Böhm would have liked Fiocca if they had met in peacetime. He was obviously a man of taste and sophistication, a man with whom one could discuss modern ideas, and that was rare in Böhm’s experience. He had held up to the initial stages of interrogation well, answering all the basic questions calmly and quietly, not volunteering additional information, or floundering when asked for information about specific dates, simply saying he could not remember, but would be happy to explain anything if he could see the relevant records.
It was a pity, really, that none of that calm intelligence would help him in the hours to come.
The workload was pressing. The weak and vacillating Vichy leadership had allowed French terrorists, communists and Jews to operate throughout the south of France. The people, originally obedient after the shock of their complete military defeat, had grown restive. Now they pinned their hopes on the Americans and were sneaking out of the woodwork like vermin when the farmer has neglected putting down poison on their trails. One mouse in particular.
Böhm did not approve of handing out these names to enemy agents as if they were badges of honor. To him, the White Mouse was simply Operative A and he insisted he was never referred to by any other name in this building. He had hoped that destroying the rat runs of the Old Quarter would have forced him out into the open, but rumors of activities only increased. Prisoners and airmen who had been shot down disappeared along routes of safe houses, collecting false papers on the way, and reappearing in Spain or in England, or in North Africa. His detector vans picked up the coded squeals of a dozen radio sets whispering to London and Algiers, and this man seemed to be able to carry it all—papers, messages, radio parts, prisoners—through every checkpoint they set up.
At first he had assumed him to be a peasant or fisherman who knew the coast and the back roads. But perhaps he had been wrong.
He began to read through the reports Heller had left on his desk of the escape from the coast. The terrorist who had been killed had been identified as Antoine Colbert, a lawyer whose father’s firm had been arranging the finances of the wealthy in Marseille for years. For a moment Böhm had hoped they had, by some stroke of luck, caught their mouse. In the days which followed, however, Colbert’s family had disappeared too smoothly and efficiently for it to have been the work of an organization panicked by losing its head.
The White Mouse was still out there.
He read the reports again. The sharp-eyed private who had seen movement on the steep and rocky shore and insisted his patrol leader turn on the searchlight; the boasts, almost certainly exaggerated, of the number of escapees they had shot while they huddled in an overloaded rowing boat until their light had been shot out; the scramble to find the shore party who had helped the escapees. Then he saw it, a line in the middle of the account of the man who had winged Colbert, causing him to shoot himself. He saw two other persons with the dead man, and thought one, judging by a glimpse caught in the swinging beam of a torch, might have been a woman.
A woman? Surely not. Women did not fight among men. Radio operators, the occasional student painting slogans on the wall, yes, but surely the Resistance had not sunk so low as to put a gun in a woman’s hands? But then again, he had himself interrogated a number of female radio operators in Paris and some had shown a certain unwomanly enthusiasm for the fight. He began to reconsider. What if the White Mouse was a woman? Would Frenchmen take instructions from a female? Unusual perhaps, but not impossible. The ease with which the White Mouse made his—or her—way through checkpoints and railway stations, disappeared from rendezvous, melted like mist into the streets looked a lot less like magic if you considered his searchers had been looking for a man of fighting age, not a woman.
He leaned back in his chair, pressed the tips of his fingers together and remained motionless, staring straight into the air in front of him until he knew what it was he really wanted, then picked up the heavy handset on his desk.
“Captain, come in please.”
He came at once. “Heil Hitler!”
“Heller, the files we hold on the civilian population of Marseille. I want you to look again at all the women we’ve heard even the vaguest rumor about. Especially those known to frequent the black market. Exclude all those with children under ten years of age, and those who are themselves over fifty. I want reports of each of them on my desk, arranged in order of their family’s wealth.”
Heller blinked behind his glasses. “Of course, sir. May I ask why?”
Böhm was happy to explain his theory and pleased to see Heller’s eyes light up with intelligent appreciation.
“And why you are concentrating on the wealthier women?”
A sensible question.
“Because, whoever she is, she operates with great confidence and freedom. We had thought that to be the confidence of the lower orders, untrammeled by a civilized education and a freedom born of a familiarity with every rat hole in this city. But what else gives a woman confidence and freedom, Heller?”
Heller hardly hesitated at all. “Money.”
Böhm nodded. “The files please, Heller.”
“Of course.” But the man didn’t move; his mouth simply opened and closed like a fish.
“What is it?”
“I shall fetch the files at once. Only I think… sir, I think Madame Fiocca’s file will almost certainly be on the top of the pile.”
Böhm frowned. She had seemed every inch the spoiled French housewife. Loud, showy, confident. His voice became sharp. “Tell me what you know of her now, if you please.”
Heller spoke quickly. “Born in Australia. Ran away from home and worked as a journalist in Paris for Hearst Newspapers. Known to use the black market frequently and supply her friends from her stores…” He faltered. “Travels frequently, and used to regularly visit a prisoner in Mauzac, before he escaped.”
Böhm’s mouth had thinned into a straight line.
Heller stared into the space above his head and continued. “She had her husband send her fifty thousand francs to the inn where she was staying near the prison. Naturally it was investigated as a possible bribe after the man escaped, but she told the local police it was used to pay her bar bills and complained about the gross abuse of confidentiality to the Post Office. They issued her a formal letter of apology.”
Böhm was not used to feeling rage, but he felt it now, running white hot through his bones. “Where is she?”
“We put a car on her, sir. When she left here. She went straight back to their home.”
Böhm gritted his teeth. “Get her. Get her now.”
