by Bodie Thoene
Bill Cooper cocked his head slightly and peered at Mac with interest. “Hey, Mac! Weren’t you . . . are you still seeing Danny Marlow’s widow?”
“Josie? Not really. I mean, I see her sometimes.” Mac shifted uncomfortably at the question. He hoped Cooper would move on to other topics.
“Where is she?” Cooper looked around Mac’s shoulders, as if expecting Josephine Marlow to stroll out onto the terrace.
“Paris.” Mac did not add that she was most likely breakfasting with a French colonel.
“You’re going back to Paris?”
“I might as well. There’s no war here.”
Cooper’s ruddy face lit up. He lowered his voice. “Listen, I was supposed to pass along an important message to her from a German Wehrmacht officer I met in Berlin. He brought something out of Poland for her . . . from that priest she’s so fond of. I thought I was going to be in Paris to give her the tale in person, but my kindhearted little Nazi press officer advises me that if I go to France I may not be allowed back into dear old Deutschland. And this isn’t something you can put in a letter. The French authorities in the Anastasie would pounce on it like ducks on a bug. You know?”
Cooper was correct about the French postal service. The censors had been named after Saint Anastasie, the woman who had her tongue cut out on orders of Emperor Diocletian. The tongue of every letter that entered or left France these days was cut out, leaving the reader to wonder just what it was that the original document meant to say. Important matters like this could not be trusted to good fortune and the mails.
Cooper checked over his shoulder, as if Klopp’s terrace might also be a hangout for Gestapo spies. He was right to be concerned. Luxembourg, Holland, and Belgium were packed with German “tourists” these days—many of whom had more sinister reasons for traveling in the neutral nations than sightseeing.
Cooper took Mac by the arm and led him to a path that wound down the face of the cliff toward the river. Out of range of prying ears he told Mac about the German major, the Catholic priest from Warsaw, and an old rabbi in Palestine. At last he opened his wallet and removed a photograph of a baby. A half smile flicked across his face. “This year in Jerusalem.”
The engine that would carry John Murphy to the coast of Belgium chuffed impatiently beneath the ornate train shed of the Luxembourg City terminal. Mac knew Murphy was just as impatient to be on his way back to London.
Mac extended his hand in farewell. “Kiss Elisa and the kids for me.”
“Her wire says she’ll be waiting at Victoria Station when I get there.” Murphy’s eyes were alive with anticipation. “I may take a few days off. It’s been months.” He glanced at his watch as if even the minutes were too long to wait now.
“I envy you,” Mac said, and he meant it. “Someone to come home to.”
“Well, then? Get busy. I told you what Trump said. He’s ready to open a new section: TENS Newsreel in London. He needs a good man to head it up. Why not?”
“I’m not cut out for a desk job. Anyway, Eva’d still be off in Wales.”
“That could change.”
“Five months ago I never would’ve believed it . . . before Warsaw.”
Murphy shrugged. “So hustle back and marry that girl. You know what they say about love and war.”
Mac waved his hand in front of his face, as if the thought was a fly to be brushed away. “Never mind love. It’ll kill me for sure. All I care about right now is the war. It’s safer. Talk to Churchill for me when you get back to London, will you, Murphy? See if you can’t get me and my camera on a ship of the Royal Navy.”
Murphy just smiled as he boarded the train.
Mac eyed the two large men standing near the serpentine wrought iron of the train-station lightpost; they were in no way remarkable in either looks or actions. To anyone but a trained observer, the raincoat-clad figures, one in brown and the other in navy blue, would have been indistinguishable from hundreds of other middle-class businessmen.
But Mac was a trained observer. The watchful eye of the camera never captured interesting scenes unless Mac had noticed them first. And these two men, both wearing fedoras pulled low across their foreheads, were interesting. Mac was certain they had ridden the tram to the train depot with him and Murphy. But they had not boarded a train themselves, and now after Murphy’s express had pulled out, they were still lounging in apparently idle conversation.
