Before I pulled on chinos and T-type shirt (Lord knows why, but I’d stuck with military underwear, and this undershirt with short sleeves had been washed a hundred or more times) I checked all the guns in the room, making sure they were oiled and loaded, even though they were always kept that way. Still shaky after nearly being caught out that morning, I guess.
Taking the .45 from its jacket holster and tucking it into my waistband, I left the suite and limped barefoot through the third-floor corridors and hallways, checking stairwells and windows all round the building. Because the Savoy was really in two parts, I couldn’t look over the main drag outside, the Strand, without going down and up again, but that didn’t bother me. I was certain the hotel was secure, otherwise there’d have been a reception committee waiting for us when we returned. I scouted the place pretty well though, and didn’t go back to my rooms until I was satisfied there was no hostile incursion. Ankle throbbing like hell along with other parts of me – the bruise over my chest felt like a thick sheet of lead had been bolted there – I poured myself a whisky, using a glass this time, but still taking it raw. It did me fine.
Still tired, but feeling a little better, I washed some glasses and the accumulation of plates and dishes I’d collected over time in the bathroom sink, then began to prepare chow for myself and my unwelcome guests. I think I would have slept twenty-four hours solid if I’d closed my eyes, so I didn’t allow it I kept going because that was the only thing to do, and besides, I was so hungry a horse would’ve only made first course.
The German showed up first, politely rapping on the door and waiting for me to open it. He’d found fresh duds from somewhere – white shirt, dark slacks, but the same brogues he’d been wearing that morning – and if they looked a little snug on him, it didn’t matter, he still wore them well. He’d shaved too, and his hair was slicked back with water so that it looked shiny, kind of sleek. Although he looked nothing like the German actor Conrad Veidt, the image kept coming back to me; maybe it was his manner, stiff, watchful, arrogant, and yeah, even charming in a snake-like way. I wasn’t gonna admit it to myself then, but all that propaganda had worked on me as it had on most people on our side of the conflict, and I didn’t want to be persuaded otherwise. Hatred has its own fodder, and I was a pig for it
Inviting him in, I told him to help himself to a drink. He opened a bottle of wine.
We hardly spoke a word to each other, but I felt his eyes on me as I got on with cooking and he sipped the wine. Albert Potter appeared next, shuffling in without announcement, still in his blue overalls, helmet tucked under his arm. Making straight for the coffee table, he poured himself the same brand of hooch as before. The conversation didn’t exactly flow even then, mainly because of the tension between myself and the German.
The girls arrived ten minutes later, both of them looking a whole lot prettier than when they’d emerged from the tunnels. The wife of whoever had once occupied the suite next door had great taste in fashion, and it looked like the husband hadn’t been mean with her dress allowance. The girls’ outfits were simple but classy.
Muriel wore a light green knee-length skirt, cream square-shouldered blouse tucked into the waist, the ensemble a little looser than Cissie’s who was, well, a little more up-holstered. Don’t get me wrong – both girls were slim, but Cissie had been given more curves. Her pleated skirt fell just below the knees and she wore a matching jacket, despite the heat (I think she wanted to make the most of what she’d found in the closets), with a white blouse underneath. Neither one wore stockings, though I was willing to bet the previous tenant had plenty – that was their one concession to the climate, I assumed – and both balanced on high heels that did a lot for the shape of their legs. I had to admit it was swell to see the female form looking so goddamn good again, although it went no further than that for me. Not at that time, anyway.
Their hair gleamed from fresh grooming, Muriel’s light-brown locks curling round one cheek, Cissie’s darkly vibrant curls resting over her shoulders. The thin scar line across her face was barely noticeable as she smiled at us three men.
The German, who’d cleared an easy chair for himself when he’d entered the room, stood to attention. ‘It is wonderful to know that such beauty still exists,’ he said to them with oily sincerity.
Cissie ignored him, following the warden’s example by heading straight for the cocktail bar – the booze-laden coffee table where Potter was holding fort. He tipped his glass at her in greeting.
‘Give me something strong, long and life-preserving,’ she begged. ‘Something I can regret tomorrow.’
‘Well there’s gin, but I can’t see no tonic,’ said Potter, lifting bottles and scouring the collection in front of him.
She looked at me accusingly and I said lamely, ‘There’s no call for it.’
‘All right,’ she said. ‘Open a tin of peaches and use the juice. I’m a girl who’s used to roughing it.’
For the first time that day I grinned. I quickly found the right can and punched a hole in its top with the opener, then handed it to Potter, who’d already worked on the gin.
‘Ice would have been perfect,’ Cissie complained jokingly, ‘but I suppose the Savoy isn’t what it used to be. Mu, I expect it’s champagne for you?’
It was as if a shadow had darkened her friend’s face. ‘A glass of wine will do,’ she responded quietly, and I remembered she and her father had toasted her mother’s memory with champagne in this very hotel.
