Ken Follett - Jackdaws

by Jackdaws [lit]

  "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 fianc‚ 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. 1 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 Chapdlle, 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.

  They chugged slowly through woods and rolling fields. An hour later the two French women got off the train, and Flick and Ruby quickly slid into the vacated seats. However, Flick regretted the decision almost immediately. The gendarmes, both in their twenties, immediately struck up a conversation, delighted to have some girls to talk to during the long journey.

  Their names were Christian and Jean-Marie. Both appeared to be in their twenties. Christian was handsome, with curly black hair and brown eyes; Jean-Marie had a shrewd, foxy face with a fair mustache. Christian, the talkative one, was in the middle seat, and Ruby sat next to him. Flick was on the opposite banquette, with Maude beside her, slumped the other way with her head on Diana's shoulder.

  The gendarmes were traveling to Paris to pick up a prisoner, they said. It was nothing to do with the war: he was a local man who had murdered his wife and stepson, then fled to Paris, where he had been caught by the flics the city police, and had confessed. It was their job to bring him back to Chartres to stand trial. Christian reached into his tunic pocket and pulled out the handcuffs they would put on him, as if to prove to Flick that he was not boasting.

  In the next hour Flick learned everything there was to know about Christian. She was expected to reciprocate, so she had to elaborate her cover story far beyond the basic facts she had figured out beforehand. It strained her imagination, but she told herself this was good practice for a more hostile interrogation.

  They passed Versailles and crawled through bomb-ravaged train yards at St. Quentin. Maude woke up. She remembered to speak French, but she forgot that she was not supposed to know Flick, so she said, "Hello, where are we, do you know?"

  The gendarmes looked puzzled. Flick had told them she and Ruby had no connection with the two sleeping girls, yet Maude had addressed Flick like a friend. flick kept her nerve. Smiling, she said, "You don't know me. I think you have mistaken me for your friend on the other side. You're still half asleep."

  Maude gave her a don't-be-so-stupid frown, then caught the eye of Christian. In a pantomime of comprehension she registered surprise, put her hand over her mouth in horror, then said unconvincingly, "Of course, you're quite right, excuse me."

  Christian was not a suspicious man, however, and he smiled at Maude and said, "You've been asleep for two hours. We're on the outskirts of Pans. But, as you can see, the train is not moving."

  Maude gave him the benefit of her most dazzling smile. "When do you think we will arrive?"

  "There, Mademoiselle, you ask too much of me. I am merely human. Only God can tell the future."

  Maude laughed as if he had said something deliciously witty, and Flick relaxed.

  Then Diana woke up and said loudly, in English, "Good God, my head hurts, what bloody time is it?"

  A moment later she saw the gendannes and realized instantly what she had done-but it was too late.

  "She spoke English!" said Christian.

  Flick saw Ruby reach for her gun.

  "You're British!" he said to Diana. He looked at Maude. "You too!" As his gaze went around the compartment he realized the truth. "All of you!"

  Flick reached across and grabbed Ruby's wrist as her gun was halfway out of her raincoat pocket.

  Christian saw the gesture, looked down at what Ruby had in her hand, and said, "And armed!" His astonishment would have been comical if they had not
been in danger of their lives.

  Diana said, "Oh, Christ, that's torn it."

  The train jerked and moved forward.

  Christian lowered his voice. "You're all agents of the Allies!"

  Flick waited on tenterhooks to see what he would do. If he drew his gun, Ruby would shoot him. Then they would all have to jump from the train. With luck, they might disappear into the slums beside the railway tracks before the Gestapo was alerted. The train picked up speed. She wondered whether they should jump now, before they were moving too fast.

  Several frozen seconds passed. Then Christian smiled. "Good luck!" he said, lowering his voice to a whisper. "Your secret is safe with us!"