Jackdaws (45 page)

"I'll have to do this
alone," Flick said. "The rest of you had better go to the cathedral and
wait for me there."

"All my sins have been forgiven
several times over, I've spent so much time in church today," Paul said.

"You can pray for a place to
spend the night," Flick told him, and she hurried away.

She returned to the street where
Michel lived. A hundred meters from his house was the bar Chez Régis. Flick
went in. The proprietor, Alexandre Régis, sat behind the counter smoking. He
gave her a nod of recognition but said nothing.

She went through the door marked
Toilettes. She walked along a short passage, then opened what looked like a
cupboard door. It led to a steep staircase going up. At the top of the stairs
was a heavy door with a peephole. Flick banged on it and stood where her face
could be seen through the judas. A moment later the door was opened by Mémé
Régis, the mother of the proprietor.

Flick entered a large room whose
windows were blacked out. It was crudely decorated with matting on the floor,
brown-painted walls, and several naked bulbs hanging from the ceiling. At one
end of the room was a roulette wheel. Around a large circular table a group of
men were playing cards. There was a bar in one corner. This was an illegal
gambling club.

Michel liked to play poker for high
stakes, and he enjoyed louche company, so he occasionally came here for an
evening. Flick never played, but she sometimes sat and watched the game for an
hour. Michel said she brought him luck. It was a good place to hide from the
Gestapo, and Flick had been hoping she might find him here, but as she looked
from face to face around the room she was disappointed.

"Thank you, Mémé," she
said to Alexandre's mother.

"It's good to see you. How are
you?"

"Fine, have you seen my
husband?"

"Ah, the charming Michel. Not
tonight, I regret." The people here did not know Michel was in the
Resistance.

Flick went to the bar and sat on a
stool, smiling at the barmaid, a middle-aged woman with bright red lipstick.
She was Yvette Régis, the wife of Alexandre. "Have you any scotch?"

"Of course," said Yvette.
"For those who can afford it." She produced a bottle of Dewar's White
Label and poured a measure.

Flick said, "I'm looking for
Michel."

"I haven't seen him for a week
or so," Yvette said.

"Damn." Flick sipped her
drink. "I'll wait awhile, in case he shows up."

CHAPTER

FORTY-FOUR

DIETER WAS DESPERATE. Flick had
proved too clever. She had evaded his trap. She was somewhere in the city of
Reims, but he had no way of finding her.

He could no longer have members of
the Reims Resistance followed, in the hope that she would contact one of them,
for they were all now in custody. Dieter had Michel's house and Gilberte's flat
under surveillance, but he felt sure that Flick was too wily to let herself be
seen by the average Gestapo flatfoot. There were posters of her all over town,
but she must have changed her appearance by now, dyed her hair or something,
for no one had reported seeing her. She had outwitted him at every stop.

He needed a stroke of genius.

And he had come up with one—he
thought.

He sat on the seat of a bicycle at
the roadside. He was in the center of town, just outside the theater. He wore a
beret, goggles, and a rough cotton sweater, and his trousers were tucked into
his socks. He was unrecognizable. No one would suspect him. The Gestapo never
went by bicycle.

He stared west along the street,
narrowing his eyes to look into the setting sun. He was waiting for a black
Citroen. He checked his watch: any minute now.

On the other side of the road, Hans
was at the wheel of a wheezy old Peugeot, which had almost come to the end of
its useful life. The engine was running: Dieter did not want to take the risk
that it might not start when it was needed. Hans was also disguised, in
sunglasses and a cap, and wore a shabby suit and down-at-the-heel shoes, like a
French citizen. He had never done anything like this before, but he had
accepted his orders with unflappable stoicism.

Dieter, too, had never done this
before. He had no idea whether it would work. All kinds of things could go
wrong and anything could happen.

What Dieter had planned was
desperate, but what did he have to lose? Tuesday was the night of the full
moon. He felt sure the Allies were about to invade. Flick was the grand prize.
She was worth a great deal of risk.