Mac’s mind flashed back to the destruction of his hotel room. He still couldn’t fathom the reason for the vandalism, but these two gave him a clue as to the identity of the criminals. This pair had Gestapo written all over them. Mac toyed with the idea of going straight up to them and demanding that they pay for his busted camera. Better to verify his suspicions first, though. Even if they were German agents, they might not be interested in him. And if they weren’t, it was better to leave it that way.
One way to check. Mac turned sharply and boarded the tram that was waiting to return to the center of the city. Sure enough, when Mac had seated himself and glanced out the window, he saw that the conversation had come to a halt, and the two men were hurrying toward the tram.
Just as the first of the two—a dark-eyed man with a prominent nose—entered the car, Mac stood up and pushed past the other passengers, back onto the sidewalk. “Changed my mind,” he said to the conductor. “Sorry.”
Mac wanted to see how they would handle this. For both to get out again right behind him would be suspicious even to a blind man. Both figures took a seat. The one nearest the window had a heavily jowled face that he pointed everywhere in the tram—ceiling, walls, floor—except out the window at Mac. The tram pulled out.
Knowing he would now recognize both sets of features again wherever he saw them next, Mac’s need now was for alternate transportation back to his hotel. No taxis presented themselves, so when the next tram pulled up, Mac boarded it.
There were no stops between the Gare Centrale and the ancient battlements that towered over the Petrusse River. The coach slowed as it crossed the viaduct that rose on spindly iron legs over the chasm. The heights of the rock wall were shrouded in mist, but eventually it crossed the ramparts of the medieval fortifications.
At his stop above the cliff face, Mac recognized his mistake. The man with the prominent beak had gotten off the earlier coach and was waiting in the fine rain. The last thing Mac wanted was to lead these thugs back to his hotel and risk another spree of destruction, so he tried to make the train-station trick work again. Mac waited until the big-nosed man seated himself and the tram door closed, then popped up and said apologetically that he had almost missed his stop and needed to be let off.
The raincoated figure stood and also demanded to get out.
At the now-deserted tram stop, Mac found himself face-to-face with his pursuer. “I don’t know what you want,” Mac said, “but you are one ugly customer.”
“Was ist?” replied the figure, whose wide-mouthed grin revealed he was missing his front teeth. “Come now, Mr. McGrath. There is no need to be uncooperative. We just want to speak with you about a matter of great importance. You will come with me.” The last sentence was punctuated by the sudden appearance of a small Mauser pistol from the raincoat pocket.
Mac’s protest died unspoken, and he raised his hands. “There is no need for that.”
A casual wave of the pistol accompanied the instruction. “Please walk on slowly, a pace ahead of me. And you will not try to run. Having your knee destroyed would be very unpleasant for you, and I could scarcely miss at this range.”
“What do you want?”
“All in good time.”
Turning aside from the tram line, they paced the damp stones of the walk that skirted the edge of the precipice. Sheer rock walls fell away into the depths of the narrow gorge. The slender path followed the line of the ancient fortifications, which were themselves carved out of the solid rock of the cliff.
It was a very lonely spot. There were no others out walking on t
he cold and damp day, and they had moved away from the tracks so that a screen of brush blocked the view.
“That is now far enough,” the man said.
“Look, what’s this all about? I know you’re Gestapo, but I don’t know why you want me. And why’d you tear up my room in Paris?”
The thickset agent smiled his gap-toothed grin but said nothing. He gestured for Mac to back up until his legs were against the rain-streaked boulders of the parapet.
“Is this just for fun? ’Cause I got news for you, pal. I’m an American journalist. My country won’t like you strong-arming its citizens. Your boss won’t be happy either.”
“Enough chatter! Where is he?”
“Where is who?”
The German agent lunged with his pistol hand, striking Mac across the side of the face with the barrel. Mac’s head snapped back, and the skin over his cheekbone split. Clenching his fists, Mac crouched into a fighting stance. But another motion of the pistol forced him to relax and drop his hands again. A trickle of blood ran along the line of Mac’s jaw and dripped onto the paving stones.
