by Alan Furst
In silence Fedin and de Milja drove out of Calais on a little country road, the E2, headed for the village of Aire, where the Lys River met the Calais canal. They were to meet with a man called Martagne— formerly the director of the port of Calais, now an assistant to a German naval officer—at his grandfather’s house in the village.
A few miles down the E2, a camouflage-painted Wehrmacht armored car blocked the road. A soldier with a machine pistol slung over his shoulder held up a hand. “Out of the car,” he said.
As Fedin moved to open the door he asked quietly, “Who are they?”
“Feldengendarmerie,” de Milja said. “Field police units. It means they’re starting to secure the staging areas for the invasion.” He wondered where Fedin’s Lüger was. Normally he hid it in the springs beneath the driver’s seat.
“Papers, please.”
They handed them over.
“Ruzicki,” he said to de Milja. “You’re Polish?”
“French citizen.”
“Your work pass runs only to November, you know.”
“Yes. I know. I’m getting it renewed.”
He glanced at Fedin’s papers, then gestured for them to open the back of the truck. He studied the crates of Vienna sausage and sardines, the name of the distributor stenciled on the rough wood. “Unload it,” he said.
“All of it?”
“You heard me.”
He lit a cigarette as they worked, and another soldier joined him, watching them haul the crates out and stack them on the warm tarred gravel of the road. “Did I see this truck up in Le Touquet last week?” the second soldier asked.
“Might have,” de Milja said. “Sometimes we go up there.”
“Where do you go there?”
“Oh, Sainte Cecile’s—you know, the orphanage.”
“French orphans eat Vienna sausage?”
“For the sisters, I think. The nuns.”
When they were done they stood aside. The first soldier slid a bayonet out of a case on his belt and neatly popped a slat loose from a crate of sardines. He speared one of the tins, held it away from his uniform to avoid the dripping oil, sniffed it, then flung it away, cleaning his bayonet on the weeds beside the road.
“Load it up,” he said.
While they worked, the soldier wandered around the van. Something displeased him, something wasn’t right. He opened the passenger-side door, squatted on the road, stared into the cab. De Milja sensed he was a moment away from putting his hand beneath the front seat and finding Fedin’s pistol.
“Do you know, sir, we took an extra crate of sausage from the storeroom? There’s one more than we’re supposed to have.”
The soldier stood and walked to the back of the truck. His face was dark with anger. “What does that mean? Why do you tell me that?”
De Milja was completely flustered. “Why, ah, I don’t know, I didn’t mean . . .”
His voice hung in the air, the soldier leaned close, saw the fear in his eyes. “You do not offer bribes to German soldiers,” he said very softly. “It is something you do not do.”
“Of course, I know, I didn’t—” de Milja sputtered.
The soldier jerked his head toward the road: it meant get moving. Fedin grabbed the last two crates, carried them into the front seat with him. When he tried to start the car it stalled. The engine caught, Fedin made a grinding shift, the car lurched forward, almost stalled again. The soldier turned away from them, clasped his hands behind his back and stared down the road in the direction they’d come from.
4 September, 9:26 p.m.
In the Funkabwehr bureau on the boulevard Suchet, at the end of the hall where Sturmbannführer Grahnweis’ personal office was located, there was a mood of great anticipation. Grahnweis was cool and businesslike in the summer heat. He could be seen through the open door doing a little late paperwork; studying reports, sometimes writing a comment in the margin. Work went on, he seemed to suggest, the glory and the drudge in turn, such was life.
A few senior officers had found it necessary to be in the Funkabwehr office that night, chatting in low voices with attentive junior staff, who busied themselves with the thousand little jobs that must be done every day in a military office. The devil is in the details, the Germans say.
Klaus was hunting for the carnet file, Helmut needed a look at the July pay vouchers for the Strasbourg station, Walter asked Helmut if the Lyons relay tower plan was still locked up in committee in Berlin. Heinrich, at 9:27, nodded sharply to himself, held the headphones tightly to his ears for a moment to make absolutely sure, then dialed a single digit on his telephone. The crowd in the Funkabwehr office knew immediately that what had been a strong possibility was now confirmed: Grahnweis had caught a spy.
