Liberation

  Nancy’s gear had been in the truck and she’d changed out of her whore’s outfit and back into slacks and boots as soon as they returned and realized the camp was under attack. They were only just clear of it when machine-gun fire hit the tank. She felt the heat of it on her face, like a blush of shame. It became Franc’s funeral pyre and when she and René returned to the spot just before first light, they buried his charred remains by the road and marked the spot with a cross of stones.

  As dawn broke, the survivors from the camp were walking in scattered groups through the forests on both sides of the river, avoiding the roads and taking meandering twisting routes to the fallback position near Aurillac. Occasionally, a Henschel would pass overhead, firing random machine-gun bursts into the foliage hoping to hit one or other of the groups. They missed. When Nancy and René reached the fallback, Tardivat and Fournier could hardly look at her. It was different to the aftermath of the attack on Gaspard’s camp. No one was celebrating, telling blossoming stories of their heroism and daring. The air stank with defeat, and the whispers among the men were all about the lost weapons, the likely reprisals on the villages near where they were found, how the civilian population of Montluçon would suffer for the attack on the Gestapo headquarters.

  Nancy set herself up in the corner of a half-ruined barn, and Fournier and Tardivat slept there too, exhausted and talking to each other only in low voices while Nancy stared at the wall and said little to anyone. She thought of Henri—what she might do to get him back, to find out if he were really alive or dead. Once Denden made it to the fallback they could radio requests for resupply, and perhaps in a few days she would return to Böhm, offer herself up on a plate. She needed to make this right first though. She had left them to fend for themselves hours after finding a spy in their camp. The dull ache of not knowing what was happening to Henri, which had become a familiar companion since the day of his arrest, had become an ever-present agony since that night in Courçais. It had driven her mad, and that madness had cost her men dearly. And they knew it.

  It was two days before she saw Denden again. He was at the back of a ragged group led by Gaspard. When she saw Denden’s face, she was afraid he was wounded, so ashen was he with fatigue and grief.

  “The radio’s gone, Nancy.” It was the first thing he said to her when they found her in the barn. “I destroyed it when I thought we were going to be overrun.”

  “So now you have nothing,” Gaspard said, sitting down heavily opposite her on the earth floor. “Without your rich men in London, you have nothing. No food, no guns, and no soldiers.”

  She looked up and around the group, the last of her senior officers. They looked broken, disappointed.

  “You should have been here,” Gaspard said, making sure she knew. “You let that little bitch give away our position then went on your crazy mission, taking our best men from their posts when we needed them the most.”

  No one, not Tardivat, not Fournier, not even Denden tried to disagree.

  “Fine. I’m nothing. I’m shit,” she said, without heat. “But we still have a job to do. That army group…”

  Denden started to pull off his boots, wincing hard as he did. “That job’s canceled, Nancy. We’re back on the usual harry-the-Germans missions, or we would be if we hadn’t just had our men and weapons scattered.”

  “One hundred dead, two hundred wounded…” Gaspard continued.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Gaspard,” Denden screamed at him. “She gets the fucking point.”

  Gaspard turned toward him and Nancy wondered if they were finally going to kill each other here and now and save Böhm the job. Gaspard attacking Denden, Nancy fighting Gaspard, Fournier fighting her. But though Gaspard opened his mouth to speak, to sling something hateful at Denden, he stopped. Even he was too broken to fight with any spirit today. She’d broken them all.

  She put her head in her hands, then felt a touch on her shoulder. She looked up. It was Tardivat; he offered her a water bottle. She took it and thanked him. He didn’t reply. She had to fix this, she had to. It was more important than her own hurt, more important, today, in this moment, than Henri. She wanted to stop, to curl up and die as the realization hit her. She had no easy way out; there was no slipping off and arriving like a martyr in Böhm’s office for her now. This was her job; this was what had to be done.

  “Do you still have the code book, Denden?”

