Jackdaws (38 page)

Still no one was sure what had
happened out there. The uncertainty was unbearable for Paul. Flick had to go to
Reims, one way or another. He had to know whether she was walking into a
Gestapo trap. Surely there must be a way to check whether Brian's transmissions
were genuine?

His signals bore the correct
security tags: Percy double-checked. But the Gestapo knew about security tags,
and they could easily have tortured Brian to learn his. There were subtler
methods of checking, Percy said, but they depended on the girls at the
listening station. So Paul had decided to go there.

At first Percy had resisted. It was
dangerous for operational people to descend on signals units, he said; they
disrupted the smooth running of the service for hundreds of agents. Paul
ignored that. Then the head of the station said he would be delighted for Paul to
make an appointment to visit in, say, two or three weeks? No, Paul had said,
two or three hours is what I had in mind. He had insisted, gently but firmly,
using the threat of Monty's wrath as a last resort. And so he had gone to
Grendon Underwood.

As a small boy in Sunday school,
Paul had been vexed by a theological problem. He had noticed that in Arlington,
Virginia, where he was living with his parents, most of the children of his age
went to bed at the same time, seven-thirty. That meant they were saying their
prayers simultaneously. With all those voices rising to heaven, how could God
hear what he, Paul, was saying? He was not satisfied with the answer of the
pastor, who just said that God could do anything. Little Paul knew that was an
evasion. The question troubled him for years.

If he could have seen Grendon
Underwood, he would have understood.

Like God, the Special Operations
Executive had to listen to innumerable messages, and it often happened that
scores of them came in at the same time. Secret agents in their hideaways were
all tapping their Morse keys simultaneously, like the nine-year-olds of
Arlington kneeling at their bedsides at half past seven. SOE heard them all.

Grendon Underwood was another grand
country house vacated by the owners and taken over by the military. Officially
called Station 53a, it was a listening post. In its extensive grounds were
radio aerials grouped in great arcs like the ears of God, listening to messages
that came from anywhere between the arctic north of Norway to the dusty south
of Spain. Four hundred wireless operators and coders, most of them young women
in the FANYs, worked in the big house and lived in Nissen huts hastily erected
on the grounds.

Paul was shown around by a
supervisor, Jean Bevins, a heavy woman with spectacles. At first she was
terrified of the visiting big shot who represented Montgomery himself, but Paul
smiled and talked softly and made her feel at ease. She took him to the
transmitting room, where a hundred or so girls sat in rows, each with
headphones, notebook, and pencils. A big board showed agents' code names and
scheduled times for transmission—known as "skeds" and always
pronounced the American way—and the frequencies they would use. There was an
atmosphere of intense concentration, the only sound being the tap of Morse code
as an operator told an agent she was receiving him loud and clear.

Jean introduced Paul to Lucy Briggs,
a pretty blonde girl with a Yorkshire accent so strong that he had to
concentrate hard to understand her. "Helicopter?" she said.
"Aye, I know Helicopter—he's new. He calls in at twenty hundred hours and
receives at twenty-three hundred. No problems, so far."

She never pronounced the letter
aitch. Once Paul realized that, he began to find it easier to interpret the
accent.

"What do you mean?" he
asked her. "What sort of problems do you get?"

"Well, some of them don't tune
the transmitter right, so you have to search for the frequency. Then the signal
may be weak, so that you can't hear the letters very well, and you worry that
you might be mistaking dashes for dots—the letter B is very like D, for
instance. And the tone is always bad from those little suitcase radios, because
they're so small."

"Would you recognize his
'fist'?"

She looked dubious. "He's only
broadcast three times. On Wednesday he was a bit nervous, probably because it
was his first, but his pace was steady, as if he knew he had plenty of time. I
was pleased—I thought he must feel reasonably safe. We worry about them, you
know. We're sitting here nice and warm and they're somewhere behind enemy
lines dodging the bloody Gestapo."

"What about his second
broadcast?"

"That was Thursday, and he was
rushed. When they're in a hurry, it can be difficult to be sure what they
mean—you know, was that two dots run together, or a short dash? Wherever he was
sending from, he wanted to get out of there fast."

"And then?"

