Citadel (3 page)

Basil knew this to be untrue. In fact, Occupied
France was quite gay. The French barely noted
their own conquest before returning to bustling
business as usual, or not as usual, for the Germans
were a vast new market. Fruit, vegetables, slabs of
beef, and other provisions gleamed in every shop
window, the wine was ample, even abundant (if
overpriced), and the streetwalkers were quite active.
Perhaps it would change later in the war, but
for now it was rather a swell time. The Resistance,
such as it was—and it wasn't much—was confined
to marginal groups: students, Communists, bohemians,
professors—people who would have
been at odds with society in any event; they just
got more credit for it now, all in exchange for
blowing up a piddling bridge or dynamiting a rail
line which would be repaired in a few hours. Happiness
was general all over France.

The source of this gaiety was twofold. The first
was the French insistence on being French, no
matter how many panzers patrolled the streets and
crossroads. Protected by their intensely high selfesteem,
they thought naught of the Germans, regarding
the
feldgrau
as a new class of tourist, to be
fleeced, condescended to (“Red wine as an aperitif!
Mon Dieu!
”), and otherwise ignored. And there
weren't nearly as many Nazi swastikas fluttering
on silk banners as one might imagine.

The second reason was the immense happiness
of the occupiers themselves. The Germans loved
the cheese, the meals, the whores, the sights, and
all the pleasures of France, it is true, but they enjoyed
one thing more: that it was Not Russia.

This sense of Not-Russia made each day a joy.
The fact that at any moment they could be sent to
Is-Russia haunted them and drove them to new
heights of sybaritic release. Each pleasure had a
melancholy poignancy in that he who experienced
it might shortly be slamming 8.8 cm shells into the
breach of an antitank gun as fleets of T-34s poured
torrentially out of the snow at them, this drama
occurring at minus thirty-one degrees centigrade
on the outskirts of a town with an unpronounceable
name that they had never heard of and that
offered no running water, pretty women, or decent
alcohol.

So nobody in all of France in any of the German
branches worked very hard, except perhaps
the extremists of the SS. But most of the SS was
somewhere else, happily murdering farmers in the
hundreds of thousands, letting their fury, their
rage, their misanthropy, their sense of racial superiority
play out in real time.

Thus Basil didn't fear random interception as
he walked the streets of downtown Bricquebec, a
small city forty kilometers east of Cherbourg in the
heart of the Cotentin Peninsula. The occupiers of
this obscure spot would not be of the highest quality,
and had adapted rather too quickly to the torpor
of garrison life. They lounged this way and
that, lazy as dogs in the spring sun, in the cafés, at
their very occasional roadblocks, around city hall,
where civil administrators now gave orders to the
French bureaucrats, who had not made a single
adjustment to their presence, and at an airfield
where a flock of Me110 night fighters were housed,
to intercept the nightly RAF bomber stream when
it meandered toward targets in southern Germany.
Though American bombers filled the sky by day,
the two-engine 110s were not nimble enough to
close with them and left that dangerous task to
younger men in faster planes. The 110 pilots were
content to maneuver close to the Lancasters, but
not too close, to hosepipe their cannon shells all
over the sky, then to return to schnapps and buns,
claiming extravagant kill scores which nobody
took seriously. So all in all, the atmosphere was one
of snooze and snore.

Basil had landed without incident about eight
kilometers outside of town. He was lucky, as he
usually was, in that he didn't crash into a farmer's
henhouse and awaken the rooster or the man but
landed in one of the fields, among potato stubs just
barely emerging from the ground. He had gathered
up his 'chute, stripped off his RAF jumpsuit to reveal
himself to be a rather shabby French businessman,
and stuffed all that kit into some bushes (he
could not bury it, because a] he did not feel like it
and b] he had no shovel, but c] if he had had a
shovel, he still would not have felt like it). He made
it to a main road and walked into town, where he
immediately treated himself to a breakfast of eggs
and potatoes and tomatoes at a railway station
café.

