Sequentially, the Don't storyline of Allen & Anya (Annie)

*Really, utterly _MAJOR_ spoilers for any readers of The Don't Series that are not caught up.

Don't read this.

Also, this is an 'incomplete' narrative, in the sense that it is only sections that deal with Anya's story and her effect on Allen's life, so secondary characters to that are given short shrift here, and if you haven't already read the Series and know what Eleri, Geis, Robin and Carter are up to...you're likely gonna be very confused. (Go read The Don't Series, starting with "Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree" first.)

That said, this is all the references to Anya/Annie in the Series, rendered in proper timeline order. If you know of one I've forgotten, do let me know.

BEGIN::Two weeks prior to the first scene of "Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree", story #1 in the 'Don't' Series.

German Occupied Channel Island of ALDERNEY - Treeton Labor Camp - 1943 - The day was not hot, but Allen Dale's level of comfort when in a uniform had always been quite low. This particular uniform, made to fit another man and not yet tailored to his own measurements, might have made a right proper-looking chauffeur out of its original owner, but on him it no doubt looked a fright.

Its previous owner had been rather rotund of belly, and short of leg.

Kommandant had demanded an appointment for him with a Peter Port tailor later that very afternoon to see to the over-abundance of fabric in the coat, and the dearth in the trousers' hem, but that had not yet come to pass, it still being early. It would mean a trip across the waters before it might be seen to, following a dismissal from Kommandant himself stating that he would have no further use for his new man, Dale Allen as was, today.

Until such time it was to be polish, spit, shine, buff. Polish, spit, shine, buff. Something besides an endless string of fags to pass the time waiting for his new boss.

Presently he was on his back (lap blanket upon the ground to protect the fabric of the uniform) trying to examine the hard-to-see back of a tyre for a potential puncture. Construction upon this island's military buildings, sheds and huts ever on-going, and so recent still that nails might be found nearly anywhere. And tyres ever at picking them up.

Dale had not been at his duty long when he noticed something nearby blocking out what little sun had been helping his examination along.

He cricked his neck just so, in an effort to see who was there - preparing to jump up with a ready-excuse in case it proved to be the Kommandant - and was surprised to see instead of familiar Jerry jackboots, the ankles and lower calves of a woman. A woman in a rather fetching pair of modest heels.

For a long moment (likely felt by only himself) his mind stalled out at gathering any further information about the person now between himself and the sun's rays.

"Why, you're not LeBeouf," he heard a voice say, its tone one of curious - tentative, even - surprise.

The shade of the sun (to the woman's back) briefly kept him from seeing her face, but he quickly adjusted at being addressed by her, and her face came into his view easily enough.

"LeBeouf?" he said, turning on the blanket until he was able to right himself. "Nah, he's done for. Gaming debts, 'twas said. Got 'im a broken leg, 'think it was. Ankle at the very least. Won't drive for weeks - if not longer." He pulled himself up to standing, gave a harder-than-it-needed-to-be tug at his uniform's coat to compensate for the billow of fabric in the belly, and stamped a foot to bring the trouser hem as low as it might fall. "Bit shoddy yet, I know, me in his kit."

"His what?" she asked.

"Kit," he said, recognizing now the accent in her speech. Russian, he thought - Eastern. He made a mental note for the gang that more than Germans were populating this island, Alderney. Though in what capacity he could not be certain. "His rig," he offered as explanation, her face still registering confusion. "His clothes - his uniform."

Along with her dawning understanding, she gave him a quickly buried look of concern, as though she did not think much of his griping about his present attire. As though it were embarrassing to her and she disapproved of it. But as much as he saw this, read this in her face, he also saw that she was at learning to keep such knee-jerk reactions to herself. To shade what she really thought.

This, far more than the woman herself, interested him.

Her attire was not lost on him, though. He had not seen a woman dressed so nicely since the unit had dropped into France, and due to an operational mix-up (and possibly some of Mitch's haphazard navigational calculations) ended up dead-center in Occupied Paris, nearby several fashion ateliers that catered to the Nazi high command's local mistresses.

She wasn't dressed high-fashion by any means, but her frock was new and nicely pressed - and its style current - not the four-to-five-year-old style Islander women wore for lack of any alternative.

"Dale Allen," he grabbed for his hat from off the Duesenberg's bonnet so that he might put it on his head and then in turn gallantly tip it to her.

"Anya Grigorovna," she replied in kind, but he noticed that even in the announcing of her name something about her seemed closed, perhaps slightly haunted, as though a spectre hung behind her, over her shoulder that only she could see.

"And how does the day find you, Annie?" he asked briskly, slipping in a wink to try and get a smile - or at least the beginning of a smile - out of her.

"Things are quite out-of-the-ordinary," she told him, her gaze turning distracted. "Lieutenant Gisbonnhoffer has proposed marriage, and he has busily devoted the morning to planning a party in celebration of his engagement at his estate on Guernsey."

At this unexpected but potentially useful snip of news, Allen allowed himself to muse aloud, hoping to get a hint of her loyalties. "Hmmm. Kommandant won't like that, now will he? Skivving off administration, derelicting duties to-?" he waited a beat, two beats, to see if she would correct him, call him out for lack of respect in his tone.

Well, no particular love for the lieutenant on her part, then. "Who's the lucky girl, then?"

"She lives on Guernsey…at his estate," Grigorovna said - and if he wasn't mistaken there was a dryness in her tone, like an irritation in her throat. "From an old family of English nobility."

"Local celebrity, then, wot?" he smiled for her (as she was doing none of her own), winked again to let her know that he thought it cracking good luck a local girl would go for a Jerry officer.

"…Lady Marion," she finished, her face reacting not at all to his turned-cheeky antics.

"Lady Marion-" he echoed her, his own heart starting to grow a bit cold at what he feared might be the surname to come. A name he had heard with startling regularity since he had first met Robin Oxley.

"Nighten. Her father is Lord Nighten. Herr Geis' estate was once theirs. Surely you have heard of it - the - great house at Barnsdale? I understand the gardens there are quite unmatched." Her face, which was, he had decided, likely quite pretty when she didn't look quite so on the cusp of anxious, tried to pull into a hopeful expression but began to slip back into its creases of interior study.

"Well, we must wish them both joy, then, eh? Many happy returns and all that."

To this she said nothing, and he thought it was quite possible she had not marked his saying it at all.

Her eyes had gone to ground, flicking here and there, unsettled, distracted at best. When she did finally speak, it was not in direct reply to him, but on a tangential topic, about which no one could have much of an emotional investment one way or another. "I am come because the Lieutenant says Kommandant's driver's is to journey to Guernsey later today, and I am to liaise with you about returning here before you go so that you might carry the invitations to be properly posted."

"And that is very true," he wagged his head, agreeing that he was indeed bound later for Guernsey and that tailor, trying to push away the disturbing thought that not only was Oxley's girl on these islands but that she was consorting with - making plans to marry - a Jerry lieutenant. "I shall be delighted to see you again, Annie. And carry your invitations."

"They are not mine," she said, and he was struck with the sudden willfulness that seemed - out-of-nowhere - to flare within her pupils. "I should not hold such a party."

She turned away from him to walk back to the command hut, but stopped short, and turned back to elaborate. "That is, as a prisoner of Treeton Camp, I have no means by which to celebrate any thing large or small, good or evil. I live by my masters and do as they bid me. That is all. I meant nothing more."

"Right-o," he said, perhaps too quickly agreeing with her (literal) about-face, do come out and see me again, he thought, even in his concern for Oxley's affairs able to tag her as a potential asset. And certainly later this afternoon, as he was collecting the aforementioned invitations, planning to nick one to hand-forge a copy of (something at which he had always been adept), confirm this lieutenant's fiancée's name, and use that forgery as a means into that sure-to-be Jerry-filled swank soiree.

Later, driving Kommandant to the Lackland Camp (not yet dismissed from his duties), Allen found himself replaying their brief interaction in his mind. 'My masters,' she had said, 'as a prisoner' she had said. This Anya Grigorovna had no reason to harbor any love for Jerry, then. She had not seemed the sort to feel beholden to her captors, for all they had outfitted her and kept her tidy and seemingly fed - away from the harsh toil and life of Alderney's other camp laborers. There had been an edge of fear about her, yes. But there, too - he took heart from it - had been that flare of defiant willfulness, that desire to set him right about her position, about where her loyalties might lie (even though for all she knew he was an eager collaborator). Yes. Anya Grigorovna was a woman that he could convince to take a risk, a woman willing to take a chance.

She was the very sort of asset he was so desperately in need of.

There would at least be that to bring back as news to the gang, perhaps blunt (though not enough, he could be sure of that) this news about Oxley's girl.

Probably best to bring that unsettling bit to Mitch, first. Trial run, there.

"Driver!" Kommandant's voice brought him back into the moment, the way it had of bouncing off the interior of the car.

In the backseat, Kommandant Vaiser held his forehead in his cupped hand. "Leave me," he said in a begging tone, his voice cracking. "Here, I shall commandeer another car when needed. I can bear the sight of you no longer. Come back tomorrow, stitched a-right. I shall look at you again, then. Decide if I can tolerate this tailor's handiwork. This? Take it," he thrust several Reichmarks into the front seat, where they fluttered down next to Allen like leaves from an autumn tree. "And get yourself barbered. A mustache, yes," he addressed Allen's full-face beard, grown among the unit's rough time sneaking about the brush and shadows on Guernsey, "but all this?" Vaiser swept his free hand along his own upper cheeks to illustrate, "I banish. Perhaps something small, discreetly debonair about the chin - if the man can cut it correctly, carve it out of this…Island undergrowth you rustics seem to prefer. And a pair of decent boots," he added with another flutter of bills. "If you cannot find a worthy pair, buy the best you can, and tomorrow I shall order others from France. IF I approve the rest," he gave a gesture of his hand to signify the totality of Allen's appearance. "Need I mention a proper bath?" and then to himself, "humph, one never knows, out here on the very fringe," he rolled the word around in his mouth, "of civilization."

He cocked a brow at Allen as he stepped out, unaided as Allen held the door for him, onto the planking of Lackland, his central camp's, office hut. "A hot bath." And with a final, skeptically distasteful but not wholly-disapproving glance behind, he strode away in.

Things transpire; dead men attend Lady Marion's engagement party, and Lieutenant Gisbonnhoffer is permanently tasked to the Treeton Camp. A dance of some significance occurs during the Nightwatch broadcast.

Between the end of "Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree" and the beginning of "Don't Go Walkin' Down Lovers' Lane" nine weeks pass. During this time Unit 1192 move their base of operations to the island of Sark, and specifically Blind La Salle's farming tenement there.

This scene takes place during that time, just on the cusp of the action in "Don't Go Walkin' Down Lovers' Lane" beginning.

ALDERNEY – Treeton Camp – September 1943 – Daylight fell through the incompletely joined horizontal planks that made up the shared wall of the freestanding officer's double privy, dust and ephemera swimming in its shafts.

Jerry fag clamped between his lips, Allen Dale, the Kommandant's driver was taking a piss. Staring down into the blackness of the pit that descended from the hole before him, he heard the rough wooden door to the other side open and familiarly slam shut. Heard the wooden block's squeaky turn to prevent the door being opened from the outside-a small privacy few of the men bothered themselves with. The doors had been fashioned to hang shut, helped along by a spring, after all.

The wall separating the two halves of the small building was as breezy and as made up of unfilled chinks as those facing the exterior—a privy too airtight a favor to no one.

It should not have surprised him to hear the other person every bit as well as if they had been standing directly next to him. However... There was a shuffling, and then a stop.

"Mr. Allen," came the clear but quietly intense sound of a voice—a woman's voice. "I see you there!"

Though nearly at the end of his task, Allen jumped as though the exposed part of him had been stung by a bee. His eyes shot over toward the dividing wall, the space lit well-enough that he could see the concerned eyes of Lieutenant Gisbonnhoffer's secretary without needing to strain, and could discern that she, certainly, could see rather more of him than he felt comfortable with in that particular situation.

Immediately he bounced on his heels, efficiently pulling up his trousers and stowing himself again within his chauffeur's uniform.

It took only a moment to do so. Out of sight, out of mind. Re-composed, he stepped directly toward the wall and the pair of eyes so inconsistent with the tacit barbarism of such a place. Such a war.

"But a tick," he called to mind the press of time, though she was usually cautious enough for both of them, information she passed able to be shared quickly, discreetly, and in full view of the guardhouse during her brief, permitted visits outside the officer's building.

Certainly her following him to the privy being about as different from their usual interactions as possible.

"I will not apologize," she informed him. "Though I see I have startled you."

He ignored the question she raised of his momentary (and uncharacteristic) modesty. "Will you not be seen comin' in here?" he questioned, looking about him, this shed that amounted to a toilet rough and disgusting, for all that it was 'officers only'.

"It is where I am expected to…" her voice trailed off, even in the midst of the harsh truths of her life, unwilling to be purposefully coarse.

Allen held back a wince, a talent he was putting to almost 'round-the-clock use since the unit had become stranded upon these oppressed islands.

"Yes," he agreed hastily, trying not to show irritation that her captors would not even offer her the privacy and gentility of a loo of her own, even were it to be only a chamber pot, instead forcing her to go bog among their own filth and excrement. "Well then, best be to it." He crouched down slightly to bring his eyes to a level with her own. "For certain they know how long I been in here a'ready."

Her eyes (all that he could see of her face, save what there was of the upper bridge of her nose dividing them one from another) were wide with alert, more than a little like an animal that knows it is being stalked, attentive to any sound or fluctuation about them, a rabbit ready at a moment's notice to dart away. Alderney was flush with wild hares. Here, he thought, here he had found yet another.

"A man at the Lackland Camp," she (unaware of his inner dialogue) referenced another of the island's prison camps, this one the Kommandant's Alderney HQ. "Your man?" she asked uncertainly. "If his name is Windhover, and he supplies Kommandant's table...his safety is gravely compromised. The Kommandant and Lieutenant have discovered his anti-Occupation activities. He is to be found guilty of spying by a military court, and is to be taken into custody before curfew today."

Would it never fail to kick him in the gut? This topsy-turvy new life wherein rather than being an operative run by a higher-up he was now himself at running a growing-more complicated spy network? And all the while putting on mask after mask after mask in order to conceal-even from what should have been his compatriots-his own, true loyalties? And the existence of the unit?

He was a short-grift to them, the islanders he met, the Jerries. On-the-make, Black Market, bit o' gambling, get you what you need. Anya Grigorovna proved to be one of the few among his contacts who believed-seemed to intuit on some level, though he frequently worked ('til this point) to de-bunk it-that he was a touch more than a mere chappie looking to score and get ahead for purely selfish reasons.

"You gave chase all the way out here, risking yourself, just to tell me that?" He let false joviality (though it sounded entirely persuasive) coat his question. "If he's done for, he's done for," he told her, not admitting that he had any connection to Windhover.

"Risk?" she asked him, her eyes wide with disbelief at his casual response to her news. "The life of a man? A good man? In the face of that, how can I think about risk?" In her passion she had slipped the fingers of her left hand over the slat at her eye level, trying to bring her face closer to the partition that separated them, to better take the measure of him.

"How can you not?" he intently whispered. "They've got you by the short-" he paused, awkwardly editing himself, "end of the stick, here. You daren't risk yourself more. Kommandant and his lieutenant are dangerous men."

"And so you will just stand by?" She sounded of a child confused by her sums. "Do nothing?"

