sincerely appreciate your co-operation. May I call you Percy? I'd like to.'
He was a gentleman, Percy Capel knew. Hadn't met many, but there'd been enough for him to know one. He would have said that a judge at the Old Bailey was a gentleman, sent him down for five years when it could have been ten with hard labour, and there had been a whisper of a smile on his face as he'd heard the testimony of how Percy had done the entry bit. And, of course, the best gentleman had been Major Anstruther.
This one, no doubt about it, was a proper gentleman.
'What we've realized, Percy, is that our records on Albania are quite pathetically thin. Files of stuff about Yugoslavia and Greece, but some very good things were done in Albania and we don't have an adequate picture of them. Time goes on, and if we don't shift ourselves the eyewitnesses, the participants, will be beyond reach. We want to talk to you about Albania and your work alongside the group led by Mehmet Rahman. Would you be up for that, Percy?'
He nodded, muttered that he'd be happy to, then saw the smile of appreciation on the gentleman's face.
It had all happened fast. Him still in bed, with a cup of tea, Sharon in her housecoat doing breakfast, Mikey I shaving – and the phone had rung. Sharon had screamed up the stairs that the Imperial War Museum was on the phone, and wanted Percy for his experiences – and apologies and apologies and more apologies than he could count for the lack of notice, and the liberty taken of having sent a car for him in the hope that he wasn't too busy. No, Percy Capel had not been too busy. He had been driven by a respectful chauffeur across south-east London and at the museum – beside those damn great naval guns – the gentleman had been waiting for him.
'It's what we try to do, fill holes in knowledge, and nowhere better than from the people who were on the ground. I expect you'd like some coffee, and I think we can rustle up some biscuits.'
The gentleman, all old-world courtesy, wore a three-piece suit and a puffed-out tie that was immaculate at his collar. He had a handkerchief spilling from a breast pocket, and shoes you could have seen your face in. Percy was glad he'd kept the chauffeur waiting those extra minutes while he'd rummaged for a clean white shirt and Sharon had used the stiff brush to get the dandruff off his blazer with the British Legion shield on its breast pocket.
When the coffee was in front of him – 'Two lumps, please' – and he'd had his second biscuit, he started.
At his elbow, a tape-recorder turned. He didn't think they wanted crap so he told it like it was – for history and their archives – and scratched in memories that he'd long ago discarded.
He told of the old squadron, Lancasters, and how he'd been volunteered out to the Middle East so had missed the raid four weeks afterwards to Hamburg.
His new unit, flying Halifax Bill MZ971s, went up the Adriatic from the strip outside Alexandria, then turned to starboard and over the Balkans – his had had a girl in a swimsuit on the port side of the nose, with long legs, and she was shouting, 'I'm easy,' in white paint on the camouflage.
The job of the aircraft and crews was to drop agents and weapons into occupied territory.
That night, the weather people said there would be cloud cover to blank out a full moon over the target drop zone, and they'd carried a special-operations major and his sergeant, and a mountain of gear in tin cases, and he'd been in his usual place at the rear gun turret.
Never trust the bloody weather people. Clear moonlight bathed the Halifax on the approach run, not a bloody cloud for love or money, and the flak bursting, and the fire first in port outer, then in starboard inner, and the pilot had ordered them to bail out. He'd followed the gear, the major and his sergeant, but he'd been the last to go clear out through the port-side hatch in the fuselage, and then 'I'm Easy' had corkscrewed and he'd been halfway down on his parachute when she'd gone in. Bloody great bang and bloody great fire.
The major's sergeant had fallen like a stone, poor beggar, because his canopy hadn't opened.
In the days and weeks that followed, Major
Anstruther had made him batman, pack-mule, explosives expert, radio-operator and killer.
They had met up with Mehmet Rahman and a gang of thugs and lived in caves. His toes still hurt from the first dose of frostbite, but it wasn't bad enough to stop him helping the major to blow a rail bridge and, later, to sabotage the shaft and winding shed of a chrome mine. .. And there was the ambush of a convoy of the 21st Mountain Corps in a valley up north of Shkodra, and his Sten gun had jammed and, beside him, the major had used up the last of his loaded magazines and thrown the last of his grenades and – if it had not been for Mehmet Rahman – they were both dead meat.
