“A woman, Herr Leutnant. An old story. No surprises.”
“May I ask why you are not in a prisoner-ofwar camp? You seem military.”
“Sir, I am a contractor. My firm, M. Vercois et Fils—I am the son, by the way—has contracted to do much cement work on the coastline. We are building an impregnable wall for the Reich.”
“Yes, yes,” said Abel in a policeman’s tired voice, indicating that he had heard all the French collaborationist sucking-up he needed to for the day.
“Now do you mind, please, turning to the left so that I can get a good profile view. I must say, this is a terrible photograph of you.”
“I take a bad photograph, sir. I have this trouble frequently, but if you hold the light above the photo, it will resolve itself. The photographer made too much of my nose.”
Abel checked.
It still did not quite make sense.
He turned to Macht.
“See if this photo matches, Herr Hauptmann. Maybe it’s the light, but—”
At that moment, from the line two places behind M. Vercois, a man suddenly broke and ran crazily down the platform.
“That’s him!” screamed Boch. “Stop that man, goddammit, stop that man!”
The drama played out quickly. The man ran and the Germans were disciplined enough not to shoot him, but instead, like football athletes, moved to block him. He tried to break this way, then that, but soon a younger, stronger, faster Untersharführer had him, another reached the melee and tangled him up from behind, and then two more, and the whole scrum went down in a blizzard of arms and legs.
“Someone stole my papers!” the man cried. “My papers are missing, I am innocent. Heil Hitler. I am innocent. Someone stole my papers.”
“Got him,” screamed Boch. “Got him!” and ran quickly to the melee to take command of the British agent.
“Go on,” said Abel to M. Vercois as he and Macht went themselves to the incident.
His face blank, Basil entered the main station as whistles sounded and security troops from everywhere ran to Gate No. 4, from which he had just emerged. No one paid him any attention as he turned sideways to let the heavily armed Germans swarm past him. In the distance German sirens sounded, that strange two-note caw-CAW that sounded like a crippled crow, as yet more troops poured to the site.
Basil knew he didn’t have much time. Someone smart among the Germans would understand quickly enough what had happened and would order a quick search of the train, where the M. Piens documents would be found in the first-class loo, and they’d know what had transpired. Then they’d throw a cordon around the station, call in more troops, and do a very careful examination of the horde, person by person, looking for a man with the papers of poor M. Vercois, currently undergoing interrogation by SS boot.
He walked swiftly to the front door, though the going was tough. Too late. Already the feldpolizei had commanded the cabs to leave and had halted buses. More German troops poured from trucks to seal off the area; more German staff cars arrived. The stairs to the Métro were all blocked by armed men.
He turned as if to walk back, meanwhile hunting for other ways out.
“Monsieur Piens, Monsieur Piens,” came a call. He turned and saw the Luftwaffe colonel waving at him.
“Come along, I’ll drop you. No need to get hung up in this unfortunate incident.”
He ran to and entered the cab, knowing full well that his price of survival would be a trip back to the years 1912 through 1918. It almost wasn’t worth it.
A few days earlier (cont’d.)
“Promote him!” said Basil. “The games you play. I swear I cannot keep up with them. The man’s a traitor. He should be arrested and shot.”
But his anguish moved no one on the panel that sat before him in the prime minister’s murky staff room.
“Basil, so it should be with men of action, but you posit a world where things are clear and simple,” said Sir Colin. “Such a planet does not exist. On this one, the real one, direct action is almost always impossible. Thus one must move on the oblique, making concessions and allowances all the way, never giving up too much for too little, tracking reverberations and rebounds, keeping the upper lip as stiff as if embalmed in concrete. Thus we leave small creatures such as our wretch of a Cambridge librarian alone in hopes of influencing someone vastly more powerful. Professor, perhaps you could put Basil in the picture so he understands what it is we are trying to do, and why it is so bloody important.”
“It’s called Operation Citadel,” said Professor Turing. “The German staff has been working on it for some time now. Even though we would like to think that the mess they engineered on themselves at Stalingrad ended it for them, that is mere wishful dreaming. They are wounded but still immensely powerful.”
