by Simon Mawer
‘And you are important?’
‘I sound important. That’s what matters. And they have a sneaking suspicion that I have contacts.’
‘And do you?’
He laughs. ‘You must have contacts in order to survive in this damned city. Let’s go somewhere a bit more comfortable.’ He folds her arm in his and leads her off towards the rue de Rivoli to a café where he is known, and where you can actually get real coffee if you speak to the right waitress. Over coffee they chat for a while about nothing very much – what he used to do before the war, how he was a pilot, how he wants to get back to flying – and when he has paid, they go round the corner to a flat that he has, a two-roomed place with barely any furniture beyond a couple of chairs and a table and two mattresses on the floor. She feels like a tart, a casual pick-up preparing to negotiate terms. ‘You must remember everything I say,’ Gilbert tells her. ‘Can you do that? Commit nothing to paper.’
‘Of course.’
‘Claire said two passengers …’
‘It all depends.’
‘The pianist from CINÉASTE?’
‘I’m not sure about her. I’ve got a meeting.’
‘What’s the trouble?’
She shrugs. She isn’t going to be quizzed about matters that don’t concern him. She should never have mentioned it to Claire, and Claire shouldn’t have told Gilbert. This is how things come unravelled. ‘I’ll have to see. But the other passenger is all right.’
‘So we play it by ear, do we?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘I’ll need your help at the landing ground. You’ve organised drops, I presume? Pick-ups are a bit different.’ He grins disarmingly, a little boy planning a prank. ‘Of course they’re different. The damned kite has to land for a start. But that’s the problem – you’ve got to stand there as it lands, turns and taxies back to the take-off point. It makes the devil of a noise, seems enough to wake the dead, never mind the local police. So you need a bit of nerve to stick to it. Do you have nerve?’ He looks her up and down.
‘I’ve got nerve.’
‘I’ll bet you have. Now listen carefully. We use a three-light L with the long side upwind.’ He puts coins on the table. ‘A, B and C. A is the touchdown point, and that’s where the reception party stands. B is one hundred and fifty metres downwind, but of course you need a greater total length for a landing ground.’
‘Six hundred metres—’
‘Minimum. And good solid ground underfoot. We had a Lysander bog down last spring and ended up having to torch her. It took a month to get the pilot back home, never mind the passengers. Still, we’ve not lost anyone yet.’ His grin reminds her of Benoît’s, the pure insouciance of it, the suggestion that he is sharing something intimate with her. ‘The third light, C, is fifty metres to the right. That’s the turning marker once the kite is down. He’ll turn on that and then come back to A ready for take-off. We stand to the left of A and approach the plane from the port side once it’s ready. That’s the left.’
‘I know it’s the left. I know all this. I was briefed in London.’
‘Then you’ll know it twice. The pilots have instructions to shoot anyone approaching from the other side. It hasn’t happened yet.’
‘No one’s approached from the right, or no one’s been shot?’
Again that grin. ‘Neither. The pilot keeps the engine running while any passengers get down. There’ll be a couple of passengers inbound this time. The last passenger unloads their luggage. Then our passengers climb on board, strap in and they’re off. Five, six minutes on the ground if things go well. And Bob’s your uncle.’ He says it in English. Maybe he wants to show that he knows the language, knows the colloquialisms, knows exactly what he is doing. He produces a Michelin map of northern France and unfolds it on the table. ‘Now the travel arrangements. You travel from Austerlitz. I’ll be on the same train but I won’t recognise you. Whether you travel separately or together is up to you. Whichever you think would be less conspicuous. You get tickets to Libourne. Not Bordeaux because you need a special pass for the coastal area. But you’re going to get off at Saint-Pierre-des-Corps anyway. Got that?’ He places his finger on the map, near the junction of the two rivers, the Loire and the Cher. ‘Saint-Pierre-des-Corps is the through station for Tours—’
‘It’s miles away from Paris!’
