by Scott, Manda
Two minutes later, Céline joins her in the ladies’ convenience, dressed as a housemaid.
‘It’s him?’
‘Without question.’
Céline allows herself a small sigh of happiness. She says, ‘I’ll let René know. If Kramme leaves before you get down again, I’ll follow and send Daniel back for you.’
This is how they planned it: every eventuality covered. The spark of Céline’s eyes is electric. ‘He will die, Sophie, I swear it.’
They part. Sophie heads back out into the foyer and paces a while, smoking, as if lost in thought.
René arrives before she lights her second cigarette. He is her bag man in the truest sense of the word. He takes a room on the second floor and she follows him up, scandalizing the concierge. Inside, she strips down to her underwear and dresses again from the suitcase he has brought, in the maroon dress and ridiculous heels she wore to the Canadian ambassador’s soirée. A new wig replaces the grey one and she becomes a brassy blonde with a surfeit of blusher and bright, scarlet lips.
Like this, she really is the lamb staked out for the taking. The Italian jacket turns inside out, and is black now, with a high collar. She takes her scarf – even now, she is never without it – but this time she flaunts it, openly.
Last in the suitcase he hauled up the stairs for her is an English-made handbag, reconfigured by the CIA and sold to the agencies of Europe. JJ has three, of which this is his finest. It contains a tiny camera, not much bigger than a couple of boxes of cigarettes taped together. A fish-eye lens concealed amidst decorative beading allows it to take in half a room. Reverse pressure on the bag’s opening catch triggers the shutter.
René hands her a shoulder holster. She straps it on and transfers her Hi-Power from her discarded handbag; she has not brought JJ’s Colt, lovely though it is – she needs a gun that fits her hand without her having to think about it. Two spare magazines fit into inner pockets of her jacket. She slides the jacket on and turns on the spot, raising her arms.
‘Does it show, the gun?’
‘Only if you know what you’re looking for.’
‘Which is the point.’
‘Which is the point.’ René is endlessly calm. He, too, has changed, swapped his red sweater for a grey one, and slid a cap on his head. He lights a cigarette and lets it droop from the side of his mouth. Like this, he is Maquis again. If he is Kramme’s agent, he is nerveless.
She thinks it cannot be him, but then she thinks the same about Daniel and JJ. Curious, she says, ‘Are you never afraid?’
‘If someone was about to take a hammer to my fingers, I might be. Anything less than that …?’ He shrugs. ‘What is there to worry about?’
She has many answers, and nothing is served by dwelling on any of them. One last look in the mirror: she is utterly unlike the woman who walked in. The concierge will not know her, nor the men in the bar. Maximilian Kramme certainly will, but that, too, is the point.
‘Make him think he is one step ahead of us,’ Laurence said in their hours of planning. ‘His arrogance will lure him in, and he will be less inclined to check for traps.’ She, who knows Kramme best, did not disagree then, nor does she now.
René flashes her a high-voltage grin and she feels her own mouth dry.
‘Happy?’ he asks.
‘Very. Go now. I’ll wait six minutes and follow.’
He grips her arm. ‘See you at the farm.’
Sophie has never been blonde before, not like this, brazen. It’s an interesting experiment. Shouldering her way through the lounge door a second time, she gives her overcoat and beret to the first man who offers, and accepts a drink from the second.
Her quarry has not moved from his seat with his back to her. She takes her white wine and moves along the bar, trailing men’s attention. Her handbag rests on the counter beside her. She watches Kramme’s reflection and feels in her marrow the moment when he notices her, the fractional break before that awareness shifts to recognition, the shock that follows it.
If the Diem feint is accurate in any respect, he must have known she was coming, but still, he has not been this close to Sophie since he proposed marriage and it would appear that she affects him still.
She sneezes, and fumbles in her bag for a tissue. Blowing her nose causes her to sneeze again. With a soft, ‘Merde!’ she closes the bag and, quite soon afterwards, abandons her wine and her entourage and heads out of the bar.
