Diana

by R. F Delderfield

  “I sometimes feel sorry for the poor devils,” she said, unexpectedly. “Most of them are fed up and far from home, and I can’t help suspecting that even the dimmest of them are beginning to doubt the final issue. I used to watch them mooching about in the early days, trying to take an interest in Napoleon’s tomb and the Arc de Triomphe but so obviously hoping the pretty girls would unbend!”

  “Haven’t any, by now?”

  “Precious few, although I think some would like to; some of them are rather handsome brutes, aren’t they? Here is where you drop off, Jan!”

  She stopped at a roundabout within sight of the Arc and opened her capacious handbag, glancing in the mirror and adding a few touches to her make-up. She was trying to appear casual but was not succeeding very well. She had difficulty in gauging the amount of lipstick to apply and as for me, my mouth was dry and the old, familiar beast began to claw at my belly. I had an address to go to, a rooming house in the Avenue de Medecin, on the left Bank, not far from the Pantheon but it depended wholly upon Raoul when we met again. I had strict orders to stay indoors until I was visited or summoned.

  I got out, collected my hand luggage and stood hovering by the car. She grinned and said:

  “It’s like those days you used to see me off on the Waterloo train, Jan! It never started soon enough, did it, and when it did, it always stopped again a few yards down the platform! Then we had to begin—‘Well …?’ all over again.”

  I admired her panache but I could not match it, much less improve upon it. I remembered too vividly the last time I had seen her off from Whinford Junction, the time she had never returned, and I wondered, dismally, if the same thing could happen again.

  “How long do you think it will be, Di?”

  “Not long, Jan, I won’t let it be. A day or so, perhaps. Certainly not more than a week.”

  We had not parked in the best of places and an impatient truck driver hooted behind us.

  “Kiss me, Jan!”

  I reached over the empty passenger seat and kissed the tip of her nose. Her eyes were clouded and she whipped her hand from the wheel and squeezed my arm.

  “Dear Jan! My Jan!” she said, and let in the clutch. I watched her shoot into the flow of traffic and stood shakily alongside the kerb, savouring a valediction that was a password by now. The first time she had ever used those words in parting had been sixteen years ago in a suburban train when she was a precocious schoolgirl of fifteen. As I picked up my grip and walked slowly along the tree-lined pavement towards the Etoile, it seemed to me only the day before yesterday.

  Chapter Six

  RAOUL CAME on the thirteenth day. It was the first time I had seen him in civilian clothes and they reduced him both in stature and dignity, so much so that I felt justified in complaining about my interminable isolation. He had shed his military brusqueness with his tunic and polished leggings, and when I told him I had been so bored that I had been on the point of committing the deadliest sin of an undercover man, that of putting my thoughts on paper, he only smiled wearily and said: “That would have been harmless, my friend, providing you lit the fire with your deathless prose each morning!”

  I asked eagerly after Diana, how she was making out with Yves, and whether he had shown any curiosity about her parting with Rance. This time his smile warmed a little.

  “I keep telling myself I was mad to allow myself to become involved in this adventure,” he said, “for how can a wife teach her husband to drive? Sometimes I think both you and she are using the Resistance as marriage brokers. Come now, you may be as tender and solicitous as you choose when you have accomplished what you were sent here to do!”

  Then he relented. “She is managing very well! Yves was curious about Rance but the story stood up. He is supposed to be in Italy with another woman and that pleases Yves. He probably derives a certain amount of pleasure from Diana’s presumed jealousy. It is a very curious marriage!”

  “You people make a cult of understatement,” I growled. “It’s a bloody outrageous marriage and all I care about is terminating it! When do I start?”

  “Tonight!” he said and twinkled at the effect he produced.

  “Tonight? But good God, man, what about my briefing? I don’t even know what I’m supposed to get from him before I knock him off!”

  He opened the door and glanced out on to the stairhead. I caught a fleeting glimpse of one of his henchmen, the tall, drooping one, lounging against the cast-iron bannister with a slung Sten gun on his shoulder. He shut the door again, locked it and took a long, fattish envelope from his inside pocket.

  “You will have until dusk to study this, Jan,” he said. “It is a list of possibles and the maximum we can expect. All you need to do is to persuade Yves that you understand it, so that you are not fobbed off by trivial or irrelevant papers. He will attempt that if you fail to impress him sufficiently. You might have to threaten him with death on the spot. You might even have to beat him, but be sparing, we want him in one piece and it might be very difficult to get his co-operation if he is injured. Later on, if things go as we plan, we might try and get him across the Channel. It has worked with one of the biggest Quislings in Holland who was worth all the trouble, they tell me. One can never be sure with that kind of man. On the other hand he might have unexpected reserves of courage. Many of us have. Perhaps you have yourself, Jan?” and he looked at me with one of his quizzical half-smiles.

  “I’m not frightened of Yves de Royden,” I said, “and given the advantage of surprise I haven’t much doubt that I can cope with anyone in the house who tries to help him. That’s not what bothers me, it’s getting Diana clear after we’ve done our part of the business.”

