And suddenly his nerves let go of their chill alarms and he heard Gaby say softly, “Oh,” because there in front of them on the long straight route to Paris was a roadblock with a dozen armed soldiers, an armored car with a cannon-snout showing, and a black Citrfen that could only be a Gestapo vehicle.
A soldier with a submachine gun was waving them down. All faces turned toward them. A man in a dark hat and a long beige overcoat stepped into the road, waiting. Gaby hit the brakes, a little too hard. “Steady,” Michael said, and as the Mercedes slowed he peeled off his gloves.
2
The man who peered in through the rolled-down window at Michael Gallatin had blue eyes so pale they were almost without color, his face chiseled and handsome in the way of a Nordic athlete—a skier, Michael thought. Perhaps a javelin thrower, or a long-distance runner. There were fine lines around his eyes, and his blond sideburns were going gray. He wore a dark leather hat with a jaunty red feather in its band. “Good morning, Colonel,” he said. “A small inconvenience, I fear. May I see your papers?”
“I hope the inconvenience is small,” Michael answered icily. The other man’s face kept its thin, polite smile. As Michael reached into his coat for his packet of papers, he saw a soldier take up a position directly on the other side of the car. The soldier’s submachine gun barrel wandered slightly toward the window, and Michael felt a knot of tension clench in his throat. The soldier was staking out his lane of fire; there was no way Michael could pull the Luger from his holster without being shot to tatters.
Gaby kept her hands on the wheel. The Gestapo agent took Michael’s papers and glanced in at Gaby. “Your papers also, please?”
“She’s my secretary,” Michael said.
“Of course. But I must see her papers.” He shrugged. “Regulations, you know.”
Gaby reached into her coat. She brought out a packet of papers that had been made for her yesterday, when she’d decided to go to Paris with him. She handed them over with a crisp nod.
“Thank you.” The Gestapo agent began to inspect the photographs and documents. Michael watched the man’s face. It was a cold face, and it was stamped with a cunning intelligence; this man was no fool, and he’d seen all the tricks. Michael glanced toward the roadside, and saw Lieutenant Krabell and his driver there. The driver was checking the engine as Krabell’s papers were being laboriously examined by another Gestapo agent.
“What’s the problem?” Michael asked.
“Haven’t you heard?” The blond-haired man looked up from his reading, his eyes quizzical.
“If I had, would I be asking?”
“For a communications officer, you’re certainly out of touch.” A brief smile, a hint of square white predator’s teeth. “But of course you know there was a parachute drop in this sector three nights ago. The partisans in a village called Bazancourt helped the man escape. There was also a woman involved.” His gaze slid toward Gaby. “Do you speak German, my dear?” he asked her in French.
“A little,” she answered. Her voice was cool, and Michael admired her courage. She looked the man straight in the eyes and didn’t waver. “What do you want me to say?”
“Your papers speak for you.” He continued his inspection, taking his time about it.
“What’s your name?” Michael decided to take the offensive. “I’d like to know who to lodge my complaint against when we get to Paris.”
“Johlmann. Heinz, middle initial R for Richter.” The man kept reading, not intimidated in the least. “Colonel, who’s your superior commander?”
“Adolf Hitler,” Michael said.
“Ah, yes. Of course.” Again, that brief show of teeth. They looked like they were good at tearing meat. “I mean your immediate superior in the field.”
Michael’s palms were damp, but his heart had stopped pounding. He was in control of himself, and he would not be rushed. He glanced quickly at the soldier on the other side of the car, still holding the submachine gun ready, his finger on the trigger guard. “I report to Major General Friedrich Bohm, Fourteenth Sector Communications, headquarters in Abbeville. Our radio code is ‘Tophat.’ ”
“Thank you. I can get through to Major General Bohm in about ten minutes on our radio equipment.” He motioned toward the armored car.
“Be my guest. I’m sure he’d like to hear why I’m being interrogated.” Michael stared up at Johlmann. Their eyes met, and locked. The moment stretched, and in it Gaby felt a scream pressing behind her teeth.
Johlmann smiled and looked away. He studied the photographs of the colonel and his secretary. “Ah!” he said speaking to Michael, his cold eyes brightening. “You’re an Austrian! From Braugdonau, yes?”
