Jackdaws (43 page)

Her voice softened. "I feel
fine. Don't worry about me."

He found himself saying something he
had not planned. "What will we do after the war?"

There was a surprised silence at the
other end of the line.

Dieter said, "Of course, the
war could go on for ten years, but on the other hand it might be over in two
weeks, and then what would we do?"

She recovered her composure
somewhat, but there was an uncharacteristic tremor in her voice as she said,
"What would you like to do?"

"I don't know," he said,
but that left him dissatisfied, and after a moment he blurted out, "I
don't want to lose you."

He waited for her to say something
else.

"What are you thinking?"
he said.

She said nothing. There was an odd
sound at the other end, and he realized she was crying. He felt choked up
himself. He caught the eye of the mechanic's wife, still timing his phone call.
He swallowed hard and turned away, not wanting a stranger to see that he was
upset. "I'll be with you soon," he said. "We'll talk some
more."

"I love you," she said.

He glanced at the mechanic's wife.
She was staring at him. To hell with her, he thought. "I love you,
too," he said. Then he hung up the phone.

CHAPTER

FORTY-ONE

IT TOOK THE Jackdaws most of the day
to get from Paris to Reims.

They passed through all the
checkpoints without incident. Their new fake identities worked as well as the
old, and no one noticed that Flick's photograph had been retouched with eyebrow
pencil.

But their train was delayed
repeatedly, stopping for an hour at a time in the middle of nowhere. Flick sat
in the hot carriage fuming with impatience as the precious minutes leaked away
uselessly. She could see the reason for the holdups: half the track had been
destroyed by the bombers of the U.S. Army Air Corps and the RAF When the train
chugged into life and moved forward, they looked out of the windows and saw
emergency repair crews cutting through twisted rails, picking up smashed
sleepers, and laying new track. Her only consolation was that the delays would
be even more maddening for Rommel as he attempted to deploy his troops to repel
the invasion.

There was a feeling in her chest
like a cold, inert lump, and every few minutes her thoughts returned to Diana
and Maude. They had certainly been interrogated by now, probably tortured,
possibly killed. Flick had known Diana all her life. She was going to have to
tell Diana's brother, William, what had happened. Flick's own mother would be
almost as upset as William. Ma had helped raise Diana.

They began to see vineyards, then
champagne warehouses alongside the track, and at last they arrived in Reims a few minutes after four on
Sunday afternoon. As Flick had feared, it was too late to carry out their
mission the same evening. That meant another nerve-racking twenty-four hours in
occupied territory. It also gave Flick a more specific problem: Where would the
Jackdaws spend the night?

This was not Paris. There was no
red-light district with disreputable flophouses whose proprietors asked few
questions, and Flick did not know of a convent where the nuns would hide anyone
who begged for sanctuary. There were no dark alleys in which down-and-outs
slept behind rubbish bins ignored by the police.

Flick knew of three possible
hideouts: Michel's town house, Gilberte's apartment, and Mademoiselle Lemas's
house in the rue du Bois. Unfortunately, any of them might be under
surveillance, depending on how deeply the Gestapo had penetrated the Bollinger
circuit. If Dieter Franck was in charge of the investigation, she had to fear
the worst.

There was nothing to do but go and
look. "We must split up into pairs again," she told the others.
"Four women together is too conspicuous. Ruby and I will go first. Greta
and Jelly, follow a hundred meters behind us."

They walked to Michel's place, not
far from the station. It was Flick's marital home, but she always thought of it
as his house. There was plenty of room for four women. But the Gestapo almost
certainly knew of the place: it would be astonishing if none of the men taken
captive last Sunday had revealed the address under torture.

The house was in a busy street with
several shops. Walking along the pavement, Flick surreptitiously looked into
each parked car while Ruby checked the houses and shops. Michel's property was
a high, narrow building in an elegant eighteenth-century row. It had a small
front yard with a magnolia tree. The place was still and quiet, with no
movement at the windows. The doorstep was dusty.

