When Hell Struck Twelve

by James R Benn

  Still steady.

  I watched the world go by. Swirls of brightly colored dresses, khaki, and white shirts almost as grimy as mine. A troop of French soldiers marching in formation, maybe to show who was now in charge. Chants of de Gaulle, de Gaulle rose and fell. Five young women, stripped to their undergarments, their heads roughly shaved, were paraded down the street as examples of what collaborators of the horizontal persuasion could expect. I wondered what the fate of the girls at the One-Two-Two would be. I wondered if the French men who made a bundle off the black market operating out of the club would ever get their heads shaved.

  I tried not to think about Diana.

  I worked on what the Swedes had to do with all this and came up with nothing. Maybe it was a code. Maybe when my brain evened out and stopped zinging all over the place, I’d understand.

  Maybe Kaz knew.

  I patted his head. Kaz knows everything.

  I wished I could sleep. Someday.

  I tried to close my eyes. I couldn’t seal out the light, but I did feel my eyelids heavy with grit and shuttering like a screen door latched too loosely in high winds. Once, they closed completely. Then I was back on this sunny Paris boulevard with the giant block party and the bells and the tanks and all the pretty girls.

  The wall had softened. No, it was a blanket, and I was lying down. Where the hell was Kaz? I tried to sit up, panicking as I called out for him.

  “Hey, Billy, it’s okay. We got you.”

  I blinked.

  Big Mike, hovering over me. Where the hell were we?

  “You okay?” Big Mike asked.

  “Kaz?” was all I could manage.

  “Right here,” Big Mike said, crooking his thumb toward a stretcher behind him.

  I looked around. It was an ambulance, the half-moon windows at the back filtering in light through green leaves as we drove.

  “Hospital,” I said, trying to sit upright. “We got to get him to a hospital.”

  “Relax, Billy, that’s where we’re headed right now. Kaz has been checked out, he’s stable. You relax, okay?”

  “No, in England. He needs a specialist. Mitral something or other, I can’t remember.” There was something else I had to remember, but my mind was as thick as molasses. I looked around the ambulance as if there might be a clue somewhere. Kaz was covered with a wool blanket, asleep. Or unconscious, I wasn’t sure. He needed a real hospital, not some army forward aid station.

  “Billy, look at me,” Big Mike said. “Look at me.” More insistent, so I tried to focus.

  “What?” I didn’t feel right. No zing. Everything was hazy, heavy, and so confusing.

  Beneath my own wool blanket, I felt the quiver come back, like an old friend you’d outgrown, but who still hung around your house uninvited.

  “Did you hear me, Billy?” Big Mike shook me.

  “No, what? Spit it out, willya.” He was beginning to get on my nerves.

  “This is England. We found you and Kaz three days ago in Paris.”

  “Three days?” Nothing was making any sense. Big Mike didn’t make sense.

  “You’ve been out of your head for three days, Billy,” Big Mike said. “We were worried.”

  “Yeah, well, I was worried about Kaz. But at least you’re getting him to a hospital,” I said, not certain why it had taken so long.

  “Not just Kaz, Billy. You too, buddy. You’re not doing so great,” Big Mike said.

  “I’m fine,” I said, trying to rise. I was stopped by the straps across my chest. “Get these things off me!”

  “We’re almost there, Billy,” Big Mike said, looking away, staring out the half-moon windows instead of looking me in the face. “Almost there.”

  “Are the Swedes there?” I asked as I closed my eyes, not knowing why I’d asked, but knowing it was important.

  The sunlight played on my lids, leaving dancing, flickering images of light. It was like watching a film in the middle of a dream. Vague, haunting images burning themselves into my mind, trying to warn me, or remind me, of what I needed to know, or already knew.

  Sweden. It was Sweden in my dreams, even as I pressed against the restraints.

  Historical Note

  The famous stand of the Polish 1st Armoured Division on Hill 262, also known as Mont Ormel ridge, helped trap many of the Germans surrounded by Allied forces near the town of Falaise. Mont Ormel, with its commanding view of the area, sat astride the only escape route open to the retreating enemy. Their three-day ordeal ended when the Poles pushed back the last German attack after close-quarter fighting. The division sustained 1,441 casualties including 466 killed in action.

  The phrasing General Eisenhower uses in Chapter Nine to describe the slaughter that took place inside the Falaise Gap is taken from his memoir Crusade in Europe (1948), in which he likened it to a scene out of Dante. “It was literally possible to walk for hundreds of yards at a time, stepping on nothing but dead and decaying flesh.”

