The little Luftwaffe corporal with the nickel-framed, thick glasses, ripped open his flies and urinated somewhat short-sightedly into the wash basin containing three pairs of his socks.
‘Like Persil,’ he said, concentrating on the job in hand. ‘Piss, I mean.’ He finished and buttoned up the flies of his English battledress, complete with the blue patches of a POW sewn all over it. ‘Gives your washing that final touch.’
‘I’ll give you the final touch, you dirty little bastard,’ Otto said from his position on the wooden bunk, ‘I’ve got to wash my face in that basin, you know!’
‘Nothing wrong with piss,’ the corporal said easily, obviously not bothered by his new cell mate’s threat. ‘Makes your eyes sparkle.’
Otto sighed and gave up, slipping back into a thoughtful silence once more while across the Channel the great German coastal batteries thundered, giving Dover the benefit of the usual evening hatred.
He had been in England three days now. They had landed at Portsmouth where the funny little Englishman in the skirt had patted him kindly on the arm and, with the aid of the Count as interpreter, had comforted him with, ‘Don’t take it to heart, son. Bit o’ bad luck, that’s all, especially having to leave those good-looking bints behind as well. But cheer up, you’re seeing the world now.’ And he had swaggered off at the head of his black-faced ruffians. Two years later he would sail from that same port to meet his violent death at Dieppe, in that famously disastrous raid. But Otto would never learn of that.
Thereafter he and the Count had been taken in a heavily escorted convoy through the Southern English countryside, beautiful and green in the late September sunshine, with the Count giving an excited running commentary, until they had reached the grim case of an embattled Dover, where they had been separated into their own isolation cells.
There Otto had remained in solitary confinement for forty-eight hours, his only contact with the outside world an elderly soldier who thrust plates of cold food at him three times a day and a chipped mug of scalding hot tea, each time grunting only one word: ‘Grub!’
It was to be the first word of English he would learn.
Then suddenly this very morning, the elderly soldier, who he saw now wore battered carpet slippers, had beckoned him to another cell, in which he had found the little short-sighted corporal. The man’s habits weren’t exactly social, but at least he was someone to talk to. Maybe this chap had information he could piece together into some sort of incredibly daring and intelligent plan. That would be sure to impress the Count von der Weide. Hell, thought Otto, I bet he's loving every minute of his new-found career as Prisoner Of War.
The ancient walls shuddered for one last time as the evening hate ended, the plaster drifting down from the roof like sad grey flakes of snow. Otto, his ears ringing in the sudden silence, asked, ‘Now that's over, how did you get here, mate?’
The little corporal looked up from his socks. ‘Special invitation of King George.’ His accompanying wink was magnified in the thick lens. ‘Asked me over to Buckingham Palace to have a cup of tea and a cream cake with him and his missus. God shave the King!’ He stood to attention and raised his sock-clad hand to his forehead in mock salute.
Otto grinned. This little corporal's a bit of a card, he thought. ‘Come off it! How did you really get here?’
The corporal’s grin disappeared. ‘The usual Luftwaffe balls up,’ he said. ‘My squadron, the Eleventh Bomber stationed at Evreux, was scheduled for a raid on the East End of London. That’s where the docks are, I think. Anyway, I’m sitting in the wet canteen, enjoying a quiet beer with my pals, and the squadron sergeant-major comes charging in saying, “Where’s Schmidt?” – that’s me – “We need a relief radio operator. Heinz has gone and got himself the pox from some frog girl!”’
The corporal’s face showed just what a shock that must have been for him. ‘I said, “What me, Sergeant-Major? But I’ve not been certified fit for flight duties. Besides I’ve got glasses as well.”’ The corporal paused for a dramatic sniff. ‘Didn’t worry the big bastard one bit. He said, cheeky as well, “I hereby, certify you fit for flight duties – and stick those glasses in yer pocket. I don’t want the pilot to see you wearing them.”
‘I sez, “But I’m blind as a bat without them.”
‘“Don’t worry,” he sez, “I’ll lead you over to the aircraft.”’
In the prison cell, the corporal shook his head in mock wonder. ‘You wouldn’t think it possible, would you, eh? But that’s the way Fat Hermann –’ Otto knew that was Reich Marshall Goering, the head of the Luftwaffe ‘– is running the war. Somebody ought to tell the Führer about him.’
‘And what happened then?’
‘What do you think, mate?’ the corporal answered sourly. ‘Oberleutnant Schmitz, our arsehole of a pilot, couldn’t find London! Imagine that, couldn’t find London, a city with ten million inhabitants and covering hundreds of square kilometres, and it was bright as day – full moon!’
Otto laughed out loud, but quickly managed to add a sympathetic edge to the sound. ‘And then?’
