Jackdaws (35 page)

Hesse complied. Michel's face showed
enormous relief combined with a fear that this might not be real.

Dieter explained to Walter Goedel,
"Before questioning the prisoners, I will take samples of their
handwriting."

"Their handwriting?"

Dieter nodded, watching Michel, who
seemed to have understood the brief exchange in German. He looked hopeful.

Dieter took
Madame Bovary
from his
pocket, opened it, and put it down on the table. "Copy out chapter
nine," he said to Michel in French.

Michel hesitated. It seemed a
harmless request. He suspected a trick, Dieter could tell, but he could not see
what it was. Dieter waited. The Resistance were told to do everything they
could to put off the moment when torture began. Michel was bound to see this as
a means of postponement. It was unlikely to be harmless, but it had to be
better than having his fingernails pulled out. "Very well," he said
after a long pause. He began writing.

Dieter watched him. His handwriting
was large and flamboyant. Two pages of the printed book took up six sheets of
the letter paper. When Michel turned the page, Dieter stopped him. He told Hans
to return Michel to his cell and bring Gilberte.

Goedel looked over what Michel had
written, and shook his head bemusedly. "I can't figure out what you're up
to," he said. He handed the sheets back and returned to his chair.

Dieter tore one of the pages very
carefully to leave only certain words.

Gilberte came in looking terrified
but defiant. She said, "I won't tell you anything. I will never betray my
friends. Besides, I don't know anything. All I do is drive cars."

Dieter told her to sit down and
offered her coffee. "The real thing," he said as he handed her a cup.
French people could get only ersatz coffee.

She sipped it and thanked him.

Dieter studied her. She was quite
beautiful, with long dark hair and dark eyes, although there was something
bovine about her expression. "You're a lovely woman, Gilberte," he
said. "I don't believe you are a murderer at heart."

"No, I'm not!" she said
gratefully.

"A woman does things for love,
doesn't she?"

She looked at him with surprise.
"You understand."

"I know all about you. You are
in love with Michel."

She bowed her head without replying.

"A married man, of course. This
is regrettable. But you love him. And that's why you help the Resistance. Out
of love, not hate."

She nodded.

"Am I right?" he said.
"You must answer."

She whispered, "Yes."

"But you have been misguided,
my dear."

"I know I've done wrong—"

"You misunderstand me. You've
been misguided, not just in breaking the law but in loving Michel."

She looked at him in puzzlement.
"I know he's married, but—"

"I'm afraid he doesn't really
love you."

"But he does!"

"No. He loves his wife.
Felicity Clairet, known as Flick. An Englishwoman—not chic, not very beautiful,
some years older than you—but he loves her."

Tears came to her eyes, and she
said, "I don't believe you."

"He writes to her, you know. I
imagine he gets the couriers to take his messages back to England. He sends her
love letters, saying how much he misses her. They're rather poetic, in an
old-fashioned way. I've read some."

"It's not possible."

"He was carrying one when we
arrested all of you. He tried to destroy it, just now, but we managed to save a
few scraps." Dieter took from his pocket the sheet he had torn and handed
it to her. "Isn't that his handwriting?"

"Yes."

"And is it a love letter… or
what?"

Gilberte read it slowly, moving her
lips:

I think of you constantly. The
memory of you drives me to despair. Ah! Forgive me! I will leave you! Farewell!
I will go far away, so far that you will never hear of me again; and
yet-today-I know not what force impelled me toward you. For one doesn't
struggle against heaven; one cannot resist the smile of angels; one is carried
away by that which is beautiful, charming, adorable.

She threw down the paper with a sob.

"I'm sorry to be the one to
tell you," Dieter said gently. He took the white linen handkerchief from
the breast pocket of his suit and handed it to her. She buried her face in it.

It was time to turn the conversation
imperceptibly toward interrogation. "I suppose Michel has been living with
you since Flick left."

"Longer than that," she
said indignantly. "For six months, every night except when she was in
town."

"In your house?"

