Citadel (10 page)

“That is very true.”

“Is this a secret you will not divulge?”

“I will divulge, and what's more, now is the time
to divulge, before we all die of starvation or alcohol
withdrawal symptoms.”

“How very interesting.”

“A man on this panel has the ear of the prime
minister. He holds great power. It is he who insisted
on this highly unusual approach, it is he who
forces us to overbrief you and send you off with
far too much classified information. Let him speak,
then.”

“General Sir Colin means me,” said the professor.
“Because of my code-breaking success, I find
myself uniquely powerful. Mr. Churchill likes me,
and wants me to have my way. That is why I sit on
a panel with the barons of war, myself a humble
professor, not even at Oxford or Cambridge but at
Manchester.”

“Professor, is this a moral quest? Do you seek
forgiveness beforehand, should I die? It's really not
necessary. I owe God a death, and he will take it
when he sees fit. Many times over the years he has
seen fit not to do so. Perhaps he's bored with me
and wants me off the board. Perhaps he tires of my
completely overblown legendary wit and sangfroid
and realizes I'm just as scared as the next fellow,
am a bully to boot, and that it ended on a rather
beastly note with my father, a regret I shall always
carry. So, Professor, you who have saved millions,
if I go, it's on the chap upstairs, not you.”

“Well spoken, Captain St. Florian, like the hero
I already knew you to be. But that's not quite it.
Another horror lies ahead and I must burden you
with it, so I will be let alone enough by all those
noisy screamers between my ears to do my work
if the time comes.”

“Please enlighten.”

“You see, everyone thinks I'm a genius. Of
course I am really a frail man of many weaknesses.
I needn't elucidate. But I am terrified of one possibility.
You should know it's there before you undertake.”

“Go ahead.”

“Let us say you prevail. At great cost, by great
ordeal, blood, psychic energy, morale, whatever it
takes from you. And perhaps other people die as
well—a pilot, a Resistance worker, someone caught
by a stray bullet, any of the routine whimsies of
war.”

“Yes.”

“Suppose all that is true, you bring it back, you
sit before me exhausted, spent, having been
burned in the fire, you put it to me, the product of
your hard labors, and
I cannot decode the damned
thing
.”

“Sir, I—”

“
They
think I can, these barons of war. Put the
tag ‘genius' on a fellow and it solves all problems.
However, there are no, and I do mean no, assurances
that the pages you bring back will accord
closely enough with the original to yield a meaningful
answer.”

“We've been through this a thousand times,
Professor Turing,” said the general. “You will be
able, we believe, to handle this. We are quite confident
in your ability and attribute your reluctance
to a high-strung personality and a bit of stage
fright, that's all. The variations cannot be that
great, and your Turing engine or one of those
things you call a bombe ought to be able to run
down other possible solutions quickly and we will
get what we need.”

“I'm so happy the men who know nothing of
this sort of work are so confident. But I had to face
you, Captain St. Florian, with this truth. It may be
for naught. It may be undoable, even by the great
Turing. If that is the case, then I humbly request
your forgiveness.”

“Oh, bosh,” said Basil. “If it turns out that the
smartest man in England can't do it, it wasn't
meant to be done. Don't give it a thought, Professor.
I'll simply go off and have an inning, as best I
know how, and if I get back, then you have your
inning. What happens, then that's what happens.
Now, please, gentleman, can we hasten? My arse
feels as if Queen Victoria used it for needlepoint!”

Action This Day

Of course one normally never went about in anything
but bespoke. Just wasn't done. Basil's tailor
was Steed-Aspell, of Davies & Son, 15 Jermyn
Street, and Steed-Aspell (“Steedy” to his clients)
was a student of Frederick Scholte, the Duke of
Windsor's genius tailor, which meant he was a
master of the English drape. His clothes hung with an almost scary brilliance, perfect. They never just
crumpled. As gravity took them, they formed extraordinary
shapes, presented new faces to the
world, gave the sun a canvas for compositions
playing light against dark, with gray working an
uneasy region between, rather like the Sudetenland.
Basil had at least three jackets for which he
had been offered immense sums (Steed-Aspell was
taking no new clients, though the war might eventually
open up some room on his waiting list, if it
hadn't already), and of course Basil merely smiled
drily at the evocations of want, issued a brief but
sincere look of commiseration, and moved onward,
a lord in tweed, perhaps
the
lord of the
tweeds.