"Do nothing? Aye," he agreed to the course of non-action. "As I did when the British government went to war, and asked the island men to fight." He dressed his statement up in relaxed, careless informality and non-concern. "Why else do you think I am still island-bound? A healthy bloke like meself? If I did not choose to fight then, why would I do now?" He gave an exaggerated nod. "Do nothing? Aye. As will you ere the day come this dogsbody should run afoul of its master."

"As you will do if I am caught and disappeared?" she asked him, but she did not accuse him.

No, he read the rest in her eyes, though she did not speak it, her nascent understanding of his queer, reversed hypocrisy.

Even as you stand here, she was thinking, invested enough in the risks taken by a mere prisoner to whom you have no connection that you are at wasting valuable time scolding her?

With only her eyes on his, with no other observances or information to go on, she had caught him out as a fraud. Partially his fault-he was too moved by her plight, too affected by her out-of-place presence here among such horror that he often tripped up in playing her off. Partially her own shortcoming: she was far too willing to believe a man noble rather than a coward, rather than an opportunist willing to profit from the suffering of others, so long as he did profit.

As they had never spent such a close or lengthy interval with one another, he had never encountered her this intimately before; never been able to read so clearly how close she was to sussing him.

Again, without confessing any connection to this soon-to-be-arrested Windhover, he warned her; "only, pray this chap-in-peril of yours knows no names to give them, or that he dies before he can reveal them. That is what you may do." His mouth shut and turned hard for a moment. Not letting it rest like that for too long, he again turned breezy. "And tell me again why you will not let me contract an escape for you from here." He let his eye half-wink, as though he were asking no more than if she cared to share his hiding place in a round of Olly Olly Oxen Free.

"I will not leave my family," she replied, and he saw the second knuckles of her fingers retreat though the slats as though she were drawing back from him, from his tonal shift, leaving only the tips of her fingers and the rounded ends of her typist's nails. "I have nothing else in the world, nothing of value, or of connection, and they are here, so for whatever it is worth, this has become my world. I share it with them."

It was a reasoning he, with only barely-a-brother left as relation to him in the world, could barely fathom. To choose against flight-against self-when her obvious civilized gentility, her very humanity, was at odds with everything by which she was oppressed here.

He did not reply, and made an effort to not again meet her eyes, casting his glance toward the door, knowing he was cutting it close, his spending a reasonable time at the privy without the guardhouse noting it, or an officer arriving needing a turn at the pit.

"I needn't say," he told the air in front of him, "but give me time to put some distance..." As he pushed wide the door on his exit, the tips of those fingers, that hand-this woman in peril he could never touch, whom he could not comfort, and who would not even allow him to plan her eventual rescue-caught at the edges of his forward vision, and he settled for allowing himself the frivolous momentary lapse of letting his left hand alight for half-a-moment at the slat upon which her fingertips rested. It may have seemed a gesture without thought, without significance. A man pressing his hand into a wall as leverage against opening a door with his other.

But such a door needed no amount of strength to swing it wide, and insignificant gestures of utility rarely caused him, hours hence, to chasten himself for employing them.

It had been the half-shadows in that limited light cast upon her lids, what he could see of the light freckles on the bridge of her nose, he told himself. A 'last round before closing time' sentimentality that had overtaken him, the realization that she had not likely had even an instant of connection afforded by the kindness of a human touch in longer than he probably understood. The utter lack of realization within himself that he, also, was in need of such a touch, such a connection. Of some acknowledgement of what was real.

After all, it was only a palm, the pad just below his dexterous fingers, placed upon the pads of her fingertips. There was nothing erotic, nothing sensual or flirtatious to it. Not even soft. No, in regular life there would have been nothing to it, a mostly rough collision of skin that had lingered one heartbeat too long to be considered accidental.

And hours hence, when he did chasten himself over it, it was an uninteresting decision he had reached. He could not let his instincts lead him so close in the direction of compromising himself-or of misleading her-again.

She was, no matter what she might believe, a woman still with things to lose. And he was a man who must further divorce himself from exercising his basic decency, and not only in matters involving the fragile welfare of imprisoned females.

Anya Grigorovna might well have devoted more of her time to reviewing the unexpected moment that had transpired between her and the Kommandant's driver in the officer's privy that day, had a quarter of an hour later she not witnessed a man whose familiar visage would have been shocking enough to find in this hellish place, had he not also been laughing on the wrong side of his face.

Anya/Annie has identified the newest prisoner at Treeton Camp-the incorrectly, in-violation of the Geneva Convention detention of American (flying with Eagle Squadron for the RAF) POW Thomas Carter, though she knows him by a very different name.

Channel Island of Alderney - "Diefortner," the Kommandant interrupted his own dictation-giving, addressing his eager-to-advance adjutant whose nose, 'til then, had been studiously buried in transcribing. (A rare moment when it was not, figuratively, buried in this, his commanding officer's, arse.)

"Ja, Kommandant?"

"How is that girl working out, the one I had you find for Gisbonnhoffer? Things going," he ran his tongue across the front of his top teeth, "...quite carnally, there? Quite as...unwholesomely...as I'd hoped? Or shall we have to find him another?"

Diefortner rushed to vindicate himself. He, more than others, knew that any foot soldier was only as important to the Kommandant as their last success, the most-recent triumph they had provided Vaiser. "I am informed that things have, indeed, proven quite...satisfying...numerous reports of 'happy endings' and whatnot for the Lieutenant where his newly appointed secretary is concerned."

"But can she type, Underlieutenant? After all, as long as we must pay to keep the wench around, board and clothe her as well, she might as well be of some clerical use to the Reich, don't you think?"

"When I screened her, Sir, she was made to provide proofs of her proficiency both in German and in typing."

"Hmm. Where did you say you found her, again?"

"Among the Russian laborers brought in to build our fortifications, Herr Kommandant."

"Splendid. Splendid. One so hates to outsource where unnecessary."

"And so you hope to distract the Lieutenant with this piece of tender Russky flesh?"

The Kommandant shot him a slow, dangerous look. He would rather be the one to expound (at his discretion, at his deigning to interact with his inferiors) upon any devious plans of manipulation, rather than have them interrogated out of him by, of all people, his own adjutant. Nonetheless, he admired the Underlieutenant's appetite and curiosity for exploitation, and so he would on this occasion instruct the younger man on his better's cunning arrangement.

"Our plan," he stroked the younger man's ego by including him in the possessive pronoun, "is to wean Geis away from this ridiculous infatuation with the islander-who is not even really an islander, but a vacationing British citizen, and a member of their substandard little class of nobility." He snorted. "Engagement! Yes, 'Lady' Marion Nighten is to become less and less at the front of his mind; the Fatherland, and his all-consuming duty to it, evermore at his core."

"And you believe Anya Grigorovna the most expedient way to bring this about?"

"A dog well-fed, well-bred, and well-exercised is far less likely to bite his master, Diefortner. So, I have assigned Gisbonnhoffer here to work long shifts where I can keep my eye on him. I have provided a pretty-is she...pretty, would you say?-"

"Ja, Herr Kommandant. One would say she could nearly pass for Aryan."

The Kommandant sent him a doubtful, and warning look.

The Underlieutenant quickly corrected himself, "Nearly."

Vaiser continued on as though he had only stopped a moment for breath, not for his adjutant's response, "-girl for him to play or scrap with, as he chooses, quartered within his own office, always available to him; and the opportunity to advance beyond his wildest dreams, should he excel at his duties."

"Really, very shrewd dealings, Sir."

The Kommandant gave a dismissive grunt to the compliment, picking up the next communiqué to dictate his reply to. "Now," he said, his tone a throwaway, "if only he can manage to get 'Our American Cousin' to talk."

Thomas Carter again tallied the visible knots in the wooden door. It was no easy task, as the light level in the small closet was minimal. But no hard task, either, as he had all-but memorized every one of them several days ago. So even in the dark he knew their shape, what things they looked of to him: a twist of salt-water taffy from Atlantic City's boardwalk, his babushka's-his mother's mother's-oversized chin, the spill of blood on snow from Pedersan's wounding in the Winter War-the one that ultimately claimed his life. Strikingly, the wooden door they adorned had proven quite similar to the last door Carter was forced to look at while in captivity; almost two months that time, in Soviet hands, the knots and burls of that door speaking to his mind similarly. He could not say the monotony in his interpretation of the wood was a comfort.

On the other side of the closet door he heard the creak of the desk chair as Gisbonnhoffer tilted it back and slung his long legs atop the blotter on his desk.

"God Save the King," came a woman's voice over static-y reception, which did not alter it enough to disguise the Southern drawl of her American English. "Vive la France, and God Bless America. It's two o'clock...and so begins the Nightwatch." The verboten swell of Billie Holiday's singing filled the Nazi's office.

"Keep talking, my dear," Lieutenant Geis Gisbonnhoffer crooned to the unknown woman on the other end of the radio broadcast, "That's right. You will slip up. You will."

The sound of the Lieutenant's head laying against the wall gave Carter all the picture that he needed of his tormentor in his mind: his eyes closed, the better to be alert should any tell-tale sound invade the airwaves and give up her position.

Such was the Nazi lieutenant's nightly obsession. Every night, back to the office by two, turn on the wireless and wait for the Nightwatch to unwittingly give herself away.

"We shall see how you enjoy my freedom, since I cannot grant you your own, Thomas Carter," Gisbonnhoffer had sneered to him after one particularly long and unproductive session of interrogation. "You have made it quite apparent to all here that solitary confinement does little to shake your resolve, 2-2-6-5-4-8-3-2-3-6-Zed. Therefore, you shall be confined elsewhere. You shall have the opportunity to see how the Reich treats those who are cooperative." The tall man leaned in closer to him, placed a hand familiarly on the back of the metal chair he was tied to. "You shall smell my food, hear the respect given me by the men. You shall never be without me, in. your. head. In short, you shall bear witness to my life. My control of the world around me. And to your utter lack of same."

Which was how he came to be chained here in a tight closet space within the camp office of Gisbonnhoffer. And indeed he did smell the SOB's food, overhear all sorts of ridiculous obeisances done him by his various underlings. But as for having the Nazi sadist in his head? Well, he had thus far proven mentally strong enough to easily resist that. And for all that, of a two a.m. hour he would prefer, thanks, to be sleeping in order to recover any strength that might still answer to his call, the sounds of Billie Holiday were better far than the profound soundlessness of Solitary, and this broadcasting Southern girl's voice a balm to the most ravaged soul, even that of a Jersey Boy.

Most of the time he thought the Lieutenant's plan for him ridiculous, chaining him here by wrist and ankle to newly-installed metal rings bolted to the floor and walls, the manacles wearing away his skin where they sat. His hungry mind learned things by leaps and bounds about the German occupation of the islands, their future plans, their most basic and day-to-day operations. He was all but brimming with clandestine intelligence. He absolutely itched to be debriefed.

Most of the time he thought the Lieutenant all but laughable. Most of the time. And then there were the times the Nazi attacked, debased his Secretary just beyond that door. Carter had no indication that the German knew how such violence affected him, nor how deeply, and on how intimate a level. It was hellish to overhear, knowing what was taking place, knowing himself at present powerless to prevent it, or escape from it.

At times Gisbonnhoffer would all but treat the woman named Anya as though she were little more than office furniture, or a convenient domestic. Other times, he would physically assault her as though he could not breathe otherwise, as though he were consumed by some bent passion for her, forcing himself (though in her position she could offer little enough resistance) on her, gruffly calling 'Marion, Marion' over and over again until he was spent and briskly dismissed her from his presence.

Thankfully he had never yet thought to open the closet door to check on his peculiarly quartered prisoner in those ensuing moments, or he would have found a true weakness with which to torment his captive.

No matter how many times such attacks occurred, they raised the hair on the back of Carter's neck, brought out an instant sweat on his brow, and fueled a rage in his belly like few he had ever known.

Once, only minutes after such an assault had concluded, with Gisbonnhoffer off to the head to freshen up, the prisoner tasked with removing and emptying Carter's piss bucket (a short Gypsy boy, perhaps all of sixteen years old) jerked open the closet door to find him thus.

The boy's dark eyes registered Carter's distress, and something else, too: a surprise that this man would react so. Well, they had probably impressed upon this poor kid that he, Carter, was some sort of animal, like as not to bite off the kid's hand if he got too close. Feast on those tender, dark eyes like succulent jumbo Black Sea caviar.

Who would expect a monster kept in a dark closet, after all, to show pangs of sympathy? To express emotion beyond rabid fury?

He guessed at the Gypsy's origin really, (was there no one these dogs would not persecute?) as somewhere near Russia, where the other forced labor not island-based had been shipped from: "Spasiba," he said (not knowing how to make himself understood in Romany), thanking the boy for removing the bucket, despite the fact that he had not been fed or watered in twelve hours, and the metal pail was bone-dry empty.

At his speaking the boy's dark eyes reacted again, and the boy managed a frightened, "nichivoah" in reply, before replacing the bucket, re-securing the closet door, and scurrying out of the office.

Idiot, Carter berated himself at the boy's departure. He had slipped up, there, and given them something, if the boy handed it on-which most likely he would, himself a cruelly treated inhabitant here as well, willing, no doubt, to broker any information in return for an alleviation of his own dismal condition.

To task Romany with emptying human waste-it was an especially cruel punishment for members of a society concerned with purity. Carter knew these Germans too well to think that such an assignment was arbitrary.

He felt badly for the boy, but worried that he, himself, was set to feel far more badly in the near future, should the boy pass on that he had gotten the flier to talk-and in Russian, at that.

He did not have to wait long for his feared reprisal. He was not quite asleep some two hours later when he heard the floorboards in the office creak under someone's weight, though no one had turned on a light. The door to his closet cracked open. He was set back, leaning against the furthest corner (though, all-told, the distance to make it such was negligible), his feet in front of him should he need them for kicking. They had taken his boots shortly after he arrived, laces and all, so that he was barefoot, the soles of his feet now blistered, and infected from days' worth of splinters as the Germans had walked him about on crudely made wood floors none had bothered (in this prison camp) to sand or lacquer.

It was so dark the person's features were hard to make out. But a streak of light from the uncurtained window fell across a hand, which revealed to him it was a woman's, the fingers long and graceful. This woman was on her knees, her elbows resting on the floor, long curly hair (the room too dark to reveal its color) pooling on the floor around her shoulders.

She began speaking rapidly to him in Petrograd-accented Russian. Her words were hushed, but they tumbled out of her like a mountain spring spilling out over rocks.

"I am Anya Grigorovna. The Gypsy boy told me about today. You must have hope. I have sent for someone to come for you. I do not know when they will come, or how, but I have brought you this," she produced a medium-sized hairpin, which she pressed into his disinterested, limp, hand.

He looked at her, his first glimpse of the woman Gisbonnhoffer so viciously used. The woman on whose account he suffered, time and time again. Certainly she was pretty enough in her own right to inspire in any man a feeling of excitement, such that the Lieutenant ought not need his thoughts of this 'Marion' to carry the day.

She was a good actress. He utterly believed her terror at the possibility of being caught, believed she would have formed some sort of friendship with the Gypsy boy. Believed she would feel something like pity for the man in the closet.

So, she was to be the means of this new plan (whatever it was) to trap him into talking, to breaking. Very well, he welcomed the challenge.

The hairpin, of course, was the true sign of brilliance. He never would have fallen for her having produced the actual key to the manacles, nor any sort of tool that might work as a cutter. But a hairpin? Genius. And just the right size to fit into his mouth for safekeeping until the right moment.

