Kobalt - WIP - Chapter 19: the Recruit
Vosges Mountains
1941
Spring
“Again.”
“My hand is going to fall off.”
“Again, chaton.”
Kat punched the sandbag again, her knuckles bloody, raw, and by now, numb. She had returned from the sanatorium two weeks before, conveyed by one of the Swiss resistance connections. Her foot was as healed as it was going to get, the institution’s single doctor only able to spare her a few hours a week to help her learn how to manage getting around on it.
It throbbed painfully all the time, but she’d managed to avoid infection. They’d been kind to her, but there was no question that she would never walk or run properly again. They’d offered to take her on as an administrative assistant, but Kat had a debt and intended to pay it. She thanked them, curled up in the boot of the smuggler’s sedan, and arrived three hours later in this little mountain camp, stinking of petrol fumes and sweat.
Jerome Masson had barely concealed his surprise, but the Brideux twins welcomed her to the group without a hint that they’d ever doubted her. Now she was as recovered as she could be, ruining her hand on sand filled burlap.
Jeanette set the bag aside, and nodded to the soapy bucket of water. “Wash you paws, little cat. Then I’ll show you how to clean your claws.”
“But I still don’t understand the point of this,” Kat said as she winced, her split knuckles stinging as the soap contacted them. “I’ll never be able to punch a man hard enough to stop him. I’m not strong enough.”
“That’s not the point,” the older woman said, giving Kat a slap on the back that almost made her fall face first into the bucket. “Now, look at those men. Go on.”
Kat turned her eyes on the rest of the camp. They were deep in the mountain woods, too far from any German positions to be easily detected, so the men and women of the camp were lounging about openly, cleaning weapons, trading gossip, or else turning rabbit over small fires.
“What about them?”
Jeanette leaned down to speak into her ear. “They all think with their cocks. Even the queers. Especially the queers, only they’re thinking about each other with their cocks.”
“What has that to do with — “
“See Jerome over there? Flirting with that airhead Brigitte?”
Kat spotted their wireless operator and sometime-captain, chatting with a pretty brunette girl a little older than herself. “Yes.”
“Well, she’s not an airhead, she’s one of our best undercover agents. She can walk through any Vichy town, into any Vichy mansion. She’s unlocked more back doors for us than anyone. But Jerome’s been gone on assignment since we recruited her, so he thinks he’s got a student on his hands, and not a master.”
“You think because he wants to… ?”
“They can’t help it,” Jeanette said with a grin. “Even when they’re trying, they’re vulnerable.”
As Kat watched Jerome hunch down next to the pretty young spy, she thought she understood. She turned to her mentor. “It’s smart, Brigitte pretending she’s interested him.”
“Maybe she is interested in him,” Jeanette suggested. “Maybe she goes to bed with him, who knows. She’s new, as far as he knows. We haven’t told him about her, but say she fucks him. Maybe smart for her, as long as she doesn’t think with her pussy.”
“Not so good for him,” Kat pointed out.
“Not for a lot of German officers, either,” Jeanette grinned. “Little Bride of Blood, we call her. None of her boyfriends live long.”
“But Jerome is not an enemy.”
“He’s a fighter. A strong fighter. Brave. Committed. But right now, he needs to be reminded not to think with his cock. He lets a beautiful woman distract him, his performance in the field suffers.”
“I see.”
“You’re going to remind him,” Jeanette said decisively. “Go over there and punch him.”
Kat stared at her. “What?”
“Not his pretty face. Right there under the ribs. Get good and close to him, my limping princess. Cleanse his doubt of your combat readiness.”
Jeanette gave her a little push, and Kat felt suddenly dizzy. She tucked her walking stick under her arm, and malingered a little near the fire, but she could fell the older woman’s eyes on her. She looked sidelong at Jerome, but he was busy pointing out various members of the camp to Brigitte.
“Ah, Katerina,” he said, rising with a smile. “You’re looking well. How—“
She didn’t think. She moved into him as though planning an embrace, then punched him directly in the solar plexus. He gasped, doubled, and fell to his knees. The blow, a short punch, had been more effective than she’d anticipated. He glared up at her in astonishment and confusion, but was unable to rise or speak.
