Jackdaws (11 page)

"No, no, no," Dieter said.
As he had expected, Becker's approach was completely unscientific. A strong
young man could withstand being punched almost indefinitely. "First, you
blindfold him." He produced a large cotton bandana from his pocket and
tied it over Bertrand's eyes. "This way, every blow comes as a dreadful
shock, and every moment between blows is an agony of anticipation."

Becker picked up his wooden club. Dieter
nodded, and Becker swung the club, hitting the side of the victim's head with a
loud crack of solid wood on skin and bone. Bertrand cried out in pain and fear.

"No, no," Dieter said
again. "Never hit the head. You may dislocate the jaw, preventing the
subject from speaking. Worse, you may damage the brain, then nothing he says
will be of any value." He took the wooden club from Becker and replaced it
in the umbrella stand. From the selection of weapons there he chose a steel
crowbar and handed it to Becker.

"Now, remember, the object is
to inflict unbearable agony without endangering the subject's life or his
ability to tell us what we need to know. Avoid vital organs. Concentrate on the
bony parts: ankles, shins, kneecaps, fingers, elbows, shoulders, ribs."

A crafty look came over Becker's
face. He walked around the pillar, then, taking careful aim, struck hard at
Bertrand's elbow with the steel bar. The boy gave a scream of real agony, a
sound Dieter recognized.

Becker looked pleased. God forgive
me, Dieter thought, for teaching this brute how to inflict pain more
efficiently.

On Dieter's orders, Becker struck at
Bertrand's bony shoulder, then his hand, then his ankle. Dieter made Becker
pause between blows, allowing just enough time for the pain to ease slightly
and for the subject to begin to dread the next stroke.

Bertrand began to appeal for mercy.
"No more, please," he implored, hysterical with pain and fear. Becker
raised the crowbar, but Dieter stopped him. He wanted the begging to go on.
"Please don't hit me again," Bertrand cried. "Please,
please."

Dieter said to Becker, "It is
often a good idea to break a leg early in the interview. The pain is quite
excruciating, especially when the broken bone is struck again." He selected
a sledgehammer from the umbrella stand. "Just below the knee," he
said, handing it to Becker. "As hard as you can."

Becker took careful aim and swung
mightily. The crack as the shin broke was loud enough to hear. Bertrand
screamed and fainted. Becker picked up a bucket of water that stood in a corner
and threw the water in Bertrand's face. The young man came to and screamed
again.

Eventually, the screams subsided to
heartrending groans. "What do you want?" Bertrand implored.
"Please, tell me what you want from me!" Dieter did not ask him any
questions. Instead, he handed the steel crowbar to Becker and pointed to the
broken leg where a jagged white edge of bone stuck through the flesh. Becker
struck the leg at that point. Bertrand screamed and passed out again.

Dieter thought that might be enough.

He went into the next room. Gaston
sat where Dieter had left him, but he was a different man. He was bent over in
his chair, face in his hands, crying with great sobs, moaning and praying to
God. Dieter knelt in front of him and prized his hands away from his wet face.
Gaston looked at him through tears. Dieter said softly, "Only you can make
it stop."

"Please, stop it, please,"
Gaston moaned.

"Will you answer my
questions?"

There was a pause. Bertrand screamed
again. "Yes!" Gaston yelled. "Yes, yes, I'll tell you
everything, if you just stop!"

Dieter raised his voice.
"Sergeant Becker!"

"Yes, Major?"

"No more for now."

"Yes, Major." Becker
sounded disappointed.

Dieter reverted to French.
"Now, Gaston, let's begin with the leader of the circuit. Name and code
name. Who is he?"

Gaston hesitated. Dieter looked
toward the open door of the torture chamber. Gaston quickly said, "Michel
Clairet. Code name Monet."

It was the breakthrough. The first
name was the hardest. The rest would follow effortlessly. Concealing his
satisfaction, Dieter gave Gaston a cigarette and held a match. "Where does
he live?"

"In Reims." Gaston blew
out smoke and his shaking began to subside. He gave an address near the
cathedral.

