A sample of my novel in progress, The Republic of Noise

Lorient, 1940

He smelled the difference as he woke. It was familiar, he could taste the moisture; the fish, the salt rested lightly in his nostrils as he slowly opened his eyes, returning to consciousness from natural rather than opium-induced sleep.  It would have been drowned by the lorry’s exhaust the night before. He pulled back the heavy blinds, and unlatched the dormer windows and opened them, letting the cool, laden air rush in. He saw the sea for the first time through the window, the shoreline broken by cranes and skeletal construction scaffolding. The jetties lined with fishing boats and yachts you would expect from a coastal town were there, but the boats were draped in tarpaulins, their thin masts bare and solitary, and all seemed frozen in place from this distance. The room was smallish, a brass bed with white linen, parquet floor with a thick rug near the bed, a small bathroom with a white enamel tub and a tap resembling a sea-bass done in gold filigree, a large porcelain wash-basin with a large vanity mirror over it, and comforting thick white towels hanging from brass hooks. Next to the window sat a desk with a green-shaded reading lamp and blotter. A few art deco prints hung on the walls, a chest of drawers stood on the inside of a small closet he’d thrown his bag and coat into the night before. He chose to wear his normal civilian attire for breakfast.

In the morning light of the dining room, the rest of his fellow travellers looked clean-shaven, scrubbed and alert. The round tables were draped with soft white tablecloths and laid with heavy silver cutlery wrapped in white napkins. At the door to the dining room was the young officer who had accompanied him the night before, the black uniform contrasting with the dark tweeds and wool vests, and the flowing skirts and white blouses under the cardigans and peplum jackets. He noted, to his surprise, some of the women wore trousers. They were fourteen in all, seven couples, and they acknowledged each other cautiously and filled up the seats. If there were any other guests at the hotel, they were not present in the dining room.

Each table each seated four, and names and black SS folders sat atop the plates. Once they were seated, white-jacketed stewards appeared, bringing out the dishes of thick slices of bread, eggs, and sausages, and the pots of steaming coffee. He found himself seated next to a pale redhead with shoulder-length hair, a heart-shaped face, and intriguing brown eyes, just light enough to catch your attention if you stared long enough to notice the slightly sardonic twist of the full lips.

All ignored the food and opened and read their orders silently and quickly. Then they looked up at the people at their tables with a new curiosity. Willie was intrigued by what he saw in Julia, as he now knew her, and saw her looking at him with an almost scientific curiosity.

The SS officer waited until they had read the orders, stood at the top of the room, and began to speak. “You will stay here for a few days. When it is time for you to leave, you will pack no clothing, no bags. You may move about the town but must do so with care. The British bombers already started to target this region, but this is only at night. We observe a strict blackout after 6 pm. You will be given two hours’ notice by the concierge of your departure.”

The first couple left that evening. The next day, Laurence, Helen, Michaels, and Nigella were adventurous, wanting to explore Lorient. They inveigled the others, including Willie and Julia, to walk about with them. But they soon realized the change they brought with them. At the Saturday market, in the public square a few blocks from the hotel, the natives cleared a path for them, looking down and away as they walked. Helen tried to haggle with one of the venders for some azurite beads, but the old woman wearing a faded crimson shawl simply handed them to her: “Gratuit,” she said, and bowed and turned away.

 Horace, a stocky, prematurely balding man in his early thirties with a powerful jaw and a light beard, said he had been there on holiday a few years before. He led them along the Cours de la Bôve, peering into the shops and cafés, to the theatre by the statue of Vincent Massé. It had been converted into a movie house, and a poster announced the feature, Jud Süss, which would begin in about an hour. They decided to go to a café and wait. It was late October, and the townspeople walked about bundled in dark jackets and overcoats. The dark facades of the old buildings had their shutters closed and curtains drawn, giving the streets below the gray-blue sky a forbidding air. They went into the nearest café and as they entered, the twenty or so patrons fell silent. The waiter, an old man with a lined, stubbled face, a broken nose and gray eyes, walked over and asked them what table they wished. They settled for one by the window and sipped at the bland red wine as one by one, the few customers paid and walked quietly out.

