Citadel (9 page)

And he hadn't. Basil sat on the park bench the entire
day, obliquely watching the German across the
street. He got so he knew the man well: his gait
(bad left hip, Great War wound?); his policeman's
patience at standing in one place for an hour, then
moving two meters and standing in that place for
an hour; his stubbornness at never, ever abandoning
his post, except once, at three p.m., for a brief
trip to the pissoir, during which he kept his eyes
open and examined each passerby through the gap
at the pissoir's eye level. He didn't miss a thing—
that is, except for the dowdy Frenchman observing
him from ninety meters away, over an array of
daily newspapers.

Twice, unmarked Citroëns came by and the officer
gave a report to two other men, also in civilian
clothes, on the previous few hours. They nodded,
took careful records, and then hastened off. It was a long day until seven p.m., a twelve-hour shift,
when his replacement moseyed up. There was no
ceremony of changing the guard, just a cursory
nod between them, and then the first policeman
began to wander off.

Basil stayed with him, maintaining the same
ninety-meter interval, noting that he stopped in a
café for a cup of coffee and a sandwich, read the
papers, and smoked, unaware that Basil had followed
him in, placed himself at the bar, and also
had a sandwich and a coffee.

Eventually the German got up, walked another
six blocks down Boulevard Saint-Germain, turned
down a narrower street called rue de Valor, and
disappeared halfway down the first block into a
rummy-looking hotel called Le Duval. Basil looked
about, found a café, had a second coffee, smoked
a Gauloise to blend in, joked with the bartender,
was examined by a uniformed German policeman
on a random check, showed papers identifying
himself as Robert Fortier (picked freshly that
morning), was checked off against a list (he was
not on it, as perhaps M. Fortier had not yet noted
his missing papers), and was then abandoned by
the policeman for other possibilities.

At last he left and went back to rue de Valor,
slipped down it, and very carefully approached the
Hotel Duval. From outside it revealed nothing—a
typical Baedeker two-star for commercial travelers,
with no pretensions of gentility or class. It would
be stark, clean, well run, and banal. Such places
housed half the population every night in Europe,
except for the past few years, when that half-the-population
had slept in bunkers, foxholes, or ruins.
Nothing marked this place, which was exactly why
whoever was running this show had chosen it. Another
pro like himself, he guessed. It takes a professional
to catch a professional, the saying goes.

He meekly entered as if confused, noting a few
sour-looking individuals sitting in the lobby reading
Deutsche
Allgemeine Zeitung
and smoking, and
went to the desk, where he asked for directions to
a hotel called Les Deux Gentilhommes and got
them. It wasn't much, but it enabled him to make
a quick check on the place, and he learned what he
needed to know.

Behind the desk was a hallway, and down it Basil
could see a larger room, a banquet hall or something,
full of drowsy-looking men sitting around
listlessly, while a few further back slept on sofas
pushed in for just that purpose. It looked police.

That settled it. This was the German headquarters.

He moseyed out and knew he had one more
stop before tomorrow.

He had to examine his objective.

A few days previously (cont'd.)

“Another book? Exactly yes and exactly no,” said
Sir Colin.

“How could there be a second original? By definition
there can be only one original, or so it was
taught when I was at university.”

“It does seem like a conundrum, does it not?”
said Sir Colin. “But indeed, we are dealing with a
very rare case of a second original. Well, of sorts.”

“Not sure I like the sound of that,” said Basil.

“Nor should you. It takes us to a certain awkwardness
that, again, an ironist would find heartily
amusing.”

“You see,” said Basil, “I am fond of irony, but
only when applied to other chaps.”

“Yes, it can sting, can it not?” said General
Cavendish. “And I must say, this one stings quite
exhaustively. It will cause historians many a
chuckle when they write the secret history of the
war in the twenty-first century after all the files are
finally opened.”

“But we get ahead of ourselves,” said Sir Colin.
“There's more tale to tell. And the sooner we tell
it, the sooner the cocktail hour.”

“Tell on, then, Sir Colin.”

