I sat away in a corner. The Bürgermeister’s wife must have been pretty not so long ago. She brought Les and me substantial glasses of a heavy, white wine each. She had a tight, worried smile. I listened to James questioning her husband, a thin, nervous old man who wrung his hands as if he was washing them. I needed time to think. I needed to think because I realized that at least a quarter of the conversation I overheard was in German, and that I quickly began to understand it. I also realized that the same had been happening to me in France and Holland. Maybe some people are just good at that sort of thing and don’t know it until it happens to them. Perhaps it’s like having an ear for music. I think that Les had realized it was happening to me too, because he raised his glass, and grinned a silent toast. The boy tugged at Les’s sleeve, and asked, ‘Can I have a cigarette, Tommy?’
I spent the night in the Bürgermeister’s daughter’s bed. She didn’t need it any more. A couple of days earlier some soldiers had murdered her with a flamethrower, after they’d finished with her. Turned her into a carbonized statue, kneeling in a burnt-out room like a black Madonna. James said that it happened that they were French, but they could have been in anybody’s army. The family buried her in the evening, in a shallow grave in a small cemetery. She was wrapped in a quilted bed cover, which stank of kerosene before she was halfway there. Half a dozen old folk turned out to help. One old lady, in particular, wept a mountain, although she made no noise. The boy told me later that she was the school-mistress. James had us go with them. After they laid her in the hole the Bürgermeister looked at me. He and his wife didn’t ask anything: they just looked at me. I saw that Les was also looking keenly at me. I murmured the Lord’s Prayer, and the group followed me in German, the cadence of the lines moving up and down like music heard over water. Finally I bent to take a little soil, but the girl’s mother took it from me and did the honours. Either that was the German way, or she knew that I wasn’t quite what I was cracked up to be.
James put his hand on my shoulder as we walked back down to the house; sometimes our boots scraped on the cobbles. He spoke two sentences, which were, ‘Nicely done, Charlie.’ And, ‘Thank you.’
I just hoped that I’d done the right thing. It must have been all right, because I didn’t dream that night. I slept with my hand on my pistol, remembering the last conversation I had had in the Quonset bar the evening before.
Albie had lurched up with a smaller man who he leaned against. He was all tact, Albie. He said, ‘This is Gumshield. Gumshield is a fast featherweight. He wins us lots of money, so don’t shoot him.’
Gumshield started, and gave me a worried look. He had a Douglas Fairbanks moustache and sticky-up salt-and-pepper hair. And an interesting variety of facial scars. I guessed maybe he wasn’t so fast after all. I asked, ‘Why should I?’
‘Gumshield’s the guy I told you about. He was Grace’s regular poke over here.’
It didn’t feel as bad as I thought. He had a voice five registers too deep for his size, which made him sound vaguely ridiculous. He said, ‘Sorry, bud. I thought she was unoccupied. Never took a Padre’s girl before.’
‘Don’t worry. You were probably right the first time. What Grace never is, is occupied, that is . . . and I’m not used to being a Padre yet, anyway.’
‘You don’t mind then?’
‘I didn’t say that. I don’t mind as much as I thought I would.’
‘That’s good.’ That was Albie. ‘We can all get another drink in then.’
I OK’d that. I asked Gumshield short questions, and listened as he gave me long answers. He had a tendency to ramble. Albie looked bored, and scratched his hand a lot around the space of his missing finger. The back of his hand looked red and angry. What it had amounted to was that Grace had shared Gumshield’s field bag for a few days, while she waited to hitch up with a group of renegade Red Cross doctors and nurses. They had already tried to cross into Germany a couple of times, and had been sent back with fleas in their Gallic ears. After Grace had hooked up with them Gumshield had a feeling that they’d made it. Albie bellowed a long rolling thunder of a belch that could have stunned a cat, and agreed with him. They were mainly Frogs, they told me, but there were a couple of long-haired Eye-tie drivers from somewhere, and a beautiful blonde German nurse they were bound to have trouble with. They were travelling in a couple of well-stocked US White-type armoured ambulances. They were headed north-east, Gumshield told me, to a place called Löningen. What was in my mind was the map I had studied earlier. It was one of Les’s maps. In my mind’s eye I could see that Löningen. It was on the road to Bremen.
When we turned out of the gate Les had asked me, ‘Where to, Guv?’
‘Isn’t that up to the Major?’
James told us, ‘Not really. As long as we’re not far behind the front there’s work for us anywhere.’
So I said, ‘Let’s go to Bremen.’
I grinned at Les, and he turned and grinned at me and the Major, who told us, ‘Don’t take us anywhere we’re likely to get bombed. That would be irritating.’
I’d lied to them about the girl in the
