Basil never looked back, and walked swiftly down the street until he reached rue de Valor and headed down it.
Boch was lecturing Abel on the necessity of severity in dealing with these French cream puffs when a man roared into the banquet room, screaming, “They’ve blown up one of our radio cars. It’s an attack! The Resistance is here!”
Instantly men leaped to action. Three ran to a gun rack in a closet where the MP 40s were stored and grabbed those powerful weapons up. Abel raced to the telephone and called Paris command with a report and a request for immediate troop dispatch. Still others pulled Walthers, Lugers, and P38s from holsters, grabbed overcoats, and readied themselves to move to the scene and take command.
Hauptsturmführer Boch did nothing. He sat rooted in terror. He was not a coward, but he also, for all his worship of severity and aggressive interrogation methods, was particularly inept at confronting the unexpected, which generally caused his mind to dump its contents in a steaming pile on the floor while he sat in stupefaction, waiting for it to refill.
In this case, when he found himself alone in the room, he reached a refill level, stood up, and ran after his more agile colleagues.
He stepped on the sidewalk, which was full of fleeing Parisians, and fought against the tide, being bumped and jostled in the process by those who had no idea who he was. A particularly hard thump from a hurtling heavyweight all but knocked him flat, and the fellow had to grab him to keep him upright before hurrying along. Thus, making little progress, the Hauptsturmführer pulled out his Luger, trying to remember if there was a shell in the chamber, and started to shout in his bad French, “Make way! German officer, make way!” waving the Luger about as if it were some kind of magic wand that would dissipate the crowd.
It did not, so taken in panic were the French, so he diverted to the street itself and found the going easier. He made it to Boulevard Saint-Germain, turned right, and there beheld the atrocity. Radio Car Five still blazed brightly. German plainclothesmen had set up a cordon around it, menacing the citizens with their MP 40s, but of course no citizens were that interested in a German car, and so the street had largely emptied. Traffic on the busy thoroughfare had stopped, making the approach of the fire truck more laggard — the sound of klaxons arrived from far away, and it was clear that by the time the firemen arrived the car would be largely burned to a charred hulk. Two plainclothesmen, Esterlitz, from his SS unit, and an Abwehr agent, sat on the curb looking completely unglued while Abel tried to talk to them.
Boch ran to them.
“Report,” he snapped as he arrived, but nobody paid any attention to him.
“Report!” he screamed.
Abel looked over at him.
“I’m trying to get a description from these two fellows, so we know who we’re looking for.”
“We should arrest hostages at once and execute them if no information is forthcoming.”
“Sir, he has to be in the area still. We have to put people out in all directions with a solid description.”
“Esterlitz, what did you see?”
Esterlitz looked at him with empty eyes. The nearness of his escape, the heat of the flames, the suddenness of it all, had disassembled his brain completely. Thus it was the Abwehr agent who answered.
“As I’ve been telling the lieutenant, it happened so quickly. My last impression in the split second before the bomb exploded was of a man walking north on Saint-Germain in a blue pinstripe that was not well cut at all, a surprise to see in a city so fashion-conscious, and then whoosh, a wall of flame behind us.”
“The bastards,” said Boch. “Attempting murder in broad daylight.”
“Sir,” said Abel, “with all due respect, this was not an assassination operation. Had he wanted them dead, he would have hurled the Molotov through the open window, soaking them with burning gasoline, burning them to death. Instead he merely ignited the petrol tank, which enabled them to escape. He didn’t care about them. That wasn’t the point, don’t you see?”
Boch looked at him, embarrassed to be contradicted by an underling in front of the troops. It was not the SS way! But he controlled his temper, as it made no sense to vent at an ignorant police rube.
“What are you saying?”
“This was some sort of distraction. He wanted to get us all out here, concentrating on this essentially meaningless event, because it somehow advanced his higher purpose.”
“I–I—” stuttered Boch.
“Let me finish the interview, then get the description out to all other cars, ordering them to stay in place. Having our men here, tied up in this jam, watching the car burn to embers, accomplishes nothing.”
“Do it! Do it!” screamed Boch, as if he had thought of it himself.
Basil reached the Bibliothèque Mazarine within ten minutes and could still hear fire klaxons sounding in the distance. The disturbance would clog up the sixth arrondissement for hours before it was finally untangled, and it would mess up the German response for those same hours. He knew he had a window of time — not much, but perhaps enough.
He walked through the cobbled yard and approached the doors, where two French policemen stood guard.
“Official business only, monsieur. German orders,” said one.
He took out his identification papers and said frostily, “I do not care to chat with French policemen in the sunlight. I am here on business.”
“Yes, sir.”
He entered a vast, sacred space. It was composed of an indefinite number of hexagonal galleries, with vast air shafts between, surrounded by very low railings. From any of the hexagons one could see, interminably, the upper and lower floors. The distribution of the galleries was invariable. Twenty shelves, five long shelves per side, covered all the sides except two; their height, which was the distance from floor to ceiling, scarcely exceeded that of a normal bookcase. The books seemed to absorb and calm all extraneous sounds, so that as his heels clicked on the marble of the floor on the approach to a central desk, a woman behind it hardly seemed to notice him. However, his papers got her attention and her courtesy right away.
“I am here on important business. I need to speak to le directeur immediately.”
She left. She returned. She bade him follow. They went to an elevator where a decrepit Great War veteran, shoulders stooped, medals tarnished, eyes vacant, opened the gate to a cage-like car. They were hoisted mechanically up two flights, followed another path through corridors of books, and reached a door.
She knocked, then entered. He followed, to discover an old Frenchie in some kind of frock coat and goatee, standing nervously.
“I am Claude De Marque, the director,” he said in French. “How may I help you?”
“Do you speak German?”
“Yes, but I am more fluent in my own tongue.”
“French, then.”
“Please sit down.”
Basil took a chair.
“Now—”
“First, understand the courtesy I have paid you. Had I so chosen, I could have come with a contingent of armed troops. We could have shaken down your institution, examined the papers of all your employees, made impolite inquiries as we looked for leverage and threw books every which way. That is the German technique. Perhaps you shield a Jew, as is the wont of your kind of prissy French intellectual. Too bad for those Jews, too bad for those who shield him. Are you getting my meaning?”