"Friday he didn't broadcast.
But I didn't worry. They don't call unless they have to, it's too dangerous.
Then he came on the air on Saturday morning, just before dawn. It was an
emergency message, but he didn't sound panicky. In fact I remember thinking to
myself. He's getting the hang of this. You know, it was a strong signal, the
rhythm was steady, all the letters clear."

"Could it have been someone
else using his transmitter that time?"

She looked thoughtful. "It
sounded like him… but yes, it could have been someone else, I suppose. And if
it was a German, pretending to be him, they would sound nice and steady,
wouldn't they, because they'd have nothing to fear."

Paul felt as if he were wading
through gumbo. Every question he asked had two answers. He yearned for
something definite. He had to fight down panic every time he recalled to mind
the dreadful prospect that he might lose Flick, less than a week after she had
come into his life like a gift from the gods.

Jean had disappeared, and returned
now with a sheaf of papers in a plump hand. "I've brought the decrypts of
the three signals received from Helicopter," she said. Her quiet
efficiency pleased him.

He looked at the first sheet.

CALL SIGN HLCP
(HELICOPTER)

SECURITY TAG PRESENT

MAY 30 1944

MESSAGE READS:

ARRIVED OK STOP CRYT
RENDEVOUS

UNSAFE STOP NABBED BY GGESTAPO

BUT GOT AWAY STOP IN
FUTURE RENDEZVOUS AT CAFE DE LA GARE OVER

"He can't spell for nuts," Paul commented.

"It's not his spelling,"
Jean said. "They always make errors in the Morse. We order the decoders to
leave them in the decrypt, rather than tidy them up, in case there's some
significance."

Brian's second transmission, giving
the strength of the Bollinger circuit, was longer.

CALL SIGN HLCP
(HELICOPTER)

SECURITY TAG PRESENT

MAY 31 1944

MESSAGE READS:

ACTIV AGENTS NOMBER FIVE AS
FOLOWS

STOP MONET WHO IS WOUNED
STOP

COMTESSE OK STOP CHEVAL
HELPS OCA

SIONLY STOP BOURGEOISE
STILL IM

PLACE STOP PLUS MY RESCUER
CODE—

NAME CHARENTON STOP

Paul looked up. "This is much worse."

Lucy said, "I told you he was
in a rush the second time."

There was more of the second
message, mainly a detailed account of the incident at the cathedral. Paul went
on to the third:

CALLSIGN HLCP (HELICOPTER)

SECURITY TAG PRESENT

JUN 2 1944

MESSAGE READS:

WHAT THE DEVIL HAPPENED
QUERY

SEND INSTRUCTIONS STOP
REPLY IMMEDIATELY OVER

    "He's improving," Paul said.
"Only one mistake."

"I thought he was more relaxed
on Saturday," Lucy said.

"Either that, or someone else
sent the signal." Suddenly, Paul thought he saw a way to test whether
"Brian" was himself or a Gestapo impersonator. If it worked, it would
at least give him certainty. "Lucy, do you ever make mistakes in
transmission?"

"Hardly ever." She threw
an anxious glance at her supervisor. "If a new girl is a bit careless, the
agent will kick up a hell of a stink. Quite rightly, too. There should never be
any mistakes—the agents have enough problems to cope with."

Paul turned to Jean. "If I
draft a message, would you encode it exactly as it is? It would be a kind of
test."

"Of course."

He looked at his watch. It was
seven-thirty p.m. "He should broadcast at eight. Can you send it
then?"

The supervisor said, "Yes. When
he calls in, we'll just tell him to stand by to receive an emergency message
immediately after transmission."

Paul sat down, thought for a moment,
then wrote on a pad:

GIVE YOUR ARMS HOW MAN
AUTOMATS

HOW MY STENS ALSO AMMO HOW
MNY

ROUNDS ECH PLUS GREDANES
REPLY IMMMEDIATLY

He considered it for a moment. It was an unreasonable
request, phrased in a high-handed tone, and it appeared to be carelessly
encoded and transmitted. He showed it to Jean. She frowned. "That's a
terrible message. I'd be ashamed of it."

"What do you think an agent's reaction would be?"

She gave a humorless laugh. "He would send an angry reply with a few swear words in it."