  The Battle of the Falaise Gap was a tremendous defeat for the Germans, made possible in large part by the Polish stand on Hill 262. Estimates of German causalities are imprecise, but it is generally agreed German forces suffered about ten thousand dead and fifty thousand captured, in addition to tremendous losses in equipment.

  It was indeed the policy of the Allies not to liberate Paris immediately. As supreme sommander of Allied Expeditionary Forces, Eisenhower did not consider the liberation of Paris to be his primary objective. The goal of the American and British forces was the destruction of all German forces in order to end the war in Europe as quickly as possible and then concentrate military resources against the enemy in the Pacific.

  In addition, the Allies had estimated that thirty-six hundred tons of food per day would be required to feed the population of Paris after Liberation. Utilities would have to be restored and transportation systems rebuilt, all of which would take significant amounts of materials, manpower, and engineering skills needed elsewhere for the war effort.

  The deception plan in this novel is my own invention. But the notion would have made strategic sense, and the purpose behind Colonel Harding’s plan mirrors Eisenhower’s strategic thinking.

  As for the poem “Hellish Night” by Arthur Rimbaud, several mistranslations have come to us from the original French. The line:

  grand le clocher sonnait douze . . . le diable est au clocher, à cette heure

  Translates properly as “the moonlight when the bell struck twelve.” But somewhere along the way a translator changed “bell” to “hell,” perhaps through keyboard proximity or some other unintended error. With apologies to Monsieur Rimbaud, I found the mistranslation incredibly powerful and chose to go with “when hell struck twelve” for the radio message that plays a key role in the story.

  General Charles de Gaulle did not share Eisenhower’s thoughts on the French capital. The uprising in Paris began without his help or encouragement, spurred on mainly by the Communist resistance groups led by the charismatic Colonel Rol. Once the fighting began, de Gaulle pressed for French forces to be sent into the city. As a Frenchman, he did not want the rebellion to be crushed with great loss of life and the possible destruction of Paris. As a politician, he did not want the Communist-led uprising to succeed without him. He got his way, and General Leclerc’s tanks, along with American GIs who were added to the attack as it became bogged down, took Paris in time for de Gaulle to make a grand entrance as the President of the Provisional Government of the French Republic.

  The Saint-Just Brigade represents the extremist wing of the Communist-dominated Francs-Tireurs et Partisans resistance group. There were many purges of party members who did not properly conform to the Soviet line. A shadowy FTP group operated a secret prison within Paris after the Liberation at what is now the George Eastman Dental Institute. They used it as a torture and execution site, eliminating everyone fro
m captured fascist collaborators to Resistance members and some unfortunates who were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. The murder files that Colonel Remke shows Billy describe exactly how their victims were disposed of.

  Pervitin was mass-produced and millions of doses were given to German forces. It was called Pilot’s Salt, the Stuka Pill, and the Panzer Pill. The drug was wildly popular, until supplies began to run low and soldiers had to deal with their addiction to this methamphetamine.

  The gathering of war correspondents at Rambouillet was real enough. Ernie Pyle, Andy Rooney, Bruce Grant, and others were there waiting to enter Paris. Besides the Germans, they had one other enemy—Ernest Hemingway. As described in this narrative, he did take over the one hotel in town for the ragtag group of résistants who followed him. Hemingway did play fast and loose with the regulations concerning war correspondents, but he claimed to have gathered useful information. Andy Rooney’s opinions of Hemingway are actual quotes, which he gave later in his life. He was not a fan.

  Acknowledgments

  I am once again indebted to first readers Liza Mandel and Michael Gordon, for their able scrutiny of this manuscript. It is so helpful to have careful readers who can look at the story with fresh eyes as it nears completion; they are a tremendous help.

  My wife, Deborah Mandel, works on editing and proofreading these stories with amazing diligence. She reviews chapters as they are written, then the final draft multiple times, making significant improvements with each pass. She also puts up with cranky writer syndrome with great patience.

  I am very grateful to Cara Black for allowing Billy to venture into the universe of the Leduc Detective Agency, and to meet Claude Leduc, the grand-père of her détéctive très chic, Aimée Leduc. If you haven’t read her Parisian mystery series, you are in for a treat.

  The entire staff of Soho Press is amazing. They make this hard work quite bearable, and their creative support is a tangible joy.