“That’s right.”
“Well, that’s amazing! I know Braugdonau!”
Gaby felt as if she’d just taken a punch to the stomach. Her Luger. So close. Could she get to it before the soldier sprayed her with bullets? She feared she couldn’t, so she didn’t move.
“I have a cousin in Essen!” Johlmann said, still smiling. “Just west of your hometown. I’ve been through Braugdonau several times. They have a very fine winter carnival.”
“Yes, they do.” A skier, he decided.
“Good snow on those mountains. Hard-packed. You don’t have to worry about avalanches so much. Thank you, my dear.” He returned Gaby’s papers to her. She took them and put them away, noting that a couple of other soldiers had wandered closer to have a glimpse of her. Johlmann carefully folded Michael’s papers. “I remember the fountain in Braugdonau. You know. Where the statues of the Ice King and Queen are.” His teeth flashed. “Yes?”
“I’m afraid you’re mistaken.” Michael held out his hand for his papers. “There is no fountain in Braugdonau, Herr Johlmann. I think it’s time for us to be on our way now.”
“Well,” Johlmann said with a shrug, “I suppose I am mistaken, after all.” He slid the packet into Michael’s hand, and Michael was very glad he’d listened to all the details McCarren had given him about the layout and history of Braugdonau. Michael’s fingers closed around the papers, but Johlmann wouldn’t let the documents go. “I don’t have a cousin in Essen, Colonel,” he said. “A white lie, and I hope you’ll pardon my presumption. But you know, I have been skiing in that area before. Beautiful place. That very famous run about twenty kilometers north of Essen.” His smile came back, and it was a horrible happiness. “Surely you know it. The Grandfather. Yes?”
He knows, Michael thought. He smells the British in my skin. Michael felt poised on the edge of a precipice, and beneath him were slavering jaws. Damn it, why hadn’t he slid the Luger next to him on the seat? Johlmann was waiting for his answer, his head cocked slightly to one side, the red feather stirring in the breeze.
“Herr Johlmann?” the soldier with the submachine gun said. His voice was nervous. “Herr Johlmann, you’d better—”
“Yes,” Michael said. His stomach clenched. “The Grandfather.”
Johlmann’s smile flicked off. “Oh, no. I’m afraid I meant the Grandmother.”
“Herr Johlmann!” the soldier shouted. Two other soldiers yelled out, and ran for the trees. The armored car’s engine started with a roar. Johlmann looked up. “What the hell is going—” And then he heard the high whine just as Michael did, and he twisted around to see the glint of silver diving toward the roadblock.
Fighter plane, Michael realized. Coming down fast. The soldier with the submachine gun shouted, “Take cover!” and ran for the roadside. Johlmann, sputtering with anger, called, “Wait! Wait, you!” But the soldiers were running for the trees and the armored car was scrambling like an iron roach for cover, and Johlmann cursed and dug into his coat for his pistol as he whirled back to face the false colonel.
But Michael’s hand had grown a Luger. As Johlmann’s pistol rose, Michael thrust the Luger’s barrel into Johlmann’s face and pulled the trigger.
There was a whoosh like an oncoming avalanche, a chatter of machine-gun bullets from an aircra
ft’s wing guns, and in that instant the sound of the Luger going off was silenced by the larger weapons. Two columns of bullets marched alongside the road, straddling the Mercedes and sending sparks flying, and Heinz Richter Johlmann, ex-Gestapo, staggered back with a single smoking hole in the center of his forehead, just below his jaunty hat. Michael had his papers gripped in his other hand, and as the fighter plane’s shadow swept across the earth Johlmann fell to his knees with blood beginning to run down his shock-frozen face. His head sagged forward. His hat, full of gray brains, fell off, and the fighter plane’s fierce hot breeze blew the red feather before it like a bloody exclamation mark.
“Krabell!” Michael shouted. The young lieutenant had been about to run for the trees, his driver unable to get the motorcycle’s engine started. He turned toward the Mercedes. “This man’s been hit!” Michael said. “Get a medic—but first move that damned barricade!”