  “That won’t be so difficult,” he said, “not if you operate without damaging the ceilings! You’ll go out by Lysander and we have that arranged for tomorrow night!”

  I was elated by this information. I had pictured a much longer delay, a period of lying up in some dismal room like the one I occupied now and then a ticklish journey out of Paris to some God-forsaken coastal rendezvous with a submarine. If Raoul meant to smuggle us out by aircraft, we ought with luck to be back in England within forty-eight hours and imagination took flight with the Lysander. A few days making out reports and then leave and a rail warrant to Sennacharib! My spirits soared. It was a wonderful tonic after thirteen days in that airless attic under the tiles.

  “You had better give me the drill, Raoul,” I said. “I assume Diana already has hers.”

  He took a small tracing from his side pocket and crossed over to the window, beckoning to me to follow. The tracing was a detailed plan of de Royden’s Paris house, one section devoted to the ground floor and one to the first floor where Yves had his study-office.

  “As to getting in, that should be perfectly simple,” he said. “Diana will unlatch this garden door and you might even get up to the study without meeting any of the servants. She will try and arrange that for you!”

  I smiled at this and he asked the reason. I was tempted to tell him this side-door routine was familiar to us, that she had performed an almost exactly similar introduction on my behalf the night she was eighteen when I had entered Heronslea by the garden door and listened to the invited guests romping their way through the Gay Gordons downstairs, but he was not in the mood to relish confidences of that sort. I noticed that he was taut and having a struggle to conceal the fact in case he infected me.

  “Very well,” I said, “I’m inside and upstairs. What then?”

  “If you do meet any of the servants do not forget that you are Rance,” he said. “Only the butler, Harvé, knows Rance well. The others may have seen him half-a-dozen times when he called at the house but it is very unlikely they will challenge you. It is essential that you get upstairs without disturbing the household. You need at least half-an-hour closeted with Yves in the study or, if you are unlucky enough to encounter him elsewhere, you will have to take him into the study for that is where the safe is, and that is
the only place you are unlikely to be disturbed. We have briefed Diana very thoroughly on this point. She is going to do everything in her power to get him there and keep him there but one can never tell. After all, he is in his own home and can move wherever he likes!”

  “Does he work in his study in the evenings?”

  “Usually after dinner, but not always. You cannot count on it.”

  “Are there likely to be documents you need in that study?”

  “No, almost certainly not, but there is an index book, or so Diana believes, a book that contains the names of hundreds of sub-contractors and the products they supply. That would be extremely valuable to us. It could be the basis of a major sabotage campaign prior to the Allied invasion, or even before that. Diana says she would recognise the book. It is red and indexed in ivory. Bring that whatever happens.”

  “We then leave by the same door?”

  “Mon Dieu, no! By the front door, openly! To go out the way you came in would be to set everybody wondering. Yves never uses that door and you would have to circle the house to get to the car.”

  “Where is the car?”

  He referred to the map:

  “In the courtyard, here. It is his own car, a black Mercedes. Diana will drive you to the factories. You will sit in the back, with Yves on your left. The side he sits is important. He will be furthest from the concierge huts when you stop at the entrances to show your papers.”

  “Won’t his car be admitted without those formalities?”

  “Certainly not! Yves discharged a man only last week for failing to examine his identity card at the Vincennes gate. The fact that it is his car will probably keep the gatekeepers on their toes!”

  “We call at the Vincennes workshop first?”

  “That is the most likely. After that, Orly, and then the other three, but don’t worry about the routes, Diana has worked these out.”

  “Where will you be?”

  “Following, but not too closely. Don’t worry if you don’t see us. Pepe, my man outside, is a clever driver and can tail a car like an American speed cop. You probably won’t know we are around. When you have finished your round, Diana will bring you to my apartment. It is in a street near the Avenue des Capucins, not far from the Madeleine. Any questions?”

  “Several,” I said, although the assignment sounded far more straightforward than I had anticipated. “If I have to kill him, do I stay to make my own search of the safes, or run for it?”

  He thought hard for a moment. I could see that he had worried about this and had not fully made up his mind. Finally he said: “You run for it, my friend, but I shall despair of you if you are obliged to botch it as badly as you did the last job! We need Yves de Royden alive. If he is killed, it will complicate things very much, perhaps fatally for a good many of us! Anything else?”

  “Yes,” I said, “about this list you’ve given me. My studying it won’t help, I’m no technician and I know very little about what he makes inside those factories. Suppose I show it to him and demand his co-operation there and then? Would that be an idea?”

  He sucked in his cheeks and then blew them out again, smiling but ruefully. “You have a genius for confusing things, my friend. Let me put it this way. We are after the contents of those safes. You are bound to bring us papers of no importance at all, but we have someone who can do all the piecing together that is necessary, providing Yves doesn’t hoodwink you and leave top secret material behind. The index book is recognisable. For the rest, use your own judgment when the time comes, but we want him delivered to us alive! With him and his papers we may show a handsome profit on this plan of yours!”

