty and go out again just as I used to; I shed the skin, don the heels, smile the smile, and graciously accept the drink when it is offered.

  Then a curious thing happens: I come straight home again. Seems I’ve lost the taste for it.

  So most afternoons I go out troublemaking with Morven and Elsie, come home and watch a game show or read a bit of Proust, and turn out the light well before nine o’clock. Then your “randy Miss Evelyn” has a nice long fiddle with her bits.

  Despite my resolution, I go over every part of that night: how he smelled of Old Spice and tasted of ripe mint, his smooth hands and eager tongue, and how the chaise lounge was still faintly redolent of cigar smoke.

  And when I think of that creepy wax mannequin in the next room I recall another tidbit from the lore of John Dillinger, which is that J. Edgar Hoover kept the bank robber’s pokey in a jar and that it’s still stashed away somewhere in a labyrinth of offices in downtown Washington, D.C.

  If this rumor is true, then it seems we have infiltrated the FBI.

  The Melancholy Knight

  12.

  Early 1939–Summer 1942

  NEVERINO WARNED me against returning to Berlin, but I couldn’t stomach the prospect of a secretarial job at the German embassy, sifting through crumpled sheets of carbon in the rubbish bins like a common snoop. So after a respite in Blackabbey, I resumed my palm-reading practice in a new neighborhood, using various glamours to escape the attention of the plain-clothes police.

  All through my time in Berlin, Morven and I had kept in touch through silver lockets we wore with one another’s pictures inside—rather like mobile phones without the monthly bill. We didn’t see much of each other once the war broke out. That’s the primary drawback of the loo flue: it isn’t safe when your destination is in a war zone. You can’t land when the porcelain’s just been blown to smithereens. It’s even more dangerous to attempt travel between two war zones: if both toilets get bombed, you’re a goner. Sounds like a slim chance, but it’s not slim enough to risk it.

  So even if I’d had time to flue home, I’d have to get back the ordinary way (by sea, probably, and the voyage would take forever and a day)—and how would I explain how I’d gotten to America in the first place? Living in London, Morven was able to flue home for coventions, but she was obliged to return by way of a WC in some sleepy little shire, then go the rest of the route by train.

  I visited her in London once, toward the end of the Blitz, and I had to do the same thing. I wasn’t used to traveling by ordinary means, and it always put me in a sour mood—howling babies and prams blocking the aisles, the jostling and the inane conversations and the stink of unwashed bodies. I so wanted to flee to the toilet at the end of the car—but when you use the flue on a moving train, there’s no telling where you’ll end up.

  Morven met me at the station. She suggested we go for a cocktail at the Monkey’s Uncle, a cozy little watering hole we’d been to a couple of times during our stopover in London after the last war.

  “Still standing?” I asked.

  “Was, as of yesterday.”

  The Blitz brought down dozens of buildings every day, meaning that the warrens of London were expanding at an unprecedented rate.

  THE MONKEY’S UNCLE was much as I remembered it, though the shelves behind the bar weren’t so abundant as they’d once been, and there were freshly printed posters on the walls reminding us all that TITTLE TATTLE LOST THE BATTLE. The clientele had shifted, too—locals were mixing with military service personnel, and posh diplomats rubbed elbows with factory workers. War is the great equalizer in this respect, at least. I had a special fondness for this place, associating its dim snugs and Cockney chatter with relief and impending homecoming.

  The sirens sounded midway through my third whisky ginger. The proprietor came out from behind the bar and instructed us to make for the shelter downstairs as he locked the front door and pulled the blinds. Most of his customers, primed by routine, were already polishing off their drinks in one go before making their way to the basement door.

  “How do you generally handle this?” I asked my sister, just as the proprietor hurried past our snug without so much as a glance.

  “That, first,” she said with a small smile. “Then I unlock the door and see if anybody out on the street needs help.”

  It wasn’t as straightforward as she made it sound. No sooner were we back out on the street than a bomb fell three blocks up, and as we ran forward a couple of wardens in gas masks forcibly shooed us away again. The façade of a whole row of houses had been torn off by the blast, leaving all the davenports and floral-papered walls exposed like a life-sized dollhouse. Dust was rising off the rubble that spilled out into the roadway. There wasn’t a sign of life anywhere.

  While the wardens were busy picking through the ruins, we turned ourselves into ferrets and plunged into the mess. I followed Morven deeper and deeper, until we came upon a wrought-iron grate over a basement window. We peered in, and with our beady eyes we could see two young mothers huddled in the far corner of the basement with five children between them, clearly too terrified even to cry.

  “Don’t worry,” Morven said, loud and clear, with that strange aplomb unique to Blitz-time Londoners. The mothers couldn’t see her, but they responded to the sound of her voice with visible relief. “We’ll get you out of here.” I started at the shrill sound of a telephone ringing somewhere in what was left of the building.

  Back on the street, we knew where to dig, and this time we paid no attention to the air-raid wardens.