Before depositing it there, he decided, what the heck?, to ask her more about this 'big breakout' she had arranged on his behalf.

He matched her Russian, even down to the accent, though his had, perhaps, a bit more of his mother's westerly tones in it. "Come with me."

"No," she checked the office behind her, and door to the hallway beyond, her demeanor still perfectly fearful. "I cannot leave. I have family here. Muchfamily. If I run, they will kill them all."

Just, he thought, his eyes narrowing with the thought, as if you do not do this-set me up for a fall-they will hurt them to punish you. He did not begrudge her her decision to work for the enemy. In such situations, he well knew, everyone made their own choices according to their own weaknesses, their own endurance levels and psychological toughness. He must remember not to judge this woman.

"Then why help me," he asked, curious to know what answer she might come up with, to see if they had prepped her for that one.

"Because I saw you the day they brought you here, to be caged in this closet. After all they had done to you, you were laughing...do you recall it? On the wrong side of your face."

It was a good thing he had not placed the hairpin yet into his mouth, or he would have swallowed it, it and any chance he had to flee this hell-on-earth anytime soon.

"Why do you say that to me," he asked, for the first time that day feeling the dryness of his throat, the parched splits in his dehydrated lips.

"Your father, Prince Igor Fomovich Komonoff, was kind to me when I was a child. You look very like him."

Certainly his own mother had said it often enough to him, his babushka had spent years off-and-on lamenting the fact, the resemblance between him and his father who had not been able to escape the October Revolution with his family, who had been trapped behind as Lenin, and eventually Stalin, came to power.

"You," she named him, "are Prince Alexsei Igorovich Komonoff, an exiled émigré. I will do anything in my power to help your father's son."

He shook his head, coolly refuting her assertion. "I am Thomas Carter, Flight Commander, 2-2-6-5-4-8-3-2-3-6-Zed," adding to himself, 'citizen of the United States of America, and resident of the state of New Jersey'.

She insisted, "You are Petrograd-born."

"And if you are telling the truth, you are going to be caught, and extinct titles and meaningless membership in the once-glittering Russian nobility will certainly not prove enough to save you."

She drew her chin in for a moment, as though he had slapped her-it was clearly not the response from him she had expected.

"However," he went on, "you may assure yourself you have done a very admirable job. You may tell your handlers I have said so. And that I thank them for the gift of the hairpin, as it may yet come in handy to me." He took it in his teeth and hid it between his cheek and lower gum.

"You will see, Aliosha," she used the informal version of the name, though he had not given her leave to do so. "They-someone-will come, as I have said. I would not lie-even for these German beasts-to the son of Prince Igor Fomovich."

Carter's gaze intensified as he looked at her a brief instant longer before she shut the door. Her doing of it was whisper-quiet, and he was alone again, with the knots in the wood, invisible in the dark, yet etched into the backs of his eyelids at this point.

How could this woman have known his father's saying? Had he, himself, broken without recalling it? Was there perhaps some new drug the Germans had perfected for making a man's lips loose, and leaving him with no memory of it? Or was he simply to trust her, this Duchess Anya, her family, it would seem, not having escaped the country in time, and enduring what persecution came next at the hands of their countrymen only to now have further hardship and brutality inflicted on them by these German animals?

Was he to put his trust in her, accept her sincerity?

In the end, some hours later in his examination of his eventful night, Carter found he was left with this: a hairpin is a hairpin is a hairpin, and it matters not how one comes by it, nor how one is expected to use it. He controlled the hairpin, now, he possessed the hairpin. It would do his bidding. It could not have looked more of a key to him if it had been presented with a ribbon on it by the mayor of New York City following a tickertape parade.

Next day/morning after.

Alderney - Outside Barracks Headquarters - Allen Dale was preparing to strike a match and light a smoke. He looked down for a moment to the Kommandant's car's rubber tire, thought better of it, and struck off the leather sole of his left shoe. He held the match up to the snipe between his lips, cupping the light in his hand against the heightening wind, careful not to let the flame flare and catch his mustache and goatee afire as well.

"Mr. Dale," he heard, in a woman's voice. "Chauffeur?"

Her voice was always quiet, always undersold. He had wondered more than once if it were so in her normal life, or rather, her prior life. Life before this camp, this place, this imprisonment. For all that the woman Anya seemed to move freely about the area of barracks headquarters, he knew her, at her own admission, to be a prisoner here.

But still, not much like the other prisoners. She had a sleeping room in among the offices, ate what the officers were served (though not with them), and was allowed to dress much like any other attractive woman out among the rest of the free (he snorted a bit at that) world. And she was always very clean, with a bit of scent on, too. If you didn't look at it too closely you might come away thinking these German officers very genteel toward her. Might come away remembering things about her no man on a military mission had any business thinking about in regards to a contact.

"Hullo, there, Annie," he said, his accent deconstructing the Russian of her name.

To any observer's eyes they were simply two people employed by the Germans having an inconsequential chat, a secretary and a driver.

She began to speak, relating to him as quickly as possible her face-to-face encounter with the flier now being kept in the Lieutenant's office cupboard.

"It's good, your English," Allen complimented her, careful to buoy her spirits with remarks about her skill, rather than personal comments, such as how flattering the dress she wore today was against her skin. He had gotten into trouble with that before. He could see in her eyes when she looked at him that she could be trouble for him, could easily fall, sinking hip-deep into the cult of Allen Dale, dangerously charming undercover spy and renown ladies' man. And he didn't really need any complications like that between them. Nor wish to have to further disappoint a woman whose life was already bleak beyond measure. She was proving far too valuable an asset to risk in any such a way.

Nonetheless, she took on a glow at his kind word and deferential demeanor.

"So you gave 'im the hairpin, like I done told you?"

"Yes. The smaller one. He put it in his mouth."

"Good. Good. Let's hope he proves himself a real corker and knows when best to use it. Now, get yer Gypsy boy to leave the closet's outside latch undone, and we'll hope no one notes it. After that, it's all on Lady Marion."

Anya went pale at his mention of the name, the first time she had been let in on the exact 'who' of Robin's 'best I could do' plan.

"Marion?" she asked. "The woman's name is Marion? I do not know...I do not think..." she muttered and stuttered along for a moment in what he assumed was Russian before she returned to English. "It is not safe for her here."

"Naw," Dale tried to calm what he took to be a case of nerves. "Don't you worry. Your part's done, Annie. It'll all come 'round right. Best thing you and I can do is get out of the way." To try and cheer her further, he extended his nearly-through cigarette to her, but she politely declined it.

Smart, too, he thought to himself, seeing how the shadows moved behind the window in an office that faced them and the approach to the HQ and nearby guard towers. Would do her no good to have her captors thinking they shared anything more than the occasional (and rare) two-minute chat.

He let the still-smoking butt of the snipe fall onto the muddy ground at his feet as she walked away, back to her clerical prison, her hair always down, lengths of it catching in the on-again off-again wind, swirling it about her like tendrils of smoke, lifting ends of it as though it wished to be liberated from the gravity that held it here, wished to break with such governance as the wind must have done long ago time before memory; free, unchained, its caprice unbound to any will but its own.

Allen Dale pulled himself out of the moment and went to stand beside the car's backseat door. The Kommandant would be out at any time, ready to travel on to the next camp, as it was a review day.

Following the plan, to get Carter to "kidnap" her in order to facilitate his escape from Treeton, Marion has dressed herself as a lamb to the slaughter and traveled (against Occupation Code) to Alderney in order to see Geis on his birthday and set the escape in motion.

From his manacled spot in the Lieutenant's office closet, Eagle Squadron Flight Commander Thomas Carter had felt himself begin to sweat in dread and anticipation of what was to come next, as Gisbonnhoffer seemed (by all audible sounds) to have cornered Anya Grigorovna in his office yet again.

And yet, something about this encounter was different. Carter listened more closely. It was not Anya at all, but another woman, at whose unexpected appearance the Lieutenant was quite overcome.

He asked after her health, her father's health. Damn him if he wasn't actually cordial, actually courtly in his attentions to her. Such deferential behavior on his part made his vile conduct toward Anya all that more of an affront.

After a violent (but highly efficient) escape from Treeton, during which he gags Marion and she cannot explain to him that she is a friendly, Carter has a still-warm gun to Marion's head and his foot is to the gas pedal of their stolen auto, as she must shift and steer.

And here he was, Thomas Carter, sharing a getaway car with this woman, the Lieutenant's 'Marion'. Even in her now-disheveled state-her dress ink-stained, her hair slightly awry, her cheeks and face distorted by the gag he had employed on her-he was not so absent of his own body not to note that the German's fascination with her (at least insofar as her looks) was not mis-placed.

A pretty girl. An Islander. The kind of person he was meant to be defending, to be fighting for. A pretty girl, a local islander, a non-combatant: collaborating with his enemy. Becoming his enemy. Marion. How he despised the sound of that name and all that it represented to his tormentor, the Lieutenant. Could this girl driving this car know what her consensual relationship with Gisbonnhoffer had done to Anya Grigorovna? What it had forced his already brought-low countrywoman to become? To endure? Were he to live long enough to find the time, he could not wait to inform her, most eloquently.

As "Don't Go Walkin' Down Lovers' Lane" ends, Carter escapes to Sark with Marion (and unbeknownst to him, stowaway Djak), but fails to apprehend the crucial fakery of Robin's half-a-plan. The Unit, however, remains ignorant of Carter's mindset for some time, knowing only that he has escaped, and safely.

By the time they do find out, and Marion is recovered, it is Mitch who unwittingly becomes Gisbonnhoffer's new prized prisoner.

"Don't Give Out with Those Lips of Yours" begins with a desperate search for information on where Mitch has been taken, when he will be released, and whether his (and the Unit's) cover has been blown.

Allen Dale, masquerading as Dale Allen, Nazi-employed chauffeur, drove up to the Treeton Camp and began waiting outside the Kommandant's car as he had been instructed to do upon disembarking at the harbor. Herr Kommandant was somewhere inside, in a meeting. Allen was to attend on him once it was concluded. Everything back to normal.

Here came Anya Grigorovna. She was clean and tidy as ever, but something about her face appeared unusually drawn, pinched in a way he had not noticed before. Allen paused for a moment, wondering if he saw it so only in relation to the well-fed cheeks and curves of Marion, and even the still-coming-on figure of Eleri Vaiser, the women with whom he had spent so much time over the past two days.

Uncharacteristically Anya made a direct beeline to him and the car, not bothering (as usual) to conceal her interest in arriving there.

"Hullo," he called, friendly as always.

"Mr. Allen," she began, quite earnestly.

Perhaps she had news of Mitch, knew him to be there already, even before he had planned to ask her.

"Mr. Allen, what news have you for me?"

Right. The flier, and perhaps the Gypsy boy-doubtless both on her mind since Carter's very public escape. The Gypsy boy, he seemed to recall, was a friend of hers. And her a woman with very little contact among anyone friendly.

"The very best kind," Allen assured her, patting at his uniform pockets to locate his matches, fag already between his half-parted lips. "None." He gave her a wink.

He had expected her to visibly relax at this information, in the knowledge that the man she help escape was safe, no longer, even, being sought by his former captors. She did not.

His own face slightly fell at her lack of demonstrated relief. "What's wrong, Annie?" He could not afford subtlety. She was allotted so little time to be out-of-doors.

Her eyes had trouble steadily holding onto his. They anxiously flicked about everywhere. "There has been a fast-working illness since last I saw you. It swept through my mother's cell bloc." Her eyes shot heavenward. "She died three days ago. Herr Geis has been at his post so infrequently since the escape, I...I took it upon myself to look into files I am not meant to see. I was searching for news of my father, my other family here. I wanted to get word to them, somehow. To tell them of my mother-"

Allen resisted the gut-impulse to reach for her hand. All this sadness, and no one for her to share it with, penned up here in the officers' administration building. His spoken prompt was just above a whisper, "And?"

"German files do not lie, Mr. Allen."

Her unexpectedly solemn face now held context for him.

"What I found showed me: my family is dead. Everyone I came here with, gone. Extinguished. My uncles, my aunt, even cousins." Her brows drew into a wrinkle as she referenced Gisbonnhoffer. "He knew, all along-if he had cared to look-and he never even told me. I am alone." Her eyes came back to his, tears having gathered in them. "I am ready to go," she told him, her voice's strength disappearing into murmur, "as you have always said I might."

Allen, as was his way, smiled his confidence into those tear-filled eyes. "Then we shall get you out, as I have always said," he almost added 'my girl', before recalling to his mind that she was not a woman to lightly treat so. "I shall put my friends on it this very day." With an unpleasant twinge, his mind brought him back to Mitch. "Only..."

"Yes?"

"Only, can I get you to stick it out just a bit longer? Two days? Perhaps less. Quite possibly far less. Only, there is a man being held here, and I must find him. More important than the flier that we find him, and get him out."

One could see her going through recent detainees in her mind. "The Sarkese fisherman?" she asked, her tone understandably disconcerted.

"The very one! Is he already released?"

"No. Not yesterday, and no one has left the camp the entire day, not since Herr Kommandant arrived."

Allen slightly bit his lip, all but having forgotten the unlit cigarette he had left hanging there. "Will you do it, Love?" He winced inwardly at the endearing term, but he needed every ounce of persuasion on his side-on Mitch's side. "Will you do it...for me?"

Anya's mouth gaped for a moment, his request not expected by her, so many times he had attempted to cajole her into escaping (only to have her resist on account of her family), yet here he was begging her to stay on. Her eyes slid over toward the nearest guard, whose stance had become wary, as her time to return indoors grew near.
"Yes," she said, almost as an exhale, but not one of relief. "I will stay for your friend. I will find where he is for you, and how you may best help him."

"Good girl," Allen told her, his own relief such that he did not mark the painful resignation on display in her lonely walk back toward Gisbonnhoffer's office.

The task now falls to Allen to share his news of the day with the rest of the Unit, residing at Blind La Salle's farm. Robin and Carter have just struck up an exceedingly tentative détente (it would be overspeak to call it a truce).

Being unable to follow the group's English very well, it is Djak who sights Allen's arrival first.

SARK - La Salle's barnyard - 1943 - Djak began to shout when she saw Allen rattling down the dirt track toward the house and barn, the beater of a bike he had 'borrowed' threatening to collapse before his journey's end.

Robin encouraged him to tell all. "Quick as you can, Allen, quick as you can!"

Wills agreed. "Details later, we have been waiting forever for news."

Allen had not yet even dismounted the bike before he began to share. "Mitch is at Treeton. Still there. Marion taken back to Guernsey, along with Vaiser's grown daughter what has showed up, who is to be billeted there." Off the bike, letting it drop to the ground. "Geis had told Marion he would release Mitch for her, unharmed, but...he has left Alderney and pursued Marion back to Guernsey and Barnsdale."

Robin took his hand to the back of his neck, and gave himself a good scratching. "So we are in a definite fix. Can you say where he is at the camp?"

"I cannot, no, but I've got Annie on it." Allen tried to take his first truly deep breath to compensate for his exertion over the last thirty minutes. He wished to goodness someone would think to hand him a dipper of water. His eyes snapped up to Robin's. "Told me today she's ready to come out. 'Family keeping her there's dead, now, she's found out. Had to play her a bit to convince her to stay and help with Mitch."

"Who's this Annie?" Carter asked, wondering whom their contact was at the camp. "Can she be trusted?"

"Anya Grig-somethin', you know-Geis' secretary-got you out, didn't she?"