But the Sturmbannführer let the receiver rest on its cradle. He finished the final paragraph of his report, initialed the lower corner, and then answered the phone. The frequency was the same as last night, Heinrich reported. Grahnweis thanked him, turned on his receiver, fiddled with the dial until the transmitted numbers came through crisp and clear. Several of the senior officers and a few people on his own staff drifted into the large office, close enough to Grahnweis’ desk to hear what went on.
The two Loewe-Opta radio trucks had been in position since early evening, strategically placed on either side of the Montmartre hill. Grahnweis gave them a few minutes to get a fix on the transmission, then called Truck Number One to come in on his communications
radio.
“I can confirm the forty-nine meters—are you getting it?”
“We hear him, but the direction is a little blurred. The way we’re receiving, he’s bouncing between eighteen and twenty-three degrees.”
“I see.” Grahnweis studied his city map for a moment. “Then go up to the rue Caulaincourt, try for a reading there and call me back.”
From the second truck, on the boulevard Barbès side of Montmartre, the news was better. Their signal was clear, just about precisely on 178.4 degrees. Grahnweis made certain the celluloid disc was perfectly centered, then ran the silk thread out along the degree line. “Could be in Sacré-Coeur,” he said. “Perhaps in the belfry. I wonder— have they also a hunchback, like Notre-Dame?”
The first RDF truck came over the radio a few minutes later. “Not much better, Herr Sturmbannführer. Maybe it’s the elevation—but something’s deflecting here, something’s hurting the reception.”
“But not in London, we hope.”
There was a pause as the radio technician tried to decide how to answer this. Grahnweis saved him the trouble. “We’re doing just fine. Stay where you are, I’ll be back in a moment.”
The technician said Yes sir briskly and signed off in a hurry. This working for a legend required a steady nerve.
Grahnweis reached into his desk drawer and retrieved a special map of Paris, in book form, printed on heavy paper, showing every street, every alley, the number of every building. He then dialed his intercom and instructed his chief clerk to telephone the northern electrical power substation. Moments later he was talking to the French night supervisor, asking to be connected with the office of Leftenant Schillich.
As he waited, he could hear the deep hum of the station’s giant turbines. Leftenant Schillich, he thought to himself, you had best be available for this call, and don’t make a fool of Grahnweis.
“Leftenant Schillich,” said a youthful voice.
Grahnweis explained what he needed, starting at the rue Caulaincourt side of Montmartre and working along a certain line toward the east, street by street. Then he turned up the volume on his receiver and silently begged the W/T operator to keep on transmitting.
“Starting at Caulaincourt, now,” Schillich announced.
From the speaker: 562 511
“Next on the list is the avenue Junot, from number thirty to the end.” Grahnweis’ audience was hushed and anticipatory, sensing that the moment of the kill was near. At the leftenant’s direction, the substation engineers wor
ked their way east, across the grid of steep, crooked streets that made up the old village high above Paris.
“Next we have,” said Schillich, following his own edition of Grahnweis’ map, “the rue Lepic.”
Grahnweis found the street and marked it with his index finger.
From the receiver: 335.
Then 428.
Then silence.
In the Hôtel Bretagne, the room went dark. Janina’s hand froze on the dead key and she tore the earphones from her head. But there was nothing, other than the evening hush of an occupied city, for her to hear. For a few seconds she sat there, then, before she could do anything, the lights came on, the red filaments in her radio tubes glowed back to life.
It was just a brief outage, she realized, some problem with the electricity.
A few miles south of the roadblock, Fedin pulled off the E2 and drove a little way down a farmer’s dirt path. There was no need to discuss what had to be done—he simply took the weapon from beneath the seat and walked out into the strip of forest that separated two fields. Theoretically they would note where it had been dumped and, some day, return to collect it.
