The Café de l’Océan was strategically sited on the crossing of two narrow alleys in the Quartier Barre, north of the harbour. At the end of the alley Miller saw two grey-uniformed Germans with a motorcycle combination parked on the quay under a crowd of squalling gulls. They looked as if they were having a pleasant seaside smoke. Soon, an SS armoured car and six men would have failed to respond to signals enough times for there to be noise and fuss. But not, Miller devoutly hoped, too soon.
Outside the café, Hugues looked up and down the alley with the air of a conspirator in a bad play. ‘Get in here,’ said Miller, not unkindly, and shoved the door open for him.
The Café de l’Océan was a room twenty feet on a side, with a bar across the inside corner. It contained some thirty men, five women, and a fug of cigarette smoke. Two field-grey Germans were playing draughts at a table in the corner. Seeing them, Hugues stiffened like a pointer at a grouse. Miller knocked his arm and said, ‘Camouflage.’ He hoped he was right.
Hugues swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing in his throat above the frayed collar of his shirt. He elbowed his way up to the bar, next to an elderly gentleman with a beret, a large grey moustache and red-and-yellow eyeballs. He said to the fat man behind the bar, ‘A Cognac for me, and a Cognac for my friend the Admiral.’
The barman had eyes like sharp currants. ‘L’Amiral Beaufort?’
‘That’s the one.’ A fine sheen of sweat glazed Hugues’ pink-and-white features. The BBC had sent the password down the line. But it was always possible that something would have gone astray, that this impenetrable barman, whom he knew to be a résistant, would refuse to make the next link in the chain.
But that was all right, now.
The barman gave them the brandy, and scribbled a laborious bill with a stub of pencil. Hugues passed a glass to Miller, said, ‘Salut,’ and looked at the bill. Pencilled on the paper were the words Guy Jamalartégui – 7 Rue du Port, Martigny. Hugues pulled money from his pocket and passed it to the barman with the bill. The barman put the money in the till, tore the bill into tiny fragments, and dropped the fragments in the wastepaper bin.
‘Bon,’ said Hugues. ‘On s’en va?’
Next to him, a voice said in a hoarse whisper, ‘Vive la France!’
Hugues’ heart lurched in his chest. The voice belonged to the man with the grey moustache. He turned away.
‘I saw the paper. He is a good man, Guy,’ said the man with the moustache. His breath smelt like a distillery. ‘A very good man. Permit me to introduce myself. I am Commandant Cendrars. Perhaps,’ he said, ‘you have heard of me?’
Hugues’ eyes flicked to the Germans at their draughts game. He smiled, an agonised smile. ‘Alas no,’ he said. ‘Excuse me –’
‘Croix de Guerre at the Marne,’ said the old man. ‘A sword long sheathed, but still bright. And ready to be drawn again.’ He put his head close to Hugues. A silence had fallen around him. Cendrars’ alcoholic rasp was singularly penetrating, his attitude visibly conspiratorial. ‘I am not the only one. There are others like me, waiting the moment. The moment which is arriving. Arriving even now. The great fight for the resurrection of France from under the Nazi heel. We are not Communists, monsieur. Nor are we Socialists, like the résistants. I trust you are not a Communist. Non. We are simple Frenchmen –’
‘Excuse me,’ said Hugues. ‘It will soon be curfew.’
Cendrars said, with a significant narrowing of his orange eyes, ‘In the mountains today, it is said that they killed six SS.’
The silence had become intense: a listening silence. Miller drained his glass, grabbed Hugues firmly by the arm, and marched him out into the alley. ‘What was he saying?’
‘Madness,’ said Hugues. ‘Stupid old bastard. Stupid old Royalist con –’
‘No politics,’ said Miller. ‘Home, James.’
They started to walk.