‘Vino it is,’ piped Potter, picking up the bottle already opened by Stern. ‘And a very sensible choice, if I may say so. Leave the hard stuff to reprobates like me.’
‘And me,’ piped Cissie.
They drank and watched me cooking over the small stoves on the floor, no one saying anything for a while. I think that initial coolness between us all was due to something more than just unfamiliarity: I think it was because there was no trust between us yet, despite what we’d been through together that morning. Even though we were the survivors of a scourged world, we weren’t sure of each other, we weren’t comfortable in each other’s presence. It was different between the two girls – they were already friends – but the rest of us were strangers. Heck, one was even an alien, a Kraut at that. Just sharing the same blood type wasn’t enough, not by a long chalk. Part of the problem, for the girls I mean, was that in a depleted society, our gender roles took on a whole new significance, and they weren’t quite ready for that just yet. None of us were. And to add to the girls’ discomfort, they couldn’t be sure if any of the men they were with were quite sane.
The ice only began to break when I started serving up the food.
9
THE INFORMATION didn’t come out like this; it was in no sense as concise and dispassionate. The evening developed in its own easy way, you see, after a while people just gabbing when they felt like it, their bellies a little fuller, their heads a little mellowed by the booze; a person could be maudlin one minute, cold-blooded the next, emotional after that, a real mixture of sentiment and hard fact. Regret figured a lot, nostalgia for the good things now gone even more; but grief, having had three years to settle, was pretty much subdued. Here’s what most of that evening’s parley amounted to.
First Cissie, her whole name Cicely Rebecca Briley. Like me, she was of mixed parentage, her father English, mother Jewish. Her folks had run a public house in Islington and she had helped out behind the bar (illegally, of course) until old enough to find herself proper employment, one that might help the war effort. That was back in ‘41 and she was sixteen at the time. With most of the able menfolk off fighting the war, the country was crying out for women to fill the men’s jobs, so Cissie began her working life on a lathe in an engineering company.
On the same day the factory was bombed and a flying piece of metal scythed across her face, her parents’ pub was demolished by another pilotless plane – these were the doodlebugs, the flying bombs, the first German V1s to be used on England and Belgium
in June ‘44. Henry Briley was dead when the Heavy Rescue squad dug him out of the rubble, but his wife, Rachel, Cissie’s mother, survived almost another three days with both legs and pelvis crushed, and one arm missing. Cissie’s stay in hospital was only overnight – beds were needed for the seriously ill or injured – and when she left there was no home to go to. It took her two days to locate the hospital they’d taken her mother to, and by that time Rachel was dead. Home gone, parents gone, job gone, there wasn’t much left for Cissie. She moved in with relatives and joined the ambulance service, channelling all her anger and grief into the work and quickly realizing hers was not the only tragedy of this devastating war. Within a year and with Hitler losing, the V2s replaced the V1s; and then everything changed.
Naturally she couldn’t figure out why everybody around her was dropping dead even though the rocket bombs were falling in other parts of the city; but then, nobody could at first, not even the military or the government itself. All hell had broken loose, but the panic was short-lived, as short-lived as the people themselves. It was horrific, a hideous nightmare, the deaths so sudden and so gruesome to watch; and not knowing if they were going to be next added to everyone’s terror. Soon, because Cissie remained healthy while everyone else was dead or dying, she was taken into hospital and blood-tested. Before she knew what was happening she was in the back of a truck with a bunch of other ABneg blood types being driven down to the special sanatorium in Dorset, and it was in the truck that she made friends with Muriel Drake, a fellow passenger and blood kind.
All manner of tests were carried out on the ABnegs at the sanatorium, but still no scientist or medical officer could figure out why they were immune from whatever it was that had been released by the V2 rockets. To make progress towards a solution even more difficult, those very same investigators were falling dead themselves, and it was only when a couple of medics with the immune blood type were found that any sustained research was achieved. Another problem was that it was only in the last decade that truly extensive research was being carried out on blood groupings, so very little was already known. Now they were learning fast, but it was too late.
It seemed the disease, gas, poison, virus – the military still didn’t know what had been inside those last V2s – worked on the blood system, stimulating the chemical reaction that caused coagulation so that, within minutes in most cases, the blood hardened inside the large veins of the bigger muscles, this leading to – and it was Muriel who remembered the term – thromboembolism. The veins in the heart, lungs, brain, as well as other less life-threatening areas, were completely blocked, while minor veins became engorged. It meant that because of the blockages, the excessive free-flowing blood had nowhere to go and nowhere to return to – ‘venous occlusions’, Muriel called that effect – so massive swellings and leakages occurred all over the body. The cramping pains victims suffered because of this were excruciating, rendering many unconscious before death itself claimed them.