On their first pass along the
street, they saw nothing suspicious: no workmen digging up the road, no
watchful loiterers at the pavement tables outside the bar, Chez Régis, no one
leaning on a telegraph pole reading a newspaper.

They returned on the opposite side.
Outside the baker's shop was a black Citroën Traction Avant with two men in
suits sitting in the front, smoking cigarettes and looking bored.

Flick tensed. She was wearing her
dark wig, so she felt sure they would not recognize her as the girl on the
Wanted poster, but all the same her pulse beat faster and she hurried past
them. All along the pavement she listened for a shout behind her, but it did
not come, and at last she turned the corner and breathed easier.

She slowed her pace. Her fears had
been justified.

Michel's house was no use to her. It
did not have a rear entrance, being part of a row with no back alley. The
Jackdaws could not enter without being seen by the Gestapo.

She considered the other two
possibilities. Michel was presumably still living at Gilberte's apartment,
unless he had been captured. The building had a useful back entrance. But it
was a tiny place, and four overnight guests at a one-room apartment would not
only be uncomfortable but also might be noticed by other people in the
building.

The obvious place for them to spend
the night was the house in the rue du Bois. Flick had been there twice. It was
a big house with lots of bedrooms. Mademoiselle Lemas was completely
trustworthy and was more than willing to feed unexpected guests. She had been
sheltering British agents, downed airmen, and escaping prisoners of war for
years. And she might know what had happened to Brian Standish.

It was a mile or two from the center
of town. The four women set out to walk there, still in pairs a hundred meters
apart.

They arrived half an hour later. The
rue du Bois was a quiet suburban street: a surveillance team would have trouble
concealing themselves here. There was only one parked car within sight, an
impeccably upright Peugeot 201 that was much too slow for the Gestapo. It was
empty.

Flick and Ruby took a preliminary
walk past Mademoiselle Lemas's house. It looked the same as always. Her Simca
Cinq stood in the courtyard, which was unusual only in that she normally parked
it in the garage. Flick slowed her pace and surreptitiously looked in at the
window. She saw no one. Mademoiselle Lemas used that room only rarely: it was
an old-fashioned front parlor, the piano immaculately dusted, the cushions
always plumped, the door kept firmly closed except for formal visits. Her
secret guests always sat in the kitchen at the back of the house, where there
was no chance they would be seen by passersby.

As Flick passed the door, her eye
was caught by something on the ground. It was a wooden toothbrush. Without
pausing in her stride, she stooped and picked it up.

Ruby said, "Do you need to
clean your teeth?"

"This looks like Paul's."
She almost thought it was Paul's, although there must be hundreds like it in
France, maybe thousands.

"Do you think he might be
here?"

"Maybe."

"Why would he have come?"

"I don't know. To warn us of
danger, perhaps."

They walked on around the block.
Before approaching the house again, she let Greta and Jelly catch up.
"This time we'll go together," she said. "Greta and Jelly, knock
on the front door."

Jelly said, "Thank gordon, my
feet are killing me."

"Ruby and I will go around to
the back, just as a precaution. Don't say anything about us, just wait for us
to appear."

They walked along the street again,
all together this time. Flick and Ruby went into the courtyard and past the
Simca Cinq and crept around to the back. The kitchen ran almost the whole width
of the house at the rear, with two windows and a door between. Flick waited
until she heard the metallic ring of the doorbell; then she risked a peep
through a window.

Her heart stopped.

There were three people in the
kitchen: two men in uniform, and a tall woman with luxuriant red hair who was
definitely not the middle-aged Mademoiselle Lemas.

In a frozen fraction of a second,
Flick noted that all three were looking away from the windows, reflexively
turning in the direction of the front door.

Then she ducked down again.

She thought fast. The men were
obviously Gestapo officers. The woman must be a French traitor, posing as
Mademoiselle Lemas. She had looked vaguely familiar, even from the back: there
was something about the stylish drape of her green summer dress that struck a
chord in Flick's memory.

