Spitfire

by M. L. Huie

  Escape—that’s what she had in common with the others on the plane. Livy, who didn’t like thinking about herself too much, knew this jump across the English Channel might well be lifting the curtain on a new act for her. A second act in which she intended to resolve some loose plot threads left dangling in the first.

  Some of Livy’s anxiety on the plane began to dissipate as she walked through the terminal at Le Bourget. The ticking clock in her head that usually led her to Black Market Billy for more Polish vodka now eased as she scanned the building for her contact.

  The airport itself showed little of the bustle you’d expect from a major city like Paris. The walls and floors had the look of transition about them. Livy wondered if they’d been quickly painted over after liberation, but there hadn’t been enough money in the coffers to make it gleam.

  Livy passed under an archway with BIENVENUE À PARIS hurriedly stenciled over a peeling gray wall. On the other side of the arch, the airport opened into a bright lobby with large windows that concealed any imperfections in the decor. Several drivers stood there, wearing spotless gray-and-black uniforms and holding signs with the names of hotels such as Crillon and Le Grand.

  At the end of the line stood a tall, dapper man holding a placard reading KEMSLEY. Livy sauntered up to him, smiling.

  “Miss Nash? Welcome to Paris. I’m Dennis Allard, Kemsley’s Paris bureau chief,” the tall man said with an old-world bow of his head. “Not that there is much of a bureau to be chief of, at the moment.”

  Livy guessed him to be in his midforties. He had black hair gone gray on the side that he had swept back rather dramatically from two prominent widow’s peaks. She thought he looked like Basil Rathbone as the Sheriff of Nottingham, except in better clothes.

  Allard took her case and directed her toward the front of the main building.

  “Right, I’ve got everything taken care of for you. I arranged your flat personally. Have you been to Paris before? Of course you have. Your French is excellent, I hear, so you’ll get along nicely with the locals. If you need anything—anything at all—you must ring me at once. I’ll pass along my number once you’re settled. Right. I’ll get my car. I know you’ve had a long and tiring journey, so just have a rest. You read French as well? Naturally. Here’s Le Monde. It’s de Gaulle’s paper, but it has potential, I think. I won’t be a moment.” Allard dropped the paper in her lap, turned, and headed for the exit, his long legs striding twice the length of everyone else’s.

  The man had barely given her time to respond, as if nothing she might say could possibly interfere with the plans he’d already made. Everything about him said formal, polished, and absurdly efficient, yet he had a twinkle in his eyes when he smiled and seemed genuinely pleased to see her.

  * * *

  Forever impatient, Livy nevertheless did as she was told and found a seat where she could peruse the front page of Le Monde. A quick scan of the headlines told Livy all she needed to know about France’s current politics. The socialists, the communists, and the Christian Democrats shared almost equal space alongside the former president and war hero de Gaulle. In a country where even the government was still officially provisional, telling the good guys from the bad might very well depend on the day.

  As she turned the page, a familiar face near the baggage claim caught her gaze. The man stood waiting with a small group of passengers. He glanced in her direction and they locked eyes. Tom Vance was in Paris.

  He did an unintentionally comedic double-take punctuated by a quick smile. As he turned and walked toward her, Livy had a chance to size him up. He wore a royal-blue pinstriped double-breasted suit with a white pocket square. Livy had to admit he looked pretty unruffled for a man who’d spent a couple of hours on a plane. But the familiar grin didn’t change the fact that his presence here seemed more than a little dodgy.

  “The Kemsley office, wasn’t it?”

  “Beginning to think I’m being followed, Mr. Vance,” Livy said, ignoring the joke.

  “I’m here for work. How about you? You’re one of Fleming’s scribblers, huh?” he said, sounding surprised.

  “Indeed I am.”

  “Well, well.” He stood bag in hand, an awkward moment as the life of the busy airport unfolded around them. “You know, we just might be here working on the exact same story,” he said. “If so, we could help each other.”

  “And what makes you think we’re here for the same reason?”

  “I don’t know. Funny that we keep bumping into each other, don’t you think?”