So, they realized anti-coagulant therapy would be ineffective, because it would only promote further haemorrhaging, and clotting drugs would only intensify the thrombosis. And they still hadn’t discovered why AB negative blood refused to react to the Blood Death, why they themselves, and their human guinea pigs, were immune. You have to remember that all the advanced nations of the world were desperately working on a solution, an antidote, any kind of cure, the Allied countries keeping in close contact with one another, but none so far had come up with an answer. Time had run out swiftly, and eventually the remaining doctors in the sanatorium ran out too. One day they just walked, leaving no note, no explanations, no excuses. They’d realized it was hopeless.
For the guinea pigs left behind it was almost a relief. No more tests, no more blood drained from their bodies to be taken away in glass tubes, no more tissue samples cut out, no more needle jabs – and no more vanishing into the sanatorium’s special, restricted wing where, it was believed but never confirmed, because no patient ever came back, operations were performed on the ABnegs (the rest suspected that experimental blood transfusions were being carried out). When those principal doctors fled, all order went with them. First the soldiers guarding the ‘inmates’ – no ABnegs had stayed on voluntarily after the first week – had absconded, soon followed by all the remaining staff and researchers. These people knew by then that death was hanging over every one of them, and they could think of better places to be when it happened.
Soon after, the guinea pigs, about a hundred in all, went their separate ways. Cissie and Muriel decided to stick together.
Muriel Drake was from a higher branch of society than Cissie, although even as a daughter of a lord she had been treated no differently from anybody else at the sanatorium (panic is classless, I guess). For whatever reasons, the two girls got along and did a lot to keep up each other’s morale in those terrible days. Like everybody else, they’d lost family and friends, and at the sanatorium they never knew when an amiable nurse or guard was going to cash in their chips right in front of them. Now that the place was emptying fast, they made their plans together.
Muriel’s mother, Lady Daphne Drake, had been struck down in the first year of the war, but not by anything the mad Führer had sent over. A No 14 bus had knocked down Lady Daphne as she’d tried to cross Piccadilly Circus during the Blackout, after she’d enjoyed Jack Hulbert singing for the conga and outwitting Nazi spies in Under Your Hat, the bus killing her instantly and leaving Muriel pretty much alone with her father, Lord Montague Drake – Muriel’s two older brothers, who had joined the Forces as soon as war was declared and much against their father’s wishes, were in other parts fighting the Germans, one with the navy, the other with an RAF squadron based on Malta. Muriel had not heard from either of her brothers since the Blood Death outbreak and, not knowing if they shared the same blood type as her, assumed they were both dead. Although the family home was in Hampshire, most of the time she had lived in their Kensington apartment; at seventeen she had joined the ATS, the Auxiliary Territorial Service, and was soon serving as a subaltern. Nothing heroic in that, she’d assured us: it was a natural role for any patriot. And hadn’t Princess Elizabeth herself joined the ATS just before her nineteenth birthday?
On the day the first Blood Death V2s had rained down, Muriel had been having lunch with her father at Simpson’s-in-the-Strand when the waiter, who had just served them with mulligatawny soup, which was to be followed by cold roast gosling and salad – strange, she had told us, how she had never forgotten that day’s menu despite the horror that had accompanied the lunch – had keeled over onto their table, his skin turning blue, the veins in his hands and temples protruding as if about to burst. His eyes had started to bleed.
Muriel, not unreasonably, had proceeded to scream the place down, while her father, who was attempting to help the distraught waiter by opening his shirt collar so that he could breathe more easily, suddenly clutched at his own heart. Her attention now solely on her father, Muriel hadn’t noticed that virtually everyone else in the restaurant was going through the same paroxysms, and when Lord Drake’s skin began turning blue, his hands and cheeks ulcerating at an unbelievable rate, his veins swelling like the waiter’s, she fainted. When she had eventually come round again, every person who had not fled the restaurant, including her father, was dead. She had run out into the street, out into a dying city, and only later did it occur to her that she hadn’t even heard the bombs drop.
Like Cissie, she was rounded up within days, blood-tested, then taken down to the Dorset sanatorium.
Even while this secret medical establishment was slowly being abandoned, she, Cissie and a few others had been reluctant to leave the security it offered, afraid of what they might find in the strange new world outside. But three years was a long time to be cooped up anywhere; also, rations were finally running low. Neither desperation nor bravery took them back to the capital though: it was homesickness that had done that.
And as they’d driven one of the few ve
hicles left behind at the sanatorium through the country lanes they had come upon Wilhelm Stern.
As we listened to the German tell his story, the sun sinking low over the Thames outside, flushing the walls of the suite a soft red and deepening the shadows, it seemed to me he was a little light on detail. Sure, he told it convincingly, but there was something about the guy that made me unwilling to trust him. The fact that I still regarded him as the enemy had a lot to do with it, right? Yeah, no doubt about that. But he’d said something back there in the tunnel that firmed up my suspicions.