Assignment in Brittany

by Helen Macinnes

  The door of the dining-room opened. The firm, hard step on the stone floor gave warning. Hearne carefully stirred the soup, all his attention fixed on the hanging iron pot. Light, hurried footsteps followed. Thank heaven, Pléhec was watchful.

  “Where is it?” It was a voice used to command and demand.

  “Through there,” answered Pléhec. The confident footsteps resumed their march. A door banged. Pléhec began arranging some food on the two plates which he had placed on the table.

  “Less for us all tonight,” he grumbled under his breath. He was grudgingly doubling the quantities on the Germans’ plates.

  “Same price, double helpings!” The curses which moved on his lips were as blistering as they were silent.

  The door crashed once more: again the steps rang on the floor.

  “Such filth,” said the German, with characteristic tact. He paused in his stride. “How long must we wait for the food?”

  “Coming. This instant,” said Pléhec.

  The footsteps passed into the restaurant. Pléhec finished arranging the fish and peas on the plates. Then he spat on the fish, and smeared them carefully with his thumb. “Garni!” he said, grimly, and carried the plates into the restaurant.

  Hearne, concentrating on the soup as if he were preparing the most difficult soufflé, could hear only the voices of the two Germans. The Frenchmen were sitting in complete silence. “How long must we wait for the food?” There was something familiar in that voice. Or perhaps every German talked French with that accent. “How long must we wait for the food?”

  Hearne took off the. cook’s cap and walked silently to the screened restaurant door. By standing at the side of it and gently moving the pleated curtain half an inch, he could see well enough into the front room. The two Germans were at a table near the window. One was a dark-haired young man with a high, thin nose and tight eyes. He wore a uniform, but he wasn’t a soldier. The other man had his back half turned to Hearne. Tall; powerfully built. An officer. For an instant his head turned to watch the silent Frenchmen. For an instant Hearne could clearly see the even features, the colourless face, the smoothly brushed fair hair. He remembered the fluttering white curtains in Madame Corlay’s room, the immovable soldier at the door, the young captain who hadn’t enjoyed his visit. The ditch-digger...that was it! Deichgräber. If it wasn’t Deichgräber, then uniformity was still on the increase in Germany. Deichgräber... what the hell was he doing here, anyhow?

  Hearne moved quickly back to the table and began shifting some plates about. Pléhec returned, fussed about the pots and the table, and then he was back in the restaurant once more. So it went on for half an hour, and by that time the seven customers had all arrived and been served. By that time the Germans had finished their meal and left.

  “They’ve gone next door. They’ll get wine and music there. They didn’t think much of this place,” Pléhec said when he returned with the news of their departure.

  Hearne sat down on the nearest chair. He was tired and hot; his worry over Deichgräber wouldn’t go away. It cut through his head like a saw. “Any guess?” he asked Pléhec.

  “Why they were here? Oh, just the usual: they come to look us over about once every week.”

  “You know them by sight?”

  “No; these were new ones. Picquart says they arrived yesterday evening. You’d enjoy Picquart, by the way. Pity you can’t meet him this time. He sits at his window next the Hôtel Poulard and watches the visitors in its garden. We have many visitors, you understand. We are now a Boche playground. Sometimes it is interesting. When Reichsmarschall Elephantiasis was here, for example. Unfortunately, the little bomb was not expert enough: it didn’t go off. But the Reichsmarschall left at once, and two men who had nothing to do with it were executed. That depressed Picquart. Still—it is war.” Pléhec hunched his shoulders, and cut himself a slice of bread, and poured himself the last cup in the coffeepot. “It’s war. Those who can help must keep alive, even if others are killed. Only those who try to help are any good to France. The others are bilge-water, not even ballast.”

  “Does Picquart know the names of the visitors?”

  Pléhec, his mouth full of bread and the remains of some fish, nodded.

  “I’m interested in the names of these two men.”

  Pléhec rose and wiped his mouth on a corner of his apron. “Must see if Picquart needs some more water to drink.” He disappeared through the screened doorway.