The German leaned close. He put the muzzle of the Mauser under Mac’s chin, lifting Mac up on his toes. With evil-smelling breath loaded with onions and herring he said, “Coy is not your style, Herr McGrath. We know you were with Lewinski getting out of Poland. Where is he now?”
“Wait, hold on. Let me think.” Mac’s mind was racing. Where had he heard that name? He really did not know what this thug was asking about. But he couldn’t say that. The image of the flight from Warsaw scrolled itself in Mac’s mind. He saw a replay of Ambassador Biddle and the staff people and a weird character in a gas mask. “Do you mean the strange duck who wears the gas mask and has the curly red hair?”
“Of course! That’s Lewinski!” A backhand rake of the pistol barrel across Mac’s mouth burst his lip open and knocked him to his knees. “Quit stalling! Where is he?”
Now what? Mac could not say that he didn’t know this Lewinski character’s whereabouts, even though he didn’t. He’d never be believed. “Yeah, sure. I know where he is. He’s in . . . Paris,” he said, naming the first city that popped into his head.
The Gestapo agent hefted the pistol as if weighing it. “So, you are telling the truth? Lying to us can cause great pain.”
“So what do we do now? Stay here till the other bully boy runs over to check my story? Can I get up?”
The dark eyes stared down the bulbous nose and into Mac’s bloody face. He put the pistol back in his coat. “Of course,” he said, extending his hand to help Mac get up. Mac knocked the offer away and unsteadily rose to his feet. “There’s just one problem.”
“Yeah? What’s that?”
The burly man suddenly grabbed Mac by the neck and his belt. He hoisted the cameraman onto the wall and pushed his head downward over the drop-off. “The problem is, I don’t believe you. You would never give away a secret as vital as Enigma so lightly. Where is he really?”
Mac was truly terrified. Blood from the cut on his cheek was now running down into his eye. And below Mac was a cloud that concealed a two-hundred-foot drop. “I really don’t know. Don’t you think I’d tell you if I did?” he gasped.
“Probably,” the agent grunted, and he momentarily relaxed his grip.
It was the opening Mac needed. His hands, which had been down by his waist, burst apart the grasp. Mac kicked the man in the midsection, knocking him back a pace. But before Mac could get clear of the wall, the Gestapo thug charged in again, anxious to get his hands back on Mac’s neck.
The agent’s damp shoe slipped on a loose rock underfoot, turning his lunge into an unexpected sprawl. Mac slid off the wall. Grabbing the lapels of the agent’s raincoat as he dropped, Mac stood up quickly, pulling upward as hard as he could.
With a startled cry that turned into a long, drawn-out scream, the Gestapo agent plunged over the edge of the precipice, hurtling into the canyon. The shriek made less noise than the sirens of the Stukas Mac had heard in Poland and stopped abruptly.
Mac wiped the blood from his cheek and lip. He resisted the urge to see where the man had hit. Instead he turned his thoughts to a more immediate problem: what to do now.
If he went to the authorities, what would he say? How could he explain that he had just murdered a Gestapo agent who had been trying to kill him over some secret that Mac didn’t have? What was that all about, anyway? And what about the guy’s partner? Where was he?
In the end Mac slipped into his hotel through a side door and checked out immediately to return to Paris.
A sympathetic clerk exclaimed over the condition of his face.
“Yeah, well, those slippery rocks are dangerous sometimes,” was all Mac said.
26
Impossible Things
Josie had spent the night in the bomb shelter beneath the Foyer International after two German bombers had flown lazily over Paris just to have a look at the Eiffel Tower. No air-raid alarm sounded, no bombs were dropped, but the harsh crack of antiaircraft fire erupted from eager batteries across the city. It was a French shell that rained down near the Metro in the Montmartre District. Two men were killed, and one woman suffered an amputated leg. After the damage had been done, air-raid sirens sounded a few minutes before midnight, but there were no enemy planes overhead.
