Jackdaws (29 page)

The Gestapo man in the front seat
held on his lap a sledgehammer, for breaking doors down.

Dieter had been hunting once. He did
not much like country pursuits, preferring the more refined pleasures of city
life, but he was a good shot. Now he was reminded of that, as he waited for
Helicopter to begin sending his coded report home to England. This was like
lying in the hide in the early dawn, tense with anticipation, impatient for the
deer to start moving, savoring the thrill of anticipation.

The Resistance were not deer but
foxes, Dieter thought, skulking in their holes, coming out to cause carnage in
the chicken house, then going to earth again. He was mortified to have lost
Helicopter. He was so keen to recapture the man that he hardly minded having to
rely on the help of Willi Weber. He just wanted to kill the fox.

The driver immediately turned west,
and the signal began to strengthen. "Got you," Dieter breathed.

But five minutes had elapsed.

The car raced west, and the signal
strengthened, as Helicopter continued to tap on the Morse key of his suitcase
radio in his hiding place—a bathroom, an attic, a warehouse—somewhere in the
northwest of the city. Back at the château of Sainte-Cécile, a German radio
operator had tuned to the same frequency and was taking down the coded message.
It was also being registered on a wire recorder. Later, Dieter would decrypt
it, using the one-time pad copied by Stéphanie. But the message was not as
important as the messenger.

They entered a neighborhood of large
old houses, mostly decrepit and subdivided into small apartments and bed sitting
rooms for students and nurses. The signal grew louder, then suddenly began to
fade. "Overshoot, overshoot!" said the Gestapo man in the front
passenger seat. The driver reversed the car, then braked.

Ten minutes had passed.

Dieter and the three Gestapo men
sprang out. The one with the portable detection unit under his raincoat walked
rapidly along the pavement, consulting his wrist dial constantly, and the
others.

It was a fine summer evening. The
car was parked at the northern end of the city. Reims was a small town, and
Dieter reckoned a car could drive from one side to the other in less than ten
minutes.

He checked his watch: one minute
past eight. Helicopter was late coming on air. Perhaps he would not broadcast
tonight… but that was unlikely. Today Helicopter had met up with Michel. As
soon as possible, he would want to report his success to his superiors, and
tell them just how much was left of the Bollinger circuit.

Michel had phoned the house in the
rue du Bois two hours ago. Dieter had been there. It was a tense moment.
Stéphanie had answered, in her imitation of Mademoiselle Lemas's voice. Michel
had given his code name, and asked whether "Bourgeoise" remembered
him—a question that reassured Stéphanie, because it indicated that Michel did
not know Mademoiselle Lemas very well and therefore would not realize this was
an impersonator.

He had asked her about her new
recruit, codenamed Charenton. "He's my cousin," Stéphanie had said
gruffly. "I've known him since we were children, I would trust him with my
life." Michel had told her she had no right to recruit people without at
least discussing it with him, but he had appeared to believe her story, and
Dieter had kissed Stéphanie and told her she was a good enough actor to join the
Comédie Française.

All the same, Helicopter would know
that the Gestapo would be listening and trying to find him. That was a risk he
had to run: if he sent no messages home he was of no use. He would stay on air
only for the minimum length of time. If he had a lot of information to send, he
would break it into two or more messages and send them from different
locations. Dieter's only hope was that he would be tempted to stay on the air
just a little too long.

The minutes ticked by. There was
silence in the car. The men smoked nervously. Then, at five past eight, the
receiver beeped.

By prearrangement, the driver set
off immediately, driving south.

The signal grew stronger, but
slowly, making Dieter worry that they were not heading directly for the source.

Sure enough, as they passed the
cathedral in the center of town, the needle fell back.

In the passenger seat, a Gestapo man
talked into a short-wave radio. He was consulting with someone in a
radio-detection truck a mile away. After a moment he said, "Northwest
quarter." followed. He went a hundred meters, then suddenly turned back.
He stopped and pointed to a house. "That one," he said. "But the
transmission has ended."