Krabell and the driver hesitated, wanting to run for cover before the fighter came back for another strafing pass. “Do as I say!” Michael commanded, and the two Germans scrambled to the wooden barricade. They moved it aside, Krabell searching the sky with his goggled eyes, and then Michael heard the deadly whine of the plane coming down for a second attack. “Go!” he told Gaby. She pressed her foot to the floorboard, and the car lunged forward, passing Krabell and the motorcyclist and roaring through the opened barricade. Then the two Germans fled for the trees, beneath which the others had thrown themselves to the ground. As Gaby raced them along the road, Michael glanced back and saw the bright glint of sun on the plane’s wings. It was an American aircraft, a P-47 Thunderbolt, and it looked to be headed right for the Mercedes. He saw the fireflash of the machine guns, bullets marching along the road and throwing up gravel. Gaby swerved the car violently to the left, its tires going off the road into grass. There was a wham! that Michael felt at the base of his spine, and Gaby fought to keep control of the wheel. We’re hit! she thought, but the engine was still roaring, so she kept the speed up. Dust boiled into the car, blinding Michael for a few seconds. When it cleared, Michael saw two shafts of sunlight entering the roof through jagged holes in the metal, and a chunk of the rear windshield the size of his fist had been blown away. Fragments of glass were scattered all over the seat beside him and glittered in the folds of his coat. Gaby saw the glint of sun along the Thunderbolt’s wings as the aircraft turned in a tight circle. “Coming back again!” she shouted.
He had not come all this distance to be killed by an American fighter pilot. “There!” he said, grasping Gaby’s shoulder and pointing toward an apple orchard on the right.
Gaby spun the wheel, veering the Mercedes across the road and into a flimsy wooden fence that banged the front fender but burst apart to give them passage. She drove past an abandoned hay wagon into the shadows of the orchard, and three seconds later the Thunderbolt zoomed overhead, its bullets chopping branches and white buds from the trees but none of them hitting the Mercedes. Gaby stopped the car and put on the hand brake. Her heart was hammering, her throat scratchy with dust. She looked at the bullet holes in the roof, their exits marked by a hole in the passenger seat and another hole in the floorboard. She felt a vague, dreamy sensation that she thought might be the first cat-feet creepings of shock. Then she closed her eyes and leaned her forehead against the steering wheel.
The plane screamed above them again. No guns were fired this time, and Michael’s muscles untensed. He watched the Thunderbolt turn west and dart toward another target, possibly a movement of soldiers or the armored car. The Thunderbolt dove, its guns firing, then it quickly gained altitude and zoomed away, heading west toward the coast.
3
“He’s gone,” Michael said at last, when he was certain of it. He took a few deep breaths to calm himself, and smelled dust, his own sweat, and sweet apple buds. White blossoms lay all over the car and were still floating down. Gaby coughed, and Michael leaned forward, grasped her shoulder, and pulled her back from the wheel. “Are you all right?” His voice was strained with tension. Gaby nodded, her eyes glazed and watery, and Michael sighed with relief; he’d feared that a bullet had hit her, and if that had happened, the mission was in dire jeopardy. “Yes,” she said, regaining some of her strength. “I’m all right. Just dust down my throat.” She coughed a few more times to clear it out. What had terrified her most about the encounter was the fact that she’d been at the mercy of God, and unable to shoot back.
“We’d better go. It won’t be long before they find out Johlmann was shot by a Luger instead of a machine gun.”
Gaby pulled herself together, a simple matter of willpower over scorched nerves. She took the brake off and backed the Mercedes along its path of plowed grass to the road again. She got up on the gravel and drove east. The radiator was making a little tinkling noise but all the gauges indicating that gas, oil, and water were okay. Michael watched the sky with a wolf’s undivided attention, but no more planes swept out of the blue. Neither were they being followed, and he assumed—hoped, really—that the soldiers and the second Gestapo man were still in shock themselves. The road unwound beneath the Mercedes’s tires, and abruptly the gravel turned to pavement and a sign announced that Paris was eight kilometers ahead. There were no more roadblocks, which relieved both of them, but they passed several truck-loads of soldiers going in and out of the city.