  He came back soon, licking his lips like a cat. Evidently Picquart’s system did work well. “The dark one is secret police. Hans Ehrlich. The other is a captain. Joachim Deichgräber. Both arrived last night by car—with a lady. A Fräulein Lange. You look surprised? I assure you that we have our feminine visitors too. That is quite usual.”

  Hearne wasn’t listening. Hans Ehrlich...secret police... Hans Ehrlich along with Captain Deichgräber, whom he had seen only a few days ago in Saint-Déodat. Hans...Hans... It couldn’t be. He was just at the stage of imagining things, of inventing suspicions.

  “What’s the woman like?” he said suddenly.

  “Young and beautiful. They always are.”

  “Red hair? Dark red—almost brown?” Like the glint of autumn leaves in the evening sun, he thought bitterly. He was being a complete fool: the girl was haunting him.

  “Is it important?” asked Pléhec.

  Hearne reflected for a moment. “No,” he said; and then, “Yes!”

  Pléhec looked at him curiously and once more pulled himself out of his chair.

  He came back into the kitchen, carrying some dirty plates. “Red hair,” he said.

  Deichgräber—Saint-Déodat—Hans—Elise. Hearne’s intuition had completed the circle before his mind had dared. “Fräulein Lange,” he said aloud. Could that possibly be her second name? Lang-e. Two syllables. And then it dawned on him. “Mademoiselle Lange.” This time he gave the French pronounciation, making it one syllable. It sounded convincing.

  Pléhec finished lighting the second candle before he looked up. “What does it matter?”

  “A lot. If she is the girl I think she is, then she and the dark-haired Hans are responsible for counter-espionage in this district.”

  Pléhec had closed the shutter over the small window. “So?” he said slowly. His eyes moved quickly towards the back entrance to the kitchen. His attention was divided: he was listening.

  Hearne said, “They may be here for a short holiday; or they may be here to investigate. There is plenty to investigate.” He thought of Duclos and Picquart, the notary; and Pléhec himself. The Frenchman read his thoughts.

  “Others too,” he remarked. “Guehenneuc has a small printing press. He prints sheets, and then Boulleaux smuggles them out into the mainland. Such things as the truth about Dunkirk, and about Oran. But it would be difficult to guess they came from here. And Dr. Fuzet—”

  “So all your customers are in it together?”

  “They don’t know that.”

  “But you do?” Hearne grinned at the little fat man in front of him. So here was the real centre of all this resistance. Pléhec had understood him. He said simply, “They don’t know that, either.” Again he listened, his eyes slanted towards the back door. The moisture on his pale face gleamed in the light of the candles. His face seemed whiter, his hair darker. “Etienne,” he said.

  It was Etienne. He locked the door carefully behind him. He no longer wore Corlay’s jacket.

  Pléhec spoke again. “I’ve kept you some food.” He turned to Hearne. “And you should eat some more, too. There’s little to offer you but scraps. But even the best people are eating pot scrapings these days.” He and Etienne sat down at the wooden table with its clutter of dirty plates and emptied pots. The two plates which the Germans had used were noticeable: they still contained food. Pléhec emptied their leavings into the fire-place. “It would poison even the pigs,” he said scornfully.

  In the front room, French voices were again talking with their quick,
staccato accents. There was silence in the courtyard outside the shuttered window. The rejected food hissed and spluttered in the dying fire.

  20

  QUICKSAND

  If he were to be killed, thought Hearne, then he couldn’t have chosen a more beautiful place to end this life. It would be almost worth dying to draw a last breath of this silvered air; to see, as his final glimpse of this world, the fragile spires and curving walls etched against the dark blue sky. The moon was crescent; the stars shone all the brighter for its half-light. Any other visual memories would be bathos after this: this was the ultimate perfection. From behind the shower of stars there should have come the soaring of pure voices in Debussy’s Sirènes. That would have the magic of this picture. Thoughts of death and sirens and glamourie... Hearne smiled to himself as he stretched his body tightly into the shadow of a house wall, and waited for Etienne’s touch on his arm to move on again. Thoughts of death and sirens...he must be pure Celt, after all. This proved it. Only the Celts had thought of this island as the Mountain of the Tomb.