“It all turns on the fulcrum of folly and vanity
known as the human heart, especially when basted
in ambition, guilt, remorse, and greed. What a
marvelous stew, all of it simmering within the
head of the Reverend MacBurney. When last we
left him, our God-fearing MacBurney had become
a millionaire because his pamphlet
The Path to
Jesus
had sold endlessly, bringing him a shilling a
tot. As I said, he retired to a country estate and
spent some years happily wenching and drinking
in happy debauchery.”

“As who would not?” asked Basil, though he
doubted this lot would.

“Of course. But then in the year 1789, twenty-two
years later, he was approached by a representative
of the bishop of Gladney and asked to make
a presentation to the Church. To commemorate
his achievement, the thousands of souls he had
shepherded safely upon the aforenamed path, the
bishop wanted him appointed deacon at St. Blazefield's
in Glasgow, the highest church rank a fellow
like him could achieve. And Thomas wanted it
badly. But the bishop wanted him to donate the
original manuscript to the church, for eternal display
in its ambulatory. Except Thomas had no idea
where the original was and hadn't thought about
it in years. So he sat down, practical Scot that he
was, and from the pamphlet itself he back-engineered,
so to speak, another ‘original' manuscript
in his own hand, a perfect facsimile, or as perfect
as he could make it, even, one must assume, to the
little crucifix doodles that so amused the Cambridge
librarian. That was shipped to Glasgow, and
that is why to this day Thomas MacBurney
lounges in heaven, surrounded by seraphim and
cherubim who sing his praises and throw petals
where he walks.”

“It was kind of God to provide us with the second
copy,” said Basil.

“Proof,” said the admiral, “that He is on our
side.”

“Yes. The provenance of the first manuscript is
well established; as I say, it has pencil marks to
guide the printer in the print shop owner's hand.
That is why it is so prized at Cambridge. The second was displayed for a century in Glasgow, but
then the original St. Blazefield's was torn down for
a newer, more imposing one in 1857, and the manuscript
somehow disappeared. However, it was discovered
in 1913 in Paris. Who knows by what
mischief it ended up there? But to prevent action
by the French police, the owner anonymously donated
it to a cultural institution, in whose vaults it
to this day resides.”

“So I am to go and fetch it. Under the Nazis'
noses?”

“Well, not exactly,” said Sir Colin. “The manuscript
itself must not be removed, as someone
might notice and word might reach the Russians.
What you must do is photograph certain pages
using a Riga Minox. Those are what must be
fetched.”

“And when I fetch them, they can be relied
upon to provide the key for the code and thus give
up the name of the Russian spy at Bletchley Park,
and thus you will be able to slip into his hands the
German plans for Operation Citadel, and thus
Stalin will fortify the Kursk salient, and thus the
massive German summer offensive will have its
back broken, and thus the boys will be home alive
in '45 instead of dead in heaven in '47. Our boys,
their boys, all boys.”

“In theory,” said Sir Colin Gubbins.

“Hmm, not sure I like ‘in theory,'” said Basil.

“You will be flown in by Lysander, dispatched
in the care of Resistance Group Philippe, which
will handle logistics. They have not been alerted to
the nature of the mission as yet, as the fewer who
know, of course, the better. You will explain it to
them, they will get you to Paris for recon and supply
equipment, manpower, distraction, and other
kinds of support, then get you back out for
Lysander pickup, if everything goes well.”

“And if it does not?”

“That is where your expertise will come in
handy. In that case, it will be a maximum huggermugger
sort of effort. I am sure you will prevail.”

“I am not,” said Basil. “It sounds awfully dodgy.”

“And you know, of course, that you will be
given an L-pill so that headful of secrets of yours
will never fall in German hands.”

“I will be certain to throw it away at the first
chance,” said Basil.

“There's the spirit, old man,” said Sir Colin.

“And where am I headed?”

“Ah, yes. An address on the Quai de Conti, the
Left Bank, near the Seine.”

“Excellent,” said Basil. “Only the Institut de
France, the most profound and colossal assemblage
of French cultural icons in the world, and the
most heavily guarded.”

