This time there is no wandering out of the station to look at the river. This time there is purpose and intent, and a sense of confidence. Paris holds no new fears. And she still feels the thrill of transgression, the knowledge of Benoît within her, the startling outrage of it and the comfort. Has he exorcised the ghost of Clément? Is he the man she might love? Perhaps thinking all this is what distracts her, because it is only as she emerges from the métro at Maubert-Mutualité that she realises she is being followed.
Anger trips over fear. Why didn’t she spot him earlier? Where has he come from? Who is he? Who has sent him? More questions than answers.
From the boulevard she climbs the slope towards the rue des Écoles and the great dome of the Panthéon. At a secondhand bookshop she pauses to pick up a photographic album from one of the bins on the pavement. The book shows Parisian scenes from the early part of the century, the days when the city seemed hopeful and gay, something exquisite created out of silver and platinum rather than the base metal of today. In the reflection of the shop window she can see her follower on the other side of the street standing with his back to her, examining something in another window. He’s a slight figure, with his raincoat collar pulled up and his hat pulled down.
She feels the slow churn of nausea. French police? Abwehr? Gestapo? The city is as riddled with spies as a Roquefort cheese with mould.
“Those were the days, eh, Mam’selle?” the bookseller remarks as she puts the book down. “We won’t see their like again.”
She smiles and agrees that he is probably right, and walks on, trying to stroll, trying to be at ease with herself, a woman alone in the city with a man following. Again she pauses to look in a shop window—some ironmongery, a sewing machine, a stepladder that may or may not be part of the window display—and watches him swim towards her in the reflection, then stop to tie his shoelace. He stays down, apparently having difficulty, while she gazes at things she doesn’t want. Then she moves on, quickly now so that he has to struggle to keep up.
The street emerges into the great square with the bulk of the Panthéon, that temple to no god whatsoever, standing massive in the centre. She looks round quickly, trying to think, trying to remain calm. On her right is the long façade of the Sainte-Geneviève library with a gaggle of students hanging round the entrance; over to the left the architectural confection of Saint-Étienne-du-Mont. She turns left and crosses the uneven pavé towards the church, trying not to hurry, trying to be a young woman who on a whim has decided to say a prayer. Pushing through a leather curtain she finds herself in the shadowy interior, immersed in the smell of incense and obfuscation but free for a moment. Thirty seconds, she reckons, maybe less. The skill is to throw the tail off without giving the impression that you know you are being followed. A delicate art. She looks around at the sanguine glow of stained glass, at flickering candles and shifting shadows of people at their devotions.
Twenty seconds.
The body of the church is divided across by a rood screen, an elaborate amalgam of spirals and arches. She hurries up the side aisle and through a door into the chancel. There are side chapels on the right, one of them holding a gilded sarcophagus where candles flicker and an inscription says Sainte Geneviève Ora Pro Nobis. An old woman kneels at prayer before the relic of the saint.
Ten seconds.
The aisle curves round behind the high altar. Ahead is a door to the sacristy and further round the curve, tucked in a shadowy recess, a confessional. The sacristy is too obvious. She walks round to the confessional, pulls aside the curtain, pushes her suitcase inside and crams herself after it. A musty darkness, redolent of anguish and guilt, envelops her. She holds the curtain so she can peer out like a child playing Hide and Seek.
Beside her the grille slides open. “Yes, my child?”
Memories come flooding through the open trap—her convent school, the duties of penance and obligation, the odious smear of guilt. On the far side of the lacework of metal is the shadow of the priest’s face. “Oh, I thought …” What did she think? What could she say? Through the gap in the curtain she watches the old woman get up from her prayers at the tomb of Sainte Geneviève and take her place to wait for the confessional. Immediately behind her the man appears, walking round the curve of the apse, searching.
“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.”
“When did you make your last confession, my child?”
For a moment the man stands indecisively by the tomb of the saint. He holds his hat against his chest and she can see his face in the candlelight. And she knows him. It is the man who accosted her before, the one who followed her out onto the embankment when she first arrived in the city.
“Years ago, Father. Four, maybe five.”
“That in itself is a sin, my child.”
What should she say? She holds the curtain and watches the man’s movements. What is his name? She remembers. Miessen. Maybe she even has his card somewhere in her bag. Julius Miessen. German? Dutch? French? Who is he?
“So what else do you have to confess, child?”
“Confess?” She hesitates. Impure acts, that’s what they used to say at school. I have committed impure acts. And the priest would make careful enquiry as to what these impure acts might have been.
“What nature of acts, my child?”
The man disappears into the sacristy. It’s obvious to try there: the open door, a light showing, the possibility of rooms and corridors and another exit. Should she go now while he is out of sight? “I’ve touched myself, Father.”
“How many times, my child?”
“How many times have I touched myself? I’ve no idea. I don’t keep a diary. And I’ve been with a man. Maybe that’s a little more important.”
The priest is unfazed by irony. “How many times have you done that?”
“Twice.”
“With the same man?”
“Of course.”
Miessen reappears at the sacristy door. He’s panicking. He’s looking this way and that, and there’s something repulsive about the sleek look of his face in the light from the clerestory windows. Something shifts in her guts, fear and triumph swimming together.
“And do you love this man?”
Does she love Benoît? She isn’t sure. She isn’t even sure what love is. She knows fear well enough. Fear she recognises. And hate. But love? “I’m very fond of him,” she whispers, “and perhaps he loves me, I don’t know. We seem … suited to each other.” Why is she telling the priest this? Why isn’t she making things up, giving Anne-Marie Laroche a whole set of her own sins?
Miessen walks past, mere feet from where she kneels, and goes down the aisle back towards the body of the church, looking round anxiously, as though what he seeks might be hiding behind one of the pillars. The priest is lecturing her about fornication, its pitfalls and dangers, its effect upon God himself. “Remember, you are not your own,” he warns. “You were bought at a price.”
What will Miessen’s next move be? Will he assume that his quarry has left by one of the side doors, or will he guess that she is hidden somewhere inside the building? And why, in God’s name, is he following her?
“My child?”
“Yes, Father?”
“If you have finished your confession you must make your act of contrition.”
She gets to her feet. “Thank you, Father.”
“Your act of contrition, my child. Your penance—”
She picks up her suitcase. “No penance is needed, Father. You see, my greatest sin is that I no longer believe in God.”
