A small table by the window was stacked with bandages and dressings, along with a few bottles of medicines. A pile of books, one in Polish, rested on the nightstand.
“Stefan Grabin ski,” Kaz said. “He’s called the Polish Poe. Demon ruchu. The Motion Demon. Horror stories, not to my taste.”
“There’s horror enough,” I said. I flipped the pages of the other two books. One was a paperback, The Saint Goes On, by Leslie Charteris. I’d read a few of his books, and knew they were fairly easy reads. Maybe he was trying to improve his English. The other was a thicker hardcover, Selected Poems, by W. B. Yeats. That was heavier going, and I flipped through the pages, wondering at his wide-ranging interests. It opened to a bookmark at “The Circus Animals’ Desertion,” a poem I’d not heard of.
“Ah, Yeats,” Kaz said. “A famous Irish poet. Are you familiar with his work?”
“Not really. I don’t get this poem about circus animals, that’s for sure.”
“The meaning is in the last lines,” Kaz said, reciting them from memory.
Now that my ladder’s gone
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.
“He wrote it near the end of his life, about trying to recapture the creativity of youth,” Kaz said. “It speaks about returning to the elemental truths, I think.”
“He has those lines underlined,” I said, feeling easier talking about concrete truths.
“Poles have a deep understanding of poetry,” Kaz said, taking the book from my hands. “He knows Latin, too, if this is in his hand. Corpora dormiunt vigilant animae.”
“What’s that mean?” I asked, as Kaz showed me the inscription on the first page of the book.
“The bodies are asleep, the souls are awake.”
“Interesting guy,” I said. “Not that it matters.”
The nightstand also held a fountain pen and three small pebbles. Souvenirs of Poland, maybe? We looked under the bed, behind the chest of drawers, and found nothing but dust balls. Magazines and a radio in the sitting room. Coal in the bucket by the fireplace. Well-stocked larder and a few bottles of vodka to ease the pain. Nothing suspicious, just a chilly rural cottage with a decent stock of booze, books, and bandages.
“See anything out of the ordinary?” I asked Kaz.
“Nothing. It has a temporary look, no personal effects, but that fits with what we were told.”
We left, checking to be sure nothing was disturbed, and that we had locked the door behind us. The only evidence of our visit was a few scratches around the lock, where Big Mike had used his blade. Nothing a nurse or crippled pilot would notice.
“Waste of time,” I said to Big Mike.
“Worth checking out,” he said, like any good cop would. You never passed up a lead, no matter how slim. That’s how cases were solved. We drove back to the main road, turning south for Dover, belly landings and wild-goose chases behind us.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
We left Kaz at the Lord Nelson Inn, on Flying Horse Lane in Dover, not far from the docks that ran along the channel. Dover Castle loomed over the town from the heights to the east, an ancient gray fortress that had been called the Key to England since the days of Napoleon, maybe before. All three of us got rooms at the inn, since there wasn’t much of a tourist trade these days. Flying Horse Lane looked like a nice little side street, except for the building directly across from the pub that had taken a direct hit. The Germans still fired their big artillery pieces across the channel, aiming at the castle and hitting everything around it in the process. The front of the three-story structure was nothing but a mass of bricks, tumbled into the street. Stairs jutted out into thin air, and wallpaper fluttered in the sea breeze where it had torn away from the collapsed wall. A few men in blue coveralls worked at stacking the bricks, which meant this had been a recent hit. I hoped what they said about lightning held true for artillery shells.
I’d told Kaz to stay put, in case Scotland Yard had a long tail on us. We had passed a bookstore about a block from the inn, and Kaz said he’d only need a few minutes there and he’d be set to hole up in his room. The newly painted sign over the store window read FRONTLINE BOOK SHOP, and I got the feeling that folks here were proud to be closer than anyone else in England to the enemy, less than twenty-two miles across the channel.
Big Mike gunned the jeep up the steep road as we tried to figure out where the entrance was. The castle was huge, the outer walls and battlements encircling the hill above the town. There was an inner circle of fortifications, with the actual castle in the center of that. It looked like something out of Robin Hood, and I half expected to see knights on horseback. Instead, we came to a stop at an antiaircraft emplacement, where the sergeant in charge told us to go back down the switchback road and find the military entrance at the base of the cliff. It was much less grand than the approach to the castle. We parked the jeep under camouflage netting and walked into a wide chamber cut into the limestone cliff. The air smelled damp and chalky, and I glanced back for a glimpse of blue sky before we turned a corner and lost sight of it. The duty officer checked our papers and directed us to the area assigned to the Eighth Air Force staff. The tunnels were well lit, clearly marked, and filled with a constant hum from the ventilation system. Offices and large rooms had been carved out on either side of the main chamber. It made the Underground Tube shelters in London look cramped.
“Billy, good to see you,” boomed the voice of Colonel Bull Dawson. “How do you like our little hideaway?”
“Not bad, sir,” I said as Bull pumped my hand in a crushing grip that came from long hours of holding onto the controls of a B-17 at thirty thousand feet. “Where do you have the Russians stashed?”
“Come on,” he said. “You’ll both want to see this.” Bull led us down a narrow stairway, the stone worn in the center by centuries of martial footsteps. He pushed opened two metal doors and ushered us into a large, square room with a catwalk, about five feet high, on one side. The other wall was filled with detailed maps, taped together, forming a mosaic of England, France, Germany, Italy, all the way to the Soviet Union. The tables between the two walls held plotting boards, maps with airfields, antiaircraft defenses, dotted with symbols for fighters and bombers along routes that stretched from England to the Ukraine, with connections to Italy and back to England. American and Russian officers huddled in small groups, pointing at maps, pushing aircraft markers across plotting boards. At the far end of the room was a communications center, filled with switchboards, radios, teletypes, and signal repeating gear, tall metal boxes that reached to the end of the corridor.
“This is where they fought the Battle of Britain from, can you believe that?” Bull said. “That was before either Russia or America was in the war. Now we’re planning Operation Frantic from the same rooms. Amazing.”
“Yeah,” I said, trying to sound enthused about the historical import of the whole thing, but my attention was on Captain Kiril Sidorov. He was up on the catwalk, walking back and forth, his hands clasped behind him, watching every Russian officer who talked with an American. His eyes danced over them all, looking for what, I wondered? Signs of disaffection? Desire for personal property? Preference for bourbon over vodka? By his side was Rak Vatutin, who had his eyes on me. Both of them wore sidearms, and I had the sense of being in a cell block, with those two as guards. Maybe the Russians were used to it, but I didn’t like it one bit. I was tempted to shout out Topper’s message to Vatutin, and see what his reaction would be. But I wasn’t here to have fun, so I waved to him, just to enjoy seeing him turn away.