Outside, it is snowing again: a slow, soft, steady fall that will leave ten centimetres on the roads before morning. Her car is two blocks away and the pavement is treacherous underfoot. Walking on packed snow in these heels is far from effortless. She takes small steps, carefully, hands out for balance. René is off to her right. The red glow of his cigarette is full stop and question mark both. JJ should be behind, Daniel in front with René and Céline fanning out to the sides: she has the full team, the ultimate backup. The door to the Hôtel de Ville opens and closes.
She hears soft footsteps behind her. The gap between her shoulder blades feels naked. She turns right and crosses a road, left, left again, and back onto the street one block up. She stops in a doorway to light her cigarette, draws on it three times, glances back. Kramme is stooped, shuffling. He is wearing a hat. If she were going only on outline and gait, she wouldn’t know him. Her spine feels ever colder.
Her car is the almost-new DS that brought her up the mountain on her return from Berlin; one of JJ’s, borrowed from his pool. It is cold and will not start. She can’t pump the throttle for fear of flooding it, nor turn the key too often for fear of flattening the battery. She puts clutch and accelerator to the floor and mouths a brief prayer of a kind she has not spoken in many years. Holy Mary, Mother of—
The ignition fires.
She hauls off the wig, discards the heels for pumps and pulls away from the kerb. The fan blows frigid air at her knees and ankles and she loves it. She loves everything.
The Fayette farmhouse has not changed in any important way since she first dropped out of the sky onto its doorstep in 1944. Sophie picks out the small alterations: there is central heating in the downstairs rooms and a toilet with a handbasin has been added at the back, accessed by a short passageway from a door at the rear of the kitchen. The cattle are the great-granddaughters of those that gave milk on the morning of Sophie’s first breakfast. They are in the biggest of the barns now, ahead of her as she drives in, with the cattle at ground level and hay in the upper storey. The barn to her left, opposite the house, is a machinery store.
Tonight, yard, house and barns are newly clad in snow. A torch flickers to her right. She pulls up next to it and rolls down her window. Daniel, who was ahead of her, appears out of the darkness. From somewhere hidden, he has brought his wartime Sten and is wearing it across his back. With this, he is Maquis again, younger, oddly vulnerable. Cradled across his forearms he carries his father’s pre-war shotgun. Patrick is not the only one with a call on vengeance.
She says, ‘Seven minutes behind.’ She has stopped twice and looked back down the road to the headlights grinding slowly up the hairpin bends behind her. Three sets, a steady half-kilometre apart. ‘JJ’s a minute back with René and Céline two minutes behind him.’
‘We’re on, then.’ Daniel jerks his head to their right, opposite the farmhouse, angles the torch in the same direction. ‘If you park your car by the barn, he’ll see it when he draws in.’
She eases the DS up to the wall of the barn, leaving a space in front, in case someone needs it for cover. A dozen paces to her right, the main doors of the barn lie ajar ahead of her with a small entrance door set another three metres further along.
She steps out and makes clear tracks in the snow, through to the gap in the main doors. Daniel rolls shut the heavy oak behind her, and clicks on the light.
Inside is Daniel’s car and a host of other farm machinery, and Patrick, leaning on the wall. His eyes catch the inadequate light of the wartime bulb and reflect it back to her in
all its drabness. His arms hang loose by his sides and from his left hand, the better hand, hangs a brand new Colt automatic. Tension rolls from him, but it’s living tension, such as she has not felt from him since the day of Kramme’s wedding.
Sophie checks her watch. ‘He’ll be here in five minutes. We have time for our eyes to adjust to the dark again.’
And for you to change. Her suitcase is behind him, already open. With relief, she discards the dress and dons instead the loose slacks and cotton shirt that she has kept since the mountains and that feel like a second skin. She lifts her scarf and wraps it round her neck, inside her shirt. Now she, too, is wholly Maquis.
‘Thank you,’ she says, and Patrick nods.
Some moments later, as if he has had to find the words, blow off the dust, stitch them together: You might want to go into the house. It’s safer there.
She shakes her head. ‘You’ll need backup until the others get here.’
I have Daniel and Laurence.
If we can trust Daniel. Which perhaps we cannot. ‘Where is Laurence?’
In the kitchen, by the back door. He and JJ installed a set of floodlights. He’ll switch them on if we need to be able to see.