The morning paper offered no apologies to the families of the Montmartre dead and maimed, nor for the loss of a night’s sleep. The headlines clearly blamed the victims for their own bad luck and offered this word of warning in the headlines of the front page:
“CITIZENS OF PARIS!
When You Hear the Sound of Antiaircraft Guns, Go to the Nearest Air-raid Shelter!”
Josie spent the morning at the Ritz Hotel, covering a fashion show staged for the benefit of French soldiers. The lobby bustled with overdressed ladies eyeing the latest fashions in the shopwindows. Nearly every one of the shoppers wore a tricolored ribbon with a paper rose pinned to the lapel. This was a sign that they supported the drive to beautify the Maginot Line for the soldiers of France by planting rosebushes at the front. The explosion near the Metro did not concern them at all. After all, none of them were the sort who rode the Metro anyway. Limousines were their style, Josie thought, as she passed two women walking their beribboned Pekinese dogs. Something in their manner made Josie believe that these grand dames of society could not imagine a stray shell having the impudence to land anywhere near their domain.
“Did you hear it? It hit just outside the Metro station, my dear.”
“But of course! It had the good sense to avoid the Ritz! Can you imagine what a scandal that would have been? What a racket last night. It woke me up, and I could not get back to sleep.”
Josie tucked the newspaper under her arm and passed through the oblivious mob. She took the Metro to meet Mac McGrath at the Café Voltaire on Rue de l’Odeon and noticed that the faces of subway passengers were not smiling and carefree this morning. Who on this train had not recently climbed the steps of the Metro station at Monmartre? Nearly all on board had been there at one time or another. The incident had a sobering effect on the ordinary men and women who could easily imagine themselves in that place when the errant missile hit its mark.
Josie found herself examining the patch of blue sky and imagining planes and artillery as she ascended the stairs to the street. She comforted herself with the old adage about lightning never striking twice.
She walked quickly to the café, which was crowded with a mix of professors and political types who gathered each lunch hour to rehash theories about the war. A haze of cigarette smoke hovered over the noisy room. Josie spotted Mac at a small table in the far corner. He wore dark glasses and was miraculously dressed in the uniform of an American correspondent. He looked very handsome, Josie thought, in spite of a bandage on his cheek. It surprised her that she was actually impressed, like some schoolgirl swooning over a man in uniform. Mac sipped a glass of wine and stared sullenly out the window at the teeming
crowd of pedestrians on the sidewalk.
She was at the table before he noticed her. His smile of greeting was almost guilty, as if he did not want her to suspect that he was brooding about something.
“You made it,” he said, regaining his pleasant expression instantly. “I didn’t think you would come.”
“I told you I would.” She smiled at her reflection in the dark lenses. “Clark Gable in sunglasses.”
He raised them enough to reveal that his right eye was nearly swollen shut. “Gable would’ve fared better. Some drunk in a bistro didn’t like Americans. I showed him what a friendly bunch we are.” He let the frames slip back into place.
“All the same, you look . . . really wonderful, Mac.”
He flipped his lapel absently as if his tidy appearance embarrassed him. “Oh, this. I had to give in.”
“What have you done with your tweed coat and your lucky red tie?”
“I’ve still got them. The war won’t last forever, you know.”
Same old Mac. The uniform was only a temporary aberration.
“You look swell all the same, even if it won’t last.”
“I’ve hitched a ride with the British navy. John Murphy put in a good word with Churchill for me. They’re old friends, you know. Murphy and First Lord of the Admiralty. But I had to get myself a regular uniform, he said. The Brits wouldn’t have me on board otherwise. Maybe going to get some real action on film.”
So he was leaving France, Josie thought.
“The sea. That’s where the real war is,” Mac continued. “This whole Maginot thing . . . well, you know how it is. The Phony War.”
“I’m glad you called, Mac.”
He put down his wineglass and took her hand. “Are you, Jo?”
“Yes, really.” And she was, too, even though she thought about him less and less since Andre had become a regular part of her life.
“Why do I always feel this way when I see you? Like I’m fifteen or something?” Mac eyed her with the expression of a sorrowful puppy.