by Manda Scott
‘Why did she start?’
‘You will have to ask her that; I’m sure she had her reasons. And to do so, you must find her. Please do this, Captain, as a matter of urgency. To lose Elodie now would be … heartbreaking.’
‘We are doing our best.’
‘You had another question?’
‘What happened to Toni Gaspari, the third member of your Jedburgh team?’
There is a pause, and a heaviness that is felt, rather than heard. ‘He was shot during the assault on Kramme’s wedding. He was our sniper. They had one better. It’s not fashionable to say these things, but some of the Boche were exceedingly good at what they did.’
‘There’s no chance he might have escaped? That he could have made a new life for himself in the US under another name and turned up in a CIA care home for ageing spies?’
‘Sadly not. I buried his body with my own hands.’
‘Right. I’m sorry. Thank you.’ Slowly, she is learning to read him and he is not telling the whole truth about this. She could call him on it, but decides not to. She says, ‘You should dispose of this phone.’
‘I am in the very process of doing so. Goodbye, Captain. Good luck.’
He is gone, leaving no real trace. Rarely has she been so deftly, delicately obstructed. You are good. Do old spies ever retire?
She dials once more. ‘Patrice? It’s me again.’
‘Hey.’ He’s walking. Actually, he’s running; she can hear the pound of his feet, the judder of it in his breath. Somewhere in the background, a tannoy announces places and times, too fuzzily to make out.
‘Hey. Can you locate another phone? I don’t want to call it, I just want to know where it is.’
‘I can try. Same arithmetic as before.’
She gives him René’s number and sits in the dark, listening. ‘Are you in an airport?’
‘Kind of.’
She laughs. ‘Patrice, it’s like being pregnant, you either are or you aren’t.’
‘Yes, but sometimes it’s not useful to tell the listening world.’
It’s been a long day. She should know this. ‘Right. Sorry.’
‘No worries. I’ve got your answer. Do you remember the place that got one star on TripAdvisor where we …’
Didn’t quite get around to having sex: a museum in the centre of Orléans. She says, ‘I remember.’
‘Two streets south is a small, rather chic hotel: two floors only, very discrete.’
‘I know it.’
‘Room number is the first two digits of your father’s date added together and then subtract the first digit of my birthday.’
That’s nine. Her lips tingle, as if newly kissed. ‘You’re a magician.’
‘I do my best. Take care, eh?’
‘You too. Travel safe.’ Wherever you are going that I can’t know because now you live in the world of spies and secrets and I am only paddling in the shallow water at the edges.
But she has information and she can act on it. She wants to call in support, but the first rule of mobile phones means she can’t. She pulls on her jacket, throws back the last of the coffee and heads—
And here is Martin Gillard, standing in the doorway. She springs back from the sight of him. ‘How long have you been there?’
‘A while. Did Laurence know who Paul Rey’s son was?’
‘You listened to my phone call?’
‘I realize you don’t believe this, but we are on the same side.’
‘Until you kill someone on my watch. Unless you already have.’ She is sharp. His stare is his answer. Defensive, she says, ‘I thought you’d gone home?’
‘I don’t have a home in Orléans, I have a room in a hotel, which is one elevator ride from a well-stocked bar.’ He leans back against the doorpost, hands in pockets. ‘There’s no alcohol here, you may have noticed. McKinney won’t have it on the premises. Tonight, that has to be the better choice.’
‘I didn’t know there were many paid assassins with an alcohol problem. Is that compatible with the job description?’
In the late evening light, Gillard’s eyes are more grey than blue. His gaze, meeting hers, is intelligent and calculating, but it is not hiding anything; she would bet quite a lot on that. He says, ‘I think you have a particularly skewed opinion of my function. I make things happen. Sometimes I stop things happening.’
‘Or not.’
