Romeo growled to Rosie, ‘I’d tell him something, if I wasn’t enjoying the salaud’s hospitality. I’d tell him to shut his ugly face.’
The confirmation came, anyway: at about eight, local time. Romeo did a little dance of joy; Plumier, who’d been playing a game of patience, pushed the cards together and got up. ‘I’ll round up the boys. Curfew’s a problem, got to have ’em here before, see.’
‘Where from?’ Romeo, glancing over at him… The forester told him, ‘Chantier de Jeunesse – but they’ll have snuck down to the village by this time… We’ll be hoofing it from here, you realize?’
‘Four kilometres?’
‘Nearer three. You were there the other day, God’s sake!’
‘By road from the south, not on foot through the bloody trees.’ He frowned, bowed to Plumier’s wife. ‘My apologies, madame.’
‘Oh, I hear a lot worse than that, often enough, from my dear husband… Why don’t you have a snooze, refresh yourself and kill a bit of time?’
‘Doubt if I could. Thanks all the same.’
‘He’s on edge,’ Rosie told her. ‘Been waiting a long time, for this.’
‘I know. I realize…’
‘Talking about me as if I wasn’t here. Or some sort of animal.’ Pushing his fingers through his grey hair… ‘Another three hours, eh, before we move?’
‘Two and a half, more like,’ Plumier’s wife told him. ‘Prefers to make doubly sure, his nibs does. Getting through the woods in the dark, too, you see.’
‘We’ll have some moon, though.’
‘Perhaps not much.’ She shrugged. ‘In any case, that’s his way.’
‘He’s a good guy, too. One of the best. Just bloody irritating, when he wants to be… Angel, how are you doing – so quiet, there?’
‘I’m all right. But I’ll be glad when you’re on your way and calming down.’
‘Huh.’ He pulled a hard chair up close to hers. ‘I’ll be sitting up there’ – pointing skyward – ‘thinking of you and Marcel and this new man coming back here. You in all this – crazy business. You know, just sort of pressing button ‘A’ and flying out of it – extraordinary, really…’
‘Yes. It’s weird.’
It was nearly ten before Plumier came back with his two helpers, Michel and Albert from the youth camp – S.T.O., Service Travail Obligatoir, a Petainist set-up which sent most of its recruits to work in Germany but also had work-camps here in France – for the lucky few. Michel looked about eighteen, Albert no more than fifteen. They worked mainly in forestry, under Plumier, which was how he knew them. They’d slipped under the wire, they told Rosie, weren’t likely to be missed as long as they were back before roll call at six a.m. Madame Plumier made coffee for everyone, and gave those two soda-bread and jam; her husband got out the torches they’d be using – two with red material bound over them, which the boys would use, and his own plain glass, uncovered, for passing the recognition signal. He asked Rosie, ‘You do it, eh? You’re the expert?’
She was taking the Mark III with her, in a satchel with a strap over her shoulder, so as to get her signal off to Baker Street as soon as the Lysander started back. They’d return to this house then, get a few hours’ rest and start early for Rouen. She’d decided to take the new courier to within a few miles of town, then drop him off with her bicycle roughly where Romeo had picked her up. He was going to see her, anyway, it made little difference. They might even know each other. But she wasn’t telling Romeo this, since she didn’t want an argument.
Van and bicycle were both under cover meanwhile, in a shed behind the house.
‘Shall we go?’
Ten-thirty. There was thin, high cloud, but enough moon-radiance getting through it to see by. She told Romeo, ‘You were right.’
‘Wasn’t I, though.’ He put a heavy arm round her shoulders. ‘Wasn’t I, my Angel!’
* * *
The clearing was about a hundred and fifty yards north to south, and for most of its length a lot narrower on the other axis, but irregular in shape – wasp-waisted, and wider at this southern end than it was higher up. The last-quarter moon was in the western sky at an altitude of about thirty degrees, its shape vaguely discernible at times but mostly only the veiled source of this milky half-light. There was virtually no wind: the clouds were drifting very slowly eastward, but although this was high ground, here in the shelter of the beechwood you could barely feel it.