‘That’s the way we do it. Three, four hours these days. You catch the 13.15 train. If you can’t make it for some reason, you can get the next, an hour later. Remember, get your tickets right through to Libourne – not Bordeaux – but get off at Saint-Pierre-des-Corps. When you’re there, you purchase a ticket for Vierzon. It’s a branch line and you only go two stops to Azay-sur-Cher. But again, buy a ticket for the whole distance. I should be at Azay at the same time, but if not there’s a hut behind the station where you’ll find bicycles waiting. They’ll be locked up.’ He roots around in his jacket. ‘Here are the keys. Don’t lose them. Once you’ve unlocked the bikes you take the road direct to the village. You cross the railway line and head due south. It’s signposted Azay-sur-Cher. After two kilometres, immediately before a woodland, turn left onto a cart track. Follow this track for another two kilometres and park the bikes. The landing ground is the open field on your left. Oh, and bring warm clothes. There’ll be a lot of waiting around in the cold.’
It’ll go fine, comme sur des roulettes, he adds, and she remembers Buckmaster’s words: like clockwork. ‘There’ll be a message on Radio London giving the go-ahead. We’re scheduled for tomorrow night, but you never know. “The garage man has greasy hands”, that’s the message. The whole op is codenamed MECHANIC.’ He pauses and looks at her. ‘And after the operation, what do you do?’
‘I return to my circuit.’ She looks at the map. ‘Vierzon’s on the Toulouse line. I can get the Toulouse train from there.’ She pauses. She has said more than she needs, more than she intends. He watches her thoughtfully, his lips pursed.
‘You could always return with the Lysander. Return to England, I mean. They can take three passengers at a pinch.’
‘I’ve thought about that.’
‘Maybe like that it would be safer for you.’
‘I didn’t come to France to be safe.’
‘Of course you didn’t. But these days things are especially difficult. It isn’t easy to keep matters under control. Things …’ He waves a hand vaguely, ‘fall apart. People do things they shouldn’t. It’s difficult to keep everyone happy.’
‘What people? What are you talking about?’
He ignores her question, but smiles and catches up her hand and shakes it gently. ‘You are too beautiful to be here, my dear Alice. I have seen others come here and have ugly things happen to them, others as lovely as yourself.’
Carefully she takes her hand back. ‘My looks have nothing to do with it. Look, I must go now. I’ve got a meeting.’
He shrugs. ‘Perhaps you’ll think about what I said …?’
She pushes her chair back and stands up. ‘I will.’
IV
At the métro station she does the usual things – going in by one entrance and out by another, appearing to lose her way and then doubling back on herself. No one seems to be following. So she takes the train to Yvette’s place as she did before and circles warily round the street where Yvette lives, sniffing round like a mammal whose nest has been violated by another. Things seem little different from the last time – people going about their quotidian lives with that listlessness that characterises the occupied city. Customers pick disconsolately through the flea market. A clochard with a dog begs for centimes. A busker plays the violin, badly. Women argue, kids shout.
Are there watchers?
She strolls past and turns into the café where the fat guy called Boger stands behind the bar. How do you manage to keep fat these days? ‘This is for Yvette,’ she says, handing a letter across the zinc. The man sucks his lip as though he hopes it might be nutritious.
‘M
ake sure she gets it,’ she says, and walks out.
Balzac’s head, the mane of hair, the staring eyes and aggressive nose, the heavy jowls. Alice watches it from afar. She feels detached from everything, as though it’s all in a dream, one of those where logic seems iron-bound and yet strange things happen, dreams in which she has a gun in her hand and she’s prepared to use it if need be. She’s prepared to kill and doesn’t care if she gets killed. That’s the strange thing. She doesn’t care.
Nothing happens. The lanes of the cemetery coil like snakes around the tombs, their scales glistening in the rain.
Two forty-four.
Rules for making a rendezvous: always give a time that’s an hour later than the one you intend. Will Yvette understand? Will she understand, and if she does understand, will she come? And if she comes, will she come alone?
In the wind and the drizzle people move among the tombs, placing a flower, standing for a moment in prayer or contemplation. Crows flap their way across the memorials, looking for scraps. There’s mistletoe in the trees, clumps of mistletoe like rooks’ nests. A quiet, mortifying plant, it seems fit for a cemetery.