  I had forgotten that it was my plan, or rather, Diana’s, and that Raoul had been a convert to it. One thing about it still worried me, however. How far, if at all, did Yves trust his wife at this moment? Was it possible that a man could condone his wife’s association with a man like Rance yet still accept her as an ally? Had he lived with Diana for years without discovering anything at all about her? Was it possible that he was playing a waiting game and hoping to pounce at a moment when he could strengthen his position with the Germans by handing over not only his wife, but a whole group of people like Raoul and myself?

  “Have you actually seen Diana in Yves’ presence since we killed Rance?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he said, “I have seen her once,” but volunteered no further comment.

  “Did it strike you then that he still had no suspicion she was working for us?”

  “My friend,” he said, “you will not be able to satisfy yourself as to that until you meet him. Ah yes, I remember, you have met him, but that was long ago, before he sold himself.”

  “To money?”

  “No, my friend, to machines. Today he thinks only in terms of machines. This makes him an excellent technician but a bad judge of the human heart.”

  I had to be content with this for he passed on to details of route, clothing, equipment, telling me what I should carry in my pockets and what I should not carry, that I must walk from the hideout to the Bois de Boulogne and set out before dusk, so as to reach there in time to make myself familiar with the approaches to the house. Diana’s zero hour was fixed at ten fifteen, that was the time she would make her final check on Yves and the garden door. He showed me how to get into the shrubbery bordering the house on the south side and finally insisted on taking another look at my automatic.

  “It is a child’s toy,” he said disparagingly, “but I am bound to admit it, it was more than enough for Rance.”

  “What did you do with Rance’s body?” I asked.

  “You are not gathering material for a detective novel,” he said, smiling.

  We had a drink from a flask he carried and presently he left. It was five o’clock and traffic was heavy in the street below. I sat down on the bed to make what I could of the schedule he had given me.

  The area where the de Roydens had their town house was a section that seemed to me to have an affinity with the rest of the capital. It stood aloof, like a shy, elegant woman caught in the eddies of an autumn sale. There are parts of London that try hard to shake sister suburbs out of their clothes but residential Paris has an aloofness all its own, and on this particular night, with not a leaf stirring and the dry heat of the day pulsing in the stones underfoot, it seemed the loneliest place on earth.

  It was about nine-thirty when I reached the gates and gave them a gentle push. They were not locked and I was thankful that an orchard-robber’s entrance was unnecessary. Diana had also been successful in dealing with the parking-area light, for that side of the house lay in deep shadow. I kept close to the laurels and worked my way towards the little court, guided by a glimmer of moonlight reflected by the polished wing of a car. It was the Mercedes Benz, a huge, sleek monster, trumpeting wealth and privilege, a car that would have warmed the heart of Diana’s mother when the family cruised around Whinmouth in a Rolls with a chauffeur at the wheel and the rear seats crowded with expensive-looking dogs.

  There was a subdued light in the entrance hall and its glow lit part of what appeared to be the dining room adjoining. I took a quick peep over a box hedge to see if anyone was moving about. No one was and the room was empty as far as I could see. It was furnished with heavy, period pieces and I studied it for a moment savouring the irony of the situation. All through my adolescence I had stood outside Diana’s private world looking in, a ragamuffin at a barrier, a boy with his nose pressed against a pie-shop, not wanting the pies but the girl to whom they were being served on a silver platter. Always I had to remain under cover, an eye cocked for keepers and dogs and my body braced for ignominious flight; now, incredibly, here I was again, subject to the same restrictions and tensions.

  I moved into the deep shadows where the shrubbery ran down close to the house and found the door marked on Raoul’s plan. Its glass panels were reflected by what I imagined to be the lights from the kitchen on my left and it could be reached by two steps approached by a
path beside a small glasshouse. I looked at the luminous dial of my watch and saw that it was ten minutes to ten, twenty-five minutes to zero hour. I backed into the shrubbery and found a place where I could keep the garden door under observation. Then I settled down to wait.

  I think those twenty-five minutes were the longest I have ever lived through. Apart from the faint glow of the kitchen lights, the house on this side was in darkness and in the shrubbery this darkness pressed down on me like a weight. I could smell freshly-clipped privet and it reminded me of a terraced street in the Brixton suburb where I had lived as a child before my parents died and I was sent down to Devon. The fragrance made me think of my mother for a moment, of the strained, anxious look she always had and of the rustle of her clothes when she came in to tuck me up at night.

  Down near the Etoile I could hear the faint purr of traffic and overhead an occasional rumble of thunder. I wondered if there would be a storm before morning and if so what effect it would have upon our plans. Then my thoughts were swung back on the door as I heard the scrape of a shoe and saw a shadow reflected behind the panels. I knew the shadow must be Diana’s and that she was making a final check on the door. It was the first glimpse I had had of her for almost a fortnight and it steadied me even though it was only there for a matter of seconds. Then it disappeared and a light went off and on nearer the front of the house. I guessed that this was a signal intended for me and when I looked at my watch again I saw that it was now exactly fifteen minutes past ten.

  I panicked for a moment, groping for my pistol and wiping my sweating hands on the lining of the jacket pockets. Then I relaxed and moved forward to the garden door.