“And neither of these two men knows how to drive?”
“No, they don’t. Not everyone can drive. I’ve told you that there have been arrests, we’ve had losses.”
“Very good. What else?”
“I’ll get word to you of the day and the place where you need to go to help us.”
Amelia went out to walk around the Acropolis, as the priest had told her to do. She didn’t know who would get in touch with her, all she knew was that she had to walk.
A car stopped next to her and she saw a woman’s face and heard a voice asking her to get in. She did so instinctively.
“Get down on the floor,” the woman sat next to the driver said.
“Where are we going?” Amelia asked.
“To find your car.”
She couldn’t see where they were going, all she felt was her stomach turning over from the twists and turns the car was making. They stopped after half an hour. She was surprised to see that they were in a garage.
“Get out, we’re here,” the woman said.
A man came hobbling toward them. He had a pistol in his belt.
“You’re late,” he said to them in Greek.
“We had to get past the patrols,” the driver said, and then he, pointing to Amelia, added in English, “She’ll take you.”
“Can you drive?” the limping man asked her, looking at her for the first time.
“Yes, fairly well.”
“You’ll have to do better than that,” the man said grumpily.
“Does it hurt?” the woman asked, looking at the man’s bandaged leg.
“That’s not important. The important thing is that I can’t drive.”
They showed Amelia an old black car parked nearby, and she was worried that she would not be able to handle it. Albert James had taught her in London and she had passed her driving test, but she had never really driven at all.
“Let’s go,” the lame man said.
The couple got back into the car and drove out first. Amelia suffered the humiliation of stalling the engine before she could even get the car started.
“Can you drive or can’t you?” the man said, annoyed.
“I’ve told you, I can, a little.”
“Well, come on, let’s go.”
He showed her the way to go. He seemed preoccupied and made no effort to be friendly.
“What’s your name?” Amelia asked him.
“What do you care? The less you know, the better.”
She fell silent, but she blushed with annoyance. The man seemed to regret having been so brusque.
“It’s for your own safety, you can’t tell anyone what you don’t know if they arrest you. But you’re right, you have the right to have a name you can use to get in touch with me. How about Costas?”
“I don’t care,” she said in annoyance to the tall dark man, who wore a bushy moustache.
“You are a British agent, you must be very good at it to live with a Nazi and not have anyone suspect you.”
She was going to defend Max, to say, again, that he was not a Nazi, just a soldier doing his job. But she knew that Costas wouldn’t understand, wouldn’t want to understand. For him all the Germans were the same, and Max wore the uniform.
“Are we going to pick up all the material?” she asked.
“Not all of it, a part. Other members of the group have already taken the rest. Last night. They’ve left us the explosives and the detonators. We’re going to blow up a convoy of tanks. You will be my driver, you’re not that bad at it.”
When they reached the warehouse where the weapons had been stored, the other couple was already there. The man was carrying boxes to his car, while the woman stood watch with a pistol.
“You will keep watch too. Get up there on that rock and tell me if you see anything strange. Take this,” he said, holding out a pistol.
“I don’t need it,” Amelia said, without daring to take it.
“Take it! What will you do if they discover us? Cry at them?” Costas shouted.
Amelia took the gun and climbed up on the rock without saying another word.
She waited impatiently for the two men to finish camouflaging the weapons in their cars, which took them around an hour. When they had finished, they made a sign to the two women.
On the way back to Athens, Amelia drove in silence; it was Costas who started to speak.
“The operation will take place in three days. We’ll put the charges in tomorrow morning. Then we’ll wait for them to pass and... Boom!”
“Good,” Amelia replied without too much enthusiasm.
“Are you scared?”
“It would be stupid for me not to be. You should be scared as well.”
“No, I’m not scared. Whenever I kill Germans I feel something in my gut, as if I were... bah! You’re a woman.”
“A woman who’s driving your car and is going to help you blow up a convoy.” Amelia couldn’t bear the lack of respect that Costas was showing her.
“Yes, women are brave as well, our female comrades in the Resistance don’t complain, they know how to obey orders and they don’t quake when they have to pull a trigger. We’ll see what you can do.”
“Why don’t you use your female comrades?” she asked in annoyance.
“The last roundup decimated our forces. My leg is a reminder, I had to jump over a wall with a bullet in my knee. Lots of us are in the hands of the Gestapo. They won’t get away alive.”
“And what if they speak?”
“They will never speak! We are Greeks.”
“I suppose that you are human beings as well.”
“So you would speak, then,” he said mistrustfully.
“How many times have you been arrested? How many times have you been interrogated by the Gestapo?” Amelia asked.
“No, they’ve never been able to catch me.”
“So don’t say what you would or wouldn’t do.”
“And what about you? How many times have you been arrested?” he replied in a mocking tone of voice that offended her.
