Otto's Phoney War Read online

  ‘Ten years for a heap of shit,’ Otto stuttered wildly, ‘and he spends a small fortune … ’

  The Count smiled, ‘Don’t take it, old chap. Be above it. Everything is relative, you know, as that Jewish fellow Einstein maintains. Tut-tut,’ he shook his head in mock annoyance. ‘I really have a thing about the Hebrews this afternoon. I must be more careful, I really must.’

  ‘The proposition?’ Otto interrupted him.

  ‘Oh, yes, the proposition. Well, my dear young friend, it’s either ten years in the jute mills, or join us.’

  ‘Us?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But who are you?’

  The Count beamed at him. ‘I thought everybody in this area knew who old Meadow was? Sorry. We’re the Abwehr.’ He gave the dumbstruck Otto the full benefit of his expensively gold-capped teeth. ‘You know, my dear fellow, the spy chappies.’

  BOOK TWO: OTTO ENTERS THE SECRET SERVICE

  ‘The more I see of men, the more I like animals.’

  Otto von Bismarck

  ‘The term Abwehr is German for 'ward-off' and was chosen to emphasize the defensive character of this department of the Reichswehr Ministry following the First World War.’

  Zentner & Bedürftig, Encyclopedia of the Third Reich

  CHAPTER 1

  ‘Pigeon-shit!’ Hirsch, the little Jewish instructor, said for the second time and flicked a white spot from his dirty, stained waistcoat. ‘Pigeon-shit, that’s the best you can use in an emergency.’

  Otto sighed. It seemed as though ever since he had left his home to seek a fortune, he had kept landing in the shit, in both senses of the phrase. Now, apparently, he was in it once more. He made a little gesture of irritation with his pencil.

  ‘No notes, Number Sixty-Nine,’ Hirsch said sternly, looking at him over the edge of his nickel-rimmed spectacles. ‘Keep everything in your head. First rule of clandestine activity, Sixty-Nine.’

  ‘Yes,’ Otto caught himself in time from using Hirsch’s own name, though everyone used it in the little mess of that remote country house. ‘Yes, Number Nine! Right then, let’s get on with it. As I was saying – pigeon shit … ’

  Otto slumped in his seat with resignation and hoped he wouldn’t go to sleep again. Twice this week he had done so during lectures; it was the fault of the very boozy lunches they served at the Abwehr training school. Maybe that was part of their training too, he wondered. Harden our stomachs so we can drink the enemy to death.

  It was a week now since the strange Count, or ‘Meadow’, as he preferred to be called, had deposited him at the Abwehr training school not far from the border town of Düren, where, according to the Count, the Secret Service had a company of its own special commandos, the Brandenburgers.

  He had been given a Brandenburger uniform himself, though without any badges of rank or unit identification. ‘Never let the chaps of the Regular Army catch you outside dressed the way you are,’ the Count had warned him seriously. ‘They’ll see straight away you’re no soldier. Spot you for a spy right off.’ Suddenly he had laughed and said, ‘And in a way they would be right, eh, Otto?’ And with that enigmatic statement he had departed, leaving a puzzled Otto to cope with the strange life of the remote country-house training school – and the even stranger individuals who ran it.

  There was ‘Brass Eggs’, for instance, a frail-looking, scented, wavy-haired lieutenant in the Brandenburgers who taught him unarmed combat and who invariably grabbed for his testicles during their staged fights together with the comment, ‘brass eggs, always give them the brass eggs, Sixty-Nine.’ Twice a weary Otto had spotted him sneaking off up the road that led to Düren, dressed in a tight-fitting sailor’s suit with what appeared to be a lady’s handbag slung over his skinny arm. It hadn’t taken much imagination to guess what he was up to. By the end of the week he and Brass Eggs were tossing each other all over the coconut matting of the gym like the best of enemies.

  ‘Maps’, his map-reading instructor, was another of the teachers who seemed to be leading a strange secret life.