No one present saw it coming, the fist that barreled into Allen Dale's jaw, followed quickly by a second, only somewhat less fast-flying than the first.

Allen's neck snapped back from the unexpected (seemingly un-warranted) blow. He fell back, and would have smacked the ground had he not flopped into Royston first. Royston held Allen up, but only barely, Allen just on the cusp on consciousness.

Carter surged, but John was ready this time, and had the flier's dominant arm in a hold, preventing further physical violence.

"You ass," Carter shouted, bouncing like a boxer, up and down on the balls of his feet, ready for the round two bell. "You simpleton bastard," he bellowed at Allen, just returning to fully knowing where he was.

Carter lunged against the leverage of John upon his arm, ignoring the pain, but still could not get free to renew his assault on Allen. "He rapes her," Carter had eyes for no one but Allen as he growled to him what Anya's life at Treeton was like. "He humiliates and assaults her daily. And you have 'played her a bit'?" He spat it like venom, "so that she might condemn herself further to his ceaseless abuse?"

John, worried Carter might well let him fracture his arm, decided Carter needed some necessary cooling off, and force-marched him away from where they were gathered, but not before Carter shot off some rapid Russian to Djak.

Standing to follow after John and Carter, she paused for a moment where Royston still supported an unsteady Allen, and cast her dark eyes upon him like she was mixing potions for a powerful hex. With a great hocking noise she spit her disgust in his direction, due to her height missing his face, but getting her point across despite the barriers of language.

"I didn't know," Allen, finding his voice, protested several times. "I didn't know! She never said. I didn't know," the last calling of it was loud, as though he hoped the wind might carry his ignorance of the matter to where John had taken Carter.

"Go after them," Robin told Royston.

"You do not know our Allen," Johnson's voice tried to reason with Carter who still bouncing on the balls of his feet, no mind to the arm the big man had in a twist in an effort to steer the flier away from Allen Dale, whom Carter had managed to batter with some force before he was brought under control by the unit's large medic.

"Our Allen would not have done so had he known the truth of this."

"What says he of Grigorovna?" Djak ran to get in front of Carter to ask him in her Russian. She had mistaken the Scottish man's use of 'Allen' for 'Anya', the woman whose ill-treatment had incited the unexpected dust-up outside La Salle's barn.

"He says it is merely idiocy on the part of all that led the chauffeur to entice her to stay and subject herself further to Gisbonnhoffer's assaults," Carter replied, his breath coming in gulps, as John's hold on him prevented his lungs from working as well as they might.

"So now that it is known he will go and get her, and bring her here to safety?" Djak's question was hopeful.

Carter shook his head in the negative. "Your rom baro's best man has been taken by the lieutenant," Carter informed Djak of Bonchurch's capture using terms the Gypsy could understand. "They believe she can be of use to them in getting him released. That will be this clan's priority," he referenced the unit.

Djak looked from Carter's only-now-calming-down face to the bushily-bearded one still holding him in abeyance.

Johnson looked down at the Gypsy boy with the friendliest expression he could muster, though at the moment he was rather distracted, concerned that Carter's rage-filled energy would outlast his own steady strength at restraining him.

"It is the wrong choice to us," Djak told Carter pragmatically, a crease at her brow. "But she is of our clan. Not theirs."

Clearly, in the wake of war and displacement, Djak had continued to think of the people he became involved with still in the method of his people; clan, family, relation.

Carter looked at the small Gypsy boy.

The fight went out of him, and he sagged. Thomas Carter, part of a clan? He wanted to employ the American idiom, 'speak for yourself', but he found that not only could he not immediately think of how to phrase it so that it could be understood in the Russian, he could not deny that his visceral actions of the last quarter hour threw such a disavowal of kindred connection entirely into doubt.

Allen, the most easily mobile of Unit 1192, escorts Robin to the Nightwatch on Guernsey, using his German-approved passes and access to watercraft as Kommandant's driver, and finds himself in Barnsdale House's large natatorium late at night with far too much time to contemplate his faults. His attention settles on his favorite marble, there. Classically white, a female form contemplating a bathe.

Beauty, Allen thought, and got himself hit right between the eyes by the memory of Anya Grigorovna. There was something that had struck him from the moment he first met her. Someone looking as she did: neat, attractive, unerringly feminine-housed there among that place. Like a carpet of violets sprung up about the cast-off pile outside a glue factory: unexpected. There was something both delicate and simultaneously tenacious about her. At least he thought there was. He found himself faltering in his thoughts of her. Knowing now, at Carter's word, what her life within Treeton was like he could no longer let himself believe that he knew her. Their ever-brief conversations so far from true intimacy among friends. She had given him no confidences to keep. He had tried his best to rein in his natural tendency toward flirtatious behavior with her, to prevent himself from seeming to offer things to a woman unable to return such advances lightly.

But he had slipped back into old, tried and true habits in the end, on behalf of Mitch. Not knowing what her agreeing to stay on for him might cost her. That hurt.

To think that he had exploited her-asked someone already victimized to further submit to victimization-he would have bloody well punched himself had Carter not. He was an information man, after all. How could he not have seen? Not suspected?

His face, no need for him to cloak it when alone in the dark, showed the disgust and angst that he felt about the situation. One of his fists had actually gone to grip a shock of his own hair and give it a tug of frustration.

But of course, like clockwork Kommandant's daughter, Eleri Vaiser always seems to be nearby when Allen is at his lowest and worst…

He did not hear the padding of bare feet on the tile floor, but when the pool's special nighttime lighting was engaged, his head snapped up in response to it, before he could wipe away his anxious, self-loathing expression.

"Mr. Allen?" Eleri Vaiser asked, her own face a shock at seeing the dismay scored across his.

"Wot you doin' here?" he asked, half-barking out the question before she could think to ask him the same. In an eye's twinkling he had wiped his face clean of anything representing his inner thoughts. His demeanor, however, still gravitated toward brusque.

"I have, that is...Lady Marion told me...that I might swim." She indicated her present attire. She was indeed outfitted for a swim. The suit was obviously another loaner from Marion's closet, the hips and bust not filled quite as they ought to be on the nineteen-year-old's shape. Over her arm she had a towel draped, and a swim cap covering her hair. The cap and suit were of palest pink, the color barely discernable in the low mood lighting.

"And I'm sure you well may," he told her. She moved to place the towel on a chaise. "Is it always so like this among the English?" she asked him. "So many people about so late at night?"

"Howzat?" he asked, for the first time feeling a bit of alarm at her inquisitiveness.

"Well, only that I wish to fit in. IF I am to be forced to stay here," she cast him a level glance, clearly thinking back to his refusal to smuggle her somehow to mainland France.

"Well, yes," he told her, "I dunno. Occupation's got us all a little out of sorts I reckon. Last couplea days hardly standard." His tone held none of its usual camaraderie.

"Have you been swimming?" she asked, though his attire should have clued her in otherwise.

"No," he told her, himself surprised by what came next out of his lips. "I have been thinking about how I have disappointed someone. Someone that I care about. That I would rather wish not to disappoint."

She stood still, considering this. "And so you have disappointed yourself?"

"Yeah," he agreed. "That's it."

"Herr Geis has disappointed Lady Marion," she told him, looking at him intently to gauge his response to the news.

He held back a scoff. "And was that hard to do?"

Her brow creased. "I do not know. They have had an awful quarrel, so the newest parlor maid says the stable boy told her. Lady Marion told him she was glad to have lost his ring. And she does not seem to wish for another one to replace it."

Allen re-cast his coming-on grin at this juicy gossip as troubled concern. "Ellie," he told her, instructively. "I think that may be best for all concerned."

"Best?" she almost cried out in disagreement, almost stamped her foot at his (to her) incorrect judgment of the situation. "A man like Herr Geis having his heart broken? You did not see him this evening afterward, or you would not say so. He is tortured!" She did not shout, but was no less impassioned. "He has been scorned. I would not wish such unhappiness on anyone."

"Really," he replied, ambiguous in his delivery of the word. Still, he retained his seat, despite that knowing in her presence he (as Kommandant's driver) ought to stand.

"You do not like him much, I see. But you are wrong," Eleri told him. "He has qualities, Mr. Allen. Can't you see that he loves her?"

Allen felt his inner frustrations begin to push their way to the surface, as they might for some men at the pub who've had too much and find their anger spilling over into a physical brawl. "Don't be daft, Fraulein," he half-spit at her. "He doesn't even know her! If he loves someone, he loves someone who doesn't exist." And of course he knew more than a little about that. The Nightwatch: a clever paste-up concoction of Lady Marion, not a girl he could ever truly meet. Anya: a spectre of what she had really been made to become, him ignorant of her hurtful truth.

At his harsh retort, Eleri's face looked as though he had slapped her, and he recalled to himself that life among the nuns and the other girls at Ripley Convent School most likely did not involve strange men taking apart your notion of true love at two in the morning. "Chin up," he tried to lessen his attack on her. "If she really has thrown him over, you may have a chance with him after all."

He wondered if the Nightwatch ever took requests. He knew exactly what he would set aside for Miss Vaiser. "I fall in love too easily/I fall in love too fast/I fall in love too terribly hard/For love to ever last."

"How shortly ago," he reminded her, "you were begging me to snatch you away to your Yanick. Your 'meant-to-be' freedom fighter...How soon after arriving were you forcibly snogging me? And here you are, pining over your father's right-hand man?" He scoffed at her, telling himself he did not care if there was hurt bubbling up in her eyes. "You. Have exhausted me," he said. "I'm turning in."

He stood to go, realizing in that moment of facing the high glass windows that did she stay to swim there was a distinct possibility this might prove just the way Marion stole home of an early morning after her broadcast concluded. With Robin. And he certainly could not have anyone sussing out that.

Allen looked at her, expecting Eleri to attempt to make a peace with him, possibly get him to stay. Instead she simply looked like a cross between petulant and wounded.
She stared at him, her eyes flaring as if to ask, "why are you still here, then?"

So it was to be solely up to him to find some reason to lengthen their time together. He noticed something tucked into the towel she had laid down.

"Wot's this," he asked, seizing it before she could stop him.

"Nothing," she nearly snapped at him. But it was obvious she wished to tell someone, and him one of the only people on the islands she knew. "It is an invitation." Begrudgingly she added, "just as you said would come. To Cabaret Alstroemeria, to see Joss Tyr's show...and dine with Herr Prinzer."

He looked up through his eyebrows from the fancy invitation card. "Then why do you not look happier about it?" he asked. "His is a rather elite guest list."

Her eyes cast down at this. "I do not know how to dance. That is, not in the popular style. And I am sure there will be dancing."

"Can you waltz?" he asked. "All good Germans can, I am told."

"Yes," she told him, and he took her into a hold.

"Now relax it," he told her, "and step in closer." As she did so, the unfitted top of her borrowed swimsuit gaped somewhat, without her knowing it, and looking down from his height he had a nearly unobstructed view of the tempting swells of Miss Vaiser's still coming-on 'charms'.

His immediate reaction was to raise his chin, and close up the hold as much as he could without seeming ridiculous. Certainly this was the last sort of distraction he needed. He made an effort not to roll his eyes at the foolhardiness of his own actions. What he did for King and Country...for Robin. They would never appreciate it.

He tried to come up with the least romantic song he could think of, but he just kept seeing her silly swim cap, droopy rubber faux-flowers sprouting all over it.

"Okay, then," he announced. "Off with that-or I shall have to expend all my energy to keep from giggling at you."

He had assumed her hair was pinned up under the cap. He was wrong. With the cap's removal her dark hair cascaded over her shoulders, down her bared back and over his own arm where he had her in the hold. Before he let himself think too much about the dangerous turn that had given the moment, he launched into a song, showing her how to move to the steps by following his own. "Pardon me, boy," he sang lightly, "Is that the Chattanooga Choo Choo?/Track twenty-nine/Boy, you can gimme a shine."
"You've stepped on my foot," she protested. Hers was, after all, bare.

"No," Allen disputed her, "you misplaced your foot beneath mine. Give it another go, now..."

His mind was turning on so many axes now: Letting down Anya, safeguarding Marion's Nightwatch return, Wills' windmill proposal, another trip to come across the waters back to Sark, Geis given his walking papers, gaping swimsuit, length of hair tickling at his hand, fetching nude marble. He did not doubt he may have stepped wrongly. "You...leave the Pennsylvania Station 'bout a quarter to four/Read a magazine and then you're in Baltimore/Dinner in the diner/Nothing could be finer/Than to have your ham an' eggs in Carolina..."
"What a queer song," she announced. "I don't understand half the words. What is it about?"

"Hmm..." Allen considered, "'S 'bout a chappy learnin' to accept his blunders, pull through them in the end," he lied. "Now, just here, Hen," he fell back on being the instructor, "let us attempt a bit of a dip..."

Eyes up, Mate, he coached himself to look away from that still prone-to-gaping top. Lessens the distractions.

Not that Allen Dale could say, all in all, he minded a healthy diversion every now and then. Did keep one from growing too gloomy sullen, after all.

During a grueling interrogation at Treeton that Carter had always, eerily, managed to withstand, but which Mitch could not, Mitch attempts to put an inch of truth into a lie, thinking it might protect Marion from Geis: that she is, in fact, secretly married.

Geis stalked back toward the camp offices, his mind a-tilt. He could not even focus on the maddening interference of the Kommandant in the wake of the fisherman's wild (but passionately given) assertion that Marion, his Marion, had been-was still, possibly-married to an Islander.

He could not bring himself to believe it, to credit it at all. Setting aside Marion herself-hardly a woman suited to wedding a simple, provincial laborer-he could not imagine her noble family allowing such an ill-advised and in-equal match.

But then, perhaps they had not. Perhaps it had been a youthful indiscretion. Of course they would have wished to keep such quiet, even were they able to annul it or have it otherwise dissolved. But then, the fisherman had not said 'had been wed' or 'was once wed', but spoke of the matter entirely in present tense.

This Islander, so the fisherman declared, now gone for a soldier-so, officially his enemy. A man to be shot on sight. But, a man no longer present on these islands.

He thought of how he had so recently all but prostrated himself in front of Marion in the wake of her anger with him over news of his own long-forgotten family. He thought of the cast of her eyes, the hurt he perceived there, and, the disgust. Her treatment of him had been...belittling. Severe. If this were true-that she had a similar secret-could she have...would she have..?

The idea proved all but inconceivable. It would make her...his eyes closed against the thought, so repellent, so beyond present belief.

But he could not banish it, could not make it go away, sharing a corner with Jodderick the Bailiff's request and the return of the Nightwatch. Instead it stood, the barest of facts. (No, gossip, he tried to tell himself.) The barest of testaments, of a broken, half-witless simpleton fisherman. But who, truly, had nothing visible to gain in that moment by lying about such a subject.

There was something that he did not wish to acknowledge. Something about it he would rather turn away from: the fact that something of it had an undeniable ring of truth.

Marion had always told him she had returned to the islands in those dangerous days before the impending Occupation to tend to her father. But who truly would take such a risk? And taking it, stay on? At such a hazardous time? Simply, a dutiful daughter? Or a woman keen on a lovers' rendezvous? Perhaps a last chance to see a secret husband before he received orders to ship out?

Married at twenty (he almost gasped) would have made her three years a wife to this man when Jodderick had first introduced them.

He threw open the door to his office, not caring as the knob smashed into the reciprocal wall at the force of his opening it.

His eyes spied his file cabinet.

Records. Yes. Had this truly happened it would be certain that somewhere there must be a record of it. Somewhere on these islands.