The lines at the sides of his eyes tighten. He runs his tongue round his teeth. ‘I was not paid to protect Sophie Destivelle. If we are truthful, I have not been paid to protect Elodie Duval, but whoever I am, whatever I may or may not have done, there is not a man alive who doesn’t feel it his duty to protect those he loves. If Elodie is dead, I will live with that failure for the rest of my life. I would appreciate it if you didn’t find it necessary to gloat either in prospect or in retrospect.’
Picaut regards him, thoughtfully. ‘Do you think she’s dead?’
‘I am trying very hard to believe she isn’t.’
She looks down at her feet and contemplates the beginnings of a plan. In a while, with a nod to the absent Rollo who will hate this, she looks up again. ‘Have you ever killed a police officer?’
‘No. Nor will I.’
‘Are you armed?’
‘Not at present.’ He chews the edge of his thumb. ‘It could be arranged.’
She says, ‘Do you trust me?’
‘Strange that you should ask. I was just wondering that.’
‘And?’
‘I think I do.’
‘Can I trust you?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘Then get your gun and come with me. We’re going to look for JJ Crotteau and it may be that he doesn’t want to be found.’
12 August: US Third Army captures Alençon.
15th: Operation Dragoon: Allies land on the south coast of France.
19th: Resistance uprising begins in Paris.
30th: Allies enter Rouen.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
SAINT-CYBARD
August–September 1944
SUMMER CREEPS PAST and the Allied tanks become snarled in the hedgerows of Normandy, fighting over villages whose names they don’t know for fractions of inches on a map, back and forth. The Boche should just give up – everyone knows this – but they have been ordered to fight to the last man’s last round and those who think this is a foolish notion are hanged in sight of the rest. So they fight, and die, and the fractional inches become actual inches, saturated with the blood of the dead.
In between jaunts of its own, the Maquis de Morez garners this information hazily, from the BBC, from notes in the drops, from the radio contact with Laurence’s brigadier, and, rarely, by word of mouth from Saint-Cybard: from the Milice women, and from Véronique, a rather striking young woman who is, it becomes evident, on intimate terms with Céline.
The Frenchmen among the Maquis affect not to notice as the two women sit pale head to dark by the fire, and retire early to Céline’s cabin. Paul Rey has no shame: he stares and grins lopsidedly, and, on these nights, Sophie has no trouble persuading him to bed.
Not that she has trouble anyway; just that if he has more than a mouthful of Cognac, or if the killing has been hard that day, and perhaps a man has been lost, he becomes prone to long soliloquies on love and commitment that stray too close, too often, to a proposal she has no intention of accepting. At least when Véronique is visiting Céline, he thinks only of sex, which is fine.
July becomes August and the tanks break free of the bocages. Caen falls, and Montgomery is bogged down in Holland, or so it seems. In the middle of the month, the Americans land in Saint-Tropez and begin to fight their way north. On all sides, the Boche are under assault, and on all sides, the Maquis are let off the leash to join that assault. There are specific actions required at specific times: a rail line destroyed or (less often) mended, telephone exchanges destroyed – or mended. Panzer divisions, infantry divisions, staff cars to blow up.
&nb
sp; But in between, they can pick their own targets, and they do. They call guns, food, coffee, tobacco from the sky and it is delivered. Ask and ye shall be given. Seek and ye shall find. Sophie wakes in the morning with her blood on fire and goes to sleep beside Paul Rey the same. This is what they were born for. Life is short and bright and nobody has to think more than half a day ahead.
And yet, they have not found Kramme. This is the cockroach in their wine. Her dreams are all of him: living, smiling, laughing, the touch of his hand, the kiss; or dead, bleeding, with his throat laid bare to the bones of his neck, and his tongue cut out.
She wakes, and neither is true, and it is her fault. All that she told him of the rule book, he has taken to heart: a different bed each night and never let anyone know where it is. Every day, more of the citizens of Saint-Cybard join the Maquis; winning is contagious and there are few who believe the Allies will not win. And yet none of them knows where Kramme is. Or if they do, they are afraid to tell of it.
