Jackdaws (36 page)

"Of course."

"We have to catch a train to
Paris."

"I can get you to
Chartres." He glanced at the sky, calculating the time until daylight,
then pointed across the field to a farmhouse, dimly visible. "You can hide
in a barn for now. When we have disposed of these containers, we'll come back
for you."

"Not good enough," Flick
said firmly. "We have to get going."

"The first train to Paris leaves
at ten. I can get you there by then."

"Nonsense. No one knows when
the trains will run." It was true. The combination of Allied bombing,
Resistance sabotage, and deliberate mistakes by anti-Nazi railway workers had
wrecked all schedules, and the only thing to do was go to the station and wait
until a train came. But it was best to get there early. "Put the
containers in the barn and take us now."

"Impossible," he said.
"I have to stash the supplies before daylight."

The men stopped work to listen to
the argument.

Flick sighed. The guns and
ammunition in the containers were the most important thing in the world to
Anton. They were the source of his power and prestige. She said, "This is
more important, believe me."

"I'm sorry—"

"Anton, listen to me. If you
don't do this for me, I promise you, you will never again receive a single
container from England. You know I can do this, don't you?"

There was a pause. Anton did not
want to back down in front of his men. However, if the supply of arms dried up,
the men would go elsewhere. This was the only leverage British officers had over
the French Resistance.

But it worked. He glared at her.
Slowly, he removed the stub of the cigarette from his mouth, pinched out the
end, and threw it away. "Very well," he said. "Get in the
van."

The women helped unload the
containers, then clambered in. The floor was filthy with cement dust, mud, and
oil, but they found some scraps of sacking and used them to keep the worst of
the dirt off their clothes as they sat on the floor. Anton closed the door on
them.

Chevalier got into the driving seat.
"So, ladies," he said in English. "Off we go!"

Flick replied coldly in French.
"No jokes, please, and no English."

He drove off.

Having flown five hundred miles on
the metal floor of a bomber, the Jackdaws now drove twenty miles in the back of
a builder's van. Surprisingly it was Jelly—the oldest, the fattest, and the
least fit of the six—who was most stoical, joking about the discomfort and
laughing at herself when the van took a sharp bend and she rolled over
helplessly.

But when the sun came up, and the
van entered the small city of Chartres, their mood became somber again. Maude
said, "I can't believe I'm doing this," and Diana squeezed her hand.

Flick was planning ahead. "From
now on, we split up into pairs," she said. The teams had been decided back
at the Finishing School. Flick had put Diana with Maude, for otherwise Diana
would make a fuss Flick paired herself with Ruby, because she wanted to be able
to discuss problems with someone, and Ruby was the cleverest Jackdaw. Unfortunately,
that left Greta with Jelly. "I still don't see why I have to go with the
foreigner," Jelly said.

"This isn't a tea party,"
Flick said, irritated. "You don't get to sit by your best friend. It's a
military operation and you do what you're told."

Jelly shut up.

"We'll have to modify our cover
stories, to explain the train trip," Flick went on. "Any ideas?"

Greta said, "I'm the wife of
Major Remmer, a German officer working in Paris, traveling with my French maid.
I was to be visiting the cathedral at Reims. Now, I suppose, I could be
returning from a visit to the cathedral at Chartres."

"Good enough. Diana?"

"Maude and I are secretaries
working for the electric company in Reims. We've been to Chartres because…
Maude has lost contact with her fiancé, and we thought he might be here. But he
isn't."

Flick nodded, satisfied. There were
thousands of French women searching for missing relatives, especially young
men, who might have been injured by bombing, arrested by the Gestapo, sent to
labor camps in Germany, or recruited by the Resistance.

She said, "And I'm the widow of
a stockbroker who was killed in 1940. I went to Chartres to fetch my orphaned
cousin and bring her to live with me in Reims."

One of the great advantages women
had as secret agents was that they could move around the country without
attracting suspicion. By contrast, a man found outside the area where he worked
would automatically be assumed to be in the Resistance, especially if he was
young.