“Professor, you speak as if you had a seat in the OKW general officers’ mess.”
“In a sense he does. The professor mentioned the little machines he builds, how they are able to try millions of possibilities and come up with solutions to the German code combinations and produce reasonable decryptions. Thus we have indeed been able to read Jerry’s mail. Frankly, I know far more about German plans than about what is happening two doors down in my own agency, what the Americans are doing, or who the Russians have sent to Cambridge. But it’s a gift that must be used sagely. If it’s used sloppily, it will give up the game and Jerry will change everything. So we just use a bit of it now and then. This is one of those nows or thens. Go on, Professor.”
“I defer to a strategic authority.”
“General Cavendish?”
Cavendish, the army general, had a face that showed emotions from A all the way to A–. It was a mask of meat shaped in an oval and built bluntly around two ball bearings, empty of light, wisdom, empathy, or kindness, registering only force. He had about a pound of nose in the center of it and a pound of medals on his tunic.
“Operation Citadel,” he delivered as rote fact, not interpretation, “is envisioned as the Götterdämmarung of the war in the East, the last titanic breakthrough that will destroy the Russian warmaking effort and bring the Soviets to the German table, hats in hand. At the very least, if it’s successful, as most think it will be, it’ll prolong the war by another year or two. We had hoped to see the fighting stop in 1945; now it may last well into 1947, and many more millions of men may die, and I should point out that a good number of those additional millions will be German. So we are trying to win—yes, indeed—but we are trying to do so swiftly, so that the dying can stop. That is what is at stake, you see.”
“And that is why you cannot crush this little Cambridge rat’s ass under a lorry. All right, I see that, I suppose, annoyed at it though I remain.”
“Citadel, slated for May, probably cannot happen until July or August, given the logistics. It is to take place in southwest Russia, several hundred miles to the west of Stalingrad. At that point, around a city called Kursk, the Russians find themselves with a bulge in their lines—a salient, if you will. Secretly the Germans have begun massing matériel both above and beneath the bulge. When they believe they have overwhelming superiority, they will strike. They will drive north from below and south from above, behind walls of Tigers, flocks of Stukas, and thousands of artillery pieces. The infantry will advance behind the tanks. When the encirclement is complete, they will turn and kill the 300,000 men in the center and destroy the 50,000 tanks. The morale of the Red Army will be shattered, the losses so overwhelming that all the American aid in the world cannot keep up with it, and the Russians will fall back, back, back to the Urals. Leningrad will fall, then Moscow. The war will go on and on and on.”
“I’m no genius,” said Basil, “but even I can figure it out. You must tell Stalin. Tell him to fortify and resupply that bulge. Then when the Germans attack, they will fail, and it is they who will be on the run, the war will end in 1945, and those millions of lives will have been saved. Plus I can then drink myself to death uninterrupted, as I desire.”
&nb
sp; “Again, sir,” said the admiral, who was turning out to be Basil’s most ardent admirer, “he has seen the gist of it straight through.”
“There is only one thing, Basil,” said Sir Colin. “We have told Stalin. He doesn’t believe us.”
The Third Day
“Jasta 3 at Vraignes. Late 1916,” said Macht. “Albatros, a barge to fly.”
“He was an ace,” said Abel. “Drop a hat and he’ll tell you about it.”
“Old comrade,” said Oberst Gunther Scholl, “yes. I was Jasta 7 at Roulers. That was in 1917. God, so long ago.”
“Old chaps,” said Abel, “now the nostalgia is finished, so perhaps we can get on with our real task, which is staying out of Russia.”
“Walter will never go to Russia,” said Macht. “Family connections. He’ll stay in Paris, and when the Americans come, he’ll join up with them. He’ll finish the war a lieutenant-colonel in the American army. But he does have a point.”
“Didi, that’s the first compliment you ever gave me. If only you meant it, but one can’t have everything.”