The woman Grigorovna rushed into the room upon his arrival, almost colliding with him in her hurry to take his coat before he called for her.

He let her have the coat to hang, and walked toward his filing cabinet to lean one elbow upon it. Catching her eye he jerked his head to indicate that she was to shut the door.

As she knew he expected it, she did so, and walked toward him.

Anya Grigorovna did as she was bid and beckoned, as she might have any other day in the office block of the Treeton Camp. She had said she would stay. That she would attempt to find out what she could about Mr. Allen's fisherman. But nobody was talking. No one seemed to know anything about him; not why he was being held, nor for how long. Only that he had been brought here, and was, it seemed, still here. A comfortless piece of circular information.

She thought of the Gypsy char girl, how she might have proven useful in the situation. How, even as little as they had had time and vocabulary for communicating to each other, she missed her. Another loss.

Losses that mounted in front of her like a child's wooden blocks stacked precariously in play.

Lieutenant Gisbonnhoffer had positioned himself near the corner of the office, his legs somewhat apart, one arm on the filing cabinet. It was clear what he wished. What he required of her.

She walked like a sleeper toward him, stopping when her eyes were close, on level with his closely shaven Adam's apple.

"On your knees," he demanded, as though she needed prompting. His voice was poisonous. She imagined the spittle from such a mouth would be bilious, and freakishly black.

She looked at the corner edge of the filing cabinet. The same one she had broken in to, that had irrefutably given her the news of her family's total annihilation. How simple it would have been for him to tell her. He consulted files within it numerous times a day.

And yet he had not.

"Down. On your knees," he repeated the command like a curse. She saw his chin tremble with the force of whatever it was that had him in its grip.

"No," she told him, the sound of her refusal not at all harsh. Her head tucked down as her knee drove itself with the force of seven of her into his unprotected groin. "Standing is better."

With the pain of the unexpected, damaging impact he began to double over, but she brought the back of her bent skull up into the point of his chin as it came down, clocking him soundly with a well-landed second blow.

His head snapped back and he fell to the unvarnished wooden floor.

Anya's triumph was short-lived. Knowing there was nowhere to run, she did not even attempt it.

"Guard!" Gisbonnhoffer screeched once he again found breath, purple already blooming along his jawline, both his fists set about his crotch, the knuckles of them clenched white with physical anguish.

"You could have told me," she said to him, her voice controlled, so unlike his in this moment.

"Told you what?" he gasped out, nearly retching.

The guard arrived, speedily comprehending the situation and training his weapon on her.

"That you murdered my family, you motherless whoreson. You Devil's bastard." She did not know the words for the curse in German, so she rendered it in Russian.

As another guard arrived and they were taking her away to-she did not know where-she heard the Lieutenant shout after her, "your mother died of illness, you crazy-" but the exterior door to the office block swung closed behind them and she was unable to hear what filthy German moniker he chose to tag her with.

Kommandant arrives at Treeton, only to send Mitch away to Mainland, Occupied France (at least that's what Mitch is told. In truth, he has been sent to Eva Heindl's family on Guernsey). At this interference, Gisbonnhoffer is livid.

Not too long after, the Kommandant arrived.

Geis was now gingerly seated at his desk, still concentrating on babying certain injured parts of his anatomy. Without preamble, he started in on the situation of the Sarkese fisherman. "Why did you do that?"

"Send him away?" Vaiser asked, "Release him? No. I sent him to Eva. She is good for such things, I suspect." The Kommandant paused. "Well, rather, she is good for many things. And good at many others." His eyes bugged lecherously at this. "He believes I have banished him to France." He shared some of his insight (gained through Specialist Joseph's diligent notes) into the fisherman's psyche. "He is not the sort of man to run. Not if he believes doing so endangers those around him."

Geis held back a groan at the Kommandant's, as usual, high level of confidence in his own schemes. "And what purpose do you possibly hope to serve?"

"Purpose?" Vaiser smiled, tapping a finger on the inkwell atop Geis' desk. "Would you ask a magician to prematurely show his hand? Spoil his trick?" He shook his head. "All in good time, Herr Geis." He teased with his tongue at the corner of his mouth. "Like your divorce." Vaiser knowingly grinned, savoring it. "All in good time. What has happened to your face?"

Geis cradled his chin for a moment in his cupped hand. Grimly he replied, "The woman you gave me-"

"What? Your secretary?" Vaiser laughed with glee. "Ho ho! I think I rather like this. Where is she now?" He looked about the room, peeked his head out the office doorway into the hall. "Not back among the camp proper already?"

"No. She has been taken to the blockhouse, on my order."

"Well get her back!" the Kommandant happily demanded. "Get her back! This, I think could be fun. Have her sent 'round to my villa directly." His eyes sparked. A challenge. How he did like a new challenge.

And how he did enjoy-he could see Gisbonnhoffer was in pain, though the man had not said, though of course three separate guards, including the waiting-outside Diefortner had already related something of the just-occurred events to him before he had left the blockhouse. How he did enjoy the thought of his lieutenant expecting something rather calming...and receiving something rather...not instead.

'Teach him better than to lose focus mooning over Lady Moron.

Tasty, tasty, tasty, Vaiser chanted to himself as he turned to leave Geis alone with his bodily trauma and as-per-usual gloomy mood. A new toy to play with when he got home tonight. Better than Christmas, wot.

ALDERNEY - "Not usually one to ask such questions, Sir," Allen spoke to the Kommandant, seated behind him in the back of the moving car. "Only, Lady Marion and Fraulein Eleri were wondering..."

"What's that, Driver? You are trying to share some sort of news of my brat child?" Vaiser leaned incrementally forward.

"Only that she was asking after the Sarkese fisherman wot helped rescue Lady Marion. Miss Eleri seems quite taken with the romance of the whole story."

"Yesss," the Kommandant agreed dryly. "Romance. The reason she was sent here, of course. 'Romance'. Well," he replied chipperly, "you may tell them he has been sent home to his boat and his family, properly rewarded by Lieutenant Gisbonnhoffer for his part in the returning of Barnsdale's once and future mistress." Vaiser grinned toothily. "I say, Driver, what did you think of Herr Geis' secretary?"

Allen had to work to keep his expression non-committal. "Did, Sir?"

"Yes, 'did'. As in, did you like her, did you find her attractive, did you ever..." his voice trailed off as his tongue curled around his front teeth.

"Not as in 'do', Sir?"

"Well, you see, Mr. Allen, I had taken her off Herr Geis' hands on a lark. I thought I might like her more for myself. But, I am sorry to say, that with only the shortest of trial periods I find I do, in point of fact, not care much for her, nor her brand of rebellion."

"Rebellion, Sir?"

"Yes," he did not elaborate. "I've arranged to have her transferred to Jersey under OberseerJarl Derheim."

Allen worked hard to sound conversational. "Operation Todt needs another in their secretarial pool, then?"

"Goodness me, no!" Vaiser chuckled. "They are simply in constant need of mindless, unskilled labor. Bodies to throw at placing their mines. It is a pity, though."

Allen had to swallow back, 'nice to hear you say it', as he knew the Kommandant too well to think those words' sentiment was genuine in a humane way.

"I should very much have liked to see you two become friends." Vaiser's mind reverted to its old proclivities, and he took a moment to envision the now-banished secretary in the front seat with his Driver, nearly on her stomach, face-down, her head all but colliding with the steering wheel. His driver, tightly sprung from the waist down, attempting to still successfully pilot the auto. He restrained himself, just barely, from chortling.

In lieu of answering Vaiser (grateful to be excused from such) as they had arrived, Allen pulled up the car, turned off the engine and got out to open the Kommandant's door.

As Vaiser was getting out, he withdrew a small sheaf of Reichmarks from his black SS overcoat, stuffing them without looking inside the front placket of Allen's chauffeur's uniform. With his other hand he gave them a firm, thumping pat.

"Do not think I am unaware," he cautioned Allen, looking over beyond the driver's shoulder, "or unsympathetic to the fact that such information about the Sarkese fisherman, or any other prisoner-if shared with the proper people-might yield you considerable revenues, further increase your standing in the present culture of Occupation. Do know that I value you in your position here. And, by all means, Mr. Allen, find yourself a woman. Take her to that particular shop in St. Peter Port..."

"Wot? Ginny...Glasson's?" Allen asked, curiously.

"Yes. The very one. Yes. Have her polished and primped-money no object. And see that the service is placed on my tab. By all means. I owe you that much."

Not aware of the Kommandant's bent-of-mind about himself and Anya Grigorovna, and awash in an inner dialogue of both hope for Mitch and growing despair for the transferred (lost-to-him) Annie, Allen found there was nothing to do but thank the architect of his divided mind, close the car door behind him, and begin the long, solitary wait until he was called upon to drive Herr Vaiser somewhere else.

Anya is lost. Marion is lost. "Don't Give Out with Those Lips of Yours" concludes.

May, 1945, the islands are liberated. Shortly thereafter, the war ends. The Unit is formally (and secretly) disbanded and goes its separate ways.

A decade passes. Allen leaves England for America. He marries-as was always his dream/plan-a Rockette (she has a name, Florinda). But the war and his secret role in it continues to dog him. And sink a destined-to-flounder marriage.

Nightmares are only one manifestation of his coming-on breakdown.

So begins Story 4, the final story: "'Til I Come Marchin' Home".

NEW YORK CITY - 1954 – "What name did I call out?" he asked after Florinda, wanting to know before she went, his gaze to the sheets.

"Ellen," she told him as she double-knotted the belt of her robe, "Mary - and Annie," she finished. "Always Annie." He could not tell if what he heard in her voice was sarcasm or a begrudging blessing. "Maybe wherever she is, she's the one that could make you happy."

Eleri. Marion. And Anya.

The eternal trifecta of women he could not save. Time, for the rest of the world, he knew, moved reliably clockwise. Seconds to hours to weeks to years. But for him it had abandoned that path. Instead, time for him had become sand in an hourglass that was continually, erratically shaken, the motion perpetually rearranging each grain, each point in the past, colliding it with the present. Wrecking (it seemed, it always seemed) any possible future.

His nightmares - his war - had sunk his marriage, and he drowned, breathless, in their wake.

Armed with only an address Iain Johnson somehow had knowledge of, Allen arrives, unannounced, at Carter's New Jersey home only to find that he cannot quite bring himself to tell the former RAF pilot why he's really there. Over a series of days and calls and meetings he stalls out, almost as though HE isn't sure why he's there.

Hoboken, NEW JERSEY - 832 King's Court - Spring 1954 - It brought Allen immediately to attention.

"What is this all about?" Carter asked without preamble.

He had waited, he had expected an explanation. Simply, he was done dancing at a moment's notice without some reasoning being imparted to him. Certainly he had at this point more than earned the truth, the cause of all this.

When Allen answered, his motivation so much at the ready as to surprise even him, he found himself reverting with surprising ease into the sort of lingo one used when in His Majesty's Service. "I need everything you've got on Anya Grigorovna," he told Carter.

"Then I know a man with a list," Carter replied, ceasing whatever it was he could do that so effectively telegraphed menace. He stepped to the side so that Allen might exit the washroom.

Lists of missing people were common in those days, kept by men looking to make money (for people who wished to look at their lists) as much as by men who wanted to help their fellow man.

Carter agrees to help Allen look for Annie, but does not plan to join Allen on any quest outside of the U.S.

As Allen speaks more freely about what he wishes to do regarding Annie, he finds himself at the kitchen table with Carter's family; his grandmother, and his daughter, Zara.

Carter quietly interposed himself, without addressing his rebuttal to anyone in particular. "Things could only have been worse had the Germans discovered my Russian connections. They had little enough personal humanity left to render them humane toward others, and if you will recall, Russia had not signed the Geneva Convention. Connection with them would have gained me nothing."

Allen spoke up to add, "I only learnt that it were she - this girl - who had recognized him once the islands were liberated and I was back in London reading his de-brief. It was not the first time she had come to me with information, but never about anyone she knew or had history with."

"He is speaking of Anna Lendova."

Allen's head jerked around, back to Carter. "Wot's that?"

"The Baroness Anna Grigorovna Lendova. 'Annie', as you called her."

"Wot? Anya? A Baroness?"

Granny shook her head. She was obviously familiar already with some facts of this story. "At her age, it is unlikely she ever had cause to use her title, much less live under it and reap the rewards, much less the respect to which it entitled her."

"She would have lived under the Reds," Carter agreed. "Doubtless why she introduced herself to us in the familiar. Her family name and title would only have further served to make her a target."

"And she knew you?" Zara asked, unfamiliar with the story or the name.

"She claimed to have known my father," Carter answered her evenly. "It is said we look much alike."

"That is what Babushka says."

Allen had a moment to wonder where Carter's father was, if Zara did not know him, and found himself re-hearing the pilot's earlier words in regard to what happened to another lost, disappeared person from his earlier life; 'The war. Wars. The annihilation of an entire class system.'

"What was he like?" Zara asked.

"Carter's dad?" Allen answered her. "How should I know?"

"No," she replied something almost stern coming into her tone. "During the war, when you knew him. What was he like?"

Before Allen departs New Jersey, he and Carter discuss the specifics of such a search, like money.

"Reichmarks and script, yes," Carter agreed with hesitance. "One could scarcely forget the 'glorious' tales of your winnings."

"Ah," Allen magnanimously agreed. "But what you were not around to note was that at the end the Navy showed up and the government back home agreed to take on such worthless paper, and converted it back into the accepted coin of the Realm." Smug gave way to sly.

A look askance. "I have never heard the like. They ate such a cost?"

"Not an eye batted. The Islands would have been ready for the skip had they not." Allen drew his two hands (one with two fingers cupping a slender, stubby glass) out in the air in front of him, as if setting the tableau, or a newsprint masthead. "Ruined without hope of recovery. Whitehall could not have that. The Channels 'ad been written off once. In the face of what had been visited upon them and in the wake of victory the feeling was that much was owed them. Buying them out of financial disaster was the least His Majesty's government could do."

Light suspicion. "And you - you were allowed to cash in as well?"

"Not like I asked if it were cricket, man. I spent the war taking it on the chin as a civilian collaborator. As you well know. Just extended my performance by a few days, popped into Lloyd's on-island and claimed summat of what I was owed. Had it more or less put by since then, as I said. I'll not want anytime soon." Allen's posture showed he was still committed to that act of defiance. "Nor shall she," he followed with a moment later, "when I find her."

Here, Carter turned grim, but as always, remained direct. "You may have to settle for simply finding something of her. Even, only a bloc-mate, or distant relative."

But Allen would not allow a wet-blanket upon his newly mapped-out plan. "I will find what there is to be found."

The conversation broke off as Carter leveled an eye at the Kommandant's driver and studied him unblinkingly, his own throat going somewhat dry in the asking of his next question. "You will return to Alderney?"

Allen met that eye with a gaze of his own that held more than a little weight, but conveyed his own commitment to what he believed ought be done. "Only if it turns out there is no other way."

Both men instinctively swallowed.

"We do know everything, all that might be accounted, of her time there." The unfamiliarity of empathy (never used, never seeming to be called for) crept into the former RAF man's speech. "Perhaps…you will be spared that journey."

Allen now found that he had to look away. He squinted into the distance. "Not sure missions like this are meant to spare one."

"No." Carter, also, found something to concentrate upon in the distance.

"Nor that they should."

"Probably, no."

As Allen brought his sight line back nearer to them, he reverted to a breezier line of chatter. "I shall tell Djak you are happy, shall I? Family man? American dream and all that?"