"I have an apartment. Very small.
But it was enough for two… two people who loved each other." She continued
to cry.

Dieter strove to maintain a light
conversational tone as he obliquely approached the topic he was really
interested in. "Wasn't it difficult to have Helicopter living with you as
well, in a small place?"

"He's not living there. He only
came today."

"But you must have wondered
where he was going to stay."

"No. Michel found him a place,
an empty room over the old bookshop in the rue Moliere."

Walter Goedel suddenly shifted in
his chair: he had realized where this was heading. Dieter carefully ignored
him, and casually asked Gilberte, "Didn't he leave his stuff at your place
when you went to Chatelle to meet the plane?"

"No, he took it to the
room."

Dieter asked the key question.
"Including his little suitcase?"

"Yes."

"Ah." Dieter had what he
wanted. Helicopter's radio set was in a room over the bookshop in the rue
Moliere. "I've finished with this stupid cow," he said to Hans in
German. "Thru her over to Becker."

Dieter's own car, the blue
Hispano-Suiza, was parked in front of the château. With Walter Goedel beside
him and Hans Hesse in the backseat, he drove fast through the villages to Reims
and quickly found the bookshop in the rue Moliere.

They broke down the door and climbed
a bare wooden staircase to the room over the shop. It was unfurnished but for a
palliasse covered with a rough blanket. On the floor beside the rough bed stood
a bottle of whisky, a bag containing toiletries, and the small suitcase.

Dieter opened it to show Goedel the
radio. "With this," Dieter said triumphantly, "I can become
Helicopter."

On the way back to Sainte-Cécile,
they discussed what message to send. "First, Helicopter would want to know
why the parachutists did not drop," Dieter said. "So he will ask,
'What happened?' Do you agree?"

"And he would be angry,"
Goedel said.

"So he will say, 'What the
blazes happened?' perhaps." Goedel shook his head. "I studied in
England before the war. That phrase, 'What the blazes,' is too polite. It's a
coy euphemism for 'What the hell.' A young man in the military would never use
it."

"Maybe he should say, 'What the
flick?' instead."

"Too coarse," Goedel
objected. "He knows the message may be decoded by a female."

"Your English is better than
mine, you choose."

"I think he would say, 'What
the devil happened?' It expresses his anger, and it's a masculine curse that
would not offend most women."

"Okay. Then he wants to know
what he should do next, so he will ask for further orders. What would he
say?"

"Probably, 'Send instructions.'
English people dislike the word 'order,' they think it's not refined."

"All right. And we'll ask for a
quick response, because Helicopter would be impatient, and so are we."

They reached the château and went to
the wireless listening room in the basement. A middle-aged operator called
Joachim plugged the set in and tuned it to Helicopter's emergency frequency
while Dieter scribbled the agreed message:

WHAT THE DEVIL HAPPENED?
SEND INSTRUCTIONS. REPLY IMMEDIATELY.

Dieter forced himself to control his
impatience and carefully show Joachim how to encode the message, including the
security tags.

Goedel said, "Won't they know
it's not Helicopter at the machine? Can't they recognize the individual 'fist'
of the sender, like handwriting?"

"Yes," Joachim said.
"But I've listened to this chap sending a couple of times, and I can
imitate him. It's a bit like mimicking someone's accent, talking like a
Frankfurt man, say."

Goedel was skeptical. "You can
do a perfect impersonation after hearing him twice?"

"Not perfect, no. But agents
are often under pressure when they broadcast, in some hiding place and worried
about us catching up with them, so small variations will be put down to
strain." He began to tap out the letters.

Dieter reckoned they had a wait of
at least an hour. At the British listening station, the message had to be
decrypted, then passed to Helicopter's controller, who was surely in bed. The
controller might get the message by phone and compose a reply on the spot, but
even then the reply had to be encrypted and transmitted, then decrypted by
Joachim.

Dieter and Goedel went to the
kitchen on the ground floor, where they found a mess corporal starting work on
breakfast, and got him to give them sausages and coffee. Goedel was impatient
to get back to Rommel's headquarters, but he wanted to stay and see how this
turned out.

