Jackdaws (23 page)

The key question for Dieter was:
Would the Resistance hear of the arrest of Mademoiselle Lemas? Reims was a
city, not a village. People were arrested every day: thieves, murderers,
smugglers, black marketeers, communists, Jews. There was a good chance that no
report of the events in the rue du Bois would reach the ears of Michel Clairet.

But there was no guarantee.

Dieter got into the car and headed
for Sainte-Cécile.

CHAPTER

NINETEEN

THE TEAM HAD got through the morning's
instruction reasonably well, to Flick's relief. Everyone had learned the falling
technique, which was the hardest part of parachuting. The map-reading session
had been less successful. Ruby had never been to school and could barely read.
A map was like a page of Chinese to her. Maude was baffled by directions such
as north-northeast, and fluttered her eyelids prettily at the instructor.
Denise, despite her expensive education, proved completely incapable of
understanding coordinates. If the group got split up in France, Flick thought
worriedly, she would not be able to rely on them finding their own way.

In the afternoon they moved on to
the rough stuff. The weapons instructor was Captain Jim Cardwell, a character
quite different from Bill Griffiths. Jim was an easygoing man with a craggy
face and a thick black mustache. He grinned amiably when the girls discovered
how difficult it was to hit a tree at six paces with a.45-caliber Colt
automatic pistol.

Ruby was comfortable with an
automatic in her hand and could shoot accurately: Flick suspected she had used
handguns before. Ruby was even more comfortable when Jim put his arms around
her to show her how to hold the Lee-Enfield "Canadian" rifle. He
murmured something in her ear, and she smiled up at him with a wicked gleam in
her black eyes. She had been in a women's prison for three months, Flick
reflected: no doubt she was enjoying being touched by a man.

Jelly, too, handled the firearms
with relaxed familiarity. But Diana was the star of the session. Using the
rifle, she hit the center of the target with every shot, emptying the magazine
of both its five-round clips in a steady burst of deadly fire. "Very
good!" Jim said in surprise. "You can have my job."

Diana looked triumphantly at Flick.
"There are some things you're not best at," she said.

What the heck did I do to deserve
that? Flick asked herself. Was Diana thinking of their schooldays, when Flick
had always done so much better? Did that childhood rivalry still rankle?

Greta was the only failure. Once
again, she was more feminine than the real women. She put her hands over her
ears, jumped nervously at every bang, and closed her eyes in terror as she
pulled the trigger. Jim worked with her patiently, giving her earplugs to muffle
the noise, holding her hand to teach her how to squeeze the trigger gently, but
it was no good: she was too skittish ever to be a good shot. "I'm just not
cut out for this kind of thing!" she said in despair.

Jelly said, "Then what the hell
are you doing here?"

Flick interposed quickly.
"Greta's an engineer. She's going to tell you where to place the
charges."

"Why do we need a German
engineer?"

"I'm English," Greta said.
"My father was born in Liverpool."

Jelly snorted skeptically. "If
that's a Liverpool accent, I'm the Duchess of Devonshire."

"Save your aggression for the
next session," Flick said. "We're about to do hand-to-hand
combat." This bickering bothered her. She needed them to trust one
another.

They returned to the garden of the
house, where Bill Griffiths was waiting. He had changed into shorts and tennis
shoes, and was doing push-ups on the grass with his shirt off. When he stood up,
Flick got the feeling he wanted them to admire his physique.

Bill liked to teach self-defense by
giving the student a weapon and saying, "Attack me." Then he would
demonstrate how an unarmed man could repel an attacker. It was a dramatic and
memorable lesson. Bill was sometimes unnecessarily violent but, Flick always
thought, the agents might as well get used to that.

Today he had a selection of weapons
laid out on the old pine table: a wicked-looking knife that he claimed was SS
equipment, a Walther P38 automatic pistol of the kind Flick had seen German
officers carrying, a French policeman's truncheon, a length of black-and-
yellow electrical cord that he called a garotte, and a beer bottle with the
neck snapped to leave a rough circle of sharp glass.