  “Remind me why we didn’t just go to a bar in Little London?”

  “The pubs are better here,” Morven replied as she tossed a chunk of concrete. “At least for the time being.”

  ONE NIGHT in the spring of 1942, my last caller turned out to be Neverino. He checked behind all the radiators before he uttered a word. “Please correct me if I am being presumptuous,” he said, “but I wonder if the White Witch isn’t bored out of her gourd, doing this as long as she has?” I was, truth be told, and furthermore I was beginning to fear my disguises weren’t really fooling anyone. He told me he had a new job for me, a real opportunity, the work I was made for.

  “You must go back to London—tonight, if you can—and tomorrow afternoon go to this address.” He handed me a card. Once I’d read it I held it to a candle, then tossed the flaming bit of paper into the grate, and Neverino nodded in approval. He instructed me to present myself as “Alice” and tell whomever answered the door that I was there to see “Mr. Robbins.” He left that night without telling me whom I was really meeting or what this was all about.

  The address on the card turned out to be Orchard Court, where the Special Operations Executive kept apartments for interviews. When Jonah—“Mr. Robbins”—opened the door, my first thought was that his face reminded me of an effigy, a medieval knight. His features had a finely chiseled quality, though there was nothing cold in his looks or manner. He was tall and dark, clean-cut though a bit rumpled round the edges. The man clearly hadn’t been to the barb
er in a while—his hair was tousled like a small boy’s—and he hadn’t shaved in at least two days either. Still, you could tell at a glance that he inspired confidence—but more important, that his capable air was born out of acumen rather than arrogance. He walked with a pronounced limp, but if the injury pained him much he gave no other indication of it.

  He didn’t tell me his real name then, of course, nor did I give him mine. He ushered me into the apartment and a sturdy young woman, his assistant, served me instant coffee using a proper tea service, an incongruity that made me grin. Robbins caught my eye and smiled with me at the joke, offered me a cigarette, and then proceeded to conduct the most banal and utterly aimless conversation I’ve ever had.

  He asked about my family, my upbringing, my educational background, but there was no mistaking this for an ordinary interview: he would switch from German to French and back again, and I would answer in the same language. I eyed him appraisingly as he spoke; he had to be in his late thirties. No wedding ring, but I had an inkling he was married. I was eighty-one years old by this time, but I had documentation stating my age as thirty-eight, and my natural appearance was younger still. I could do this.

  “I’ve heard a great deal about your activities in Berlin,” he said at last. “We would be very much obliged if you would agree to work for us.”

  “Pardon me, but if I’m not mistaken, I’ve already been working for you lot for quite some time.” I affected distance, taking slow pulls on my cigarette as he told me there would be at least three phases of training before I received my first assignment. Phase one commenced tomorrow.

  I came out of that meeting feeling giddy as a tadpole, though I did my best not to show it.

  THANKS TO the glowing references of Neverino and others in the Centaur network, I was able to bypass the SOE preliminary school, where they conducted introductory weapons training while weeding out the recruits who couldn’t pass muster. It would have been rather silly to test me so, seeing as I had already proven myself a reliable subagent in Berlin.

  I eventually found out that Robbins was something of a hero. Assigned to a resistance circuit outside Lyons in the fall of 1941, he had been betrayed, arrested, and tortured at Avenue Foch, and later imprisoned at Fresnes. After a month in solitary confinement there, he was put aboard a train—a cattle car, more like—bound for one of the German death camps. He had managed to escape from that train in the chaos of an air raid, and despite a shattered kneecap he’d made his way across France mostly on foot (though he had once been rolled up in an oriental carpet and stuck in the boot of an old roadster).

  He had finally returned to England in a fishing boat in March of 1942, and among his SOE colleagues he was rightfully regarded as a miracle man. Robbins was the obvious person to instruct us in the art of keeping alive by the seat of one’s pants, and so he accompanied us to Mallaig in the Scottish highlands, where SOE had a paramilitary school.

  The men training at Mallaig were all adventurers and opportunists whose brains would otherwise have been squandered in the military, and the women were generally educated abroad and spoke at least four languages apiece. Something else you would have noticed is this: although they were seldom beautiful in the conventional sense (cleft chins, mousy hair, frog eyes), they each possessed that je ne sais quoi that prevented any man from ever refusing them anything. If one of these girls asked a man for a fag and he was down to his last he’d hand it to her without hesitation, even with the knowledge that his ration was up for the week. Their brains were essential, of course, but their charisma was even more valuable. Charm is not a virtue—I’d learned that the hard way long ago—but for once I could put my own to work for a worthy cause.

  To call the first day of training “grueling” would be a hideous understatement. I pretended not to notice the resentful glances of the other women recruits, who saw that I was not scratched, bruised, and breathless after a daylong slog through the mountains like they were. I often caught Major Robbins looking at me too—in open admiration. No nettles in my hair, no dirt or blood on my elbows.