She steps out of the box. The church seems cool and vacant, empty of anyone who matters. She smiles at the old lady who moves to take her place in the confessional, and crosses to the door marked Sacristie. There is a corridor, then a room with wardrobes and hanging vestments and a gaunt, polychrome crucifix hanging on the wall. She crouches to open her suitcase, trying to do things as calmly as possible, as surely and exactly as she is able. Don’t rush. Hâte-toi lentement, her mother always used to tell her when picking her up and tending grazed knees. There are nail scissors in her wash bag. She uses them to cut open the lining of the suitcase exactly between the two hinges. Inside is an identity card and food coupons in the name of one Laurence Aimée Follette. She slips the papers into her shoulder bag, closes the case, and straightens up just as someone comes in, a priest in a threadbare soutane looking at her with startled amazement.
“For the refugees,” she says before he can utter a word. “I wondered where to leave them.” She takes off her coat, folds it and lays it on the suitcase. “I only want to help, Father.”
She smiles and slips past him. At the end of the corridor a door opens out onto the street. Daylight brushes her face with drizzle. Students are milling around the entrance of the lycée across the street and Laurence Follette hurries through the throng and turns up a side street into the rue de l’Estrapade. No one seems to be following but still she goes directly across the street and then takes two right turns, which bring her round to the familiar square. Marie answers the door to her knock, Marie with her stern face and faint air of disapproval, Marie who cannot be her betrayer because she already knows where she is staying, and surely the whole point of following her from the station is to find out where she has taken refuge in the city.
Who is Julius Miessen? For whom is he working?
She retreats to Madeleine’s room. For the first time she is afraid, truly afraid. Not the momentary fear of anticipating a parachute jump, or standing before a barrage and waiting to be searched, or finding that a man is tailing you through the streets of Paris. Not fear of something. Just fear, like a disease, a growth, thick and putrid, wedged behind her breastbone. Fear in each breath and each heartbeat. Fear rising up her oesophagus and souring the back of her mouth so that she finds herself swallowing a lot. Fear of what might happen, of what might be happening at this very moment while she sits, as helpless as an invalid, on the bed.
“I’m off home, Mademoiselle,” Marie calls through the door. “Monsieur Clément will be back any minute.”
She listens for the maid’s footsteps retreating down the corridor and for the front door opening and closing. What, she wonders, does Marie think about all this? Does she go home and talk about the strange, fraught woman who has appeared at the Pelletier apartment and been welcomed in by Monsieur Clément with open arms? Does she gossip? Does she talk about poor Madame Pelletier and her lovely baby and wonder aloud what the devil is going on, what on earth Monsieur Clément is playing at? Do her words filter through the intricate fabric of the city and reach the ears of the police or the Abwehr or the Gestapo?
She finds some matches in the kitchen and solemnly, in the kitchen sink, performs the cremation of the young student Anne-Marie Laroche.
Laurence Follette from Bourg-en-Bresse in the department of Ain is the occupant of this room in the Pelletier apartment now. Laurence. Faintly androgyne, like so many French names, symbolic perhaps of a profound ambiguity at the heart of the French people, who once advocated Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, but now proclaim Work, Family, Fatherland; a people for whom the same word, baiser, does for kiss and fuck.
Laurence waits. She waits for Clément, like a patient nursing her disease and waiting for the doctor who might at least offer a palliative to soothe her pain. The sound of the front door opening brings a great flood of relief, relief that must show in her face when she goes out to greet him, for, after embracing her and telling her how wonderful it is to see her again and how much he has missed her, he holds her at arm’s length and sees the cold pinch of fear in her face.
“Are you all right, Squirrel? What’s the matter?”
“I’m fine. It’s just …” What should she say? Confession or obfuscation? “Someone followed me. I think from the station. I threw him off but he knows I’m in the city. They know.”
“Who knows?”
She shrugs. “I’ve no idea. I met him before. He tried to pick me up the last time I came. I thought he was a pimp, or something.” Pimp. She uses the English word. She doesn’t even know the French. Souteneur? Perhaps that’s it. “But now I wonder. Maybe he works for the police, maybe the Germans. Who knows? Anyway, now they can guess I’m staying somewhere in this area, in the Latin Quarter.”
They sit in the kitchen, which gives the illusion of being the warmest room in the apartment. The scrubbed deal table replaces the barriers between them that fear has dismantled. He opens a bottle of wine, a Romanée-Conti that, he says, his father would weep to see being drunk like this. “So what happens now?” His tone is different, as though now he is somehow part of what she does.
She shakes her head. “Someone knows I’m here. I’m dangerous, Clément, and not only to myself. I’m dangerous to you.”
He smiles. She can see what he is about to say. It’s obvious, really. And the knowing it makes her want to weep and laugh at the same time. “You’ve always been dangerous to me, Squirrel. From the moment I first set eyes on you.”
“You’d be safe from me in England.”
“I wouldn’t want that kind of safety. I’d want you with me.”
She looks up. She thinks of le Patron and Benoît, of all the people who depend on the circuit—Gaillard and Marcel and the collection of résistants who make up the réseau Wordsmith. Gabrielle Mercey, and the family at Plasonne. She can simply step out of their world, without even saying farewell. “You’d be willing to go if I came with you?”
He makes a small gesture of indifference. “I got a phone call from Madeleine yesterday. The ducks have flown, she told me. It sounds like one of those messages they transmit on the radio.”
She attempts a smile, as though she has forgotten the trick and is having to relearn it. “What does it mean?”
“That’s my nickname for Augustine. Mon petit canard. The ducks are her and Rachel. It means they’ve got across the border into Switzerland. So I’ve no reason to stay in France, have I? And if you were to come with me …”
THAT EVENING SHE goes up to the roof again and sends a wireless message out into the wild autumnal air, a message as quick as she can make it, as sharp and clear as she can be. I have been followed, she wants to write. Someone knows I’m in the city. The city itself is watching, waiting, the detector vans listening for the faintest hint of me. The wolves are circling, sniffing the air, baying for blood. This message—they are listening to this message. But all she transmits is:
MECHANIC CONFIRMED
She knows what they’ll think at Grendon and in the offices in Baker Street as it comes off the teleprinters: Alice is winning. But she’s not; she’s panicking. And when you panic, you drown.
She closes the transmission. The fragile lifeline with England is snapped. She packs the wireless set away and carries it downstairs, struggling to keep afloat, talking to herself, reassuring herself, trying to see the clear light of dawn in the dark of the evening. Fear is like a tide, under the influence of the waxing moon. She can feel gravity’s hand, that elemental pull draining the blood from her face and drawing it from her body. The moon period. What was it she told Benoît all that time ago in Oxford? We’re minions of the moon. Minions, slaves, worshippers. She takes the pistol from the spares compartment of the wireless case and puts it in her shoulder bag.