  He nodded, not looking at her.

  “Then I’ll go and get us a radio. You said something about a spare in Saint-Amand? Used to belong to that girl who got picked up in March?”

  “You’ll never make it,” Gaspard said, getting to his feet. “I’m going to see to my men.”

  Denden waited until Gaspard had marched out of the barn before he replied. “Yes. I stopped for a drink with my motorbike friend there. Bruno from the café in the square where we were said he had a spare set hidden away. But we have no vehicle, Nancy. The trucks are all gone.”

  “A bicycle then,” she said firmly.

  “But Saint-Amand is more than a hundred kilometers away.”

  “A bit less over the hills.” She didn’t need the lost maps to tell her that. She knew the roads and paths round here almost as well as Gaspard. Denden, Fournier and Tardivat exchanged cautious glances.

  “I can get you the bicycle,” Fournier said at last.

  “But why do you have to go, Nancy?” Denden asked. “Can’t you send one of the boys? You need to find which of our arms depots are still secure, resupply the men from there as best you can.”

  “Do you still have my notebook, Denden?”

  He reached into his back pocket, showed it to her.

  “Then you can handle all that. You and Fournier and Tardivat. But I can get through checkpoints. No one else here can.”

  He shoved the notebook back into her pocket, reached for her hands. “Nancy, your face is everywhere.”

  “They don’t see my face when I go through checkpoints! They see a housewife. Look, I know I’ve been a goddamn fool. I fucked it up; I have to fix it.”

  She plunged her hands into her bag and pulled out the dress she had worn in the Gestapo raid. It was stiff with dried blood. “Tardi, can you make this into something respectable? Dress me as a war widow? God, what I wouldn’t give for the material from that nightdress now.”

  Tardivat lit a cigarette. “I still have a parachute in my pack.”

  “Can you do it, Tardi?”

  He flinched when she said his name.

  “Yes. I can do it, mon colonel. It will take me till morning. You should sleep, wash. You look like a witch out of fairy stories, not a housewife.”

  He took the bloody rag of a dress from her and walked out of the barn. She watched him go, thinking of that nightdress. He had made it as a gesture of his admiration, of fellowship and friendship, and she had lost it. Lost it and got men killed. She needed it back.

  Fournier got up too, touched Denden on the shoulder. “We should begin at once, Denis.”

  Denden nodded. “One moment,” he said, then waited until Fournier had slouched out of the barn. “Did you kill Böhm?” he asked. “I know about the offer he made in Courçais now, what Anne said.”

  That made it easier somehow. “No. And he said Henri is still alive, but I know I need to fix this now, Denden. I can’t go looking for him until we are done.”

  He stood up, touched her shoulder. “I’m sorry, Nancy.”

  “Did Jules survive? I haven’t seen him.”

  He looked away from her. “He did, but he daren’t speak to me after Gaspard… Just get some sleep.”

  Then he was gone too.

  She woke next morning aching from the cold ground and the bruises she had picked up in the raid. The dress was lying next to her. She went to wash in one of the icy tributaries that ran from the mountains and into the river in the valley below. Someone had told her once it took hundreds of years for the rain to work its way through the soil and then emerge again, purifie
d and enriched in these springs. She worked the blood out of her nail beds and scrubbed her skin pink, then put on the dress Tardivat had washed and repaired, made more decent and plain with his harvested parachute silks. It was a little too big for her now, but Tardi had provided a sash, similar to ones she’d seen women wearing in Chaudes-Aigues—a very French attempt to make starvation fashionably acceptable. She smoothed her hair behind her ears and put on her shoes. Not her army boots, not her heels, but the mid-level low and feeble things made out of cardboard she wore when she needed to get through ordinary checkpoints.

  The men, scattered around the clearing over their morning cooking fires, glanced at her in surprise. They had grown used to seeing her in slacks and army tunic, and her sudden reappearance as an ordinary Frenchwoman shocked them. Denden and Tardi were waiting by the barn, an iron-frame bike between them.