Miller kept a little behind Hugues. He did not like this Cendrars. He liked even less the fact that the news about the killing of the SS on the mountain was already gossip in the town. Germans did not sit still and mourn dead SS men. There would be searches and reprisals –
In front of him, Hugues stopped dead. He was talking to someone: someone small, in a woollen hat and a big overcoat. He had thrown his arms round the small person, was embracing this person, making an odd baying noise that might have been laughing but sounded a lot more like crying. It was a weird and dreadful noise, the sort of noise guaranteed to attract attention. It caused Miller to pull the beret down over his eyes and start his feet moving in a new direction.
Suddenly, the person said in French, ‘For God’s sake, shut up.’ Hugues leaped back as if shot. His face was amazed, mouth open.
‘Be a man,’ said the small figure.
The small figure of Lisette.
Miller said, ‘Hugues. We have to go.’
‘You have to go,’ said Lisette.
This is all we need, thought Miller.
Hugues stared at her. He did not understand the words she was saying. Through his tears of joy, her face looked luminous, like an angel’s. He had forgotten he was a soldier. He was a man, and this woman was bearing his child. There was nothing else he needed to know. Now they could be happy for ever.
‘Free,’ he said.
‘Correct,’ said Lisette. ‘Now for God’s sake get moving.’
‘Moving?’
Miller cleared his throat. Lisette looked as good as new. Not a mark on her. Eight months pregnant. Blooming with health.
That was bad. That was very bad.
Miller said, ‘They told us that you were taken to Gestapo HQ in Bayonne.’
‘I was,’ said Lisette. She looked up and down the alleyway. It was empty, except for the deepening shadows of evening. ‘They let me go. Because of the baby.’
Her face was the same as ever: pale, aquiline, with the dark-shadowed eyes and transparent skin of late pregnancy. This was not a woman who had been tortured.
Miller said, ‘What happened, exactly?’
‘They asked me what I knew, how I came to be in that village. I said I was visiting, that I knew nothing. They … well, they seemed to believe me. They said that a woman in my … condition would not tell them lies, out of respect for her unborn child.’ Her face split in a white grin that sent the shadows scuttling for cover. ‘Of course, I agreed.’
‘Sure you did,’ said Miller. ‘How did you find us here?’
‘I knew you were heading for St-Jean-de-Luz. It is a known thing that if you require information in St-Jean, you will find it in the Café de l’Océan.’
‘Is it?’ Miller did not like this. In fact, he hated it. No Gestapo man had ever been worried about an unborn child, let alone an unborn child whose mother had been apprehended in a raid on a Resistance stronghold. The only reason the Gestapo would have let Lisette out was so they could follow her to her friends.
Miller said, ‘I have to go.’
‘You?’ said Hugues.
Miller said, ‘We have a military operation here. It seems to me that this town is going to get real hot, real soon. And we have to be moving right along.’
‘So Lisette accompanies us.’
Miller looked at him with a face grey as concrete, ‘It is whoever has accompanied Lisette from Bayonne that gives me the problems.’ He watched Hugues’ face. He saw the frown, the struggle. He knew what the answer was going to be. Hugues had abandoned Lisette once in the name of duty. He would not do it again.
Lisette said, ‘You must go.’
Hugues said, ‘No.’
Miller turned away and started to walk, hands in pockets, stopping himself from running, keeping to a stolid peasant shuffle, heading towards the farmyard.
He heard footsteps behind him: one pair of short legs, one pair of long. In a pane of glass he saw their reflection. Hugues had his arm round Lisette’s shoulders and an agonised expression on his face. The steps slowed and halted. Miller walked on, faster, heading for the edge of town.
God damn it, thought Miller. Hugues had seen the address pencilled on the bill at the Café de l’Océan. And it would not take the Germans long to get it out of him.
It was a mess. A five-star, copper-bottomed, stinking Benghazi nine-hole latrine of a father and mother of a mess.
The houses were thinning. A truck engine clattered on the road ahead. Miller faded gently off the verge and into some bushes. A lorryload of soldiers rolled by, blank-faced under their coal-scuttle helmets. Hugues and Lisette had not jumped into the hedge. The lorry stopped alongside them with a wheeze of brakes. An officer climbed down from the cab. Miller heard him bark, ‘Papiers?’