Thus the suit he now wore was a severe disappointment.
He had bought it in a secondhand
shop, and
monsieur
had expressed great confidence
that it was of premium quality, and yet its drape
was all wrong, because of course the wool was all
wrong. One didn't simply use
any
wool, as its
provincial tailor believed. Thus it got itself into
twists and rumples and couldn't get out, its creases
blunted themselves in moments, and it had already
popped a button. Its rise bagged, sagged, and gave
up. It rather glowed in the sunlight. Buttoned, its
two breasts encased him like a girdle; unbuttoned,
it looked like he wore several flags of blue pinstripe
about himself, ready to unfurl in the wind. He was
certain his clubman would not let him enter if he
tried.

And he wanted very much to look his best this
morning. He was, after all, going to blow up something
big with Germans inside.

“I tell you, we should be more severe,” argued SS
Hauptsturmführer Otto Boch. “These Paris bastards,
they take us too lightly. In Poland we enacted
laws and enforced them with blood and steel and
incidents quickly trickled away to nothing. Every
Pole knew that disobedience meant a polka at the
end of a rope in the main square.”

“Perhaps they were too enervated on lack of
food to rebel,” said Macht. “You see, you have a different
objective. You are interested in public order
and the thrill of public obedience. These seem to
you necessary goals, which must be enforced for
our quest to succeed. My goal is far more limited.
I merely want to catch the British agent. To do so,
I must isolate him against a calm background, almost
a still life, and that way locate him. It's the
system that will catch him, not a single guns-blazing
raid. If you stir things up, Herr Hauptsturmführer,
I guarantee you it will come to nothing.
Please trust me on this. I have run manhunts,
many times successfully.”

Boch had no remonstrance, of course. He was
not a professional like Macht and in fact before the
war had been a salesman of vacuums, and not a
very good one.

“We have observers everywhere,” Macht continued.
“We have a photograph of M. Piens, delicately
altered so that it closely resembles the man
that idiot Scholl sat next to, which should help our
people enormously. We have good weather. The
sun is shining, so our watchers won't hide themselves
under shades or awnings to get out of the
rain and thus cut down their visibility. The lack of
rain also means our roving autos won't be searching
through the slosh and squeal of wiper blades,
again reducing what they see. We continue to
monitor sources we have carefully been nurturing
since we arrived. Our system will work. We will get
a break today, I guarantee it.”

The two sat at a table in the banquet room of
the Hotel Duval, amid a batch of snoozing agents
who were off shift. The stench of cigarette butts,
squashed cigars, and tapped-out pipe tobacco
shreds hung heavy in the room, as did the smell
of cold coffee and unwashed bodies. But that was
what happened on manhunts, as Macht knew
and Boch did not. Now nothing could be done
except wait for a break, then play that break carefully
and …

“Hauptmann Macht?” It was his assistant, Abel.

“Yes?”

“Paris headquarters. Von Choltitz's people.
They want a briefing. They've sent a car.”

“Oh, Christ,” said Macht. But he knew this was
what happened. Big politicos got involved, got
worried, wanted credit, wanted to escape blame.
No one anywhere in the world understood the
principle that sometimes it was better not to be energetic
and to leave things alone instead of wasting
energy in a lot of showy ceremonial nonsense.

“I'll go,” said Boch, who would never miss a
chance to preen before superiors.

“Sorry, sir. They specified Hauptmann Macht.”

“Christ,” said Macht again, trying to remember
where he'd left his trench coat.