And then the road was lined with tall, graceful trees and it widened into an avenue. They passed the last wooden farmhouse and saw the first of many brick and stone houses, then met gray buildings decorated with white statuary like sugar frosting on a cake. Paris gleamed in the sunlight before them, the towers of its cathedrals and monuments glowing like golden needles. Its ornate buildings crowded together much as the structures of any metropolis, but these with the dignity of centuries. The Eiffel Tower stood against a background of drifting clouds as fragile as French lace, and the vaulted roofs of Montmartre were the varied, burnished reds and browns of an artist’s palette. The Mercedes crossed the pale green waters of the Seine over a bridge decorated with stone cherubs, and Michael smelled moss and mud-stranded fish. The flow of traffic was heavier once they crossed the Boulevard Berthier, one of the grand avenues that circled the City of Light and was named for Napoleon’s marshals, but Gaby was undaunted. She merged into the contest of Citrfens, horse wagons, bicyclists, and pedestrians, and most of them gave way before the imposing black staff car.
As Gaby drove through the streets of Paris, one hand on the wheel and the other motioning other vehicles and people out of their path, Michael smelled the aromas of the city: a commingling, heady festival of a thousand scents, from a whiff of smoky perfume through the croissants and coffee of a sidewalk cafe to the grassy manure being raked by a street cleaner. Michael was near being overwhelmed by scents, as he was when he visited any city. The smells of life, of human activity, were sharp and startling here, none of those damp, foggy odors he associated with London. He saw many people talking, but few smiling. Fewer still were laughing. And that was because there were German soldiers on the streets, carrying rifles, and German officers drinking espresso in the cafes. They reclined in their chairs with the relaxed postures of conquerors. Nazi banners flew from many of the buildings, unfurled in the breeze over the upraised arms and imploring faces of marble, French-carved statues. German soldiers directed traffic, and some streets were blocked by barricades with signs marked ACHTUNG! EINTRITT VERBOTEN! Adding insult to injury by not using the native language, Michael thought. No wonder so many faces scowled at the Mercedes as it swept past.
Compounding the traffic problems were many laboring, swastika-emblazoned trucks, creeping along and backfiring in the midst of bicyclists like bomb blasts. Michael saw several troop trucks, loaded with soldiers, and even a couple of tanks pulled over to the side, their crews sunning themselves and smoking cigarettes. The whole picture said that the Germans believed they were here to stay, and while the French could go about their daily lives it was the conquerors who kept
the reins tight. He saw a group of young soldiers flirting with girls, a stiff-backed officer getting his boots shined by a little boy, another officer shouting in German at a waiter who frantically mopped up a carafe of spilled white wine. Michael sat back in his seat, drawing in all the sights, sounds, and aromas, and he felt a heavy shadow over the City of Light. The Mercedes slowed, and Gaby hit the horn to hurry a few bicycling citizens out of the way. Michael smelled horseflesh, and he looked to his left at a military policeman astride a horse that wore blinders with Nazi symbols on them. The man saluted.
Michael nodded absently and wished he had that bastard alone in the forest for one minute.
Gaby drove east on the Boulevard des Batignolles, through an area crowded with apartment buildings and rococo houses. They stayed on that boulevard, crossing the Avenue de Clinchy and then turning north. Gaby turned right onto the Rue Quenton, and they entered a district where the streets were made of rough brown paving stones and clothes hung on lines across windows. The buildings here were painted in faded pastels, some of their faeades cracked and the ancient clay bricks exposed like yellow ribs. Here the bicyclists were fewer, there were no sidewalk cafes or street-corner Van Goghs. The structures seemed to lean drunkenly against each other, as if in forlorn support, and even the air smelled to Michael of bitter wine. Shadows held figures who watched the black car glide past, their eyes dead as counterfeit coins. The Mercedes’s breeze stirred old newspapers from the gutters, and their yellowed pages drifted over the littered sidewalks.
Gaby drove fast through these streets, hardly pausing at the blind intersections. She turned left, then right, then left again a few blocks ahead. Michael saw a crooked sign: RUE LAFARGE. “We’ve arrived,” Gaby said, and she slowed down and blinked the headlights.