Véronique brings their breakthrough. She arrives one morning, which is not her usual time. Sophie is sitting in the sun on the bare grass outside the infirmary, re-rolling newly washed bandages. The Patron lies on a straw-filled pallet in the shade of a canvas awning behind her. René sits on a log, washing three glass syringes ready to be boiled. Everyone else who is fit to work is out foraging; in the mountains, food is plentiful, but you have to know where to find it. Their increasing numbers means more hunting for food. Also, the Boche are no longer sending spotter planes over the hills. It has been possible to light fires in the open for several weeks now.
René is almost always left behind. He is shorter of temper since he was rescued, and she has twice had to treat his ruined hand for infection, but in between he has become a good nurse, and is growing more skilled in the cleaning of wounds. He is first to see Véronique. They knew each other before the war and he is fond of her, so that when she arrives, he scoots along the log to make space for her.
She won’t sit. She stands, weaving her fingers through her hands. ‘Céline isn’t here?’
‘She’ll be back,’ Sophie says. Probably. Nobody adds the conditionals; they are part of the life they lead.
‘When?’
‘Three o’clock? Five?’ It’s hard to tell.
‘I have to go back.’
‘We’ll tell her you were here.’ It’s not that Sophie dislikes Véronique, she just doesn’t really have time for her.
The girl takes a breath and bites it back. And then: ‘Kramme is getting married.’
‘What?’
‘Luce Moreau: Kramme has asked her to marry him and she’s said yes. They are to wed tomorrow at the church at Arc-sous-Montagne at two o’clock in the afternoon. All the Boche will be there.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Lisette sent me, her sister.’
Lisette, so Sophie has learned, was Daniel’s fiancée until the war came, at which point, such was her dedication to the Resistance that she married into the Milice in order to provide the Maquis with intelligence. She has never yet sent them bad information.
‘Hold on, are you telling me Lisette is Madame Andreu? That Luce Moreau is a Résistante? Seriously?’
‘You know them?’
‘I delivered Lisette’s twins. I …’ Took dinner many times with Kramme and Luce Moreau, but she is not about to tell them that.
Fuck.
Fuck.
Her mind is a litter of smoking parts. Kramme is to marry. Luce Moreau. Luce ‘I would die for the Reich’ Moreau is one of the so-courageous women who give themselves to the Boche so that they can send word to the mountains. And she is to marry Kramme.
What is there to say, but fuck?
And yet, Kramme will be in public. Out in the open. Visible. A pulse begins to pound behind Sophie’s eyes. She says, ‘Véronique, thank you. Céline and Fabien will decide what to do. We’ll tell them as soon as they get back. In the meantime if you want—’
Ro!
The noise is more like a cough than a word, but it’s forcefully said. She turns, slowly, suppressing a sigh. The Patron cannot walk. It is possible he never will, but she has JJ lift him outside every morning so he’s not just staring at the ceiling. Beyond that, they barely communicate. She hasn’t heard him speak since the day of Laurence Vaughan-Thomas’s confrontation and has long since stopped caring, or so she thinks. Now, he is partway off his pallet, struggling to sit.
In a flash of anger, she says, ‘I’ll be back at two to move you before the sun moves round too far.’
Ro!
Hesitantly, René says, ‘I think he means “no”, not “go”.’
There was a time when she was the one who understood the Patron. She stands square in front of him, her hands on her hips. ‘Is it no?’
He shakes his head, and then, somewhat frantically, nods. He works his mouth, and this sound, she almost recognizes. Ramme.
He stares at her, full eye contact with an intensity bordering on mania. This is entirely new: whole or broken, he has never held her gaze before.
‘Patron?’
He grunts, struggles off the pallet onto his knees and drags the edge of his thumb across the parched ground, making marks that turn out to be letters.
Because she’s expecting it, she picks out KRAMME from the strange scrawl, but the rest is a drunk-spider mystery, as opaque as his speech.
To René, she says, ‘Go down to the cook-fires. Marcel has a chalkboard he uses for writing out what he needs done. Bring it. And the chalk.’