  “Fournier delivered this for you,” Denden said as she approached, trying to sound cheery. But Fournier hadn’t stayed to see her off, Nancy thought. “And I’ve found these.” He handed her a pair of reading glasses. “I picked them up in case mine got smashed, and I’ve been trying to remember the name of the square with the café and Bruno… but I can’t recall it for the life of me.”

  He started describing the square, the way the light patterned the walls of the buildings in the afternoon and the qualities of the hospitality he’d enjoyed there, till Nancy just put her hand on his arm and he ground to a halt.

  “I’ll find it, Denden.”

  He was scared for her, she realized, under all the chatter. Tardi pushed himself off the wall and fished something out of his pocket. A crucifix on a chain. He showed it to her, then without saying anything, fastened it around her neck. For just a second she thought it was burning her skin, but no, the metal was just cold.

  “Are you a Christian, Tardi?” she asked.

  He didn’t look her in the eye, but his voice didn’t sound angry. “I have tried to be; I have not always succeeded. But if you are to look like a war widow… They would ask God’s help.”

  56

  Focus, Nancy. It was market day in Saint-Amand and the crowd might give her a little cover, but it also meant there were plenty of eyes on the street to recognize her. Those damned posters. She put on the glasses that Denden had given her; they gave the world a slightly pinched look, but they did not blind her. Between that and the rather poor dress, and the not very fashionable hat, most men’s eyes glided over her.

  The crowd was thin, and at each corner of the main square German soldiers lounged against the gray walls. She went through Denden’s description of the friendly café again in her mind. A small square, he’d said. Near to the river with a chestnut tree in the middle. Not this one then, with the church on one side and the town hall on the other, and high up the hill.

  She stopped at a stall to fill her string bag with a few gray-market potatoes and a mangy-looking cabbage. Now she was just a woman on her way back home from market. She fetched her bike and pushed it past the soldiers on the south of the square. Not looking at them, not not looking either. She was invisible to them.

  The road sloped down steeply toward the river, the narrow pavements empty now and the houses shuttered and cold. She looked right and left, searching for some sign of this square. Had Denden said anything about the view that would help her to know which way to turn when she reached the river? She’d have to guess. Left, then, if she couldn’t find it she’d put on a little dumb show of patting her pockets and fussing. Just an ordinary shopper who’d left something behind on one of her errands and had to turn back.

  The river was full of summer rain, churning under the ancient stone arches of the bridge. She smiled at it. It was too narrow for a jeep full of soldiers to cross, so the Resistance wouldn’t have to blow it up. Perhaps it would survive another five hundred years. She paused as if to admire the view. On the other side of the river was a towpath and a band of woodland; to the right and on this side the towpath was squeezed between the water and an old stretch of city wall.

  Left it was then. Christ she was glad she hadn’t had to operate in a town. She had almost rotted to death in the damp of the woods until the guys found her the bus, but at least she hadn’t had to live day after day under the half-shuttered eyes of all these buildings, having to guess at the whisperings, compromises and collaborations going on behind the closed doors.

  She passed two broken-down-looking warehouses and stole a glance back up toward the church. A shimmer of green among the timbered house fronts of an old square caught her eye; she turned up the path and found herself in Denden’s square.

  It was just as he had described it, a cartoon of small-town France, the high buildings leaning into one another, and one side occupied by the flank of an old seminary. The tree in the center of the square looked ancient too, gnarled and thick, but still sending forth fresh greenery into the summer air. The leaves shook and whispered in the breeze and she thought of the thousands of troops pouring into northern France, the individual men that made up the landing force, the fresh surge of hope.

  She leaned her bicycle up against the wall in one of the narrow alleys leading off the square and hooked her bag over her arm. The café was open, but she had no passwords, no codes, and the charming young man Denden had spoken of, Bruno, had probably been shipped off to work in Germany or disappeared into the hills. She walked in.

