Jackdaws (39 page)

"Thank you," said Flick.

The girl hesitated. No doubt she was
wondering how many more of those notes Flick had. "I do girls, too,"
she said. She reached out and brushed Flick's breast lightly with her
fingertips.

"No, thanks."

"Maybe you and your boyfriend—"

The girl looked at the thousand-franc note. "Well, I guess this is my night off. Good luck, honey."

"Thanks," said Flick.
"I need it."

She found her room, put her case on
the bed, and took off her jacket. There was a small mirror over a washbasin.
Flick washed her hands, then stood looking at her face for a moment.

She combed her short blonde hair
back over her ears and pinned it with hair clips. Then she put on the wig and
adjusted it. It was a bit big, but it would stay on. The black hair altered her
appearance radically. However, her fair eyebrows now looked peculiar. She took
the eyebrow pencil from her makeup kit and darkened them. That was much better.
Not only did she look like a brunette, she seemed more formidable than the
sweet girl in the swimsuit. She had the same straight nose and severe chin, but
that seemed like a family resemblance between two otherwise different-looking
sisters.

Next she took her identity papers
from her jacket pocket. With great care, she retouched the photograph, using
the eyebrow pencil to draw faint lines of dark hair and narrow dark eyebrows.
When she was done, she looked hard at the picture. She did not think anyone
would be able to tell it had been doctored unless they rubbed it hard enough to
smear the pencil marks.

She took off the wig, stepped out of
her shoes, and lay on the bed. She had not slept for two nights, because she
had spent Thursday night making love to Paul and Friday night on the metal
floor of a Hudson bomber. Now she closed her eyes and dropped off within
seconds.

She was awakened by a knock at the
door. To her surprise, it was getting dark: she had slept for several hours.
She went to the door and said, "Who is it?"

"Ruby."

She let her in. "Is everything
all right?"

"I'm not sure."

Flick closed the curtains, then
switched on the light. "What's happened?"

"Everyone has checked in. But I
don't know where Diana and Maude are. They're not in their room."

"Where have you looked?"

"The proprietress's office, the
little church next door, the bar across the street."

"Oh, Christ," Flick said
in dismay. "The bloody fools, they've gone out."

"Where would they have
gone?"

"Maude wanted to go to the
Ritz."

Ruby was incredulous. "They
can't be that stupid!"

"Maude can."

"But I thought Diana had more
sense."

"Diana's in love," Flick
said. "I suppose she'll do anything Maude asks. And she wants to impress
her paramour, take her to swanky places, show that she knows her way around the
world of high society."

"They say love is blind."

"In this case, love is bloody
suicidal. I can't believe it—but I bet that's where they've gone. It will serve
them right if they end up dead."

"What'll we do?"

"Go to the Ritz and get them
out of there—if we're not too late."

Flick put on her wig. Ruby said,
"I wondered why your eyebrows had gone dark. It's effective, you look like
someone else."

"Good. Get your gun."

In the lobby, Regine handed Flick a
note. It was addressed in Diana's handwriting. Flick ripped it open and read:

We're going to a better hotel. We'll
meet you at the Gare de l'Est at 5 a.m. Don't worry!

She showed it to Ruby, then ripped
it to shreds. She was most angry with herself. She had known Diana all her
life, it was no surprise that she was foolish and irresponsible. Why did I
bring her? she asked herself. Because I had no one else, was the answer.

They left the flophouse. Flick did
not want to use the Metro, for she knew there were Gestapo checkpoints at some
stations and occasional spot checks on the trains. The Ritz was in the Place
Vendôme, a brisk half-hour walk from La Charbo. The sun had gone down, and
night was falling fast. They would have to keep an eye on the time: there was
an eleven o'clock curfew.