He nodded politely at each German he saw and
so far had not excited any attention. His only concession
to his trade was his Browning pistol,
wedged into the small of his back and so flat it
would not print under suit and overcoat. He also
had his Riga Minox camera taped to his left ankle.
His most profound piece of equipment, however,
was his confidence. Going undercover is fraught
with tension, but Basil had done it so often that its
rigors didn't drive him to the edge of despair, eating
his energy with teeth of dread. He'd simply
shut down his imagination and considered himself
the cock of the walk, presenting a smile, a nod, a
wink to all.

But he was not without goal. Paris lay a half
day's rail ride ahead; the next train left at four, and
he had to be on it. But just as he didn't trust the
partisans who still awaited his arrival 320 kilometers
to the east, he didn't trust the documents the
forgery geniuses at SOE had provided him with.
Instead he preferred to pick up his own—that is,
actual authentic docs, including travel permissions—
and he now searched for a man who, in the
terrible imagery of document photography, might
be considered to look enough like him.

It was a pleasant day and he wandered this way
and that, more or less sightseeing. At last he encountered
a fellow who would pass for him, a welldressed
burgher in a black homburg and overcoat,
dour and official-looking. But the bone structure
was similar, given to prominent cheekbones and a
nose that looked like a Norman axe. In fact the fellow
could have been a long-lost cousin. (Had he
cared to, Basil could have traced the St. Florian line
back to a castle not 100 kilometers from where he
stood now, whence came his Norman forebears in
1044—but of course it meant nothing to him).

Among Basil's skills was pickpocketing, very
useful for a spy or agent. He had mastered its intricacies
during his period among Malaysian gunrunners
in 1934, when a kindly old rogue with one
eye and fast hands named Malong had taken a liking
to him and shown him the basics of the trade.
Malong could pick the fuzz off a peach, so educated
were his fingers, and Basil proved an apt
pupil. He'd never graduated to the peach-fuzz
class, but the gentleman's wallet and document envelopes
should prove easy enough.

He used the classic concealed hand dip and distraction
technique, child's play but clearly effective
out here in the French hinterlands. Shielding his
left hand from view behind a copy of that day's
Le
Monde
, he engineered an accidental street-corner
bump, apologized, and then said, “I was looking at
the air power of
les amis
today.” He pointed upward,
where a wave of B-17s painted a swath in the
blue sky with their fuzzy white contrails as they
sped toward Munich or some other Bavarian destination
for an afternoon of destruction. “It seems
they'll never stop building up their fleet. But when
they win, what will they do with all those airplanes?”

The gentleman, unaware that the jostle and
rhetoric concealed a deft snatch from inside not
merely his overcoat but also his suit coat, followed
his interrupter's pointed arm to the aerial
array.

“The Americans are so rich, I believe our German
visitors are doomed,” said the man. “I only
hope when it is time for them to leave they don't
grow bitter and decide to blow things up.”

“That is why it is up to us to ingratiate ourselves
with them,” said Basil, reading the eyes of an appeaser
in his victim, “so that when they do abandon
their vacation, they depart with a gentleman's
deportment.
Vive la France
.”

“Indeed,” said the mark, issuing a dry little
smile of approval, then turning away to his far
more important business.

Basil headed two blocks in the opposite direction,
two more in another, then rotated around to
the train station. There, in the men's loo, he examined
his trove: 175 francs, identity papers for one
Jacques Piens, and a German travel authority “for
official business only,” both of which wore a
smeary black-and-white photo of M. Piens, moustachioed
and august and clearly annoyed at the indignity
of posing for German photography.

He had a coffee. He waited, smiling at all, and
a few minutes before four approached the ticket
seller's window and, after establishing his bona
fides as M. Piens, paid for and was issued a firstclass
ticket on the four p.m. Cherbourg–Paris
run.

