“I commend him,” said Basil.
“As do we all,” said the admiral.
“The fair copy, in his own hand, somehow came to rest in the rare books collection at the Cambridge Library. That is the one he copied himself from his own notes on the sermon, and which he hand-delivered to Carmichael & Sons, printers, of 14 Middlesex Lane, Glasgow, for careful reproduction on September 1, 1767. Mr. Carmichael’s signature in receipt, plus instructions to his son, the actual printer, are inscribed in pencil across the title page. As it is the original, it is of course absurdly rare, which makes it absurdly valuable. Its homilies and simple faith have nothing to do with it, only its rarity, which is why the librarian at Cambridge treasures it so raptly. Are you with me, Basil?”
“With you, sir, but not with you. I cannot begin to fathom why this should interest the intelligence service, much less the tiny cog of it known as Basil St. Florian. Do you think exposure to it would improve my moral character? My character definitely needs moral improvement, but I should think any book of the New Testament would do the job as well as the Reverend MacBurney.”
“Well, it happens to be the key to locating a traitor, Basil. Have you ever heard of the book code?”
There was a fallacy prevalent in England that Occupied France was a morose, death-haunted place. It was gray, gray as the German uniforms, and the conquerors goose-stepped about like Mongols, arbitrarily designating French citizens for execution by firing squad as it occurred to them for no reason save whimsy and boredom and Hun depravity. The screams of the tortured pierced the quiet, howling out of the many Gestapo torture cellars. The Horst Wessel song was piped everywhere; swastikas emblazoned on vast red banners fluttered brazenly everywhere. Meanwhile the peasants shuffled about all hangdog, the bourgeoisie were rigid with terror, the civic institutions were in paralysis, and even the streetwalkers had disappeared.
Basil knew this to be untrue. In fact, Occupied France was quite gay. The French barely noted their own conquest before returning to bustling business as usual, or not as usual, for the Germans were a vast new market. Fruit, vegetables, slabs of beef, and other provisions gleamed in every shop window, the wine was ample, even abundant (if overpriced), and the streetwalkers were quite active. Perhaps it would change later in the war, but for now it was rather a swell time. The Resistance, such as it was — and it wasn’t much — was confined to marginal groups: students, Communists, bohemians, professors — people who would have been at odds with society in any event; they just got more credit for it now, all in exchange for blowing up a piddling bridge or dynamiting a rail line which would be repaired in a few hours. Happiness was general all over France.
The source of this gaiety was twofold. The first was the French insistence on being French, no matter how many panzers patrolled the streets and crossroads. Protected by their intensely high selfesteem, they thought naught of the Germans, regarding the feldgrau as a new class of tourist, to be fleeced, condescended to (“Red wine as an aperitif! Mon Dieu!”), and otherwise ignored. And there weren’t nearly as many Nazi swastikas fluttering on silk banners as one might imagine.
The second reason was the immense happiness of the occupiers themselves. The Germans loved the cheese, the meals, the whores, the sights, and all the pleasures of France, it is true, but they enjoyed one thing more: that it was Not Russia.
This sense of Not-Russia made each day a joy. The fact that at any moment they could be sent to Is-Russia haunted them and drove them to new heights of sybaritic release. Each pleasure had a melancholy poignancy in that he who experienced it might shortly be slamming 8.8 cm shells into the breach of an antitank gun as fleets of T-34s poured torrentially out of the snow at them, this drama occurring at minus thirty-one degrees centigrade on the outskirts of a town with an unpronounceable name that they had never heard of and that offered no running water, pretty women, or decent alcohol.
So nobody in all of France in any of the German branches worked very hard, except perhaps the extremists of the SS. But most of the SS was somewhere else, happily murdering farmers in the hundreds of thousands, letting their fury, their rage, their misanthropy, their sense of racial superiority play out in real time.
Thus Basil didn’t fear random interception as he walked the streets of downtown Bricquebec, a small city forty kilometers east of Cherbourg in the heart of the Cotentin Peninsula. The occupiers of this obscure spot would not be of the highest quality, and had adapted rather too quickly to the torpor of garrison life. They lounged this way and that, lazy as dogs in the spring sun, in the cafés, at their very occasional roadblocks, around city hall, where civil administrators now gave orders to the French bureaucrats, who had not made a single adjustment to their presence, and at an airfield where a flock of Me110 night fighters were housed, to intercept the nightly RAF bomber stream when it meandered toward targets in southern Germany. Though American bombers filled the sky by day, the two-engine 110s were not nimble enough to close with them and left that dangerous task to younger men in faster planes. The 110 pilots were content to maneuver close to the Lancasters, but not too close, to hosepipe their cannon shells all over the sky, then to return to schnapps and buns, claiming extravagant kill scores which nobody took seriously. So all in all, the atmosphere was one of snooze and snore.
Basil had landed without incident about eight kilometers outside of town. He was lucky, as he usually was, in that he didn’t crash into a farmer’s henhouse and awaken the rooster or the man but landed in one of the fields, among potato stubs just barely emerging from the ground. He had gathered up his ’chute, stripped off his RAF jumpsuit to reveal himself to be a rather shabby French businessman, and stuffed all that kit into some bushes (he could not bury it, because a] he did not feel like it and b] he had no shovel, but c] if he had had a shovel, he still would not have felt like it). He made it to a main road and walked into town, where he immediately treated himself to a breakfast of eggs and potatoes and tomatoes at a railway station café.
He nodded politely at each German he saw and so far had not excited any attention. His only concession to his trade was his Browning pistol, wedged into the small of his back and so flat it would not print under suit and overcoat. He also had his Riga Minox camera taped to his left ankle. His most profound piece of equipment, however, was his confidence. Going undercover is fraught with tension, but Basil had done it so often that its rigors didn’t drive him to the edge of despair, eating his energy with teeth of dread. He’d simply shut down his imagination and considered himself the cock of the walk, presenting a smile, a nod, a wink to all.
But he was not without goal. Paris lay a half day’s rail ride ahead; the next train left at four, and he had to be on it. But just as he didn’t trust the partisans who still awaited his arrival 320 kilometers to the east, he didn’t trust the documents the forgery geniuses at SOE had provided him with. Instead he preferred to pick up his own — that is, actual authentic docs, including travel permissions— and he now searched for a man who, in the terrible imagery of document photography, might be considered to look enough like him.
It was a pleasant day and he wandered this way and that, more or less sightseeing. At last he encountered a fellow who would pass for him, a welldressed burgher in a black homburg and overcoat, dour and official-looking. But the bone structure was similar, given to prominent cheekbones and a nose that looked like a Norman axe. In fact the fellow could have been a long-lost cousin. (Had he cared to, Basil could have traced the St. Florian line back to a castle not 100 kilometers from where he stood now, whence came his Norman forebears in 1044—but of course it meant nothing to him).