It had been an easy walk, with Plumier leading and following contours more than paths. Since arrival, he and Romeo had made their dispositions; pacing out distances and holding up wet fingers, they’d agreed that the Lysander should be encouraged to touch down close inside the northeast perimeter, on a track of about south-southwest. The two boys, with the red torches, were placed to right and left of this track, slantwise across the wasp’s waist, so to speak. The pilot would know he had to land so as to pass about midway between them, with his nose pointing at the white torch which would be flashing the recognition signal from this apex of the triangle.
They were all in position now. The Lysander could turn up half an hour early, if it wanted to.
Romeo muttered, ‘Wouldn’t mind a smoke, eh, Angel?’
‘Best not think about it.’
‘You could light a bonfire here – who’d see it?’
He was probably right, at that. Although out of some remnant of self-discipline he wasn’t lighting up. You chose high ground for a landing-field whenever possible, so that the torches wouldn’t be visible from still higher ground in the vicinity. There was none that was any higher around here, and the enclosing woods guaranteed privacy horizontally.
‘You were here in daylight, weren’t you?’ Plumier spoke through his teeth, chewing something. ‘Did you see the work we’ve been doing on that side there, over the ridge?’
‘Don’t recall it… We came up from Bellencombre, turned at La Fresnaye and trekked over the crest at Hêtre le Poilu.’
‘So you wouldn’t have. But what I’m saying – we’re clearing there as well. Trees all felled, real big ’uns, and now we’re tractoring the roots out. Looks like a bloody moonscape – in this light it’d be fantastic.’
Rosie said, ‘Sounds as if you enjoy your job, Marcel.’
He grunted an affirmative. ‘Plenty worse. Yours, for instance. But you’re right, I do… Flown in Lysanders before, Martin?’
‘Oh God, yes!’
It would be on its way by now, Rosie thought. With the new courier beginning to wonder what he might be getting into. Initially, at take-off, the feeling was always of relief – the end of the waiting, hanging round. Then you saw the next hurdles coming up…
‘One thing,’ – Plumier, talking quietly with Romeo – ‘one small matter, Martin – who’s going to service our damn tractors, now you’re buggering off?’
‘Don’t worry. Chum of mine from Rouen’ll be in touch. I gave him my customer-list, and all the records – including unpaid bills, you’ll be glad to hear. Name’s Pigot – Marc. First-class mechanic and – you know, like-minded.’
‘One of your lot, is he?’
‘No. But he’s blown up a few rail tracks, in his time. An action group with links to l‘Armée des Ombres.’
‘Marc Pigot. Right… Hey – hear something?’
Very faint. But there, all right…
Rosie said, ‘Your taxi, sir.’
‘By God, it may be…’
‘Coming towards, all right. On time, too. Must be.’
‘Better stand by. Martin – good luck, old pal, let’s see you again one day.’ Plumier called softly, cupping his hands around his mouth, ‘Be ready lads!’
A red spark glowed, switched off again. The engine-noise sounded about right, she thought. Also on target, and on time. When they arrived, they arrived suddenly – you’d wait hours, and suddenly it would be on top of you, almost before you knew it. Very loud, already. Still couldn’t see it. They painted them black, of course.
‘S
witch on, you two!’ Plumier passed her the white torch. ‘Here you are. ‘AK’ – right?’
