Jackdaws (4 page)

After a moment, she took a step
forward.

She lumbered across the
cobblestones. She thought the major was shooting at her, but she could not be
sure as there was so much gunfire from the château, from Geneviève, and from
the Resistance fighters still alive in the parking lot. The fear that a bullet
might hit her at any second gave her strength, and she broke into a lurching
run. She made for the road leading out of the square to the south, the nearest
exit. She passed the German lying on top of the redhead, and for a startled moment
she met his eye and saw an expression of surprise and wry admiration. Then she
crashed into a café table, sending it flying, and she almost fell, but managed
to right herself and run on. A bullet hit the window of the bar, and she saw a
cobweb of fracture lines craze the glass. A moment later, she was around the
corner and out of the major's line of sight. Alive, she thought gratefully;
both of us—for a few more minutes, at least.

Until now she had not thought where
to go once she was clear of the battlefield. Two getaway vehicles were waiting
a couple of streets away, but she could not carry Michel that far. However,
Antoinette Dupert lived on this street, just a few steps farther. Antoinette
was not in the Resistance, but she was sympathetic enough to have provided
Michel with a plan of the château. And Michel was her nephew, so she surely
would not turn him away.

Anyway, Flick had no alternative.

Antoinette had a ground-floor
apartment in a building with a courtyard. Flick came to the open gateway, a few
yards along the street from the square, and staggered under the archway. She
pushed open a door and lowered Michel to the tiles.

She hammered on Antoinette's door,
panting with effort. She heard a frightened voice say, "What is it?"
Antoinette had been scared by the gunfire and did not want to open the door.

Breathlessly, Flick said,
"Quickly, quickly!" She tried to keep her voice low. Some of the
neighbors might be Nazi sympathizers.

The door did not open, but
Antoinette's voice came nearer. "Who's there?"

Flick instinctively avoided speaking
a name aloud. She replied, "Your nephew is wounded."

The door opened. Antoinette was a
straight-backed woman of fifty wearing a cotton dress that had once been chic
and was now faded but crisply pressed. She was pale with fear.
"Michel!" she said. She knelt beside him. "Is it serious?"

"It hurts, but I'm not
dying," Michel said through clenched teeth.

"You poor thing." She
brushed his hair off his sweaty forehead with a gesture like a caress.

Flick said impatiently, "Let's
get him inside."

She took Michel's arms and
Antoinette lifted him by the knees. He grunted with pain. Together they carried
him into the living room and put him down on a faded velvet sofa.

"Take care of him while I fetch
the car," Flick said. She ran back into the street.

The gunfire was dying down. She did
not have long. She raced along the street and turned two corners.

Outside a closed bakery, two
vehicles were parked with their engines running: one a rusty Renault, the other
a van with a faded sign on the side that had once read
Blanchisserie
Bisset
—Bisset's Laundry. The van was borrowed from the father of Bertrand, who
was able to get fuel because he washed sheets for hotels used by the Germans.
The Renault had been stolen this morning in Châlons, and Michel had changed its
license plates. Flick decided to take the car, leaving the van for any
survivors who might get away from the carnage in the château grounds.

She spoke briefly to the driver of
the van. "Wait here for five minutes, then leave." She ran to the
car, jumped into the passenger seat, and said, "Let's go, quickly!"

At the wheel of the Renault was
Gilberte, a nineteen-year-old girl with long dark hair, pretty but stupid.
Flick did not know why she was in the Resistance—she was not the usual type.
Instead of pulling away, Gilberte said, "Where to?"

"I'll direct you—for the love
of Christ, move!"

Gilberte put the car in gear and
drove off.

"Left, then right," Flick
said.

In the two minutes of inaction that
followed, the full realization of her failure hit her. Most of the Bollinger
circuit was wiped out. Albert and others had died. Geneviève, Bertrand, and any
others who survived would probably be tortured.

And it was all for nothing. The
telephone exchange was undamaged, and German communications were intact. Flick
felt worthless. She tried to think what she had done wrong. Had it been a
mistake to try a frontal attack on a guarded military installation? Not
necessarily—the plan might have worked but for the inaccurate intelligence
supplied by MI6. However, it would have been safer, she now thought, to get
inside the building by some clandestine means. That would have given the
Resistance a better chance of getting to the crucial equipment.