“Damn it all,” said Horace. “The avenue used to be so lively. On the weekend there were children here.”

“Inevitable, I suppose,” said James, a tall, youngish blond man with pale blue eyes. “Still in shock.”

“I understand,” said Helen, a slender brunette with gray eyes and thin, cruel lips, “but I don’t like it. There is no shame in being conquered by a superior force. It wasn’t 20 years ago they occupied the Ruhr. They are not being herded onto ships and taken away.”

They left and walked back to the theatre and sat quietly in their pairs in the darkness. The theatre was filled with dour natives, and their group occupied a whole row the natives avoided. Willie and Julia sat next to each other. She was Irish, he had discovered, in their quiet conversations in the pitch-blackness; a doctor trained at Queens University in Belfast. She had volunteered to serve the Reich. She had said no more, and he had not asked. Their orders instructed them to behave like married couples. On the first night, he’d told her: “We don’t have to do anything, you know. We could lie here for a few nights until you’re comfortable.”

“And disobey orders?” said Julia, with mock seriousness, undoing the buttons of her dress. “I’d just as soon not risk it.” She slipped out of her ivory chemise, and he looked at her body clinically. The only women he’d been with in England had been whores, Willie suddenly realized, looking at Julia’s marble skin, her full breasts and the red-dark bush at the junction of her milky thighs.

“Aren’t you going to get undressed?”

He pulled his nightshirt over his head and threw the bedclothes back. She put one knee onto the bed then the other, and knelt there, looking at him intently.

“You don’t seem very excited about this,” she said.

“You’re lovely. It’s the suddenness that’s all,” he said, stroking his slowly hardening penis.

“Are you worried I’ll get pregnant?” she asked. “Don’t.”

“It’s…,” he’d barely thought of it. “That’s convenient.”

“Then obey your orders,” she said, staring at his cock with an unexpected vigour, licking her lips a little. “Fuck me.”

Now they sat next to each other, in the barely-cushioned seats with their forearms brushing against each other familiarly. The Wochenshau before the feature was The Fall of France. Willie watched in fascination the armoured cars trundling across the fields like packs of boars, the Wermacht marching through Verdun and Strasbourg, where he had passed a few months before, and remembered as bright, colourful, the people busy and indifferent. He stole a glance over at Julia’s face during the scene displaying the captured African soldiers among the French troops, the large lips, ears, heads, the proportions seeming bizarre in comparison to the white soldiers. She showed the same clinical curiosity as the others. They watched Jud Süss silently and Julia grasped his hand as Kristina was raped, but he could sense it wasn’t just from horror or fear.

In the two days it took for the rest of them to be spirited off, they did not venture outside again, instead a few congregating on the roof of the hotel during the day, staying in their rooms, playing cards in the lounge, and meeting in the dining room in the early evenings. The SS had taken over the hotel, and the only other occupants were high-ranking technical officers and their adjutants, who seemed far too engrossed to pay the travelers any mind. From the roof, they could see directly down to the bay, as the long, gray tubes of U-boats were winched out of the water to rail-tracks, onto the disc-shaped concrete platform where they would be slowly rotated to line up with the pens to be serviced. Off to the side of the revolving disc, two massive concrete walls were rising out of the ground, already sloping to meet in the point of a narrow lancet arch a hundred feet off the ground. The fragile exoskeleton of scaffolding on the outside looked so thin at this distance, it seemed made of needles.

“You almost forget those little dots moving up and down are men,” said Julia. I wonder what they’re building?”

“I would guess they’re going to be reinforced pens to service the submarines without danger of them being seen,” said Willie. “The curve of the wall is to deflect the falling bombs. Quite ingenious. The British have already begun bombing the facilities at Brest and Saint Nazaire, but we’re safe for now, I think.”

“You think?” said Julia, turning the sardonic lips and brown eyes onto him. The relationship had grown quickly and strangely, and her Irish lilt, which she dropped into from the South London accent when they were alone, was not quite so sardonic. “You’re not sure?”