It was daylight when a young woman
in SS uniform came to tell them that the reply had come in and Joachim had
almost finished typing it.

They hurried downstairs. Weber was
already there, with his usual knack of showing up where the action was. Joachim
handed the typed message to him and carbon copies to Dieter and Goedel.

Dieter read:

JACKDAWS ABORTED DROP BUT
HAVE

LANDED ELSEWHERE AWAIT
CONTACT

FROM LEOPARDESS

Weber said grumpily, "This does
not tell us much."

Goedel agreed. "What a
disappointment."

"You're both wrong!" Dieter
said jubilantly. "Leopardess is in France—and I have a picture of
her!" He pulled the photos of Flick Clairet from his pocket with a
flourish and handed one to Weber. "Get a printer out of bed and have a
thousand copies made. I want to see that picture all over Reims within the next
twelve hours. Hans, get my car filled up with petrol."

"Where are you going?"
said Goedel.

"To Paris, with the other
photograph, to do the same thing there. I've got her now!"

CHAPTER

THIRTY-TWO

THE PARACHUTE DROP went smoothly.
The containers were pushed out first so that there was no possibility of one
landing on the head of a parachutist; then the Jackdaws took turns sitting on
the top of the slide and, when tapped on the shoulder by the dispatcher,
slithering down the chute and out into space.

Flick went last. As she fell, the
Hudson turned north and disappeared into the night. She wished the crew luck.
It was almost dawn: because of the night's delays, they would have to fly the
last part of their journey in dangerous daylight.

Flick landed perfectly, with her
knees bent and her arms tucked into her sides as she fell to the ground. She
lay still for a moment. French soil, she thought with a shiver of fear; enemy
territory. Now she was a criminal, a terrorist, a spy. If she was caught, she
would be executed.

She put the thought out of her mind
and stood up. A few yards away, a donkey stared at her in the moonlight, then
bent its head to graze. She could see three containers nearby. Farther away,
scattered across the field, were half a dozen Resistance people, working in
pairs, picking up the bulky containers and carrying them away.

She struggled out of her parachute
harness, helmet, and flying suit. While she was doing so, a young man ran up to
her and said in breathless French, "We weren't expecting any personnel,
just supplies!"

"A change of plan," she
said. "Don't worry about it. Is Anton with you?" Anton was the code
name of the leader of the Vestryman circuit.

"Yes."

"Tell him Leopardess is
here."

"Ah—you are Leopardess?"
He was impressed.

"Yes."

"I'm Chevalier. I'm so pleased
to meet you."

She glanced up at the sky. It was
turning from black to gray. "Find Anton as quickly as you can, please,
Chevalier. Tell him we have six people who need transport. There's no time to
spare."

"Very good." He hurried
away.

She folded her parachute into a neat
bundle, then set out to find the other Jackdaws. Greta had landed in a tree,
and had bruised herself crashing through the upper branches, but had come to
rest without serious injury, and had been able to slip out of her harness and
climb down to the ground. The others had all come down safely on the grass.
"I'm very proud of myself," said Jelly, "but I wouldn't do it
again for a million pounds."

Flick noted that the Resistance
people were carrying the containers to the southern end of the field, and she
took the Jackdaws in that direction. There she found a builder's van, a horse
and cart, and an old Lincoln limousine with the hood removed and some kind of
steam motor powering it. She was not surprised: gas was available only for
essential business, and French people tried all kinds of ingenious ways to run
their cars.

The Resistance men had loaded the
cart with containers and were now hiding them under empty vegetable boxes. More
containers were going into the back of the builder's van. Directing the
operation was Anton, a thin man of forty in a greasy cap and a short blue
workman's jacket, with a yellow French cigarette stuck to his lip. He stared in
astonishment. "Six women?" he said. "Is this a sewing
circle?"

Jokes about women were best ignored,
Flick had found. She spoke solemnly to him. "This is the most important
operation I've ever run, and I need your help."