“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 could 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.
He awakened before dawn. He tried his best to make himself presentable and slipped out, locking the padlock behind himself. The early-morning streets were surprisingly well populated, as workingmen hastened to a first meal and then a day at the job. He melded easily, another anonymous French clerk with a day-old scrub of beard and a somewhat dowdy dark suit under a dark overcoat. He found a café and had a café au lait and a large piece of buttered toast, sitting in the rear as the place filled up.
He listened to the gossip and quickly picked up that les boches were everywhere today; no one had seen them out in such force before. It seemed that most were plainclothesmen, simply standing around or walking a small patrol beat. They preformed no services other than looking at people, so it was clear that they were on some sort of stakeout duty. Perhaps a prominent Resistance figure— this brought a laugh always, as most regarded the Resistance as a joke — had come in for a meet-up with Sartre at Les Deux Magots, or a British agent was here to assassinate Dietrich von Choltitz, the garrison commander of Paris and a man as objectionable as a summer moth. But everyone knew the British weren’t big on killing, as it was the Czechs who’d bumped off Heydrich.