  During the day the big, bluff civilian appeared perfectly normal, a dry, rational individual, whose life centred around contour lines, grid references and compass bearings. But in the evening he changed completely, the confident look vanished from his face to be replaced by a nervous haunted one, as if he were a sorely troubled man. Once, an astonished Otto had come across him on his knees, scrubbing madly at the great wooden steps that led upstairs. The sweat had been pouring from his face as he dipped his brush in the pail of steaming suds and belaboured the eighteenth century woodwork as if his very life depended upon it. He was muttering to himself too – that ‘they’ were ‘everywhere’. Otto had ventured to ask who ‘they’ were.

  Maps had paused for an instant, wiping the sweat off his brow with the back of his wet hand like a charlady might, and had whispered solemnly, ‘Fraid I can’t tell you, Sixty-Nine. Not at this moment, you understand.’ He had jerked his scrubbing brush in the direction of the roof and added, ‘They’re up there, you know. Listening to every word we say. Must get rid of as many of them as I can.’ And with that he had commenced scrubbing furiously once more.

  On another occasion, Otto had caught a brief glimpse of Maps standing out on the lawn below, clad in gum-boots with a piece of lace curtain wrapped around his head like a beekeeper’s veil, but otherwise stark naked in spite of the dawn cold, busily spraying his clothes which were spread out in front of him on the grass with a flit-gun. Otto nicked himself twice shaving that particular morning.

  ‘Slightly peculiar, I suppose,’ the Commandant, Major Haase, had agreed reluctantly when Otto had remarked upon Maps’ strange behaviour. ‘But you must understand, Sixty-Nine, that all the staff here are highly gifted individuals.’ He had beamed at Otto. ‘And they do say that genius is akin to madness, don’t they? I mean, look at you, Sixty-Nine.’

  Otto had flinched again at the use of his awful code-name and wondered who had bestowed it on him. Somehow he suspected it might have well been Brass Eggs. ‘How do you mean, Number One?’

  ‘You seem perfectly sane and rational, in spite of having the Count for your father.’

  ‘What the … the Count isn't my father!’ Otto had exploded incredulously.

  Major Haase had winked solemnly. ‘Never fear, Sixty-Nine, your secret is safe with me.’

  Next morning the fat major had taken up Otto’s pistol training himself, appearing in the grey uniform of a female Army auxiliary, complete with sling-bag and short skirt which rode up his fat thighs every time he knelt to demonstrate a shot to reveal the salmon-pink straps of an issue garter belt. ‘Just one of my many disguises, Sixty-Nine,’ he had said calmly when Otto’s face had revealed his astonishment. ‘Not to worry, all in a day’s work.’

  ‘Now, supposing,’ Hirsch, the Jewish instructor in codes and secret-writing, was saying, ‘that the agent does not have a tame pigeon at his disposal to obtain our blessed raw material. Prego. What is said agent to do?’

  Otto wrenched his mind back from its slightly unnerving daydreams and focussed on Hirsch. The instructor had grown his side-chats long and dyed his hair jet-black to give his Jewish features what he fondly imagined was an Italianate cast; and it was for this same reason that he threw an occasional Italian word into his lectures. Not that Hirsch’s Jewishness worried Otto. In this crazy place, he told himself, anything could happen.

  Hirsch pulled a handful of what appeared to be bird-seed out of his waistcoat pocket, like a magician pulling a rabbit out of his top-hat and beamed at Otto as if he had just achieved something of importance. Inwardly Otto groaned.

  ‘Sprinkle some of this on your window-sill,’ he suited his actions to his words and spread the seed on the table in front of him, making cooing, encouraging noises, as if hesitant pigeons were already approaching the imaginary balcony. ‘Park benches are also particularly good for this kind of operation, Sixty-Nine, especially if children are about to provide the agent with cover. Bambini
make an ideal distraction. Now the collection of the shit presents a few problems but, pazienza, there are ways to obtain the vital raw material, once the dear little Paloma has deposited it right under our noses. All we need is a spoon and … ’

  Otto gave up. He closed his eyes and dozed off, forgetting the production of secret ink from pigeon shit for this particular afternoon.

  It was in the third week of his training that Otto learned for the first time why the Count had freed him from the Gestapo’s clutches. Thursday morning’s training had commenced with bayonet fighting, in the high-hedged garden of the service's country house. Under the command of a burly Regular Army sergeant, he was supposed to be running screaming at a line of sacks filled with sawdust suspended from wooden frames, and rip his bayonet into them bellowing, ‘Take that, you swine, right in the guts … Buckets of blood, that’s what we love, buckets of blood.’

