by Alan Evans
“Very well. I will try.” The girl turned away, then back: “Thank you.” She turned again and went walking on along the side of the basin.
Engel climbed into the car. Pianka let in the clutch and said, “A tough nut, that one.” Then, as they passed the girl walking quickly through the rain, the coat flattened against her, he added, “Nice legs, though.”
“You’re a lecherous old bastard,” Engel told him and Pianka grinned. Engel knew his old friend was nothing of the sort. He rubbed his stiff leg and wished the summer would soon come so that this aching would ease a little. He liked the girl. That had not stopped him from vetting her because of her work in the dockyard office and he had kept her under surveillance a couple of times when he had the men to spare. Her life was an open book: no family in St. Nazaire, no lover, just a few friends or acquaintances. She bought on the black market occasionally, but who didn’t? He liked her because there was a freshness, directness about her, honesty. And after talking to Grünwald… He growled at Pianka, “Hurry it up! I need a drink!”
*
Catherine watched the car until it disappeared into the darkness. She was breathing quickly and not because of walking into the wind and the rain. She was afraid of Engel. Not as she was afraid of Grünwald; that was a shuddering inside, a gut-churning fear of his hands on her body. Engel she feared because he was brave and clever. She knew she had to be very careful with him.
That Friday evening, as every evening, Catherine went to a café near her apartment in the Rue de Saille. It was her habit to take a glass of wine and talk with the proprietress, an old friend, for an hour or so. It was almost time for her to leave when Henri entered. He had not showed up for several days and she’d been very worried. Not only for him: time was slipping by and she knew the urgency of the matter.
He carried an old shopping bag with food in it that he had bought while visiting farms, servicing their machinery: butter, cheese and eggs. He sold these to the patrons of the café; this was a regular business. He looked very tired tonight but he grinned when he came to sell some eggs to Catherine Guillard.
He had found Peyraud. That was all he told her then—that and the place name: Le Havre.
But the following day, Saturday, when they met on the train to Le Havre, he told her the whole story, the clacking of the wheels giving them privacy.
Catherine, in the dockyard office, had obtained the address of the engineers who built the dock. Their office was in northern France and Henri went there. He found the Germans in control, and he had to wait some days before he could be sure of a safe man to contact. When he did take the plunge he had luck. The man he approached, very casually, in a bar at the end of the day’s work, proved to be a senior clerk. When Henri asked about Peyraud the man looked about him nervously. “You want M’sieur Peyraud?”
“That’s right. It is a personal matter.”
“The office has no papers for M’sieur Peyraud, the Germans took them.”
“The Germans! Why?”
“He refused to work for them and resigned.” The clerk glanced around again to make sure they were not overheard. “You understand, I agree with him, I do not want to work for the Germans but I have a wife and children. You are Resistance?”
Henri shook his head, “I just want to talk to Peyraud.”
The clerk smiled crookedly, “You are wise, trust no one. I will find out what I can. Tomorrow at this time—here?”
The next evening, he gave Henri the name of a village to the north of Le Havre. It was not Peyraud’s address but it was known in the office that he had bought a house in that vicinity
Henri drove there in the rattling old Renault and toured the area for days, ostensibly looking for work. Because of his business at St. Nazaire he had a pass for the coastal zone. It was a country of forests, secluded hamlets and lonely, hidden houses. The people were suspicious of a stranger asking questions.
Now Henri’s shoulder nudged Catherine as the train rocked and he grinned at her. “I thought I was going to spend the rest of the war up there, but in the end I found the place. It’s nearly twenty kilometres from the village they told me about, there aren’t many people up there and the old man only bought the house in the summer of 1939 as a place to retire. He hadn’t lived there much because most of the time he was away working on some harbour or dock, so only a few of the locals knew of him. He came back in September 1940 and in March of ’41 the Germans moved into the house. He’s a prisoner there. I got all this from the people we’re going to. Jean Boilet runs the sawmill. Nobody lives near them and they’re safe.”
Catherine glanced at him. “They know?”
“Just what we are. Not where we’re from or what we’re doing.”
The less people knew the less they could tell…
*
Catherine Guillard woke with the dawn in the Boilets’ house that Sunday morning and went down to the big kitchen where Henri had spent the night. The household was already stirring, and they drank bitter ersatz coffee and ate crusty bread with Jean the woodcutter and Madame, his wife. Woodcutter was an old-fashioned term. Jean owned the sawmill built next to the house, felled trees from the forest, then cut them into timber.
Afterwards Catherine and Henri climbed the stairs to the room at the top of the house and settled down to work. The room was small and bare save for two chairs. They sat side by side and some three feet back from the open window so the sun would not reflect from the lens of the telescope and give them away to a German patrol. It was a bright sun in a hard, blue winter’s sky. It gave no heat but nor did it breed mist or heat-shimmer; the air was crystal clear. They had brought the telescope with them—it opened out to a length of a third of a metre, but closed to a cylinder only four inches long and thus was easily concealed—and they took turns with it at the open window.
