Sunday, May 28
Peter thought the weather was cool for May. But after thinking about the assignment he’d been given the day before, he concluded that it was his apprehension and not the temperature that gave him chills. He’d gone to church that morning before he’d had to report for duty then spent the rest of the day with Olivier going over documents, code phrases, and maps. None of the suspected agents were aware that the others were also reporting to the Allies. According to the information sheets, none of them socialized with one another, and none of them lived in the same neighborhood. They all spied in isolation from one another, and they all had other contacts. In every case, however, the majority of their contacts sympathetic to the Allies had been captured or had simply disappeared.
Olivier already planned to use his home, about six miles northeast of Calais, as headquarters. He had done that before with other assignments, and despite the risk, no one had yet been arrested at the Olivier farmhouse. Beyond that, the two men made few plans. There really weren’t many to make. Peter would contact the agents, let them know he was an American seeking information about German forces in the area, and ask them for any information they had. Olivier would remain in hiding where he could easily come to Peter’s aid when they ran across the double agent.
McDougall had promised them any equipment they wanted, but they packed lightly. Peter had a new Colt M1911 pistol and a new trench knife, both in waterproof coverings. He also packed a small pile of papers that McDougall had given him: mostly maps of the beaches and the city but also the addresses of the contacts and a few other things. All were wrapped in waterproof cloths. He grabbed a few changes of clothing, his serviceman-size Book of Mormon, and some rations. As he finished packing, Peter looked over at Olivier’s pile: only a pistol and a duffel bag.
“What’s in the bag?” Peter asked. Olivier showed him. The bag contained an American-made M1 rifle, extra ammunition, a bundle of French currency, some wigs, a few odd items of clothing, and an elaborate kit of make-up, glue, paints, loose hair, and other items one might want to help create a disguise.
“What’s with the make-up? Want to look good for the Nazis?”
“The way I have managed to survive so long in occupied France is by blending in, remaining anonymous while I am working an assignment.” Olivier closed the make-up kit. “Otherwise, I am the crippled son of a milkman. Everyone recognizes me and ignores me. My sister and I live on a small farm, and I only leave it once or twice a week. I don’t get involved in anyone else’s business, and they don’t get involved in mine.”
“I thought you knew the area . . .”
“I do.” Olivier glanced at Peter with a smile. “As Jacques, I only leave a few times a week, but I leave quite often as someone else. It’s amazing what a little make-up can do, eh?”
Peter was unacquainted with how much the right make-up could change someone’s appearance, but he didn’t confess his ignorance. His three sisters back in the States had still been too young and too poor to wear make-up when Peter had left, so he was skeptical about its usefulness until he remembered that Olivier had looked like a different person when Peter had first seen him exiting McDougall’s office. Peter had recognized him later but only barely. He decided he would wait until he had seen a few more disguises before he came to a conclusion about their effectiveness.
“Don’t you think we’ll need something more than this? Just a disguise and a few weapons? Should we take more food or explosives? I only have a handful of extra rounds for my handgun. And maybe we should take some grenades, just in case.”
“We have to travel light on the route we’re taking. I have almost everything we need in France, including bullets for your .45,” Olivier said.
“Everything except the make-up?”
Olivier ignored Peter’s jibe and carefully began wrapping each item in multiple layers of waterproofing. His hands were steady and relaxed as he worked, as if preparing for dangerous assignments was routine. Maybe it is routine for him, Peter thought.
“How long have you lived in Calais?” Peter asked.
“My whole life.” Olivier put the last item, his rifle, in his bag and placed it where he could reach it from his bed. He slipped his handgun under his pillow.
“So I imagine you know most of the people there.”
“Not most, but many.”
“Then why do they believe you’re crippled? Surely you haven’t been pretending to be a cripple your entire life.”
“Not much gets past you, does it?” Olivier stretched out on his bed and put his hands behind his head. “Besides my sister and a few neighbors, everyone in France thinks I was injured in an explosion when the German Army began its occupation.”
Peter nodded, his curiosity satisfied. Olivier spent the evening catching up on sleep. Peter spent the evening lying on his bed, but he didn’t sleep.