She was about to stop the car and roll up her sleeves to show him the marks of the handcuffs on her wrists, or else roll down her stockings to show him her legs, but she did not, she realized that he was just like this, and did not speak to upset her.
“In three days’ time,” he reminded her when they said goodbye.
Max was in the bath when she got to the hotel.
“Where have you been?” he asked from the bathroom.
“Out for a walk. I went to the cathedral,” Amelia said, tensing up.
She let him carry on enjoying his bath and left the room to take advantage of the few minutes she had and photograph some of the documents he had spread out over the desk.
She didn’t even look at what she was taking photographs of. She had no time. She would give them to Dion as soon as she could.
The night before the Resistance operation, Max said he had to go away for a few days to a village where several German soldiers had fallen ill.
“I don’t know what it is, but I need to go and have a look.”
“When are you leaving?”
“Very early tomorrow morning. My adjutant will come to pick me up before dawn.”
“You look worried...”
“I am, I’m worried about how the war is going. In Berlin they refuse to see what is happening.”
“And what is happening, Max?”
“We might lose. It was a mistake to attack the Russians and we are now paying for it.”
Amelia gave a sigh of relief. She fervently hoped that Germany would lose the war, even though her main worry at the moment was how to leave the room without Max noticing. They hadn’t slept together since last night, because she had said that she was not feeling well. He had accepted her sleeping in the neighboring room, but was not happy about it and insisted that they kept the doors between their rooms open.
There was no problem now. Max would go at dawn, and she would go s
oon after. She had to go to Costas’s house, and from there they would go to the point the convoy would pass by in order to place the explosives. She calmed herself down by saying that she only had to drive.
Max came to her bedside to say goodbye, and kissed her on the forehead, thinking that she was still asleep. When he had left the room she got out of bed in a single bound. She was ready in fifteen minutes. Dion had given her a plan of the hotel with the service exits marked, so she could get out without being noticed. He had also given her a maid’s outfit. She had put it on, wrapped her hair in a scarf, and put on a pair of glasses that disguised her face.
She went out of the room and went to the service staircase. She was lucky, she only passed a grumpy waiter who was cross at having to serve breakfast so early. He didn’t even reply to her greeting.
She left the hotel and walked quickly until she reached Omonia Square, where the couple were waiting for her.
“You’re late,” the woman said.
“I came as soon as I could.”
They took her to Costas’s house. The man was waiting for them impatiently in the garage.
“Our friends will be asking where we are. We have the explosives,” he fumed.
Amelia didn’t know where they were going, she only followed Costas’s instructions. After a while they left the city and she was pleased to see the green shoots of spring on both sides of the road.
“This way... Look, you can see some houses over there, the rich people live there... It’s not so hot in the summer.”
Then he pointed out a sloping dirt road; Amelia was afraid that the car wouldn’t be able to climb up it. But they managed, and after driving for a while they came to a building that looked like a place where agricultural implements were stored. Costas told her to stop, and without warning five armed men appeared.
The lame man greeted them effusively and introduced them to Amelia. The men helped him to unload the explosives and the weapons they had carried in the couple’s car.
“It’s not bad,” said one of the men, who appeared to be the leader of this little group.
“What do you mean, it’s not bad!” Costas grumbled. “The English have done what they said they’d do, Dmitri; Churchill isn’t one of us, but he wants the same things.”
Costas gave Amelia a pistol and told her and the other woman to take some bicycles, which were leaning up against one of the walls of the building. They obeyed without question, they took the bicycles and walked with them into the pine trees until they reached the edge of the next road.
No one was coming by this spot, but Costas sent three men into strategic spots to keep watch, and told Amelia and the other woman to ride up and down the road on their bicycles, each one in a different direction, and if they saw anything they should say so at once.
They obeyed at once; as she was getting onto her bicycle Amelia saw them placing the explosives on either side of the road.
She thought she could hear the noise of truck engines, and left the road so that she could spy, in the distance, the military convoy slowly approaching. She pedaled as fast as she could back to where Costas and his men were working.
“They’re coming!”
“Hurry up! We have to finish, the bastards are nearly here!”
They went to hide in the trees and Costas made a sign to Amelia.
“We’ve put explosives in several places, and each of us will have a detonator. That way it’s safer; if one charge fails to go off then the others won’t. Come with me, I’ll show you which one is yours.”
“Mine? I don’t know anything about explosives...”
“All you have to do is push this switch when you hear my whistle. Just that. You can do it. It’s easier than driving. Then you know what you need to do. Run back to where we left the car; if I’m not there, then wait for me, and if I take longer than five minutes then go.”
“Without you?”
“I can’t run, not with my leg how it is. I’ll get along as best I can.”
“You shouldn’t be here,” Dmitri said, “but you have to be involved in everything, we couldn’t have done it without you.”
“Shut up, and help me get to the car when the time comes.”
“The doctor said that you could lose your leg if you keep on walking on it.”
