Work Text:
The Hidden Man
August 1943
Wimbledon
It was a pleasant Sunday afternoon, in the house on M— Street. Major MacDonald wanted to see Troy and Moffitt the next day for a briefing on a new mission, but for the time being all five men were at liberty.
Tully Pettigrew glanced out of a window, then frowned and looked again, trying to get a better view. “Sarge,” he said, nodding toward Moffitt, who was on the settee reading the newspaper. “I think your folks are about to drop by. Your dad just got off the 17 bus, with a lady and a dog.”
The Englishman got up and went to the window, peering out of the side window. “Great Scott,” he exclaimed in consternation. “I say, it is my parents... and they’ve got Sir Joseph with them.” His father had come by the house a couple of months earlier after the Rats had taken up residence there, but Mrs. Moffitt had not come with him that time.
“Then I am not here at all, I am hiding,” said Arnheiter, blue eyes wide with alarm. With as much haste as he could manage, he got up from the chair where he was sitting and headed for the “radio shack”, which was actually his bedroom. He had only been part of the household for a few weeks, but he had been told about Moffitt’s younger brother Giles, who had been killed the previous winter in an air raid. “I am a person your Familie will never want to see.”
“Right,” said Hitch, seeing the problem at once. “How long before they get here?” he asked Tully.
“Four, five minutes maybe. They’re not in a hurry, just moseying up the street looking at the houses.”
Hitch nodded, and they sprang into action. He shoved Arnheiter’s wheelchair, which was parked as usual in the corner, into the radio room. On his way out, he snatched the pasteboard card off the door that read Sendungsraum, which they had tacked up there as a joke. Troy went into the kitchen and briskly removed the fifth chair, stowing it in the former butler’s pantry for the time being. He arranged the other four dining chairs around the table as if those were all there were.
Moffitt went into the kitchen, poured a fresh mug of tea, added milk and sugar, and carried it into the radio room. He was very grateful that he would not have to explain to his grieving parents the presence of an obviously German young man in their house, but he also felt guilty that the fifth member of the team should find it necessary to hide himself in a priest hole, so to speak. “I say, Corporal, I am frightfully sorry about all this... but thank you.”
“No, I am sorry, not you. I do not want to make your parents angry or more sad. I can stay quiet. They will not know I am here.”
“Are you certain?” Moffitt asked, thinking to himself, I owe you a half dozen of Bass, old boy…
Arnheiter nodded emphatically. Being a diffident man by nature, he inwardly shuddered at what he imagined the elder Moffitts would say, or do, upon seeing him there; it would entail complicated explanations and bad feelings, and he would much rather make himself invisible than try to negotiate a situation like that one.
As Moffitt went to the door to greet his parents, Troy suddenly pointed to the table by the sitting room window. “Hitch— the books!” he hissed sharply. There were two books on the table: First Steps in English, and Englisch für Anfänger,[1] along with several sheets of paper filled with written exercises in Arnheiter’s neat—and unmistakably European—script.
“Damn!” Hitch leaped to grab the stack of educational materials and looked for somewhere to put them, but it was too late— the elder Moffitts were already in the entrance hallway.
“Quick, in here!” Tully yanked up the center cushion of the sofa; Hitch shoved the books and papers under the cushion, and then stood directly in front of it, partly to hide what was under it, but mostly to prevent anyone else from sitting there.
Just as Moffitt opened the sitting room door to introduce his parents to his friends and comrades, they heard a faint metallic ‘snick’, which told the Rat Patrol that the door to the radio room was now locked from the inside.
Arnheiter had locked the door just in case someone had the idea of looking in there. Mothers and aunts— they always want to look at everything. Arnheiter stood still a moment, not sure what he ought to do next. He could, he supposed, lie on the floor between the bed and the wall, or under the bed altogether, as he had done once in his youth when the parents of his sweetheart Lieselotte—‘Lilo’ for short—had returned earlier one evening than she had expected. But he doubted the need for anything that drastic. Moving the desk chair out now would make a noise, so he took his pencil and quietly lay down on the bed, propped on his elbows, and continued to compose the letter he had begun writing to his family earlier that day. As the officially required Kriegsgefangenenpost letter form allowed the POW writer one side of one folded sheet, rather less than A4 size, it sometimes took two or three drafts to condense everything he wanted to say into a sufficiently-brief missive that would also pass the censors.