“How sure could I be, darling? And would you prefer me to tell you we could be bombed on our beds at any time?”

The pairs they’d been directed to form had bonded considerably in a short space, helped by the French animus.  On the morning of the fourth day, the concierge knocked on their door at 8 am. Willie saw an envelope slipped under the door: “Be ready to depart in two hours. Take nothing with you except the clothes you wear.”

The Admiral occupied a chateau with white columns near the water’s edge, close enough to look through the French doors, or stand on his portico and see the gray metal eels glide past, the men lined on the hull, on their way to or from the service pens. The winter was approaching, and its edge lined the air. On the way down to the waterfront in the Mercedes, they saw lines of black trucks blowing thick, gray smoke out of their exhaust pipes, some fitted up front over the driver’s cab, filled with material, men, and soldiers streaming in both directions along the road. They were let off on the grounds of the chateau, and led by their handler, a young officer in the ubiquitous black uniform, along a stone footpath on the edge of the grounds, but still close enough to see the marble portico and white Doric columns on one side, and on the other the apron of a vast field, stretching back about a mile, which was being excavated by men and giant machines. If they hadn’t been walking into the unknown, the contrast would have held them both in awe as they trod the narrow slate gray path that seemed to separate the two worlds: the luxury and comfort of the chateau, and almost biblical misery of the hundreds of men toiling ceaselessly in the growing yellow light of the morning, as the Israelites must have toiled under Pharaoh.

As they walked, the bond of the last few days began to weaken in this new tableau, this new landscape, and the unknown, which loomed ahead of them. Until he had been paired with Julia, Willie had assumed he would be assigned to a technical post, possibly working on the design or service of the U-boats. Now, as he walked down the new concrete stairs, to below sea-level, the certainty evaporated. They descended into a fortified bunker, whose walls were a foot thick, he guessed, as the sea, the chateau, the army of slaves, all disappeared from view and they found themselves in a maze of gray walls and black doors, and seemingly no end or beginning.

Inside one of the forbidding line of doors was a small office, where an SS officer sat behind a desk, waiting for them.  Willie automatically raised his hand in salute, saying: “Oberführer…”.

 But the Oberführer, a red-faced, ruddy man, which short, thick black hair, raised his own hand, displaying unusually thick fingers.

“Stop,” he said. “That all ends here. No more saluting, no more titles. Your mission begins here.”

They stood in front of the gray metal desk awkwardly as he motioned them to two chairs of the same metal across from him. Filing cabinets lined the wall behind him, and storage shelves ran across the other walls. A small metal fan sat whirring on the desk, even though the room was cool. Above him, the slit eyes of the circular ventilation grille stared down on the room, its fan spinning noiselessly.

They sat, still in their overcoats, and stared at him. His eyes lingered on Julia, as he sat back, the springs on his chair creaking a little.

“So, I imagine at the moment you have no idea what your next steps will be?”

“No,” replied Willie. Julia sat silently.

“A most fascinating and exotic mission,” said the Oberführer. “You will leave this office, be taken onto a U-Boat, and taken to an island near the South American mainland. There you will meet with our agents and do as they instruct. They know very little about you. All they know is that you are British.”

Willie felt Julia’s breath and emotions rise at being called British, but she remained still.

“You were not told until now,” continued the Oberführer, “for security reasons. And I imagine because it would have caused you needless anxiety, contemplating being confined in a space smaller than this room for two weeks. You will be provided with clothing with money and a few pieces of gold sewn into the garment lining in case you are separated or shipwrecked. Your contacts will meet you on the beach. They will greet you with the sentence, ‘I hear the water on the Riviera is chilly this time of year.’ You will reply: ‘But the water here is warm. I think I prefer the Caribbean Riviera.’

“You will then accompany your contacts and be told of your assignments. You will heed their instructions, but you will not be answerable to them, you understand? We do not expect reports from you. When it is time for you to act, you will be contacted. You will know the contact. And finally, I see a note here from the Reichsführer addressed to you, directly, Herr Braun. It reads: ‘Remember, wells and granaries must be poisoned without the enemy knowing.’”

END

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