In Miller’s pocket was an identity card, work permit, ration card, tobacco card, frontier zone permit, and a medical certificate signed by a Doctor Lebayon of Pau explaining that chronic lumbago had prevented him from being deported to Germany as a forced labourer. Miller derived a certain sense of security from carrying them, but he knew that a detailed cross-examination about his maternal uncles or the colour of Doctor Lebayon’s beard would scupper him, quick.
He hoped that Hugues and Lisette were in the sort of mental state that permitted clear thinking. He doubted it.
Quiet as a shadow, he slid away through the bushes. Ten minutes later, he was back in the farmyard.
Mallory said, ‘Where’s Hugues?’
Miller told him.
Mallory lit a cigarette. Then he dropped it on the floor and stamped it out, and shouldered into his webbing. ‘We’re off,’ he said.
‘Off where?’ said Miller.
‘Martigny.’
‘What if they talk?’
‘They talk,’ said Mallory. ‘The Germans will react. If they don’t react, nobody’s talked.’
And if they do, thought Miller, gloomily, we’re dead.
Again.
There was a peak in the Southern Alps that had done this to him: Mount Capps, a treacherous peak, full of crevasses and rotten rock, its upper slopes decorated with snow fields that in the morning sun fired salvoes of boulders and later in the day became loose on their foundations and came slithering down like tank regiments, roaring and trailing plumes of pulverised rock and ice.
Mallory had left his base camp on the third day of the climb, leaving Beryl and George, his companions, waiting. He had bivouacked in the lee of a huge rock, halfway up an ice field, and spent a cold, restless night among the cracks and booms of the refreezing ice.
He had woken at four, and gone out. The sky had been clear, the peak of Mount Capps a peaceful pyramid of pink-tinged sugar icing over whose slopes Venus hung like a silver ball. It was a beautiful morning.
Mallory had walked ten feet away from the tent, into the cover of the rocks he used as his lavatory. He dropped his trousers.
A rumble came from the mountain. Feathers of snow fluttered away from the rocks. The rumble became a roar. He looked back at his tent.
A fifty-foot wall of snow and ice and rock thundered across his field of vision. It must have been moving at two hundred miles an hour. The icy breath of its passage slammed him against the rocks.
Ears ringing, he dragged himself back on his feet.
In the tent had been his pack, with spare ropes, food, extra clothes, sleeping bag.
The tent was gone. In its place was a deep, rubble-filled scar in the mountainside. All he had left was the rope he had taken to the rocks, his ice axe, and the fact that he had been climbing mountains since his tenth birthday.
Mallory buckled his trousers. Beryl and George were down there, waiting for him. They had spent six weeks planning this expedition. Nobody had ever climbed the southeast face of Mount Capps.
Mallory had thought at four o’clock that December morning, nine thousand feet above sea level: Beryl and George and the rest of the team are counting on you. It is not just your life. You have responsibilities. So you get killed going up. On this mountain you are just as likely to get killed going down. Three hours to the summit, then nine hours to base camp.
If you are going to die, you might as well die advancing as die retreating.
So he had shouldered his single coil of rope and his ice axe, and made it back to base camp in eight hours.
Via the summit.
The papers had said he was a hero. As far as Mallory was concerned, he had done the job, and not let the team down, and that was enough.
And now the team were out there on the south coast of England, hundreds of thousands strong, waiting to embark on the transports.
It was a job with risks. But that did not make it any less of a job.
They left quickly across the fields, Andrea carrying Wallace. There had been very little sleep: enough to make men groggy and dazed, but not enough for anything approaching rest. As they tramped through the orchards and fields of young corn it was raining again, and a blustery wind clattered branch against branch.
The town lay in darkness under the evening sky. Night fell as Jaime led them round its southern fringes, crossing darkened roads, climbing a couple of low ridges and scrambling down terraces. Engines were roaring in St-Jean-de-Luz. On the other side of the bay the Germans were moving, there was no way of telling where, or who against. All they could do was hope that the movements had nothing to do with Hugues and Lisette.
One step at a time.
‘Wait here,’ said Jaime.