Carter seemed a bit breathless by the sudden shift. "You may...tell...anyone whatever you like."

"The prince-thing, even?" Nothing could have stopped that Dale family grin. "No more secret, that?"

"Yes," Carter nodded, skeptical, but good-naturedly. "The prince-thing, even." He felt his face taking on some new version of a smile. One he had never known before. One he could only assume was meant for and brought into being by Allen Dale, the way he could exasperate and yet try to charm you in equal parts. He wondered that he had not noticed it before, that Dale's was really a very diverting personality. And a quick-study mind. "Babushka will light a candle for you, you should know," he told the other man. "This night, and probably every night from now on."

South America – BRASIL, City of Salvador da Bahia – 1954 - It was an unremarkable day. The weather was what Allen Dale had come to expect from this new climate, the ocean and bay to the East, the steam of the jungles further inland.

He had been in town for nearly a month, having come directly here from the North of France. He had not left Jersey until he had found what he had come for, there. His trip had proved to be one of disappointment. One whose outcome Carter would have experienced no surprise at learning: Anya Grigorovna, exiled Russian baroness that she was, was dead.

He had tracked her transfer from Alderney and the Kommandant's residence to the Todt labor taskforce led by Oberseer Jarl Derheim from a headquarters on Jersey. She had been sent to work there, but, as the Kommandant had shared with him long ago, not in a secretarial capacity.

Due to the Jerries' general lack of concern for their workers, and specifically for their workers escaping from a locked-down island, Todt workers were often allowed to roam the St. Helier streets at night. It had proven easier to let the starving workers forage in the darkness than to feed them. Afraid of the Germans, of disease—and sometimes merely of the 'quality' of people Todt had enslaved: political dissidents, Communists, homosexuals, intellectuals at odds with the present leadership, and Gypsies-Islanders were not at all keen on extending a helping hand toward these people reduced to mere shadows of their former humanity.

When morning roll call would come (with its litre of milkless, sugarless coffee), Todt workers would have returned to their pens to start the day anew building Hitler's fortifications and mining the beaches.

Except on the rare occasion.

There was no real way to know now, years later, why Annie had proved the exception: pretty girl, less badly-used, not-yet-starving, perhaps. One of Jersey's main men of what little Resistance there was on-island had sheltered her among his own family. She, in-turn, had helped him devise new codes for his carrier pigeon enterprise, meant to coordinate a movement against the Germans on both Guernsey and Jersey.

Carrier pigeons were, by order of the Occupation, illegal, but this bloke had managed to get special allowances made for him. He had been tasked with caring for Officer Count Werner von Himmel's feathery pets while their master was recuperating from his Todt-mine injury.

After that it had been easy, as von Himmel had re-styled himself following his exit from the military into the psychic cabaret act Joss Tyr. As Tyr he found himself still in need of housing for his quartet of doves. And no one was going to cross Prinzer's particular pet. Or the Islander who kept said pet's pets.

Messages began crossing the distance between the two islands. And continued even when Tyr was re-located with his master to Guernsey. Until Avia, Tyr's particular favorite of his feathered piteousness, failed to return to Jersey. At that time the network proved broken, and never was repaired.

Sometime during this, Annie was turned in by fearful Islanders, her hiding place betrayed.

By the few accounts Allen could find, her time aiding the Resistance on Jersey had been a fulfilling one. And her time following re-capture brief. What Jerry records there were showed she had been immediately tasked back to the hardest of labor details. Within the week she was dead.

He had found several contradictory accounts of her death: merely a work site accident, or a deliberate act of sabotage—he would never know.

Within the month her clothes—a few of the prettier ones she had been bought to wear in her clerical capacity on Alderney—found their way to the town swap. Clothing and material—even thread—had become scarce by then. The few Ivoroid buttons, even, on her shirtwaists were now ridiculously valuable.

Allen had managed, with great effort and dogged focus, to find the daughter of the woman who had bought one of Annie's skirts that day.

"You would not believe what she gave for it," the daughter had said. "You would have thought it were made of pure gold."

He had looked at the daughter, of an age now that showed she could not have been more than five or six at the time. He wondered what she could recall of those days, whether she understood that a bit of hardy, unstained, unripped cloth had been equal to or better than gold.

"You don't still have it?" he had foolishly inquired—what good could it do him?

"Matter of fact," the daughter had told him, "my mum packed up a trunk after Liberation. Filled it with things from those days. Said she would keep it always, in case we needed to remember. Needed to be reminded of those days, of what happened."

"And you still have it?"

The daughter gave him a narrow look. "I don't need musty, worthless bits in a trunk to remember Granny passing away on the only bed we hadn't broken up for firewood because she had decided to stop eating so the rest of us could have more. To remember Germans taking away my playmates' parents and sending them home bruised and bleeding because they wouldn't give the names of where they got their phony extra ration card. But yes, I still have it."

She showed him up to the loft.

The small trunk was indeed full of Occupation things: shoes with only paper trying to cover holes worn through their soles, several German edicts that were circulated to Islanders, a few now-empty packets from the Vega boxes. Certainly nothing he hadn't seen before. Hadn't, himself, lived among those years ago.

The skirt was near the bottom, folded carefully. He could not judge whether it had been altered, taken in so severely, because of the nutritional state of the woman who bought it, or (lost to his memory with the passage of time and the present norm of routinely seeing healthy women) if Anya, herself, had been so dangerously slender.

It had seemed silly to ask for a moment alone with it. It was an inanimate thing—not even something Annie would have chosen for herself. It had been little more than something to make her attractive bait for Gisbonnhoffer, he knew now. Dressing up Andromeda to meet the sea monster.

He came very close to feeling foolish in that stranger's loft, feeling borderline ridiculous over having such emotional feelings about the abandoned clothes of the woman who had needed a Perseus and had instead got him. Until his hand felt something crinkly along the skirt's hand-stitched hemline.

He hadn't stepped down the ladder from the loft to ask permission, he simply snapped the slender thread of the hem and unrolled what little fabric there was there until the slip of paper fell into his hands.

And with it he had Anya's story, the words she wished to leave the world with, in her own hand.

It was not the whole, naturally (whoever found the time to share that?), but it was not only her words that mattered, here—though she had chosen them well. It was the fact that in all the uncertainty of her fate she had managed to do so at all. To write just the sort of testimonial the courts were now, a decade later, looking for in order to bring such men to justice. And she had done it with clerical panache, writing her statement flawlessly, beautifully, in a trio of languages.

"I, Anna Grigorovna Lendova," the paper read, in feathery graphite, "Russian-born prisoner upon these Channel Islands, once held at the Alderney Treeton Camp for a secretary, then tasked to manual labor with Operation Todt, denounce Island Kommandant Heinrik Vaiser, Todt Work-Gang Oberst Gottleib Weisenschlag, and Herr Lieutenant Geis Gisbonnhoffer and their compatriots for the following crimes against their fellow man; in general and in particular as follows..."

There was nothing left of her upon the skirt, he knew that. Not even a long hair left behind. How could there be, a decade later? No, there was nothing left of her in the world that could be found—even her body's resting place was unknown, untraceable somewhere under the sands and rock of Jersey.

This small paper was all that could be said to be hers—that could be used to prove (outside his own memories) that a woman such as Annie existed. No children of her own, no husband, her family wiped out of existence.

He looked at the paper; how fragile it was, how easily damaged. And yet how much power it held, that slender slip of paper with that light dusting of her handwriting.

It was its own Holy Testament, he thought. It was a sword that would enable a proper vengeance to be taken.

So slight it could have weighed little more than a human soul, but how many souls—not only hers—did it represent, did it stand witness of? Men and women and children voiceless to dictate their stories, snuffed out with no one to advocate for them.

But for Annie.

Clever Annie. Always anxious, her life one of a bird in an overly small cage, its keepers cruel and capricious-but Annie, always looking for a way to help.

She had helped others. Carter, Djak-others. She had stayed behind for the sake of her family. In the end, she had stayed behind to help him. And it was her end, because she had done what he asked.

Never telling him the cost she was paying along the way.

He imagined her for a moment, standing at the front of the other occupants of Alderney, where-had they ever been let out-they would have flooded the parade grounds of the Treeton Camp. As always, she was the only one in color, the only one tidy, clean for her work and life in the office hut. He thought of her eyes, of what terror her life must have been.

And he thought of her courage.

And he thought of both the hope and the lack of hope this paper implied. Hope, that it should one day be located and acted upon. And the lack of hope. Written down and hidden, it was, showing her own doubt that she would be able to tell the right someone the same damning things in person. Her final communication with this world.

How long had she worn it, hidden within her hem? Had she ever tried to give it to someone? Had she ever told another living being all the things those curs had done to her?

After a few minutes he knew he was crying. 'Like a little girl', he might have joked in company, but he knew: not like a little girl. Rather, like a man. Like a man who had swallowed his sorrows during the war until he was full of them, and now they would either poison him or spill over.

Like a man reading someone else's story that he suddenly realizes is also his own.

Someone else's loft, someone else's witness statement. For all that the Channels were British soil, really—someone else's country. But not someone else's war.

His war.

Final battle yet to be fought.

He still carried Annie's paper in his pocket, though he could have recited it verbatim if called upon. He was here on her errand, after all. Looking for Jarl Derheim, whereabouts unknown, expecting that through him he could locate this Work-Gang Oberst Gottleib Weisenschlag (likewise whereabouts unknown) on Annie's list.

Taking care of Derheim along the way—though he had not been singled-out for naming in the denouncement—would stand as a side-project.

All information that he could find strongly suggested Derheim had managed to avoid capture and replanted himself (with some help from sympathetic governments and German émigrés) in this corner of South America.

But his search over the last few days seemed to be drying up. Now he was out for a walk to clear his head and decide on his next course of action while waiting for his most recent enquiries (and the cash he had attempted to grease them with) to come through for him.

Through sheer happenstance, Allen runs across Eleri Vaiser in Brazil, living under an assumed name and against her will among a tight-knit community of escaped Nazi families.

He makes no plans to see her again after their chance encounter, and yet Eleri continues to show up-whether she's wanted or not.

Her fascination with him fueled, perhaps more than a little, by her inability to understand the gaps and absence of logic in his war-time behavior.

They become an unintentional couple-though a platonic one, and Eleri begins to enlist Allen (and his expertise) to help her attempt yet another escape from her life by having him buy a car for her (with her money) and proceed to teach her to drive it.

The hotel's upper floors were quite warm, and after a moment Eleri stood and walked toward the French doors of the balcony, opening them in the hopes of catching something of a breeze off the bay, two blocks distant.

"Undo your collar and cuffs," she instructed him. "You are turning dreadfully pink. Shall I ring to see if they've any ice?"

With some degree of annoyance (he was not a child, after all), he began to do as she suggested, peeling back his shirtsleeves into cuffs, unbuttoning his shirt until several inches of ribbed undershirt was visible, pulling out its tail from his trousers. "No ice," he told her, "I've naught to drink up here."

She looked down at him on her way crossing the room away from the French doors. He ran his hand through his hair. With his collar open and his shirt cuffed he did feel better. A slight breeze had begun to stir the light curtains at the balcony doors.

He saw Eleri reach for her gloves.

"She was a Yank," he said, surprising himself by actively trying to delay her exit. "I went over there after the war," he straddled his forehead with his hand, fingertip and thumb tip each to its own temple, "stayed with my aged auntie. Florinda was a dancer. Auntie, costume mistress."

Down went the hat. It had no weight, and the bed was not a hard surface, but if it had been so it would have made a resounding thud. "You do not live in Guernsey!"

"Naw," he admitted, going on. "Not since '45. Got out, right after liberation."

"And what, then, is your present occupation?" she asked, surprised confusion about her face. She was no longer about to leave.

"Presently?" he asked rhetorically. "I am a man of no occupation."

Her eyes narrowed, her mouth opened as though she could now taste something in the air. "And why come here, to Carnaval?"

And there it was: the real question. The answer that would ultimately answer all the others: the kernel of his identity, and the games that had been played with it since a certain disastrous plane crash pre-war.

"I'm at looking for someone from the war," he told her.

"Looking for someone?" her question was wary, distrustful at the vague use of 'someone'. "An old lover?"

"No, a woman—" he quickly cut in. "A person, a very good person." He increased the intensity of their eye contact, letting his brows raise as if to tentatively ask, 'trust me on this one?' "I am looking for someone who hurt her."

Eleri's head did a long, slow motion nod, as if she were calculating furiously during its descent. "There are certainly enough Germans here who fit that description."

He nodded.

She looked at him, and though she did not say it, he could read it in her face: This is why you are here,notCarnaval. This is why the handgun. At this point he did not doubt she knew something of his meetings with contacts (though until now she had clearly not understood the nature of them), knew the name he traveled under (the one upon his present passport) was an inverted version of the one she had known him as.

"That day, in the taverna. You wanted me to know where von Bachmeier was. Wanted to know that information, didn't you?"

"Myself, and a thousand others," he confessed.

She was nearly grunting with the work of getting the jack to raise the car up off the earth, and she responded with gritted teeth. "If I learn to change a tire properly-then will you stop rowing with yourself?" she asked. "You are a fair beast today. Schmidznagel may well be better company."

"He has more reason to be so," he bit back, squatting down to point out the first of many lug nuts she must remove. His forearms rested on his upper legs, his hands, useless in the moment, flopped down toward the ground.

"You want…money?" she asked, incredulous. "This, right now, it's about money?" she was obviously confused, she turned to look back at him, brought her hand up to her face, not realizing she was smearing more grease with every touch.

When she could see into his eyes, she answered herself. "No, you don't. What is this about? Not the tire—I understand the need for the tire. But this—your humour. Something's wrong."

He let himself rock slightly back on his heels, let his bum hit the ground as he collapsed into a seat on the earth to her back. "Told you I was lookin' for someone."

"Yes, I know."

"Well, he can't be found. Leastways, not by me. Not by the many others I've put pounds in their pockets here to help look."

"Which is why you are leaving."

He pointed toward the other lug nuts, still needing loosened and removed, and she returned to her prescribed task.

"I will leave and follow what information I have wherever it will take me."

"Who is this person? This woman you are doing this for? You say she was not your lover. What, then—your family? How could your tie to her be so strong that you do not feel satisfied by what you have already done? The time and effort you have already expended?"

How could his tie to her be so strong. 'That I was the method of her destruction,' he wanted to say. He thought for a moment. It was the first time since sitting at Carter's Hoboken table he had again been well and truly confronted about who he really was, what he stood for. How easy it had been for the former RAF pilot to slice through all of it, how direct and definitive had been his statement on the matter. Allen wondered if he had it within himself to also dissect the riddle so.

"I was born with the name Allen Dale," he told her. "It was the British Secret Service that suggested I alter it for use in my work."

"The British Secret-"

"Pull it off the axle, there," he instructed her, cutting her off, "My unit had been dropped into France on a standard mission when during our escape a cock-up left us stranded first on Guernsey, before we made our way to Sark."

"You took the job as my father's driver-"

"And I ran a network of informants across three islands."

"She is your informant," Eleri quick-deduced. "What happened to her, your responsibility." He watched the sometimes warring colors in her irises coalesced into glimmering understanding, into what—if he was not kidding himself—was empathy.

He had not planned to confess to this. What good could come of it, of telling Eleri who he was? Who he always had been?

She took her hands, and finally realizing their level of grime, wiped them vigorously upon the trousers of his she wore.

"I know where you can find this man," she told him.