“The full moon is next Saturday so we’ll go sometime this week,” she tells Clément. “I’ll find out tomorrow.” She feels the weariness in her smile. “I want to be safe, just for a few minutes I want to be safe. It’s so bloody tiring being afraid all the time.”
The café in the rue Saint-André des Arts is exactly the same as it was. Small, dull, of no consequence. As far as she can see no one has followed her. She walks in, feeling the weight of the pistol in her pocket, in the pocket of Madeleine’s coat that she has borrowed, the hound’s-tooth check that says, on the label, Molyneux. The man at the bar, a different man from her last visit, looks up with an equal indifference.
Is la patronne around? He shrugs and calls over his shoulder—“Madame Julienne! Someone for you”—and the door at the back of the bar opens and there she is. Claire. Looking worried, looking suspicious, giving a faint smile of recognition. “Come,” she says. “Come round the back.”
Claire’s little room has the same pictures, the same calendar with the same messages scrawled against the same dates. How do you recognise a traitor? What are the hints that give betrayal away? What are the lineaments of treachery? Claire is brisk and organised, like a travel agent who has booked an unusual but not entirely unknown itinerary. “It’s all arranged for the day after tomorrow, as long as the weather lifts. You’ll have to see Gilbert about the details.”
Gilbert. She recalls that strange, oblique conversation in the office overlooking Portman Square, the tall and awkward colonel with his even taller superior. Jill Bear is our movements man for the Paris area. The whole thing seemed a kind of fantasy, something that might never happen. And now it is happening—Gilbert is expecting her; she has to meet him in the Tuileries, on the other side of the river. She has to be there at a specific time, at the circular basin in the Grand Carré, beside the statue of Cain. The correct place at the correct time. She must make sure.
“You know the gardens, don’t you?”
“Of course.”
And there is a little rigmarole they’ll have to go through, a bit of question-and-answer. She and Claire rehearse it. “Make sure you get it right. He’s a stickler for detail.”
“I’ll get it right.” She takes her hand from her pocket and holds it out. “Thank you,” she says. At the door she pauses, as though the thought has that moment struck her. “Why do you do it?”
Claire looks puzzled. “Do what?”
Alice gestures as though to indicate the bar, but in reality meaning everything, the planning, the danger, the looking over your shoulder and minding your back, the whole nightmare anxiety of the clandestine life. Fear is a caustic that soaks into everything—your clothes, your possessions, your skin. Perhaps you smell of fear as a heavy smoker smells of tobacco or an alcoholic smells of booze. “All this,” she says. “For the organisation.”
The woman frowns. “Don’t ask fucking questions. You should know better than that. Questions require answers, and you don’t always know the answer so you start making things up. I just do it, right? I just do it. So do you.”
THERE ARE FEW people around when she gets to the gardens. She remembers a painting in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, something by Pissarro—The Tuileries Gardens in Rainy Weather. Reality mimics the painting: the autumnal trees, a scattering of rain, gusts of wind blowing women’s skirts, puddles gleaming like silver coins, the whole view blended and blurred into cloud and drizzle. She finds the statue of Cain Coming from Killing His Brother Abel and strolls towards it, looking for likely watchers. A couple of off-duty German soldiers approach and try to engage her in conversation.
“I’m waiting for a friend,” she tells them.
“Un français?”
“Bien sûr.” The gun, now in her shoulder bag, weighs heavily.
“Germans are better men.”
“Not if they haven’t got any manners.”
She is saved—it’s ridiculous, an absurd risk—by a shout of “Goodness, it’s been a long time hasn’t it?” from a man who comes striding across the gravel towards them. He’s good-looking with a mop of wavy hair and eyes that do a lot of smiling. He nods at the Germans and takes her arm to draw her away. “Didn’t we last meet at Aunt Mathilde’s?”
“It was ages ago,” she agrees. “Before she moved to Montpellier.”
He kisses her on both cheeks, then turns to the watching soldiers. If they don’t leave his cousin alone they’ll find themselves explaining their behaviour to their superior officer. Their expressions fall and they wander off. Gilbert grins. “The thing about our brave conquerors is that they always obey orders as long as they feel they’re coming from someone important.”
“And you are important?”
“I sound important. That’s what matters. And they have a sneaking suspicion that I have contacts.”
“And do you?”
He laughs. “You must have contacts in order to survive in this damned city. Let’s go somewhere a bit more comfortable.” He folds her arm in his and leads her off towards the rue de Rivoli to a café where he is known, and where you can actually get real coffee if you speak to the right waitress. Over coffee they chat for a while about nothing very much—what he used to do before the war, how he was a pilot, how he wants to get back to flying—and when he has paid, they go round the corner to a flat that he keeps, a two-roomed place with barely any furniture beyond a couple of chairs and a table and two mattresses on the floor. She feels like a tart, a casual pick-up preparing to negotiate terms.
“You must remember everything I say,” Gilbert tells her. “Can you do that? Commit nothing to paper.”
“Of course.”
“Claire said two passengers …”
“It all depends.”
“The pianist from Cinéaste?”
“I’m not sure about her. I’ve got a meeting.”
“What’s the trouble?”
She shrugs. She isn’t going to be quizzed about matters that don’t concern him. She should never have mentioned it to Claire, and Claire shouldn’t have told Gilbert. This is how things come unravelled. “I’ll have to see. But the other passenger is all right.”
“So we play it by ear, do we?”
“I suppose so.”
“I’ll need your help at the landing ground. You’ve organised drops, I presume? Pick-ups are a bit different.” He grins disarmingly, a little boy planning a prank. “Quite a bit different. The damned kite has to land for a start. But that’s the problem—you’ve got to stand there as it lands, turns, and taxies back to the take-off point. It makes the devil of a noise, seems enough to wake the dead, never mind the local police. So you need a bit of nerve to stick to it. Do you have nerve?” He looks her up and down.
“I’ve got nerve.”
“I’ll bet you have. Now listen carefully. We use a three-light L with the long side upwind.” He puts coins on the table. “A, B, and C. A is the touchdown point, and that’s where the reception party stands. B is one hundred and fifty metres downwind, but of course you need a greater total length for a landing ground.”