“So let’s go through this again, Herr Oberst,” said Macht to Colonel Scholl. “Walter reminds us that there’s a very annoyed SS officer stomping around out there and he would like to send you to the Russian front. He would also like to send all of us to the Russian front, except Walter. So it is now imperative that we catch the fellow you sat next to for six hours, and you must do better at remembering.”
The hour was late, or early, depending. Oberst Scholl had imagined himself dancing the night away at Maxim’s with Hilda, then retiring to a dawn of love at the Ritz. Instead he was in a dingy room on the rue Guy de Maupassant, being grilled by gumshoes from the slums of Germany in an atmosphere seething with desperation, sour smoke, and cold coffee.
“Hauptmann Macht, believe me, I wish to avoid the Russian front at all costs. Bricquebec is no prize, and command of a night fighter squadron does not suggest, I realize, that I am expected to do big things in the Luftwaffe. But I am happy to fight my war there and surrender when the Americans arrive. I have told you everything.”
“This I do not understand,” said Leutnant Abel. “You had previously met Monsieur Piens and you thought this fellow was he. Yet the photography shows a face quite different from the one I saw at the Montparnasse station.”
“Still, they are close,” explained the colonel somewhat testily. “I had met Piens at a reception put together by the Vichy mayor of Bricquebec, between senior German officers and prominent, sympathetic businessmen. This fellow owned two restaurants and a hotel, was a power behind the throne, so to speak, and we had a brief but pleasant conversation. I cannot say I memorized his face, as why would I? When I got to the station, I glanced at the registration of French travelers and saw Piens’s name and thus looked for him. I suppose I could say it was my duty to amuse our French sympathizers, but the truth is, I thought I could charm my way into a significant discount at his restaurants or pick up a bottle of wine as a gift. That is why I looked for him. He did seem different, but I ascribed that to the fact that he now had no moustache. I teased him about it and he gave me a story about his wife’s dry skin.”
The two policemen waited for more, but there wasn’t any “more.”
“I tell you, he spoke French perfectly, no trace of an accent, and was utterly calm and collected. In fact, that probably was a giveaway I missed. Most French are nervous in German presence, but this fellow was quite wonderful.”
“What did you talk about for six hours?”
“I run on about myself, I know. And so, with a captive audience, that is what I did. My wife kicks me when I do so inappropriately, but unfortunately she was not there.”
“So he knows all about you but we know nothing about him.”
“That is so,” said the Oberst. “Unfortunately.”
“I hope you speak Russian as well as French,” said Abel. “Because I have to write a report, and I’m certainly not going to put the blame on myself.”
“All right,” said Scholl. “Here is one little present. Small, I know, but perhaps just enough to keep me out of a Stuka cockpit.”
“We’re all ears.”
“As I have told you, many times, he rode in the cab to the Ritz, and when we arrived I left and he stayed in the cab. I don’t know where he took it. But I do remember the cabbie’s name. They must display their licenses on the dashboard. It was Philippe Armoire. Does that help?”
It did.
That afternoon Macht stood before a squad room filled with about fifty men, a third his own, a third from Feldpolizei Battalion 11, and a third from Boch’s SS detachment, all in plain clothes. Along with Abel, the feldpolizei sergeant, and Hauptsturmführer Boch, he sat at the front of the room. Behind was a large map of Paris. Even Boch had dressed down for the occasion, though to him “down” was a bespoke pin-striped, double-breasted black suit.
“All right,” he said. “Long night ahead, boys, best get used to it now. We think we have a British agent hiding somewhere here,” and he pointed at the fifth arrondissement, the Left Bank, the absolute heart of cultural and intellectual Paris. “That is the area where a cabdriver left him early this morning, and I believe Hauptsturmführer Boch’s interrogators can speak to the truthfulness of the cabdriver.”
Boch nodded, knowing that his interrogation techniques were not widely approved of. “The Louvre and Notre Dame are right across the river, the Institut de France dominates the skyline on this side, and on the hundreds of streets are small hotels and restaurants, cafés, various retail outlets, apartment buildings, and so forth and so on. It is a catacomb of possibilities, entirely too immense for a dragnet or a mass cordon and search effort.