"Which man?" he asked, his pulse snapping to attention. "What know you of whom I search?"

"The man once known as OberSeer Jarl Derheim," she answered, clearly knowing more about his present occupation than he had realized.

"Derheim-you know him? Know where he is?"

She nodded. "But he is in the cemetery. For more than one year, but less than two."

"You are certain?"

She nodded again. "Very. His death saved my life."

"Saved you-but how? How could he have been any sort of threat to you: Vaiser's daughter? Von Bachmeier's step-child?"

"You recall I told you about my teacher? My painting master? That we-were involved."

"Yea."

"He had another student. She was jealous. Very jealous of he and I, and he was not the sort of man to take a second woman into his bed when he already had one there. So there was no hope for her passion for him. Not while I stood in her way. And even in the days between my family forcing him to give me up and him doing so, it was said he had no heart for anyone else. Her solution to this was simple: to get me out of her way, and out of his mind. She met with my mother, convinced her I was possibly pregnant with his child. Immediately my mother began scheming what to do with me, how to make the problem go away. Even when it became undeniably obvious that I was not pregnant, still she schemed. I was spoiled goods. She could not be as choosy as she wished. There was an old friend of von Bachmeier's living out on a small ranch up in the mountains, financially very well-off, but needing to keep to himself for reasons left over from the war, and the way in which he entered the country. Of course, in all of this he was also living under an alias. A Dutch name, I think. He had once come to town for a visit and saw one of my paintings. He had liked it very much, and insisted on buying it from my mother, who was frankly horrified to be taking money for anything I had created, but he would have it no other way. When things changed and she was looking for a buyer of another kind, she contacted him and arranged for my engagement to him. Had he lived until the wedding I would have been shipped off to the mountains to live on a remote goat farm, with an elderly infirm husband and no other contacts in the world. Yes, I am certain he is dead. I had to wear black to his funeral, and a mourning armband for several months after. It is his death that gave me any small freedom that I now can find. I am not about to forget that."

"But if he is dead, don't you see?" he asked, "I cannot stay here. There are others. Others to seek out on her behalf."

"And your agency, this Secret Service—they would not like you helping the daughter of Heinrik Vaiser, the step-daughter of von Bachmeier," she intuited. "Unless you were doing so at their command?"

"MI-6?" he asked, a joking scoff in his voice. "No, I do not reckon they would like it—whatever the plans they have for you and your mum. But I no longer take orders from them. Not that I ever done much of it when I oughter."

"So Herr Derheim, he is the only reason you came to Brazil?"

"I came for Anya's sake," he told her, feeling unusual saying her name. "And she was too good a person to have gotten muddled up into thinking you had anything to do with what your father done. The fault in Annie's story lies with myself, and the men in her testimony."

"And so you mean to right it by pursuing these men."

"Too late to right it," he confessed, "but I mean to resolve it."

She let out a sigh. The sigh he actually felt like he needed to make. "So that is the life you choose to live, now," she said, "out in the open."

"It is," he agreed, stepping to the boot to grab another hand tool for her.

They stopped speaking after this, the task at hand reaching a point where it was easy to fall into silence, to put one's physical movements out front of whichever way one's mind was presently running, whatever interior thoughts or arguments one was carrying on within.

It lasted long enough that other than a request for a tool, or a needed bit of instruction, nothing else passed between them until she had completed her lesson, the tire removed and then acceptably re-put on the Tucker.

One might say: a lesson in futility, largely ending them at the spot they had just begun. Same tire, same car, same two people.

But not.

Eleri Vaiser now knew how to change a tire, should the need arise. And more than that she knew more about the man who had taught her such a skill. But even as she had done so, his confession, such as it were, left more to be explained, to be learned. And yet, no time for it. Not today. Not on this trip, soon to draw to a close.

He opened a bottle of soda pop for her, his hands clean, unlike her own. She leaned forward and took it from him with a studious eye. One of her waves—usually tucked behind an ear, smoothed like rows in fertile topsoil brushing along her neck fell forward and away from its fellows. Realizing now her hands to be greasy to a fault, she dared not smooth it back. She blew at it, trying to get it out of her vision. He walked closer to her and tucked it behind her ear for her. The tips of his fingers felt the whisper-smoothness of the skin at her temple, the downy hair, there.

She did not thank him as he moved to rest himself up against the car, leaning into it as did she.

Together they looked off into the distance, back toward the city and the bay. Back toward what represented reality to each of them.

He had his answer. Derheim dead. For him it was now onto the next question, the next search from Annie's denouncement statement.

For Eleri—she broke their silence, broke through the distance they had already begun building up between one another over the last half-hour since he had offered her something of truth.

"I am living a half-life, here," she announced, her bottle still resting against her lower lip, her breath flowing across it as she spoke, making it occasionally hum. "And I am so tired of being afraid of it," she mused. "So tired. Being watched, being followed. Always meant to be hiding, not being myself. See," she told him unnecessarily, "you know that fear. That haunting."

He found himself looking to the ground at their feet. Not responding, he kicked at a small lump of dirt she had scraped up in her tire exertions.

"You say I must have a solid plan if I am to leave," she declared, reciting his own advice back to him. "Very well, help me not to be afraid," and here she turned toward him, lowering the bottle from her mouth, crossing her arms over her chest. "Teach me to shoot. Without some sort of protection I will never get away from here."

He drew his head up slowly, away from where he had been looking down, to meet her eyes. She must've been able to read him very well by now, since her own face altered from its look of hopeful request in that instance, even before he spoke the words.

"No time," he told her, not even bothering to shrug to cushion his rejection of her request. "I've a few things to see to before I go, but a very few. You may carry your mum my regrets about not being able to attend her dinner party, or however that's done. Not tomorrow, but next day will be our final lesson. Has to be, my ticket's bought."

Realizing (nearly too late) that she loves Allen, Eleri manages to get him to agree to one last occasion with her before he leaves the country.

He had not been out dancing for awhile — certainly not since he had left America for the Channel Islands on his Annie errand.

That night, they encounter Gisbonnhoffer, also living in secret. Allen demands that they immediately leave the club.

"We cannot," Eleri's brows shot up onto her forehead. "He has invited us to his table for a Doppelkorn toast."

A Doppelkorntoast? An invitation by Gisbonnhoffer? The man who, in any scenario, had killed Marion? Raped Anya? Raisehisglass to the man who had broken Ox?

Atoast?

"You expect me to go drink with 'im?" The heat he had felt earlier was returning, but this time in the form of an anger he was not able to see any present advantage in hiding. The girl singer warbled on about make-believe. Chirped, more like.

He felt stretched out of shape and pulled thin. His chest threatened to twinge from this new, unexpected stress being slopped on top of whatever one might name the physically taxing moment he had been undergoing before whilst dancing with Eleri.

Eleri's face took on an expression of pleading, and she began to speak swiftly, as though if she could explain well-enough all would be put-right. "After you leave, Ihave to go on being around these people — running in to these sorts of people. Unless you can think of an excuse that's not going to hurt Frau de Lisbon's feelings and put me in a future awkward position with her, then yes, put on your 'face' and sit long enough to drink with the swine. I have done so often enough over the last ten years with him and with men like him. It will kill you only a little," she said, and then she had the nerve to take him to task, pulling her chin up and beginning to look defiantly at him. "And then you may be well shot of it. Of us all. The Frau is one of the only kind people I have ever met around here." She looked as though she might cry or shout from frustration.

Although Allen heard her words saying one thing, he felt the agitation coming off her, even in his own state of twisted, unexpected emotions. She did not wish to drink with this man. She no more wished to stay at this club than did he.

But was she right? Would it be wrong of him to pull so selfish a trick as vanishing after an invitation which he might easily ignore and walk away from, leaving her the one to deal with the fall-out, and those snubbed by his actions?

Certainly he could 'put on his face' for her. Could stand for a toast. And then they would excuse themselves and leave, and he could get his head on straight. Sort this emotional roller coaster of a night in quiet and in peace. On a plane out of and away from this forsaken country.

He was the man known as Dale Allen, after all. He could kiss the hand of Hitler himself and none the wiser. But he was finding, little by little, his life had become no longer a question of what he could do.

Looking to the distance, he could see the Gisbonnhoffer table from here; Frau Greta was already seated at it, discussing something with a waiter. Likely, the order of schnapps and the bringing of glasses.

For the toast.

How many times? How many times had he seen Anya Grigorovna bring just such a tray; tall, clear bottle and small glasses into Gisbonnhoffer's Treeton office so that Vaiser's lieutenant might celebrate some personal victory? Toast the Reich? Warm from a chill?

How many bloody times?

Had she been afraid every second in her life at Treeton? Fearful each time she opened the door to Gisbonnhoffer's office? As she closed her eyes at night to sleep?

Had she imagined breaking those tall, clear bottles and using one to slit his throat?

Or her wrist?

A toast. With Gisbonnhoffer? What would she say of Dale Allen, were she to know it? What would she think of her Mr. Allen, then? She had stayed behind for him – to seek for information about Mitch being held – because he had asked it. She had agreed to go on facing the horror at Treeton, the torment of Gisbonnhoffer. Because he, Allen, had (unwittingly) asked it.

And now he would share a drink with the man? Would look at Geis and not see, instead, Annie's face? Would behave as though the last months of his life tracking and working to avenge Anya bore no weight, were of no consequence – when presently that quest was just about all the life he had? All the purpose in himself he could muster?

Because Eleri Vaiser asked it of him? Because Kommandant's daughter requested he 'put on' his face?

This was bollocks.

In his indignation he became intensely aware of the negligible weight of Annie's fragile denouncement paper, which he always carried upon his person.

Too much, he thought, focusing on Eleri, though it was Geis against whom his rage was truly kindled. "You ask too much." Want too much, need too much. She spent all her time telling him how little she had here, too little. "Yet you always have your way," he sniped at her.

His foot twinged.

But still she asked. 'Kill you only a little,' she had said. He wagged his head at her, shaking it in the negative. "You dunno wot will kill a man. A thousand little smiles, each of which pinpoint-rots a soul, costs him some of who he is. 'Til he no longer knows anymore. Look at you lot," he jerked his chin at her. "You stand there and ask me to meet wickedness with bleeding cordiality. You ask me to stand across from a murderer and pretend I don't see the bodies rottening at 'is feet." His jaw was thrust out in disgust, and had they been outside he might very well have spat to show his further contempt. As it was, he scoffed. "I would rather wallow in the knee-deep shite of pestilent pigs than see myself standing at that man's table about to share a drink with him. And if you haven't spied that about me, love — then –" he took a measured step back from her, not bothering to soften his heavy footfalls. "You and I've never really met, and I dunno who you think's been squiring you about and keepin' your secrets—"

But she did not let him finish.

Stopping just barely short of a full-blown public row with Eleri, Allen heads to the loo before departing. Only to meet with nothing short of total disaster.

Still, he manages to make it out to the taxi, and Eleri, uninvited, follows.

South America – BRASIL – Salvador da Bahia - 1954 – The lighter went out on Eleri twice, and she flicked to re-light it. Its flame danced erratically until the cigarette took to it. But Eleri was not much of a smoker, carrying the case more to offer smokes from it than to satisfy any real habit of her own.

She took one short puff and extended it towards him.

There in the dark, he felt that tiny, slender fag improbably swell to fill the gap of space between them, felt the embers alight upon the tip of it like as though their heat and combustion occurred pushed up against his very cheek.

Everything felt as close, as unpleasantly near as had Gisbonnhoffer claustrophobically blocking him from exiting that loo.

The invitation to a toast.

The offer of a fag.

He was besieged by old, well-worn memories of Anya's dresses, how surprisingly nice they had been in contrast to the cruelty and universal want of her surroundings. In contrast to her imprisonment. How seeing a woman in something pretty and not at all shabby had always been a particular treat for him during the war. How he had worked to shelve that feeling when he was around her.

How he had offered her, how many? one-hundred unimportant drags on his cigs in the brief moments they two interacted. How she had always refused them. And how he had for so long (until it was too late, really) had no idea the toxic hands of Gisbonnhoffer were all over those jolly frocks, burning Annie, hurting her with every day, every moment she lived under his power.

He could not accept the cigarette from Eleri, letting a lateral move of his head turn her offer of it away.

In response she reached for him, a hand coming up, extended toward his forearm where he had rested it (not lightly) upon his leg. At the near-touch of her, he pulled his hand and elbow up and away, closer to the core of him, as though he could not bear the weight of her palm against his coat. And after that coat, against the well-pressed shirt inside it, against his skin.

"What is it?" she asked (quite reasonably), confusion painting her question. "Is it that he cut in? That I went with him?" She looked at him out of the side of her eyes as well, trepidatious, trying to choose her words carefully, weigh what effect they might have on him.

The ongoing encounter between Eleri and Allen intensifies, truths brutal and long held-in are finally told.

But the breaking-down of walls brings with it the threat of total emotional collapse.

And of course, there near the center, as always, as ever: Annie.

Eleri had asked him why she should not kill Gisbonnhoffer.

He noticed his foot was sore from standing without his cane. Noticed that his brain seemed again to be tracking things for him. Doing its job.

"Because I've done such work before," he told her, without being more specific, in his own mind seeing the beaches of Dunkirk, the alleyways of Paris, the farms of Normandy, twice a side street in Peter Port. Not so many that he had yet lost count.

"Because any decent person wot has done would work to keep you from the stain of doing likewise," he told her, growing closer to the truth. "Because, because of this," and he reached for Annie's denouncement paper where he kept it always on his person. "'cause of her. The woman I told you about. Why I came to Brazil." His voice was still unsteady in its speech, his tongue acting as though it were cramped from lengthy lack of use. The blood coursing through his veins seemed still, quite tremulous.

He had reached into his pocket, and his wallet within. "I found this on Jersey," he explained to Eleri. "Where she'd been sent after Treeton. 'Was sewn into the hem of a skirt sold by Jerry to islanders what needed clothing. It's in her hand," he explained further, needlessly pointing out on the slender slip of paper where Eleri might find Annie's words in her own tongue.

Eleri did not lay the gun down, but watching his face intently as he spoke, then took the small paper to read it for herself.

He had never shown this paper to another living being. Not even to the Jerseywoman whose house he found it within.

It had been like a special thing to him, a holy thing. A private communication, a directive for his eyes only. Of course he knew Annie had not meant it that way. Could not have known that he would find it, and act upon it as a sacred text.

By watching Eleri's face he could tell when she finished the French and moved on to squint at the other iterations of the denouncement to be found in the multiple languages written upon the scrap.

She read the French again. And then, a third time.

She looked up, gently returned the paper to him.

A moment later she extended the gun, grip in his direction. "You should have told me these names," she said, and he knew she was calling him out for not trusting her, though she did not say so directly. "I would have told you where he was. I would have helped you find him." During the short span of that speech, nothing about her looked at all phony.

Outside, beyond the balcony of the hotel room, the brass and drums of the Carnaval revelers could be heard, even over the wireless where he had set it to playing. So much frivolity and carefree celebration in the city that held them. Joy and merriment that seemed blocked somehow from reaching them here. They could hear it, they could look at it, observe what such gaiety meant for others, but they two, they were locked out. Trapped away from it. Drowning, still, in new knowledge of the past. The past whose grip upon them they could not seem to slip, to be free of.

Was Eleri aware of this? Did she notice as life and happiness danced by her? Was it fair of him even to be thinking about such a thing after when he had learned of Marion's true fate? Anya, who would know no earthly happiness, no merry revels. Ox, who grieved a woman - his very heart - he might not have needed to be separated from.

