The Caves of Périgord (14 page)

“Monsieur le Maire?” Jack had asked.

“Starr’s cover is so good that that he has been made deputy mayor of some little commune,” François had said, shrugging as if everyone knew that. Jack had shivered at the looseness of SOE’s security.

Just after dawn, they had left the barn and driven south in the small truck over a country road, crossed a larger road when the coast was clear, and darted across a small bridge and railway line into a thick apple orchard. They left the truck hidden, and walked half a mile through wooded country until they reached what had once been a formal garden, laid out with gravel paths, with a small château at the end of the drive. The shutters on the narrow turret windows were all open, which Berger said meant all was well. They went into a side door, which led to the cellars smelling of oak and long-spilled wine, where a middle-aged man with a mustache and Sten gun nodded deferentially to Berger, and gave a vast grin when he saw François. He gestured at a
table where a bottle of wine and some water stood beside a big loaf of country bread, some apples, dry sausage, and a large cheese.

“Strange bread,” said Jack, swallowing a mouthful of the yellow-brown dough.

“Made from chestnuts, which is the flour the peasants used around here for centuries,” said François. “Now there is a shortage of wheat again because the Germans take it. So people have gone back to the old ways. Try the sausage. It’s
sanglier,
wild boar.”

Another door opened and a woman came in quickly, tall and gaunt with gray hair and a distracted look. François leaped to his feet and hurried across the room to embrace her. She began to cry quietly as she looked at him, patted his cheek, rubbed the rough British serge of his uniform. Berger joined them and kissed her on both cheeks. Jack suddenly realized that this châeau was François’s family home, a frightening risk to take however little time Berger had been given to set up the meeting.

“My mother,” François introduced her. Jack stood, somehow constrained to bow. But then a short, squat man with a round head and a dimple in his chin followed her into the cellar, moving fast but lightly on the toes of his feet like a boxer. His hair was short and neat, his gray trousers pressed, and his shoes polished. But for the open collar, he looked like a prosperous lawyer. Behind him, another man came in wearing a dark suit and carrying a revolver. He closed the door and leaned against it.

“Hilaire,” said the short man, putting out his hand to the woman. “Madame, I thank you for the hospitality.” His French was good, but with an accent that Jack could not place. Very northern, perhaps Belgian. He moved to the table, took an apple, and sat down.

“You ought to know I was against your coming so soon,” he said to Jack and McPhee, his eyes swiveling to take in François. “But since you’re here, we have to make you useful.” He turned to the man leaning against the door and beckoned him over.

“Call this man Yves. He’s a foreman at an aircraft propeller factory in Figeac. They turn out three hundred variable-pitch propellers each week for the Luftwaffe. It’s a small plant, so the RAF haven’t much of a hope of hitting it. Yves reckons he can do the job with some small explosive charges on a couple of key machine tools they brought in from Germany, but sometimes they are searched going in and coming out. I want you to give him some plastic, some detonators, and show him how to use them. Today, just as soon as we are done.”

He finished his apple, sipped at some water, and took out a clean white handkerchief to pat his lips. “I suppose I should have said welcome to France. And thank you for bringing me in another radio operator. My own is getting tired and I’m worried about her security,” he went on. “Then I want you out of those uniforms today. We can’t have you wandering around dressed like that. It’s insane, whatever London might say.” He gestured at Christophe. “Berger here—and I want you to call him nothing but Berger from now on, because that’s how I know him and London knows him—is taking you on first. He’ll get the uniforms back to you when you start training his boys. Then you’ll be shipped back down to my area to do the same. Again, you must travel in civilian clothes.”

“In the meantime, we’ll be sending people to you for special explosives training. We’re going to cut every railway line and every telephone line between Toulouse and Paris in the course of this spring, and keep them closed until the invasion. Berger has the list of targets, and the sooner you hit them the better. I want the first two taken out within the next twenty four hours. The Germans get edgy if a plane lands and nothing happens—they like to think there’s logic to things. Blow something up and they’ll feel they know what’s going on.