It was dismayingly clear to Flick
that the safe house had been betrayed. The place was now a trap for Allied
agents. Poor Brian Standish must have fallen straight into it. Flick wondered
whether he was still alive.

A feeling of cold determination came
over her. She drew her pistol. Ruby did the same.

"Three people," she told
Ruby in a low voice. "Two men and a woman." She took a deep breath.
It was time to be ruthless. "We're going to kill the men," she said.
"Okay?"

Ruby nodded.

Flick thanked heaven for Ruby's cool
head. "I'd prefer to keep the woman alive for questioning, but we'll shoot
her if she seems likely to escape."

"Got it."

"The men are at the left-hand
end of the kitchen. The woman will probably go to the door. You take this
window, I'll take the far one. Aim at the man nearest to you. Shoot when I
shoot."

She crept across the width of the
house and crouched under the other window. Her breath was coming fast and her
heart was beating like a steam hammer, but she was thinking as clearly as if
she were playing chess. She had no experience of firing through glass. She
decided to shoot three times in rapid succession: once to shatter the window, a
second time to kill her man, and a third time to be sure of him. She thumbed
the safety catch on her pistol and held it pointing to the sky. Then she
straightened up and looked in through the window.

The two men were standing facing the
door to the hall. Both had pistols drawn. Flick leveled her gun at the one
nearest her.

The woman had gone, but as Flick
looked she returned, holding the kitchen door open. Greta and Jelly walked in
ahead of her, all unsuspecting; then they saw the Gestapo men. Greta gave a
small scream of fear. Something was said—Flick could not hear what—then Greta
and Jelly raised their hands in the air.

The fake Mademoiselle Lemas walked
into the kitchen behind them. Seeing her full-face, Flick felt a shock of
recognition. She had seen her before. An instant later she remembered where.
The woman had been in the square at Sainte-Cécile last Sunday with Dieter
Franck. Flick had thought she was the officer's mistress. Obviously she was
something more than that.

A moment later the woman saw Flick's
face at the window. Her mouth dropped open, her eyes widened, and she lifted
her hand to point at what she had seen. The two men began to turn.

Flick pulled the trigger. The bang
of the gun seemed simultaneous with the crash of breaking glass. Holding the
gun level and steady, she fired twice more.

A second later, Ruby fired.

Both men fell to the ground.

Flick threw open the back door and
stepped inside.

The young woman had already turned
away. She was making a dash for the front door. Flick raised her gun, but too
late: in a split second the woman was in the hall and out of Flick's line of
sight. Then Jelly, moving surprisingly fast, threw herself through the door.
There was a crash of falling bodies and breaking furniture.

Flick crossed the kitchen and
looked. Jelly had brought the woman down on the tiled floor of the hall. She
had also broken the delicate curved legs of a kidney-shaped table, smashed a Chinese
vase that had stood on the table, and scattered a spray of dried grasses that
had been in the vase. The French woman struggled to get up. Flick aimed her
pistol but did not fire. Jelly, showing remarkably quick reactions, grabbed the
woman by the hair and banged her head on the tiles until she stopped wriggling.

The woman was wearing odd shoes, one
black and one brown.

Flick turned back and looked at the
two Gestapo men on the kitchen floor. Both lay still. She picked up their guns
and pocketed them. Loose firearms left lying around might be used by the enemy.

For the moment, the four Jackdaws
were safe.

Flick was operating on adrenaline.
The time would come, she knew, when she would think about the man she had
killed. The end of a life was a dreadful moment. Its solemnity might be
postponed but would return. Hours or days from now, Flick would wonder if the
young man in uniform had left behind a wife who was now alone, and children
fatherless. But for the present, she was able to put that aside and think only
of her mission.

She said, "Jelly, keep the
woman covered. Greta, find some string and tie her to a chair. Ruby, go
upstairs and make sure there's no one else in the house. I'll check the
basement."

She ran down the stairs to the
cellar. There on the dirt floor she saw the figure of a man, tied up and
gagged. The gag covered much of his face, but she could see that half his ear
had been shot off.