  ‘But you said you were going to teach how to kill silently,’ he gasped in protest, his face lathered in sweat, after the first run. ‘Hell, the way I was shouting, the shitting Hottentots down in Africa could hear me!’

  Brass Eggs, for once leading a lesson in armed combat, tugged at the end of his schnapps-thickened red nose.

  ‘Oh, my aching back,’ Otto groaned, ‘doesn’t anybody in this clapmill speak clear-text! If this goes on much longer, they’ll be taking me away in the rubber-wagon. Christ, can’t you – ’

  ‘Never despair, young friend,’ a fruity voice said calmly. Otto spun round and gasped. Next to him, Brass Eggs’ clay-pipe dropped from his mouth in astonishment and shattered on the ground.

  ‘Holy strawsack,’ he choked. It was the Count, three days’ growth on his plump face, dressed in a British Army khaki tunic, a bedraggled kilt, with one red-flannel underpant-leg hanging down over his muddy knee.

  ‘Been on a mission to our Scottish comrades,’ the Count explained, indicating the general direction of the French border where Otto knew the British now had an army in the line next to the French. ‘They’re nationalist to the man. Should imagine they’ll simply drop their weapons when the balloon goes up and join us to fight for Scotland’s freedom. They do drink a lot though.’

  He drew up his wet kilt and arranged his red-flannel underpants while the other two stared at him dumbfounded. ‘Unfortunately I ran into a damn SS corporal on the way back. Couldn’t convince him I wasn’t a woman. I think he’d been drinking. He chased me half a kilometre up the road before I managed to shake him off by wading the River Sauer.’ He bent and, twisting the heavy material of the kilt, drained a couple of litres of river-water out of it. ‘Still, as Conrascius himself said, ‘A lady with skirt up can run farther than man with trousers down – hence no rape!’ He beamed at Otto winningly.

  Otto could do nothing but groan and hold his head in mock anguish.

  The Count didn’t seem to notice. ‘All right, Lieutenant, you can cut along now,’ he ordered. ‘You’ve done an excellent job with Sixty-Nine here. Congratulations.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’ Brass Eggs flushed red with pleasure and flung the man in the kilt a tremendous salute before departing.

  ‘Done?’ Otto echoed, finding his voice for the first time since the Count had made his unexpected and decidedly very strange appearance.

  ‘Yes, my boy,’ He put his arm round Otto’s shoulders in a paternal manner. ‘Just had word from old Father Christmas himself in Berlin. Gertie the Commandant, passed it straight to me a minute ago. Unusually prompt for her, I must say.’

  ‘But what is it?’ Otto exploded, not even daring to ask who old ‘Father Christmas’ in Berlin was and why the Count referred to Major Haase as ‘Gertie’.

  ‘You’ve got a mission,’ the Count answered affably. ‘You’re off this very afternoon … Now I must really change my knickers. They’re absolutely soaked.’

  CHAPTER 2

  As soon as Otto saw Madame Lejeune he knew instinctively he should not have come; he had been too clever by half. There was obviously something wrong, very seriously wrong. Her puffed-up face, as if she had been crying a lot recently, and the ankle-length black dress under the sacking apron, as she paused there in her muddy gum-boots with a bucket of feed in her red paw, told him that the worst had happened to her husband, Emil.

  ‘Is it him?’ he asked softly.

  She didn’t answer for a moment, but rubbed one hand against her plump cheek, the skin rasping under the rough surface of her palm; then she crooked a finger at him and stomped around the house to where they kept the pigs.

  A heap of fresh earth was piled there, covered with meadow flowers, a rough wooden cross stuck in its centre. He hesitated and then looked at the name which she had obviously burnt on it with a red-hot poker. It was his, although she had spelled it with two Ls.

  ‘What happened?’ he asked after a while … ‘Why did you bury him here like this?’

  Madame Lejeune pushed away the Fleming foal nosing the pocket of her apron, obviously looking for some titbit she kept there. ‘They killed him. The Walloons from over there in Old Belgium,’ she pointed to the next ridge-line which had marked the border between Belgium and Germany prior to 1918. ‘Beat him to death with clubs.’