‘We must have cruised up and down the length of the Thames looking for the damn place for hours. Then the engines started to spark and splutter and Schmitz sings out, “We’re running out of juice. Better get prepared to bail out, fellers.” Bail out! I nearly shat in my hat!’
The little corporal’s face grew pale in the light of the cell's electric lamp, bright now in the waning light. ‘Hell, I get dizzy standing on a step-ladder and I told him so over the intercom. But all the silly shit could say was, “Well it’s either that or a watery grave, Corporal, because we’ll be over the big drink in thirty seconds or so!” So what could I do?’
‘You jumped?’
‘Yeah, I jumped. And do you know what happened then?’
The corporal looked expectantly at Otto through his glasses. After a moment, Otto became a little uncomfortable. ‘No,’ he admitted.
‘The bloody engines picked up and here I am sailing down towards England and the Dornier’s off at full throttle heading for the officers’ mess and free frog champus. The Bavarian barnshitter had just forgotten to switch over to the reserve gas tanks. “Wir fahren gegen England,” my arse! If all our brave fly-boys are like Oberleutnant Schmitz, we’ll be invading England in the year 2000,’ he said with a sneer.
For a few moments Otto absorbed the indignant little corporal’s story, then he said, ‘What kind of place is this, anyway?’
‘Arsehole of the world, if you ask me. It’s an interrogation centre. Didn’t they tell you about these places in your unit?’ he looked at Otto curiously.
‘What unit?’
‘Come off it, mate, your battalion. Anyway, they try to pump you here, squeeze out some information, and they keep you here till you sing. Their trick is that Dover – we’re under some sort of fallen-down castle – is being bombarded by our own gunners off Calais. You see the irony of it, apart from the danger, your own people blow you to eternity.’
‘But what do they want to know?’ Otto asked. ‘How to run a travelling knocking shop?’
‘Your unit, the number of men in it, your weapons and the like. I’ve told them the lot, especially about that Bavarian banana-sucker Schmitz. Serves him right if they put a Tommy torpedo right up his elegant arse one of these days. Bail out!’ he sniffed again, indignantly. ‘That’s why I’m washing me socks. I’m off to a POW camp tomorrow morning.’
Otto’s handsome face wrinkled into a frown and there was a worried look in his deep blue eyes. ‘Unit, number of men, weapons?’ he echoed unhappily. ‘The only weapons we ever had were between the legs of –’
‘What?’ the little corporal exclaimed in astonishment.
‘Yes, exactly,’ Otto said miserably. ‘They'll never believe my story. I'll be here for all eternity.’
Corporal Rubinstein, still clad in his POW uniform, swung the seated officer a tremendous salute and nearly knocked himself over.
‘Permission to speak, sir?’ he barked, as if he were on the parade ground.
‘Yes, yes, of course,’ the Intelligence Corps captain said, holding his right hand to his ear with a pained look on his face. ‘I asked you a question didn't I? But please don’t shout so much, Corporal. After all, we’re not at the Guards Depot at Pirbright, you know.’
‘Sorry, sir!’ the little corporal barked.
‘Oh come off it, Rubinstein, don’t play bloody Grenadier Guardsmen with me. Permission to speak indeed!’ Captain Wanke-Smythe smiled. The ‘Wanke’ had been passed down by his mother's father, much to the mirth of the fellows at Oxford. They'd called him Smith the Wanker. ‘Well, Rubinstein, what did you find out about him?’
‘Not much, sir,’ Rubinstein replied, his professional pride hurt.
‘Well, have you found out something, man?’
‘I did, sir. But I think it’s a come-on.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You’ll hardly believe this, sir.’
‘Try me,’ Wanke-Smythe said cynically. ‘Since I joined the Intelligence Corps I have heard tellings that even a Jehovah Witness wouldn’t believe.’
‘Well, sir, he maintains that he was running a mobile brothel for the troops when our commandos grabbed him.’
‘A what?’
‘A knocking shop on wheels, sir. A travelling tart house. A perambulating prostitute parlour. A naked –’
‘Dammit, man, I get the idea!’ Wanke-Smythe’s dark eyes lit up. ‘You know, Rubbie, old boy, I think we’re on to something here. Yes, I do believe we’ve hit the jolly old jackpot.’
‘How do you mean, sir?’ Rubinstein said, infected by his officer’s sudden enthusiasm.
‘Last night I interrogated the other one who dresses up as a priest, and do you know what I found out?’
‘No, sir,’ Rubinstein breathed leaning forward in eager anticipation.
‘He once worked for Admiral Canaris.’
‘What, the mastermind of the Abwehr?’
Wanke-Smythe tapped the end of his long beaked nose significantly. ‘And my dear old Rubbie, he might well be working for Canaris still.’