  But he wouldn’t die tonight: not here. That, Hearne suddenly knew. If you were willing to die, then you didn’t. Death liked to snatch you when a hundred reasons pressed on your mind why you must live. He glanced at the thin, serious face of the boy who touched his arm so lightly, who now walked so quietly beside him, matching cautious footsteps to his. The boy felt that look, but he still said nothing. Only when assured German footsteps sounded on the stone of the street and its steps would he halt Hearne with his calm grip, guide him unhurriedly and cleverly into deeper shadows, into the labyrinth of passages and alley-ways which criss-crossed the Grande-Rue.

  They had already passed the parish church and the gardens of the fourteenth-century houses beyond it. Above them, to their left, towered the walls rising from the central peak of the island to guard all the spires and chapels which formed the Abbey. Down to the right would be the ramparts along the sea edge. They were walking northward on the east side of the island, moving farther and farther away from the gateway by which Hearne had entered the Mont that afternoon. And it was the only entrance and exit. But Etienne must know another way: he was travelling too confidently and easily. Again they halted in the black shadows of the high crowding houses. This would be the fifth time they had taken cover.

  Two figures stood on the terrace of the street. They were looking down towards the ramparts and the sea on the east side of the island. The one nearer Hearne was the dark German who had visited Pléhec’s this evening. And then the figures moved, turned to walk down the short flight of stairs to a new level of the street, and Hearne saw them both clearly. They were walking towards him, a man and a woman. Hans Ehrlich and a woman with a grey cloak thrown round her shoulders. As they crossed a band of soft moonlight, flooding a short stretch of the roadway where the house walls were lower, the woman’s hair caught the faint rays and held them prisoner for a moment. Hearne couldn’t even feel himself breathing. His arm, resting under Etienne’s gentle grip, tightened. The boy felt, rather than saw, the direction of his eyes, for the darkness of the empty house, against which they sheltered, was as deep as the plunge of the Abbey wall down into the street. Together, they watched Elise pass, or could it have been Lisa when necessary? Elise Lange: Lisa Lange. One soft and sibilant: the other, flat and two-syllabled and clear. The French and the German of it, as it were. Paris, she had said. Paris...so she couldn’t even trust her Corlay. She probably trusted no one except herself. Even Hans would find he had known little of Elise when she found a Gauleiter of a bigger province.

  They had passed. The perfume, which Hearne had noticed on the evening Elise had first appeared before him, still clung to the air.

  Etienne shivered, as if he were awakening from sleep. Hearne whispered “Gestapo!” and this time it was the boy’s arm which tightened. And then they were moving along the narrow alley which skirted the open stairs of the street, moving towards the town ramparts where they joined the Abbey walls.

  For a moment Hearne wondered if Etienne intended to scale the steps to the top of the rampart and climb down its north face. But that seemed madness, for there must be patrols on top. And then, as the boy pulled him under the shadow of the rampart’s tower, he suddenly knew that the boy would never have entertained such a dangerous idea. They remained motionless there for two minutes—time enough for Hearne to feel foolish at the way he had underestimated the boy. Strange, what wild ideas came to you when you found yourself out of your own particular field, as if you instinctively feared others’ judgments. Hearne stopped worrying, and decided to let Etienne do the thinking. The boy knew his way about these walls and ruins. He had played there as a child, and now he was using his play to outwit those who had invaded his home. When Etienne touched his arm again, Hearne moved quickly and obediently.

  He could feel Etienne leaning his weight against a part of the wall. Hearne heard the strained breathing, saw the droop of the boy’s head between his shoulders as he pushed with the side of his body. A panel of stones, narrow and low, opened as suddenly as a fissure in quake-racked earth, opened only enough to let them slide through. Again Hearne felt, rather than saw, that Etienne was leaning his thin body against the cemented rocks, and then they were shut into the darkness which lay inside the hollow of the ramparts. Etienne’s torch flickered and then held its beam steadily as it swept over the wall six paces in front of them. High above their heads was the rampart walk with its guard-houses. Outside, up there, the Abbey soldiers had once patrolled; and later, tourists had walked and exclaimed; and now soldiers had come back, soldiers with green-grey coats and streamlined helmets.