“Instead, each of you will patrol a block or so. You are on the lookout for a man of medium height, reddish to brownish hair, squarish face. More recognizably, he is a man of what one might call charisma. Not beauty per se, but a kind of inner glow that attracts people to him, allowing him to manipulate them. He speaks French perfectly, possibly German as well. He may be in any wardrobe, from shabby French clerk to priest, even to a woman’s dress. If confronted he will offer wellthought- out words, be charming, agreeable, and slippery. His papers don’t mean much. He seems to have a sneak thief ’s skills at picking pockets, so he may have traded off several identities by the time you get to him. The best tip I can give you is, if you see a man and think what a great friend he’d be, he’s probably the spy. His charm is his armor and his principle weapon. He is very clever, very dedicated, very intent on his mission. Probably armed and dangerous as well, but please be forewarned. Taken alive, he will be a treasure trove. Dead, he’s just another Brit body.”
“Sir, are we to check hotels for new registrations?”
“No. Uniformed officers have that task. This fellow, however, is way too clever for that. He’ll go to ground in some anonymous way, and we’ll never find him by knocking on hotel room doors. Our best chance is when he is out on the street. Tomorrow will be better, as a courier is bringing the real Monsieur Piens’s photo up from Bricquebec and our artist will remove the moustache and thin the face, so we should have a fair likeness. At the same time, I and all my detectives will work our phone contacts and listen for any gossip, rumors, and reports of minor incidents that might reveal the fellow’s presence. We will have radio cars stationed every few blocks, so you can run to them and reach us if necessary and thus we can get reinforcements to you quickly if that need develops. We can do no more. We are the cat, he is the mouse. He must come out for his cheese.”
“If I may speak,” said Hauptsturmführer Boch.
Who could stop him?
And thus he delivered a thirty-minute tirade that seemed modeled after Hitler’s speech at Nuremberg, full of threats and exotic metaphors and fueled by pulsing anger at the world for its injustices, perhaps mainly in not recognizing the genius of Boch, all of it well punctuated by the regrettable fact that those who gave him evidence of shirking or laziness cou
ld easily end up on that cold antitank gun in Russia, facing the Mongol hordes.
It was not well received.
Of course Basil was too foxy to bumble into a hotel. Instead, his first act on being deposited on the Left Bank well after midnight was to retreat to the alleyways of more prosperous blocks and look for padlocked doors to the garages. It was his belief that if a garage was padlocked, it meant the owners of the house had fled for more hospitable climes and he could safely use such a place for his hideout. He did this rather easily, picking the padlock and slipping into a large vault of a room occupied by a Rolls-Royce Phantom on blocks, clear evidence that its wealthy owners were now rusticating safely in Beverly Hills in the United States. His first order of the day was rest: he had, after all, been going full steam for forty-eight hours now, including his parachute arrival in France, his exhausting ordeal by Luftwaffe Oberst on the long train ride, and his miraculous escape from Montparnasse station, also courtesy of the Luftwaffe Oberst, whose name he did not even know.
The limousine was open; he crawled into a back seat that had once sustained the arsses of a prominent industrialist, a department store magnate, the owner of a chain of jewelry stores, a famous whore, whatever, and quickly went to sleep.
He awoke at three in the afternoon and had a moment of confusion. Where was he? In a car? Why? Oh, yes, on a mission. What was that mission? Funny, it seemed so important at one time; now he could not remember it. Oh, yes, The Path to Jesus.
There seemed no point in going out by day, so he examined the house from the garage, determined that it was deserted, and slipped into it, entering easily enough. It was a ghostly museum of the aristocratic du Clercs, who’d left their furniture under sheets and their larder empty, and by now dust had accumulated everywhere. He amused himself with a little prowl, not bothering to go through drawers, for he was a thief only in the name of duty. He did borrow a book from the library and spent the evening in the cellar, reading it by candlelight. It was Tolstoy’s great War and Peace, and he got more than three hundred pages into it.