My Enemy Came Nigh Read online

  Presently Aziz was in bed with Teresa, in the small room where she slept alone. The children did not disturb them, in the room next door: tired, they had fallen asleep at once. Her mother didn't seem to mind: appeared quite proud, in fact, that her daughter was frequented by one whom she called "il Raia", which is Italian for Rajah. Aziz was not, but didn't disillusion her.

  Teresa was as abundant as a Rubens ideal, she smelled slightly acrid after .an evening's sweaty toil and there was garlic on her breath; but Aziz hadn't come mentally unscathed through that morning's sortie against Taf and he needed the grunting exertion, the greedy wetness of her mouth, the oily perfume of her long hair in which he buried his face, to obliterate the tension and fear that he contained so carefully with his deliberate drawl and taut movements.

  He lay back and let her swarm all over him, draining him of poison and unknotting his nerves as effectively as a Turkish bath.

  In the bar of the club, Middleton, Tindall, Don Bradley and Tunks drank Sarti cognac and asked each other why they hadn't gone along to Clara's.

  "I don't think my wife would care for it, somehow," Bradley said with a smile. Anstey was married too, but none of them held that against him. Home was a long way from here and what he was doing with Clara had nothing to do with love or fidelity. It did have a lot to do with operations in the Jugoslav archipelago and they knew all about those; and they were a good reason and a fair excuse for recourse to the panacea that Clara and her friends provided.

  "George is saving it up for Saturday night," Tindall said.

  "Got a date with your nurse, George?" Asked Bradley.

  "Nice girl, Fay." Middleton was ambiguous.

  "Nice nice or nice how's-your-father?" Harry Tunks sounded genuinely interested.

  "Just nice. I want her to come to Rome for a forty-eight."

  Tindall had no illusions: "You'll be lucky, with every wing commander and group captain, not to mention every bloody major and colonel, sniffing round the nurses' home day and night. l don't know how you manage to get dates with her at all."

  ''I hope the boys don't miss the bus." Middleton had changed the subject. "There's Ken Hargreaves: let's ask him if he knows anything."

  And in Clara's bed, Clara was cooing "Il mio cavaliere e il piu bello di tutti" as her cavalier, the best-looking of them all, rode her enthusiastically. She was a tall, slender girl, a fit mate for the tall, handsome Anstey; Titian-haired and creamy-skinned, romantic and responsive, she made him forget that this was costing him 800 lire: enjoying it as she did, she gave their commercial copulation the illusion of an act of love.

  On the sofa in her living room her friend Anna was going hammer and tongs with Truscott: he, stocky and dark, with a black pelt from breastbone to navel; she, small and swarthy, with bristly legs. Her heels drummed happily on his buttocks, she chewed his ear and eventually they fell off the sofa together and accomplished their final rites on the hearthrug.

  In a broom cupboard with a narrow bed in it, Gina and her piccolo cinese giggled and thrashed about to the peril of two or three small ornaments and a table lamp. She was a hefty girl with two rolls of fat around her middle and looked piebald, with her dyed blonde head of hair and the black tufts here and there in other places. Charlie thought she might break his back, but he also thought it would be a better way of getting grounded than by a lump of flak through his guts or a machinegun bullet in the eye.

  Group Captain Shagger Mason was ten miles up the coast from his airfield, entertaining the matron of a military hospital to dinner at another out-of-bounds resort which had become tacitly accepted as an unofficial club for senior officers only. In peacetime it had been a lowpriced small hotel a few hundred metres from the beach, in a pretty garden. Now, the astute owners had knocked down a wall to double the size of the dining room, engaged a small orchestra to play and a tenor to sing for their supper, and created a pleasantly romantic and clandestine atmosphere. Mason gyrated to a waltz, wondering how soon he could get on the job, as he unsentimentally put it to himself.

  Matron was forty, six years older than the group captain, slim, clinically elegant, fair, sharp featured and serious-, indeed stern-looking. Her hands and feet were small for her five-feet-six, and Mason found it dazzlingly erotic that, although regulations forbade the use of coloured varnish on her fingernails, she painted her toes bright red; the colour of arterial blood. In the privacy of her quarters she wore very high heeled satin mules; and stingingly wielded a slender riding crop with her thin, strong little hand.

