What about when they entered the chateau? Flick was pretty sure there were no German women working as cleaners in France. How could Greta evade suspicion? Once again, Germans probably would not notice her accent, but French people would. Could she avoid speaking to any French people? Pretend she had laryngitis?
She might be able to get away with it for a few minutes, Flick thought.
It was not exactly watertight, but it was better than any other option.
Greta finished her act with a hilariously suggestive blues song called "Kitchen Man," full of double-entendres. The audience loved the line: "When I eat his doughnuts, all I leave is the hole." She left the stage to gales of applause. Mark got up, saying, "We can talk to her in her dressing room."
Flick followed him through a door beside the stage, down a smelly concrete corridor, into a dingy area crammed with cardboard boxes of beer and gin. It was like the cellar of a run-down pub. They came to a door that had a pink paper cutout star fixed to it with thumb- tacks. Mark knocked and opened it without waiting for a reply.
The tiny room had a dressing table, a mirror surrounded by bright makeup lights, a stool, and a movie poster showing Greta Garbo in Two-Faced Woman. An elaborate blonde wig rested on a stand shaped like a head. The red dress Greta had worn on stage hung from a hook on the wall. Sitting on the stool in front of the mirror, Flick saw, to her utter astonishment, was a young man with a hairy chest.
She gasped.
It was Greta, no question. The face was heavily made up, with vivid lipstick and false eyelashes, plucked eyebrows, and a layer of makeup hiding the shadow of a dark beard. The hair was cut brutally short, no doubt to accommodate the wig. The false bosom was presumably fixed inside the dress, but Greta still wore a half-slip, stockings, and red high-heeled shoes.
Flick rounded on Mark. "You didn't tell me!" she accused.
He laughed delightedly. "Flick, meet Gerhard," he said. "He loves it when people don't realize."
Flick saw that Gerhard was looking pleased. Of course he would be happy that she had taken him for a real woman. It was a tribute to his art. She did not need to worry that she had insulted him.
But he was a man. And she needed a woman telephone engineer.
Flick was painfully disappointed. Greta would have been the last piece in the jigsaw, the woman who made the team complete. Now the mission was in doubt again.
She was angry with Mark. "This was so mean of you!" she said. "I thought you'd solved my problem, but you were just playing a joke."
"It's not a joke," Mark said indignantly. "If you need a woman, take Greta."
"I couldn't," Flick said. It was a ridiculous idea.
Or was it? Greta had convinced her. She could probably do the same to the Gestapo. If they arrested her and stripped her they would learn the truth, but if they got to that stage it was generally all over anyway.
She thought of the hierarchy at SOE, and Simon Fortescue at MI6. "The top brass would never agree to it."
"Don't tell them," Mark suggested.
"Not tell them!" Flick was at first shocked, then intrigued by that idea. If Greta was to fool the Gestapo, she ought also to be able to deceive everyone at SOE.
"Why not?" said Mark.
"Why not?" Flick repeated.
Gerhard said, "Mark, sweetie, what is all this about?" His German accent was stronger in speech than in song.
"I don't really know," Mark told him. "My sister is involved in something hush-hush."
"I'll explain," Flick said. "But first, tell me about yourself. How did you come to London?"
"Well, sweetheart, where shall I begin?" Gerhard lit a cigarette. "I'm from Hamburg. Twelve years ago, when I was a boy of sixteen, and an apprentice telephone engineer, it was a wonderful town, bars and nightclubs full of sailors making the most of their shore leave. I had the best time. And when I was eighteen I met the love of my life. His name was Manfred."
Tears came to Gerhard's eyes, and Mark held his hand. Gerhard sniffed, in a very unladylike fashion, and carried on. "I've always adored women's clothes, lacy underwear and high heels, hats and handbags. I love the swish of a full skirt. But I did it so crudely in those days. I really didn't even know how to put on eyeliner. Manfred taught me everything. He wasn't a cross-dresser himself, you know." A fond look came over Gerhard's face. "He was extremely masculine, in fact. He worked in the docks, as a stevedore. But he loved me in drag, and he taught me how to do it right."
"Why did you leave?"
"They took Manfred away. The bloody fucking Nazis, sweetheart. We had five years together, but one night they came for him, and I never saw him again. He's probably dead, I think prison would kill him, but I don't know anything for sure." Tears dissolved his mascara and ran down his powdered cheeks in black streaks. "He could still be alive in one of their bloody flicking camps, you know."
His grief was infectious, and Flick found herself fighting back tears. What got into people that made them persecute one another? she asked herself. What made the Nazis torment harmless eccentrics like Gerhard?
"So I came to London," Gerhard said. "My father was English. He was a sailor from Liverpool who got off his ship in Hamburg and fell in love with a pretty German girl and married her. He died when I was two, so I never really knew him, but he gave me my surname, which is O'Reilly, and I always had dual nationality. It still cost me all my savings to get a passport, in 1939. As things turned out, I was just in time. Happily, there's always work for a telephone engineer in any city. So here I am, the toast of London, the deviant diva."
"It's a sad story," Flick said. "I'm very sorry."
"Thank you, sweetheart. But the world is full of sad stories these days, isn't it? Why are you interested in mine?"
"I need a female telephone engineer."
"What on earth for?"
"I can't tell you much. As Mark said, it's hush-hush. One thing I can say is that the job is very dangerous. You might get killed."
"How absolutely chilling! But you can imagine that I'm not very good at rough stuff. They said I was psychologically unsuited to service in the army, and quite bloody rightly. Half the squaddies would have wanted to beat me up and the other half would have been sneaking into bed with me at night."
"I've got all the tough soldiers I need. What I want from you is your expertise."
"Would it mean a chance to hurt those bloody flicking Nazis?"
"Absolutely. If we succeed, it will do a very great deal of damage indeed to the Hitler regime."
"Then, sweetheart, I'm your girl."
Flick smiled. My God, she thought; I've done it.
THE FOURTH DAY
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
In the middle of the night, the roads of southern England were thronged with traffic. Great convoys of army trucks rumbled along every highway, roaring through the darkened towns, heading for the coast. Bemused villagers stood at their bedroom windows, staring in incredulity at the endless stream of traffic that was stealing their sleep.
"My God," said Greta. "There really is going to be an invasion."
She and Flick had left London shortly after midnight in a borrowed car, a big white Lincoln Continental that Flick loved to drive. Greta wore one of her less eye-popping outfits, a simple black dress with a brunette wig. She would not be Gerhard again until the mission was over.