Flick wondered how long it would
take the Ritz staff to call the Gestapo about Diana and Maude. They would have
known immediately that there was something odd about them. Their papers said
they were secretaries from Reims—what were two such women doing at the Ritz?
They were dressed respectably enough, by the standards of occupied France, but
they certainly did not look like typical Ritz clients—the wives of diplomats
from neutral countries, the girlfriends of black marketers, or the mistresses
of German officers. The hotel manager himself might not do anything, especially
if he was anti-Nazi, but the Gestapo had informants in every large hotel and
restaurant in the city, and strangers with implausible stories were just what
they were paid to report. This kind of detail was drummed into people on SOE's
training course—but that course lasted three months, and Diana and Maude had
been given only two days.

Flick quickened her step.

CHAPTER

THIRTY-FIVE

DIETER WAS EXHAUSTED. To get a
thousand posters printed and distributed in half a day had taken all his powers
of persuasion and intimidation. He had been patient and persistent when he
could and had flown into a mad rage when necessary. In addition, he had not
slept the previous night. His nerves were jangled, he had a headache, and his
temper was short.

But a feeling of peace descended on
him as soon as he entered the grand apartment building at the Porte de la
Muette, overlooking the Bois de Boulogne. The job he had been doing for Rommel
required him to travel all over northern France, so he needed to be based in
Paris, but getting this place had taken a lot of bribery and bullying. It had
been worth it. He loved the dark mahogany paneling, the heavy curtains, the
high ceilings, the eighteenth-century silver on the sideboard. He walked around
the cool, dim apartment, renewing his acquaintance with his favorite
possessions: a small Rodin sculpture of a hand, a Degas pastel of a dancer
putting on a ballet slipper, a first edition of
The Count of Monte Cristo
. He
sat at the Steinway baby grand piano and played a languid version of
"Ain't Misbehavin' ":

No one to talk with, all by myself…

Before the war, the apartment and
much of the furniture had belonged to an engineer from Lyon, who had made a
fortune manufacturing small electrical goods, vacuum cleaners and radios and
doorbells. Dieter had learned this from a neighbor, a rich widow whose husband
had been a leading French Fascist in the thirties. The engineer was a
Bulgarian, she said: he had hired people to choose the right wallpaper and
antiques. For him, the only purpose of objects of beauty had been to impress
his wife's friends. He had gone to America, where everyone was vulgar, said the
widow. She was pleased the apartment now had a tenant who really appreciated
it.

Dieter took off his jacket and shirt
and washed the Paris grime from his face and neck. Then he put on a clean white
shirt, inserted gold links in the French cuffs, and chose a silver-gray tie.
While he was tying it, he switched on the radio. The news from Italy was bad.
The newscaster said the Germans were fighting a fierce rearguard action. Dieter
concluded that Rome must fall in the next few days.

But Italy was not France.

He now had to wait for someone to
spot Felicity Clairet. He could not be certain she would pass through Paris, of
course, but it was undoubtedly the likeliest place, after Reims, for her to be
seen. Anyway, there was nothing more he could do. He wished he had brought
Stéphanie with him from Reims. However, he needed her to occupy the house in
the rue du Bois. There was a chance that more Allied agents would land and find
their way to her door. It was important to draw them gently into the net. He
had left instructions that neither Michel nor Dr. Bouler was to be tortured in
his absence: he might yet have uses for them.

There was a bottle of Dom Perignon
champagne in the icebox. He opened it and poured some into a crystal flute.
Then, with a feeling that life was good, he sat down at his desk to read his
mail.

There was a letter from his wife, Waltraud.

My beloved Dieter, I am so sorry we
will not be together on your fortieth birthday.

Dieter had forgotten his birthday.
He looked at the date on his Cartier desk clock. It was June 3. He was forty
years old today. He poured another glass of champagne to celebrate.

In the envelope from his wife were
two other missives. His seven-year-old daughter, Margarete, known as Mausi, had
drawn a picture of him in uniform standing by the Eiffel Tower. In the picture,
he was taller than the tower: so children magnified their fathers. His son,
Rudi, ten years old, had written a grown-up letter, carefully rounded letters
in dark blue ink:

My dear Papa,

I am doing well in school although
Dr. Richter's classroom has been bombed. Fortunately it was nighttime and the
school was empty.