Brigitte, the Bride of Blood, giggled and clapped her hands together like a happy little child, showing a slightly gap-toothed grin.
“You bitch!” Jerome muttered as soon as he was able to get his breath back. “Why — ?”
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” Kat simpered. “Jeanette said I should practice on you. You’re so hard, I thought I was going to hurt my hand.”
He looked up at her, his eyes narrowed, his face colouring. He turned his head, squinting over her shoulder at someone behind her.
“Jeanette. You sent an assassin after me.”
“Chaton,” Jeanette said, clapping hands to her shoulders. “Now Jerome sees the power of a pretty cripple, and he’ll never underestimate you again. Brigitte already knows this, I think.”
The girl shrugged and smiled, holding Jerome’s pocket watch in her hand. He looked around at her, at his fellow commander, and Kat, his expression twisting up into a painful smile.
“This is a rout. A conspiracy.”
Kat, feeling a little guilty, extended her hand to him. He raised an eyebrow at her, his eyes going to her bound, twisted foot.
“I’m strong enough,” Kat told him. “You aren’t going to break me.”
He gave a little smile in the corner of his mouth, then took her hand. She braced herself along her good side, engaging all of the muscle she had built in her month at the hospital in Bern. She kept her balance and remained steady as he pulled himself up. He put his hand over his belly and winced.
“You hit like a brick, little girl.”
Behind him, Jeanette mimed holding a large penis at her crotch, and rolled her eyes. Kat bit down on her lip, tried, then failed to prevent herself from laughing. She caught Brigitte’s eye and soon she was the one doubled over, both of them giggling like the school girls they would have been in other lives. Together they cackled until they choked, ignoring the stares.
Wiping her face on her sleeve, Kat straightened. It had been so long since she’d expressed any spontaneous feeling of joy, so long since she’d felt like it was even possible. She sat down in Jerome’s place, turned her face up to his and saw him looking down at her with an expression of tight focus.
“What?” she demanded, blinking back tears from her fou rire.
“You’re coming with me tonight,” he said, giving her a mean grin. “It’s time you proved yourself for real, little chaton. Don’t look at Jeanette,” he warned good-naturedly. “Look at me.”
Kat frowned, taking her eyes off Jeanette and looking back at Jerome. “Tonight?”
“There’s a game forest three kilometres to the south. It includes a very fancy chateau, and some very fancy Germans have decided to have themselves a fancy little weekend.”
“Shouldn’t we attack them together, in force?” Kat said, but Brigitte tsked, making her look around. “What?”
“They aren’t hunting game,” Jeanette said, serious now. “They know we’re in the area, but they don’t want to come visit us here until their infantry arrives tomorrow evening. They’ve got a strong position there and a lot of resources. It’s a good forward base.”
“Then shouldn’t we should move camp?”
“We take the chateau,” Brigitte piped up. “The advance guard brought supply with them. Lots of provisions, lots of weapons. I saw on my way here. Do you have a cigarette?”
Kat reached into the pocket of her frock, but looked up to see the girl had lifted her smokes. She grinned again as she grabbed one out of the pack with her bucked teeth, and handed them back.
“We have to move camp anyway,” Jerome said, reaching out to light the girl’s cigarette. “And we need to strip that chateau. But they’re expecting us in force, so what do we do?”
“I’m not right for this,” Kat said at once. “I’m conspicuous. I can’t run fast. I’m—“
“You, Katerina,” he said with a smile. “Are a German beauty of unimpeachable pedigree, and Jeanette says you are a developing into a crack shot. A little sore in the back paw, yes, but it’s so easy for a pretty fraülein to twist an ankle up in these mountains.”
“Both of you will take care of the four officers and the guards,” Jeanette said, making in an instruction. “Half of us will catch the convoy on the road, bleed them while they run right to you. The rest of will rendezvous at the chateau, and we’ll see how they like what we’ve got waiting for them.”