They looked out over a shallow valley, thickly wooded with here and there the silver flash of sunlight on a stream that wandered down the floor of the valley to reach the sea through a gap in the cliffs a mile away. A bit more than a mile away, across the valley and standing in the open near the edge of the cliffs, was a sandbagged emplacement above which lifted a metal dish of some sort—it was hard to determine what it was. The ground dropped away from the emplacement down to a big house, surrounded by a wall, that stood in a clearing not far above the stream. A road ran up from the south along the cliff tops, descended into the valley, crossed the stream by a hump-backed stone bridge and ended at the gate leading to the house. There was only one other clearing and that lay a quarter mile inland of the house and on the same side of the stream. Because it was a fine day Jean had taken his three cows across the stream to graze there on the last of the winter’s grass.
Henri held a map spread on his knees while Catherine made notes on a pad. Henri muttered, “This map’s a good twenty years old but nothing’s changed—except that thing on the cliff-top.” He lifted the telescope. “Jean says there is a machine-gun post on this side of the gully, overlooking the beach but I can’t see it. Maybe we can get him to pin-point it for us.”
He slowly traversed the telescope. “Just the one sentry on the gate that I can see. And one on the cliff-top by that thing, whatever it is.” He shifted the telescope from one sentry to the other. They wore soft field-caps, not helmets, and the blue-grey uniforms of the Luftwaffe. The one on the cliff-top strolled slowly, rifle slung over his shoulder. The other, at the gate in the wall where the drive led up to the house, leaned with his back against a pillar, rifle propped against his leg and its butt on the ground. It Was too far for Henri to make out expressions, but: “They look bored stiff.”
Catherine murmured, writing neatly, carefully: “Jean estimates between forty and fifty men and he says at night there are two sentries patrolling the house, one inside the wall and another outside it. He has seen their torches. Also there is wire about ten metres outside the wall and all around. And more wire across the gully, just above the beach. We must check.”
He
nri caught his breath. “There he is!” He passed the telescope quickly and as Catherine snatched it: “He’s just come out of the side door, walking around to the front.”
The images blurred as Catherine swept with the telescope, seeking, then hesitated and were still. The old man was tall, wrapped in an overcoat that hung below his knees. He wore a beret and his hands were gloved. Accompanied by a sentry who had come with him from the house, he walked steadily but not slowly down the side of the house and turned right to cross in front of it. At both sides of the house evergreen trees grew inside the wall so the wall itself was barely visible. When he reached the line of trees on the seaward side of the house he turned left and walked down along them, turned left again to cross in front of the gate with its sentry, then finally left again up to the house.
He walked around that square, possibly forty metres each side, again and again. At first he was followed by his guard, but after two or three circuits the guard stopped by the sentry at the gate and just watched the man walking.
Henri said, “He moves pretty well for his age.”
But the old man had slowed to a weary trudge by the end of thirty minutes. He stopped and looked back at the two soldiers by the gate and one of them lounged over to him. Together they walked slowly up the side of the house and entered at a door there.
Henri had the telescope and he muttered, “He’s back in the same room; I saw him then.”
“Above the side door? Where the Boilets always see him at the window?”
“That’s right.”
“According to Madame Boilet there is only that one room above the kitchen.” Jean’s wife had worked in the house before the Germans came. “Look.” Catherine turned the pages of her pad to the sketch she had drawn to Madame’s instructions. Henri lowered the telescope, peered at the plan and nodded, then set the telescope to his eye again.
They watched through the day but in the early winter evening Jean went to fetch his cows and Catherine walked with him. Henri had wanted to go in her place but she refused: “I want to see for myself.”
Catherine and Jean walked slowly down through the forest to the stream and crossed the wooden bridge, built there by his grandfather. They came to the clearing and the cows moved slowly, curiously, to meet them. Jean stayed with them but Catherine paced quickly, counting, around the field, then wandered down the middle of it, looking at its surface. She stopped at the end nearest to the old man’s house, hidden from her now by a quarter mile of forest, and looked back up the slope to where Jean waited with the cows. The wind blew cold in her face; she checked its direction with a long strand of cotton and nodded her satisfaction.
It was dusk when she returned to the house, and time she and Henri left for St. Nazaire. Jean had a flat-bed lorry he used for delivering timber. It was loaded now and he would take them to the nearest railway station. He said, “It is in order because my customer needs the wood at once and I cannot deliver tomorrow, so it must be today.” That was in case they were questioned when passing out of the coastal area. Henri had his official pass while Catherine was his girlfriend, out for a day in the country.
As the lorry hammered along Catherine asked, “We will return on Saturday. That is possible?”
“It is possible.” Jean asked no questions.
And in the clattering train, before they came to Nantes and parted to make their separate ways back to St. Nazaire, Catherine told Henri, “We must ask London for a pick-up because there are plans and maps, far too much information to send by wireless. Ask for it as soon as possible—by Lysander or off the beach, we’ll set it up for either.”
Henri scratched his head. “What’s so important about that place, about that man?”
“I don’t know.” Nor did she try to guess.
*
During that week they made their transmissions and were answered, London asked questions and gave instructions. On Tuesday reception was bad and Henri received little, on Wednesday nothing at all. But on Friday London confirmed the time and place of the pick-up.
