Jackdaws (42 page)

His identity, hastily cobbled
together by Percy Thwaite, was that of a schoolteacher from Epernay, a few
miles west. He was hitchhiking to Reims to visit his father, who was ill. Percy
had got him all the necessary papers, some of them hastily forged last night
and rushed to Tempsford by motorcycle. The limp fitted quite well with the
cover story: a wounded veteran might well be a schoolteacher, whereas an active
young man should have been sent to a labor camp in Germany.

Getting here was the simple part.
Now he had to find Flick. His only way of contacting her would be via the
Bollinger circuit. He had to hope that part of the circuit was left intact, and
Brian was the only member in Gestapo custody. Like every new agent dropping in
to Reims, he would contact Mademoiselle Lemas. He would just have to be
especially cautious.

Soon after first light he heard a
vehicle. He stepped off the road into the field alongside and concealed himself
behind a row of vines. As the noise came closer, he realized the vehicle was a
tractor. That was safe enough: the Gestapo never traveled by tractor. He
returned to the road and thumbed a lift.

The tractor was driven by a boy of
about fifteen and was pulling a cartload of artichokes. The driver nodded at
Paul's leg and said, "War wound?"

"Yes," Paul said. The
likeliest moment for a French soldier to have been hurt was during the Battle
of France, so he added: "Sedan, nineteen-forty."

"I was too young," the boy
said regretfully.

"Lucky you."

"But wait till the Allies come
back. Then you'll see some action." He gave Paul a sideways look. "I
can't say any more. But you wait and see."

Paul thought hard. Was this lad a
member of the Bollinger circuit? He said, "But do our people have the guns
and ammunition they need?" If the boy knew anything at all, he would know
that the Allies had dropped tons of weaponry in the past few months.

"We'll use whatever weapons
come to hand."

Was he being discreet about what he
knew? No, Paul thought. The boy looked vague. He was fantasizing. Paul said no
more.

The lad dropped him off on the
outskirts, and he limped into town. The rendezvous had changed, from the
cathedral crypt to the Café de la Gare, but the time was the same, three
o'clock in the afternoon. He had hours to kill.

He went into the café to get
breakfast and reconnoitre. He asked for black coffee. The elderly waiter raised
his eyebrows, and Paul realized he had made a slip. Hastily, he tried to cover
up. "No need to say 'black,' I suppose," he said. "You probably
don't have any milk anyway."

The waiter smiled, reassured.
"Unfortunately not." He went away.

Paul breathed out. It was eight
months since he had been undercover in France, and he had forgotten the
minute-to-minute strain of pretending to be someone else.

He spent the morning dozing through
services in the cathedral, then went back into the café at one-thirty for
lunch. The place emptied out around two-thirty, and he stayed drinking ersatz
coffee. Two men came in at two forty-five and ordered beer. Paul looked hard at
them. They wore old business suits and talked about grapes in colloquial
French. They were eruditely discussing the flowering of the vines, a critical
period that had just ended. He did not think they could possibly be agents of
the Gestapo.

At exactly three o'clock a tall,
attractive woman came in, dressed with unobtrusive elegance in a summer frock
of plain green cotton and a straw hat. She wore odd shoes: one black, one
brown. This must be Bourgeoise.

Paul was a little surprised. He had
expected an older woman. However, that was probably an unwarranted assumption:
Flick had never actually described her.

All the same, he was not yet ready
to trust her. He got up and left the café.

He walked along the pavement to the
railway station and stood in the entrance, watching the café. He was not
conspicuous: as usual, there were several people hanging around the station
waiting to meet friends.

He monitored the café's clientele. A
woman walked by with a child who was demanding pastry and, as they reached the
café, the mother gave in and took the child inside. The two grape experts
left. A gendarme went in and came out immediately with a packet of cigarettes in
his hand.

Paul began to believe this was not a
Gestapo trap. There was no one in sight who looked remotely dangerous. Changing
the location of the rendezvous had shaken them off.

