Blue Noon

by Robert Ryan

Harry was aware of other customers looking at them. By now the regulars knew what they were, and some of them would be looking forward to the day of Liberation because of what they would do to men like Harry and Wolkers.

  Harry had something, however, that Wolkers didn’t. A chance of redemption. That night in the twenty-third apartment, King had sketched out a way back from his exile. One, he insisted, with zero risk to Harry, but the potential for great rewards: just tell us who is in Foch. The names of prisoners, of SOE and SIS agents, and we can take it from there. If we know who is in Foch and Fresnes and Saussaies, then we can warn others, we can even use it against the Germans. In return, there would be a clean slate for Harry, and more cash for the retirement fund.

  Harry was no fool. This time, he got it in writing, and had placed the letter in a safety deposit box at the Swiss Bank. The work produced one other bonus. It helped his conscience counter-balance some of the stunts he was pulling with Wolkers as the thefts became more and more tawdry, even by Harry’s standards. He consoled himself that it would all be over soon, when the first Willys Jeeps raced down the boulevards.

  ‘It’s a long way to Paris,’ said the Dutchman.

  ‘From where?’

  ‘From Normandy.’

  ‘What makes you think that was on my mind?’

  Wolkers laughed, showing stained teeth. ‘It’s on everybody’s mind. They’ve started emptying Fresnes and shipping prisoners east already. All the SOE people.’

  ‘Why? What use are they?’

  ‘Good question. Why don’t they just shoot them? Perfectly entitled to. Bargaining chips, perhaps.’

  ‘Possibly,’ said Harry, not convinced. It was more likely that the well-lubricated machinery of imprisonment and deportation and enslavement simply demanded more and more raw material.

  Wolkers accepted his coffee from the waiter and drank. ‘Anyway, we are all assuming the Allies are going to make it this far.’ He lowered his voice. ‘I mean, like I give a shit as long as we are well clear, eh?’ He winked. ‘But I don’t think they’ll be coming up the Champs Elysées anytime tomorrow, somehow.’

  Wolkers placed a newspaper on the table and Harry scanned the stories. Allies bottled up on the beachheads. Crack reinforcements heading north to Normandy. Americans swept into the sea. Huge Canadian losses. Storms in Channel forecast. ‘You believe that?’

  ‘I believe a third of it. It’s my policy. Official newspaper or underground rag, it’s normally thirty per cent true.’

  ‘Which thirty per cent?’

  Wolkers shrugged. ‘Storms in Channel?’ He pointed at the blue sky. ‘I doubt it. Americans swept into the sea. Hhmm. Even if they were they’d be back. Canadian losses. Well, maybe. Crack reinforcements head north? Yes, I believe that. There are some SS Panzer divisions down south which were regrouping, waiting for the new Panthers.’

  Harry was shocked by Wolkers’s loose tongue but even so he decided to add that information to his report to King later that day. Must be worth a bonus.

  ‘And when the SS arrive in Normandy,’ said Wolkers with grim satisfaction, ‘God help the people on the receiving end.’

  As the noise grew louder, Odile’s stomach contracted, making her feel sick. She could hear the massive tank transporters and the half-tracks churning the asphalt to black dust. This was a onetime passage. They wouldn’t be coming back, so what did they care about the road surface?

  Forty minutes had passed since she had heard the engines start and the roaring, grinding and clanking had grown steadily louder over that time. She had moved forward to the edge of the slope, just where the bracken-heavy valley walls began their descent. To her left was the first roadblock—three large trees interwoven with a dozen smaller ones.

  The motorcycle was a shock. The BMW suddenly appeared and the rider skidded his machine to a halt in front of the barrier of trunks. The man dismounted, looking around frantically, and raised a hand at the truck that was behind, which reluctantly slowed and also stopped. Third in the convoy was one of the Schwerer Panzerspähwagen armoured cars, then a half-track. The rest of the vehicles were hidden by the foliage, but she now had a sense of how far the column stretched. A long, long way.

  It’s too soon, Bob Maloubier’s voice said in her head. Wait until you have targets.

  On the opposite ridge of the valley she saw the figures moving, coming out of their cover. No Germans, apart from the rider, had exposed themselves yet.

