“The papers you found at that eighty-eight battery near where we met the Resistance turned out to have every gun position east of Normandy on them.” Lena smiled at him. “The section has put you in for a mention in dispatches.”
“Great,” Bill feigned, “more trinkets. I’ll see if I can swap it for a pay rise.”
Lena laughed, shook her head, picked up her little satchel and left the room.
One thing they can’t train you for is the monotony and boredom. Bill had kept himself busy going over the drawings he had made of the Gestapo HQ and compared them to the plans the Resistance had obtained. He wanted to be sure he hadn’t missed anything. He couldn’t go down Avenue Foch too often, as he would start to be recognised. They had agents watching the street and taking notes for all he knew. Life in Paris seemed to continue. There were, however, the regular power outages and the evening curfews to contend with. Despite the swastikas and German uniforms everywhere, you’d hardly know there was a war on or that Germany looked like they were starting to lose it. Coffee and liquor were plentiful, here at least, which was half the battle of keeping the civilian population compliant. Bill knew the rural populace was far less fond of their new masters.
Jack spent most of his time getting the various Resistance groups in the area ready for the coming liberation. Lena was in touch with Baker Street most days, feeding back the varied intelligence they had requested. She had started to embrace her role. Bill had seen her leave that morning with new confidence in her step. If it were possible, she suddenly seemed even more attractive to him.
Bill contented himself helping with the cooking and generally felt like a spare part. To Bill, though, this was supremely more welcome than some of his previous experience of operations in France, hiding in damp basements. He worked his way steadily through his tobacco and planned out various scenarios that would expedite their mission. Each time he came back to the same conclusion. They would have to wait for the day of the uprising. The Resistance had already started to make armbands to identify themselves. The last thing anyone wanted after four years in hiding was to get shot by their own side.
SOE had initially been reluctant to send an agent as experienced and knowledgeable as Bill back to France. They thought he knew too much, should he be captured. Bill knew, however, by this point in the war, with all the department had learned, they would not risk other operatives if a team went missing. They would already have a file of all the other operations they knew about, change the various plans, and get the possible compromised agents to a new safe house. It didn’t matter much to Bill anyway. He’d already decided if he was arrested, he’d hide one of his issued glass vials under his lip and would bite down on it long before the SD got a chance to get to work on him. It wasn’t a thought he relished, and he quickly shook it away.
The various plans for the attack on the Gestapo HQ ranged from the almost ludicrous, storming the building with grenades and pistols, getting the target to a field, and asking for a Lysander airlift out of France, to the benign: camp outside and starve them out. In the end, Bill had applied Occam’s razor. The simplest solution is usually the best. First, they would have a van ready and surround the building with as many guns as they could muster. Then, if possible, they would take all the officers inside as prisoners.
The staff at number 84 seemed to vary. On top of torturing Bill’s colleagues, the dark shadows inside were also instrumental in the evacuations, mistreatment and reprisals against the Jews in Drancy. They knowingly sent women and children to their deaths. What was this? Was there a word for it? Evil didn’t seem strong enough somehow. Could it simply be put down to war? This was certainty more than war. As if the Germans didn’t have enough on their hands with the Russians, Bill could barely imagine the logistics needed to kill vast swathes of the non-combatant civilian population in their occupied territories. They say that evil triumphs when good men do nothing. Bill was determined, despite his increasingly cynical attitude to all about him, to do whatever he could to bring the puppet masters of these obscene crimes to some justice. Justice to Bill would have meant he’d happily plaster their brains up the nearest wall, courtesy of 230 grains of Colt .45 ACP. But unfortunately, Westminster seemed to have other ideas, and they were meant to capture their target alive.
“Missing home, boss?” Lena had just walked back in.
“Miles away, sorry, Lena.”
“You look like you were pondering your existence.”
“Something like that. Any news from our divine masters?”
She pulled a small piece of paper from her pocket. It was a shopping list of gibberish.
“Look, Lena. I’ll parachute into the most dangerous place in Europe, I’ll pick up a rifle and run towards my certain death, I’ll even drink the strange noxious substances that masquerade as schnapps in some of the local cafes here, but I refuse to learn this weird black magic you call deciphering.”
