And he wanted very much to look his best this morning. He was, after all, going to blow up something big with Germans inside.
“I tell you, we should be more severe,” argued SS Hauptsturmführer Otto Boch. “These Paris bastards, they take us too lightly. In Poland we enacted laws and enforced them with blood and steel and incidents quickly trickled away to nothing. Every Pole knew that disobedience meant a polka at the end of a rope in the main square.”
“Perhaps they were too enervated on lack of food to rebel,” said Macht. “You see, you have a different objective. You are interested in public order and the thrill of public obedience. These seem to you necessary goals, which must be enforced for our quest to succeed. My goal is far more limited. I merely want to catch the British agent. To do so, I must isolate him against a calm background, almost a still life, and that way locate him. It’s the system that will catch him, not a single guns-blazing raid. If you stir things up, Herr Hauptsturmführer, I guarantee you it will come to nothing. Please trust me on this. I have run manhunts, many times successfully.”
Boch had no remonstrance, of course. He was not a professional like Macht and in fact before the war had been a salesman of vacuums, and not a very good one.
“We have observers everywhere,” Macht continued. “We have a photograph of M. Piens, delicately altered so that it closely resembles the man that idiot Scholl sat next to, which should help our people enormously. We have good weather. The sun is shining, so our watchers won’t hide themselves under shades or awnings to get out of the rain and thus cut down their visibility. The lack of rain also means our roving autos won’t be searching through the slosh and squeal of wiper blades, again reducing what they see. We continue to monitor sources we have carefully been nurturing since we arrived. Our system will work. We will get a break today, I guarantee it.”
The two sat at a table in the banquet room of the Hotel Duval, amid a batch of snoozing agents who were off shift. The stench of cigarette butts, squashed cigars, and tapped-out pipe tobacco shreds hung heavy in the room, as did the smell of cold coffee and unwashed bodies. But that was what happened on manhunts, as Macht knew and Boch did not. Now nothing could be done except wait for a break, then play that break carefully and…
“Hauptmann Macht?” It was his assistant, Abel.
“Yes?”
“Paris headquarters. Von Choltitz’s people. They want a briefing. They’ve sent a car.”
“Oh, Christ,” said Macht. But he knew this was what happened. Big politicos got involved, got worried, wanted credit, wanted to escape blame. No one anywhere in the world understood the principle that sometimes it was better not to be energetic and to leave things alone instead of wasting energy in a lot of showy ceremonial nonsense.
“I’ll go,” said Boch, who would never miss a chance to preen before superiors.
“Sorry, sir. They specified Hauptmann Macht.”
“Christ,” said Macht again, trying to remember where he’d left his trench coat.
A street up from the Hotel Duval, Basil found the exact thing he was looking for. It was a Citroën Traction Avant, black, and it had a large aerial projecting from it. It was clearly a radio car, one of those that the German man-hunter had placed strategically around the sixth arrondissement so that no watcher was far from being able to notify headquarters and get the troops out.
Helpfully, a café was available across the street, and so he sat at a table and ordered a coffee. He watched as, quite regularly, a new German watcher ambled by, leaned in, and reported that he had seen nothing. Well organized. They arrived every thirty minutes. Each man came once every two hours, so the walk over was a break from standing around. It enabled the commander to get new information to the troops in an orderly fashion, and it changed the vantage point of the watchers. At the same time, at the end of four hours, the car itself fired up and its two occupants made a quick tour of their men on the street corners. The point was to keep communications clear, keep the men engaged so they didn’t go logy on duty, yet sacrifice nothing in the way of observation. Whoever was running this had done it before.
He also noted a new element. Somehow they had what appeared to be a photograph. They would look it over, pass it around, consult it frequently in all meetings. It couldn’t be of him, so possibly it was a drawing. It meant he had to act today. As the photo or drawing circulated, more and more would learn his features and the chance of his being spotted would become greater by degrees. Today the image was a novelty and would not stick in the mind without constant refreshment, but by tomorrow all who had to know it would know it. The time was now. Action this day.
When he felt he had mastered the schedule and saw a clear break coming up in which nobody would report to the car for at least thirty minutes, he decided it was time to move. It was about three p.m. on a sunny, if chilly, Paris spring afternoon. The ancient city’s so-familiar features were everywhere as he meandered across Boulevard Saint-Germain under blue sky. There was a music in the traffic and in the rhythm of the pedestrians, the window shoppers, the pastry munchers, the café sitters, the endless parade of bicyclists, some pulling passengers in carts, some simply solo. The great city went about its business, Occupation or no, action this day or no.
He walked into an alley and reached over to fetch a wine bottle that he had placed there early this morning, while it was dark. It was, however, filled with kerosene drained from a ten-liter tin jug in the garage. Instead of a cork it had a plug of wadded cotton jammed into its throat, and fifteen centimeters of strip hung from the plug. It was a gasoline bomb, constructed exactly to SOE specification. He had never done it before, since he usually worked with Explosive 808, but there was no 808 to be found, so the kerosene, however many years old it was, would have to do. He wrapped the bottle in newspaper, tilted it to soak the wad with the fuel, and then set off jauntily.
This was the delicate part. It all turned on how observant the Germans were at close quarters, whether or not Parisians on the street noticed him, and if so, if they took some kind of action. He guessed they wouldn’t; actually, he gambled that they wouldn’t. The Parisians are a prudent species.
Fortunately the Citroën was parked in an isolated space, open at both ends. He made no eye contact with its bored occupants, his last glance telling him that one leaned back, stretching, to keep from dozing, while the other was talking on a telephone unit wired into the radio console that occupied the small back seat. He felt that if he looked at them they might feel the pressure of his eyes, as those of predatory nature sometimes do, being weirdly sensitive to signs of aggression.
He approached on the oblique, keeping out of view of the rear window of the low-slung sedan, all the rage in 1935 but now ubiquitous in Paris. Its fuel tank was in the rear, which again made things convenient. In the last moment as he approached, he ducked down, wedged the bottle under the rear tire, pulled the paper away, lit his lighter, and lit the end of the strip of cloth. The whole thing took one second, and he moved away as if he’d done nothing.
It didn’t explode. Instead, with a kind of airsucking gush, the bottle erupted and shattered, smearing a billow of orange-black flame into the atmosphere from beneath the car, and in the next second the gasoline tank also went, again without explosion as much as flare of incandescence a hundred meters high, bleaching the color from the beautiful old town and sending a cascade of heat radiating outward.
Neither German policeman was injured, except by means of stolen dignity, but each spilled crazily from his door, driven by the primal fear of flame encoded in the human race, one tripping, going to hands and knees and locomoting desperately from the conflagration on all fours like some sort of beast. Civilians panicked as well, and screaming became general as they scrambled away from the bonfire that had been an automobile several seconds earlier.