JJ’s a hard, difficult man, who makes no effort to be good, or kind, or reasonable, except to her and the others from the Maquis, for whom no problem is too hard, no request denied. She can’t imagine him a traitor any more than Daniel or René. She looks around.
A small jockey door to the right of the main entrance has been left invitingly ajar. It is in a direct line to Patrick, so that the door itself will cover him from anyone coming in, until they have stepped fully through. The range is less than twenty metres. Nobody could miss that close and Daniel is there with both barrels of a shotgun that could stop a charging boar. Still …
‘I’m not leaving you now.’
Sophie—
‘I won’t get in the way. I won’t make myself a target. But I am not leaving you now.’
Theirs has not always been an easy marriage, but from the earliest days they promised honesty, and it has survived all the vicissitudes of their life so far. His eyes search her face. She is, she imagines, as pale as he is.
Go to the other side of the car. Crouch down. Don’t get involved unless you must.
Unless he is dead. This could happen. She pushes the thought aside.
‘Be careful,’ she says.
His right hand reaches to grip her shoulder. And you.
She blinks, hard. Part blind, she feels her way past Daniel’s car and then a rusting horse-drawn cart that has been supplanted by a tractor.
Daniel clicks off the light. With stiff fingers, Sophie eases her Hi-Power from her shoulder holster. In the cold, still night, a single car approaches.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
THE FAYETTE FARMHOUSE
6–7 March 1957
LAURENCE HEARS SOPHIE’S car first. He knows the particular grind and grumble of the DS engine, listens as it rolls into the barn and falls silent.
Four days of waiting, and the end is here. He stands in the kitchen, by the door onto the yard, with his hand on the newly installed light switch that controls the floodlights. Marianne Fayette is upstairs in the farmhouse, lying on the floor beneath her bed. She thinks this undignified but Patrick and Daniel between them have charmed her into the understanding that she can recover her dignity in the morning if she is alive and that all the dignity in the world will not serve her if she catches a stray round in the cross-fire.
There will be cross-fire. The first, and most open plan assumes not; this plan assumes a single surgical bullet, a quick kill and the real effort put into disposing of the body.
The second plan assumes that the first plan will have been betrayed, in which case there will be a quite astonishing amount of cross-fire, but far fewer people know of this.
So everyone waits, guns out, safeties off, holding still and silent for the last few moments of peace before all hell descends and Laurence, who has spent altogether too much time behind a desk of late, finds that he is not sorry it has come to this, only that it has taken so long.
Kramme’s car is bigger than Sophie’s, and throatier: German. It rounds the corner and crunches to a halt in the new snow. There are no lights here, not even stars. When his headlights go out, Maximilian Kramme will be alone in the dark in a strange place. He, Laurence, would reverse out and drive away, but then he would have taken the plane to Washington in the first place. In this, as in so many things, he is the opposite of Kramme, of Patrick, of Sophie, of Céline.
The car door closes. To all intents and purposes, Kramme is boxed in, with nowhere to go, and somewhere out there in the snow and the dark is Diem, who will try to save him.
Laurence eases back the hammer on his Colt and lets the kitchen door drift open one last inch.
Let’s go.
Sophie hears Kramme’s car door close. The pressure of waiting is barely supportable. Her fingers are bloodless sticks. Her throat is a straw, whistling. She can see almost nothing, but she doesn’t need to; she can feel Patrick, his stillness, his rage. A dozen slow, snow-soft steps and the big barn door shudders as Kramme tests the weight of it, the effort it will take to pull back. The part-open side door does not move: too obvious a trap.
And yet … the oak is not so thick. At this distance, a Colt could fire through and still kill whoever is on the other side.
Shoot now. Now. Forget the rest, we can sort it later, just kill Kramme now. Now!
But Patrick won’t do that. Whatever else is at stake, his decency won’t let him shoot a man blind. He will want Kramme to see his face as he dies. She raises her own gun and—
Merde.
A spit, nothing loud, but she knows the sound of suppressed gunfire as she knows the sound of her own voice and Patrick’s gun was not silenced.
A body falls, hard, against the wall and then the floor: this sound, too, she knows.