SOE had tried to teach him every time he’d returned to England. They had some of the best instructors in the art the country could find, but it remained a complete mystery to him. Even the F-Section boss, Buckmaster, had urged him to learn the new double-transposition cyphers, which involved inventing and learning a short poem and using words from it to encode and later decode the messages. Sometimes the codes were encrypted five times over, and a short message could take half an hour. For Bill, it was too much like the maths he had hated at school. Buckmaster had wanted to move him onto the training staff to assist the combat instructors, and Bill thought this was probably partly due to his reluctance to learn and constantly failing the cypher course. In the end, the staff gave up and resigned to sending him into action with appropriate support operatives. Lena took to it like a fish to water. She could decode the messages in a matter of minutes.
Lena flipped it over and double-checked the message. “The word is the liberation of Paris is to be a French operation. de Gaulle has convinced Ike at SHAEF to allow the French forces to roll in alone and take all the credit.”
“Eisenhower seems to have a soft spot for the French. Maybe he wants to make sure they give the Americans the best hotels in the city. It is a long way from Paris to Berlin, and there aren’t many cities worth staying in before then unless you like rubble and ersatz coffee,” sniped Bill.
“There’s more,” she continued. “Buckmaster himself intends to come to Paris after the liberation.” She looked up from the paper. “It would seem he wants to start to wrap up the operations personally. I guess they won’t need many spies in France once it’s only the French here to worry about.”
“More like de Gaulle doesn’t want anyone else around to claim any credit for saving the country he has abandoned for four years. It must stick in his craw just how many of his glorious countrymen switched sides and helped the Boche.”
“We know what we are achieving here, and they can’t take away our accomplishments,” Lena replied proudly. “I have distributed the money we brought with us, which has already helped arm and feed ten Resistance groups in the city. That’s probably a hundred combat-effective troops to help when the time comes if they can secure enough weapons.”
“Your healthy optimism is really making a difference to this mission. I’m getting nothing done here surrounded by tobacco, maps and drawings.”
“Your time is still to come. Jack and I know why you are here, and neither of us would feel as safe as knowing you will lead the final stages. We know they don’t give out Military Crosses for just anything. The staff said you are a real soldier. I was heartbroken when they sent Violette off on her own mission without me. I have never made friends easily, and Violette gave me the confidence to leave my abusive boyfriend, angry I had joined up. He thought I would be a nurse, of course, but he got violent with me the night before I travelled to the finishing school. I met Violette after the interviews. She had just returned from France and inspired me to stand on my own two feet. She was also the one who encouraged me to go along on that double date.”
“I guess I owe Violette a lot, being lucky enough to be seen with you, the most beautiful agent at Baker Street.”
“I think Jack was the real lucky one, being out with Violette. Anyway, I’m trying to say that I know the spying part comes harder for you, but that is why we are a team. It was your confidence that helped me, including on the day we arrived here.”
“You have come a long way in a short time. It’s not so easy being the prey in a field full of predators. No one is here for medals, and I’m no soldier. Not really. I became an officer because I thought it would be an easy life. I wanted to escape after the strange theme park of academia at Cambridge, and the army seemed a good skive. Once the war broke out, though, I knew I needed to do more. If I could use my knowledge of languages to help the effort, I would. Combat and weapons training seemed easy, like with you and the cyphering.”
“Well, you are a warrior to me, Bill, and I don’t think we can fail. I’m proud to serve with you.” She had lowered her voice to just above a whisper and sat down beside him, putting her hand on his thigh.
“A warrior doesn’t mean you never fail. It just means you will always fight. But I’m glad you are here too.”
She threw her leg over him and, now straddling him, planted her lips on his. He felt the inevitable rush of testosterone and held her there tightly.
“Sorry to intrude, boss,” Jack said from the doorway. “I’d happily leave you to it, but I’ve just heard something is happening at the target location.”
Lena quickly stood, clearly embarrassed, her cheeks flushed, and she looked at the floor.
“What is it, Jack?” Bill asked without betraying any emotion.
“Another unit has spotted vehicles being readied at the prison, and the SS have bolstered their numbers at 84. So, I think we ought to take a look. Roland, Leo and Nicole are currently looking at the police precinct across town, but Andre is here, and he has the delivery truck ready for us.”
“We’ll be down in one minute. Make sure there are no weapons on board, and get a few boxes of supplies, so it looks like we are out on deliveries if we get a tug.”
Jack disappeared from the doorway, and Lena looked up into a half-glance at Bill and laughed.
“I guess we had better continue this later when we have some free time,” Bill said, grinning.
“If you play your cards right.”