A street up from the Hotel Duval, Basil found the
exact thing he was looking for. It was a Citroën
Traction Avant, black, and it had a large aerial projecting
from it. It was clearly a radio car, one of
those that the German man-hunter had placed
strategically around the sixth arrondissement so
that no watcher was far from being able to notify
headquarters and get the troops out.

Helpfully, a café was available across the street,
and so he sat at a table and ordered a coffee. He
watched as, quite regularly, a new German watcher
ambled by, leaned in, and reported that he had
seen nothing. Well organized. They arrived every
thirty minutes. Each man came once every two
hours, so the walk over was a break from standing
around. It enabled the commander to get new information
to the troops in an orderly fashion, and
it changed the vantage point of the watchers. At
the same time, at the end of four hours, the car itself
fired up and its two occupants made a quick
tour of their men on the street corners. The point
was to keep communications clear, keep the men
engaged so they didn't go logy on duty, yet sacrifice
nothing in the way of observation. Whoever was
running this had done it before.

He also noted a new element. Somehow they
had what appeared to be a photograph. They
would look it over, pass it around, consult it frequently
in all meetings. It couldn't be of him, so
possibly it was a drawing. It meant he had to act
today. As the photo or drawing circulated, more
and more would learn his features and the chance
of his being spotted would become greater by degrees.
Today the image was a novelty and would
not stick in the mind without constant refreshment,
but by tomorrow all who had to know it
would know it. The time was now. Action this
day.

When he felt he had mastered the schedule and
saw a clear break coming up in which nobody
would report to the car for at least thirty minutes,
he decided it was time to move. It was about three
p.m. on a sunny, if chilly, Paris spring afternoon.
The ancient city's so-familiar features were everywhere
as he meandered across Boulevard Saint-Germain under blue sky. There was a music in the
traffic and in the rhythm of the pedestrians, the
window shoppers, the pastry munchers, the café
sitters, the endless parade of bicyclists, some
pulling passengers in carts, some simply solo. The
great city went about its business, Occupation or
no, action this day or no.

He walked into an alley and reached over to
fetch a wine bottle that he had placed there early
this morning, while it was dark. It was, however,
filled with kerosene drained from a ten-liter tin jug
in the garage. Instead of a cork it had a plug of
wadded cotton jammed into its throat, and fifteen
centimeters of strip hung from the plug. It was a
gasoline bomb, constructed exactly to SOE specification.
He had never done it before, since he usually
worked with Explosive 808, but there was no
808 to be found, so the kerosene, however many
years old it was, would have to do. He wrapped the
bottle in newspaper, tilted it to soak the wad with
the fuel, and then set off jauntily.

This was the delicate part. It all turned on how
observant the Germans were at close quarters,
whether or not Parisians on the street noticed him,
and if so, if they took some kind of action. He
guessed they wouldn't; actually, he gambled that
they wouldn't. The Parisians are a prudent species.

Fortunately the Citroën was parked in an isolated
space, open at both ends. He made no eye
contact with its bored occupants, his last glance
telling him that one leaned back, stretching, to
keep from dozing, while the other was talking on
a telephone unit wired into the radio console that
occupied the small back seat. He felt that if he
looked at them they might feel the pressure of his
eyes, as those of predatory nature sometimes do,
being weirdly sensitive to signs of aggression.

He approached on the oblique, keeping out of
view of the rear window of the low-slung sedan,
all the rage in 1935 but now ubiquitous in Paris.
Its fuel tank was in the rear, which again made
things convenient. In the last moment as he approached,
he ducked down, wedged the bottle
under the rear tire, pulled the paper away, lit his
lighter, and lit the end of the strip of cloth. The
whole thing took one second, and he moved away
as if he'd done nothing.

It didn't explode. Instead, with a kind of airsucking
gush, the bottle erupted and shattered,
smearing a billow of orange-black flame into the
atmosphere from beneath the car, and in the next
second the gasoline tank also went, again without
explosion as much as flare of incandescence a hundred
meters high, bleaching the color from the
beautiful old town and sending a cascade of heat
radiating outward.