“And you?” Kat looked Jerome over, cocking an eyebrow. “What are you? My guide? My servant?”
“I’m your father’s servant,” he said with a smile. “He’s a German contractor operating a munitions factory in Lorraine. I am charged with taking you to his villa.”
“And to protect you,” Brigitte piped up. “From us.”
“Let me guess,” Kat said dryly, annoyed by the predictability. “We accidentally got lost in the woods together.”
“Stupid as a buck and doe in heat,” Jerome confirmed. “You’ve killed an SS at close range. Can you do this again?”
She met his eyes. Met the scrutiny there, the single minded intensity. The hint of some deeper intention, but Kat felt equal to it. She might have feared him once, feared being alone with him, a proven fighter and killer. But she had just decked him, and she could do it again if she had to.
As for the prospect of coming up against the SS, the idea made her mouth water. She wouldn’t have imagined a month ago that she would take a single lurching step in the direction of any of them, but if there was even the slightest chance of meeting any of the men of Frühlingsmorgen, she was hungry for it. She dreamed often of killing them as she ought to have done — neat, orderly, and comprehensively. Five bullets for five fascists.
She slept in the women’s camp as usual, managing to snatch a few hours before Jeanette’s sister Lorelei woke her. She dressed as Lorelei told her to dress, in a green check frock that was pretty and flattered her, but wouldn’t trip her up or give her away too easily in the woods. She was also given a walking stick of pine, dense but light enough to be wielded.
Jeanette herself ensured that Kat’s high shin-high boots were properly laced, her twisted foot supported well enough for the task. “Good hunting, my girl. Make Auntie Jeanette proud.”
Jerome waited for her at the edge of the clearing, with the heavy canvas bag containing his Wireless #18 set. There was no path down to their destination, but it would be easy enough to navigate the slope under the tall evergreens. He extended a pistol to her, a revolver that would go into a holster sewn into her coat, and an automatic Astra 600 9mm pistol that would go on her other side, ensuring the coat would weigh evenly.
“It will be different,” he said as they started down the dark slope. “Not like shooting at dummy targets.”
“I expect they’ll bleed more.”
“You talk fierce, little girl,” he said as he kept pace with her. “But actions talk louder.”
“Do you always flirt with your mission partners?” she wondered, keeping her eyes open for the promised road. “Or is this just your revenge for getting sucker-punched?”
“I wasn’t aware that looking forward to watching you kill these men was a form of flirtation.”
She smiled, and put her hand over the place where the revolver was secreted. It was like the one she had used on Baier, and she admitted silently that she was also looking forward to using it.
“Here,” he took her arm, helped her navigate over some sliding shale.
“Thank you,” she said, for once not feeling the need to bite back that she didn’t need help. It was dark and they were on a mission. She didn’t relinquish his hand, as his eyesight was keener than hers. “How did you become… what are you, even? A captain?”
He laughed softly. “We don’t really have ranks, cherie. But I have killed a lot of Germans and I know the area.”
“Before, though,” she pressed, releasing his hand now that she had found a reliable pine needle covered track. “You had some kind of life, didn’t you?”
His grin was just visible in the gloom. “Why, what did Jeanette tell you?”
“That you think with your cock.”
“Is that why she told you to gut-punch me?”
“I think that was just for fun.”
“I was a carpenter at the Paris Opera,” he said in a clipped tone. “I was other things too, of course.”
“Criminal things?”
“It was a bad time, Kat,” he said reproachfully. “When you have mouths to feed, you make certain decisions.”
Wife and children, she thought, wondering if they were still in Paris, or if they’d managed to get out of the country. If anyone was aware of Jerome’s present occupation, Kat imagined it would endanger them. She decided not to ask.
“I was a student,” she said lamely. “I suppose I hadn’t much of a life to give up, but I liked it.”
“Frédéric Monteux told me you liked to torture him,” Jerome said with another grin.
“I did like to torture him,” she conceded with a smile. “How do you even know him?”
“He apprenticed for me in the city before the war, then came back out to Alsace to work for his father.”