Bill never was much good at timing … or cards, now he thought about it.
“Pass as slowly as you can, Andre,” Bill advised from the passenger seat, casually leaning on the open window. Jack and Lena were in the back, sitting on crates, looking through the gaps in the canvas panels.
Bill could see some black Citreons and an armed motorcycle with a sidecar parked outside number 84. Just past them was a Pan-Pan painted up in patchy camouflage, with a German cross on the side. The baby, four-man armoured vehicle looked like a car drawn by a child, with a menacing 20mm gun poking out. It was an armed convoy. They were clearly worried about an attack from the Resistance.
They slowed to a walking pace, and as Bill looked on, two French gendarmes waved them on and shouted something about there being nothing to see. But there was something to see. Something that made Bill’s blood run cold.
He felt a stifling feeling from somewhere in his lungs. He heard himself try to shout out, but adrenaline had incapacitated him. The last time he remembered feeling this way was a few seconds before he had some out-of-body experience, and something took over his movements like he was a marionette. That time he had fought the paralysis to stand to run towards a machine gunner and two riflemen with a primed hand grenade in his hand. This time was very different. Any action he took would jeopardise the whole mission. For the good of the entire team, his subconscious had taken over and incapacitated him. It was all he could achieve to sit very still and stare in disbelief. Their truck sped up again and hurried down the Avenue.
Andre spoke. Bill let the words enter his consciousness, but he didn’t really listen. They bounced around his head, not landing. They drove for some time, but Bill didn’t know for how long, or for that matter, where the route had taken them.
They pulled up outside a fairly well-kept cafe with polished brass lanterns on either side of a large glass double-door entrance. Inside, the tables were all immaculately arranged, and each chair identically not-quite pushed in. Bill walked around to the back of the truck with legs like jelly. He was about to ask if the others had seen what he had. He got his answer. Lena was curled up on the truck floor, hugging her knees and gently sobbing. Jack had one hand on her and was staring back at Bill with eyes as wide as dinner plates.
Bill paused for a few seconds. Then, he re-gathered himself mentally and said as tenderly as he could, “Stay here, Lena, but try to stay quiet,” then, “Jack, Andre says this cafe is sympathetic to the cause. Let’s take a look.”
Jack vaulted out of the truck. “What happens now, boss?”
“Honestly, I really don’t know. Maybe this will force our hand. We’ll have to think hard if we actually need this bloke alive. Perhaps it will be easier just to risk it and slot him?”
They walked into the cafe, and a sizeable balding man wearing an apron appeared from behind a mirrored wall. His eyes had a strange squint that made it look like he was checking a bus timetable behind while one eye was looking straight through you. It looked like he’d just climbed down from the famous Paris cathedral of Notre Dame. What with his odd oversized build, he indeed reminded Bill of Quasimodo. He nervously looked to Andre, who answered the silent question with an imperceptible nod.
“Liberte!” he exclaimed. A phrase that, when used appropriately, could be answered likewise or with a hail of bullets in the wrong company.
“Liberte!” Andre replied. “Cognac for my two friends and me, please, Rene.”
They sat at a window table with a good view of the street and the truck.
“So, who was that, Willy?” asked Andre.
“An agent and friend of ours.” Bill felt like he was in a circus with their new friend Quasimodo and Andre with his own set of bizarre facial features. Even when he was being friendly, he looked like a rodent with his odd inset eyes. “She is also Lena’s best friend.”
“That is not good. She won’t last long in there, Willy. Not many do.”
Bill knew he was right. He couldn’t shake the image. The agent they were dragging in for questioning was Violette. Scratches covered her face, and one of her eyes was shiny, purple and fully closed, like a boxer after ten rounds with two angry bears. Bill wondered if she had been in Paris the whole time. If there was one thing Bill had, it was an almost photographic memory. When those memories and sights are bad, they could come back and haunt him at times.
Just as they had passed by 84, an officer in a grey uniform, who looked like a pin-up boy for the Nazis with his blue eyes, blonde hair and strong chin, had hit Violette in the back of the head with the butt of his pistol. He looked to be perhaps twenty-five. In the brief seconds afterwards, he had a maniacal grin on his blood-speckled face. With a bit of help from his photographic memory of faces from the briefing at Baker Street, Bill knew his name to be Ernst Misselwitz. Bill had the image of the monster’s claret-daubed face seared on his retinas. He couldn’t shake it.