De Milja smoked pensively and stared out over the countryside. The peasants, working in the last light of the late summer dusk, were harvesting wheat with horse-drawn mowing machines. There was a haze of dust in the air, cicadas whirred madly, the mowing machines swayed as they cut through the ripe grain. He got out of the truck to stretch his legs and felt a slight vibration in the ground. For a moment, there was no sound. Then there was just the beginning of it, thunder in the distance. Fedin returned, stood by the side of the truck, and squinted up into the darkening sky.
The ground trembled, then shook. The sound swelled, then seemed to explode the air, growing louder and louder until de Milja could feel the waves of it hammering against his heart. In self-defense he knelt down, then tried to count the dark shapes that moved slowly across the sky, returning from London, or Liverpool. Perhaps fifty Heinkel-IIIs and maybe the same number of Ju-88s, the best of the German bombers, and their escort, possibly thirty Messerschmitt-110s.
He had seen it in Warsaw, how the fronts of the buildings slid into the street in a cloud of dust, the silhouette of a fireman on a roof— arms and legs thrown wide like a gingerbread man by the blast, white fire and blue fire, the young woman a block away from harm who sits down and dies without a mark on her. He knew the Germans for the fine engineers they were.
Above him, one of the bombers trailed a delicate strand of white smoke from beneath its wing. Another flew very low and far behind the formation, de Milja could hear its engine; ignition, then silence, ignition, silence. It seemed restless; a wing dipped, the nose of the plane lowered, then righted itself. Perhaps the plane and the pilot were both damaged, de Milja thought. But, two planes among a hundred—only two planes. Others in the sea, maybe. One in poor Mrs. Brown’s kitchen. But most of the bombers would be back at it the following day. Even fire hoses wore out eventually, de Milja knew, the white, frayed threads visible through the broken rubber.
The sound faded slowly to the south, toward the Luftwaffe base near Merville. The cicadas started up again, the huge horses plodded along and the mowers creaked as they rolled through the wheat. A Norman peasant walked beside his plow horse—walked slowly, head down, like an old man—one hand riding on the horse’s shoulder.
It worked. Once you determined the street by turning off the electricity until the transmission stopped, your sound trucks could identify the building by strength of signal. They radioed back to Grahnweis: Hôtel Bretagne. The hunting party was hastily organized; two Gestapo detectives—thick-bodied types—a few senior officers with their side arms, and Walter and Helmut, who squeezed into the second car, encouraged by Grahnweis’ wink. The two cars sped through the Paris night, arriving at the rue Lepic in good time—the W/T operator was still at it, according to the technicians in the Loewe-Opta trucks.
The actual entry into the hotel was restricted to the two detectives, along with two of the senior officers who could not be told no, as well as Walter—representing Grahnweis’ faithful staff—and Grahnweis himself.
The night clerk, an old man with a white eye, trembled with fear when the Gestapo uniforms swept through the door. He showed them the registration book; they picked out, immediately, the woman “Marie Ladoux,” who for ten days had occupied a top-floor room. Rented for her by a cousin, the man said, a week before she arrived. “She doesn’t sleep here at night,” he confided to one of the detectives. “God only knows where she goes.”
They acknowledged later, quietly, among themselves, that she had been very brave. The young French girl or English girl or whoever she was—really very brave. When they kicked the door open she simply turned and stared at them as though they’d been impolite, her hand poised on the telegraph key. “Strange she had no watchers,” Walter said later to the others in the Funkabwehr office on the boulevard Suchet.
“A patched-together business, I think,” Helmut said. “Extemporized.” A sad little smile, and the shrug that went with it: the British were losing now, knocked silly by German bombs, waiting for the blow to fall as a tough, predatory army waited on the chalk cliffs at Boulogne. The same cliffs where Napoleon’s Grande Armée had waited. And waited. But this wasn’t Napoleon. And the junior officers quite properly read desperation in the girl’s mission—one could say sacrifice. Clearly nobody had expected her to survive for very long.