* * *
Charles Toussaint knelt to survey his largest flowerbed. He pulled another weed then sat back when he found no others. He loved his garden. It wasn’t at its best this year, but working in it still helped relieve stress. And this year there were many things aggravating the ulcers in his stomach. The war was not good for his legal business. He was keeping ahead of his bills but knew even a minor setback could cripple him financially. But as long as he had his garden, he had something good in his life, and he could live with the ulcers.
“I thought I might find you playing in the dirt.”
Toussaint looked up and smiled. He liked Hauptmann Hans Wenders of the German Fifteenth Army. Wenders was well educated, honorable, and shared his love of flowers. Toussaint stood. “I would shake your hand, but perhaps I should wash up first. How was your leave, Hans?”
Wenders smiled. “I believe I have the most beautiful wife in all of Europe. I wish I could have stayed longer. I needed the break. Rommel is driving us hard to finish our fortifications before the Allies attack. The man won’t be happy until every inch of beach is mined, from the Bay of Biscay to the North Sea.”
“So you’re not finished yet?”
Wenders shook his head and frowned. “Even if he gets all his mines and all his pillboxes, Rommel will find more to do.”
Noticing the downward turn in Wenders’s mood, Toussaint changed the subject. “And the tulips?”
Wenders smiled again. “The Dutch tulips were spectacular. I shall have some bulbs sent to you in the fall. In the meantime, in honor of my good French friend, I have brought some good French wine.”
Toussaint laughed. “Then, in honor of my good German friend, we shall share it while listening to some good German music.”
Toussaint led Wenders into his home. He let Wenders pick out a Wagner record while Toussaint went upstairs to wash his hands and retrieve two wine glasses.
* * *
At 2300 hours, Peter and his new partner left from Dover. The quickest, most direct route from England to France was the one between Dover and Calais, making it the obvious choice for a cross-channel invasion. Peter hoped his mission would succeed in making the Nazis believe the landing would come at the most logical location.
“You look somewhat distracted, Lieutenant. Something on your mind?” Olivier asked as they boarded the ship.
“I’m just remembering the last time I was on the English Channel,” Peter said.
Olivier nodded and left Peter with his thoughts.
They traveled partway across the channel on a small patrol craft—a British vessel. Peter tried to talk to the crew about their past experience of dropping spies off in the middle of the channel, but the captain grunted, and the first mate just smiled. Strong, silent types, Peter thought, with emphasis on the silent part. The crew didn’t get as close to the French shore as Ducey had. There were too many mines blocking the way.
The moon had already set by the time Peter and Olivier left the patrol craft. The two of them took a small boat with an outboard motor for the final five miles. Olivier navigated with a compass and flashlight. Each time he used the flashlight he was careful to conceal any extra light. Peter was grateful for the motor, but the ride was rough. The boat was only big enough for three people—or two people and their gear. It was a calm night, but even the calm waves were enough to make the little boat heave up and down, giving the men a saltwater shower. As soon as he thought he heard waves crashing on the shore, Olivier stopped the motor and handed Peter a pair of oars. They rowed, largely in silence, until they could clearly see the breakers.
Olivier carefully scrutinized the shore until he saw a faint light and smiled. “One of my neighbors left a light out for me. Quite often a German patrol will stop by and put it out, but occasionally the patrols get lazy and we get lucky. Louis was to set the light so it could be seen from the ocean but not the land. There is a hole in the cliffs—a cave you could say. The cave is about a quarter mile east of the light. I used to play there when I was a child. A couple years ago I decided it might be useful, so I dug it out a little more. We’ll hide the boat there.”
Olivier directed the boat to the cave, and they rowed toward it. Near the shoreline, they jumped out to pull the boat onto the sand. The beach was deserted as they approached, or at least it was clear of people. But large pieces of wood jutted toward the sea from the sand, standing in unwelcome greeting to any troop transports that might try to land. Rows of barbed wire crossed through the wood, across the sand, and into the rocks. There was a lot of it, more than Peter had ever before seen in one place. He looked around with a sense of foreboding. I wouldn’t want to be an infantryman trying to take this beach, he thought.
