The secret, she knew, was always to be inconspicuous. Not that she needed to be reminded. There was reminder enough in the big, black Citroën parked at the opposite corner of Place Saint Pierre. The two men in the front seat were Gestapo and made no effort to conceal the fact. They’d be more than normally suspicious too these days, for everyone knew the invasion was coming any time now. Here in Caen, the atmosphere wasn’t quite as jittery as elsewhere because just about everyone was convinced the Allies would hit the beach farther to the northeast, at Calais. Corinne herself believed that, even though her mission was here in Normandy.
She stepped off the curb onto the cobblestones of the square, head down, resisting a powerful urge to look at the Citroën. Be inconspicuous, she told herself. Be ordinary. Be just another warweary, French housewife struggling to get through one more bleak and difficult day.
Behind the car, the bells of Ste. Étienne began tolling the noonday Angelus. She stared lovingly at the twin spires of the old abbey and could barely resist a grin at the irony. Thirteenth century these spires were, looming some 90 meters over the square. The irony, Corinne understood better than most, was that this traditional Catholic call to prayer still prevailed in a city that had been strongly Protestant for over 300 years. If asked, Corinne could have added that Ste. Étienne dated back to the 11th century, that it was a fine specimen of Norman Romanesque architecture, and that the body of William the Conqueror had rested in its high altar until it was spirited away during the French Revolution.
Indeed there was very little about Caen and Ste. Étienne that Corinne didn’t know, one of the reasons she was here. Three years before the war began — it seemed more like a century ago now — Corinne Beardsley, Professor Corinne Beardsley, had successfully defended her thesis on stress and balance in early Norman architecture. She would have been content to spend the rest of her life on the subject, but the day France fell she had been recruited by the Special Operations Executive, the SOE, as a radio operator. She would have been content too, spending the war in England doing her patriotic duty in that role, but a month ago the SOE had come to her again. As unpleasant as it might seem to her, they said, not to mention extremely dangerous, there was a medieval church building in Caen that had to be — their word was “eliminated” — for reasons she didn’t need to know. No one would know how to do it better than Corinne Beardsley, they said. And so it developed that two nights ago, on the 3rd of June, a gray, single-engine Lysander had touched down in a dark field near St. Lo. It tumbled her out without ever coming to a complete stop, and then left her in the hands of the Resistance.
The Angelus bells continued as Corinne crossed the square, but it seemed the only sound in her ears was her own footsteps, growing louder and louder as she neared the Citroën. Then she realized that what she was hearing was her own heartbeat. And no wonder. At the bottom of the shabby cloth bag hanging from the fingers of her left hand were folds of plastic explosive.
Corinne shifted the bag so that the rosary in her other hand could be seen more easily. It was important that she appear to be especially devout. She stopped for a second and stooped to scratch her ankle nonchalantly. It gave her a chance to take some deep breaths. Just a few seconds more and she would pass the car, pass the façade of Ste. Étienne, and then drop into the Church of Saint Pierre behind it. Here she would pray the Angelus like other women of the city and then remain to pray at every statue, to wander about with her rosary — and scout the building for its weak point, for the spot where the plastic could do the most damage.
As she passed the car, the two Gestapo agents got out almost casually. Even before they said anything, Corinne realized she had made a deadly mistake.
What was Corinne Beardsley’s deadly mistake?