"Please encode it exactly as it is and send it to Helicopter."

She looked troubled. "If that's what you wish."

"Yes, please."

"Of course." She took it away.

Paul went in search of food. The
canteen operated twenty-four hours a day, as the station did, but the coffee
was tasteless and there was nothing to eat but some stale sandwiches and
dried-up cake.

A few minutes after eight o'clock,
the supervisor came into the canteen. "Helicopter called in to say he had
had no word yet from Leopardess. We're sending him the emergency message
now."

"Thank you." It would take
Brian—or his Gestapo impersonator—at least an hour to decode the message,
compose a reply, encode it, and transmit it. Paul stared at his plate,
wondering how the British had the nerve to call this a sandwich: two pieces of
white bread smeared with margarine and one thin slice of ham.

No mustard.

CHAPTER

THIRTY-FOUR

THE RED-LIGHT DISTRICT of Paris was
a neighborhood of narrow, dirty streets on a low hill behind the rue de la
Chapelle, not far from the Gare du Nord. At its heart was "La
Charbo," the rue de la Charbonnire. On the north side of the street, the
convent of la Chapelle stood like a marble statue in a junkyard. The convent
consisted of a tiny church and a house where eight nuns dedicated their lives
to helping the most wretched of Parisians. They made soup for starving old men,
talked depressed women out of suicide, dragged drunk sailors from the gutter,
and taught the children of prostitutes to read and write. Next door to the
convent stood the Hotel de la Chapelle.

The hotel was not exactly a brothel,
for there were no whores in residence, but when the place was not full the
proprietress was willing to rent rooms by the hour to heavily made-up women in
cheap evening gowns who arrived with fat French businessmen, furtive German
soldiers, or naive young men too drunk to see straight.

Flick walked through the door with a
mighty sense of relief. The gendarmes had dropped her off half a mile away. She
had seen two copies of her Wanted poster on the way. Christian had given her
his handkerchief—a clean cotton square, red with white dots, and she had tied
it over her head in an attempt to hide her blonde hair, but she knew that
anyone who looked hard at her would recognize her from the poster. There had
been nothing she could do but keep her eyes down and her fingers crossed. It
had seemed like the longest walk of her life.

The proprietress was a friendly,
overweight woman wearing a pink silk bathrobe over a whalebone corset. She had
once been voluptuous, Flick guessed. Flick had stayed at the place before, but
the proprietress did not appear to remember her. Flick addressed her as
"Madame," but she said, "Call me Regine." She took Flick's
money and gave her a room key without asking any questions.

Flick was about to go upstairs to
her room when she glanced through the window and saw Diana and Maude arriving
in a strange kind of taxi, a sofa on wheels attached to a bicycle. Their brush
with the gendarmes did not seem to have sobered them, and they were giggling
about the vehicle.

"Good God, what a dump,"
said Diana when she walked in the door. "Perhaps we can eat out."

Paris restaurants had continued to
operate during the occupation, but inevitably many of their customers were
German officers, and agents avoided them if they could. "Don't even think
about it," Flick said crossly. "We're going to lie low here for a few
hours, then go to the Gare de l'Est at first light."

Maude looked accusingly at Diana.
"You promised to take me to the Ritz."

Flick controlled her temper.
"What world are you living in?" she hissed at Maude.

"All right, keep your hair
on."

"Nobody leaves! Is that
understood?"

"Yes, yes."

"One of us will go out and buy
food later. I have to get out of sight now. Diana, you sit here and wait for
the others while Maude checks into your room. Let me know when everyone's
arrived."

Climbing the stairs, Flick passed a
Negro girl in a tight red dress and noticed that she had a full head of
straight black hair. "Wait," Flick said to her. "Will you sell
me your wig?"

"You can buy one yourself
around the corner, honey." She looked Flick up and down, taking her for an
amateur hooker. "But, frankly, I'd say you need more than a wig."

"I'm in a hurry."

The girl pulled it off to reveal
black curls cropped close to her scalp. "I can't work without it."

Flick took a thousand-franc note
from her jacket pocket. "Buy yourself another."

She looked at Flick with new eyes,
realizing she had too much money to be a prostitute. With a shrug, she accepted
the money and handed over the wig.