  There was the flat crack of a Sten, and the motorcyclist sprinted for cover behind the truck. A grenade exploded, well away from any vehicle, harmlessly sending up chunks of dark earth.

  She looked over at Patrick, unsure what to do for a second, then leapt to her feet, firing her own Sten at the canvas sides of the truck, fighting to keep the gun on target. A heavy Bren opened up from her right, but she watched a whole magazine wasted on thin air before the gunner found his range.

  Across the valley, the Resistants had broken cover completely. They were standing in the open, totally exposed, pistols and Stens blazing, with no clear idea of what they were aiming at. Another wasted grenade, and she felt shrapnel snick at her skin. She shouted to Patrick, who was fifty metres away.

  ‘Stay back!’

  Ignoring her, he stepped forward with his gammon bomb. The tree to his left disintegrated in a shower of bark, and then the heavy machine-gun rounds flailed through his body, grotesquely convulsing him as his insides splattered red on the green leaves around him. She dropped and buried her face in the soil as his own grenade finished the job, leaving him a mess of smoking stumps.

  Odile changed the magazine on the Sten, struggled to her feet, stepped from cover and fired three short bursts.

  A German shell exploded among the trees across the road, splintering branches and sending a rain of steel and wooden slivers down into the men. There was less fire from her side now.

  She found herself walking backwards as the 20mm cannon of the armoured car started to fire, biting chunks out of the forest, all but obliterating men caught in its path. Now the German ground troops were disembarking from the trucks, setting up sheets of covering fire. The way it should be done, she thought. Organised, concentrated, effective.

  She turned and ran, aware that others were with her, leaping clumsily through the undergrowth as the fusillades increased, a lethal curtain of rifle, machine pistol, cannon and the rapid chatter of MG-42s.

  As she went she took a quick head count. Just four men left. Christ, they could have lost a dozen or more, and not one confirmed German casualty.

  The punch of a mortar round sent her splaying forward, her forehead grazed open by the bark of a stump as she slid along the earth. She struggled up and moved on. They had no range, this was just random probing and sure enough another detonation, but far to the right.

  The guns stopped, engines started again: they’d cleared the first roadblock already. Her group’s mission was to stop the 2nd SS Panzer Division reaching Normandy, giving the Allies time to break out of the beachhead. She had delayed it for nine and a half minutes.

  She made it to the slope at the far end of the plateau and slithered down to where a motley collection of vehicles waited to take the survivors away. Patrick’s father was there in front of his gazogène van, cap in hand, kneading it into a piece of shapeless fabric as she stumbled towards him, arms outstretched for balance. All she could think was: nine and a half minutes.

  She only hoped Bob Maloubier could do better up the road.

  Thirty

  Paris, July 1944

  HARRY’S WEEKLY DEBRIEFING RENDEZVOUS with King took place in an apartment to the south of the city. Its entrance was off a dank courtyard, always flooded with grey, soapy liquid of dubious provenance, like an overflow from a laundry or sewer, but King liked it because it had two entrances. Both were watched during their meetings. To add an extra layer of security, King insisted that Harry turn up in his SD uniform. Nosy neighbours were still, even now Liberation was promised, very unlikely to ris
k complaining about the comings and goings of a Sicherheitsdienst man.

  In the shabby living room with its basic furniture, Harry sat at a wobbly card table and laboriously encoded his findings for onward transmission from a place King assured him he ‘need not know about’. King sat smoking at the dining table, drinking whisky, a battered canvas holdall at his feet. Inside was coffee, cheese, hams, and other staples that Harry would use to bribe his way through Foch and the other SS buildings. Any surplus, he would sell or give to Tante Clara in lieu of rent. Food was so much more valuable than money these days.

  ‘You heard about Oradour?’ asked King, flicking ash on the floor. ‘Or are they keeping that from you?’

  Harry didn’t answer for a while, concentrating on ensuring there were no mistakes in the encryption. ‘Oradour?’ he finally asked.

  ‘Or Tulle?’

  Harry shook his head.

  ‘When the Resistance tried to slow down the Das Reich Panzer division …’

  ‘Tried to slow? I thought they had.’

