by Lou Cadle
No, she didn’t want to dwell in those thoughts either. Reg was gone, and the life she had shared with him. There was no use in living in that part of her life. It was lost to her. She wrenched her mind away and silently practiced her German, trying to remember everything Madame C had taught her.
She woke, not understanding where she was at first. The light outside coming through the slits in the barn walls was bright. A complaining chicken brought her back to full awareness. The barn. Had the old woman returned?
But no, it was only noise of the two chickens, having a disagreement below. She crawled over to the edge and watched them for a moment, fighting over some bit of food they both wanted. One pecked at the other, who finally backed down. But the winner wouldn’t leave it at that. She chased the other bird away and then stood, chest puffed out, victorious. The bit of bug or corn had been forgotten. The victory was all that mattered.
Pecking order. The English idiom came to her. There was probably a lesson in that little scene, but she was too sleepy to derive one.
The rest of the day was taken up with calisthenics, mental coding practice, and trying not to worry. But as the late afternoon light dimmed in the barn, the worry grew again. How was Leonce? Had Claude gotten her message?
When the barn door creaked open, she started violently enough to make a board beneath her creak.
“Beatriz?” came a man’s voice.
Antonia scrambled to the edge of the loft. “Claude. Up here.”
He squinted up. “How did you get there?”
“A rope. You found my message?”
“Yes, this morning, and I also spoke to the baker. First, you need to know, Leonce has been released.”
She felt sweet relief at the news. “Is the circuit safe then?”
“Yes, though Leonce will not participate for a few weeks in case anyone is watching him.”
“That is wise. How did he manage to get free?”
“They believed he was a silly drunken fool of a Frenchman. They slapped him around and asked questions, but he never broke away from his role, and this morning, after a few hours pretending to sleep in a cell, he acted contrite and apologized and they appeared to believe him.”
“You don’t sound sure.”
“We cannot know. They may have released him in the hopes of him leading them to whoever operated the radio. So he will not come near you again.”
“Where will I be? Where will I go? Not back to the bakery, surely.”
“To be safe, not right now. Another place is being arranged for you. It might not be as comfortable, you understand. But it will be temporary until we are sure the incident did not have a lasting effect.”
“That is fine. Though I will miss Madame and her kindness.”
“It might be best not to get too attached.”
“So I told myself before I came here. But how can a person do that? I care about her, and about you, and about Genevieve and Leonce.”
“Feel less. Think more.”
The harshness in his tone surprised her, but then she remembered he had lost people, including the previous radio operator. His hard lessons had made him harder, perhaps. Or perhaps they had only made him wish to be harder. “I will try,” was all she said. “But I am glad that Leonce is well and free.”
“You need to listen to a message tonight?”
“Yes.”
“And send one?”
“Only if you have information that must be sent. And if their message is long, I should move between the listening and the sending.”
“Of course.”
“You have a message?”
“The train derailed. Quite a mess.” His smile was cold. “Two Nazis dead.”
“Good. You did well.”
“We all did. You helped. And you brought us this next job.”
“Any more news on that?”
“Tomorrow, we will contact our source inside the German headquarters and find what they have done about this Hesse’s itinerary.”
“Then I will only listen tonight. I might radio in tomorrow with that information, depending on what I hear tonight from them.”
“What time again?”
“Midnight.”
“Early.”
“Yes, and different. We don’t typically use the same schedule night after night.”
“No, you wouldn’t. Well, you’ll be well out of town tonight, which is for the best. In fact, we need to go before sunset.”
“We?”
“Yes. I have a place to take you. We leave now.”
“That soon?”
“It is a distance away, and we must walk.”
“All right,” she said. “I’ll lower my bags down to you.” She had taken her jacket off and felt the lump of rolls she had shoved into her pocket. “I’m hungry. Would you like a roll?”
“I will eat later. You go ahead.”
She ate a roll. In less than half an hour, they left, moving along the road, and then onto a cow path, overgrown with weeds, and on into the coming night.
Chapter 14
The moon was still hours away from setting when they reached their destination. They had been walking uphill at the end, into the night, the path beneath her feet narrowing until brush caught at her trousers from both sides. But the brush ended, and the silhouette of a large building was visible just ahead.
Claude had carried the radio the whole while. Now he led her forward, produced a torch and shone it briefly ahead, revealing a white stone building falling into ruin. It looked old, very old.
“What is this place?” she asked.
“No matter. It is yours until the first light.”
“Is it empty?”
“Yes. For now, yes.”
She had the sense it was someplace important. Perhaps a stop on the road to smuggling downed British pilots into Spain. Perhaps they stored explosives and munitions here. It was not for her to ask more, as it would only add more details to her memory that could be used against the Résistance were she captured.