‘But what he’s doing dressed as a priest and helping run a mobile brothel – if the other chap’s statement is true?’ Rubinstein protested. ‘Sounds more like he needs his marbles checking to me, sir.’
‘Don’t be too hasty in your judgements, Rubbie,’ the captain said calmly. ‘Cunning buggers these Boche, you should know. It’s probably all part of a plot, a very deep plot, believe you me.’ He sucked his yellow teeth and frowned hard so that the little corporal couldn’t help thinking he looked a little like Basil Rathbone doing his Sherlock Holmes act. ‘Try the blond Hun you’re inside with once again,’ he declared finally.
‘I told him I was being moved to a POW camp tomorrow, sir.’
‘Well, have a go at him tonight, while I work on the Father.’
Rubbie clasped his hands together, as if in prayer, and rolled his dark eyes piously towards the ceiling. ‘Let us pray, brethren,’ he intoned.
Smith the Wanker laughed. ‘Be off with you, you irreverent Jewish rogue!’
‘I don’t know about your officers, pal,’ the little corporal said as they sat facing each other in their wooden bunks, eating the evening meal of corned-beef sandwiches and cocoa. ‘But you wouldn’t believe the things that happened at Evreux when the gentlemen officers started hitting the sauce in the mess. Like kids they were.’
Otto sipped his sugarless cocoa morosely and said nothing. His cellmate had already packed his meagre kit in a brown paper parcel ready for his departure tomorrow; then he would be alone in the place again.
‘Our CO, for instance. He’d get as high as a howitzer every Saturday night – regular. By midnight he’d be stripping off his uniform, save his ceremonial sword and jackboots, staggering all over the field with his dingle-dangle covered by his cap, shouting that it was on account of personal modesty and he didn’t want to give the female auxiliaries stationed at Evreux a shock. They’d get screaming heebie-jeebies when they saw the size of it, he said.’ He shook his dark head in mock disgust.
Still Otto said nothing, his unhappiness forgotten a little now as he concentrated on where he had heard a similar intonation to that of the corporal before. Why, he didn’t exactly know. Outside the sirens started to give off their thin, frightening wail, indicating that soon Dover was in for another Stuka dive-bombing attack.
‘Then there was Phyllis the Padre.’
‘Phyllis is a funny name for a padre,’ Otto said, intrigued, breaking his silence for the first time.
The little corporal winked and said, ‘He was that kind of padre.’
‘Oh,’ Otto said and finished the last of his cocoa before the vibrations of detonating bombs upset the liquid.
‘One time he came back from the mess full of sauce, staggered into my billet, crying his head off and howling, “mea culpa”. I think it’s some kind of Latin war cry. Then he tried to get in my bunk with me, telling me he was going to explain all about the Immaculate Conception and it would be cosier under the blankets. And when I wouldn’t wear it, he went down on his knees, still crying and asking me to flog him “for the good of my soul!” I told him he could sod his soul, and that it was for the good of my arse. Next day he got me seven days jankers from the CO for disobeying a direct order! Ever afterwards when I met him, he’d sniff, “God and I will have nothing more to do with you, you ungrateful wretch.” Just like that, as if he had a god-damn direct line to Heaven!’
Otto laughed shortly. Now outside the British 3.7 anti-aircraft guns were beginning to thunder, but even they could not drown the roar of engines. ‘Here they come with their square eggs,’ he said.
The danger did not seem to worry the little corporal. ‘Oh, don’t worry about those Stuka shits,’ he said, carelessly. ‘They couldn’t hit a turd in a piss-pot.’
Otto shrugged. ‘If you say so – ’ the rest of his words were drowned by the sirens and howling air-brakes of a diving Stuka, hurtling out of the sky at 400 kilometres an hour. Otto could visualize the gull-winged dive-bomber flailing out of the night at an almost ninety-degree angle, as if the pilot would never be able to stop it plunging straight into the ground.
The first stick of bombs hit Dover. A series of thick, obscene crumps. The walls of their cell trembled. Plaster came raining down. A second stick sounded much closer. The third blew them both from their bunks onto the stone floor, the cell suddenly flooded with the hot acrid stink of burnt cordite. The lights flickered and went out abruptly.
‘Great buckets of fire!’ the little corporal gasped. ‘Fat Hermann’s boys might just go and croak us after all!’
And then Otto had it! On the floor, he clicked his fingers together with the excitement of his discovery, while outside the world rocked and trembled – like a ship at sea struck by a sudden hurricane – under the impact of the bombs, and hot blast came rushing into their cell to strike them across their faces like a blow from a damp, flabby fist.
‘Hey, you’re from the coast – the Baltic coast!’ he roared above the howl of the Stuka’s sirens and the thump-thump-thump of the flak.
‘What?’ his cellmate asked, getting back to his feet. Otto followed his lead.