“There are land mines everywhere, so follow my lead,” Olivier warned. “My sister and I bribed some of the Serbian workers to skip small sections of sand, but those sections are narrow.”
With Olivier’s warning, Peter allowed the Frenchman to determine their path down to the inch. Olivier tied a rope to the bow of the ship and pulled; Peter pushed from the back. The boat was heavy, but it was small and manageable. The sand gradually turned to rock interspersed with grass and weeds before reaching a short cliff that was the final transition between land and sea. That was their destination.
Olivier pointed to a cluster of three large boulders then motioned for Peter to help him move the second-largest stone in the group. It was rounded and thin, so they carefully rolled it onto another rock that prevented it from rolling out of control. They did the same thing with another rock in the group. The last rock was too big.
“I’ve never been able move the last rock, but usually we can still get the boats in. We’ll want to keep the boat in good shape. Quite likely, it will be your transportation back to England,” Olivier explained.
They carefully maneuvered the boat onto its side so it would fit into the narrow opening then pushed it into the hole and slid it back well out of sight. Together they moved the two boulders back in front of the cave. Peter grabbed some driftwood to help camouflage the cave, and Olivier replanted a few weeds in the sand. Then Peter walked back to the waterline and used his shoes and a handful of brush to soften the line in the sand where they had dragged the boat.
After they were done, they moved from the open beach up the small cliffs and into the cover of the grass, bushes, and trees. There, Olivier opened his bag and checked his equipment. The wigs were slightly damp from all the sea spray, but his make-up and rifle were fine. Peter’s equipment had similar luck: the clothes were damp, but the papers and weapons were dry. Olivier pulled an eye patch from his bag, placed it over his left eye, then pulled it down around his neck.
“My eye was injured in the same explosion that crippled me.”
“So everyone remembers you and describes you as the cripple with an eye patch, and they don’t take much notice of how tall you are or what color your eyes are,” Peter said, recognizing the value of Olivier’s disguise. “If they wanted to draw a picture of you or describe you to the Gestapo, they wouldn’t recall much of your face—they’d just remember the patch and the limp.”
“That’s right. They remember the patch, not the person. And they don’t recognize the same eyes peering at them as a salesman or a painter or a priest. Besides, if the occupying power thought I was healthy, they would have sent me to Germany to work in a factory years ago.”
Peter was beginning to appreciate Olivier’s methods. It was Jacques’s eyes that had given him away to Peter the day before, but if the old man who had walked out of McDougall’s office had been wearing an eye patch, Peter knew he wouldn’t have noticed the tiger behind the eyes.
They followed a dirt road but stayed in the bushes and trees. It wasn’t exactly the thick forest that would have been ideal for a stealthy entry into France, but there were enough trees and tall plants to hide in if they needed to. It wasn’t pleasant for either of them to walk around in wet clothing at night. Peter’s shoes were so wet he could feel the water sloshing around inside of them. His pants clung to his skin and seemed to rub in all the wrong places, but Peter reminded himself that it could have been worse.
They had walked only half a mile when Peter heard a motor. Olivier noticed it too. They dropped to the ground and cautiously peered at the road. The noise grew louder as a jeep with three German soldiers inside drove slowly by. The headlights were out, and they seemed to be looking intently into the trees. Peter wondered if the men had somehow found out about the mission. The car drove past them, and the noise faded then stopped. They heard the car doors open then shut.
“Did they see us?” Peter asked. Surely they couldn’t have seen us while we were on the ground, Peter thought.
“No, they stopped at Marcel Papineau’s home,” Olivier replied with an edge to his voice. “Come on.” He stood, grabbed his rifle, left his bag, and began to run. Peter followed. As they reached the home where the German vehicle was parked, Olivier motioned Peter to the side of the small house. There, Olivier loaded his rifle.
