I said, ‘If we wait until the next time they open it, James and I can drop down there – I’ll need you because of your German, James – Cliff, you could stop at the doors: watch our backs, and Alan you can cover us all from here.’ None of them said anything so I added, lamely, I thought, ‘. . . unless you can think of anything better?’
‘Unfortunately, no.’ That was James. I had forgotten that he actually knew why we were here, whereas the others didn’t. ‘Shit or bust, eh?’
I could have thought of better similes. Cliff asked me, ‘Who do you expect to find down there?’
‘Just one of my contacts, sir.’
He gave an amused little smile, and said, ‘I was right about you, young Charlie. You have promise. Only been out in the field a few weeks and you’re already building your own little network. Nice stuff.’ I suppose that that was better than him knowing the truth.
You wouldn’t believe the number of wide, worn, red-brick steps that led down from the cellar’s doors to its floor. I nearly choked on the smoke from small fires, candles and oil lamps, and nearly gagged on the smell of unwashed bodies, and what would have been sewage if there had been a connection to a sewer.
Two teenaged boys had come up to scavenge, and we were up alongside them as they were closing the flat doors. As usual, James was on them before they heard him. Cliff had stayed with them at the top of the steps. I stopped counting the steps at fifty. The murmur of humanity died progressively as more and more of them saw us. I carried my Luger in my right hand. Remember that I’d already seen what their Home Guard could do at that castle in Holland.
Funnily enough, it didn’t feel dangerous. As we descended James whispered, ‘Remarkable. Bloody remarkable.’
‘What is, sir?’
‘This place. Enormous. Roman bloody brickwork.’
‘Not that again.’
‘ ’s true. Water cisterns I think. I saw this in Istanbul before the war. They must have just built the telephone exchange on top of it.’
It wasn’t a nineteenth-century cellar at any rate. It was a series of huge vaulted brick caverns supported on massive brick pillars as far as the eye could see. The floor, where I could see it, looked dry and sandy. People were gathered in groups. Families? I wondered. Neighbours? Near the bottom of the worn steps an old lady caught at my ankle, and asked in English, ‘All right now, Tommy? War finished?’
I said, ‘War finished for you, Mother. War nearly finished.’
To make sure that she understood James repeated me in Kraut, and we stood, still not at floor level with them, and watched his words move from group to group. There were absolutely no soldiers that I could see; just women, children and old folk. My brain registered a couple of children crying, and a woman sobbing close by. James murmured, ‘What next?’
I nearly replied, Fucked if I know, but retreated a step or two up from him, and looked out over the crowd. They had joined up, silent now, pressing closer to the steps. Cliff’s voice boomed hollowly down to us, ‘OK down there?’
‘Fine. You?’
‘Yeah.’
Still they didn’t say anything. Still a couple of children cried, and still a woman in the darkness sobbed. I used the thirty-foot voice.
‘Is Ingrid Knier present? Is Ingrid Knier here? K-N-I-E-R.’ I hated the incongruous rhyme. I wasn’t trying to be funny.
James repeated it, and then said something else in Kraut. There was an odd experience of watching our words rippling out through the crowd, like a shock wave. Nothing seemed to happen. James murmured again: he said, ‘Long shot anyway, old man,’ and coughed.
Then I sensed some sort of movement that started at the back of the crowd. It parted as a figure moved forward, closing up again behind it. Bloody silly really, but I found that I was holding my breath.
The woman who stepped to the front spoke very quietly, but everybody in that place could hear her: one of those pin-drop moments. She didn’t look up. ‘Here is Ingrid Knier,’ she said. ‘I am her.’
She was small – even smaller than me – but roughly the same age, and dressed in baggy grey overalls, under a soldier’s jacket which had had its insignia and buttons removed. She had long dark blonde hair. I couldn’t say from where I stood whether she was plain or pretty, because a gash across her right cheekbone had been very roughly stitched: it pulled her face out of shape. She tried to smile but couldn’t make it.
I said, ‘I’m Charlie Bassett. Do you remember me?’ I’m always coming up with original chat-up lines. It sounded ridiculous, but I couldn’t think of anything else.
‘Yes. Of course. Pilot Officer Bassett. I did not believe that you would come here.’
How do you explain yourself to a girl you’ve never met, in front of a crowd of a hundred or more? I felt a lot of tension leaving me. I wondered what I was doing with a gun in my hand. I didn’t mean to sound pompous as I said, ‘I don’t make many promises, Fräulein Knier. When you know me better you’ll know that if I do, I keep them.’ I was particularly pleased to have remembered to say Fräulein.
James murmured, ‘And if I’m not mistaken it’s your doing just that sort of thing with your Grace last year that got us here in the first place.’
The woman moved forward, and stood up to the step below me, alongside James. Then she turned outwards, and spoke in German too fast for me to follow. One of the old men clapped, and another couple of the women began to sob. I asked James, ‘What did she say? I couldn’t follow it.’
‘She told them that you’d made a promise to her to come
