Shadows over Stonewycke

by Michael Phillips

  When Henri and Logan parted, Logan set out on his bicycle to make necessary contacts to begin arranging things for Louis. A printer was his first stop. The man on the left bank was not as good as Jean Pierre’s man, but his work would be adequate, and Logan was firm about not involving the priest. He had never discussed the moral complexities of such matters with him, but Logan didn’t think it would be fair to place a priest in such a compromising position. He wasn’t altogether comfortable with the decision he had just made regarding the fugitive Louis, but now that he had made it, he would handle everything on his own.

  Since the printing of the identity papers would take three days, Logan next set about locating a safe house for Claude’s friend while he waited. It was five o’clock in the afternoon when he finally trudged up the stairs of Lise’s building on his last task of the day. He had a pocketful of messages to be radioed to London that evening.

  She looked down with some dismay at the sheaf of papers Logan held out to her once he had stepped inside her apartment.

  “I’m sorry,” he apologized. He knew the longer the radio was transmitting at one time, the greater the risk of detection.

  “It’s not that,” said Lise. “But there were detector vans out last night and I had to shut off. I still have a good deal from yesterday to send.”

  “Do you think they’re onto you?” asked Logan.

  “No. I think it was just a general sweep of the area.”

  “Well, I’ll stick around as lookout while you send.”

  “It’s still some time before I can transmit.”

  “Then why don’t we go have some dinner while we wait—I’m starved.”

  She smiled. “It’s a long time since I ate in a restaurant for pleasure, without it being for some kind of rendezvous.”

  “Let’s make a point of forgetting all about the underground.”

  “We can try,” she replied.

  They walked down the stairs and to a cafe about two blocks away. Since it was Friday, the place was quite busy, and Logan found himself enjoying the festive activity around him. By all appearances he and Lise were just two friends relaxing after a hard week, not a British agent and a Resistance radio operator. The concierge welcomed them warmly and did not even notice their sudden consternation when several German officers entered shortly afterward and sat down only two tables away.

  But they were innocents tonight and had no reason to fear the Germans. At least not for another hour. Besides, the presence of the officers only reinforced their determination to avoid mention of their underground existence.

  In the months since Logan had come to Paris, he and Lise had worked frequently together, spending countless hours over the wireless, not to mention a wide variety of other missions. Though Lise had softened her original attitude toward Logan considerably, not since that first evening in her apartment had she revealed any more of her heart to him. It was as though she was embarrassed at having exposed a chink in her armor, and now wanted to make up for that lapse by proving such incidents were rare.

  She was a complex woman, indeed, and Logan was intrigued by her.

  But if Lise had not opened up to Logan, it was not for his lack of trying. The very mystery surrounding this young Frenchwoman compelled him to probe deeper. He was curious to know what thoughts hovered behind those keenly sensitive dark eyes. What did she think about L’Escroc? What were her deeper motives for what she did? Had she ever been in love? What were her political leanings? What did she think about him?

  Intuitively Logan sensed that her perceptions would be wise and valuable, as well as interesting. If only she could be induced to express them more freely!

  When the meal was finished and the coffee served, Logan leaned contentedly back, sipping at the ersatz brew, not even noticing any longer its loathsome taste.

  “Tell me, Lise,” he began casually, “what did you do before the war?”

  “I was a teacher.”

  “A teacher. Hmm . . . What did you teach?”

  “A dozen eight- and nine-year-old girls.”

  “Really?”

  “Does that surprise you?”

  Logan set down his cup and gave the question a moment’s consideration before replying. “No,” he said finally, “not now that I think of it. In fact, I can just picture them sitting around you in the Place du Trocadéro, faces scrubbed and smiling, looking up at you from the grass in frank admiration.”

  “What makes you think they would admire me?”

  “Oh, I just know they would,” Logan replied. “You possess an air of security, and they must surely have hung on every word you said. I have a daughter of my own, and I know she would like you.”

  His statement raised an obvious flicker of surprise in her normally controlled features. Logan had not intended to mention his daughter and had done so almost unconsciously.

  “I guess it’s my turn to surprise you,” he said lightly.

  “Yes, I suppose you did,” she replied. “But come, it is time we got back.”

  They paid their bill, then walked out into the icy winter night. Only after walking a half block in silence did Lise attempt to return to the previous conversation.

  “I have never thought of you as a family man,” she said as they walked.

  “I suppose I’m not really much of one.”

  “Your daughter must be very proud of you—or at least she will be when she learns of your great courage here and all the people you have helped.”

  “She’s much too young to know what is going on. But I do hope that one day she’ll find out what I did in the war, and have some reason to be proud. The Lord only knows how little else there is for her to be proud of.”

  “She will, Michel,” said Lise with sincerity. “Someday she will look up at you with the same admiring eyes you have pictured on my students.”

  “I don’t know . . . What does a child care about Nazis and tyranny and war?” Logan paused, questioning for the first time the validity of his motives for coming to France.

  “And your wife?” Lise asked. “She is aware of what you do . . . she is proud?”

  Logan did not answer. Instead he sighed deeply.