“That’s why you volunteered to take my message.” Kat leaned on her walking stick as she moved, her foot already throbbing. It was irritating and painful, but she was too full of nervous energy to give it much heed.
“It was good of you,” Jerome said quietly. “To think of him, even with that bullet in your foot.”
“I didn’t — “ Kat stopped herself, unsure of why she was telling him this. “It was never like that. We were friends.”
“I’ve had friends like that. Sometimes it’s easier than being in love.” He stopped her reply, putting a hand across her shoulders. “Look.”
Through the trees, dimly visible in the pre-dawn blue, was an extremely ugly cement building its own grounds. It was walled from all directions, its facade busy with scrolling columns and carved figures. They were still far enough above it to easily see the two staff cars and a heavily laden covered truck within the walls. There was exactly one guard posted, and even from here it was obvious by his posture indicated he was asleep.
“All right, chaton,” Jerome said in a low voice. “I’m sending you down there. It’s up to you how you want to play it. You can try and sweet talk him, or you can make the work shorter.”
It was tempting to just sidle up to the man as she’d done to Jerome earlier, and put her knife in his gut, but there was a lot of open ground between the gate and the front door. Better to have the guard take them into the building than risk being seen from its windows without him. The sudden illumination of windows in the mid-level made her certain.
“Follow me,” she said to Jerome. “Then sit down once you’re out of the trees, like you’re out of breath and dead tired.”
“Yes. Good.”
She decided to stick to her strengths, deciding to march right up to the sleeping soldier. She scrutinized him. He was some kind of infantry rank, probably also one of the drivers. That meant there was likely another one of him to go with the other staff car, and a third to man the supply truck. Including the four officers, that made seven men they’d need to dispatch.
The SS men, she knew, would be awake over their maps. They were expecting their soldiers to arrive ready to fight the attack they’d been led to believe was forthcoming. As she considered this, a new idea occurred to her.
“Jerome,” she said in an undertone. “Give me your pistol, and your belt.”
She mimed holding someone hostage. He saw her meaning at once, and to his credit, didn’t hesitate. He set his wireless behind a bush, then put his arms behind his back. She looped the belt around his wrists, making sure it appeared tight without actually constraining him. Then, holding the pistol to his head, she marched him up to the sleeping guard.
“You!” she barked in German, bringing the man at once to attention. “This bastard and his friends stole my car and robbed me. Take me to your commanding officer at once.”
The guard, drowsy and confused, needed the order repeated, but once he got the gist, he hopped to with surprising efficiency. In no time they were across the small park, and through the front doors, instructed to wait outside the study where the herr officers were currently meeting. Jerome was forced to his knees, and Kat leaned on her walking stick, twisting it in anxiety.
One of them, an aged Sturmbannführer, opened the door and blinked at them. The guard attempted to explain, but Kat cut across him, meeting the grizzled officer’s eyes and repeating the story, but adding one additional detail.
She offered the Sturmbannführer the Astra, grip first. “He has more friends in the mountains, so I thought I should bring him along. Do you have a telephone? I should like to call my father.”
He accepted the pistol, bemused.“Yes, we… of course, Fraülein—“
“Krupp,” she said, calculating for maximum nepotism, then gave him a hard stare while he processed the implication.
“Any relation to…?”
“Niece,” she said, hoping he wasn’t too familiar with the family. “I was supposed to be in Paris by now.”
“Through here. Gentleman, please,” said the old Sturmbannführer to the three younger officers, indicating that they roll up their maps. “You, guard, take him to the basement.”
Kat took her time, limping painfully towards the corner of the grand library. The eyes of all of the young grey-uniformed men were on her, even as they tried to quickly roll up their maps. She assessed them in her peripheral vision, none of them familiar to her.
“Are you injured, Fraülein?”
“It’s a sprain,” she said lightly.
The old man bent to the telephone, waiting for her to provide him with a number. She held up a finger, then, as though reaching for a pocket notebook, she drew out the revolver instead.
At first, they didn’t seem to register her action. It was as though the world had slowed down, none of them quite comprehending what was happening, giving her all the time in the world to take aim. Her first shot went through the Sturmbannführer’s chest, sending him to the floor. She’d thought it would have thrown him back, but he just collapsed like a bag of potatoes falling off the back of a truck.