Only one thing puzzled him. When
Brian Standish had been caught at the cathedral, he had been rescued by
Bourgeoise's friend Charenton. Where was he today? If he had been keeping an
eye on her in the cathedral, why not here, too? But the circumstance was not
dangerous in itself. And there could be a hundred simple explanations.

The mother and child left the café.
Then, at three thirty, Bourgeoise came out. She walked along the pavement away
from the station. Paul followed on the other side of the street. She went up to
a small black car of Italian design, the one the French called a Simca Cinq.
Paul crossed the street. She got into the car and started the engine.

It was time for Paul to decide. He
could not be sure this was safe, but he had gone as far as he could with
caution, short of not making the rendezvous at all. At some point, risks had to
be taken. Otherwise he might as well have stayed at home.

He went up to the car on the
passenger side and opened the door.

She looked coolly at him.
"Monsieur?"

"Pray for me," he said.

"I pray for peace."

Paul got into the car. Giving
himself a code name, he said, "I am Danton."

She pulled away. "Why didn't
you speak to me in the café?" she said. "I saw you as soon as I
walked in. You made me wait there half an hour. It's dangerous."

"I wanted to be sure this
wasn't a trap."

She glanced over at him. "You
heard what happened to Helicopter."

"Yes. Where's your friend who
rescued him, Charenton?"

She headed south, driving fast.
"He's working today."

"On Sunday? What does he
do?"

"Fireman. He's on duty."

That explained that. Paul moved
quickly to the real purpose of his visit. "Where's Helicopter?"

She shook her head. "No idea.
My house is a cut-out. I meet people, I pass them on to Monet. I'm not supposed
to know anything."

"Is Monet all right?"

"Yes. He phoned me on Thursday
afternoon, checking up on Charenton."

"Not since?"

"No. But that's not
unusual."

"When did you last see
him?"

"In person? I've never seen
him."

"Have you heard from Leopardess?"

Paul brooded as the car threaded
through the suburbs. Bourgeoise really had no information for him. He would
have to move to the next link in the chain.

She pulled into a courtyard
alongside a tall house. "Come inside and get cleaned up," she said.

He got out of the car. Everything
seemed to be in order: Bourgeoise had been at the right rendezvous and had
given all the correct signals, and there had been no one following her. On the
other hand, she had given him no useful information, and he still had no notion
how deeply the Bollinger circuit had been penetrated, nor how much danger Flick
was in. As Bourgeoise led him to the front door and opened it with her key, he
touched the wooden toothbrush in his shirt pocket: it was French-made, so he had
been permitted to bring it with him. Now an impulse seized him. As Bourgeoise
stepped into the house, he slipped the toothbrush from his pocket and dropped
it on the ground just in front of the door.

He followed her inside. "Big
place," he said. It had dark, old-fashioned wallpaper and heavy furniture,
quite out of character with its owner. "Have you been here long?"

"I inherited it three or four
years ago. I'd like to redecorate, but you can't get the materials." She
opened a door and stood aside for him to go first. "Come into the
kitchen."

He stepped inside and saw two men in
uniform. Both held automatic pistols. And both guns were pointed at Paul.

CHAPTER

FORTY

DIETER'S CAR SUFFERED a puncture on
the RN3 road between Paris and Meaux. A bent nail was stuck in the tire. The
delay irritated him, and he paced the roadside restlessly, but Lieutenant Hesse
jacked up the car and changed the wheel with calm efficiency, and they were on
their way again within a few minutes.

Dieter had slept late, under the
influence of the morphine injection Hans had given him in the early hours, and
now he watched with impatience as the ugly industrial landscape east of Paris
changed gradually to farming country. He wanted be in Reims. He had set a trap
for Flick Clairet, and he needed to be there when she fell into it.

The big Hispano-Suiza flew along an
arrow-straight road lined with poplars—a road probably built by the Romans. At
the start of the war, Dieter had thought the Third Reich would be like the
Roman Empire, a pan-European hegemony that would bring unprecedented peace and
prosperity to all its subjects. Now he was not so sure.