“We are going to demolish as many bridges as we can to stop the Germans sending reinforcements from the south. We have a whole German army based down here, including one SS panzer division, and that’s where we want to keep it. And that’s where you chaps come in.
Blowing bridges will slow them down, but armored divisions carry their own bridging equipment. So you’ll be training the boys with the bazookas and the mortars who will be ambushing those tanks and their soft-skinned transport every time they move. An armored division covers forty miles of road when it moves, so there’ll be no shortage of targets. Under normal circumstances, they could use road and rail and get those tanks from here to the bridges over the Loire in a day, maybe a day and a half. I don’t think we can stop them, but I think we can keep them stuck down here for a week or more. An SS unit is half as big and strong again as a conventional panzer division. If we slow them down, it could make the difference between the invasion succeeding or getting thrown back into the sea.”

He stopped, looked up at the woman, and then rose courteously to ask her to leave. He gestured Yves to follow her and the man with the Sten gun, until just the five of them were left.

“Right, end of pep talk,” he said. “Two things I want to raise. First with you, Berger. These three chaps are a team and I want them to stick together. I know your brother can be useful in your network and I know you have jobs lined up for him. Don’t do it. I know your men and mine want to see British and American soldiers on the ground here working with them, but most of all they want to see the Free French in uniform. He may be a brother to you, but for my chaps he’s a symbol of de Gaulle and a French army. You lose him on some freelance operation and I’ll never forgive you.

“Second, for you two. Consider me now to be putting my military hat and badges on, and I outrank you so this is not advice. This is an order. You will accept all orders from Berger as coming directly from me. Is that clearly understood?”

“Yes, sir,” said Jack at once. McPhee followed a moment later.

“And you will make no remark to anyone at all about French politics. You will doubtless hear about politics, even be asked about it. You will meet and train Communists, socialists, Catholic militants, and
even people who until recently were Vichy sympathizers, and you will treat them all alike. You will realize that there can be a certain tension between them. You should know the difference between the FTP, the
Franc-Tireurs et Partisans,
as the Communists call themselves, and the Gaullists. They are FFI, the
Forces Françaises de l’Interieur
. This is none of your business, and whenever the matter comes up you will say so and that is all you will say. SOE has no political ax to grind here in France, and if the French ever thought we did, our usefulness here would end at once. If I hear that you have broken this order, I will send you back if I can. If I must, I will have you shot here in France. Is that understood?”

“Yes, sir,” they chorused.

“Right, good luck, and I’ll probably see you down south in a month or so. Berger will let you know. Now off you go and show Yves how to blow up his factory.” He took another apple from the table, and dismissed the three of them, remaining behind with Berger in the cellar, the door firmly closed.

“Looks like we finally ran up against the grown-ups,” said McPhee.

CHAPTER 7
Time: The Present

T
he temple to the Resistance known as the
Centre Jean Moulin
inhabits a classically French urban palace of four stories, two wings, and three grand windows on each side of the entrance, and dominates the Place Jean Moulin in the old center of Bordeaux. It stands opposite the Cathedral of St-André, where Eleanor of Aquitaine married the King of France in the twelfth century, before proceeding to remarry herself and her lands to King Henry of England and perpetuate for three centuries the English occupation of the city and its region. Lydia had learned all this, strolled around the cathedral and reread the entries about Jean Moulin in Foot’s official history,
The SOE in France,
before she heard a merry toot on a horn. She turned to see Major Manners
grinning at her from the seat of an open-topped elderly Jaguar, his hair in disarray and looking boyish.

“Am I late, Lydia?” he called.

“No. I was early,” she said, stuffing Foot’s fat tome into her usefully large bag, a lesson she had learned from Clothilde, and walking briskly to the car. It looked red and mean and luxurious and she savored it, as Manners clambered out and walked around the beast to open the passenger door and escort her in. She felt relieved that she had chosen to wear slacks, and had a silk scarf in her bag. Convertibles were hell on hair.