“Six hundred metres—”
“Minimum. And good solid ground underfoot. We had a Lysander bog down last spring and ended up having to torch her. It took a month to get the pilot back home, never mind the passengers. Still, we’ve not lost anyone yet.” His grin reminds her of Benoît’s, the pure insouciance of it, the suggestion that he is sharing something intimate with her. “The third light, C, is fifty metres to the right. That’s the turning marker once the kite is down. He’ll turn on that and then come back to A ready for take-off. We stand to the left of A and approach the plane from the port side once it’s ready. That’s the left.”
“I know it’s the left. I know all this. I was briefed in London.”
“Then you’ll know it twice. The pilots have instructions to shoot anyone approaching from the other side. It hasn’t happened yet.”
“No one’s approached from the right, or no one’s been shot?”
Again that grin. “Neither. The pilot keeps the engine running while any passengers get down. There’ll be a couple of passengers inbound this time. The last passenger unloads their luggage. Then our passengers climb on board, strap in, and they’re off. Five, six minutes on the ground if things go well. And Bob’s your uncle.” He says it in English. Maybe he wants to show that he knows the language, knows the colloquialisms, knows exactly what he is doing.
Gilbert produces a Michelin map of northern France and unfolds it on the table. “Now the travel arrangements. You travel from Austerlitz. I’ll be on the same train but I won’t recognise you. Whether you travel separately or together is up to you. Whichever you think would be less conspicuous. You get tickets to Libourne. Not Bordeaux because you need a special pass for the coastal area. But you’re going to get off at Saint-Pierre-des-Corps anyway. Got that?” He places his finger on the map, near the junction of the two rivers, the Loire and the Cher. “Saint-Pierre-des-Corps is the through station for Tours—”
“It’s miles away from Paris!”
“That’s the way we do it. Three, four hours these days. You catch the 13.15 train. If you can’t make it for some reason, you can get the next, an hour later. Remember, get your tickets right through to Libourne—not Bordeaux—but get off at Saint-Pierre-des-Corps. When you’re there, you purchase a ticket for Vierzon. It’s a branch line and you only go two stops to Azay-sur-Cher. But again, buy a ticket for the whole distance. I should be at Azay at the same time, but if not there’s a hut behind the station where you’ll find bicycles waiting. They’ll be locked up.” He roots around in his jacket. “Here are the keys. Don’t lose them. Once you’ve unlocked the bikes you take the road direct to the village. You cross the railway line and head due south. It’s signposted Azay-sur-Cher. After two kilometres, immediately before a woodland, turn left onto a cart track. Follow this track for another two kilometres and park the bikes. The landing ground is the open field on your left. Oh, and bring warm clothes. There’ll be a lot of waiting around in the cold.”
It’ll go fine, comme sur des roulettes, he adds, and she remembers Buckmaster’s words: like clockwork. “There’ll be a message on Radio London giving the go-ahead. We’re scheduled for tomorrow night, but you never know. ‘The garage man has greasy hands,’ that’s the message. The whole op is code-named Mechanic.” He pauses and looks at her. “And after the operation, what do you do?”
“I return to my circuit.” She looks at the map. “Vierzon’s on the Toulouse line. I can get the Toulouse train from there.” She pauses. She has said more than she needs, more than she intends. He watches her thoughtfully, his lips pursed.
“You could always return with the Lysander. Return to England, I mean. They can take three passengers at a pinch.”
“I’ve thought about that.”
“Maybe like that it would be safer for you.”
“I didn’t come to France to be safe.”
“Of course you didn’t. But these days things are especially difficult. It isn’t easy to keep matters under control. Things …”—he waves a hand vaguely—“fall apart. People do things they shouldn’t. It’s difficult to keep everyone happy.”
“What people? What are you talking about?”
He ignores her question, but smiles and catches up her hand and shakes it gently. “You are too beautiful to be here, my dear Alice. I have seen others come here and have ugly things happen to them, others as lovely as yourself.”
Carefully she takes her hand back. “My looks have nothing to do with it. Look, I must go now. I’ve got a meeting.”
He shrugs. “Perhaps you’ll think about what I said …?”
She pushes her chair back and stands up. “I will.”
At the métro station she does the usual things—going in by one entrance and out by another, appearing to lose her way and then doubling back on herself. No one seems to be following. So she takes the train to Yvette’s place as she did before and circles warily round the street where Yvette lives, sniffing round like a mammal whose nest has been violated by another. Things seem little different from the last time—people going about their quotidian lives with that listlessness that characterises the occupied city. Customers pick disconsolately through the flea market. A clochard with a dog begs for centimes. A busker plays the violin, badly. Women argue, kids shout.
Are there watchers?
She strolls past and turns into the café where the fat guy called Boger stands behind the bar. How do you manage to keep fat these days? “This is for Yvette,” she says, handing a letter across the zinc. The man sucks his lip as though he hopes it might be nutritious.
“Make sure she gets it,” she says, and walks out.
BALZAC’S HEAD, THE mane of hair, the staring eyes and aggressive nose, the heavy jowls. Alice watches it from afar. She feels detached from everything, as though it’s all in a dream, one of those where logic seems iron-bound and yet strange things happen, dreams in which she has a gun in her hand and she’s prepared to use it if need be. She’s prepared to kill and doesn’t care if she gets killed. That’s the strange thing. She doesn’t care.
Nothing happens. The lanes of the cemetery coil like snakes around the tombs, their scales glistening in the rain.
Two forty-four.
Rules for making a rendezvous: always give a time that’s an hour later than the one you intend. Will Yvette understand? Will she understand, and if she does understand, will she come? And if she comes, will she come alone?
In the wind and the drizzle people move among the tombs, placing a flower, standing for a moment in prayer or contemplation. Crows flap their way across the memorials, looking for scraps. There’s mistletoe in the trees, clumps of mistletoe like rooks’ nests. A quiet, mortifying plant, it seems fit for a cemetery.
What should she do? Figures skulk in the shadows of her imagination. Are they watching her, even now? You’ll never know, that’s the problem. Not until there is the hand on your shoulder. Like being hit by a rifle bullet—you never hear the shot that gets you. That’s what they were told. The bullet travels faster than sound and so it reaches you before the noise of its passage through the air. Just so with an arrest—it’ll come when you don’t expect it, when you’ve covered all the options and you think you are safe. The knock on the door at the dead of night. The hand on the shoulder. The sudden stab of a gun barrel in the small of the back. Expect it at any moment and then you won’t be surprised.
