The boy stepped into the middle of the road. Nancy had to brake hard and wrench the wheel to avoid killing the idiot. When he ran over to the window, Mateo curled his finger around the trigger of his pistol, but the boy was already talking too fast to notice.
“Madame Nancy!”
She recognized him now. She’d seen him peering at her from the doorway of a room in a house near here. His father had been one of the men killed in the rail attack Fournier led on D-Day. She remembered the speech she’d made to the young widow, one of ten she’d made that week telling families how the men they loved had died for France.
“Relax, Mateo,” she whispered. “What is it, son?”
“The Milice are in Courçais. They have sealed up the place,” the boy said. He was pale in the evening light. “You should stay away.”
The Milice. Nancy hated them almost more than she hated the Nazis. French fascists given weapons and uniforms by Vichy and their German overlords to hunt Resistance fighters.
“You and your mother doing OK? You need anything?”
The boy shook his head. “My father would have wanted me to warn you,” he said staunchly.
Nancy managed to smile at him; she knew it was fake, an impersonation of the sort of smile she might have given a boy like this a year ago, when she didn’t have blood in her eyes, but it was close enough to being real.
“He would have been proud of you,” Nancy told him. “Thanks for the warning.”
“You’re still going, Madame?” He looked up and down the road.
“I am, kid. People to see.”
She started the engine and left him on the roadside.
Mateo cleared his throat. “But Nancy… we can arrange another meet.”
She pressed her foot on the accelerator, feeling her heartbeat, steady and slow. “But Mateo, I need a drink.”
The square was deserted. The main café was shuttered, but the place they’d been told to meet this René was up a narrow side street and the lamps inside were lit. There was hardly any one about, just an old man passing in the street, his shoulders hunched against the evening chill, glancing sideways at them as the light glimmering through the closed shutters of the café fell across their faces. Nancy pushed open the door. A quiet night, obviously. Only four men. All Milice. And the patron and a girl behind the bar. Looked like their contact wasn’t there yet.
Nancy sat down at a table in the center of the room. The girl, stringy, and too young to be working in this place, approached them, her eyes darting everywhere.
“Cognac, dear,” Nancy said. “Bring the bottle.”
“Shit,” Mateo said as the girl went wordlessly to fetch it.
“What?”
“Look above the bar.”
Nancy glanced over. Her wanted poster was pinned up on the beam.
Mateo leaned closer. “Let’s go, Nancy. While we still can.”
The girl came back and poured the first round.
“Sorry, Mateo,” Nancy said. “But I really want this drink.”
She knocked it back and the girl poured her another.
“What’s your name, dear?”
“Anne,” she replied in a whisper. Her hair was dirty but combed back carefully behind her ears and her cuffs were clean.
Nancy smiled. “Like Anne of Green Gables! That’s my favorite book. Have you read it?”
Mateo looked left and right. The other patrons were watching them now.
The girl shook her head.
“But how rude of me.” Nancy nudged Mateo, showing him the gun already in her hand under the table. “I should introduce myself. I’m Nancy Wake. That’s my poster above the bar.”
The girl turned, blinked at it, then back at Nancy. “They are offering a lot of money for your capture, Madame.”
Nancy nodded as if considering this question for the first time.
“Yes. Do you know why the Gestapo offer steep rewards for people like me, Anne? It’s not to motivate the Germans—no. They’d shoot me or turn me in for free. It’s for the French. For French cowards. For men and women who want to lick the shit off Nazi boots rather than stand up and defend themselves. For Frenchmen who say they love their country and claim the people they betray are just criminals, Jews and communists. Clever. These rewards make us wary of friends and neighbors. My husband—one of his spineless employees ratted him out. But here’s the thing: collaborators won’t get to spend their reward. No, we’re going to find them—every Vichy politician, every Milice thug—and we’re going to hang them by their traitorous little necks.”
One of the patrons stood, reaching for his side arm. Nancy spun round and shot twice from the hip just like they’d taught her. The man fell backward, sending the table and glasses smashing to the ground. Anne didn’t scream, just fled behind the bar.
Nancy shot the second Milice while he was still fumbling to get his gun out of his holster.
The third one came at her with a knife. Cowards and bullies joined the Milice, and cowards were no good in a knife fight. Nancy used his momentum to tip him down onto the wooden floorboards, then twisted the knife from his hand and plunged it into his neck in one smooth movement. Like a dance. And she had been such a good dancer. Oh those nights dancing with Henri under the star-spangled sky! The man beneath her spluttered, coughed a fine spray of blood, which she felt on her face like summer rain, and went still.
One, two, three. Mateo killed the last of them as he made a dash for the door. He sprawled in front of it. From man to meat in three seconds. That was the lesson of war. We are all just flesh. Nancy reached for her glass and finished her drink. Good stuff.
She was counting out notes to pay for the drinks, and a bit more for the mess, when the door jangled open and a tall skinny blond man in a black jacket stepped into the room. He saw the dead bodies on the floor, the smashed glasses, Mateo with his pistol drawn and Nancy paying the bill, her hands red with blood, and he laughed, loud and long.
“Hey, this is better than the usual password bullshit! I’m René. If you’ve had enough fun, you want to come with me and pick up the stuff?”
Nancy and Mateo followed him out back into the darkness.
Heller said a word of thanks into the phone, then went directly along the corridor and knocked on the door of Böhm’s office, going in before waiting for a reply. Böhm was working in a circle of lamplight, making his steady way through the pile of action reports on his desk. The volume of them increased every day—robberies, ambushes, anti-German pamphleteering, crude caricatures of the Führer painted on the walls.
“Madame Fiocca has been seen in Courçais,” Heller said as soon as Böhm looked up.
“When?” Böhm asked.
“Now. She was seen entering a café with a man not more than ten minutes ago.” Böhm got to his feet and Heller watched in confusion as he picked up his greatcoat.
“Bring the car round, Heller. I want a team of our men to follow us from here, and send up three squads from the barracks. I will have checkpoints in place at the mile point on every road out of that village within the hour, please.”
“We are going, sir? Now?”
He saw Böhm’s face distort, a quick and suppressed glimmer of frustration, but when he spoke his voice was under control.
“Courçais is only twenty minutes away in a fast car. Mrs. Fiocca obviously has business to attend to there. We go now. Too much time has been wasted in this war by men afraid to act independently and decisively, Heller. I will not be numbered among them.”