Doppelganger

Chapter 1

London, May 19, 1941

Walter Schwein’s flat was in Fitzrovia, north of Soho, in the London neighborhood that had taken its name from the 19th century Fitzroy pub. Walter heard the ominous banshee wail of the sirens − Londoners called them the “moaning minnies” – roll over the darkened city just after dark. It seemed just minutes later that the quick, bitter firing of the antiaircraft guns began. From his room, with its blackout curtains pulled closed, he could hear the thrumming of the Luftwaffe overhead, the shake of the guns, and the boom, crump, crump, crump, of heavy bombs at their work of tearing buildings apart.

Half an hour after the bombing started, he went to a high, darkened balcony that gave him a view of a third of the entire circle of London. I’ve seen big fires, Walter thought; I’ve never seen the whole horizon of a city lit up like this by hundreds of fires. It’s as if I’ve been given a window into the flames of Hell. I should be terrified, but it’s actually awe-inspiring in its savagery.

The closest fires were near enough for Walter to hear the crackling flames and the yells of firemen. Little fires grew into big ones even as he watched. Big ones died down under the firemen’s heroics, only to break out again later. About every two minutes a new wave of planes came over. The motors seemed to grind rather than roar, and to have an angry pulsation, like bees buzzing in blind fury. Into the dark shadowed spaces below him, while he watched, whole batches of incendiary bombs fell. He saw two dozen go off in two seconds. They flashed terrifically, then quickly simmered down to pin points of dazzling white, burning ferociously. These white pin points would go out one by one, as the fire brigades smothered them. But other pin points would burn on, and soon a yellow flame would leap up from the white center. They had done their work - another building was on fire.

The greatest of all the fires was directly in front of him. Flames seemed to whip hundreds of feet into the air. Pinkish-white smoke ballooned upward in a great cloud, and out of this cloud there gradually took shape − so faintly at first that he wasn’t sure he saw correctly − the gigantic dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral. St. Paul’s was surrounded by fire, but it came through. It stood there in its enormous proportions − growing slowly clearer and clearer, the way objects take shape at dawn.

After about a half hour, Walter could tell that the bombing was moving toward London’s East End. He had to go out into the street to see the damage first hand. As he exited his flat onto the street a fireman called out, “Hey mate, you’ll want one of these if you’re walking about!” The fireman reached into the lorry next to him, pulled out a steel helmet, and tossed it to Walter. “Better wear a tin hat,” he said, pointing up at the antiaircraft barrages still exploding like stars above them. “It’s the falling shrapnel from the ack-ack that’ll poke a hole in your noggin.” Walter gratefully strapped on the circular helmet – from the wear and tear, probably a relic of the First War.

The street around his flat was undamaged. Walter walked along the cobbled street of the Newman Passage, across Rathbone and through the Percy Passage to Charlotte Street. He emerged into a scene out of Dante’s Inferno. A score of more of firemen were working desperately to extinguish what looked like dozens of small fires lit by German incendiary bombs. “Give a hand, here, will you, guv’nor?” a voice next to him cried out above the din. A fireman, his face and canvas overalls blackened with soot, was standing next to a stirrup pump, a large bucket with a foot pump and hose. Thousands of these simple, two-man extinguishers had been spread all over London to combat the German firebombs. For the next half hour Walter and his partner ran feverishly from fire to fire, reloading the bucket each time. They had just doused their last incendiary when his partner stopped and said, “Right then.” Walter almost collapsed, his lungs gasping for air. He thought his legs would fall off. He slowly looked up – the fires were gone, and just a thick pall of smoke hung over the street. He reached into his pocket, pulled out two cigarettes, handed one to his partner, and lit his own, coughing as he inhaled.

“Thanks, mate,” the fireman said. He pointed towards a lorry that had pulled up half a block away and was setting out a canteen for the emergency workers and residents. “How about a ‘cuppa?’” he asked.

Walter didn’t normally drink tea. Now the steaming cup, well laced with sugar, was like nectar. “Well, the worst is over for tonight, at least,” Walter said.

“Oh no, guv’nor, the fireman laughed. “Now the nasty work starts for the bomb disposal lads. One out of ten Jerry bombs is a dud – or it’s a booby trap, set with a delayed action fuse. Jerry likes the idea of blowing up the rescue crews after the ‘All Clear’ has sounded.” Walter nodded ruefully in acknowledgement, gave a parting salute to his partner, then started walking again toward Percy Square.

The area around Percy Square, a small residential close of perhaps forty small, mostly two-story homes, had been hit with high explosive bombs. It looked as if a gigantic fist had smashed the entire block to rubble. Neighbors, rescue and first aid workers were clawing through the wreckage to get to survivors. Stretcher bearers carried the wounded to the nearby ambulances through the chaos of shattered bricks, timbers, and broken glass. The dead bodies were stacked in open spaces along the street.

Exhausted as he was, as much from the horror he was experiencing as the exertion itself, Walter still forced himself to join a group pulling in almost furious anger at a jumble of timbers and shattered walls. “There are children in here!” one of the rescuers urged. Not Dante, Walter thought, this is Hieronymus Bosch. With the other rescuers, he feverishly helped clear the ruin of what had been a home: pieces of roof and shattered rafters, a long ragged strip of plastered wall covered with ripped, blistered pink and blue chintz wallpaper, the splintered half of a carved table, beams with ragged plaster lathe stuck to them, torn curtains, the broken shards of a lime-green vase, a drenched photo album.

Ten minutes later, they reached the bodies. The children, doubtless following their parents’ repeated instructions, had crawled into in the family’s Morrison shelter, a steel box the size of a large bed distributed for London residents who might not be able to get to an air raid shelter. The children were all dead. Three little blonds girls in cute, identical dresses.

“What the hell happened here?” Walter asked. He sank down helplessly as rescuers began to remove the bodies.

“Parachute mine,” a fireman said.

“Parachute mine?” Walter asked. “What the hell’s that?”

“”Pardon, but you sound like a Yank, so this must be a bit new for you. One of Jerry’s most devilish toys. Eight feet long, with 2,000 pounds of explosive. The Luftwaffe drops them from Heinkel III bombers. They drift down to ground level by parachute, detonating either by contact or by a clockwork mechanism. They’re set to go off above ground – look around, and you can see what they do. The concussion can shatter windows a mile away. And if the parachute becomes entangled in buildings they often fail to explode, leaving the bomb squad boys not knowing whether there might also be a clockwork timer operating. And Jerry’s latest trick is to put a photoelectric cell in the timing mechanism, so as soon as they open the hatch to defuse it, the bomb goes off.”

“And you do this every night.” Walter said.

The fireman pointed to a soot and dust-covered poster on a wall that was somehow miraculously still standing like a solitary brick pillar. Walter could just barely read it: CARRY ON, LONDON! KEEP YOUR CHIN UP!

“That’s what we have to do, so we do it,” the fireman said.