“Papineau is a member of the Resistance. He often shelters Allied airmen who have been shot down; his home is the last safe house before the channel crossing. But occasionally Papineau is too willing to trust potential recruits. I fear he may have made another contact who has turned out to be an agent provocateur. The Nazis will probably bring him and his wife out to the car and take them to their headquarters in Calais for questioning. But sometimes they like to perform interrogations away from their paperwork. If they come out with Papineau, we shoot the Germans before they get to the car.”
“And if they don’t come out?” Peter asked.
“We wait five minutes, then we go in.”
Peter’s handgun was ready. So was Jacques’s rifle. A few minutes passed; it seemed like eternity. Then they heard a woman’s scream. Peter looked to Olivier for orders. He cocked his head toward the back door, and they moved toward it. Olivier tested it, but it was locked. He fiddled with it and tried again, but the result was the same. He was about to kick the door in when they heard the screams again.
“Those screams came from the front of the house,” Peter said. If the two wanted to maintain surprise, kicking in the back door was not their best option.
“Front door,” Olivier said.
They ran around the house, and Olivier instructed Peter to take whichever soldier was farthest to the right. Then he kicked the door in. There were six people in the room. Peter shot the German soldier who had been holding his pistol to the temple of a middle-aged woman. Olivier shot the soldier on the left—apparently the man in charge; he’d had his rifle pointed at the remaining people in the room. And both Olivier and Peter shot the soldier in the middle, who had been whipping an old man.
The three bodies fell to the floor, and Peter calmly shut the front door.
“Jacques, you are once again a Godsend. Hélène was about to tell them you are the next house on the route.” Peter thought Marcel Papineau looked to be at least sixty years old but realized the stress of the night’s events could have made him seem older than he was. He was bald on the top of his head, and what little hair he had left along the side of his head was white. He was clean-shaven, and Peter thought his blue eyes seemed honest.
Olivier didn’t smile, despite being greeted as a deliverer. “Marcel, I warned you to be more cautious with your recruiting. Now is not the time to be risky; we don’t have time to prove new members. We just need to keep what strength we have.”
“I didn’t recruit anyone, Jacques, not today. I don’t know how they found us. We were just trying to get this pilot to safety.”
The pilot, sitting on the floor by Marcel, was American. His arm was wrapped in a sling, and there were several bandages on his legs. A large, bloody wound extended along the side of his head. He had sun-bleached, fair hair and injury-induced pale skin.
“What happened to you?” Peter asked in English.
The pilot focused on the English words. “I was shot down this morning,” he said in a barely audible voice. “I landed in a tree and was stuck there for a while . . . and then I don’t remember.”
Peter switched to French and spoke to Papineau. “What has happened today?”
“This morning’s raid lost several planes. I was out in the fields and saw one crash about a mile inland. I walked there and found one dead airman, and then I saw this one hanging in a tree, completely unconscious. I reached him at the same time another man did. He helped me cut the pilot down and bandage a few of his wounds. Then the other man said he heard a patrol coming and left. I hid with the pilot in a friend’s barn until it was dark. The pilot woke up during the evening, but I speak little English, and he doesn’t speak French. After dark, we made it back here by bicycle. The Germans have been searching areas near the crash site all day. I don’t know how they found us here.”
“Sounds like one of your friends was more interested in whatever the Germans were offering for the successful capture of an American pilot or Resistance member than they were in your safety,” Olivier said.
“Or more scared of threats to their lives than of threats to ours,” Hélène broke in. She was a pretty woman, despite the strain that lined her face. Her cheeks were tear-stained, and blood oozed from a small cut where the pistol had been pressed to her head. Her brown hair was glossy, streaked with gray, and at the moment rather disheveled. Peter thought she looked younger than her husband by about a decade. “Greed is not the only reason—indeed, not even the most common reason the Resistance is being betrayed. You can hardly blame even a patriotic Frenchman for selling out his friends if there is a Nazi soldier pointing a gun at his wife’s head. You can’t expect them to value the life of one Allied pilot over the lives of their family.”
“Being alive under occupation is no life,” Olivier said. “Today they had a reason to whip Marcel, but if they had wanted to whip him yesterday, they would have, even without a reason.” Olivier examined the wounds on Marcel’s back and the wounds on the pilot’s head and arm. “You should leave tonight,” he said to Papineau.