The others flinched, still halfway caught in the meaningless act of rolling paper, all of them too slow to dive for cover. She fired two quick shots, blowing red holes in their grey uniforms, sending blood spattering across the book shelves behind them. She absorbed the kickback effortlessly, felt clarity of vision even as the smell of blood and punctured viscera began to rise in her nose.
The last man regained his senses and tried to run for the door. She extended her arm, sighted down the barrel and fired her fourth shot into the back of his neck. He went down on the gaudy marble floor of the entrance hall, blood pumping from the wound like water from a gardening hose.
She paused for a moment, and absorbed the scene in a fragmentary comprehension. Glassy eyes, the occasional twitch. A wedding ring here, a gold wristwatch. The one across the table from her, the youngest, had cut himself shaving.
“The others will have heard the shots,” Jerome said from the door. There was blood spray on his vest from his recent self-liberation. He held up his knife, indicated with it where she should position herself.
Kat slid to one side of the tall windows, reaching out to grab the Astra from the table. She watched as the two figures ran full tilt, heading straight for the front door with their side arms drawn.
They saw Jerome first, saw that he was armed only with a knife. He was quick as he made a dash for the lower stairs, drawing them on. The two men charged directly into the hall. Kat braced the automatic in both hands and fired two shots. They dropped with that same, almost comical abruptness, and lay shivering alongside their superior officers, their blood spreading out on the marble floor.
“Hurry, the maps,” she remembered, tearing her gaze away from the dying men. “Before they get too stained.”
“Gather them,” Jerome said, squeezing her shoulder. “I’ll check to see if there’s anyone else here.”
It was a large house, and it transpired that most of the rooms hadn’t been opened for the season. The house staff hadn’t been called in from the village, which was a stroke of good luck. Going by the clumsy steps through the dust, the three infantrymen had been made to prepare things. Kat had most of the papers and maps gathered and tied up by the time Jerome returned to the room.
“Jesus Christ,” he said, crossing himself as he saw the bodies sprawled on the table or else collapsed on the floor. “Jeanette was right. You shoot like the angel of death.”
“Help me with this,” she said, pushing the bundle into his arms. “I need to sit down.”
Without thinking, she shoved one of the listing men out of his chair, and positioned it before the window. She watched through the window as Jerome jogged to the perimeter wall, then returned with his wireless. The blue pre-dawn murk was slowly lifting, and there was just enough light for her to see what he was doing as he adjusted it, and tapped out a quick message.
“Someone in the village will send a rider to Jeanette. Then they’ll wait until dark to move out.”
Kat frowned. “Why not immediately?”
“Tree cover is thick where they are,” Jerome said as he packed up the machine and beckoned her back inside. “But we can count on the Luftwaffe to send a scout plane. In fact…”
He sized up the dead men. Kat followed his gaze, saw his object was the uniform. She watched, feeling detached and not quite human as he wrestled the grey and black SS uniform off the man who had fallen across the table.
“Crack the window so we can hear, chaton,” he said. “Help me with this.”
He took only the jacket, deciding that his dirty brown trousers wouldn’t make much of a difference from the viewpoint of anyone watching from above, and set it beside the door. Kat, meanwhile, propped herself on the table and looked into the face of one of the men she had killed, turning her head sideways as she tried to understand it.
His look of dismayed surprise was enhanced by the way his jaw seemed to hang to the side. He looked to be about forty to her, his eyes a dull blue, his face already drained of colour. His short brown hair was perfectly ordinary. His face, too, unremarkable. No indication there of what he had believed, or the things he might have done.
He was the one who had cut himself shaving. Just a little nick under the jaw. It was that small, insignificant detail, the image of that tiny human moment, that sent her staggering to the corner of the room. She dropped down on her knees and vomited her small breakfast into the antique waste bin, feeling acid burn up her throat as her stomach heaved.