But winning the war was no longer
what most occupied his mind. His future had been wrecked; he hardly cared who
ruled Europe. He thought constantly of Flick Clairet. She had ruined his life;
she had murdered Stéphanie. He wanted to find Flick, and capture her, and take
her to the basement of the château. There he would taste the satisfaction of
revenge. He fantasized constantly about how he would torture her: the iron rods
that would smash her small bones, the electric shock machine turned up to
maximum, the injections that would render her helpless with great wrenching
spasms of nausea, the ice bath that would give her shivering convulsions and
freeze the blood in her fingers. Destroying the Resistance, and repelling the
invaders, had become merely part of his punishment of Flick.

But first he had to find her.

In the distance he saw a black
Citroën.

He stared at it. Was this the one?
It was a two-door model, the kind always used when transporting a prisoner. He
tried to see inside. He thought there were four people altogether. This had to
be the car he was waiting for. It drew nearer, and he recognized the handsome
face of Michel in the back, guarded by a uniformed Gestapo man. He tensed.

He was glad now that he had given
orders that Michel was not to be tortured while Dieter was away. This scheme
would not have been possible otherwise.

As the Citroën came level with
Dieter, Hans suddenly pulled away from the curb in the old Peugeot. The car
swung out into the road, leaped forward, and smashed straight into the front of
the Citroën.

There was a clatter of crumpling
metal and a medley of breaking glass. The two Gestapo men leaped out of the
front of the Citroën and began yelling at Hans in bad French—seeming not to
notice that their colleague in the back appeared to have banged his head and
was slumped, apparently unconscious, beside his prisoner.

This was the critical moment, Dieter
thought, his nerves strung like wire. Would Michel take the bait? He stared at
the tableau in the middle of the street.

It took Michel a long moment to
realize his opportunity. Dieter almost thought he would fail to seize it. Then
he seemed to come to. He reached over the front seats, fumbled at the door
catch with bound hands, succeeded in getting the door open, pushed down the
seat, and scrambled out.

He glanced at the two Gestapo men
still arguing with Hans. They had their backs to him. He turned and walked
quickly away. His expression said he could hardly believe his good luck.

Dieter's heart leaped with triumph.
His plan was working.

He followed Michel.

Hans followed Dieter on foot.

Dieter rode the bicycle for a few
yards; then he found himself catching up with Michel, so he got off and pushed
it along the pavement. Michel turned the first Corner, limping slightly from
his bullet wound but walking fast, holding his bound hands low in front of him
to make them less conspicuous. Dieter followed discreetly, sometimes walking,
sometimes riding, dropping back out of Michel's sight whenever he could, taking
cover behind high-sided vehicles if he got the chance. Michel occasionally
glanced back but made no systematic attempt to shake off a tail. He had no
notion that he was being tricked.

After a few minutes, Hans overtook
Dieter, by arrangement, and Dieter dropped back to follow Hans. Then they
switched again.

Where would Michel go? It was
essential to Dieter's plan that Michel should lead him to other Resistance
members, so that he could once again pick up Flick's trail.

To Dieter's surprise, Michel headed
for his house near the cathedral. Surely he must suspect that his home was
under surveillance? Nevertheless, he turned into the street. However, he did
not go to his own place but entered a bar across the street called Chez Régis.

Dieter leaned his bicycle against
the wall of the next building, a vacant store with a faded Charcuterie sign. He
waited a few minutes, just in case Michel should come out again immediately.
When it was clear Michel was staying a while, Dieter went in.

He intended simply to make sure
Michel was still there—relying on his goggles and beret to conceal his identity
from Michel. He would buy a pack of cigarettes as an excuse and go back
outside. But Michel was nowhere in sight. Puzzled, Dieter hesitated.

The barman said, "Yes,
sir?"

"Beer," said Dieter.
"Draft." He hoped that if he kept his conversation to a minimum the
barman would not notice his slight German accent and accept him as a cyclist
who had stopped to quench his thirst.

"Coming up."

"Where's the toilet?"