Gilberte pulled up at the courtyard
entrance. "Turn the car around," Flick said, and jumped out.

Michel was lying facedown on
Antoinette's sofa, trousers pulled down, looking undignified. Antoinette knelt
beside him, holding a bloodstained towel, a pair of glasses perched on her
nose, peering at his backside. "The bleeding has slowed, but the bullet is
still in there," she said.

On the floor beside the sofa was her
handbag. She had emptied the contents onto a small table, presumably while
hurriedly searching for her spectacles. Flick's eye was caught by a sheet of
paper, typed on and stamped, with a small photograph of Antoinette pasted to
it, the whole thing in a little cardboard folder. It was the pass that
permitted her to enter the château. In that moment, Flick had the glimmer of an
idea.

"I've got a car outside,"
Flick said.

Antoinette continued to study the
wound. "He shouldn't be moved."

"If he stays here, the Boche
will kill him." Flick casually picked up Antoinette's pass. As she did so
she asked Michel, "How do you feel?"

"I might be able to walk
now," he said. "The pain is easing."

Flick slipped the pass into her
shoulder bag. Antoinette did not notice. Flick said to her, "Help me get
him up."

The two women raised Michel to his
feet. Antoinette pulled up his blue canvas trousers and fastened his worn
leather belt.

"Stay inside," Flick said
to Antoinette. "I don't want anyone to see you with us." She had not
yet begun to work out her idea, but she already knew it would be blighted if
any suspicion were to fall on Antoinette and her cleaners.

Michel put his arm around Flick's
shoulders and leaned heavily on her. She took his weight, and he hobbled out of
the building into the street. By the time they reached the car, he was white
with pain. Gilberte stared through the window at them, looking terrified. Flick
hissed at her, "Get out and open the fucking door, dimwit!" Gilberte
leaped out of the car and threw open the rear door. With her help, Flick
bundled Michel onto the backseat.

The two women jumped in the front
"Let's get out of here," said Flick.

CHAPTER

FOUR

DIETER WAS DISMAYED and appalled. As
the shooting began to peter out, and his heartbeat returned to normal, he started
to reflect on what he had seen. He had not thought the Resistance capable of
such a well-planned and carefully executed attack. From everything he had
learned in the last few months, he believed their raids were normally
hit-and-run affairs. But this had been his first sight of them in action. They
had been bristling with guns and obviously not short of ammunition—unlike the
German army! Worst of all, they had been courageous. Dieter had been impressed
by the rifleman who had dashed across the square, by the girl with the Sten gun
who had given him covering fire, and most of all by the little blonde who had
picked up the wounded rifleman and had carried him—a man six inches taller than
she—out of the square to safety. Such people could not fail to be a profound
threat to the occupying military force. These were not like the criminals
Dieter had dealt with as a cop in Cologne before the war. Criminals were
stupid, lazy, cowardly, and brutish. These French Resistance people were
fighters.

But their defeat gave him a rare
opportunity.

When he was sure the shooting had
stopped, he got to his feet and helped Stéphanie up. Her cheeks were flushed,
and she was breathing hard. She held his hands and looked into his
face. "You protected me," she said. Tears came to her eyes. "You
made yourself a shield for me."

He brushed dirt from her hip. He was
surprised by his own gallantry. The action had been instinctive. When he
thought about it, he was not at all sure he would really be willing to give his
life to save Stéphanie. He tried to pass over it lightly. "No harm should
come to this perfect body," he said.

She began to cry.

He took her hand and led her across
the square to the gates. "Let's go inside," he said. "You can
sit down for a while." They entered the grounds. Dieter saw a hole in the
wall of the church. That explained how the main force had got inside.

The Waffen-SS troops had come out of
the building and were disarming the attackers. Dieter looked keenly at the
Resistance fighters. Most were dead, but some were only wounded, and one or two
appeared to have surrendered unhurt. There should be several for him to
interrogate.

Until now, his work had been
defensive. The most he had been able to do was fortify key installations against
the Resistance by beefing up security. The occasional prisoner had yielded
little information. But having several prisoners, all from one large and
evidently well-organized circuit, was a different matter. This might be his
chance of going on the attack, he thought eagerly.