“But we can’t find transportation that quickly. And our radio is broken. The Nazi you just killed found it when he found the pilot.”
“Where were you hiding?” Peter asked, thinking that the house didn’t seem big enough to have many hiding spots.
“Hélène and I were not hiding—we were in our bedroom on this floor when they came. We had put the pilot upstairs in the loft. We didn’t make an attempt to hide him because his injuries are serious and we thought if someone did come, we would have time to warn him. There is a trapdoor under our bed that goes into a cellar. That is normally where we hide people, but the cellar has a half meter of water in it right now. The soldiers came in so quickly and quietly. I heard the car door shut, and I got out of bed. Then I opened our bedroom door, and there was a soldier there with his pistol in my face. He told Hélène and me to go into the front room, where his hauptsturmführer pig was waiting.” Papineau motioned to the dead officer lying on the floor. “Then the third soldier came from the loft, dragging the pilot behind him. He had also found the radio and smashed part of it. Then the hauptsturmführer threatened Hélène and me and said one of us would die if he was not told the names of our Resistance contacts.”
Peter watched Olivier think as he heard Marcel’s tale. It didn’t take him long to determine what needed to be done. “Marcel, you can use the boat we came in. I’m sure my new friend won’t mind if we find a different way for him to return to England.” Peter nodded his agreement. “We all need to leave. Someone will know these Gestapo thugs came here, and when they are missed, reinforcements will come to search. When these three are found dead, there will be little mercy for anyone still in this house. You have to leave now.”
Olivier knew his way around the Papineau home. He grabbed a coat for Hélène from a closet, retrieved a compass from a drawer, and easily unlocked the complicated lock on the back door. “Eddy, will you help the pilot?” Peter slung the pilot’s healthy arm over his shoulder and followed Olivier out the back door.
“Marcel, Hélène, we have to go now, for your own sakes.” Olivier’s request was forceful, and the Papineaus followed. Hélène was still crying as they walked out the door. Olivier turned to them. “And we must try to be quiet. Another patrol might come along at any time.”
They journeyed back the way Olivier and Peter had just come. On the way, they collected their bags. Peter found out the pilot’s name was Jonathan Walters and that he was from Mississippi, but he was badly injured and they needed to keep quiet, so Peter didn’t bother him with too many questions. When the group reached the beach, they left Hélène and the pilot in the relative cover of the brush with their gear.
“So much for all the weeds we just planted, huh?” Peter said.
Half of Olivier’s mouth pulled into a smile as he helped Peter move the first and second stones out of the way. Even with Marcel’s help, getting the boat out of the hole proved more difficult than getting it into the hole had been, but the three of them managed to manhandle it until the boat was out of the cave and flat on the sand. Marcel and Olivier pushed the boat down to the water, and Peter went to get the other refugees.
“All right, one-way ferry to England leaving in ninety seconds,” he said when he reached Hélène and the American pilot.
He helped Walters to his feet and instructed Hélène in French. She was calmer than Peter had seen her earlier, but she didn’t look happy to be leaving her country. Tears still trickled down the side of her face. She bit her quivering lip as she looked back into the dark French countryside. “Hélène,” Peter said gently. She looked up at him. “You’ll be all right. With any luck, you’ll be able to return before autumn.”
Peter wasn’t sure if she believed him or not; he didn’t really believe it himself. But she managed to give Peter a half smile as she carefully followed him down the beach in the path Olivier had created with the boat.
Olivier helped load the three escapees into the small boat. He gave Marcel directions to keep the oars handy but to use the motor as long as it would work once they got past the breakers. He tied the compass to Marcel’s wrist so it wouldn’t get lost in the sea. Then Olivier and Peter kicked off their shoes and pushed the little boat into the channel until they could no longer touch the bottom.
“Marcel, don’t start the motor for a while. Give us a chance to get on shore and off the beach. If the motor quits or if you run out of fuel, pace yourself. Row for five minutes, then rest for three. Try to keep this pilot alive so when you wash up on the English shore you’ll have someone who can speak the language. Contact Howard McDougall with British SOE. Have the BBC announce you’ve made it safely so Genevieve and I don’t worry. A verse from the Epistle of James. Good luck, my friend.”