“Known for its excellent library,” said Sir Colin.

“It sounds like quite a pickle,” said Basil.

“And you haven't even heard the bad part.”

The Fourth Day, near midnight

In the old days, and perhaps again after the war if
von Choltitz didn't blow the place up, the Institut
de France was one of the glories of the nation, emblazoned
in the night under a rippling tricolor to
express the high moral purpose of French culture.
But in the war it, too, had to fall into line.

Thus the blazing lights no longer blazed and the
cupola ruling over the many stately branches of the
singularly complex building overlooking the Seine
on the Quai de Conti, right at the toe of the Île de
la Cité and directly across from the Louvre, in the
sixth arrondissement, no longer ruled. One had to
squint, as did Basil, to make it out, though helpfully
a searchlight from some far-distant German
antiaircraft battery would backlight it and at least
accentuate its bulk and shape. The Germans had
not painted it
feldgrau
, thank God, and so its white
stone seemed to gleam in the night, at least in contrast
to other French buildings in the environs. A
slight rain fell; the cobblestones glistened; the
whole thing had a cinematic look that Basil paid
no attention to, as it did him no good at all and he
was by no means a romantic.

Instead he saw the architectural tropes of the
place, the brilliant façade of colonnades, the precision
of the intersecting angles, the dramatically
arrayed approaches to the broad steps of the grand
entrance under the cupola, from which nexus one
proceeded to its many divisions, housed each in a
separate wing. The whole expressed the complexity,
the difficulty, the arrogance, the insolence, the
ego, the whole
je ne sais quoi
of the French: their
smug, prosperous country, their easy treachery,
their utter lack of conscience, their powerful sense
of entitlement.

From his briefing, he knew that his particular
goal was the Bibliothèque Mazarine, housed in the
great marble edifice but a few hundred meters
from the center. He slid that way, while close at
hand the Seine lapped against its stone banks, the
odd taxi or bicycle taxi hurtled down Quai de
Conti, the searchlights crisscrossed the sky. Soon
midnight, and curfew. But he had to see.

On its own the Mazarine was an imposing
building, though without the columns. Instead it
affected the French country palace look, with a
cobblestone yard which in an earlier age had allowed
for carriages but now was merely a car park.
Two giant oak doors, guarding French propriety,
kept interlopers out. At this moment it was locked
up like a vault; tomorrow the doors would open
and he would somehow make his penetration.

But how?

With Resistance help he could have mounted
an elaborate ruse, spring himself to the upper
floors while the guards tried to deal with the unruliness
beneath. But he had chosen not to go that
way. In the networks somebody always talked,
somebody always whispered, and nothing was really
a secret. The Resistance could get him close,
but it could also earn him an appetizer of strychnine
L-pill.

The other, safer possibility was to develop contacts
in the French underworld and hire a professional thief to come in from below or above, via a
back entrance, and somehow steal the booklet,
then replace it the next day. But that took time, and
there was no time.

In the end, he only confirmed what he already
knew: there was but one way. It was as fragile as a
Fabergé egg, at any time given to yield its counterfeit
nature to anyone paying the slightest attention.
Particularly with the Germans knowing something
was up and at high alert, ready to flood the place
with cops and thugs at any second. It would take
nerve, a talent for the dramatic, and, most important,
the right credentials.

A few days previously (fini)

“Are you willing?” said Sir Colin. “Knowing all this,
are you willing?”

“Sir, you send men to their death every day with
less fastidiousness. You consign battalions to their
slaughter without blinking an eye. The stricken
gray ships turn to coffins and slide beneath the
ocean with their hundreds;
c'est la guerre
. The airplanes
explode into falling pyres and nobody sheds
a tear. Everyone must do his bit, you say. And yet
now, for me, on this, you're suddenly squeamish
to an odd degree, telling me every danger and improbability
and how low the odds of success are. I
have to know why. It has a doomed feel to it. If I
must die, so be it, but somebody wants nothing on
his conscience.”