He put his shirt back on for the
training session. "How to escape from a man who is pointing a gun at
you," he began. He picked up the Walther, thumbed the safety catch up to
the firing position, and handed the gun to Maude. She pointed it at him.
"Sooner or later, your captor is going to want you to go somewhere."
He turned and put his hands in the air. "Chances are, he'll follow close
behind you, poking the gun in your back." He walked around in a wide
circle, with Maude behind. "Now, Maude, I want you to pull the trigger the
moment you think I'm trying to escape." He quickened his pace slightly,
forcing Maude to step out a little faster to keep up with him, and as she did
so he moved sideways and back. He caught her right wrist under his arm and hit
her hand with a sharp, downward-chopping motion. She cried out and dropped the
gun.

"This is where you can make a
bad mistake," he said as Maude rubbed her wrist. "Do not run away at
this point. Otherwise your Kraut copper will just pick up his gun and shoot you
in the back. What you have to do is…" He picked up the Walther, pointed it
at Maude, and pulled the trigger. There was a bang. Maude screamed, and so did
Greta. "This gun is loaded with blanks, of course," Bill said.

Sometimes Flick wished Bill would
not be quite so dramatic in his demonstrations.

"We'll practice all these
techniques on one another in a few minutes," he went on. He picked up the
electrical cord and turned to Greta. "Put that around my neck. When I give
the word, pull it as tight as you can." He handed her the cord. "Your
Gestapo man, or your traitorous collaborationist French gendarme, could kill
you with the cord, but he can't hold your weight with it. All right, Greta,
strangle me." Greta hesitated, then pulled the cord tight. It dug into
Bill's muscular neck. He kicked out forward with both feet and fell to the
ground, landing on his back. Greta lost her grip on the cord.

"Unfortunately," Bill
said, "this leaves you lying on the ground with your enemy standing over
you, which is an unfavorable situation." He got up. "We'll do it
again. But this time, before I drop to the ground, I'm going to take hold of my
captor by one wrist." They resumed the position, and Greta pulled the cord
tight. Bill grabbed her wrist, fell to the ground, pulling her forward and
down. As she fell on top of him, he bent one leg and kneed her viciously in the
stomach.

She rolled off him and curled up,
gasping for breath and retching. Flick said, "For Christ's sake, Bill,
that's a bit rough!"

He looked pleased. "The Gestapo
are a lot worse than me," he said.

She went to Greta and helped her up.
"I'm sorry," she said.

"He's a bloody fucking
Nazi," Greta gasped.

Flick helped Greta into the house
and sat her down in the kitchen. The cook, who was peeling potatoes for lunch,
offered her a cup of tea, and Greta accepted gratefully.

When Flick returned to the garden,
Bill had picked his next victim, Ruby, and handed her the policeman's
truncheon. There was a cunning look on Ruby's face, and Flick thought: If I
were Bill I'd be careful with her.

Flick had seen Bill demonstrate this
technique before. When Ruby raised her right hand to hit him with the
truncheon, Bill was going to grab her arm, turn, and throw her over his
shoulder. She would land flat on her back with a painful thump.

"Right, gypsy girl," Bill
said. "Hit me with the truncheon, as hard as you like."

Ruby lifted her arm, and Bill moved
toward her, but the action did not follow the usual pattern. When Bill reached
for Ruby's arm, it was not there. The truncheon fell to the ground. Ruby moved
close to Bill and brought her knee up hard into his groin. He gave a sharp cry
of pain. She grabbed his shirtfront, pulled him toward her sharply, and butted
his nose. Then, with her sturdy black laced shoe, she kicked his shin, and he
fell to the ground, blood pouring from his nose.

"You bitch, you weren't
supposed to do that!" he yelled.

"The Gestapo are a lot worse
than me," said Ruby.

CHAPTER

TWENTY

IT WAS A minute before three when
Dieter parked outside the Hotel Frankfort. He hurried across the cobbled square
to the cathedral under the stony gaze of the carved angels in the buttresses.
It was almost too much to hope that an Allied agent would show up at the
rendezvous the first day. On the other hand, if the invasion really were
imminent, the Allies would be throwing in every last asset.