Dieter nodded to Lieutenant Hesse,
who took out a notebook and began to record Gaston's responses. Patiently,
Dieter took Gaston through each member of the attack team. In a few cases
Gaston knew only the code names, and there were two men he claimed never to
have seen before Sunday. Dieter believed him. There had been two getaway
drivers waiting a short distance away, Gaston said: a young woman called
Gilberte and a man codenamed Maréchal. There were others in the group, which
was known as the Bollinger circuit.

Dieter asked about relationships
between Resistance members. Were there any love affairs? Were any of them
homosexual? Was anyone sleeping with someone else's wife?

Although the torture had stopped,
Bertrand continued to groan and sometimes scream with the agony of his wounds,
and now Gaston said, "Is he going to be looked after?"

Dieter shrugged.

"Please, get a doctor for
him."

"Very well… when we have
finished our talk."

Gaston told Dieter that Michel and
Gilberte were lovers, even though Michel was married to Flick, the blond girl
in the square.

So far, Gaston had been talking
about a circuit that was mostly destroyed, so his information had been mainly
of academic interest. Now Dieter moved on to more important questions.
"When Allied agents come to this district, how do they make contact?"

No one was supposed to know how that
was handled, Gaston said. There was a cut-out. However, he knew part of the
story. The agents were met by a woman code-named Bourgeoise. Gaston did not
know where she met them, but she took them to her home; then she passed them on
to Michel.

No one had ever met Bourgeoise, not
even Michel.

Dieter was disappointed that Gaston
knew so little about the woman. But that was the idea of a cut-out.

"Do you know where she
lives?"

Gaston nodded. "One of the
agents gave it away. She has a house in the rue du Bois. Number eleven."

Dieter tried not to look jubilant.
This was a key fact. The enemy would probably send more agents in an attempt to
rebuild the Bollinger circuit. Dieter might be able to catch them at the safe
house.

"And when they leave?"

They were picked up by plane in a
field codenamed Champ de Pierre, actually a pasture near the village of
Chatelle, Gaston revealed. There was an alternative landing field, codenamed
Champ d'Or, but he did not know where it was.

Dieter asked Gaston about liaison
with London. Who had ordered the attack on the telephone exchange? Gaston
explained that Flick—Major Clairet—was the circuit's commanding officer, and
she had brought orders from London. Dieter was intrigued. A woman in command.
But he had seen her courage under fire. She would make a good leader.

In the next room, Bertrand began to
pray aloud for death to come. "Please," Gaston said. "A
doctor."

"Just tell me about Major
Clairet." Dieter said. "Then I'll get someone to give Bertrand an
injection."

"She is a very important
person," Gaston said, eager now to give Dieter information that would
satisfy him. "They say she has survived longer than anyone else
undercover. She has been all over northern France."

Dieter was spellbound. "She has
contact with different circuits?"

"So I believe."

That was unusual—and it meant she
could be a fountain of information about the French Resistance. Dieter said,
"She got away yesterday after the skirmish. Where do you think she
went?"

"Back to London, I'm
sure," Gaston said. "To report on the raid."

Dieter cursed silently. He wanted
her in France, where he could catch her and interrogate her. If he got his
hands on her, he could destroy half the French Resistance—as he had promised
Rommel. But she was out of reach.

He stood up. "That's all for
now," he said. "Hans, get a doctor for the prisoners. I don't want
any of them to die today—they may have more to tell us. Then type up your notes
and bring them to me in the morning."

"Very good, Major."

"Make a copy for Major
Weber—but don't give it to him until I say so."

"Understood."

"I'll drive myself back to the
hotel." Dieter went out.

The headache began as he stepped
into the open air. Rubbing his forehead with his hand, he made his way to the
car and drove out of the village, heading for Reims. The afternoon sun seemed
to reflect off the road surface straight into his eyes. These migraines often
struck him after an interrogation. In an hour he would be blind and helpless.
He had to get back to the hotel before the attack reached its peak. Reluctant
to brake, he sounded his horn constantly. Vineyard workers making their slow
way home scattered out of his path. Horses reared and a cart was driven into
the ditch. His eyes watered with the pain, and he felt nauseous.

He reached the town without crashing
the car. He managed to steer into the center. Outside the Hotel Frankfort, he
did not so much park the car as abandon it. Staggering inside, he made his way
to the suite.