  *

  Wing Commander Beale had spent his evening in the mess with a hearty, noisy group that included the padre. The Rev. Parry-Jones was in wondrously good voice and led the singing. Cracker Beale, an abstemious man, enjoyed the esprit de corps but remained clear-headed and found his thoughts constantly returning to the island of Taf and a tactical master stroke which would annihilate its defenders. He had survived sorties into the Norwegian fjords to attack heavily defended German installations and shipping, on his first tour of operations, and night attacks on French harbours during his second. He believed that a combination of both experiences would enable his wing to discourage the enemy from any further development of Taf. While he bellowed The Muffin Man and the Ball of Kirriemuir he waited impatiently for the morrow's Intelligence reports and more reconnaissance photographs.

  Lord John Grimes, standing as far as he could from Parry-Jones, watched Beale and worried. He knew what must be going on in that thick, size seven-and-a-half head. Cracker was capable of pursuing only one idea at a time and since the notion of a night attack by flares had come to him in a flash Grimes knew that it would linger for days. Grimes had returned this morning with eighteen bullet holes and three torn by flak in his aircraft, and was beginning to think that perhaps anything would be better than another daylight raid. The greatest danger in a night operation would be flying into a hill, or a collision: and it would be so difficult to find and hit targets that the risk was unjustifiable in proportion to the chances of success. So they had better press on with those unpleasant daylights. But he knew his man, and once Beale's one-track apology for a mind was set on course, a night op. became inevitable. Well, if they were going to fly into immovable obstacles, let the clown lead the way himself.

  "Come on, John boyo, let's 'ear you, then," bellowed Ianto. "How about If I Were The Marrying Kind?"

  I am, thought Grimes, and I've got four children to prove it; and I want to see them and my wife again: which I am unlikely to if we have to keep dicing about among those horrible islands much longer; and even less likely to if that ass Beale persuades Shagger to agree to a night op.

  *

  Fit. Lt. Grummit, that amoral Aesculapian, had been called from the caravan which was his mobile surgery and in which he slept, by one of the local peasants who were employed on odd jobs about the camp. The twin three­ year-old daughters of a young woman who lived on a nearby farm had fallen suddenly ill. Her husband had been killed by the Germans two years ago. She could not afford to send for a doctor from Afrona.

  Grummitt was used to this situation: it recurred every few days. He took these calls for help as they came. He was kind hearted and enjoyed ministering to the sick and needy. If there were a quid pro quo in it, so much the better; but he did not complain if he got nothing for his pains. Half the time his patients were old and smelly. But sometimes they were young, female and firm-fleshed; or the patients were children and the grateful mothers young and appetising and eager to pay in kind.

  He called Sick Quarters on the field telephone to tell them he was going off camp for half an hour, picked up his emergency bag and took his caller off on the pillion of his motorcycle.

  The twins had nothing worse than colic. The mother was not more than twenty-two, and comely. He took her back to his caravan to fetch medicine.

  There was nothing unethical about having it away this time, he told himself: she wasn't a patient, herself.

  Grummit had no aptitude for languages but
twelve months in Italy had provided him with a sufficient vocabulary. He smiled at the young woman, who was clean and wore a spotless, well pressed frock. He took her hand and gestured towards his bunk. "Amore," he suggested. "Bacio." He bent to kiss her. The response was encouraging. "Tutta nuda," he suggested, undoing his trousers with one hand and lifting her skirt with the other. "Tu sopra me," and the lazy fellow lay back on his bunk and arranged her knees one on either side of him, so that she straddled him and had to do all the work.

  Nice work, he thought, if you can get it. You lucky girl. And good luck to the General .Medical Council and all who serve in it: they may not like what I'm doing, if they could see me, but technically I'm all right, Jack.

  The twins' mother, bobbing up and down, paused for an instant to bargain in pidgin Italian. What she was saying was "Give me the medicine first.'' With bucolic cunning she had brought him to the point at which he could not refuse.