He saw Mademoiselle Lemas's Simca
Cinq parked to one side of the square, which meant that Stéphanie was already
here. He was relieved to have arrived in time. If anything should go wrong, he
would not want her to have to deal with it alone.

He passed through the great west
door into the cool gloom of the interior. He looked for Hans Hesse and saw him
sitting in the back row of pews. They nodded briefly to one another but did not
speak.

Right away Dieter felt like a
violator. The business he was engaged upon should not take place in this
atmosphere. He was not very devout-less so than the average German, he
thought—but he was certainly no unbeliever. He felt uncomfortable catching
spies in a place that had been a holy sanctuary for hundreds of years.

He shook off the feeling as
superstitious.

He crossed to the north side of the
building and walked up the long north aisle, his footsteps ringing on the stone
floor. When he reached the transept, he saw the gate, railing, and steps
leading down to the crypt, which was below the high altar. Stéphanie was down
there, he assumed, wearing one black shoe and one brown. From here he could see
in both directions: back the way he had come the length of the north aisle, and
forward around the curved ambulatory at the other end of the building. He knelt
down and folded his hands in prayer.

He said, "O Lord, forgive me
for the suffering I inflict on my prisoners. You know I'm trying my best to do
my duty. And forgive me for my sin with Stéphanie. I know it's wrong, but You
made her so lovely that I can't resist the temptation. Watch over my dear
Waltraud, and help her to care for Rudi and little Mausi, and protect them from
the bombs of the RAF. And be with Field Marshal Rommel when the invasion comes,
and give him the power to push the Allied invaders back into the sea. It's a
short prayer to have so much in it, but You know that I have a lot to do right
now. Amen."

He looked around. There was no service
going on, but a handful of people were scattered around the pews in the side
chapels, praying or just sitting quietly in the sacred stillness. A few
tourists walked around the aisles, talking in hushed voices about the medieval
architecture, bending their necks to peer up into the vastness of the vaulting.

If an Allied agent showed up today,
Dieter planned simply to watch and make sure nothing went wrong. Ideally he
would not have to do anything. Stéphanie would talk to the agent, exchange
passwords, and take him home to the rue du Bois.

After that, his plans were vaguer.
Somehow, the agent would lead him to others. At some point, there would be a
breakthrough: an unwise person would be found to have a written list of names
and addresses; a wireless set and a code book would fall into Dieter's hands;
or he would capture someone like Flick Clairet, who would, under torture,
betray half the French Resistance.

He checked his watch. It was five
past three. Probably no one would come today. He looked up. To his horror, he
saw Will Weber.

What the hell was he doing here?

Weber was in plain clothes, wearing
his green tweed suit. With him was a younger Gestapo man in a check jacket.
They were coming from the east end of the church, walking around the ambulatory
toward Dieter, though they had not seen him. They drew level with the crypt
door and stopped.

Dieter cursed under his breath. This
could ruin everything. He almost hoped that no British agent would come today.

Looking along the north aisle, he
saw a young man carrying a small suitcase. Dieter narrowed his eyes: most of
the people in the church were older. The man was wearing a shabby blue suit of
French cut, but he looked like a Viking, with red hair, blue eyes, and pale
pink skin. It was a very English combination, but could also be German. At
first glance, the young man might be an officer in mufti, seeing the sights or
even intending to pray.

However, his behavior gave him away.
He walked purposefully along the aisle, neither looking at the pillars like a
tourist nor taking a seat like a worshiper. Dieter's heart beat faster. An
agent on the first day! And the bag he carried was almost certainly a suitcase
radio. That meant he had a code book, too. This was more than Dieter had dared
to hope for.

But Weber was here to mess
everything up.

The agent passed Dieter and slowed
his walk, obviously looking for the crypt.

Weber saw the man, gave him a hard
look, then turned and pretended to study the fluting on a column.

Maybe it was going to be all right,
Dieter thought. Weber had done a stupid thing in coming here, but perhaps he
was just planning to observe. Surely he was not such an imbecile as to
interfere? He could ruin a unique opportunity.

The agent found the crypt gate and
disappeared down the stone steps.