Dieter noticed that there were no
curtains in the windows. The Resistance liked to use derelict houses for their
transmissions.

The Gestapo man carrying the
sledgehammer broke the door down with two blows. They all rushed in.

The floors were bare and the place
had a musty smell. Dieter threw open a door and looked into an empty room.

Dieter opened the door of the back
room. He crossed the vacant room in three strides and looked into an abandoned
kitchen.

He ran up the stairs. On the next
floor was a window overlooking a long back garden. Dieter glanced out—and saw
Helicopter and Michel running across the grass. Michel was limping, Helicopter
was carrying his little suitcase. Dieter swore. They must have escaped through
a back door as the Gestapo were breaking down the front. Dieter turned and yelled,
"Back garden!" The Gestapo men ran and he followed.

As he reached the garden, he saw
Michel and Helicopter scrambling over the back fence into the grounds of
another house. He joined in the chase, but the fugitives had a long lead. With
the three Gestapo men, he climbed the fence and ran through the second garden.

They reached the next street just in
time to see a black Renault Monaquatre disappearing around the corner.

"Hell," Dieter said. For
the second time in a day, Helicopter had slipped through his grasp.

CHAPTER

TWENTY-FIVE

WHEN THEY GOT back to the house,
Flick made cocoa for the team. It was not regular practice for officers to make
cocoa for their troops, but in Flick's opinion that only showed how little the
army knew about leadership.

Paul stood in the kitchen watching
her as she waited for the kettle to boil. She felt his eyes on her like a
caress. She knew what he was going to say, and she had prepared her reply. It
would have been easy to fall in love with Paul, but she was not going to betray
the husband who was risking his life fighting the Nazis in occupied France.

However, his question surprised her.
"What will you do after the war?"

"I'm looking forward to being
bored," she said.

He laughed. "You've had enough
excitement."

"Too much." She thought
for a moment. "I still want to be a teacher. I'd like to share my love of
French culture with young people. Educate them about French literature and
painting, and also about less highbrow things like cooking and fashion."

"So you'll become a don?"

"Finish my doctorate, get a job
at a university, be condescended to by narrow-minded old male professors. Maybe
write a guide book to France, or even a cookbook."

"Sounds tame, after this."

"It's important, though. The
more young people know about foreigners, the less likely they are to be as
stupid as we were, and go to war with their neighbors."

"I wonder if that's
right."

"What about you? What's your
plan for after the war?"

"Oh, mine is real simple. I
want to marry you and take you to Paris for a honeymoon. Then we'll settle down
and have children."

She stared at him. "Were you
thinking of asking my consent?" she said indignantly.

He was quite solemn. "I haven't
thought of anything else for days."

"I already have a
husband."

"But you don't love him."

"You have no right to say
that!"

"I know, but I can't help
it."

"Why did I used to think you
were a smooth talker?"

"Usually I am. That kettle's
boiling."

She took the kettle off the hob and
poured boiling water over the cocoa mixture in a big stoneware jug. "Put
some mugs on a tray," she told Paul. "A little housework might cure
you of dreams of domesticity."

He complied. "You can't put me
off by being bossy," he said. "I kind of like it."

She added milk and sugar to the
cocoa and poured it into the mugs he had laid out. "In that case, carry
that tray into the living room."

"Right away, boss."

When they entered the living room
they found Jelly and Greta having a row, standing face to face in the middle of
the room while the others looked on, half amused and half horrified.

Jelly was saying, "You weren't
using it!"

"I was resting my feet on
it," Greta replied.

"There aren't enough
chairs." Jelly was holding a small stuffed pouffe, and Flick guessed she
had snatched it away from Greta rudely.

Flick said, "Ladies,
please!"

They ignored her. Greta said,
"You only had to ask, sweetheart."

"I don't have to ask permission
from foreigners in my own country."

"I'm not a foreigner, you fat
bitch."

"Oh!" Jelly was so stung
by the insult that she reached out and pulled Greta's hair. Greta's brunette
wig came off in her hand.