  “I’m sorry . . . I only thought the wife of L’Escroc must be a proud woman.”

  “She knows nothing about L’Escroc,” Logan blurted out finally. “She doesn’t even know I’m in Paris.”

  “I see,” replied Lise. Now it was her turn to be silent. They did not know each other well enough yet for her to probe further. At length, she sought to return the conversation to the subject of Logan’s daughter, which she hoped would remove the heaviness that had descended upon them.

  “But your little girl . . . you seem to think that when she is older she will not be able to understand your absence from her now. But surely when you explain—”

  “Why should she? I’m not even sure I do.”

  Logan paused again. He had not given his family much thought in weeks. If he had hoped that by ignoring it, the problem would somehow resolve itself, he now found he was mistaken. He was just as confused about where everything stood as he was when he left Stonewycke—perhaps more so.

  “I’m probably kidding myself with all this about making her proud of me,” he finally added in frustration. “I think it’s just a lot easier to be here doing this than back there, that’s all. What’s there to be proud of in that?”

  “Does it take more courage to be a father than it does to be a soldier?” asked Lise pensively.

  She did not actually expect an answer. But Logan stopped, then reached out and touched her arm to stop her, too. She turned back and looked at him. She could not tell if he was angry, hurt, or reprimanded by her words. She had not meant them to elicit any of those responses. The question had been merely a philosophical one, but now she wondered if she’d been wise to voice it.

  A variety of reactions were surging through Logan, though anger was not one of them. His first instinct was to rebuff the whole notion. But he cou
ldn’t do that, for he had just admitted to its truth. Instead, he attempted to steer the conversation afield.

  “Where did you obtain all that wisdom?” he asked.

  Not one to probe where she was uninvited, Lise let him have his diversion. “No doubt from the Talmud,” she answered. “My father had no sons to whom he could pass on his great learning. But that hardly mattered to him. He was just as content to pour himself into his daughters. I did not attend the yeshiva, but I know as much Talmud as any man.”

  They fell silent for the remainder of the walk to Lise’s apartment. A light snow began to fall and they quickened their pace, arriving just at the time they were supposed to contact London. If it had been in either of their minds to ponder or further discuss any of the questions raised by their conversation, they were impeded by the sudden rush of successive events.

  34

  Caught

  The transmitting that evening began on a smooth note, despite the fact that a new girl was being broken in on the London end and their messages were received with agonizing delay.

  Logan paced back and forth in front of the window, pausing every now and then to peek out the blackout shade. In the frosty, darkened streets below little activity could be detected. The midnight curfew would begin in little more than an hour, and most of the cautious Parisians had retired indoors long before this, leaving only a handful of cyclists and pedestrians hurrying along to catch the last trains at eleven.

  Logan glanced at his watch. He had wanted to cut off communications much sooner than this, but Lise had been confident yesterday’s incident had not been aimed toward them. Besides, messages were piling up. Most of them were too urgent to wait. And with all the dangers that constantly beset them in their daily work, it seemed hardly necessary to allow something so minor to cause them to change their plans.

  “How much longer?” Logan called out to Lise, who was intent on her work.

  “I’m sorry it’s taking so long.”

  “I know it’s not your fault, but curfew is coming up.”

  Lise didn’t reply immediately, for a message was just then coming through. Logan turned his attention back to the window.

  Suddenly he snapped the shade closed. “Shut down! There’s a van!”

  Instantly Lise clicked off the machine, in the middle of the poor London trainee’s painstaking reply to one of their messages. She jumped up and joined Logan at the window. Turning out the light in the room, then peering out the merest crack in the shade, they could see the detector van at the far end of the street. Rounding the corner behind it came another.

  They watched, holding their breath. Had they only pinpointed the general whereabouts of the wireless sounds, or would the vans screech to a halt right in front of Lise’s building?

  Both vehicles stopped at the end of the street. Unless there was another wireless transmitting on this same block—an unlikely prospect—the Germans had only been able to zero in on the street. They would begin a house-to-house search.

  “Let’s get out of here!” said Logan, already grabbing their coats and quickly stuffing the London messages, which he hadn’t had a chance to read, into his pocket, while tossing the rest into the coal stove.

  “Michel, we can’t leave the radio.”

  Logan paused and looked at the precious instrument.

  Yes, it was indispensable to their work, and who could tell when London could send them a new one? But was it valuable enough to risk their lives over? He glanced out the window once more. As he had guessed, the German detection squad was now moving from building to building, and if they carried out their search with customary Nazi thoroughness, there might still be a few moments to attempt a rescue of the wireless.

  “Is there a back way out of here?” he asked after a momentary pause.

  “An old fire escape, up to the roof and down also.”

  Logan thought for a moment. “The roof might work,” he said, “but we might be trapped.” He paused, then went on. “No, we’d better chance it on the street. Get a box for the radio.”

  In less than two minutes the radio was packed into a cardboard box and the two were rushing out the door and down the hall to a large window. As he wrestled it open, the resulting squeak seemed ear-splitting in the quiet night, and Logan prayed the Nazis didn’t have enough manpower to patrol every back exit while their vans crept along the front of the street.