She sat awkwardly on her knees, pushing the tears away from her face. She wasn’t crying, exactly, but her eyes watered, and she felt pressure in her chest, like she was struggling to get enough air. She couldn’t quite understand it, because she felt no emotional connection to the lives she had just taken, these men who wore the uniform of the enemy. Did that make them enemies in truth, or just by affiliation? Was that the question that was hurting her, somewhere that she couldn’t reach?
She turned to see Jerome bending next to her, and looked away, ashamed to have shown such weakness. “Kat,” he said gently, and put a leaded crystal glass filled with water into her hand. “It’s all right, ma chere.”
She rinsed out her mouth, then spat it into the bin. She allowed him to help her up, turned her eyes to look again at the corpses arrayed around the room.
“Come on, let’s go into the other room.”
“No,” Kat said fiercely. “No, I have to look. I can’t let this make me hesitate. I’m staying here.”
He put a hand on her shoulder and met her eyes. The look on his face was strange, the feeling of his warm fingers through her sleeve bringing her back to herself, to her own living flesh.
“Look at them, then,” he said, his arm sliding around her shoulders, one hand pushing back her hair from her damp forehead. “Think of them if they reached our camp. Think about what they’d do. Where they’d send those they didn’t kill. Where they’d send you, chaton. That’s why they came here.”
“I know,” she whispered, trying in her mind to reanimate them, to hear them barking out orders. To see them lining up her friends on their knees. Giving the orders to fire.
But it was Jerome’s arms braced around her that made her feel her reality. He was warm, his breath steady. He was very alive, even more so than these men had been while they had still been breathing. The effect of his closeness surprised her, giving rise to an intoxicating warmth in her belly that she hadn’t experienced for the better part of a year. Not since she’d last seen Frédéric, since she’d last kissed him in that green hollow. This was a very strange place to be experiencing it again, but the man, she thought, was not so different.
“You don’t have to pretend for me,” he said into her ear. “You’re very brave, but this is not nothing. Not for anyone.”
She glared at him. “What, you want me to faint?”
“You don’t have to prove anything,” he said in a low voice, his eyes intent on her. “You’ve shown your courage more than enough.”
The lulling intimacy in his voice suggested a very tempting offer, but Kat knew better than to negotiate any new alliance in her present state of mind. Carefully, she disentangled herself, looking at him now from an arm’s length. He looked back at her with undisguised hunger. She wasn’t frightened of it, she found. There was, she thought, something just slightly fearful in him. He wasn’t unscathed by today’s events, and she understood his lustful feeling was a different kind of deflection.
Wanting to emphasize this, she gripped his collar and moved into him as though leaning in for a kiss. Instead, she touched her balled fist to his belly, just under the ribs, giving him a look of gentle warning. Reminding him what she could do if he became distracted by ideas of entitlement, of ownership. He smiled balefully at her, seeming to take the point. A faint droning sounded from somewhere in the distance, growing steadily louder.
He grinned. “Told you. Stay inside the house.”
He went over to the man on the floor. He’d twisted as he’d fallen, landing on his side. Jerome bent and fished a blood stained case of cigarettes from his inner pocket. He then took the mostly clean jacket he’d stashed by the door, hung it over his shoulders and stepped outside.
Kat watched as, casual as anything, he lit a cigarette for himself and watched the low flying Fi 156 Storch circle overhead. To her slight horror he even gave it a little wave. She stayed out of sight, but she could easily see the plane making its rounds, each wider and wider as it covered the mountains where her friends were hiding. She hoped everyone was well concealed, that someone had doused the fire. Of course they had, she knew. They weren’t fools. All of them were more experienced than her, and she was grateful for it. Finally, the Storch broke its concentric pattern, and turned westward, its droning fading away as it went.
Jerome ashed his cigarette and headed inside. “We’ll be here for some time. If anyone calls that telephone, do you think you can play the confidential secretary?”
“I can do it with the maps, I think,” she said, though she was not all sure.
“Help me set up the wireless, then. Between the two of us we should be able to feed the illusion.”
She felt his hand go to the small of her back, lingering there as he followed her into the upholstered abattoir.