With her head of close-cropped dark
hair exposed, Greta suddenly looked unmistakably like a man. Percy and Paul
were in on the secret, and Ruby had guessed, but Maude and Diana were shocked
rigid. Diana said, "Good God!" and Maude gave a little scream of
fright.

Jelly was the first to recover her
wits. "A pervert!" she said triumphantly. "Oh, my gordon, it's a
foreign pervert!"

Greta was in tears. "You bloody
fucking Nazi," she sobbed.

"I bet she's a spy!" Jelly
said.

Flick said, "Shut up, Jelly.
She's not a spy. I knew she was a man."

"You knew!"

"So did Paul. So did
Percy."

Jelly looked at Percy, who nodded
solemnly.

Greta turned to leave, but Flick
caught her arm. "Don't go," she said. "Please. Sit down."

Greta sat down.

"Jelly, give me the damn
wig."

Jelly handed it to Flick.

Flick stood in front of Greta and
put the wig back on. Ruby, quickly understanding what Flick was trying to do,
lifted the mirror from over the mantelpiece and held it in front of Greta, who
studied her reflection while she adjusted the wig and blotted her tears with a
handkerchief.

"Now listen to me, all of
you," said Flick. "Greta is an engineer, and we can't accomplish our
mission without an engineer. We have a much better chance of survival in
occupied territory as an all-woman team. The upshot is, we need Greta and we
need her to be a woman. So get used to it."

Jelly gave a contemptuous grunt.

"There's something else I ought
to explain," Flick said. She looked hard at Jelly. "You may have
noticed that Denise is no longer with us. A little test was set for her
tonight, and she failed it. She's off the team. Unfortunately, she's learned
some secrets in the last two days, and she can't be allowed to return to her
old posting. So she's gone to a remote base in Scotland, where she'll stay,
probably for the rest of the war, with no leave."

Jelly said, "You can't do
that!"

"Of course I can, you
idiot," Flick said impatiently. "There's a war on, remember? And what
I've done to Denise, I'll do to anyone who has to be fired from this
team."

"I never even joined the
army!" Jelly protested.

"Yes, you did. You were
commissioned as an officer, yesterday, after tea. You all were. And you're
getting officer's pay, although you haven't seen any yet. That means you're
under military discipline. And you all know too much."

"So we're prisoners?"
Diana said.

"You're in the army,"
Flick said. "It's much the same thing. So drink your cocoa and go to
bed."

They drifted off one by one until
only Diana was left. Flick had been expecting this. Seeing the two women in a
sexual clinch had been a real shock. She recalled that at school some of the
girls had developed crushes on one another, sending loving notes, holding
hands, and sometimes even kissing; but as far as she knew it had not gone any
further. At some point she and Diana had practiced French kissing on one
another, so that they would know what to do when they got boyfriends, and now
Flick guessed those kisses had meant more to Diana than they had to her. But
she had never known a grown woman who desired other women. Theoretically, she
was aware that they existed, the female equivalents of her brother Mark and of
Greta, but she had never really imagined them… well, feeling each other up in a
garden shed.

Did it matter? Not in everyday life.
Mark and his kind were happy, or at least they were when people left them
alone. But would Diana's relationship with Maude affect the mission? Not
necessarily. Flick herself worked with her husband in the Resistance, after
all. This was not quite the same, admittedly. A passionate new romance might
prove a distraction.

Flick could try to keep the two
lovers separate—but that might make Diana even more insubordinate. And the
affair could just as easily be an inspiration. Flick had been trying
desperately to get the women to work together as a team, and this might help.
She had decided to leave well enough alone. But Diana wanted to talk.

"It's not what it seems, really
it isn't," Diana said without preamble. "Christ, you've got to
believe me. It was just a stupid thing, a joke—"

"Would you like more
cocoa?" Flick said. "I think there's some left in the jug."

Diana stared at her, nonplussed.
After a moment she said, "How can you talk about cocoa?"