Heller saluted and withdrew, and as the door closed behind him, Böhm stood up quickly, then leaned forward on his desk. He should have known. She had been high-handed when she arrived, then sulky and girlish in front of her husband. But he had been watching Henri, not her.
When Philippe left, Nancy was expecting to break down, but she did not. She took her glass and walked through the empty house, looking at each room, trying to fix it in her memory.
The drawing room had elegant, minimal furnishings and a crop of pre-war fashion magazines on the low coffee table that she had ordered from Paris. Henri used to tease her by putting his feet up on it when they came home in the early hours of the morning from a club.
Henri’s study was much more old-fashioned. She called it his Bear Cave, book-lined and with an oak desk where he would sigh over her bills from the dressmaker’s while she smiled at him sweetly from one of the red leather armchairs by the fire. A photograph of his mother stood on his desk, next to one of Nancy herself. Madame Fiocca the elder had died the year before she and Henri met. He had always said his mother would have appreciated Nancy. It was a sweet thing to say, but Nancy thought it was good that they’d never had to test that theory. She undid the back of the photograph and found two sets of false identity papers, one for her, one for Henri. She put hers into her pocket and carefully replaced his so they’d be there when he needed them.
Upstairs she lingered on the landing before at last going into their bedroom. The bed was made, her makeup arranged neatly on her dressing table, all those lotions and potions, cold creams and colors, her silver-back hairbrushes and ivory-handled powder puffs. She glanced at the door to her dressing room. No point going in there. She couldn’t pack a suitcase like Claudette; she could take nothing with her which wouldn’t fit into her largest, but not suspiciously large, handbag. She put on two silk blouses but couldn’t risk two skirts, a scarf that could act as a shawl, her camel-hair coat and shoes that while stylish enough she also could walk in comfortably. She needed cash of course, and gathered up a pearl-handled penknife, jewelry, face cream, a comb and her genuine papers. She tucked the false papers into the lining of her bag. What else? A wedding photograph? No, it would arouse suspicion. Or one of the notes Henri had left her when he went to work in the morning, reminding her to pick up the dry-cleaning or that a business acquaintance was coming for dinner? One of those would be innocent enough, surely, and that way she would have something he had touched to hold until they met again. She found one in the drawer of her dressing table, signed as they all were, “With all my love, Henri.”
She slipped it into her bag, then returned to the hall, leaning against the wall in the shadows. Through the stained glass and metal grill of the door she could see one of the fat black Gestapo cars drawn up across the street. What was Philippe planning? The light was fading from the sky and the last bus to Toulouse left in forty minutes. She hoped to hell he was going to hurry up. She counted her breaths. One. Two. It was a trick a fellow passenger on the boat from Australia to New York had taught her when she was sixteen, alone and panicked by her sudden freedom. She thought about those first weeks in New York, the first friends she had made, her first apartment and job, her first taste of bathtub gin. Her decision, on seeing a smartly dressed woman on the steps outside the court house asking questions of some dark-suited lawyer without apology or deference, to be a journalist. Come on, Philippe. She had her hand on the door. Could she just run? Risk it? She wouldn’t stand a chance.
There was just a wisp of smoke at first—Nancy blinked to make sure she wasn’t seeing things—then the upper window of the fishmonger’s shop on the other side of the road was thrown open and a great belch of black smoke billowed out into the evening. Madame Bissot came running out, hammering on the side of the Gestapo car, pointing into the shop. Two men got out. One followed her in, the other stood leaning on the open passenger door, looking up at the lick of flame. Nancy opened the door and shut it behind her, and walked down the path to the gate as quickly as she could, staring at the Gestapo man’s back. Her heart was in her throat. Through the gate. Had it been open or closed when she came to it? Think! It was only a moment ago. Open. Henri always scolded her for leaving it unlatched, and she had been the last one coming in from the street. But then Claudette would have closed it when she’d left. No, she’d gone out the back way. Nancy left it half-open, turned back toward the shop, sure the Gestapo man would have turned round by now and already be crossing the road toward her. No. He was still staring up at the fire. She walked quickly east along the road. Each footstep sounded in her mind like a gunshot and it felt as if she had a searchlight trained on her back. How long was this damned road? She allowed herself to quicken her pace a little, then she couldn’t help herself, she ran, took her first right, then the next left, then stopped and peered round the corner to see if they were coming. The rumble of an engine made her heart stop. But no, it was just a jeep rattling along the main road, then the street was empty.
When Heller arrived outside the Fiocca house he knew at once something was wrong. The remains of a fire were being doused at the fishmonger’s shop, and though one of the men he had sent to keep an eye on Madame Fiocca was still sitting in his car staring solidly at her front door, the other was helping to put out the last embers.
Heller ignored the man helping, and rapped his knuckles on the window of the car. The man inside paled and rolled down the window.
“Well, Kaufman?” Heller said.
“No movement from inside the house,” Kaufman said hopefully. Then he pointed at an angle across the street. “Bauer is watching the back gate from there, and hasn’t spotted anyone coming out either. Anything wrong, sir?”
“When did the fire start?”
“About half an hour ago. Nasty blaze. We thought the whole building was going to go.”
“And while you were watching it, who was observing the front door?”
Kaufman was silent, his eyes widening. “I was… I only stepped out of the car to see about the blaze for a minute. Less than a minute.”
Heller closed his eyes. “And did it not seem strange to you, that while the house opposite was going up in flames, neither Madame Fiocca nor her maid ever came out to their front door to see what was happening?”
The man blinked.
Heller felt a sickness in the pit of his stomach. Then he began to walk toward the house, shouting over his shoulder. “Kaufman, follow me! Bring a crowbar for the door!”
She was gone. Of course she was gone.