He worried about his mistress.
Stéphanie was in danger, and he was responsible. Everyone's life was at risk
now, he told himself Modern warfare put the entire population on the front
line. The best way to protect Stéphanie—and himself, and his family in Germany—
was to defeat the invasion. But there were moments when he cursed himself for
involving his lover so closely in his mission. He was playing a risky game and
using her in an exposed position.

Resistance fighters did not take
prisoners. Being in constant peril themselves, they had no scruples about
killing French people who collaborated with the enemy.

The thought that Stéphanie might be
killed made his chest tighten and his breathing difficult. He could hardly
contemplate life without her. The prospect seemed dismal, and he realized he
must be in love with her. He had always told himself that she was just a
beautiful courtesan, and he was using her the way men always used such women.
Now he saw that he had been fooling himself. And he wished all the more that he
was already in Reims at her side.

It was Sunday afternoon, so there
was little traffic on the road, and they made good progress.

The second puncture occurred when
they were less than an hour from Reims. Dieter wanted to scream with
frustration. It was another bent nail. Were wartime tires poor quality? he
wondered. Or did French people deliberately drop their old nails on the road,
knowing that nine vehicles out of ten were driven by the occupying forces?

The car did not have a second spare
wheel, so the tire had to be mended before they could drive on. They left the
car and walked. After a mile or so they came to a farmhouse. A large family was
sitting around the remains of a substantial Sunday lunch: on the table were
cheese and strawberries and several empty wine bottles. Country folk were the
only French people who were well fed. Dieter bullied the farmer into hitching
up his horse and cart and driving them to the next town.

In the town square was a single gas
pump on the pavement outside a wheelwright's shop with a Closed sign in the
window. They banged on the door and woke a surly garagisre from his
Sunday-afternoon nap. The mechanic fired up an ancient truck and drove off with
Hans beside him.

Dieter sat in the living room of the
mechanic's house, stared at by three small children in ragged clothes. The
mechanic's wife, a tired woman with dirty hair, bustled about in the kitchen
but did not offer him so much as a glass of cold water.

Dieter thought of Stéphanie again.
There was a phone in the hallway. He looked into the kitchen. "May I make
a call?" he asked politely. "I will pay you, of course."

She gave him a hostile glare.
"Where to?"

"Reims."

She nodded and made a note of the
time by the clock on the mantelpiece.

Dieter got the operator and gave the
number of the house in the rue du Bois. It was answered immediately by a low,
gruff voice reciting the number in a provincial accent. Suddenly alert, Dieter
said in French, "This is Pierre Charenton."

The voice at the other end changed
into Stéphanie's, and she said, "My darling."

He realized she had answered the
phone with her imitation of Mademoiselle Lemas, as a precaution. His heart
gladdened with relief "Is everything all right?" he asked her.

"I've captured another enemy
agent for you," she said coolly.

His mouth went dry. "My God…
well done! How did it happen?"

"I picked him up in the Café
de la Gare and brought him here."

Dieter closed his eyes. If something
had gone wrong—if she had done anything to make the agent suspect her—she could
be dead by now. "And then?"

"Your men tied him up."

She had said
him
. That meant the
terrorist was not Flick. Dieter was disappointed. All the same, his strategy
was working. This man was the second Allied agent to walk into the trap.
"What's he like?"

"A young guy with a limp and
half his ear shot off."

"What have you done with
him?"

"He's here in the kitchen, on
the floor. I was about to call Sainte-Cécile and have him picked up."

"Don't do that. Lock him in the
cellar. I want to talk to him before Weber does."

"Where are you?"

"Some village. We have a damn
puncture."

"Hurry back."

"I should be with you in an
hour or two."

"Okay."

"How are you?"

"Fine."

Dieter wanted a serious answer.
"But really, how do you feel?"

"How do I feel?" She
paused. "That's a question you don't usually ask."

Dieter hesitated. "I don't
usually involve you in capturing terrorists."