Stéphanie knew immediately what had
happened. While he stripped off his uniform tunic and shirt, she got the field
medical kit out of her suitcase and filled a syringe with the morphine mixture.
Dieter fell on the bed, and she plunged the needle into his arm. Almost
immediately, the pain eased. Stéphanie lay down beside him, stroking his face
with gentle fingertips.

A few moments later, Dieter was
unconscious.

CHAPTER

TEN

FLICK'S HOME WAS a bedsitter in a
big old house in Bayswater. Her room was in the attic: if a bomb came through
the roof it would land on her bed. She spent little time there, not for fear of
bombs but because real life went on elsewhere—in France, at SOE headquarters,
or at one of SOE's training centers around the country. There was little of her
in the room: a photo of Michel playing a guitar, a shelf of Flaubert and
Moliere in French, a watercolor of Nice she had painted at the age of fifteen.
The small chest had three drawers of clothing and one of guns and ammunition.

Feeling weary and depressed, she
undressed and lay down on the bed, looking through a copy of Parade magazine.
Berlin had been bombed by a force of 1,500 planes last Wednesday, she read. It
was hard to imagine. She tried to picture what it must have been like for the
ordinary Germans living there, and all she could think of was a medieval
painting of Hell, with naked people being burned alive in a hail of fire. She
turned the page and read a silly story about second-rate
"V-cigarettes" being passed off as Woodbines.

Her mind kept returning to
yesterday's failure. She reran the battle in her mind, imagining a dozen
decisions she might have made differently, leading to victory instead of
defeat. As well as losing the battle, she feared she might be losing her
husband, and she wondered if there was a link. Inadequate as a leader,
inadequate as a wife, perhaps there was some flaw deep in her character.

Now that her alternative plan had
been rejected, there was no prospect of redeeming herself. All those brave
people had died for nothing.

Eventually she drifted into an uneasy
sleep. She was awakened by someone banging on the door and calling,
"Flick! Telephone!" The voice belonged to one of the girls in the
flat below.

The clock on Flick's bookshelf said
six. "Who is it?" she called.

"He just said the office."

"I'm coming." She pulled
on a dressing gown. Unsure whether it was six in the morning or evening, she
glanced out of her little window. The sun was setting over the elegant terraces
of Ladbroke Grove. She ran downstairs to the phone in the hall.

Percy Thwaite's voice said,
"Sorry to wake you."

"That's all right." She
was always glad to hear Percy's voice on the other end of the phone. She had
become very fond of him, even though he constantly sent her into danger.
Running agents was a heartbreaking job, and some senior officers anaesthetized
themselves by adopting a hard-hearted attitude toward the death or capture of
their people, but Percy never did that. He felt every loss as a bereavement.
Consequently, Flick knew he would never take an unnecessary risk with her. She
trusted him.

"Can you come to Orchard
Court?"

She wondered if the authorities had
reconsidered her new plan for taking out the telephone exchange, and her heart
leaped with hope. "Has Monty changed his mind?"

"I'm afraid not. But I need you
to brief someone."

She bit her lip, suppressing her
disappointment. "I'll be there in a few minutes."

She dressed quickly and took the
Underground to Baker Street. Percy was waiting for her in the flat in Portman
Square. "I've found a radio operator. No experience, but he's done the
training. I'm sending him to Reims tomorrow."

Flick glanced reflexively at the
window, to check the weather, as agents always did when a flight was mentioned.
Percy's curtains were drawn, for security, but anyway she knew the weather was
fine. "Reims? Why?"

"We've heard nothing from
Michel today. I need to know how much of the Bollinger circuit is left."

Flick nodded. Pierre, the radio
operator, had been in the attack squad. Presumably he was captured or dead.
Michel might have been able to locate Pierre's radio transceiver, but he had
not been trained to operate it, and he certainly did not know the codes.
"But what's the point?"

"We've sent them tons of
explosives and ammunition in the last few months. I want them to light some
fires. The telephone exchange is the most important target, but it's not the
only one. Even if there's no one left but Michel and a couple of others, they
can blow up railway lines, cut telephone wires, and shoot sentries—it all
helps. But I can't direct them if I have no communication."