Mehmet Rahman had saved his life, and Major
Anstruther's.
'They were good troops, the Mountain Corps, crack guys. Soon as we hit, they came up off the road and at us. We'd put down some of them, all yelling and hollering and shrieking. Then the major had nothing more to chuck at them and my Sten gun's jammed – bloody useless things, always getting blockages. They were all round us, coming after us, close enough to see them – damn soon and it would have been close enough to touch them. Mehmet Rahman came. Didn't have to. He was on his feet and running to us, all exposed, and his God must have watched for him, and there was bullets all round him but he didn't take a scratch. He had covering fire from his guys but he cleared a way through to us – shooting from the hip.
The Germans backed off. Must have been chaos for them, the ambush and all, and they went down to what trucks and armoured stuff was still able to move and quit. Probably their priority was to get the convoy through. I reckon that's why they left their wounded, just wasn't the place to do a count. They'd have gone for two or three miles, then realized how many they'd left. We were high up, well gone, but we saw them come back. They didn't need to have bothered because there were no wounded left, only the dead.'
He was telling it like it was, and he'd never told it before. He gulped at the coffee in the bone-china cup, but a biscuit was left half eaten on the plate. The gentleman gazed into his eyes, like he knew what was to come, and the tape turned.
'Up there, we couldn't take prisoners, certainly not wounded prisoners. We couldn't – honest, believe me
– do anything for the wounded. Anstruther shouted to me that I was to come away. He tried to get me behind some rocks but – shock, I suppose – I didn't move.
Mehmet Rahman went among the wounded. Those that were bad, unconscious, he shot. But he had a knife. The knife was for those who were hit in the legs or the shoulders or had holes in their guts, but their eyes were open. He took the eyes out first, like the knife was taking a stone out of a plumb, then he slit their throats. I still hear the screaming of some of them, those he hadn't reached. Not mercy killing, butchering them for pleasure. He did all of them, till it was all quiet. I caught the major's knee and I pointed to what Mehmet Rahman did, but the major shook his head. The major said, soft, that it was a bad war and that pretending otherwise wouldn't make it a better war. Mehmet Rahman was like a fucking – excuse me, sir – animal because he scooped those men's eyes out and cut off their heads, sawed through their pipes and their neck bones, did it so that the next in line could see what was coming to him, and did it for pleasure.
Then he wiped his knife on his shirt, and we went off up the mountain and left the silence. I tell you, I never heard such silence again, not in sixty years.'
There was moisture at his eyes, and Percy Capel prodded a finger behind the lenses of his spectacles and wiped them. He was asked, the gentleman's voice silken and gentle, whether he had ever talked of this.
'What? Down the Legion? Not likely. Been part of a war crime, sir, would you? I never told my Winifred – dead and buried, bless her – nor my boy, nor…
What's extraordinary, my grandson has met up with the Rahman family. He's in-' He stopped, but he had already launched so he groped for an explanation. 'In import and export. Buys and sells. He met up, just by chance, with Mehmet Rahman's grand-nephew, and that put him in contact – business, you know – with Mehmet Rahman's son, and they'd heard of our family name. Small world… My grandson asked me what I knew of Mehmet Rahman. Did I say he was a murdering swine, a bloody animal? I did not. There's truth, some of the truth, a little of the truth – that's what I chose, a little of it. I said that my family and his were joined by blood, that my life was saved by Mehmet Rahman. It's a debt, right? You can't pay off that sort of debt. It's with you all your time on earth, and with your family.'
The gentleman's face showed the vivid expression of not understanding. Percy Capel felt the obligation to explain. 'A debt like that, it owns you. Do you see that? It owns me, and my son, and my grandson. It's as much my grandson's debt as mine. They do business, my grandson and Mehmet Rahman's son, and I suppose that's like paying off the debt – but I doubt my grandson sees it that way… Anyway, you don't want to know that.'