And Marion, Marion somewhere - in-ground or walking above it - lost and wounded, never finding her way home. Never knowing why they did not search to find her. Why they gave her up for lost.

It felt as though the last decade of his life had been built upon this lie, this chief lie alone: the dead doppelganger of Marion, and the only thing that made sense about that knowledge was that that very life had crumbled all-but to dust in his hands.

He still held the gun, its weight real and foreboding where it rested on its side, impotent and un-aimed in his hand.

"We're fools," he said to Eleri, and his shoulders shook with the admission of it. The back of his skull throbbed, as though he still lay, unmoving, upon that Barnsdale davenport where he had learned that nothing would ever be alright again.

"He has won, well and truly, don't you see?" he asked her, without saying Gisbonnhoffer's name.

Her lower lip shook as she tried to hold back from full-out weeping, the look in his own eyes having an effect upon her more profound than he would have credited.

"She will have thought we broke faith with her, that we never come looking for her." He threw his arm out with the gun now in his grip, as though aiming at something across the room, and gestured strongly with it. "He did not send her on to Heaven, out of our grasp, beyond our ken — into a place where there is no more suffering. He sent her into the belly of Hell, El'ri. He sent her down to suffering," and now the gun aimed at the floor, "suffering and want the likes of us two — for all that we have seen summat of it - will never know. He cursed her," his voice began to break, and the ability to clearly pronounce words left him but he fought to speak on, "and we were too easily gulled to see it, to scupper his plans."

Tears stood out on her cheeks, falling once again as she listened intently to what he had to say. She would never have believed that loving someone could be so much about pain.

Why not say it all? he thought. What worse could come of it?

"It were my responsibility," he brought the gun up to his chest, pressing its side into him, "that night she were," he confessed. "My place to see her to safety — on to freedom!"

Eleri shook her head, obviously unsettled by the gun's proximity to his person. "But how -?"

"Yes!" he could not even let her finish her question. He rushed on. It was all coming out now, spitting forth from him like someone had engaged the valve on a long-dry fountain. "There were a secret transport that night, headed for England — for home — on to her family. And I miscalculated in my handling of her." Instinctively his free hand went again to the back of his head, and he thrust the gun away from him, onto the mattress. "'Twas Marion who nobbled me with that iron, and stole the launch. 'Twas Marion, dead-set on sending a downed RAF-er home in the place reserved for her. And this is what has been done to 'er!"

He felt his face dissolve into an expression over which he had no control, nor, any desire to control or mitigate. "Done to her and to — and to —" he could not say Ox's name, not any part of it. Even his mind could barely finish the thought.

His breath and heart were out-of-control, he was chilled and yet feverish at the same time. His hands felt swollen, their joints in malaise, no longer inclined to action. Within and without he was a collision of emotion; grinding, shattering in a moment of terrible, catastrophic impact.

His voice was scarcely comprehensible, even to him. "Oh, El," he cried out, and she could not tell if he was calling her name or swearing a good British 'hell'. "Oh, El," he begged again. "What 'ave we done?"

Through a face still wet from tears Eleri looked straight into Allen's eyes and confessed, "I meant to run over your foot."

He looked back at her, the angle of their gaze so close, so intimate, his breath not yet coming placidly. "I know," he said, and rested his forehead against hers like a man who had just run back-to-back marathons; haggard, thirsty, needing something upon which to lean for support.

She closed her eyes, wishing for the moment to last, even in this sadness, even in this despair. Her mind hurt too much, her heart beat, but as one bruised, swollen with the injury.

She thought of Marion by turns, thought of this Anya by turns, of Gisbonnhoffer and hatred and abandonment and fear. She thought of Allen and of all that he had said, had confessed to. She thought he must be the best man she had ever known. And she never wanted him to pull away from her again.

SOUTH AMERICA - Brasil - Salvador da Bahia - Hotel de Curacao - 1954 - When Eleri again slept, the hour of his own waking not fully past, Allen Dale slipped from her embrace and silently dressed. (Old-hat tasks in his life at which he was more than proficient. Slipping out and away from a girl's bed - and her arms - at all hours, dressing silently so as not to awaken drowsy, exhausted lovers.)

With the memory of long ago practice quickly returning to his limbs he lowered himself down from the upper floor balcony of his hotel room onto the darkness of the side alley below. He was seen by no one as he briskly left the Hotel de Curacao behind, able to locate just the right pools of darkness to obscure his journey out into the night.

He wore double clothing, two jumpers, two pair of trousers - for his work this night would likely prove a messy task, and his training recalled to him the potential necessity of shedding and casting-off layers quickly when needs must.

He could not have said how he knew that Gisbonnhoffer would also have been unable to sleep during the time of the Nightwatch, but in this belief Allen was not disappointed.

Taller than many of the Brazilian locals, Gisbonnhoffer was to be spotted easily enough among the raucous, all-night celebrations still carrying on (though with less energy, now) down in view of the Bay, not far from where Eleri had said his family traditionally took their rooms.

The moon was full enough to see by; lights and electric in scarce supply this close to the water. Clumps of people gathered, tall torches struck in the sand for light. From time to time a group would go a-marching, instruments to the front, crowd following in various stages of dance.

The noise, echoing off the Bay, could be heard at a great distance. Some present even had guns, shooting them off into the air (hopefully, into the air) in sporadic, explosive celebration.

As far as police presence, there was none to be seen, sensible locals having gone to bed long ago (peace officers having apparently joined them), their own revels concluded, no need to stretch them out further, squeeze at the dregs of joy any longer. Time for the celibate, sober Lenten-like days to come.

The sound of those left had become a wheezy sort of noise, the voices singing slurred but still raucous, loud by turns.

Carnaval was in its dying moments, but these celebrants would be here to make merry a little longer, until sunrise marked the true and final end.

Allen found another spot of shadow and observed. Gisbonnhoffer was among the revelers, yes, but though he maneuvered around and amongst them, he was like a sleepwalker: present, but absent. He spoke to, engaged with, none of them. They must have realized earlier that to invite him to do so was futile. None of them reached out toward him, either. Certainly he was not taking part in their celebration. It seemed more that he and they merely occupied the same geographical space. Then again, there were plenty of stoned-to-silence drunks among their jolly numbers, and they may well have simply taken him for another.

Allen waited for another song to strike up (his patience surprising even himself), for the press of bodies to come to a fuller boil of motion and dance and fever and the tangle of outrageous attire.

When Gisbonnhoffer walked into a swell of this, Allen found his moment. Knowing better than the trapped-in-the-chaos ex-German how to navigate slickly in and out of the press of a crowd, he sidled up to the back of the former Lieutenant and discharged his gun into Geis' back twice. Once to the liver and once to the lung, close enough to the heart to shortly matter, the shot to the liver (as he had been trained, as he had learned oh-so-well) just-so to sever the necessary artery.

There was no reaction among the crowd to the muffled gunfire. The drums and horns thudded and sang on in bright, brass joy. In celebration.

In the moment before Gisbonnhoffer could drop to his knees, Allen leaned toward his enemy's ear, and without showing the man he had just killed his face, hissed, his spotty-since-the-war German coming back to him in a burst of fluency: "'Twas Anya Grigorovna who stole the flier from you. Who bested you."

He wasted no time on assigning Gisbonnhoffer German slurs, the saying of which would only lengthen his speech. "In her name I revenge her upon you. Know this as your punishment: where you're going you'll never see Marion again. You'll not live long enough to speak her name."

For several beats the music and the crowd dancing to it bore Gisbonnhoffer forward, keeping him upright and unable to fall. Allen hung back, expertly slithering his way out of the tangle of people, only pausing to glance back once he was in the safety of the shadow cast by a beach shack.

The impromptu parade of Carnaval celebrants marched on. Two or three men who had overindulged to the point of unconsciousness lay strewn in their wake. And one man — not at all dressed for such festivities - looking very little of the other revelers - had fallen, glassy-eyed and lifeless, blood draining from his lips onto the sand; friendless, alone, his mouth empty, even, of a last word; blessing, or curse.

Allen Dale found his way back up to his rooms' balcony at the Hotel de Curacao nearly as easily as he had found his way down from it, his injured-but-healing foot (though far from comfortable) giving him trouble only here and there, but seeing a light now on within that room he paused, his back against the building's wall, the curtain shielding him from what, or rather whom, was beyond. Other than from the natural exertion to be expected from scaling the wall to this height, his heart did not race. His hands did not shake.

Robin visits Iain Johnson and his wife, formerly Madame La Salle, on Sark and talk turns to Allen.

SARK - La Salle family Tenement - 1955 - John and Louise had returned to the farmhouse in time for tea.

"When did Dale meet Lana Turner?" Robin asked conversationally.

"Lana Turner? Oh," John asked, confused but then smiling. "The photograph. We keep it up as it's the only one we have of him. Not Lana Turner. His wife. Ex-wife." He shared a significant look with Louise.

"Leave it to him..." Robin trailed off, knowing there was no need to elaborate out-loud about Dale's ways with the fairer sex.

"Aye," John agreed.

"He's re-married," Louise offered.

"What, really?"

"We only just heard last month. Strange, though. When he last visited he mentioned nothing of such a possibility," John shared. "Mind to the task, I suppose. Must've happened quickly."

"And his last visit was..?"

John looked to Louise.

"Six? Seven? Seven months ago."

"Yet he did not stop in to MI6, nor try to contact me." Robin's voice sounded more of suspicion (side effect of his day job) than hurt feelings.

"Didn't come by way of England. Crossed the pond to France, traveled North to see us and then back to Jersey." John shook his head and gave his shoulders a shallow shrug. "Whatever he found there he didn't stop back by."

Robin's brows knit in thought. "And he was looking for information on the Russian secretary?"

"He spoke of little else," Louise confirmed.

"Seemed to believe he might find information about her on Jersey. He was with us two nights, here."

"She was tasked to Todt, right? And transferred..."

John nodded. "It makes him nervous, though," he spoke on about Allen and Sark. "Can see it in his eyes. Thinkin' he'll be recognized and caught-out for Kommandant's driver as was. Daresay he can be more jumpy among the Sarkese during peacetime than he ever was during the war."

"It's odd," Robin tried to understand. "That he didn't try to touch base with me. We've rooms of files, entire levels. Might have been able to search something down for him."

"Wot?" John laughed through his words, guessing quite close to the mark about Robin's current work with the Ministry. "You Nazi-hunters? Pushin' yer papers 'til you're ready to pull the trigger? Reckon with Dale's connections he got whatever information His Majesty's files have without you having to dirty your hands for an unsanctioned job, and now he's at sniffing out his own trail."

"Likely a cold one."

"Well," John added, intuiting what Robin could not tell even him about his present-day occupation, "those may yet pay off. As you bloody well know."

"So you are for America, Robin?" Louise asked as she cleared away the tea things and handed down Johnson's tobacco so that he might pack a smoke.

"I am. I am, indeed."

"And will you try and see Dale?" John asked. "Hunt him down?"

"That last letter you had of him, what was the return address?"

"New Mexico. Albuquerque." Johnson bit down on a grin. "Out with Tom Mix and scores of wild injuns, one supposes."

"Don't know as I am bound that far into the New World," Robin confessed. "I had hoped to meet him in New York," he withdrew a small notebook and copied down the street address on the envelope. "Now I shall arrive friendless there."

Without preamble he brought things back to the topic of Dale's search. "Do you suppose he found anything? Even, reconciled within himself to lay the matter to rest?" Robin felt Louise's watchful eyes upon him. In his years of knowing her, he now knew that with her sight she saw just as deeply as had La Salle in his blindness. She would be making her own, confidential connections to why Dale's search for a lost woman might be of such interest to the man now Earl of Huntingdon.

John's demeanor of reply was hopeful, if lacking in specifics. "With his dislike of traveling, we had not expected to see him back with us so shortly anyway. We know only that whatever he found or did not find he has ceased searching and resettled. New country, new wife, new home," the large man's finger came to rest at the closing of Dale's brief letter, "new name."

'Signed, as is now legally mine by rights to use, 'Alan O'Dell'' the handwritten letter ended, not even a show of hesitance or uncertainty in the script that formed the new moniker. Just the smooth ease one might expect from a confidence man whose identity had always been more fluid than most.

Robin does find Allen in 'the New World' and with his new wife.

More truth is told as Allen shares the story of his time in Brazil.

Thomas Carter, notebook #12, recalling year 1958 - "I do not know that I had ever expected to hear from the Kommandant's driver again. Nor had I actively expected not to. I existed in a place devoid of expectation on the subject. He had turned up for those surprising days, that week in '54 - some might say like a bad penny - but once he had explained his purpose, I was not unhappy to help him with it. Even, I was pleased to do so. The task was the right one, if somewhat tardily attempted by us both. But that fight no longer seemed like the proper one I was meant to fight. The things that so haunted him were starting to become half-lost nightmares to me, harder to recall once I had waked from that ghastly sleep and broken with the hate and rage that had for so long consumed me and directed so many of my actions.

Or so I thought.

It was not a full two years later - there had been no communication between us in the interim - when I received an envelope with an unfamiliar return address out West, even an unfamiliar surname above that address. Inside it held a second envelope which read, simply, "her clothes were sold to a Jersey family in '44. This found among her pockets." Within was a small slip of paper, written over in three different languages, the same words; 'I, Anna Grigorovna Lendova, Russian-born prisoner upon these Channel Islands, once held at the Alderney Treeton Camp for a secretary, then tasked to manual labor with Operation Todt, denounce Island Kommandant Heinrik Vaiser, Todt Work-Gang Oberst Gottleib Weisenschlag, and Herr Lieutenant Geis Gisbonnhoffer and their compatriots for the following crimes against their fellow man; in general and in particular as follows...'

[Here a break could be seen in the flow of the notebook entry, writing beginning again in a different ink, Carter's train of thought dropped and clearly re-visited at another, later time]

I find I cannot bring myself to copy over the full-text of what inhuman and tortuous accusations (every one of them carefully and exactly worded, unimpeachably factual and truthful) that followed. Though the handwriting is necessarily small due to the lack of space (and no telling how she came by the precious paper upon which to write it), I have placed the document in this blahknote's front pocket, still in its original envelope.

When it arrived at King's Court and I opened it, there was no accompanying letter or explanation. No signature of its sender. Only, as one may see now, a strike-through over certain names in the text made by a different hand, the sweeping 'X' red grease pencil mark heavier, stronger, and of a wider width than the slender strokes of the soft lead used by the note's author. The very sort of cross-off one encounters in the gaming world when executing (and rendering null) a debtor's outstanding marker.

'Debt paid,' I knew I was meant to understand from this. 'Obligation satisfied.'"

- End journal entry

And so we have the fragmentary and incomplete story of Anya "Annie" Grigorovna. The woman who directly led to Robin's Island reunion with Marion, who set in motion and then helped facilitate the daring rescue of Carter, who enabled Djak to also rescue herself and keep safe throughout the remainder of the war. The woman who agreed to stay behind in order to help find Mitch. The woman who (inadvertently) led Allen to re-find Eleri, who condemned Gisbonnhoffer and his compatriots, and through Allen (inspired by her) was revenged upon them.

Which is to say nothing of her work on Jersey in the Underground, there. Or whether or not her death was mere tragic chance, or indeed a planned suicide attack against her oppressors.

Here we have Anya Grigorovna-as much as we can have of her-prisoner, freedom-fighter, hero: unstintingly brave in the face of despair, and standing humane among a life of barbarism.