“Lunch,” he said, and drove off with a luscious mechanical growl. They went around the cathedral square, down two streets, and reversed into an embarrassingly narrow alley. He led her into a small but decently furnished restaurant called the Wolf-something, which had an impressive number of points in the extract from the Gault Millaud guide pasted proudly beside the door. A young woman with dark bags under her eyes greeted him effusively, stared coldly at Lydia, and showed them to a table by the window.

“They say we should eat the seafood ravioli and the fish in beurre blanc,” he began. “You are looking breathtakingly lovely. Milan must suit you. Or perhaps it is Bordeaux.”

“Or perhaps the educational value of Eleanor of Aquitaine’s cathedral balanced by Jean Moulin’s memorial,” she said coolly. “Two great French people who each in their way chose the English. A happy augury for our task, I trust. And thank you for the compliment.” She looked at his tousled hair, the odd smut from the road on his reddened face, and surveyed the denim shirt and antiquated tweed jacket. They suited him. And for the first time since she had met him, he looked younger than his age, which she had ascertained from a quick check of Debrett’s to be thirty-eight. And he was indeed divorced. “Your choice of food sounds excellent. Might I begin with a Campari and soda, please?”

“No. When I booked the table, I asked them to prepare some champagne. I want to celebrate your arrival, and drink to the success of our venture. And thank you for coming, Lydia.”

“Thank you for meeting me. Now, where are we? Do you have your father’s war records?”

“Yes. And better still, I have a reply from Malrand, from the …lysée Palace itself, on the thickest notepaper you ever saw. And an invitation to have lunch with him later this week at the family place near Le Buisson. An invitation to us both.”

“I haven’t got a thing to wear that is suitable for lunch with a head of state, let alone the President of France,” she said, as a flute of champagne was placed before her. “In fact, I’m not sure I even own anything suitable.”

“I don’t think the ancestral jewels are called for. He called it a very informal family lunch, and suggested that I not bother to wear a tie.”

“Worse still, Manners. Any girl can dress decently for a formal lunch. Informal ones are the very devil.”

“The last time I was called Manners was at school. Please go on using it,” he grinned. He was looking more boyish by the minute. Boyish and merry. And still dashing. She grinned back, liking this version of him on holiday, and getting a sketchy sense of how he must have looked as a schoolboy. Emboldened, he went on. “Manners sounds much better than mister or major, and I was never all that fond of Philip.”

Two plates of giant ravioli arrived. There were three on Lydia’s plate, two white and one black, with some overflow calimari nestling against some shredded tomatoes with white slivers of garlic peeking above, like snowfields on summer mountains. It smelled divine.

“
Bon appétit,
” she said, and took a bite. Delicious. “The war records?”

“Thin. He was in a Jedburgh team, one of three. Most of the Jedburgh teams were set up in the same way. One Brit, one Yank, and one
Free Frenchman, who in my father’s case appears to have been Malrand,” he said, and took a forkful of his food. Silence. Evident appreciation. He had not been this attentive to his food at the Savoy Grill.

“Jolly good grub,” he said, as Lydia continued to eat. He put down his fork and carried on talking.

“They trained together in 1943, and dropped into France together early in 1944. The record is unclear about the date, but in French accounts Malrand is given credit for some sabotage operation against a propeller factory in February. Most of the Jedburgh teams arrived much later, with the invasion in June. But one or two of the earliest trainees were reassigned to SOE and were sent in early, where there was a particular problem of local organization. My father’s team was the earliest of them all. They were assigned to a network called Digger, and did a lot of demolition work before the invasion. My father got a DSO and a Croix de Guerre for operations against an SS panzer division. He then got his
Légion d’Honneur
for helping to liberate Toulouse in July, which is a long way south of Périgord. By October 1944, he was back in England and assigned to the team setting up the military government in Germany. That was the end of his French adventure. So whatever he did here took place between January and October of 1944. Nine months. People can have a baby in that time.”

“Well, that all fits with what I found out,” said Lydia, who had eaten as much as she dared, with a fish in beurre blanc to follow, no fitness center in sight, and a presidential informal lunch looming menacingly on the horizon. “Your ravioli are getting cold. You eat, my turn to talk.”