They had arrived on a cobbled lane that headed steeply downhill. At the bottom of the lane water flexed like a sheet of metal.
Jaime drifted off into the dark.
Mallory said, ‘Andrea. Recce?’
Andrea put Wallace down behind a wall, in what might have been a potato patch, and gently pressed a Schmeisser into his hand. Wallace’s head was buzzing with fever and morphine. At first, he had thought that these people were SOE bunglers, rank amateurs. Now he had changed his mind, or what was left of it. They were the coolest, most matter-of-factly competent team he had ever met up with. It was something that he would never have admitted to himself if he had been a well man. But frankly, they were a lot better than any SAS he had ever seen.
Think rugby. Think of a team that has trained itself not by running up and down the pitch and practising, but by playing first-class matches, and winning. Team spirit was for children. These men were in a different league.
Wallace wanted to live up to their standards. But it was hard to know how. He knew enough about wounds to know he was bad; really bad. Behind the morphine he was cold, except for the big, throbbing lump in his stomach. The lump seemed to be getting bigger, sending sickly fingers of poison into the rest of his body. Should have rested it, he thought. Should have stayed in the brothel.
But staying in the brothel would have meant a German bullet, probably with torture first.
There had been torture, bouncing along those dark, wet passages underground, metal twisting in his belly, burning up with fever, all those weeks – was it only hours? – ago. But it was a torture you could come through, if you were one of a team of grown men.
Hell of a life. Wallace felt the fever-taut skin of his face stretch in a grin. You think you’re doing fine in the children’s team, with the bombs and the Jeeps and the old gung ho. Then you get into the men’s team, and for a minute or two you feel like a man.
And after that, what?
Andrea went quietly over the back garden walls of the village. Somewhere a dog began to bark. Soon all the dogs were barking. In one of the houses a man flung open a window and swore. A light drizzle fell. At the base of the hill – more a cliff, really – the sea shifted silver under the sky.
But for the lack of lights, it could have been peacetime. Somewhere in Andrea’s mind there appeared the memory of a wedding, long tables with bottles, laughter and tobacco smoke rising into the hot Aegean night, the moon coming up out of deep blue water. This place could have been like that. And would be again.
But the memory was small, as if seen through the wrong end of a telescope, shrunk not by lenses, but by years of war.
It was suffocated by the picture of his parents’ bodies, bloodless on the shingle bank of the river. It was suffocated by a choir of death-grunts, and hundreds of night-stalks on which Andrea had not been a full colonel in the Greek army – had hardly indeed been human; had been a huge, lethal animal with a mind full of death.
Andrea slid over the last of the garden walls, and walked across the field that led to the edge of the low cliff. There was a jetty at the bottom of the village, a crook of stone quay in whose shelter a couple of dinghies shifted uneasily on outhaul moorings.
The rain swished gently down. Andrea watched, patient as stone.
And was rewarded.
Down there in the lee of a shed at the root of the quay, a match flared, illuminating a face under the sharp-cut brim of a steel helmet, silhouetting a second helmet.
The rain fell. The dogs were still barking. Andrea returned the way he had come.
Mallory, Miller and Jaime were already under the wall.
‘Pillbox on the hill opposite,’ said Mallory. ‘Covers the harbour.’
‘Two sentries,’ said Andrea. ‘On the quay. No pillbox this side.’
‘No soldiers in the village,’ said Miller. ‘This Guy’s house is the third house up from the quay.’
‘Bring Wallace,’ said Mallory.
The dogs were still barking as the five of them went over three walls and came to the back of a cottage. A dog lunged at Andrea, yelling with rage. Andrea laid a great paw on its head and spoke quietly to it in Greek: soothing, earthy words, the words of a man used to working with animals. The dog fell silent. Very quickly, Mallory opened the back door. Miller and Jaime were well into the room before the man at the table even realised they were there.
He was small and thin, with a bald, brown head, a much-broken nose and crooked yellow teeth. There was a spoon in his right hand, a wedge of bread in his left. He was eating something out of a bowl.
The Complete Navarone Page 67