The third time she looks towards Balzac there is a small figure standing in front of the memorial, a frail figure in a fawn raincoat holding an umbrella against the drizzle, a woman with thin legs and an angular stoop as though she is already an old crone.
Cautiously Alice walks down the slope and stands beside her. Yvette is looking up at the writer’s head on the plinth as though it were some kind of totem. Her face is wet with drizzle.
“I didn’t know whether you’d come.”
“Why not?”
“Have you come alone?”
Yvette glances sideways. “Of course.”
“Someone tailed me from Austerlitz yesterday. They were waiting for me to arrive.”
Silence. Balzac looks solemnly out into the afternoon. The city held no surprises for him; perhaps he wouldn’t even have been surprised by this little encounter. Alice adds quietly, “Did you bring them with you?”
“I don’t know what you mean.” Terrified eyes; wide, pleading eyes as she grabs Alice’s arm. “You’re going to get me out, aren’t you? What’s the matter, Marian? What’s gone wrong?”
“You’ve betrayed me, haven’t you?”
The wind quickens, stinging like salt in a wound. Yvette’s umbrella shudders and threatens to blow inside out. She struggles to close it. “What do you mean?”
“I told you, they were waiting for me at the station. I threw them off, but they know I’m here in the city. No one else but you knew when I was due back in Paris and where I was coming from. No one but you.”
Yvette is shivering. She’s frail and undernourished and perhaps she is cold. She was like that at Meoble Lodge, always cold. Alice grips the pistol in her pocket, feeling the other thing there as well, the small nut of the L pill against her knuckles. “I don’t trust you, Yvette. Not any more.”
“Of course you can trust me. For the love of God, I’m your friend, Marian. I’m Yvette. You know me.”
Alice looks round at the city of the dead. Living ghosts wander along the paths, peering hopelessly at the memorials. What you are we were, what we are you will become. She feels her own life hanging by a thread. “I’ll give you a final chance,” she tells her. “If you come right now, without going back to your flat, I’ll get you to England. You’ll be safe. You’ll see Violette again. But you’ve got to come right away. This instant.”
“How can I come right now? I can’t just walk out.”
“Why the hell not? What’s keeping you?”
It’s then that she notices the woman. She’s about fifty yards away down the slope, bending down to put flowers on a grave. Or maybe she’s trying to see the inscription better. There’s the same posture, the same manner of holding herself. The same leather jacket with the fur collar. The same blond curls, this time peeping from beneath a cloche hat. It’s the Alsatian woman, the one who stopped her in the place de la Contrescarpe.
Alice senses things sliding out of control. Her mind makes calculations—short, desperate additions and subtractions. Where are the others? Who, among the scattered mourners in this city of dead souls, are watching the living? She grabs Yvette’s arm as one might grab hold of a child. She’s light, a creature of hollow, sculpted bones. Alice speaks into her face, urgently, hoping that the words will hurt. “You’ve lied, Yvette. You’ve lied the entire bloody time.”
Yvette’s voice is the quiet, flaccid sound of despair. “They’ve got Emile. They told me they’d let him go.”
“You believe that? They’re the enemy, Yvette. They killed your husband, for Christ’s sake. They killed Violette’s father. Now they’ll kill me and they’ll probably kill you.”
There’s a moment of stasis. Crows jeer overhead, like the chorus of some Greek tragedy. Wind rattles the branches. She sees the Alsatian woman turn away for a second and that’s the moment she chooses to release her hold on Yvette’s arm and run. She runs faster than she has ever run in her life. She runs up the slope, with the rain stinging her face and her feet skidding on the pavé. She runs. Whether anyone is pursuing her, she doesn’t know. Running is action, running is doing, running isn’t standing and waiting for them to get you. Running is freedom, momentary and perhaps illusory but freedom nevertheless. The freedom of the escaped prisoner. She has absurd, tangential thoughts as she runs. How proud her father would be, seeing her running like this. How proud Ned, how proud Benoît and Clément. They’d cheer her on, the men who occupied, in some way or other, her life. Run! they’d cry. Run! And so she runs. Not like the wind but with the wind, past memorial and mausoleum, leaping over tombs and skidding round calvaries, careless of whether they are after her or not. One or two people stare after her. An old man—a gravedigger?—leans on a spade and watches her go. Someone shouts, but the sound is disembodied and might mean anything. Just a young woman running through a cemetery. Curious.
At the gate she stops. There’s no one there. She goes out through the gate and crosses the street, walking briskly. A few seconds’ lead. Nothing to waste. She takes a side street which cuts the cemetery out of sight. Somewhere nearby there’s the roar of a car and the wail of a police siren. Is that for her? She turns and runs to the far end of the street, turns again and runs once more, going by instinct, crossing a wide road at a run, going uphill towards what she remembers from the map as Belleville, a warren of old and decaying buildings perched on a hill at the edge of the city, a hill as high as the Butte de Montmartre. They’ll be gathering round the north of the cemetery and spreading out from there. You have to second-guess their every move. Cars, vans, they’ll be able to muster a fleet if they think her important enough.
She is important. A British terrorist trapped in the city—what could be better? As she crosses a street, someone shouts. She looks round. Is it Miessen, that dreadful man who followed her before? Can it be him? But she doesn’t wait to find out. She darts across the street and runs down an alleyway, not caring where she’s going, desperate to get away from him, from them, from anyone who may be following. She hurries on, now walking, now running, past incurious pedestrians, through streets that become lanes and alleys winding between ancient and dilapidated tenements. A maze. Somewhere in the distance she can hear more sirens, like the dead calling from the cemetery itself. She can feel them at her back, sniffing at the air of the ramshackle quarter, breathing down her neck. Children flock out of a school like starlings in their black smocks, laughing and chattering. She dodges through them and finds herself at an intersection of six streets converging on a small square where housewives queue outside a greengrocer’s and a horse-drawn cart stands outside a wine cellar. Here she pauses to get her breath and her bearings.
The horse steams in the damp air. There’s dung on the ground and the tang of urine tainting the atmosphere.
Which way to go? It’s like a puzzle out of Alice in Wonderland. Which exit to choose? One of them might be death, one might be life. Which?
As she hesitates a car drives into the square, another black Citroën, its bonnet like a coffin draped with white chevrons. Doors open and two men climb out. She ducks away into a side street, hearing a car door slam behind her and footsteps follow. A voice shouts out—German or French, it doesn’t matter which because the sense is clear in any language: Halt!