In the sitting room, Moffitt calmly greeted his parents and “Sir Joseph”, who was a middle-aged black and white English springer spaniel. His muzzle showed enough grey hairs to indicate that his puppy days had been some years before. The other Rats had already met the elder Dr. Moffitt, of course, and the younger Dr. Moffitt introduced his mother, Alice, to the three Americans with his usual aplomb.
“Pleasant neighborhood, isn’t it?” she commented. Alice Moffitt was a tallish woman, with abundant fair hair pulled back into a stylish chignon. A cloisonné butterfly brooch adorned the cardigan of her claret-coloured twinset. “I had no idea there were so many detached houses in this area. Some of them have lovely gardens. It’s a pity they placed you so far from Whitehall, though, all this way out in Wimbledon.”
Troy and Moffitt exchanged glances. There was a reason for that—with the sort of work they were doing, a residence with shared walls was absolutely out of the question. “Well,” her elder son replied, “M.I. wanted to put us somewhere a bit out of the way, you know, and the owners of this house have let it out. They’ve emigrated to Canada for the duration.”
“They’re lucky then,” she said gravely, without adding the corollary: if we had done the same, Giles would still be alive…
“It’s not a bad place,” Troy added. “A little more peace and quiet than we’re used to, but our neighbors are a lot nicer.” He grinned.
“That,” agreed Dr. Moffitt père, “is putting it mildly. I met a number of your former ‘neighbors’ in North Africa and didn’t care for them a bit.” He broke off, and turned to see what the family dog was doing. Sir Joseph was sniffing assiduously at a closed door which seemed to open off the other side of the entrance hall. “What are you on about, Joe?”
“If the house has been closed for some time,” observed his wife, “I suppose there might be mice. Perhaps we should see what he’s after…”
As she laid a hand on the doorknob, Moffitt was racking his mind for something to say, but Troy beat him to it. The wiry American shook his head, with a twinkle in his blue eyes and a charming smile. “I’m sorry, ma’am, but that room is strictly off limits to anyone without a security clearance. For our eyes only, I’m afraid.”
Leave it to Troy, thought Moffitt. Look them squarely in the eye and tell the exact truth… just not all of it.
“Yeah,” said Hitch, “that’s where we keep all the secret code books and cipher machines.” Whatever you do, Fritz, don't sneeze...
“Not to mention Sarge’s special Captain America decoder ring,” quipped Tully with a chuckle. “Yes sir, everything in there is Top Secret.”
John Moffitt recognized that they were being warned off, and changed the subject. “Well, we’d love to see the rest of the house, and perhaps turning Joe out into the garden will take his mind off the scent.”
The various members of the Rat Patrol gave the elder Moffitts the grand tour of the little house; as it was a fine afternoon, they then had an improvised tea in the back garden.
An hour or so later, on the way to the bus stop again, Alice Moffitt paused and turned to her husband. She had been quiet for some time, but she finally spoke up. “John, there’s something very odd going on there…”
“My dear girl, they work for Military Intelligence now. I daresay there are any number of odd things going on. None of which is any business of ours.” Still, he knew what she meant. He too had observed some anomalies in the house as they were visiting their son and his comrades.
Mrs. Moffitt was not to be forestalled so easily. “It’s most peculiar— it looked as if someone had been pushing a bicycle through their parlor. Whatever for?” Tradesmen’s bicycles are to be left out of doors, for heaven’s sake, not wheeled into the house.
He shook his head. “No, my dear. Not a bicycle.” He had noticed the marks on the carpet as well. “A wheelchair.”
“A wheelchair?” she exclaimed, taken aback. “But… are you sure of that, John?”
“Quite sure. The wheel marks are parallel, and widely spaced.”
That made no sense at all. “But… none of them need one, surely?”
“No, definitely not. What other oddities were you thinking of?”
“Well, there were five cups in the drainboard, but only four chairs at the table…”
“Yes. I surmise,” he said, “that they have a regular visitor who uses the wheelchair. Might well be their commanding officer, you know… in these times that’s hardly uncommon.” He continued walking, and drew another puff from his pipe. “In which case, the fifth cup is likely his, as well as the wheelchair tracks.” And the cane that is in the umbrella stand? Possibly.
“And Jack himself seemed odd, too, don’t you think, John? Not like himself.”
Dr. Moffitt had been in North Africa, and he decided not to describe to his wife some of the things he had seen there. “You must remember, my dear, he’s not the same man who left here four years ago. Not the same at all.”
ENDE
[1] ‘English for Beginners.’