On Sunday Henri travelled north for fifty kilometres to a small cove on a lonely stretch of coast. The night was good and dark, the sky overcast with a drizzling rain falling. Henri huddled at the foot of the cliffs and stared across the short stretch of beach at the sea that washed it. There was little surf and that also was good: a dark night and a quiet sea.
He checked his watch. When it showed the arranged time he flashed the torch out to sea, waited one minute then sent the signal again. He waited another minute, growing anxious now, lifted the torch again, then paused. There was something…It took shape as a dinghy carrying two men, and when Henri saw the splash of oars he rose, trotted down to the sea, and waded in. The man at the oars stopped rowing and the little boat bobbed on towards Henri, the way coming off it. He reached out with one hand to fend it off, with the other held out a slim package the size of a paperback book. The man in the stern of the dinghy grabbed the package, Henri pushed the dinghy away and the man with the oars turned it, pulled out to sea. When Henri regained the beach and glanced over his shoulder the dinghy had gone into the night, silently back to the motor gunboat from which it came.
The next morning, as Catherine left the Rue de Saille to walk to her work, she passed Henri and he nodded, “B’jour!” So she knew the pick-up had gone to plan.
Quartermain knew it before the day was out because the package was in his hands. He studied its contents at his desk in Richmond Terrace for some thirty minutes and then made his decision. He would risk a desperate gamble. He drafted a signal to ‘Geneviève’ and it was sent that night at the scheduled time when the pianist in the field would be listening in.
Henri received it. He sat on the bed in his apartment, the suitcase open beside him, the wireless aerial strung around the room. Reception was good and he only had to ask for one block of figures to be repeated. He decoded the signal, sent an acknowledgment, and walked round to the café where Catherine Guillard went each evening. He carried the old shopping bag and sold its contents of cheese and eggs as usual. Then he sat at a table alone and read his newspaper. As Catherine passed on her way out she paused by him and they made casual conversation. Then Henri said quietly, “It came.”
Catherine stared at him. So soon? He said, “One night starting with the twenty-seventh. The BBC will send a message on the night they will come. ‘Francois mend the nets.’ They want a guide and I said I’d do it.”
Catherine said, “We will talk again.” She left the café, went to the church and prayed. Usually these days she prayed for the safety of a man she loved but hardly knew, but tonight she prayed for the soldiers her information might bring to their deaths.
*
From where he lay in the big bed Patrick could see the branches of the trees waving outside the open window, and could hear their rustling, and the rain, and the quiet creaks and groans of the house in the night. It was a tall old house, in a shabby Glasgow street, and Sarah’s flat was at the top of it. She had said, “Just like your authentic artist’s garret.”
The fire had been banked with coaldust so that it would stay in until morning but that time was close now. A glow showed where an ember burned through the dust and the fire spat softly as rain fell down the chimney. He heard a check and change in her breathing and knew she was awake.
“Patrick?”
“Mmm?”
“Are you going away?”
“Don’t know.” But he had a strong suspicion. Nobody else in the troop seemed to share it, nobody knew anything but he had a feeling—
“Is that why you sent the paintings away?”
“Not really…” There’d been a dozen paintings, un-framed, and some sketches. They had followed him around from barrack to billet for the past year and recently he’d kept them here in Sarah’s flat. “I just thought I’d accumulated enough. Besides, this dealer in London keeps pestering me, and he pays good money, too. At least, he did for the other one I sent him.”
Th
at was true as far as it went. But Sarah was right—he had also sent them to London because of this feeling that an operation was in the wind. The money the dealer had sent him before he spent on visiting Sarah and on Sarah herself, on paint, brushes, canvasses, all of them hard to find after two years of war and bloody expensive. His mother no longer sent him cheques because he returned them. He lived on his pay like the rest of his troop, and what his paintings brought. He could paint: he knew that now. Before the war he hadn’t been sure…When you’re surrounded from the day you’re born by artists of one kind or another it’s easy to assume you’re an artist too, when really you’re just a talker. So he’d pretended he wanted to go to Paris to learn to paint when in fact all he wanted was to get away to see if he could. He had no doubts now. He was an artist. He had also been trained to kill a man with a knife or his bare hands but he got more money for the painting.
Sarah said her husband in London sent money to her and she returned it because she wanted nothing from him, was finished with him. She asked for nothing from Patrick, either. He thought she was fond of him as he was of her. He didn’t know about love, that was something else again and pointless anyway, because—
Sarah said, “You’ll go away, though. Some time. Probably soon.”
“Probably.”
A week ago, just after Scharnhorst and Gneisenau slipped through the Channel the spry little admiral had come up to Ayr and Madden’s lot left for Salisbury Plain that same night—for ‘specialised training’. Patrick wondered what the hell they were up to. He wished it could have been his lot the admiral had asked for. Boston, he knew, had been with the destroyers that attacked the battlecruisers. The ten-man section of a corporal’s command was enough for him to worry about, but cousin Jack captained a ship with 150 men aboard and drove her at Scharnhorst. And that was responsibility to make you shudder…
Sarah slid over on top of him, propped on her elbows her breasts lightly brushing his chest. “We’d better make the most of what time we’ve got, then.”