There was a lantern on a table by the door, and Claude lit it and switched off his torch. There wasn’t much in the way of furniture. “Stairs?” she asked, for it was a two-story building.
“Crumbled away.”
“I see. I can make do.”
“We have climbed into low hills and are above the town. If you can send your signal from there, you can here. And the Gestapo will be hard pressed to find this place. There is no road to it. Just the path, which is one of many such in this area and is easy to miss.”
“I doubt they will broadcast for long.”
He withdrew something from his pocket. “Would you like to play?” He opened his hand and showed her a deck of cards.
“What shall we play?”
“Picquet?” he suggested.
“You will have to teach me.”
“Of course,” he said. They sat on the floor in the light of the lantern and he explained the rules to her. She had played bridge with Reg in England, and this was a similar sort of game. At first they did not speak much, but then he began to talk of his childhood. Perhaps the card game had reminded him of those times.
“I wanted nothing more than to leave the country and move to the city. Now I would give anything for the simple life of a farm, even its toils, milking the cow, fighting off the birds in the fields, waking before dawn in the cold winter nights.”
“I never did that sort of work,” she said. “Tell me more. What were the hardest parts. What were the best moments?”
“The best moments were at dawn and dusk in the summer, before the work started and after it was over. And food. Oh yes, the food. When it is July, and you come in for the main meal, hide from the sun for an hour, and eat until you cannot hold any more. The salads, the meats, the fresh bread. Butter churned by Grandfather, who said no one else could do as well as he, which was true. Soft piles of it in a dish, and the cow who made it lowing outside.”
She continued to ask him questions
as they played, and he talked, revealing nothing of strategic importance but much of deeper importance. “I should ask about you as a child,” he finally said.
“I have a pique, I believe,” she said, laying down the cards.
“You do. You caught on to the game quickly.”
Compared to learning the double-coding, learning new card game rules was nothing. “Merci. And no, I cannot tell you anything about myself. I am sorry, and particularly sorry this evening that I cannot, when you have shared so much of yourself.”
“I understand,” he said. “It is safer that way. But I am not a Nazi spy.”
She barked a laugh. “I never thought you were! It is procedure, and it is a wise one, I think.”
“Yes, it is. What shall we talk about then?”
“The war, I suppose.”
“Are you not prohibited from speaking of that as well?”
“I can tell you what I know, or at least what I know from the BBC.”
“Sometimes I am able to listen to the BBC. Not often, for I should not risk being caught for such an infraction, but at times.”
“I am glad. Glad that there is something other than German propaganda for the people here.”
“Do you know anything of a British invasion of France?”
“No, nothing.” She had heard rumors, but if they were false, she shouldn’t tell him, and if they were true, she should speak of them even less. “But I think it will come.”
“Soon, I hope.”
“I as well. I want the Nazis driven back into Germany and then driven into a hole in the ground so deep that we can cover it and they will never crawl back up again. The Nazis, the Fascista, all of them.”
“Insects always crawl up again, no matter how deep you bury them, no matter how many years they hide themselves away.”
“Perhaps we will learn our lesson this time.”
“For a time, yes, perhaps. But men will be men, and some men are cruel. Others are selfish and greedy. Some take pleasure in inflicting pain, and some don’t care about that as long as they can profit from it happening and buy better suits and grand autos, to decorate their house with cut glass and silk. The best we can wish for from them is that their profit comes from both sides, the demon and his victim both.”
“What time is it?” she said.
“Almost time, I think, for you to string your antenna. Do you want help?”
“No, thank you. I have grown used to doing it.”
“Then I am going outside for a moment.”
She took up the radio case and took it to a window, where she played the antenna out and checked her own watch. Claude returned and she said, “I’ll go outside now. There are still a few minutes before I need to warm up the radio.”
She went outside and relieved herself. The moon was at the tips of the treetops to the west. It reminded her of an apricot scone her favorite tea shop had made, which stirred a craving for one.
Inside, she turned on the radio, made sure it was set to receive, and waited with a pencil and paper in hand. Exactly on time, the radio came to life. She took down the message. It was long. The signal for the end of the message came, and a pause, and the noise of the signal began again. She checked her transcription, making only one correction. Then it stopped, and she shut off the radio, checking her watch.
“It seemed long,” Claude said.
“It was. Twenty-four minutes for two sendings. Longer than is safe.”
“The Gestapo can’t find us here. Not easily. Not without having astonishing luck.”
She pulled out her silk, copied the next set of code letters onto the paper, and cut off the strip of silk, putting it aside for now. She’d burn it only once she knew she had the message deciphered correctly.
Until the second round of decoding, the message was still a mystery. But as she began to shift the letters and numbers into English words, she felt excitement at what she was seeing.
“What?” Claude asked when she looked up at him.
“It is good. This is an important man. And they have a plan to help us.”