“Howard McDougall, SOE. A verse from James.” Papineau repeated. “Good-bye, Jacques. See you after the war.” But as he grabbed the oars and slipped them into the water, Peter saw fear in his eyes. Fear for himself, yes, but also fear for the young man he left behind. “Jacques, don’t do anything crazy. Remember you can’t win the war all by yourself.”
Olivier laughed, gave the boat a final push toward England, and waded back to the beach. Peter followed.
“Well, nothing like a late-night swim to get the blood pumping,” Peter said in an attempt to lighten the mood. Olivier didn’t seem to be listening. They put their shoes back on, smoothed the path the boat had created, and replaced the rocks and driftwood so they covered the hole once more. As they tried to salvage enough weeds to camouflage the hole, Olivier stopped and gazed back at the sea. “Do you think they’ll make it?” Peter asked.
Olivier sighed, and the two of them stood. “With a little luck. If the motor works for most of the journey. If they don’t try to land in a highly guarded area and get shot by a nervous patrolman. If the weather stays calm.” He punctuated each sentence with tense hand motions then shook his head slowly. “I don’t like sending friends to possible death. But what they are leaving is certain death.”
“I don’t envy them. It will be a wet and cold night at best. At worst . . .” Peter stopped, not wanting to continue his thoughts on the worst-case scenario.
They had just reached the shelter of the trees when they heard the sputtering of an engine. “Marcel is cutting it a little close. I hope we’ve seen our last patrol for the night,” Olivier said. The engine coughed but caught. Peter and Olivier stayed there, shivering and listening until the sound faded away.
Olivier grabbed his gear and began walking inland; Peter did the same. They took the same route as before because Olivier thought it would be wise to get rid of the three bodies in the Papineaus’ home. It would be risky, but it might buy them more time before the Germans found out about the deaths.
Peter decided he strongly disliked walking in wet clothes through the French countryside, but then they heard something he disliked even more: a car. They didn’t know who was driving it at first, but since few honest French people had petrol for their cars and even fewer drove their cars after curfew, they flattened themselves against the ground. They hadn’t been walking on the road, but they were close enough to see the car speed by. It was a Nazi patrol car, and it wasn’t patrolling at a leisurely pace. It was headed to a specific destination.
“Good thing we sent them to England,” was all Olivier said when the car was out of sight.
They took a different route after they saw the second patrol car, one that Olivier explained would make a wide curve around the Papineau home. Then Peter heard explosions.
“What’s that noise? We aren’t anywhere near a front line,” he asked as the detonations began sounding more frequently.
“Just the RAF trying to take out some train tracks or airfields. If you’re here long enough, you’ll get used to the air raids. They are fairly standard: Americans by day, British by night,” Olivier explained.
After a few minutes, Olivier spoke again. “One of the men in Marcel’s house was Hauptsturmführer Schneider. He’s been in Calais since spring 1940. He was very good at tracking down Resistance members. He wasn’t the highest-ranking SS man around—that’s Standartenführer Tschirner, but Schneider has been here longer. Tschirner is probably the most feared officer in the northern half of France; Schneider isn’t—wasn’t—too far behind.
“I don’t know how Tschirner and Schneider got along personally, but professionally, they made a rather lethal team. Schneider would track the opposition down and bring them in. If they didn’t break quickly for Schneider, Tschirner would extract the information he wanted, even if it took days or weeks. Above all, Schneider enjoyed the thrill of the hunt. Tschirner thrilled in bringing men to their knees. I hope Schneider’s death will at least partially cripple their effectiveness. But realistically, I think we can expect the local Gestapo to exert every effort in trying to discover who killed Schneider and his men.”
“So they’ll be looking for us?” Peter asked.
Olivier nodded.
“Tell me more about Standartenführer Tschirner.”