Dieter closed his eyes in pain. He
could not bear the thought of bombs falling on the city where his children
lived. He cursed the murderers of the RAF, even though he knew German bombs had
fallen on British schoolchildren.

He looked at the phone on his desk,
contemplating trying to call home. It was difficult to get through: the French
phone system was overloaded, and military traffic had priority, so you could
wait hours for a personal call to be connected. All the same, he decided to
try. He felt a sudden longing to hear the voices of his children and reassure
himself that they were still alive.

He reached for the phone. It rang
before he touched it. He picked it up. "Major Franck here."

"This is Lieutenant Hesse."

Dieter's pulse quickened. "You have found Felicity Clairet?"

"No. But something almost as good."

CHAPTER

THIRTY-SIX

FLICK HAD BEEN to the Ritz once,
when she was a student in Paris before the war. She and a girlfriend had put on
hats and makeup, gloves and stockings, and walked through the door as if they
did it every day. They had sauntered along the hotel's internal arcade of
shops, giggling at the absurd prices of scarves and fountain pens and perfume.
Then they had sat in the lobby, pretending they were meeting someone who was
late, and criticized the outfits of the women who came there to tea. They
themselves had not dared to order so much as a glass of water. In those days,
Flick had saved every spare penny for cheap seats at the Comédie Française.

Since the occupation began, she had
heard that the owners were attempting to run the hotel as normally as possible,
even though many of the rooms had been taken over permanently by top Nazis. She
had no gloves or stockings today, but she had powdered her face and set her
beret at a jaunty angle, and she just had to hope that some of the hotel's
wartime patrons would be forced into similar compromises.

Lines of gray military vehicles and
black limousines were lined up outside the hotel in the Place Vendôme. On
the facade of the building, six blood red Nazi banners flapped boastfully in
the breeze. A commissionaire in top hat and red trousers looked doubtfully at
Flick and Ruby. "You can't come in," he said.

Flick was in a light blue suit, very
creased, and Ruby in a navy frock and a man's raincoat. They were not dressed
to dine at the Ritz. Flick tried to imitate the hauteur of a French woman
dealing with an irritating inferior. Putting her nose in the air, she said,
"What is the matter?"

"This entrance is reserved for
the top brass, Madame. Even German colonels can't come in this way. You have to
go around to the rue Cambon and use the back door."

"As you wish," Flick said
with an air of weary courtesy, but in truth she was pleased he had not told
them they were underdressed. She and Ruby walked quickly around the block and
found the rear entrance.

The lobby was bright with light, and
the bars on either side were full of men in evening dress or uniform. The buzz
of conversation clicked and whirred with German consonants, not the languid
vowels of French. Flick felt as though she were walking into the enemy's
stronghold.

She went up to the desk. A concierge
in a coat with brass buttons looked down his nose at her. Judging her to be
neither a German nor a wealthy French woman, he said coldly, "What is
it?"

"Check whether Mademoiselle
Legrand is in her room," Flick said peremptorily. She assumed that Diana
must be using the false name on her papers, Simone Legrand. "I have an
appointment."

He backed off. "May I tell her
who is inquiring?"

"Madame Martigny. I am her
employee."

"Very good. In fact,
Mademoiselle is in the rear dining room with her companion. Perhaps you would
speak to the head waiter."

Flick and Ruby crossed the lobby and
entered the restaurant. It was a picture of elegant living: white tablecloths,
silver cutlery, candles, and waiters in black gliding around the room with
dishes of food. No one would have guessed that half Paris was starving. Flick
smelled real coffee.

Pausing on the threshold, she
immediately saw Diana and Maude. They were at a small table on the far side of
the room. As Flick watched, Diana took a bottle of wine out of a gleaming
bucket beside the table and poured for Maude and herself. Flick could have
throttled her.

She turned to make for the table,
but the head waiter stood in her way. Pointedly looking at her cheap suit, he
said, "Yes, Madame?"

"Good evening," she said.
"I must speak with that lady over there."