  “As your mum used to say—everything happens for a reason,” Livy countered.

  “I beg your pardon.” A third voice had joined the conversation, and this one sounded straight out of drama school. Allard stood over Vance’s left shoulder, the friendly-uncle demeanor now a pursed glower. “May we help you, sir?”

  Vance turned, head down, hand out. Deferring to the older man like a good southern boy. “No, no, I was just reintroducing myself to Miss Nash here.”

  Livy suppressed a grin. Cheeky Yank.

  Allard kept the stone-faced look going as Vance retreated.

  “Well, I better collect my bag,” he said, ruefully smiling at Livy. “Pleasure to see you again, ma’am.” Then, to Allard, “Au revoir, Jeeves.”

  True to his word, Vance sauntered back to baggage claim. Allard, trying to master his bristling, turned his smile on again. “The car is just outside, if you’re ready.” Livy stood and joined him. “Do you actually know that man, Miss Nash?”

  “Know him? Hmm, wouldn’t say that, no.”

  “I shouldn’t think any respectable woman would.”

  * * *

  Allard turned on the English charm on the drive into Paris. Clouds kept the sun away as she caught her first glimpse of the French capital in two years. Allard kept up a sort of tour-director chatter as he turned the gray Renault away from the more rural environs of the airport toward the cluttered sky of the city.

  Judging by the crowds at the airport and the smattering of obviously non-Parisians walking the streets, curiosity had driven people back to the great city. Maybe they wanted to see what the Nazis had done to it. Two years after the liberation, Livy was surprised to see the burned husk of a German tank still sitting off the side of the road. The remnants of the brutal occupation lingered for the casual voyeur. People always flocked to the scene of the crime, hoping to catch a glimpse of the corpse or find something left behind by the murderer.

  Livy remembered the newsreel of Hitler visiting the Arc de Triomphe, and the tanks rumbling down the Champs-Élysées to begin the long occupation. The clouds over the city darkened as Allard turned off the main road, passing an old woman laboriously pedaling a battered bicycle. Allard downshifted, driving parallel to the Seine, chugging toward the Eiffel Tower.

  Glancing into the rearview mirror, Livy noticed a black Peugeot she’d first seen as they left the airport. The car kept a respectable distance but had clearly been with them the entire way.

  “You do know we’re being followed?”

  Allard’s eyes never left the road. “Everyone follows everyone here. That car followed me to the airport. Deuxième Bureau by the looks of it.”

  So, French intelligence knew of her arrival. “And that doesn’t bother you?”

  “Not in the slightest. We are a legitimate news service. As far as the French are concerned, you may very well be a correspondent.”

  “Shouldn’t we be talking to them? It is their country, after all.”

  “Miss Nash, no Allied intelligence agency worth its salt would share information with the Frogs right now. The Deuxième Bureau is riddled with Reds. Not to worry, though. I’ll drop you off and then lead them on a driving tour of Montmartre. Eventually they’ll get tired and leave me be.”

  Allard whipped the car onto a side street in front of a small block of flats on the Quai de Grenelle, just beyond two large hotels with what had to be breathtaking views of the river and the city’s horizon. Al
lard hit the brakes a bit too hard and parked the car on the walkway in front of number fifty-seven. Now he became her personal bellhop, taking the bags from the boot and up to a small gray doorway with no sign of a knocker or bell.

  A tiny woman, wearing a dressing gown with an ornate embroidered Chinese dragon, answered Allard’s insistent rapping after a few minutes. The woman’s wiry gray hair looked ready to break out of its tight black hairnet.

  “Oui?” she said, cracking open the door as if they might be burglars.

  She cursed under her breath upon seeing suitcases and two guests on her doorstep. The door slammed shut. Livy heard more cursing as the old woman removed the chain, and then the door reopened. Allard stepped inside with Livy’s bags and was about to make an introduction when the old woman stopped him.

  “Non,” she said, holding out a wrinkled hand with freshly painted purple nails.