And she has no choice but to obey because the street ahead of her ends in a steep flight of stairs. A cul-de-sac. And at the top of the steps, for a fleeting moment, there’s the figure of Julius Miessen.
A tide of panic threatens to overwhelm her. She turns. Behind her two men are silhouetted at the entrance to the impasse. She looks back and the stairs are empty. Miessen, if it was Miessen, has vanished.
“You, come here!” one of the men shouts. He’s wearing a leather coat, his companion, a fawn mackintosh. Both have trilby hats, as though they have modelled themselves on gangsters seen in American films. They stand in the middle of the street as she walks towards them, one hanging back slightly to the rear of the other. They’re nothing more than faces, nondescript, bony. One of them, the nearer one, has a thin moustache. She can hear her father on the subject of such moustaches: travelling salesmen and theatre impresarios. The man at the back has his hand in his pocket. He looks like the fall guy.
Her panic subsides, to be replaced by something else, a sense of detachment. “You frightened me,” she calls out to them. “What do you expect, charging around like that? What do you want?”
“Venez.” The nearer one beckons her forward, and like any innocent civilian she’s obeying. She’s anxious, but she’s obeying. “I’m coming, I’m coming. Who are you looking for?”
“Take your hand out of your pocket!”
“I’m sorry?” She doesn’t understand his accent. She wants to obey but she can’t quite understand what he is saying. “I’m sorry?”
“Your hand!”
“I’m sorry?”
She’s closer now. A dozen yards. Too far, but it’ll have to do. She knows the distances and the angles, she knows the timing. Mere fractions of a second. Make the first move and they’re always on the back foot, always trying to catch up. It’s the only advantage you’ll have.
“Haut les mains!” the man shouts.
As though trying to obey, she holds her shoulder bag out in front of her and carefully puts it on the ground. Is that what they want? Their eyes follow her movement, watch the bag as if that is what they’re after, the bag and all that’s in it. Maybe it gives her a second’s advantage, maybe as much as that. She pulls the pistol from her pocket and racks the slide all in one movement, like on the range at Meoble Lodge, dropping to a crouch, the pistol extended and gripped with both hands, covering the further of the two. The Fairbairn-Sykes position. Two shots, double tap, the reports sharp and irrevocable in the narrow space of the impasse.
Time slows.
The nearer man flinches. His companion folds up as though he’s been punched in the stomach. She shifts rightwards, covers the nearer man, squeezes the trigger twice more. Another two shots, quick succession, the slide flashing back and forth, empty cases tinkling out on the ground like something from a Christmas cracker. The man shouts and goes down on one knee, holding up his left hand as though he might ward off further bullets.
Somewhere, someone shouts. Alice runs forward. The man nearer to her is pulling something from his waistband. She fires again, at two yards, into his head. A shot in the abdomen kills, the instructor said. It’s the biggest target in the body and it kills because the contents of the gut spill out into the abdominal cavity and infection sets in and there’s nothing anyone can do. But it may take a day or two. A head shot’s more difficult but it’s decisive.
The other man lies there with a vacant expression, staring up at the sky through the one eye that remains intact. She goes to recover her shoulder bag, then runs past the two bodies back into the square. The queue of housewives has dispersed. Two people peer out from a café doorway. Faces watch from windows. The Citroën is still there, the engine running.
Where is Miessen?
She looks round the square at the five other roads that converge on it. Thin slices of buildings like narrow wedges of cheese divide the streets. Beneath the sign for the rue des Envierges someone has painted a red hammer and sickle on the wall, by accident or design both dripping blood, and the slogan FRONT NATIONAL. Is that what attracts her? She runs into the street as fast as she can and down towards the end, oblivious to the pounding of her heart and the straining of her lungs. At the far end of the street there’s light and, through a gap in the buildings, the sudden sight of the whole of the city laid out below her. The view brings her to a halt. The cloud has begun to break up and a watery evening sunlight slides across the sea of tiles, catching the odd window, bringing a meretricious shine to the view. The Eiffel Tower stands away in the distance and the dome of Les Invalides, symbols of an ideal Paris; but reality is close by and it’s drab and squalid, the ground dropping steeply down what may once have been a country hillside but is now an urban precipice with rotting tenements clinging to the slope.
For a moment she hesitates. Something wells up, bubbling behind her breastbone, something sour and intrusive. She bends over, retching, gasping, spitting out saliva and bitter slime from deep down inside her. And all the while a small fragment of her mind remains cold and objective, watching her from a distance as though detached from all this emotion. They’ll encircle the butte, it tells her. Once they discover those bodies they’ll be deploying troops. They’ll come after you and they’ll watch all the ways out, guard the métro stations, keep you penned up like a rat in a drain. You’ve got no more than a few minutes in hand.
And where is Miessen? Was he really there, or has he become a creature of her imagination? She draws in air and waits for the nausea to die down. The objective mind is louder now, her thinking clearer. The pistol is more of a liability than an asset. The gutter at her feet runs into a culvert. She swings her arm and throws the weapon into the shadows as far as she can. Then she sets off down the hill, down broken steps and steep, winding alleys, going by instinct, knowing that sooner or later the alleyways will level out into the boulevard that runs across the base of the hill, which is where they’ll be waiting. There are few people around. Many of the houses seem abandoned, the windows empty, doors gaping. Washing hangs, like bunting celebrating a long-forgotten victory. A woman stands at one door with arms folded across her chest and her mouth turned down in disgust. “What’s the hurry?” she calls. “It’s already too late.”
Her laughter seems to follow Alice down. Already too late? At the bottom of the hill a dog sniffs hopelessly at a pile of rubbish, slinking away as she comes near. Out of a side street a handcart rumbles across her path and brings her to a halt.
An old man peers out from behind a heap of used clothes. He’s as wrinkled as a walnut and wears a woollen cap on his head that makes her think of the tumbrels that rolled through the city during the Terror. This is new terror, with new myths and new nightmares.
“One of your coats,” she says. “I’ll swap with mine.”
He looks her up and down, munching on the inside of his lips. “I dunno about that.”
“It’s Molyneux.”
“Why would you want to get rid of that, then? You nick it, or what?”
“And I’ll throw in a thousand francs if you’ll give me a beret as well.”