'From the Baltic Coast?’ Otto yelled, his mouth close to the other man’s ear in the flickering pink and darkness.
‘Yes... Yes! But what – ’
‘Stralsund?’ Otto hazarded a wild guess.
‘Yes. Heaven, arse and cloudburst, yes, Stralsund! And if you’re so bloody well eager to know, Georg Fockstrasse, to be exact!’ He gasped. ‘What a time for old home-week!’
Otto knew now where he had heard accents like that before. From the Jews who lived all around old Mayer, the tailor, who was foolish enough to give credit to sailors. ‘You’re a Jew, aren’t you?’ he bellowed above the blast and thunder of another stick of bombs.
‘A what?’
‘You’re a god-damn Hebrew Jew!’ Otto roared.
In a sudden burst of purple flame, Otto caught a glimpse of the little corporal’s face, the usual good-humoured look had vanished, to be replaced by one of almost wolfish determination, the eyes bulging, the lips bared to reveal yellowish teeth. ‘Don’t try anything,’ he hissed over the patter of falling plaster. ‘You’re bigger and more powerful than me, you Nazi bastard! But I’ll make you pay, I’ll make – ’
As the cell swayed and heaved, the little corporal faced him, fists doubled, ready for action.
Very gently, Otto reached out a hand and patted him on the shoulder, saying as quietly as he could yet still make himself heard, ‘Don’t worry, Corp, I’m not going to hurt you. All I want is for you to do me a favour.’
‘A favour?’ the other man echoed, as the lights flickered back on and the roar of the Stuka engines began to die away, only to be replaced by the first thin wail of the all-clear.
‘Yes. Get me out of here,’ Otto said simply, as the other man dusted down his knees and sat back on his bunk. ‘I know nothing of military value. Honest, I am what I say I am – the owner of a mobile brothel.’
‘You want out of here – to where?’ the little corporal asked.
‘To a camp where I can be with my own people.’
‘Germans?’ Rubinstein spat out the word, as if it were dirty.
Otto nodded humbly and said a little sadly. ‘Yes, Germans. They are the only people I’ve got, friend.’
It might have been that Otto’s wish to be put with his fellow countrymen might not have been fulfilled so promptly, but for a priority telephone call that Captain Wanke-Smythe received later that night.
He was lying in his bunk in a corner of his office, working as usual through a bottle of NAAFI whisky in order to forget Dover, the Interrogation Centre, and the bombardment. He realised he hadn’t had a woman since the girl he'd picked up in Piccadilly Circus on his last forty-eight hours. He smiled, remembering that the blackout had been so effective he hadn’t been able to see her face. They had done it up against Eros, which had seemed suitably symbolic. It was into this epic reverie that the rattle of the phone injected itself wholeheartedly.
For a moment or two he stared at it drunkenly, the words of the current hit – ‘Dear little henny, when, when will you lay me an egg for my tea’ dying on his lips.
Then he fumbled for it, upsetting the pile of new leaflets from the Ministry of Information entitled, ‘What To Do If Invasion Should Come!’
‘Run like hell, I should think,’ he snarled drunkenly and picked up the receiver. ‘Are they landing?’ he said thickly.
‘Stand by, sir, for a top-priority message, sir,’ a metallically distorted prissy female voice said. ‘You are Captain Wanke-Smythe, aren’t you sir?’
‘No, Smith the Wanker,’ he snapped icily. ‘Of course, I’m him... er,’ vaguely he remembered that he had been educated at Oxford, ‘I mean he. Who wants me?’
‘One moment, sir, please,’ the prim, professional telephonist said.
There was a series of clicks, while he stared with blurred eyes at the leaflet, trying to make sense of a paragraph that commenced,
Now how do you know that this lone nun is an enemy parachutist? First you must remove the top part of the supposed nun’s habit. You will see immediately by the nature of the suspect’s anatomy if you have made an unfortunate error. However, if you have been correct in your assumptions, you will find the typical red marks made by a parachute harness –
‘Captain Wanke-Smythe?’ The voice metaphorically tapped him on his shoulder. It was upper-class, heavy with Eton, the Brigade of Guards, inherited money – and power. It was the voice of authority.
It sobered the Intelligence Corps captain up immediately. Symbolically, he swung the unknown speaker a tremendous salute which left his fingers quivering just below his hairline in the approved drill-sergeant’s fashion.
‘Sir!’ he barked.
‘Come here,’ the voice said. ‘I’ve read your report. Drop everything. Bring Graf von der Weide to my office in Broadway immediately. Lose the other chap. Thank you. Good-night, Captain.’
Abruptly the phone went dead, leaving an astounded Captain Wanke-Smythe staring at it, as if a little green man had just emerged from the thing and blown him a raspberry. He had just spoken to C!