What should she do? Figures skulk in the shadows of her imagination. Are they watching her, even now? You’ll never know, that’s the problem. Not until there is the hand on your shoulder. Like being hit by a rifle bullet – you never hear the shot that gets you. That’s what they were told. The bullet travels faster than sound and so it reaches you before the noise of its passage through the air. Just so with an arrest – it’ll come when you don’t expect it, when you’ve covered all the options and you think you are safe. The knock on the door at the dead of night. The hand on the shoulder. The sudden stab of a gun barrel in the small of the back. Expect it at any moment and then you won’t be surprised.
The third time she looks towards Balzac there is a small figure standing in front of the memorial, a frail figure in a fawn raincoat holding an umbrella against the drizzle, a woman with thin legs and an angular stoop as though she is already an old crone.
Cautiously she walks down the slope and stands beside her. Yvette is looking up at the writer’s head on the plinth as though it were some kind of totem. Her face is wet with drizzle.
‘I didn’t know whether you’d come.’
‘Why not?’
‘Have you come alone?’
Yvette glances sideways. ‘Of course.’
‘Someone tailed me from Austerlitz yesterday. They were waiting for me to arrive.’
Silence. Balzac looks solemnly out into the afternoon. The city held no surprises for him; perhaps he wouldn’t even have been surprised by this little encounter. Alice adds quietly, ‘Did you bring them with you?’
‘I don’t know what you mean.’ Terrified eyes; wide, pleading eyes as she grabs Alice’s arm. ‘You’re going to get me out, aren’t you? What’s the matter, Marian? What’s gone wrong?’
‘You’ve betrayed me, haven’t you?’
The wind quickens, stinging like salt in a wound. Yvette’s umbrella shudders and threatens to blow inside out. She struggles to close it. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I told you, they were waiting for me at the station. I threw them off, but they know I’m here in the city. No one else but you knew when I was due back in Paris and where I was coming from. No one but you.’
Yvette is shivering. She’s frail and undernourished and perhaps she is cold. She was like that at Meoble Lodge, always cold. Alice grips the pistol in her pocket, feeling the other thing there as well, the small nut of the L pill against her knuckles. ‘I don’t trust you, Yvette. Not any more.’
‘Of course you can trust me. For the love of God, I’m your friend, Marian. I’m Yvette. You know me.’
Alice looks round at the city of the dead. Living ghosts wander along the paths, peering hopelessly at the memorials. What you are we were, what we are you will become. She feels her own life hanging by a thread. ‘I’ll give you a final chance,’ she tells her. ‘If you come right now, without going back to your flat, I’ll get you to England. You’ll be safe. You’ll see Violette again. But you’ve got to come right away. This instant.’
‘How can I come right now? I can’t just walk out.’
‘Why the hell not? What’s keeping you?’
It’s then that she notices the woman. She’s about fifty yards away down the slope, bending down to put flowers on a grave. Or maybe she’s trying to see the inscription better. There’s the same posture, the same manner of holding herself. The same leather jacket with the fur collar. The same blond curls, this time peeping from beneath a cloche hat. It’s the Alsatian woman, the one who stopped her in the place de la Contrescarpe.
Alice senses things sliding out of control. Her mind makes calculations – short, desperate additions and subtractions. Where are the others? Who, among the scattered mourners in this city of dead souls, are watching the living? She grabs Yvette’s arm as one might grab hold of a child. She’s light, a creature of hollow, sculpted bones. Alice speaks into her face, urgently, hoping that the words will hurt. ‘You’ve lied, Yvette. You’ve lied the entire bloody time.’
Yvette’s voice is the quiet, flaccid sound of despair. ‘They’ve got Emile. They told me they’d let him go.’
‘You believe that? They’re the enemy, Yvette. They killed your husband, for Christ’s sake. They killed Violette’s father. Now they’ll kill me and in all probability they’ll kill you.’