A thousand! The deal is done. She scrabbles in her bag, hands the money over, grabs the first coat that seems to be her size and pulls it on. The cloth smells, of damp, of sweat, of age, of decay and despair. Who wore it before? Some Jew, probably. There’s a glut of Jewish clothes on the market. She feels in the pocket of Madeleine’s coat for the small bullet of the L pill and slips it into the new coat. Then she puts Maddy’s on the cart, careful to push it beneath other clothes.
The old man rummages through the heap of cloth, finds a pancake of black felt and tosses it towards her. What would her mother say? Lice, fleas, scabies, all those creeping parasites that you might catch. She pulls the hat down over her head and tucks her hair up. “The best deal you’ll do today,” she tells him and he shrugs indifferently and rattles off across the cobbles. Cautiously, like a small mammal listening for the sound of predators, she approaches the end of the street and looks out at the boulevard de Belleville. The street is lined with autumnal trees and wide enough to accommodate two roadways, with a space down the middle that might have once been gardens of a kind but is now just a strip of muddied gravel. Down either side of the street is a line of drab market stalls. There aren’t many customers, and those that there are have all stopped to watch an army lorry parked fifty yards away with soldiers piling out of it. Another rafle? Whistles blow. More vehicles arrive. Barbed-wire barriers are being dragged into place along the pavement, turning the boulevard into a line of demarcation. A radio babbles from a Kübelwagen while an Unteroffizier shouts orders. People at the market stalls stare, wondering what is happening, who will be rounded up, who will be searched, whether or not to pack up and go home.
Alice steps back out of sight. Time is racing now, leaving her struggling in its wake. In a few minutes the soldiers will be moving forward into the narrow streets. Can she bluff her way out? They’re looking for a woman with long, fair hair and wearing a hound’s-tooth coat. Maybe they know her as Anne-Marie Laroche. Maybe, if Yvette has talked, they know her as Marian Sutro. So maybe they won’t think twice about Laurence Aimée Follette from Bourg-en-Bresse, dressed in drab brown and a black beret; maybe she can just walk up to the barricade and show her identity card and be waved through.
But she has only one chance, a single cast of the dice, with her life resting on it. So she hesitates, holding the dice, summoning up the courage to throw.
It’s then that she sees the children. They’re behind her, coming from a church, shepherded by two nuns with wide, starched headdresses: a gaggle of little boys, maybe three dozen, coming round the corner towards her, their clogs rattling on the pavé. They are meant to be walking in pairs but discipline is breaking down—they’re jostling and pushing, spilling across the pavement and onto the narrow street. Where, she wonders, are they heading?
“Rue Timbaud,” the nun replies when asked. “The orphanage of the Daughters of Charity.” She has a pallid face of dough and the smell of sanctity about her, musty and faintly scented, as though she has spent most of her life in an atmosphere of candle smoke and incense. Alice remembers the smell and the look, a world in which cleanliness is equated with godliness, where faces and floors are scrubbed with equal energy.
“There’s a barrage up ahead.”
“A barrage?” Panic opens the nun’s eyes. “We’ve got to get the children back home. They can’t wait.”
“They must be looking for someone. Who knows? Look, if you like, I’ll help you.”
The nuns smile. Alice smiles. “I’m Laurence,” she says, lifting one of the errant children in her arms and moving to the head of the crocodile. “Come on, let’s see if we can march properly,” she calls. “Can we march like men? Left, right, left right, arms out straight. Can we do that?”
“Ladies don’t march,” one of the children complains.
“This one does.”
“Are you a soldier?”
“As a matter of fact, I am.” And as if to demonstrate the fact she strides forward. Giggling and swinging their arms like puppets, the children follow her out into the open space of the boulevard, their clogs clattering. Across the road in front of them, soldiers are now drawn up for a hundred yards or more. Under-officers are calling orders, getting them into line, preparing to advance into the side streets. The children stumble to a halt. Some of the men smile and point. “Die französische Armee,” one of them says. The French Army. There’s laughter in the ranks.
“Allons enfants!” Alice cries. Her squad of infants gathers itself and is about to advance once more when a lieutenant steps forward with hand raised. “Excuse me, Mademoiselle, I’m afraid you’ll have to wait.” He seems no more than eighteen or nineteen, a bright, fresh-faced boy with nervous eyes. His French is solid and accurate, the French of the schoolroom polished perhaps by occasional summer holidays across the border.
“What d’you mean, we can’t pass?” she cries. With the toddler still clinging to her neck she turns to display her flock. “These children need to get home. They need a wash and their supper and then they need to get to bed.”
“We have orders,” the lieutenant insists.
“To stop children? How can that be possible?”
“Not to stop children. To close the area. There’s a dangerous terrorist at large.”
“Well, we’re leaving, aren’t we? So we cannot be in any danger, can we?”
“That’s not the point.”
“Surely it is exactly the point. These poor children, victims of the bombing, need to get to their home.”
He looks at the line of children behind her. “Are they Jews?”
“Of course they’re not Jews. They’re with the Sisters, aren’t they? They’re Christians, living with the Sisters on the rue Timbaud. You can check if you like. The Daughters of Charity.”
He sniffs, as though wondering which way the wind’s blowing. Then he seems to decide. “Your papers, please.”
As she rummages in her bag for her identity card, one of the children pulls at her coat. “Daniel’s wet himself, Miss.”
She looks round. The child in question stands there with a thread of urine dribbling down his leg. A nun hurries forward. “This is disgraceful!” she cries as she crouches to deal with the boy. “Frightening God’s creatures.”
Alice turns back to the officer. “Now look what you’ve done. May I speak with your superior officer, please? There must be someone in charge round here.”
The young man blushes. “I’m in charge.”
“Then I demand you stop frightening these children and let us through.”
He’s confused, torn between his duty and the palpable stupidity of corralling a bunch of babies. “Go through,” he says, brushing her identity card aside. “Get out of here.”
Behind him, the ranks part. One of the soldiers wolf-whistles. “Die Rattenfänger von Hameln,” a voice shouts. The Ratcatcher of Hamelin. More laughter. The Pied Piper smiles and makes a gesture that’s half a wave, half a salute and the column of children moves forward through the line of soldiers, through the trees and the market stalls of the central reservation, across the roadway on the other side and into the opposite street. Suddenly they are away from the noise of the military and into an illusory calm.
The Sister takes hold of the toddler. “Thank you for your help,” she says. “I imagine you’ll want to be moving on.”
“I’m afraid I have to.”
“Don’t use the métro,” the nun warns her. “They’ll shut it down. They always do.” She smiles sympathetically. “And God bless you,” she adds.