She and the Patron share an awkward silence while the boy runs down and back again. When the chalkboard is given to him, she finds that his hands may be able to hold a mug, to grasp a spoon and shovel food into his mouth, but the intricacies of writing take him to the border of his own limitations. He holds his right wrist with his left hand, carves out each letter, like a mason with a chisel.
Watching him is painful. Sophie gazes up at the mountain until he makes another sound that might be, Look.
She does.
Kramme. Kill Kramme. The pulse behind her eyes hammers harder. Already, the shock of Luce Moreau’s part in this is fading into insignificance. ‘You really think Kramme will leave Saint-Cybard?’
The Patron nods, once, fiercely, smears out the first message and stabs down, double-fisted, to write again. CA—
The chalk skitters away from his fingers. He grabs it, tries again. And a third time.
Fuck.
She gapes at him.
Sorry.
‘No, no, it’s fine.’ It’s not the word, it’s just that he can say it, whole, unadulterated. The only word she’s heard him say that sounds completely normal. She starts to laugh, and the look on his face does nothing to stop her. Helpless, she slides into a breathless, whooping, gut-cramping hysteria, and is only saved because he joins her, so that when the fit passes and she winds down to sobriety, and the vast, unquenchable grief, he is ready for that, too, and comes to hold her in a rough, hard embrace.
I’m sorry.
‘Oh God, Patrick. Don’t be sorry. Don’t ever be sorry. It’s me who needs to say that.’
No.
‘For so many things. Yes.’ She leans her head on his shoulder, turns her face sideways, says, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, over and over while he strokes her hair. It is René, standing awkwardly a few paces away, who brings her back to herself.
She takes a steadying breath. ‘What were you trying to say? What do we need to do?’
Call him.
She understands him now. How could she have thought ‘no’ meant ‘go’? And by ‘him’, he means Laurence Vaughan-Thomas. The man from whose presence he has emphatically turned.
‘Laurence is with Fabien. They’ll be back by mid-afternoon. Do we need him before then?’
Yes. Now. All of them.
In the infirmary, she keeps a Very flare for precisely this purpose. A green star lifts high over the mountain, scaring the crows. She sets the pis
tol back under the plank that is her only shelf. ‘Would you like some coffee while we wait?’
Thank you.
Laurence Vaughan-Thomas returns with a gang of eight Maquisards. He runs ahead of them, and stops. The Patron has been working with his chalk again, working on his sentences so they make proper English.
If he reads it at all, Vaughan-Thomas does so in a passing glance. The rest of his attention is focused on Sophie, as if the Patron were not there. She has seen dogs like this, beaten so that they will not look at their masters.
The Patron, astonishingly, impossibly, has commandeered René as a crutch and pulled himself to standing, or at least, something closer to vertical than he has been. You have to lead them. He lays a hand on Vaughan-Thomas’s arm. And that’s enough, really. Relief transfigures him. From the crown of his head to his feet, he is lighter.
There is a possibility he might weep, which would be uncomfortable, not least because Céline has arrived, and JJ, Fabien, Daniel. Paul Rey is there too. His presence makes Sophie’s skin tingle. He grins at her, and she returns it, dizzied by the moment.
The men stand around the chalkboard, reading – some of them slowly, because the Patron has written in English.
‘What do we do?’ Céline asks.
Assault them. The Patron speaks and Sophie translates.
Not everyone can understand him yet. Vaughan-Thomas does, obviously. Before she is done, he says, ‘How many men will we need?’
How many have you got?
‘One hundred and four.’
Take them all.
‘It may well be a trap.’
Of course. But you will be prepared for it.
The sun sets gold and scarlet on their plan. It is not a subtle plan, but it is powerful and they feel powerful now. Beyond those first few, only a small corps of the central command knows the full detail: Fabien, who trained long ago with Laurence, Céline, JJ, Daniel, the Jedburghs, and Thierry, of course. The remaining ninety-six Maquisards think they are at last going to liberate Saint-Cybard.