  Etienne’s torch picked out the stones he had been seeking. They were easy to find, for they were not the depth of the rest of the wall, and they formed a deep alcove or recess in the tremendous thickness of stone which supported the rampart walk. Hearne, looking quickly over his shoulder, noticed that behind them was a similar recess through which they had entered. It seemed as if there might have been a small gateway through the ramparts at this point once; as if it had been blocked up, but not with the same thickness as the walls themselves. Etienne was advancing over the thick white dust on the ground, the round circle of light from his torch growing larger as he neared the stones on which it was aimed. He beckoned Hearne to follow closely, and placed his shoulder against the stones as he gave his first word and smile. “Swivel,” he explained politely, and then the torch was switched off and there was no smile to see, only the darkness. And there was only a feeling of effort as the thin body strained. There was only the dead smell of forgotten space, and the sound of a stone as Etienne’s foot slipped gratingly. And then the narrow slab of rock moved slowly aside. The cool, clean breeze from the sea ended the feeling of suffocation. In front of them was a panel of night sky, and the gentle movement of small trees swaying like black-shawled women at a funeral. Etienne knocked Hearne’s arm impatiently. They stepped over the rough threshold of stone on to firm earth where the dust had been moulded by rain and wind into something solid and clean.

  Hearne took a deep breath. They were outside the ramparts. For the second time that night he was thankful for the medieval mind and its love of mysteries. Perhaps it had been the repression of the Middle Ages, its secret opposition to authority, which had created these ingenuities.

  Etienne led a careful way through the wooded grove, sloping inevitably towards the sea. Judging by the stars, they were curving round to the west as they approached the north shore of the island. Hearne tried to recapture a visual image of the map of Mont Saint-Michel. As far as he remembered, the southern half of the island consisted of the houses and shops and was guarded by the ramparts rising from the rocky shore. In the centre of the island were the spiralling buildings which formed the Abbey, enclosed by steep walls of their own. And these walls joined the ramparts of the little town, so that the Abbey and its walls formed its northern boundary. Beyond the Abbey, towards the north shore, were only small trees and shrub
falling away to the sea, where the precipices and rocks of the island met the treacherous sands. Small wonder that for seven hundred years no invaders had ever captured this island. No invaders... Hearne thought of the silent, darkened houses behind the ramparts, of the Germans taking their evening stroll while the half-fed Frenchmen were locked indoors. Only invaders, he qualified, who had been handed the keys of the fortress on a silver platter. That was why Pléhec’s hate had only been equalled by his bitterness; that was why this boy of sixteen had the eyes and mouth of a man of forty.

  Etienne spoke in a whisper. “Soon we shall strike the path of steps from the Abbey’s north wall. They will lead us to St. Aubert’s spring at the edge of the shore. There is an easy way there of getting on to the sand. The rest of the shore is too steep and dangerous.” Hearne nodded and concentrated on following. The ground was difficult, but if any sentry was looking down from the heights of the deserted Abbey the shadows of the trees and bushes would camouflage their progress. It was with considerable relief that he at last saw the stone staircase. Follow that, and they would reach the shore.

  But Etienne had no intention of doing anything as simple as walking down the steps carved out of the rock. He used them only for direction, it seemed. And then Hearne had to admit to himself that the ground was easier, too, at this part. By following the staircase Etienne was saving them a good deal of effort. That was something to be thankful for, anyway. It was then that they heard the footsteps.

  Etienne grasped Hearne’s arm as he halted, and pulled him under the cover of a bush. They lay still, their ears straining for every sound. Yes, it was footsteps all right, Hearne decided. Two people. Not guards or sentries: the pace was too broken, too leisurely. Two men talking. Germans, of course; and Germans with special privileges, too, to be walking through the Abbey groves at this hour. For no one lived within the Abbey: it was only a museum and showpiece, closing its gates to ordinary mortals each evening. Hearne waited, wondering.