She walks through the gathering dusk of the city, hurrying through the back streets, crossing boulevards like an animal slinking across an open field where predators lie in wait. Military vehicles roar past while she hangs back in doorways. Crowds issuing up from the métro mill around helplessly in the darkness. For some of the way she joins up with two girls who are trying to get home to Issy in the south. They are speculating about what has happened. A power failure was one possibility, but that doesn’t explain the military vehicles. “There’s always something going on,” one of the girls complains. “Maybe it’s the Jews again. I mean, there’s still hundreds of them around. If not the Jews, then it’s communists.”
Once across the river Alice separates from them, apologising for leaving, agreeing that they should meet up again, taking down a phone number. She watches them go with regret. Fear stalks her once she is on her own, fear that is only partly assuaged when the door to the apartment on the place de l’Estrapade finally closes behind her.
“You look a complete mess,” Clément exclaims. “What have you been up to? And where on earth did you get that coat? Didn’t you take one of Maddy’s?”
She detaches herself from his embrace and lights a cigarette, her hands shaking. “I had to give it away.”
“That’ll make her happy.”
“They nearly got me, Clément. They had me bottled up in Belleville—”
“What the hell were you doing in Belleville? It’s a slum.”
“Meeting Yvette.”
“Who the hell’s Yvette?”
“Yvette,” she repeats, as though it’s obvious. “Yvette. I went to meet her and they almost caught me.” She looks round, looks at her watch, looks for distraction. There are things to do, preparations to make, decisions to reach; anything but thinking. “The radio. Radio Londres. We need to know if the pick-up is on.”
He leads her into the salon, pours a glass of wine, tries to sit her down on one of the uncomfortable sofas. “There’s time yet. Tell me what happened.”
But she can’t sit down. Sitting down would mean inertia and she cannot sit still, not at the moment. There are voices in the background, high-pitched, excited voices chattering words that are not quite audible, like an angry conversation taking place in another room. She tries to look at him but somehow she can’t do that either, she can’t look at anything for any length of time, can’t concentrate on anything, can’t bring her mind into focus on any single thought, certainly can’t sit down. “Will Madeleine really be cross about the coat?”
He laughs. “Maddy? I shouldn’t think she’ll notice.”
Madeleine won’t be cross. It’s a blessed relief. She pauses to listen to the voices. But the sane part of her mind is still there, struggling for command. You’re imagining things, it tells her. It’s the stress. Hysteria. She draws on her cigarette, feeling the bite of smoke in her lungs, and looks round for something to do. The cigarette. She concentrates on that, on how to breathe the smoke in and how to expel it. That’ll do for now. That, and trying to ignore the voices.
“You haven’t told me what happened, Marian.”
“I killed someone.” She says it quietly. Perhaps he won’t hear what she said. Would that make the confession invalid, if the priest didn’t hear it exactly?
But he has heard. He stands there looking at her with confusion in his face. “You’ve done what?”
She turns her head away. “Two men. Maybe both. I’m not sure. Yes, I’m sure. Both.”
He bends and puts his hands on her shoulders and tries to look into her eyes, as though he might read the truth there. “Two men? What on earth do you mean?”
Isn’t it clear enough? She has killed people. That’s what the voices seem to be saying. They’re murmuring, just below the level of audibility so that she isn’t certain they are even there: she has killed two men. Killing is what everyone else seems to be doing at the moment, except that they mostly do it at one remove, dropping a bomb or firing a shell or launching a torpedo, or even sitting at a laboratory bench and designing weapons. But she has done it exactly as they promised at Meoble Lodge—at close quarters, hand to hand. Double tap. And in cold blood, more or less. A good term that, cold blood. Because blood’s never cold. Not until you’re dead, anyway.
She makes herself look him in the eye. “They had me cornered in a cul-de-sac in Belleville. So I shot them. I’m a murderer, Clément. They’ve turned me into a murderer.”
“Don’t be absurd.”
“And that man was there, the man who followed me before. I saw him there. Julius Miessen he’s called.”
“Well, he’s not following you now.” He reaches out and pulls her against him. She feels the sting of tears. He bends and kisses her cheek and her eyes, and then her mouth.
She tries to pull away. “The radio,” she insists. “We must listen to the radio.”
“Don’t you ever give up?”
“I can’t give up,” she replies. “Don’t you understand? If I give up, I’m dead.”
THEY SIT IN the salon with the wireless on, tuned through the roar of jamming to Radio Londres. The drumbeat of the letter V plays out into the room. And then the announcer’s voice: “Ici Londres. Les Français parlent aux Français. First we have some messages for our friends.”
They wait as the messages are read out, the sentences of nonsense, sometimes poetic, often merely banal. The voice is calm, like a parent reciting a poem to a child, oblivious to the noise all around: “Grand-mère a cueilli des belles fleurs … La pluie tombe sur la plaine … Jean veut venir chercher ses cadeaux … Le cadavre exquis boira le vin nouveau … Le garagiste a les mains pleines de graisse—”
“That’s it,” she cries. “The garage man has greasy hands. That’s the one.” The mess of emotion that she feels becomes, for a moment, something physical. Nausea, bile bubbling up inside her throat. “We’re going. The pick-up is on. The trouble is …”
What is the trouble? The trouble is that she feels sick, that the voices are still whispering to her, like a tune going round and round in her head, something that you can’t get rid of.
“The trouble is, they’ll be watching for me. The whole of bloody Paris will be looking for me now. They know I’ve organised a pick-up and they’ve got my description. Yvette will have told them everything. I’m blown wide open, Clément.” Brûlée is the word. So much better than the English because that is what she feels—burned, scorched. “I’m a danger to everyone.” She attempts a smile. “Radioactive.”
Clément shrugs. “I’m used to that. All you have to do with something that is radioactive is keep it in a lead-lined container. Where do we have to go tomorrow? You’ve not told me anything yet.”
“We’ve got to catch the Bordeaux train.”
“From Austerlitz? That’s easy.” He smiles, that infuriating smile that he always uses when he is about to prove you wrong or foolish, the smile she loathed and loved at the same time. “We catch the train further down the line, at Ivry. We’ll use the laboratory van. The Collège has certain privileges and one of them is the van—it runs pretty often between the Collège itself and the lab at Ivry. Tomorrow it’ll be going to Ivry. Does it all the time.” He takes her hand and draws her towards him. “Now you need some rest. More than anything, you need to sleep.”