He went out on the platform, the only Frenchman
among a small group of Luftwaffe enlisted
personnel clearly headed to Paris for a weekend
pass's worth of fun and frolic. The train arrived, as
the Germans had been sensible enough not to interfere with the workings of the French railway system,
the continent's best. Spewing smoke, the engine
lugged its seven cars to the platform and, with
great drama of steam, brakes, and steel, reluctantly
halted. Basil knew where first class would be and
parted company with the privates and corporals
of the German air force, who squeezed into the
other carriages.

His car half empty and comfortable, he put
himself into a seat. The train sat … and sat … and
sat. Finally a German policeman entered the car
and examined the papers of all, including Basil,
without incident. Yet still the train did not leave.

Hmm, this was troubling.

A lesser man might have fumbled into panic.
The mark had noticed his papers missing, called
the police, who had called the German police.
Quickly enough they had put a hold on the train,
fearing that the miscreant would attempt to flee
that way, and now it was just a matter of waiting
for an SS squad to lock up the last of the Jews before
it came for him.

However, Basil had a sound operational principle
which now served him well.
Most bad things
don't happen.
What happens is that in its banal,
boring way, reality bumbles along.

The worst thing one can do is panic. Panic betrays
more agents than traitors. Panic is the true
enemy.

At last the train began to move.

Ah-ha! Right again.

But at that moment the door flew open and a
late-arriving Luftwaffe colonel came in. He looked
straight at Basil.

“There he is! There's the spy!” he said.

A few days earlier (cont'd)

“A book code,” said Basil. “I thought that was for
Boy Scouts. Lord Baden-Powell would be so
pleased.”

“Actually,” said Sir Colin, “it's a sturdy and almost
impenetrable device, very useful under certain
circumstances, if artfully employed. But
Professor Turing is our expert on codes. Perhaps,
Professor, you'd be able to enlighten Captain St.
Florian.”

“Indeed,” said the young man in the tweeds, revealing
himself by name. “Nowadays we think
we're all scienced up. We even have machines to do
some of the backbreaking mathematics to it,
speeding the process. Sometimes it works, sometimes
it doesn't. But the book code is ancient, even
biblical, and that it has lasted so long is good proof
of its applicability in certain instances.”

“I understand, Professor. I am not a child.”

“Not at all, certainly not given your record. But
the basics must be known before we can advance
to the sort of sophisticated mischief upon which
the war may turn.”

“Please proceed, Professor. Pay no attention to
Captain St. Florian's abominable manners. We interrupted
him at play in a bawdy house for this
meeting and he is cranky.”

“Yes, then. The book code stems from the presumption
that both sender and receiver have access
to the same book. It is therefore usually a
common volume, shall we say Lamb's
Tales from
Shakespeare
. I want to send you a message, say
‘Meet me at two p.m. at the square.' I page through
the book until I find the word ‘meet.' It is on page
17, paragraph 4, line 2, fifth word. So the first line
in my code is 17-4-2-5. Unless you know the book,
it is meaningless. But you, knowing the book, having
the book, quickly find 17-4-2-5 and encounter
the word ‘meet.' And on and on. Of course variations
can be worked—we can agree ahead of time,
say, that for the last designation we will always be
value minus two, that is, two integers less. So in
that case the word ‘meet' would actually be found
at 17-4-2-3. Moreover, in picking a book as decoder,
one would certainly be prone to pick a common
book, one that should excite no excitement,
that one might normally have about.”

“I grasp it, Professor,” said Basil. “But what,
then, if I take your inference, is the point of choosing
as a key book the Right Reverend MacBurney's
The Path to Jesus
, of which only one copy exists,
and it is held under lock and key at Cambridge?
And since last I heard, we still control Cambridge.
Why don't we just go to Cambridge and look at the
damned thing? You don't need an action-this-day
chap like me for that. You could use a lance corporal.”

“Indeed, you have tumbled to it,” said Sir Colin.
“Yes, we could obtain the book that way. However,
in doing so we would inform both the sender and
the receiver that we knew they were up to something,
that they were control and agent and had an
operation under way, when our goal is to break the
code without them knowing. That is why, alas, a
simple trip to the library by a lance corporal is not
feasible.”