Chapter 15
That was not quite how England had worded it. It had been nearer an order, but she didn’t present it to Claude in those terms. “This project he is working on they know something of,” she said. “And it is a serious matter indeed. There is a thing that he can make radar do that will be very dangerous for us, and for France.”
“I don’t understand radar, to be honest.”
“Who does?” she said. “Well, this man does, and a few hundred others. But they say that it will put the Nazis ahead of us if he is allowed to continue. We must try to capture him, they say, to question him. And if that fails, we must kill him.”
“Yes, that is not news to me.”
“The news is, they are dropping another agent tomorrow night, at 11:00 p.m.”
“So early at night? Won’t they be leaving England in the daytime?”
“It is that important, I think.”
“Who is this man? Or woman?”
“Man. Code name Bernard. He knows the Nazi.”
“How?”
“University is all they radioed to me.”
“So the Nazi was educated in England?”
“Or the Englishman in Germany, or both somewhere else together. No matter. They want us to keep the Nazi alive so that this man can interrogate him for details you or I might not understand.”
“They don’t think we can do the job?”
“I couldn’t, I’m sure. I couldn’t tell if he was lying or making up terms or anything else. Too technical.”
Claude looked frustrated. “No. I could not either. I don’t like new people, is all. Every new person has to be found a place to stay. Every new person who is not French, not known, is a new risk. A doubled risk for us.” He pointed to the lantern. “Should we turn this off?”
“In a moment. I need to burn this, but first there are details to memorize. Also, you know which landing field AR is?”
“Yes—it was I who designated them. It is different than where you were dropped.”
“Okay, good. One moment.” She bent to her message and read it and re-read it, committing the crucial facts to her memory. Then she closed her eyes and imagined them written on her eyelids, a list of operational details. She opened her eyes, re-read what she had on the paper, and she had recalled everything. “All right. I will burn this and my code, and then let us shut off the lantern.”
“I should go back to town soon. For you, it may be safer to stay off the road for a few hours with that radio. Will you be all right alone here?”
“Yes. Should I make my way back to town at dawn?”
“To the barn. And it should be easy for you to retrace your steps. The path to the road is clear enough. One of us will come get you from the barn and take you to your new accommodations at two hours after dawn.”
“Yes. I understand.”
“Thank you for the message. And for the card game.”
“Thank you. It was a good distraction. I have too few of them. Had I known how boring some days would be, I’d have brought a good book with me.”
“The bookstore has been closed for two years, but I can find books for you. I didn’t think.”
“You know what book would be useful? A German dictionary. German to French, German to English, either one.”
“That will be possible.”
“I need to learn more of their language.”
“I hope you never have to use it.”
“I hope I do. I hope I have many opportunities to overhear chance comments that I can radio back or tell you so that you can plan more sabotage.”
“You know, we would not use you operationally if we did not need to.”
“I want you to. I can manage two jobs. The radio only takes an hour every other day, at most.”
“Yes, but without it, we cannot arrange supply drops. Or to get the messages back as we have this week.”
The thought of
not being able to do more with the circuit stung her. She wanted to act. “I’ll be careful.”
He shook his head. “I should hope so.” He said it in English, surprising her. It was heavily accented English. He switched back to French. “Tomorrow, expect someone two hours after dawn.”
She nodded, and set about burning the silk and paper. He was gone in a few seconds. She turned off the lantern. She settled down on the old wooden floor, spreading out her suitcase as a pillow, and tried to nap. It was hard to sleep, with the excitement of a new operation in her mind. A kidnapping. An interrogation of a Nazi.
Antonia would make certain that she was in on both of them.
PART II
Chapter 16
Four of them were there to meet the plane—Claude, Genevieve and Edgard held the three torches to signal the pilot. Antonia stood to the side of the field nearest the dirt road, keeping watch for any approaching stranger. The moon seemed too bright, like a spotlight shining on their figures, but that was not to be helped.
The buzz of the engine changed as it flew overhead and then turned. It continued to move away, and for a moment Antonia was confused. Had he seen something to make him change his mind about landing?
But then the noise returned, and in seconds the shadow of the plane blotted out the moon, and there was the sound of an impact on the fallow field. A male voice said, “Damnation,” and only then she realized the new agent had parachuted from the plane. She had expected the plane to land, for some reason. But off it flew, banking back to the west.
She ran toward the man’s voice, and he continued to curse under his breath, fighting off the parachute. “Shh,” she hissed.
“Shh yourself, mate.”
“Keep it quiet. The enemy is everywhere.”
“All right, all right!” His voice was softer when he said it. “This blasted thing—where’s the release?”
She reached out, found an arm, and said, “Keep still. I’ll get it.” She felt around to his back, found the release for the parachute, and pulled it.