‘Right.’ Straining her eyes into the translucent darkness, filtered moonglow over the dense-black surround of beeches: then not waiting any longer, flashing the dot and dash, dash-dot-dash. And again – over and over: ear-splitting noise by this time, and she saw it just as Romeo did, shouting and flinging up an arm. It wasn’t landing, though, not on this pass, only racketing over like some great roaring bat not much above the treetops. There one moment, gone the next – checking first, she realized, then he’d bank around, come in and land. The pilots were all adepts, very expert. She stopped flashing: he’d have seen it, must have, would know it was OK to come on in, she’d start again when she heard him out there on his approach. She felt Romeo’s arm round her shoulders and his bristly face against her cheek, heard his shout of, ‘On my way. Bless you, Angel. Take care now!’ He’d gone – out of this shadow, loping out into the middle where the machine would finish its run. Where the pilot would want him, too. If they could make the changeover of passengers and get back into the air in say four minutes, they wouldn’t take five over it. Or even four and a quarter. She’d seen it often enough before this. Plumier patted her shoulder: ‘OK?’ He was on his way too, to help. She’d had an impression – illusion – just for a moment – of engine-noise inside the forest. But it could only have been echoes of the Lysander’s racket – which was building again now, as deafening as before, only this time meaning business. She had the torch aimed and flashing AK, AK, AK… Providing a leading-mark as well as the recognition-signal.
Volume was being turned right up again. Then it cut. OK – landing…
Blaze of light – roar of the Lysander’s throttle suddenly wide open – streaks of light and a machine gun hammering. Impression of fireworks here and there… She’d screamed – pointlessly, of course – ‘Romeo!’ He was in it – all that light, the criss-crossing streaks – so was Plumier. And the boys? Several guns firing – some upward, tracer streaming up searchlight beams like sword-blades slashing at the treetops: the Lysander out of it, though, its noise reducing rapidly, leaving mostly the continuing, jerky hammering of machine guns and one’s own shock, bewilderment. Those weren’t searchlights, they were headlights, converging vehicles – and in the centre, Romeo. Alone – she hadn’t seen the forester go down, but he must have. Romeo with a pistol in his hand, taking snap-shots this way and that: then he’d doubled – staggering forward, trotting as if to catch up with his own toppling weight: then he’d gone down – a belly-flop – and in the same instant she was blinded.
Searchlight – spotlight, pinning her against the backdrop of trees like an actress on a stage. She was ready for it – more or less. Well – what else? A single shot, then – couldn’t have been aimed at her… And no more since that one – only dazzling light and running figures, a lot of shouting. She began to put her hands up, then half-realized what she was doing, lowered them again – facing that brilliance, praying to God they would shoot.
17
‘You’d do better to cooperate with us. Really would.’
A different one, today – saying the same as the other had yesterday. This one’s name was Prinz, he’d told her in his guttural French. Badly fitting civilian clothes, mid-forties, flabby-looking, with a large head and mouse-coloured hair. Could have been Heinrich Himmler’s nephew – truly, there was a definite resemblance, even the same pig eyes. He was hunched in a round-backed swing-chair behind the desk, and they’d put her on a straight-backed kitchen-type one, out in the middle of the room – which was almost identical to the one in which she’d been through this same routine yesterday. Maybe was the same one. Board floor, no carpet, the desk, two filing cabinets, one three-legged stool in the corner and a common-or-garden shovel propped beside it. She didn’t remember those, but—
Shivering: in a warm room. All right, the shakes. Trying to control them. Pig eyes on her for a moment, noting it…
The Palais de Justice, she was in. She didn’t think anyone had told her – simply knew it. Almost as if it had been inevitable that she’d end up here. Three days now – she was fairly sure this was the fourth day – which would make it Tuesday. Midnight Friday into early hours of Saturday had been the disaster in the forest. She’d regained consciousness – or partly had – on the floor in the back of a truck a few hours later – in chains and – well, extreme discomfort – soldiers’ legs and boots all round her, German voices, occasional bursts of ugly singing – and must have been unconscious again when they’d carted her in. Small hours of the morning, as she’d imagined it, since – the Place Foch deserted, swastika banner hanging limp over that sombre doorway; she’d have been slung over one of the bastards’ shoulders, as she’d envisaged it. But at some stage she might have lost a day. Could have stayed more or less unconscious all of Saturday: and there’d have been no way of telling day from night if they’d left her in the cell, where a caged light blazed continuously, but there was a routine of taking the bucket – the cell’s only furniture – to empty it in a lavatory at the end of a stone passage, and there was a ventilator in there through which daylight could be seen, when there was any.