He shouted at a sergeant,
"You—get a doctor for these prisoners. I want to interrogate them. Don't
let any die."

Although Dieter was not in uniform,
the sergeant assumed from his manner that he was a superior officer, and said,
"Very good, sir."

Dieter took Stéphanie up the steps
and through the stately doorway into the wide hall. It was a breathtaking
sight: a pink marble floor, tall windows with elaborate curtains, walls with
Etniscan motifs in plaster picked out in dusty shades of pink and green, and a
ceiling painted with fading cherubs. Once, Dieter assumed, the room had been
filled with gorgeous furniture: pier tables under high mirrors, sideboards
encrusted with ormolu, dainty chairs with gilded legs, oil paintings, huge
vases, little marble statuettes. All that was gone now, of course. Instead
there were rows of switchboards, each with its chair, and a snake's nest of
cables on the floor.

The telephone operators seemed to
have fled into the grounds at the rear but, now that the shooting had stopped,
a few of them were standing at the glazed doors, still wearing their headsets
and breast microphones, wondering if it was safe to come back inside. Dieter
sat Stéphanie at one of the switchboards, then beckoned a middle-aged woman
telephonist. "Madame," he said in a polite but commanding voice. He
spoke French. "Please bring a cup of hot coffee for this lady."

The woman came forward, shooting a
look of hatred at Stéphanie. "Very good, monsieur."

"And some cognac. She's had a
shock."

"We have no cognac."

They had cognac, but she did not
want to give it to the mistress of a German. Dieter did not argue the point.
"Just coffee, then, but be quick, or there will be trouble."

He patted Stéphanie's shoulder and
left her. He passed through double doors into the east wing. The château was
laid out as a series of reception rooms, one leading into the next on the
Versailles pattern, he found. The rooms were full of switchboards, but these
had a more permanent look, the cables bundled into neatly made wooden trunking
that disappeared through the floor into the cellar beneath. Dieter guessed the
hall looked messy only because it had been brought into service as an emergency
measure after the west wing had been bombed. Some of the windows were
permanently blacked out, no doubt as an air-raid precaution, but others had
heavy curtains drawn open, and Dieter supposed the women did not like to work
in permanent night.

At the end of the east wing was a
stairwell. Dieter went down. At the foot of the staircase he passed through a
steel door. A small desk and a chair stood just inside, and Dieter assumed a
guard normally sat there. The man on duty had presumably left his post to join
in the fighting. Dieter entered unchallenged and made a mental note of a
security breach.

This was a different environment
from that of the grand principal floors. Designed as kitchens, storage, and
accommodation for the dozens of staff who would have serviced this house three
hundred years ago, it had low ceilings, bare walls, and floors of stone, or
even, in some rooms, beaten earth. Dieter walked along a broad corridor. Every
door was clearly labeled in neat German sign writing, but Dieter looked inside
anyway. On his left, at the front of the building, was the complex equipment of
a major telephone exchange: a generator, enormous batteries, and rooms full of
tangled cables. On his right, toward the back of the house, were the Gestapo's
facilities: a photo lab, a large wireless listening room for eavesdropping on
the Resistance, and prison cells with peepholes in the doors. The basement had
been bomb proofed: all windows were blocked, the walls were sandbagged, and the
ceilings had been reinforced with steel girders and poured concrete. Obviously
that was to prevent Allied bombers from putting the phone system out of action.

At the end of the corridor was a
door marked Interrogation Center. He went inside. The first room had bare white
walls, bright lights, and the standard furniture of a simple interview room: a
cheap table, hard chairs, and an ashtray. Dieter went through to the next room.
Here the lights were less bright and the walls bare brick. There was a
bloodstained pillar with hooks for tying people up; an umbrella stand holding a
selection of wooden clubs and steel bars; a hospital operating table with a
head clamp and straps for the wrists and ankles; an electric shock machine; and
a locked cabinet that probably contained drugs and hypodermic syringes. It was
a torture chamber. Dieter had been in many similar, but still they sickened
him. He had to remind himself that intelligence gathered in places such as this
helped save the lives of decent young German soldiers so that they could
eventually go home to their wives and children instead of dying on
battlefields. All the same, the place gave him the creeps.