“What do doctors know!” Costas said disdainfully.
The noise of the trucks and the cars was ever louder. Amelia took up her position. She was tense and tried not to think about what she was about to do. She knew that lots of men would die.
Costas had organized the explosives so that the convoy would be trapped by several explosions along the road.
Amelia saw trucks and cars drive past, followed by an official vehicle containing members of the Wehrmacht. When it came past she would have to set off her explosives. She held the mechanism tight, and looked down at the detonator, waiting for Costas’s whistle. When she heard it, she pushed the switch. The road became an inferno. Several vehicles were thrown up into the air, others set on fire, a tank blew up when its ammunition exploded. The fragments of various bodies were thrown dozens of meters away from the roadside. The flames devoured the remaining trucks, and the heartrending screams of the wounded mingled with the orders an officer was giving from the turret of a tank. She heard the whistle of bullets cutting through the pure morning air mix with the desperate cries of the wounded. She knew that now was the moment to run back to the place where the car was, but she was paralyzed when she looked toward the car where the officers had been traveling. A terrifying scream came from her throat.
“Max! Max!” she cried out wildly, running into the inferno. She didn’t think, she just knew that she had to get to the side of the road where Max was lying, covered in blood and flames. Amelia tried to put out the fire with her bare hands.
Costas saw Amelia running toward the road. “She’s mad,” he thought, “they’ll catch her and she’ll talk and then we’ll all be caught.” He aimed his pistol at her and saw her fall to the ground near one of the officers. Then he fled up the hill, supported by one of his comrades.
Amelia fell to the ground a few meters from where Max was lying. She was shouting: “What have I done! My God, what have I done!”
Caught up in his pain, Max thought he heard Amelia shouting, and thought that he must be dying, as he could hear her voice.
It was not a good day for the Germans: June 6, 1944, and a few hours earlier, on the beaches of Normandy, the Allies had begun their invasion.
When Amelia started to regain consciousness, she was in a hospital, and the first face that she could see was SS Colonel Winkler’s. She wanted to scream, but her voice was stuck in her throat.
“Wake her up, I need to interrogate her,” Winkler said to the doctor who was at her side, along with a nurse.
“You can’t interrogate her; she’s been in a coma for more than a month.”
“The safety of Germany is more important than whatever might happen to this one woman! She is a terrorist, a spy!”
“Whatever she is, she has been in a coma, I informed you just as you ordered, because it looks like her situation has been improving over the last few hours. But we will need to wait until we know if her brain has been damaged. Let me do my job, Colonel,” the doctor asked.
“It is a matter of the highest importance that I interrogate this woman.”
“In order to do it successfully, you will have to let me do my job; as soon as she can talk I will tell you.”
In spite of her state, Amelia could see the look of hatred in Colonel Winkler’s eyes, and so she closed hers.
“Now you will have to go, Colonel, or the patient may go back into her coma.”
The words seemed to reach her from a long way away. There were several men talking around her, but she did not want to open her eyes, afraid that one of them might be Winkler.
Several more weeks went by until Amelia was fully conscious once again. Every moment of consciousness was a pain to her, as she rem
embered Max and her soul burned within her. She couldn’t bear to think that she had killed him. She had pressed the detonator when the officers’ car had come past. Max’s bloody body as he fought against the flames came always to her mind’s eye, and she wanted to slip away into an eternal sleep.
But in spite of her desire to die, she kept on getting better, and while she did so she thought of the moment that would come when Colonel Winkler would return to interrogate her. She said to herself that they were bringing her back from death in order to send her back to death again, for that was all she could expect at the colonel’s hands, but she didn’t care. She said to herself that she deserved to die.
She had to make an effort to think, but her instinct told her that it was better to keep silent, that they would think that she could not speak because of the trauma she had suffered; better still, that they would think she had lost her memory.
The doctor saw her every day and consulted with his colleagues over which might be the best treatment to remove her from this vegetative state in which she appeared to be sunk. He suspected that she could hear him, that she understood him when he spoke, but that she did not want to answer him, although he could not prove that or be sure of it.
Amelia tried to look lost, as if she were sunk in her own world.
“Any news, Nurse Lenk?”
“None, Dr. Groener. She spends the whole day looking straight ahead. It doesn’t seem to matter if she’s in the bed or if we’re walking her around; she doesn’t seem to understand anything.”
“Anyway... Leave me with her for a moment, Dr. Bach needs help in his ward, go and give them a hand.”
Dr. Groener sat in a chair next to Amelia’s bed and looked closely at her. He saw her eyes moving, almost imperceptibly, as she kept her gaze unfocused and lost.
“I know you are in there, Amelia, that you are not confused and unconscious, even if you seem not to understand us. Colonel Winkler will come here soon to take you away and interrogate you. I have to let you go because I can’t do anything else for you. I would recommend that you be sent to some institution, although your future does not depend on me, but on the colonel.”