What happened in the forest – how it had – her brain swam when she tried to think about it. Romeo might have forgotten all that self-discipline of his and told someone – some woman who’d thought he was deserting her?
Or at the Ardouval end: bad security by Plumier – or others close to him – or those boys, or one of them?
César?
The notes she’d written for him. Christ, if it was him…
Disaster, nothing less.
It wasn’t, though. Couldn’t be. Please God, it couldn’t!
Did I tell you Buck came to my wedding?
But – she remembered now, the conclusion she’d arrived at – last night or some time, in her cell – they had to be reading codes, in this case Baker Street’s answer to her request for arrangements to be made for Romeo’s extraction. Signals had undoubtedly been intercepted in the previous réseau’s time – and Romeo had been blamed for it – and it was still happening. Despite complete change of personnel, different codes, etcetera.
She’d assumed her own new code would have been safe at least for a few weeks.
Prinz was still leafing through some file. Some time had passed since he’d spoken.
She wondered where Ben was, what he was doing. One of the mental exercises advocated in the resistance-to-interrogation course had been to concentrate the mind on happy memories and on people whom one loved, admired, or even lusted after. Mind over matter: you weren’t here, you were there. That was reality, this only an interlude that was to all intents and purposes illusory, was best thought of as a nightmare from which eventually you’d wake up. The psychologists had to give you advice of some kind, of course – but she’d thought even then, on the course, that if they were drilling down into the nerves of your teeth, what the hell difference did it make what you thought about?
She’d try it, anyway. Try anything – including prayer.
Although if God gave a damn, would one be here now? Would Joan of Arc have burned? Romeo be dead?
They hadn’t laid a finger on her, yet. Not since the early hours of Saturday in the woods, and a few kicks in the truck.
‘Didn’t you hear me?’
There were handcuffs on her wrists, behind her back. When they’d brought her into Rouen she’d had leg-irons on as well. She’d probably been only semi-conscious even when she’d thought she was wide awake. Dazed, anyway, not thinking straight – after the crack on the head one of them had given her. It still throbbed all the time, and when in the cell she’d touched it very gingerly with her fingertips there seemed to be a depression in the bone, where the caked blood was.
Gazing up at the window, over the interrogator’s head: telling herself, Hating them, that’s what to think about… The window was high up, and small enough not to need bars on it. All one saw w
as a rectangle of grey sky.
So it still hadn’t cleared.
How about the moon – how long before Ben might be back on the Breton coast?
‘I hope you appreciate that I’m exercising extreme patience.’ Glaring at her: an ugly, sulky child. ‘Can hear me, can you?’
She nodded, and it hurt her head. She said it: ‘Yes.’ No point in infuriating him: perhaps he’d said something to her and her mind had been elsewhere. It was going to start soon anyway, this was only the work-up.
It was a comfort that the pill was still in its pocket in her bra.
What the criteria would be, though – for getting to it and taking it – was something else. How you’d recognize the end of the road, be certain… Maybe you wouldn’t have to think at all – just do it.
‘Are you deaf?’
‘I may be. One of your men hit me. You can see—’
‘You are an agent of the British so-called Special Operations Executive—’ he’d put that in English, mouthing it with a lot of lip-movement and in that almost comically German accent: they were all stage Germans, if you let them be. He was telling her, ‘You were caught red-handed, and resisted arrest. You’re lucky not to have been shot out of hand. Now listen to me. I’ve been studying your file – such as it is. It’s an S.D. file, and far from complete. For your information, we’re not S.D. here now; we’re Geheime Staatspolizei.’ Gestapo, that meant: he sounded smug about it. ‘The officer you saw yesterday compiled this, and it tells me next to nothing. About as much as you told him, eh?’
‘I – don’t know…’
‘So you see – my purpose in giving you that information – it leaves a great deal for you to tell us. Of course, our own researchers will be getting to work on it now—’
‘I don’t remember anything. My head—’
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