Flick spoke to the driver,
Chevalier. "Look for a quiet spot to let us out." The sight of six
respectably dressed women getting out of the back of a builder's van would be
somewhat remarkable, even in occupied France, where people used any means of
transport they could get. "We can find the station on our own."

A couple of minutes later he stopped
the van and reversed into a turn, then jumped out and opened the back door. The
Jackdaws got out and found themselves in a narrow cobbled alley with high
houses on either side. Through a gap between roofs she glimpsed part of the
cathedral. Flick reminded them of the plan. "Go to the station, buy
one-way tickets to Paris, and get the first train. Each pair will pretend not
to know the others, but we'll try to sit close together on the train. We
regroup in Paris: you have the address." They were going to a flophouse
called Hotel de la Chapdile, where the proprietress, though not actually in the
Resistance, could be relied upon not to ask questions. If they arrived in time,
they would go on to Reims immediately; if not, they could stay overnight at the
flophouse. Flick was not pleased to be going to Paris—it was crawling with Gestapo
men and their collaborators, the "Kollabos"—but there was no way
around it by train.

Only Flick and Greta knew the real
mission of the Jackdaws. The others still thought they were going to blow up a
railway tunnel.

"Diana and Maude first, off you
go, quick! Jelly and Greta next, more slowly." They went off, looking
scared. Chevalier shook their hands, wished them luck, and drove away, heading
back to the field to fetch the rest of the containers. Flick and Ruby walked
out of the alley.

The first few steps in a French town
were always the worst, Flick felt that everyone she saw must know who she was,
as if she had a sign on her back saying British Agent! Shoot Her Down! But
people walked by as if she were nobody special, and after she had safely passed
a gendarme and a couple of German officers her pulse began to return to normal.

She still felt very strange. All her
life she had been respectable, and she had been taught to regard policemen as
her friends. "I hate being on the wrong side of the law," she
murmured to Ruby in French. "As if I've done something wicked."

Ruby gave a low laugh. "I'm
used to it," she said. "The police have always been my enemies."

Flick remembered with a start that
Ruby had been in jail for murder last Tuesday. It seemed a long four days.

They reached the cathedral, at the
top of the hill, and Flick felt a thrill at the sight of it, the summit of
French medieval culture, a church like none other. She suffered a sharp pang of
regret for the peaceful times when she might have spent a couple of hours
looking around the cathedral.

They walked down the hill to the
station, a modern stone building the same color as the cathedral. They entered
a square lobby in tan marble. There was a queue at the ticket window. That was
good: it meant local people were optimistic that there would be a train soon.
Greta and Jelly were in the queue, but there was no sign of Diana and Maude,
who must already be on the platform.

They stood in line in front of an
anti-Resistance poster showing a thug with a gun and Stalin behind him. It
read:

THEY MURDER! wrapped in
the folds of OUR FLAG

That's supposed to be me, Flick
thought.

They bought their tickets without
incident. On the way to the platform they had to pass a Gestapo checkpoint, and
Flick's pulse beat faster. Greta and Jelly were ahead of them in line. This
would be their first encounter with the enemy. Flick prayed they would be able
to keep their nerve. Diana and Maude must have already passed through.

Greta spoke to the Gestapo men in
German. Flick could clearly hear her giving her cover story. "I know a
Major Remmer," said one of the men, a sergeant. "Is he an
engineer?"

"No, he's in
Intelligence," Greta replied. She seemed remarkably calm, and Flick
reflected that pretending to be something she was not must be second nature to
her.

"You must like
cathedrals," he said conversationally. "There's nothing else to see
in this dump."

"Yes."

He turned to Jelly's papers and
began to speak French, "You travel everywhere with Frau Remmer?"

"Yes, she's very kind to
me," Jelly replied. Flick heard the tremor in her voice and knew that she
was terrified.

The sergeant said, "Did you see
the bishop's palace? That's quite a sight."

Greta replied in French. "We
did—very impressive." The sergeant was looking at Jelly, waiting for her
response. She looked dumbstruck for a moment; then she said, "The bishop's
wife was very gracious."