  Over the following days we were shown how to dump sugar in the Nazi gas tanks and how to deploy an exploding candlestick without losing a hand. We scaled walls and fences and had target practice for hours on end. Much of what we were learning was already familiar to me, stealth tactics and suchlike, but even the boys grimaced at the prospect of using wire garrotes and street-fighting like a pack of rogue Chinamen. We were also presented with a prototype of the infamous truth drug and taught the various means of administering it. I didn’t think I’d be needing any of that, but the knowledge still proved useful in the end.

  I sailed through those three weeks. After all, my instincts were sharper and my aim surer than any ordinary recruit’s. The other women agents began to grumble to our instructors that I was getting special treatment, which was perhaps to be expected—for success, quoth Mr. Bierce, is the one unpardonable sin against one’s fellows. Our instructors merely answered that they would do well to follow my example—if they could.

  They told us stories that were meant to keep us vigilant, if only to avoid providing them with yet another horror story to tell future recruits: the man who ordered a café noir when café noir was all they served, what with milk being rationed; the unfortunate agent who hid in a madhouse in Kraków, only to find that all the inmates were scheduled for euthanasia.

  Other anecdotes were meant to inspire us: the American agent with a wooden leg who had already parachuted into Lyons and had quickly proved herself one of the SOE’s greatest assets, or the ultimate determination of the Jewish agent who got plastic surgery to make his features appear more Aryan. And of course there was Major Robbins, whose bravery and razor wit had proved his salvation.

  Robbins gave lectures nearly every day, and he often assisted the unarmed combat instructors. He was very fond of saying, “Don’t think so bloody much!” whenever a recruit was slow to respond. It was the classroom time with him I relished most, though; with each new day I learned more about the circumstances of his capture and escape. “There was a second,” he said. “One second, that’s all I had, to leap out the open door and disappear into the forest along the track. I am only here speaking to you now because I did not hesitate.”

  He was informal and quick to laugh, but he never made light of the task before us and the consequences of failure. “Boys and girls, there is a reason our species has thrived, has dominated all other creatures on God’s green earth since the dawn of time. Why? Because the human survival instinct is second to none, that’s why.

  “Our language, our civilization—these are just the trappings. It is our instinct that preserved our distant ancestors from the beasts on the African plains, and you must trust that instinct above all else. If you recall only one thing from all your weeks of training, let it be this.” He paused, gazing around the room at each of his pupils in turn. “If you hesitate,” he said, “all will be lost.” The excitement and admiration he inspired was very nearly palpable; they were fine words, all the more so because he had lived them.

  Then someone had to go and ask what would happen if you shot a comrade by mistake. “Anybody who kicks down the door is, in all likelihood, no friend of yours,” Robbins replied, and the group erupted in laughter. “Again,” he went on above the snickering, “it is a matter of intuition, a matter of instinct.

  “You must divorce yourself from all sentiment,” he said. “There can be no tender thoughts of your mother—no thoughts at all, if you can help it. You cannot save the life of a child at the price of your associates’.”

  Then he told us that there was no shame in confessing ourselves unsuited to the task, and that if so our job prospects for other branches of government or military service would be unaffected. At times you could see a doubt flicker across their faces, but the majority of my classmates were to decide it was much too late to turn back now. You could only pretend to be the man or woman you wanted to become, and hope and pray you would ev
entually grow into it. So everyone prayed—everyone but me.

  OTHER WOMEN at Mallaig were much friendlier, but they weren’t the ones in training to be parachuted into France. All the cooks and housekeeping staff had given themselves aliases—Mrs. Wrench, Mrs. Pitch, Mrs. Axel, Mrs. Sledge—and they attended to our needs with jollity and a brisk sort of affection. They considered themselves den mothers as much as maintenance staff, though the head cook, Mrs. Dowel, ran a very tight operation. After all, no self-respecting beldame lets her cauldron—full of soup, which is fully edible, mind you, no bat wings or eyeballs in the mix—run dry.

  Of course, I knew what they were from the get-go; if a beldame ever wants to see if there are kindred nearby, she needs only to look at the crescent moon on the base of her thumbnail. The moon will glow if there are other beldames about, as I found when I shut myself in the WC upon my arrival.

  At our first supper I lifted my teacup to find a strange symbol scrawled in black ink on the napkin:

  One of the other recruits had already noticed and was craning her neck to make sense of it, her brow knotted. “What is that?”

  “Haven’t the faintest,” I replied coolly as I took a sip. She would tell the others, of course—but let them talk.

  Mrs. Dowel was making the rounds, stopping by each table in the canteen to ask if everyone had enjoyed their meal, and on the far side of the room I heard Robbins declare her hearty lamb stew had gone to a better place. When she paused at our table to lap up the compliments, I gave her a look that said I accepted her invitation to meet her and the others that same night. They don’t call it the witching hour for nothing.