  The window opened onto the metal fire escape as Lise had indicated. Carefully they stepped out onto the metal grating, tiptoeing so as not to reveal their presence.

  Slowly—very slowly—they made their way down the two flights and into the littered, darkened alley, one end of which led to the street fronting Lise’s building on which the Germans were at this moment conducting their raid. Hugging the dirty brick wall, they crept in the opposite direction toward the next block.

  Just as they reached the end Logan stopped abruptly and jumped back against the dark recess of the wall, shoving Lise back also.

  “Gestapo,” he whispered.

  “We better give it up,” said Lise. “If we stow the wireless in one of these garbage bins, and pretend to be a couple in love and out late, we still might get past.”

  “Maybe we’ll have to,” replied Logan, “but I’m not quite ready to give up on the radio yet.”

  The next instant, however, gave Logan pause to reconsider his daring. The night-call of a prowling tom cat nearly sent him into Lise’s arms with panic. He grinned nervously at his reaction, and the twinkle in Lise’s eyes told him he had given her a rare moment of amusement. But the serious urgency of the moment did not allow them to revel long in humor. They were trapped in an alley, with the Gestapo watching the street on the one end, and the street swarming with Germans from the two vans on the other. Even if they did stash the radio, there appeared little hope they would get by without at least being detained for questioning, during which time the alley was bound to be turned inside out and the radio discovered.

  Suddenly Logan’s eyes lit up.

  He set the box on the ground, took out the wireless, and hid it behind a trash bin. Then he handed the empty carton to Lise. She gave him a puzzled look, but in the months of their association she had learned to accept his occasional odd behavior without question.

  “Hold that box open,” he said, “and stay right beside me.”

  Then he turned his attention to the old tom that had taken up a position on a ledge just above the trash bin, calmly observing all the strange goings-on below.

  “Come here, kitty,” said Logan in the loudest whisper he dared. “Come, kitty—I’ve got something nice for you.” He attempted to give his voice a sappy inviting sound, but the cat, scrawny and mangy and as hungry as being homeless during wartime could make him, made no move except to wash his face.

  “Come, Monsieur le matou,” joined in Lise. Her voice too was sweet, and this time the animal looked up with some interest.

  Slowly the cat stood, taking notice of the box for the first time, seemingly tempted by the unknown contents inside. Noiselessly he jumped onto a pile of trash nearby. Lise made an untimely jerk with the box and the animal froze. But before it could leap back to safety, Logan’s hand shot out and grabbed it by the tail. The tom hissed and spat, while its back leg clawed Logan’s wrist and its front paw whipped a vicious scratch across his cheek. But Logan did not let loose his grasp, and pulled the clawing, furious animal toward him, deposited him into the box, and snapped the lid quickly shut.

  “Now what?” asked Lise, handing Logan the box, which the caged animal was beating against from inside, letting out deep pained cries.

  “Now we can be on our way,” said Logan. “But please, look more distraught for your poor sick matou, your beloved pet who has taken ill.”

  With bravado Logan led her out of the alley and into the street, where they were promptly stopped by the vigilant Gestapo.

  “Arrêtez!” shouted one of the three standing nearby, who followed his command by running t
oward them, gun drawn.

  Logan and Lise stopped in their tracks.

  “What is in that box?” asked the man in very poor French.

  “In here?” replied Logan innocently. “Why, only a sick cat we are taking to the veterinarian. We would have waited till morning, but my wife could not sleep for all the poor beast’s awful cries.”

  “Open it up.”

  “Please, Monsieur Officer, it is nearly crazy since I put him into the box. I had the devil to pay just trapping it inside. You can see the scratches it gave me.” Logan pointed to the blood on his cheek and held out his wrist toward the man.

  “I said open it up—now!” repeated the man.

  Logan cracked the lid, and with a disgusted grunt the agent bent over to peer into the box. Seeing hope of freedom, the tom lurched toward the opening. Logan’s hand slipped from the lid with the animal’s movement, and the cat came screaming out of its prison into the German’s face. He leaped back with an angry curse, and the cat fled once more for the alley.

  “Quel dommage!” exclaimed Logan, partly in apology to the startled German, and partly as if bemoaning his own ill luck. “Now I must trap the animal all over again.”

  “Just see that you do it before curfew,” growled the angry agent, in an attempt to regain some of his lost dignity. “Fool animal-loving Frenchmen!” he muttered.

  “Merci,” said Logan with great sincerity. “You have a kind heart!”

  He and Lise turned back into the alley after the lost cat. Once back under the cloak of darkness, Logan retrieved the wireless, set it back into the box, then waited several minutes more to allow for a plausible cat search.

  “I hope these Germans are as gullible as customs officials on whom I used to see seamen pull this ruse,” said Logan.

  “You think they will let us stroll right by?”

  “Let’s hope so,” answered Logan. “But why don’t you go back the other way. They’ll question you but eventually let you go. No sense both of us running the risk of getting caught with this thing.”

  “No, Michel. We are in it together.”

  “But we still have to get the radio across town—and before midnight.”