  It was a pretty mean little place: half a dozen tables and the zinc bar; three customers, all old men, and the barman. He was a great slab of a fellow, heavy armed and red faced. Did he look too well fed to be honest? She thought of the black-market men she had known in Marseille. Any one of them could have slit your throat for a hundred francs, but they were too bloody minded, too independent to deal with the Nazis. It was the men in suits with briefcases and polished shoes you had to look out for.

  She asked for a brandy and when she had paid for it, drank it off and set her glass on the bar.

  “Does Bruno still work here? An old friend of his asked me to pass on a message.”

  The barman polished a glass with a dirty towel. “Give me the message, I’ll get it to him next time I see him. If I see him.”

  She looked straight at him. “Maybe I’ll wait. See if he turns up.”

  He shrugged, then said a bit too casually, “If it’s about the bike he’s selling, it’s out back. You can come see it if you like.”

  The last thing Nancy wanted to see was another bloody bike—she could barely move as it was and she was sure her ankle was bleeding.

  “That’s it!” she said brightly.

  The yard at the back of the bar did have an old bike in it, which they bent over as they talked in case someone was watching from the overlooking buildings. Nancy fiddled with the seat and made a face.

  “Bruno was picked up by the Gestapo two weeks ago,” the barman said, “and I can’t swear one of those old guys in my place isn’t on their payroll. I’ve known them both twenty years, but who can tell these days?”

  Nancy folded her arms, still staring at the bike. “I heard Bruno had a spare radio set. We lost ours.”

  The barman stood back, lifted his hands and shook his head hard enough to make his jowls wobble, as if refusing an unreasonable price. “Not a hope, Madame. Not here. But I know they have a spare in Châteauroux, or at least they did a week ago.”

  “That’s eighty kilometers away!”

  “Nearest one I know of.” A black cat emerged from the woodpile and rubbed against his legs. He bent down and scratched its ears. “One of their operators tried to run from a checkpoint, got shot in the back. You want Emmanuel, or at least that’s what they call him. British fella.”

  No one had told Nancy about an operative called Emmanuel operating near Châteauroux. Fair enough—London wasn’t going to chat with them about agents in adjacent networks unless they needed to.

  “Can you give me the address?”

  He did and, shooing the cat away from the door, led her back out throu
gh the main bar. Nancy called out a cheery promise to talk to her friend about Bruno’s bike, and went to the narrow back alley where she had left her own.

  Eighty kilometers away and she could barely put one foot in front of the other as it was. She looked at her ankle: yes, definitely bleeding. Eighty bloody kilometers, with an address and a name but no papers for the region and swarms of trigger-happy Gestapo all over the place. Then somehow, the ride back into the mountains.

  “It has to be done, and you have to do it.”

  Christ, she was losing it. She’d said that out loud. At least she hadn’t said it in English. She clambered painfully back onto the bike and pushed off.

  57

  Nancy missed the mountains now, all those twisting back roads surrounded by good cover where the Germans were no longer willing to explore thanks to the work of her men. Between Saint-Amand and Châteauroux the Boche were out in force and didn’t look that bloody nervous at all. She managed to duck two checkpoints, seeing them in time to turn off her route without attracting attention, but the third one had set themselves up on a sharp bend on the back road between Maron and Diors. She ran straight into them, and of course, as they were off the main road they were bored, and she, teetering along on her bike after twelve hours in the saddle was a welcome distraction.

  “Your papers, Madame! Where are you going?”

  She stared up at him, saying nothing, her eyes wide. She could probably kill this one, a blow to the throat just like the one she had used on the guard at the transmitter station, but he had two friends with him, one already with his hand on his revolver. She was unarmed. Take out the corporal with the first guard’s gun, hope the third one panicked and she had time to shoot him too, or rush him and go for his eyes? Perhaps a twenty percent chance.