“Tschirner honed his skills at repressing local populations in Warsaw before he was assigned to Calais. He rarely travels outside the city limits. I hear he fears assassination and wants to stay in the city where Resistance members have more difficulty operating. He was transferred here from Poland after someone in the Polish Resistance tried to assassinate him. It’s a pity they didn’t succeed. Tschirner was hit in the chest and spent several months recovering in a Berlin hospital before he came here. The Polish assassin hit him while he was outside of Warsaw; hence, he doesn’t want to leave the more populated areas without strong protection.
“I don’t know if he has any family. If he does, they are back in Germany. Tschirner is rumored to know Adolf Hitler personally. He rarely takes time off, and if there is something important going on, he can go days with very little sleep. He’s obsessive and efficient. He always travels with his aide, Obersturmführer Prinz, and usually a few other guards. From what I hear, Tschirner’s aide is much like him: ruthless, slightly paranoid, a loyal member of the Nazi party, a skilled interrogator, and suspicious of his own army. Like Tschirner, very dangerous.”
They trudged through the fields and hedgerows until nearly dawn. Finally, Olivier pointed to a dark two-story home and indicated that they had arrived at the Olivier farmhouse. He told Peter to stay in a clump of trees while he checked the home. He circled the house slowly then disappeared into the barn. A few minutes later, he reappeared and went into the cellar then came out and went into the house. He was inside for a long time. Or at least it seemed like a long time to Peter, who had little body fat, was still wet from their swim, and was getting increasingly colder as he waited for Olivier to finish his inspection. He had been fine while they were moving, but inactivity allowed the chill to seep deep into his body. Peter had begun to shake from the cold when Olivier leaned out a door and motioned him inside.
The door led into the kitchen. It was small but clean. Olivier laughed softly when he saw Peter shivering. “Sorry, I know you’re cold, but I didn’t want to enter a trap. If the Papineaus were betrayed, I thought it was possible that my cover, too, had been blown. We have a secret room you can sleep in.” Olivier bent down to take his own wet shoes off. “Well, it’s more of a hole than a room.” He handed Peter some dry clothes and lit a candle. “We have extra blankets, so maybe you can finally warm up, eh?” Peter tried to smile, but his teeth were chattering too violently. Once he changed, Olivier led him into the parlor, opened a closet, removed a broom, mop, and bucket and pulled a panel from the back wall. “The space under the stairs. It’s not very roomy, but my sister keeps it clean and organized.”
It was small. Peter had to crawl in, and once inside, he couldn’t stand. But there was a narrow sleeping pad against one wall, and several blankets lay folded at the head. There was less than a foot of bare floor along the other wall. It was stacked with boxes of ammunition, an enormous radio, and some other items too far back along the wall for Peter to see. He carefully maneuvered into the crawl space, lay down, and wrapped the blankets around his body. Then Olivier put the panel back on the wall. Peter heard him replace the cleaning supplies and then heard him walk up the stairs.
It took Peter some time to fall asleep. His training had helped him stay calm and focused during the night’s events, but there was no training on how to deal with the aftermath. He had helped kill three people that night. He tried not to think about it because even knowing what he now did about Hauptsturmführer Schneider, it made him uneasy. You also helped save three people tonight, he told himself. If they make it to England in one piece.
Peter remembered to say his prayers. He prayed for his family and for the three exiles trying to cross the English Channel. Then he prayed for help with his assignment. He wanted to repent for the deaths he’d caused, but he knew he would do the same thing if the situation came up again, so he didn’t mention it. It was just easier not to bring it up.
Early in the war, Peter had figured out how to shove unpleasant thoughts aside, so after he finished his prayers, he turned his thoughts to the next task: how to make his body stop shivering. The night hadn’t been very cold, but the wind through his wet clothing had left him feeling like an ice cube. After he managed to stop shaking, he had to get over the eerie feeling that he was sleeping in a coffin. If he stretched out, either his toes touched the back of the far stair or his head bumped against the back of the closet. He also didn’t like the fact that there was nowhere for him to run if someone found the hole in the back of the closet. Mentally, he tried to come up with a few ways to escape should he be discovered. In the end, however, he just crossed his fingers and hoped that any patrols would be small enough that he could shoot them before they shot him, and then he went to sleep.