  “Ah, oui. Pardonnez-moi.” Allard plopped the bags down, found his wallet, and counted out several hundred francs, which the old woman promptly recounted and slipped into the pocket of her gown. She gave Allard a single key and jerked her head up the stairs.

  “Madame Riveaux, Mademoiselle Nash of Kemsley News in London,” Allard said.

  Madame Riveaux gave Livy a withering glance, shook her head, opened the door behind her, and disappeared into her rooms.

  “Electricity is still being rationed here. Hopefully the blackouts don’t last too long. Never said this was the Ritz, but then you’re not Rita Hayworth, are you?” Allard said as kindly as possible.

  The room, which was one of two at the top of the staircase, could manage only a small bed, a small bath, and a small writing desk and chair.

  “Wouldn’t a visiting English reporter be staying at a hotel?” Livy asked.

  “Indeed. That’s why most of the hotels are full. The press is flocking back to Paris. But you’re not alone. Who do you think is staying in the other rooms?”

  Having stowed her bags and opened the curtains of the room’s lone window to reveal a view of a brick wall, Allard turned to go. “I’ll be back to pick you up around half seven. There are cafés and brasseries closer to the Tower. Right? And don’t dress for the theater. The Grand Guignol isn’t quite the Paris Opera.”

  He left her alone.

  It might not be the Dorchester, Livy thought, but it was a damn sight more comfortable than the inside of a prison cell at Fresnes.

  Chapter Twelve

  Livy took Allard’s advice and wandered away from the Seine toward the Rue St. Charles before settling in a brasserie on a side street. The streets felt at once familiar and new. Livy had grown up listening to her mother talk about this café or that bookshop in her beloved Paris. Because her initial exposure to the City of Light had come during the war, Livy had had very little time to savor the culture and cuisine. Still, the city felt a part of her in a way. Memories of her mother flooded through her mind as she caught snippets of the Parisian dialect and smelled the city’s savory scents.

  Yet even though she spoke French like a native, Livy had always felt like a British girl in France. That’s exactly what she was. To the core.

  The restaurant Livy settled on had been one of her favorite haunts during the war. The interior had been given a fresh coat of paint, but otherwise the chairs, the tables, and the bar looked just as they had during the dark days of the occupation. She hoped its ownership had also not changed.

  Livy ordered tea first, although she longed for a glass of French wine to ease her nerves. She smiled to find bouillabaisse, a fish stew more often found in the south of France, on the menu. The dish came with small slices of crisp toast, but she decided to skip the garlicky rouille sauce.

  Allard’s dismissal of French intelligence as being inundated with communists gnawed at her. She knew people in Paris, and if he was right, she just might be able to use that to her advantage.

  At the end of her meal, she asked her waiter, a round-faced boy who couldn’t be more than seventeen, to give the proprietor a message. She said, “Tell him I’m a friend of André’s and I have a message for him.” Her French was beginning to feel more like second nature now.

  The boy nodded and headed toward the kitchen. Livy hoped the wartime code phrase would provoke a response.

  It did.

  Minutes later a big man with dark hair and a belly that hung over his dirty apron stepped out of the kitchen. His eyes narrowed as he scanned the patrons. Then he saw her. He waited until he was seated on her right side to finally speak.

  “Annette,” he said quietly. Hearing her wartime alias sent a shiver through Livy’s body. “I was certain you’d been killed.”

  “Sorry to disappoint, Paul.”

  Paul Cornet grabbed her hand and kissed it. His thick fingers felt rough and greasy. During the war he had been a liaison between SOE, the Resistance, and Free French Intelligence. Livy hoped some of those old connections remained.

  “Here you are again, but I do not think you are a tourist, no?” His strong Marseille dialect was lyrical as ever.

  “Clever as always. And the bouillabaisse is better than I remembered.”

  “But you have not touched the sauce, so stop flattering me and get to the point,” he said, his smoky voice rumbling in his chest.

  “You still have friends in the Deuxième Bureau?”

  “Yes. I have—friends.”

  “I lost something to one of Stalin’s boys, and I need to have a tête-à-tête. Do you think one of your friends might be able to arrange something?”