  ‘But in God’s name, why, Madame?’ Otto asked in horror.

  ‘They said he was a German nationalist, whatever that may be, and wanted to return the East Cantons to the Prussians … And then in St Vith they wouldn’t bury him in the cemetery because the director is one of those new Nazis and he said that Emil was pro-Belgian and not fit to lie at the side of good Germans.’

  Otto shook his head sadly. Nothing in his young mind had given him a clue that this might happen. ‘What can I say, Madame?’ he asked weakly.

  ‘Don't say anything. Come, let me make you a good Ardennes bacon sandwich and a cup of real bean coffee, remember?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Mon Dieu!’ she exclaimed, ‘how my Emil did laugh every time he remembered the look on your face the first time you came here. You were so astonished we'd part with real coffee for your Prussian shit!’ She stomped towards the kitchen, chuckling and crying at the same time.

  ‘Uniforms,’ the Count had announced solemnly. He had changed out of his sodden kilt and into much more respectable civilian clothing. His manner seemed to have changed to fit the new image as well. ‘To be exact, twelve uniforms are what we need.’

  Otto said nothing.

  ‘We want six border guards’ uniforms, two tram conductors, two street-gang overseers’ uniforms like they wear over there in Belgium,’ the Count had ticked them on his fingers, ‘and two gendarme uniforms.’ Otto remained stubbornly silent.

  The Count, dressed in an immaculate white flannel suit, complete with monogram in gold on the pocket, had frowned and then continued. ‘As soon as Father Christmas heard we had a Belgian expert, the assignment came winging its way here.’

  ‘Expert?’

  ‘Yes, of course, you,’ the Count had said, his face serious. ‘You know that part of the world like the back of your hand. That’s why I picked you for training in the first place.’ Otto had sighed. In the years to come he would learn that all the members of the Abwehr, and for all he knew, their opposite numbers in France and England, believed their own lies; it was one of their greatest faults.

  ‘Where will you begin?’ And then before Otto could explode, he had added, ‘Old Father Christmas had indicated to Gertie that there will be five thousand Reichsmark expenses in it, you know for travel, bribes etc., and a five-thousand-mark bonus on the successful delivery of the uniforms.’

  Otto’s mouth opened and closed abruptly like a drowning man gasping for breath before he went down for the third and last time. ‘Five-thousand-mark bonus!’ he had choked.

  ‘That’s what Old Father Christmas said. Now where will you start?’

  Otto hadn’t the faintest idea who old Father Christmas was. It couldn't be the Führer himself, could it? No, Hitler would never deal with such sensitive matters personally. Whoever th
is hidden director turned out to be, there was no escaping the fact he was offering a small fortune for this mission. That knowledge made Otto's mind race at a furious pace as he considered the mission seriously for the first time. He must get his hands on that money!

  Outside the mad map-reading instructor was burning away the foundations of the house with a blow torch and through the opening window, Otto could hear him moan, ‘My God, they're everywhere!’

  ‘Curious chap,’ the Count had commented, following the direction of Otto’s gaze. ‘Never touches a drop of the stuff either. Must be those damn grid references.’

  ‘I have a contact,’ Otto had said hesitantly, ‘in Belgium.’

  ‘I say, have you?’

  ‘Yes,’ he had lied glibly, emboldened by the knowledge that everyone in the Abwehr was crazy. ‘He has a large farmhouse not far from the German border.’ He thought of Emil’s tumbledown farmhouse and hoped there was no such thing as mental telepathy. ‘He’s a very high-ranking official,’ he finished off, sounding confident.

  ‘But can he be trusted? Old Father Christmas has said that there must be the strictest security for this operation.’

  ‘He’s virtually one of us.’

  ‘Good, you know your Belgium and your Belgians,’ the Count had conceded. ‘I’ll leave it up to you. Now what about your code-name?’

  ‘Code-name?’

  ‘Of course, can’t have an op without a code-name. Old Father Christmas wouldn’t like that one bit.’ The Count’s handsome brow had creased in thought; then he had clicked his fingers together excitedly. ‘Got it. What about Lobo?’

  ‘Lobo?’