  *

  No, Hargreaves had said, when Middleton asked him if he knew anything about their morning's work. But there may be a signal in by the time they got back.

  He was almost over-conscientious, fussy, a bit of an old woman; besides, he didn't drink much and women didn't interest him, so he had ample extra time to spend in his office.

  When they returned to camp he went straight to the Nissen hut that housed the Intelligence section. The duty clerk stood up. "Like some tea, sir?"

  "Good idea. Any signals?"

  "Just come in, sir, from the cypher office."

  The envelope was marked Secret and Hargreaves read the message with a flutter of excitement. He was given to fluttering. In a more masculine man the emotion could have been described as a tremor.

  The signal said nothing about the results of that morning's attack. The report it contained was more ominous than informative. There was a U-boat somewhere in the southern Adriatic, in some kind of trouble. It was thought to be making for Taf. If it did arrive there another strike must be mounted in full squadron strength.

  It was at times like this that Hargreaves wished he were a drinking man. He was sensitive and had a great capacity for affection. It would help him in his job if he could dull his emotions sometimes. He had been on the squadron for three years and in that time at least fifty pilots and navigators had been killed or wounded. He hated having to stand in front of them at brief1ngs and prate about the enemy's order of battle, when their immediate future offered short odds against death and he faced nothing more lethal than a motor ride with Rev. Parry-Jones. Against logic, he felt ashamed; for it was not his fault that he had myopia and astigmatism and couldn't recognise his own mother at five yards without his glasses. If he had been fit to fly in any capacity he would have done so. He wouldn't have volunteered, any more than he had volunteered to join at all. But if, when he was called up, he had been offered a choice of some combatant role, he would have put up with it. And it would have had to be the Air Force because the uniform suited him best. It matched his eyes. Anyway, he couldn't see himself in dreary old khaki. And somehow he thought he might have got into trouble in the Navy.

  He re-read the message and felt sick. The morning's combat reports and the pictures taken later by photographic reconnaissance Spitfires had given him yet again a certainty of what it was like to take part in a strike against a well-defended target. He didn't want to have to look again at twenty-four faces, most of them with less than as many years of life behind them, and talk in an unemotional voice about flak dispositions, armed enemy shipping and the possibilities of interception by enemy fighters, when he was not going to have to share those delights. Repetition had made it no easier.

  Four

  Some two hours after the attack, Zdenka returned to Taf from the small island of Sprot with Leutnant Scheusal and the two sailors who had taken them there in a motorboat.

  Scheusal was a signals officer, charged by von Trampel with the duty of reconnoitering the smaller islands within ten miles of Taf to find the best site for a centimetric radar array, which would give some warning of low flying aircraft approaching. He had taken Zdenka because she had a physics degree from Zagreb University, her father had been a keen yachtsman and she knew the islands well, and Taf was her family's holiday home where the German invasion had caught them.

  They had been exploring the area for three days and had now decided that the island of Mojat was the most suitable site. From there they had gone the five miles to Sprot, which was pretty and uninhabited and would be a useful satellite for a unit on Mojat; a place where Scheusal could set up a radio link in case enemy action put the one on Mojat out of use. Sprot had been a favourite picnic spot of Zdenka's in happier times, and while the two sailors guarded the boat she had taken Scheusal for a walk and then they had gone for a swim. She did not dislike him personally, although she feared his sadistic moods, but as an enemy she hated him. By a pretence of tolerance she had won much confidence from the Germans and was not averse to using her body in order to learn what was going on at Mojat. At university she had gone to bed with three of her fellow students whom she liked no better than Scheusal; and with a handsome English actor who had once spent a holiday aboard her father's boat, whom she found a great deal less amiable than this German and much less generous. She enjoyed sexual intercourse intensely for its own sake and needed no mental harmony with a partner; and it gave her an added pleasure to have the private knowledge that she was fooling her lover, outwitting the enemy; and would one day bring about Scheusal's death; how, she did not know, but it was a fixed intention and her excuse for taking him into her body with delight. Her four years at the university had given her some intellectual pretensions which helped her to rationalise her actions. An honest and detached observer would have said that she was behaving like a whore because it was her nature to do so, and if the war hadn't happened she would either have been taking a regiment of lovers experimentally or have married and be cuckolding her husband for the fun of it whenever she could. But there was a lack of critical and detached observers around, that year.