  The big man shifted in his seat. “You ask too much of an old man, Annette.”

  “Just relay the message. That’s all I ask.”

  Cornet looked around at the other patrons. Drinking, laughing. “Since I am able to run my place now without the Boche, maybe I owe you one. But only one,” he said, emphasizing the last two words. “A few of them—Russians—come in here from time to time. We talk. One is older. Smart. I like him. He comes in with a younger one. A hothead. Him I don’t like. He smells, too. So I’ll see what I can do. But next time—you try the garlic sauce.”

  * * *

  She found Allard waiting outside precisely at seven thirty. They drove back across the Seine into Paris’s notorious red-light district known as Quartier Pigalle. While parts of the great city seemed vacant, even depressed, this particular area teemed with people, thanks largely to the number of Allied soldiers still roaming the streets. The neon of Pigalle gleamed in the night.

  “Your contact is a Madame Martel. She has your ticket as well as press credentials for your interviews tomorrow,” Allard said, whipping the Renault past a line of prostitutes who encircled three American GIs.

  “And we’re sure Miss Billerant no longer works at the theater?”

  “That’s my understanding. She left under some sort of cloud about a month ago. Until then she’d worked as a seamstress.”

  Allard pulled the car over at a corner, free of Parisian femmes, and killed the engine. “There are three short plays on the program tonight, running just under two and a quarter hours, so I’ll meet you outside the theater at eleven.”

  The nursemaid act was wearing a bit thin on Livy. However, she didn’t know her way around this part of the city, nor did she fancy being accosted tonight by Sergeant Smith from Kansas or whoever, so she nodded and got out of the Renault.

  Livy turned off the Rue Chaptal and felt as if she’d stepped back in time fifty years. A few haggard prostitutes stood in doorways, their faces heavy with rouge and lipstick, voices husky from too many cigarettes, calling to male and female audience members en route to the theater’s entrance. Gaslight illuminated the narrow alley that housed the Théâtre du Grand-Guignol. Strictly translated, it meant “Big Puppet Theater,” but the Grand Guignol was far from a children’s playhouse.

  Allard had warned her that the theater’s reputation was for producing plays that included the most violent aspects of society. Performances routinely depicted graphic murder, torture
, and mutilation onstage, all enacted in a way that seemed so real the theater boasted that patrons often fled in the middle of the show in terror.

  Livy, whose taste in theater ran more to the classics, walked down the cobblestone alleyway toward the entrance without the sense of dread that other patrons might have felt. She’d seen real horrors in the war. Her mind flashed back to Fresnes and the courtyard after the shell had hit. She remembered soldiers without legs, pieces and parts of bodies here and there.

  Tonight, this was just a show.

  The building itself could have been a small hotel or row of flats except for the poster on an easel out front with the title UN CRIME DES UNE MAISON DE FOUS, accompanied by the lurid image of an eyeless young woman reaching out. APRÈS COUPS—Doing the Deed—was another title on the bill. Livy shook her head as she made her way to the front door.

  Madame Martel stood next to the box office, scanning the arrivals. Livy guessed her to be about forty-five and more than a bit severe, as she wore a tailored black suit with her dark hair plastered against her head.

  “Miss Nash, a pleasure to welcome you.” She spoke English with very little trace of an accent. “To be frank, I am surprised a newspaper such as yours would find our theater interesting.”

  “We thought readers might want to know how the occupation impacted the city’s famous nightlife,” Livy said, more than pleased with this bit of improvisation.

  “As you may know, the theater—like all of Paris—is struggling to regain what we once had. Your story means so much to our work here. Now, we have a box seat for you near the rear of the house, so you can observe the performance as well as the effect it has on the audience.”

  “Don’t worry, madame. I don’t scare easy.”

  Martel led Livy through a small lobby decorated with more blood-soaked posters advertising the theater’s previous titles, then down a narrow staircase and into the theater itself. If there had not been a stage and curtains at one end of the space, Livy would have sworn she’d entered a small church. The walls curved upward toward rafters where two carved wooden angels looked down on the seating.