Flick's heart sank into her boots.
Jelly could speak perfect French, but she knew nothing about any foreign
country. She did not realize that it was only in the Church of England that
bishops could have wives. France was Catholic, and priests were celibate. Jelly
had given herself away at the first check.

What would happen now? Flick's Sten
gun, with the skeleton butt and the silencer, was in her suitcase, disassembled
into three parts, but she had her personal Browning automatic in the worn
leather shoulder bag she carried. Now she discreetly unzipped the bag for quick
access to her gun, and she saw Ruby put her right hand in her raincoat pocket,
where her pistol was.

"Wife?" the sergeant said
to Jelly. "What wife?"

Jelly just looked nonplussed.

"You are French?" he said.

"Of course."

Greta stepped in quickly. "Not
his wife, his housekeeper," she said in French. It was a plausible
explanation: in that language, a wife was une femme and a housekeeper was une
femme de menage.

Jelly realized she had made a
mistake, and said, "Yes, of course, his housekeeper, I meant to say."

Flick held her breath.

The sergeant hesitated for a moment
longer, then shrugged and handed back their papers. "I hope you won't have
to wait too long for a train," he said, reverting to German.

Greta and Jelly walked on, and Flick
allowed herself to breathe again.

When she and Ruby got to the head of
the line, they were about to hand over their papers when two uniformed French
gendarmes jumped the queue. They paused at the checkpoint and gave the Germans
a sketchy salute but did not offer their papers. The sergeant nodded and said, "Go
ahead."

If I were running security here,
Flick thought, I'd tighten up on that point. Anyone could pretend to be a cop.
But the Germans were overly deferential to people in uniform: that was part of
the reason they had let their country be taken over by psychopaths.

Then it was her turn to tell her
story to the Gestapo. "You're cousins?" the sergeant said, looking
from her to Ruby and back again.

"Not much resemblance, is
there?" Flick said with a cheerful air she did not feel. There was none at
all: Flick had blonde hair, green eyes and fair skin, whereas Ruby had dark
hair and black eyes.

"She looks like a gypsy,"
he said rudely.

Flick pretended to be indignant.
"Well, she's not." By way of explanation for Ruby's coloring, she
added, "Her mother, my uncle's wife, came from Naples."

He shrugged and addressed Ruby.
"How did your parents die?"

"In a train derailed by
saboteurs," she said.

"The Resistance?"

"Yes."

"My sympathies, young lady.
Those people are animals." He handed the papers back.

"Thank you, sir," said
Ruby. Flick just nodded. They walked on.

It had not been an easy checkpoint.
I hope they're not all like that, Flick thought; my heart won't stand it.

Diana and Maude had gone to the bar.
Flick looked through the window and saw they were drinking champagne. She felt
cross. SOE's thousand-franc notes were not for that purpose. Besides, Diana
should realize she needed her wits about her at every second. But there was
nothing Flick could do about it now.

Greta and Jelly were sitting on a
bench. Jelly looked chastened, no doubt because her life had just been saved by
someone she thought of as a foreign pervert. Flick wondered whether her
attitude would improve now.

She and Ruby found another bench
some distance away, and sat down to wait.

Over the next few hours more and
more people crowded onto the platform. There were men in suits who looked as if
they might be lawyers or local government officials with business in Paris,
some relatively well-dressed French women, and a scattering of Germans in
uniform. The Jackdaws, having money and forged
ration books, were able to get pain noir and ersatz coffee from the bar.

It was eleven o'clock when a train
pulled in. The coaches were full, and not many people got off, so Flick and
Ruby had to stand. Greta and Jelly did, too, but Diana and Maude managed to get
seats in a six-person compartment with two middle-aged women and the two
gendarmes.

The gendarmes worried Flick. She
managed to squeeze into a place right outside the compartment, from where she
could look through the glass and keep an eye on them. Fortunately, the
combination of a restless night and the champagne they had drunk at the station
put Diana and Maude to sleep as soon as the train pulled out of the station.