It turned out that one of the few buildings in Paris with an actual Nazi banner hanging in front of it was a former insurance company’s headquarters at 14 rue Guy de Maupassant in the sixth arrondissement. However, the banner wasn’t much, really just an elongated flag that hung limply off a pole on the fifth floor. None of the new occupants of the building paid much attention to it. It was the official headquarters of the Paris district of the Abwehr, German military intelligence, ably run from Berlin by Admiral Canaris and beginning to acquire a reputation for not being all that crazy about Herr Hitler.
They were mostly just cops. And they brought cop attributes to their new headquarters: dyspepsia, too much smoking, cheap suits, fallen arches, and a deep cynicism about everything, but particularly about human nature and even more particularly about notions of honor, justice, and duty. They did believe passionately in one cause, however: staying out of Russia.
“Now let us see if we have anything,” said Hauptmann Dieter Macht, chief of Section III-B (counterintelligence), Paris office, at his daily staff meeting at three p.m., as he gently spread butter on a croissant. He loved croissants. There was something so exquisite about the balance of elements— the delicacy of the crust, which gave way to a kind of chewy substrata as you peeled it away, the flakiness, the sweetness of the inner bread, the whole thing a majestic creation that no German baker, ham-thumbed and frosting-crazed, could ever match.
“Hmmm,” he said, sifting through the various reports that had come in from across the country. About fifteen men, all ex-detectives like himself, all in droopy plain clothes like himself, all with uncleaned Walthers holstered sloppily on their hips, awaited his verdict. He’d been a Great War aviator, an actual ace in fact, then the star of Hamburg Homicide before this war, and had a reputation for sharpness when it came to seeing patterns in seemingly unrelated events. Most of III-B’s arrests came from clever deductions made by Hauptmann Macht.
“Now this is interesting. What do you fellows make of this one? It seems in Sur-la-Gane, about forty kilometers east of here, a certain man known to be connected to inner circles of the Maquis was spotted returning home early in the morning by himself. Yet there has been no Maquis activity in that area since we arrested Pierre Doumaine last fall and sent him off to Dachau.”
“Perhaps,” said Leutnant Abel, his second-in- command, “he was at a meeting and they are becoming active again. Netting a big fish only tears them down for a bit of time, you know.” “They’d hold such a meeting earlier. The French like their sleep. They almost slept through 1940, after all. What one mission gets a Maquis up at night? Anyone?”
No one.
“British agent insertion. They love to cooperate with the Brits because the Brits give them so much equipment, which can either be sold on the black market or be used against their domestic enemies after the war. So they will always jump lively for the SOE, because the loot is too good to turn down. And such insertions will be late-night or early-morning jobs.”
“But,” said Leutnant Abel, “I have gone through the reports too, and there are no accounts of aviation activities in that area that night. When the British land men in Lysanders, some farmer always calls the nearby police station to complain about low-flying aviators in the dark of night, frightening the cows. You never want to frighten a peasant’s cows; he’ll be your enemy for life. Believe me, Hauptmann Macht, had a Lysander landed, we’d know from the complaints.”
“Exactly,” said Macht. “So perhaps our British visitor didn’t arrive for some reason or other and disappointed the Sur-la-Gane Resistance cell, who got no loot that night. But if I’m not mistaken, that same night complaints did come in from peasants near Bricquebec, outside Cherbourg.”
“We have a night fighter base there,” said Abel. “Airplanes come and go all night — it’s meaningless.”
“There were no raids that night,” said Macht. “The bomber stream went north, to Prussia, not to Bavaria.”
“What do you see as significant about that?”
“Suppose for some reason our fellow didn’t trust the Sur-la-Gane bunch, or the Resistance either. It’s pretty well penetrated, after all. So he directs his pilot to put him somewhere else.”
“They can’t put Lysanders down just anywhere,” said another man. “It has to be set up, planned, torches lit. That’s why it’s so vulnerable to our investigations. So many people — someone always talks, maybe not to us, but to someone, and it always gets to us.”
“The Bricquebec incident described a roar, not a put-put or a dying fart. The roar would be a Lysander climbing to parachute altitude. They normally fly at 500, and any agent who made an exit that low would surely scramble his brains and his bones. So the plane climbs, this fellow bails out, and now he’s here.”
“Why would he take the chance on a night drop into enemy territory? He could come down in the Gestapo’s front yard. Hauptsturmführer Boch would enjoy that very much.”
Actually the Abwehr detectives hated Boch more than the French and English combined. He could send them to Russia.
“I throw it back to you, Walter. Stretch that brain of yours beyond the lazy parameters it now sleepily occupies and come up with a theory.”
“All right, sir, I’ll pretend to be insane, like you. I’ll postulate that this phantom Brit agent is very crafty, very old school, clever as they come. He doesn’t trust the Maquis, nor should he. He knows we eventually hear everything. Thus he improvises. It’s just his bad luck that his airplane awakened some cows near Bricquebec, the peasants complained, and so exactly what he did not want us to know is exactly what we do know. Is that insane enough for you, sir?”
Macht and Abel were continually taking shots at each other, and in fact they didn’t like each other very much. Macht was always worried about Is- Russia as opposed to Not-Russia, while the younger Abel had family connections that would keep him far from Stalin’s millions of tanks and Mongols and all that horrible snow.
“Very good,” said Macht. “That’s how I read it. You know when these boys arrive they stir up a lot of trouble. If we don’t stop them, maybe we end up on an antitank gun in Russia. Is anyone here interested in that sort of a job change?”
That certainly shut everyone up fast. It frightened Macht even to say such a thing.
“I will make some phone calls,” Abel said. “See if there’s anything unusual going on.”
It didn’t take him long. At the Bricquebec prefecture, a policeman read him the day’s incident report, from which he learned that a prominent collaborationist businessman had claimed that his papers were stolen from him. He had been arrested selling black-market petrol and couldn’t identify himself. He was roughly treated until his identity was proven, and he swore he would complain to Berlin, as he was a supporter of the Reich and demanded more respect from the occupiers.
His name, Abel learned, was Piens.