She shocked them, though. The rules of the game specified that the W/T operator give up, accept interrogation, accept the consequences of spying, which hadn’t changed in a hundred years—the courtyard, the blindfold. But though she did not struggle when they took her, they got her only as far as the backseat of the Gestapo Mercedes, securely handcuffed, with a detective on either side. Yet she managed to do what she had to do; they heard the crunch of bitten glass and a few seconds later her head fell over like a broken doll and that was the end of “Marie Ladoux.”
Grahnweis stayed behind with one of the senior officers to examine the real prize—the clandestine radio. Which turned out to be the good old Mark XV transceiver—actually its first cousin, the Paraset—but, Grahnweis thought, standard MI-6 equipment. He nodded to himself with satisfaction and relief. The British scientists made him nervous— sometimes great bumblers, sometimes not. He feared that under pressure of war they might outperform themselves and conjure up some diabolical apparatus that would make his life a hell. But, so far, nothing like that, as far as he could tell, in the Hôtel Bretagne.
Standard stuff. Two transmission frequencies—from 3.3 to 4.5 megacycles and from 4.5 to 7.6 megacycles. Four to five watts of power—enough to get to London. Three American metal tubes, a 6V6 crystal-controlled pilot, cadmium steel box, silver finish. A calibration curve, to assist the operator, was mounted in the upper-left-hand corner, essentially a graph chart with a diagonal line. Grahnweis took a soft leather tool pouch from the pocket of his uniform jacket and selected a screwdriver for the task of getting behind the control panel. To the senior officer looking over his shoulder he said, “Maybe something new inside.”
There was.
Grahnweis left the hotel by the Saint-Rustique side of the building; meanwhile, the senior officer exited on the rue Lepic—this parting company a mysterious event that nobody ever really explained. For a time it wasn’t clear that Grahnweis was ever going to be found, but, with persistence and painstaking attention to detail, he was. Crown on the second bicuspid molar, fillings in upper and lower canines, a chipped incisor. Yes, that was Grahnweis, if a tattered charcoal log under a jumble of brick and tile could be called any name at all.
The junior officers of the Funkabwehr were extremely put out by this turn of events. It was, at its heart, rude. And rudeness of this sort they would never have ascribed to the British character. Had they known, of course, that it was the Poles who’d sent their leader from the room they would have thrown up their hands in angry recognition. What coul
d you expect? But the British were different: Aryan, northern, civilized, and blessed with certain German virtues—honor in friendship, and love of learning.
The British were, in fact, perhaps a little worse than the Poles, but the Germans wouldn’t come to understand that for some time. “Personally,” said Heinrich, “it is the very sort of thing I find I cannot forgive.”
7 September, 2:30 p.m.
Genya Beilis seated herself by a window in the Café Trois Reines, next to the St. Pierre cemetery in Montmartre. She was a vision, even in the end-of-summer heat. A little white hat with a bow, set just to one side of her head, a little white suit, three dashes of Guerlain. Not the usual for this neighborhood, but who knew what business royalty might have up here—maybe a call on a poor relative, or a bouquet for a former lover, who somehow wound up in the local boneyard. Whatever the truth, she shone, and her tea was served with every courtesy, and every drop still in the cup.
Very damn inspiring, the way she walked. Maybe you didn’t believe in heaven but you certainly could believe in that. Chin and shoulders elevated, back like fine steel, the emphatic ring of high heels on the tile floor of a café. In the cabinet de toilette, Madame whipped off a lambskin glove and slipped a brown envelope behind a radiator. Then she returned to her tea.
A few blocks away, a number of Gestapo gentlemen read newspapers in cars and doorways all the livelong day as the mess in the rue Lepic was cleaned up, but that was hopeless and they knew it. Nobody was going to be coming around to see what happened to X. The abrupt halt in transmission, the absence of coded start-up signals— missent call sign, incorrect date—and the London people would know their network communication had been cut. One sent the newspaper readers out to the cars and doorways, but one knew better.
The lovely lady in white returned to the quartier of the Café Trois Reines on two occasions, but she found no chalk mark on M. Laval’s gravestone and the letter in the toilette mailbox went uncollected, so that, in the end, the latest news on canals and barges in the Channel ports went unread.