‘Patrick!’ She runs, crouched low. Outside, more cars accelerate into the yard. Brakes whine. Boots run on snow. Sophie gives thanks for JJ, René, Céline.
A voice shouts, ‘Here! Kramme, here!’
The voice is not French, but she knows it. Fuck them – they want to play it like this, they’re welcome. Raising her gun, she fires an entire magazine through the jockey door without care for who she might hit.
Following her lead, Daniel blasts his shotgun at the thin wood, both barrels, one after the other. A man cries out, but it’s not a death scream: a pellet or two somewhere inconvenient, nothing more, certainly not a shattered liver, a ruptured gut, the long, slow death of which she has dreamed.
‘Daniel, go!’ Cursing, Daniel throws the shotgun into a pile of straw, drags his Sten over his head, kicks open the jockey door and barrels out, firing.
She shouts, ‘Lights! Laurence, we need lights!’
A slight hiss, a fizz in the night and there is light. Light! Liquid silver floods under the door, through the cracks at the hinges, dazzlingly bright.
‘Patrick?’ He lies on his side between the barn wall and Daniel’s car. She takes hold of his shoulder, then jerks back as his hand grasps at hers. He pulls himself onto his side. His face is masked in light and shadow. He gives a strange, wry grin, but brighter than she’s seen in ten years. He is not hurt. Get Kramme. If he thinks I’m dead, he’ll make a mistake.
She squeezes the hand that lies in hers. On an impulse, she bends and kisses him on the cheek; it’s that kind of night. Outside is more firing, more shouting. More voices join, in several languages.
Patrick sits up, listening. Russians? How are they here?
She says, ‘Americans trying to put us off the scent. That’s one of Paul Rey’s men.’ Paul Rey, who is playing an exceptionally dangerous game, but then, they all are.
She says, ‘If I was wrong …’
It won’t be your fault. Patrick grips her arm again. Laurence trusts him too.
She pushes herself up. ‘Don’t show yourself
until you have to. Laurence and I will kill Kramme. Céline can sort out the unwanted extras.’
If she gets here.
Even as he speaks more cars pull in, doors slam, someone shouts in English. Sophie squeezes his shoulder. ‘She already has.’
With her left hand, she inches the jockey door open. Outside, the snow, which was irritating but manageable, has become a blizzard of the most debilitating kind. Nobody sane would drive in this. JJ just has – she can’t see his car, but she can hear the deep bass of his voice and the stutter of his gun. He’s at the yard’s far end, firing at the Americans. Paul won’t like that, but then Paul shouldn’t have brought people he cared about if he didn’t want them to be shot at.
In the silver-white whirling chaos, the yard has become a double-ended firing range. Daniel is down on one knee near the cow byre at the far end, arcing his Sten in a long angry spray across the yard. Halfway down stand the only solid shapes in the white-out; three big, black BMW 501s that look as if they might be carrying extra armour. Figures shuffle in the shelter they give. Ricochets whine.
Looking across at the farmhouse, Sophie can make out the milking parlour with the hayloft upstairs where she slept on her first night in France. In the doorway below stands a shape that should be Laurence. He is firing, shouting, waving at her. Other, less obvious, shapes move to her left. She aims a double shot at the half-seen shoulder of a man bigger than JJ, and there aren’t many of those in the world.
She doesn’t make a kill, but the monster stops firing at Laurence, who signals again across the snow-driven space – arm raised, swung, made flat – movements she can see through the whirling snow; old, old signals, dug deep into her unconscious.
Her body follows the meaning long before her mind has caught up. With Laurence covering, she runs hare-like, jinking left and right, heading obliquely across to join him in the kitchen doorway. Here, amidst all the acrid reek of gunshot, is the warmth of baking and coffee, sanity in the midst of the carnage. Laurence says, ‘Patrick?’
‘Alive.’ She looks round the corner, fires, ducks back, changes her empty magazine. Fourteen rounds left. ‘He’s laying low in the barn so they think he’s dead. Paul Rey’s here. He’s brought extra men. JJ and Daniel are both firing at the Americans. I haven’t seen René yet, which may be telling.’ It’s not conclusive, but it’s a start.