There’s a moment of stasis. Crows jeer overhead, like the chorus of some Greek tragedy. Wind rattles the branches. She sees the Alsatian woman turn away for a second and that’s the moment she chooses to release her hold on Yvette’s arm and run. She runs faster than she has ever run in her life. She runs up the slope, with the rain stinging her face and her feet skidding on the pavé. She runs. Whether anyone is pursuing her, she doesn’t know. Running is action, running is doing, running isn’t standing and waiting for them to get you. Running is freedom, momentary and perhaps illusory but freedom nevertheless. The freedom of the escaped prisoner. She has absurd, tangential thoughts as she runs. How proud her father would be, seeing her running like this. How proud Ned, how proud Benoît and Clément. They’d cheer her on, the men who occupied, in some way or other, her life. Run! They’d cry. Run! And so she runs. Not like the wind but with the wind, past memorial and mausoleum, leaping over tombs and skidding round calvaries, careless of whether they are after her or not. One or two people stare after her. An old man – a gravedigger? – leans on a spade and watches her go. Someone shouts, but the sound is disembodied and might mean anything. Just a young woman running through a cemetery. Curious.
At the gate she stops. There’s no one there. She goes out through the gate and crosses the street, walking briskly. A few seconds’ lead. Nothing to waste. She takes a side road which cuts the cemetery out of sight. Somewhere nearby there’s the roar of a car and the wail of a police siren. Is that for her? She turns and runs to the far end of the street, turns again and runs once more, going by instinct, crossing a wide road at a run, going uphill towards what she remembers from the map as Belleville, a warren of old and decaying buildings perched on a hill at the edge of the city, a hill as high as the butte de Montmartre. They’ll be gathering round the north of the cemetery and spreading out from there. You have to second-guess their every move. Cars, vans, they’ll be able to muster a fleet if they think her important enough.
She is important. A British terrorist trapped in the city – what could be better? As she crosses a street, someone shouts. She looks round. Is it Miessen, that dreadful man who followed her before? Can it be him? But she doesn’t wait to find out. She darts across the street and runs down an alleyway, not caring where she’s going, desperate to get away from him, from them, from anyone who may be following. She hurries on, now walking, now running, past incurious pedestrians, through streets that become lanes and alleys winding between ancient and dilapidated tenements. A maze. Somewhere in the distance she can hear more sir
ens, like the dead calling from the cemetery itself. She can feel them at her back, sniffing at the air of the ramshackle quarter, breathing down her neck. Children flock out of a school like starlings in their black smocks, laughing and chattering. She dodges through them and finds herself at an intersection of six streets converging on a small square where housewives queue outside a greengrocer’s and a horse-drawn cart stands outside a wine cellar. Where she pauses to get her breath and her bearings.
The horse steams in the damp air. There’s dung on the ground and the tang of urine tainting the atmosphere.
Which way to go? It’s like a puzzle out of Alice in Wonderland. Which exit to choose? One of them might be death, one might be life. Which?
As she hesitates a car drives into the square, another black Citroën, its bonnet like a coffin draped with white chevrons. Doors open and two men climb out. She ducks away into a side street, hearing a car door slam behind her and footsteps follow. A voice shouts out – German or French, it doesn’t matter which because the sense is clear in any language: Halt!
And she has no choice but to obey because the street ahead of her ends in a steep flight of stairs. A cul-de-sac. And at the top of the steps, for a fleeting moment, there’s the figure of Julius Miessen.
A tide of panic threatens to overwhelm her. She turns. Behind her two men are silhouetted at the entrance to the impasse. She looks back and the stairs are empty. Miessen, if it was Miessen, has vanished.
‘You, come here!’ one of the men shouts. He’s wearing a leather coat, his companion, a fawn mackintosh. Both have trilby hats, as though they have modelled themselves on gangsters seen in American films. They stand in the middle of the street as she walks towards them, one hanging back slightly to the rear of the other. They’re nothing more than faces, nondescript, bony. One of them, the nearer one, has a thin moustache. She can hear her father on the subject of such moustaches: travelling salesmen and theatre impresarios. The man at the back has his hand in his pocket. He looks like the fall guy.