  She was determined to go with Leutnant Scheusal's detachment to Mojat. He could get her a permit to move from Taf, and she would find herself a room with one of the few families living on the island. She would try to go officially as a technical assistant, for the unit on Taf was short of technical officers and N.C.Os and there was no apparent danger in her acquiring detailed knowledge about the German radar equipment: to whom could she pass it on, from the midst of a German-held group of islands?

  She, and the other girls who worked in any way for the Germans, Eva and Maria-Pia among them, ran a bigger risk from their own people than from the occupying force. To be suspected of genuine collaboration with the enemy would mean a death sentence; if not now, then later when the Allies finally won this long war. It was important not to be suspected of treachery, but equally important not to be accidentally betrayed by their own people's careless talk. Zdenka and those who worked secretly as partisans led precarious lives and were under constant nervous strain.

  Taf stank of scorched paint and explosives, of charred timber and hot metal. Some rockets which had been badly aimed had hit buildings: there was the stench of burning rubble that had been doused with water.

  As heavy as the pall of bad smells was the sullen ill­ temper of the garrison. There had not been such a heavy attack for three months; and the last time, the harbour was less crowded and the damage less severe. The Germans went about their salvage work and the burying of their dead in angry quiet. The Jugoslavs kept out of sight. Any who chanced upon a group of soldiers or sailors were lucky to get away with only hate-filled looks. A rough shove aside, or, if much outnumbered, blows, were more likely. To be caught showing sly signs of satisfaction at the damage was to invite a beating. It was best to keep out of the way and even the clergy and children went to ground.

  When the motorboat was made fast at a jetty Scheusal curtly sent Zdenka away.

  She walked briskly, keeping her eyes averted from passing s
oldiers and sailors, up the hill to another large house near the one where von Trampel lived. Her father had died soon after the German occupation and she was alone there with her mother. Her two brothers had escaped to join the army of General Mihailovitch, in the mountains of the mainland, fighting against both the German and Italian invaders and the army of partisans under Tito: as ardent royalists, they regarded Tito and communism as even greater dangers for their country than the Nazis and Fascists.

  Her mother was tending a vegetable garden, helped by an old man who had worked for them as long as Zdenka could remember. She was a faded beauty in her late forties who always looked sad and tired now. When she saw her daughter she went quickly to her and said "I was worried in case you were caught by the English aeroplanes."

  "They wouldn't waste ammunition on one small boat. We were on Sprot when they flew over; twice: on their way here and on the way back." She thought briefly about being on Sprot, and what her mother would say if she knew the details of their visit.

  "What is the damage like?" Her mother's eyes shone.

  "Very bad. The Germans are very angry."

  "Good. And what about your trip to Mojat?"

  "He likes it. Says it is entirely suitable."

  "And you went to Sprot?" Her mother's eyes filled with tears. "Happy memories."

  "That is why I went, Mother," Zdenka said gently. "And I will find some way to go with them to Mojat."

  "You run too many risks."

  "Returning to those places where we all used to be so happy made me feel that any risk is worthwhile if it enables us to get rid of this vermin more quickly."

  *

  Eva ate lunch with von Trampel and Wüstling, but they were guarded in their talk. She left them brusquely as soon as coffee was served, and went to her room, where she sat for half an hour apparently listening to her wireless set. Her father was the town clerk and they had a smallholding where they lived in a substantial farmhouse. Nearly all their produce was taken by the Germans. Her brother, Petar, had been wounded during the Italian invasion of Greece in 1941, where he had gone in an attempt to reach England in the hope of joining the Navy. He had been gravely ill for a long time and then allowed to return to Taf, where the Germans made him work as a harbour master responsible for one of the fishing docks.