The barman pointed to a door in the
corner. Dieter went through it. Michel was not in the men's room. Dieter risked
a glance into the ladies': it was empty. He opened what looked like a cupboard
door and saw that it led to a staircase. He went up the stairs. At the top was
a heavy door with a peephole. He knocked on the door, but there was no answer.
He listened for a moment. He could hear nothing, but the door was thick. He
felt sure there was someone on the other side, looking at him through the
peephole, realizing he was not a regular customer. He tried to act as if he had
taken a wrong turn on the way to the toilet. He scratched his head, shrugged,
and went back down the stairs.

There was no sign of a back entrance
to the place. Michel was here, Dieter felt sure, in the locked room upstairs.
But what should Dieter do about it?

He took his glass to a table so that
the barman would not try to engage him in small talk. The beer was watery and
tasteless. Even in Germany, the quality of beer had declined during the war. He
forced himself to finish it, then went out.

Hans was on the other side of the
street, looking in the window of a bookshop. Dieter went across. "He's in
some kind of private room upstairs," he told Hans. "He may be meeting
with other Resistance cadres. On the other hand, it may be a brothel, or
something, and I don't want to bust in on him before he's led us to anyone
worthwhile."

Hans nodded, understanding the dilemma.

Dieter made a decision. It was too
soon to rearrest Michel. "When he comes out, I'll follow him. As soon as
we're out of sight, you can raid the place."

"On my own?"

Dieter pointed to two Gestapo men in
a Citroën keeping watch on Michel's house. "Get them to help you.',

"Okay."

"Try to make it look like a
vice thing—arrest the whores, if there are any. Don't mention the
Resistance."

"Okay."

"Until then, we wait."

CHAPTER

FORTY-FIVE

UNTIL THE MOMENT when Michel walked
in, Flick was feeling pessimistic.

She sat at the bar in the little
makeshift casino, making desultory conversation with Yvette, indifferently
watching the intent faces of the men as they concentrated on their cards, their
dice, and the spinning roulette wheel. No one took much notice of her: they
were serious gamblers, not to be distracted by a pretty face.

If she did not find Michel, she was
in trouble. The other Jackdaws were in the cathedral, but they could not stay
there all night. They could sleep in the open—they would survive the weather,
in June—but they could so easily be caught.

They also needed transport. If they
could not get a car or van from the Bollinger circuit, they would have to steal
one. But then they would be forced to carry out the mission using a vehicle for
which the police were searching. It added more dangers to an already perilous
enterprise.

There was another reason for her
gloom: the image of Stéphanie Vinson kept coming back to her. It was the first
time Flick had killed a bound, helpless captive, and the first time she had
shot a woman.

Any killing disturbed her
profoundly. The Gestapo man she had shot a few minutes before Stéphanie had
been a combatant with a gun in his hand, but still it seemed dreadful to her that
she had brought his life to an end. So it had been with the other men she had
killed: two Milice cops in Paris, a Gestapo colonel in Lille, and a French
traitor in Rouen. But Stéphanie was worse. Flick had put a gun to the back of
her head and executed her. It was exactly how she had taught trainees to do it
in the SOE course. Stéphanie had deserved it, of course—Flick had no doubt
about that. But she wondered about herself. What kind of person was capable of
the cold-blooded killing of a helpless prisoner? Had she become some kind of
brutish executioner?

She drained her whisky but declined
a refill for fear of becoming maudlin. Then Michel came through the door.

Overwhelming relief flooded her.
Michel knew everyone in town. He would be able to help her. Suddenly the
mission seemed possible again.

She felt a wry affection as she took
in the lanky figure in a rumpled jacket, the handsome face with the smiling
eyes. She would always be fond of him, she imagined. She suffered a painful
stab of regret as she thought of the passionate love she had once had for him.
That would never come back, she was sure.

As he came closer, she saw that he
was not looking so good. His face seemed to have new lines. Her heart filled
with compassion for him. Exhaustion and fear showed in his expression, and he
might have been fifty rather than thirty-five, she thought anxiously.