Jackdaws

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.

THE FOURTH DAY Wednesday, May 31, 1944

CHAPTER 17

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.”

At first Greta was skeptical about the plan. “But, sweetheart, even if we succeed, what’s to stop the Germans just rerouting calls around the network?”

“Volume of traffic. The system is overloaded. The army command center called 'Zeppelin’ outside Berlin handles one hundred twenty thousand long-distance calls and twenty thousand telex messages a day. There will be more when we invade France. But much of the French system still consists of manual exchanges. Now imagine that the main automatic exchange is out of service and all those calls have to be made the old-fashioned way, by hello girls, taking ten times as long. Ninety percent of them will never get through.”

“The military could prohibit civilian calls.”

“That won’t make much difference. Civilian traffic is only a tiny fraction anyway.”

“All right.” Greta was thoughtful. “Well, we could destroy the common equipment racks.”

“What do they do?”