  ‘Well, they succeeded by a week. At Oradour and Tulle, the Germans took their revenge. They hanged ninety-nine at Tulle. At Oradour they burned the women and children in the church and shot the men. Hundreds. You must be careful, Harry. They are cornered rats now.’

  Harry finished the last line of his report, asking for some sort of acknowledgement of his work from London. ‘Why would you worry about me? You tried to kill me once.’ He pointed at the mark on his neck. ‘Remember?’

  ‘Orders, Harry. And if I’d wanted you dead, you’d have been dead.’

  ‘And if I hadn’t been able to dance on my toes like a bleedin’ ballerina for six hours?’

  ‘You’re a survivor, Harry. I knew you’d make it.’

  ‘It was touch and go, King.’ He shuddered as he thought of those hours breathing through the material, the cords slicing into his neck as he rotated to keep his balance.

  King was irritated now, annoyed at being reminded how close he came to killing the goose that would one day lay the golden Gestapo eggs. He still wasn’t sure what had stayed his hand that night at the lynching, why he had given the man a slim chance of survival. Perhaps it was some prescience that, one day, he and Harry’s paths would cross to their mutual benefit.

  King stood up, raised himself to his full height and brushed back his hair. ‘Thing is, Harry, and it is very unprofessional of me to say so … I rather like you.’

  ‘Christ, what do you do to people you dislike? It’s a good job you had the gun that night in the apartment, King.’

  ‘No it isn’t. I could have persuaded you to work for us anyway, Harry. I know you are always open to offers, no matter who makes them. I’ve been doing this a long time. I went on an exchange to Germany in ’33, and I tell you it was obvious even then what was going on, where it would all lead. When I got back, I was debriefed, informally, by someone from the office, as it were. They were impressed with my observational skills. The idealism lasted eighteen months, perhaps two years after I began. Then, you realise that intelligence is a war of attrition and exploitation. Particularly the latter. Find the weakness, exploit it. Sometimes, you are a weak man, Harry. For the record, once more, I’m glad you got out of the noose. Case closed.’

  He took the coded report from Harry, and scooped up the one-time pad. ‘I’ll send and destroy as always, Harry.’

  ‘If it is all about exploitation, why, then, should I trust the men in London?’

  ‘Those were early days, Harry. Look, London is very grateful. Do you realise how valuable it is to know who has been in those cells? Whose radio is suspect? Whose word we can rely on? Do you know what that is worth?’

  Harry nodded and pointed at the bag on the floor: ‘I would guess a kilo of butter, two hams, some real coffee and maybe even some tea.’

  King laughed. ‘That’s about the size of it.’ He held up the paper. ‘I’ll make sure this is sent.’

  Harry rose, grabbed the bag of contraband and asked, ‘The other thing?’

  King shook his head. ‘Can’t help you there. She seems to have disappeared.’

  Harry nodded. King knew he didn’t believe him. Despite what Harry suspected, it was true. Odile was somewhere in the centre of France. More than that, King didn’t know.

  After Harry had left King screwed up his message and set fire to it in the ashtray, then set about re-drafting the message, in a terse, professional manner that would give credit where credit was due. To him. After all, he had a career, a future in the service, his eyes on the French or Austrian desks. Once Paris was liberated, as it surely would be, the chances were Harry would have no future at all.

  The Germans were in the forest. Odile had heard the snap of a tailgate, barked orders, the casual joshing and complaining of soldiers as they stretched their legs. Probably a patrol from the barracks at Laval.

  She moved back into the woods as silently as she could and headed for the camp, sweating in the collection of woollen rags that covered her. At least she had good boots now, taken off the dead parachutist with uncommonly small feet she had found, still tangled in his lines. He’d been dead a week or more, and animals had been at him, but she had ignored that. After she had levered the boots free she cut the man down and had buried him as best she could.

  After the Das Reich debacle, Odile had regrouped with the survivors and moved north, following the route of the Panzer convoy in many cases, witnessing their savage passage, to the area between Rennes and Le Mans. There, they been given new orders: Operation Sherwood. Round up all allied stragglers and group them into camps, hide in the forests and live off the land. We will come and find you, promised London. Yes, she thought, if the Germans didn’t first.

  She made good going over the hard ground as the foliage overhead thickened and the undergrowth thinned in the gloom. Far behind her she heard a single shot. There was no return fire. Perhaps it was just a trigger-happy trooper.

  Twenty minutes later she found the makeshift camp again, in the clearing on top of the hill, fifty men, mostly crouched or slumped down on the spongy earth, their equipment scattered messily around them. Sitting against a tree was Marshall, the American, part of a Jedburgh drop team that had become separated from each other. He was looking for his English and French co-jumpers to make up his triumvirate, but the chances of finding them were slim. Langan, the sandy-haired SOE man who was her superior, was one of the few on his feet, seemingly incapable of immobility. Most of the others were flight crew, shot down in the past two or three weeks and now hiding out in the forests, as instructed, until the Second Front overtook them.

  There were Americans, Canadians, South Africans, New Zealanders, Polish and British, with a smattering of maquis guards, a veritable League of Nations of evaders, and about as harmonious. Most of them had grown tired of this boy scouting and were becoming restive. Let them try it in winter, Odile thought, see how much they’d like it then.

  ‘Well?’ asked Langan.

  It wasn’t until she tried to speak that Odile realised how out of breath she was. Langan fetched her some water and she drank a mouthful, wetting a cloth and wiping her face with the rest. She had no illusions about how she looked. Her skin was criss-crossed with black, grimy lines, where soil and dirt had worked their way into her epidermis, her eyes were permanently red and sore from never daring to let go into a deep sleep, and her cheeks sunken from picking at food she wouldn’t serve to a dog.

  ‘There are Germans over to the west. We have to move east, to the camp at Fréteval.’

  This was one of the mustering areas suggested by MI9 and passed on to SOE.

  Langan nodded and indicated the men. ‘Some of them want to strike out on their own, take their chances.’

  Odile shrugged. She was too tired to argue. ‘Let them. Just don’t tell them where we are going.’

  She shuffled over to Marshall, while Langan spread the word that they were striking camp, closed her ears to the mumbles of discontent and slid down the tr
ee trunk to sit beside him. ‘Thanks for the gun.’ She offered the M3 machine pistol back.

  ‘Keep it.’ He tapped his sidearm. ‘I’ve got a spare.’

  She smiled her thanks, grateful not to have to go back to the unreliable Sten, which she had grown to hate. An argument was brewing on the far side of the clearing as dissident groups demanded conflicting courses of action.

  ‘You think they’re an ungrateful bunch, don’t you?’ he said, indicating the squabblers. ‘Cigarette?’

  She shook her head. ‘Not ungrateful. They’re just young and selfish.’

  ‘Young? How old are you?’

  ‘A hundred and five,’ she laughed.

  ‘You’re not thirty yet.’

  ‘Maybe not,’ she snapped. There was a time when people mistook her for a teenager. ‘But I think these war years are like cat or dog years. Each one is worth four or five normal twelve months. I’ll be an old woman when it’s over.’

  Langan came up, his mouth grim, the freckles standing out on his pale skin. ‘There’s a little group of Aussies buggering off, the rest are with us. How far is it?’

  ‘A day and a bit,’ Odile said, trying to keep the weariness out of her voice. ‘Mostly on woodland tracks. There is only one section of open fields and we cross that at night.’ As Langan left to supervise the mustering and send the Aussies on their way, she stood and held out a hand for Marshall and pulled him to his feet. ‘How is it?’

  He took a couple of steps and winced. ‘Better. But not perfect.’

  He had wrenched his ankle on landing, which was why he hadn’t been able to rendezvous with his Jedburgh group. She could tell he was putting a brave face on what he considered the failure of the mission—to co-ordinate behind-the-lines actions by the French maquis. He had trained for six months to achieve nothing.

  She slid her arm through her rucksack straps and flinched as the metal frame found its permanent groove on her spine. She despised the sack almost as much as the Sten. One of the young maquisards had that gun now, and seemed positively thrilled. Don’t hold the magazine, she warned the boy, it’ll jam. It’s what saved Harry, she almost added.