Christophe was older than Francois, in his early thirties, and he looked like a civilian. Whatever military service he might have done was a long time ago. Thicker-built than his brother, with the same dark complexion and oddly light, gray eyes, he took his time before answering the American. He turned to his brother first. “Another cavalryman, Francois?” he asked.
“Parachutist,” said his brother.
“You have my sympathies, Monsieur,” Christophe said to McPhee. “Your great skill is to drop in from the skies, and we poor squabbling Frenchmen have somehow managed to organize ourselves well enough that we can hold an airstrip so you just fly in and walk out of the plane. We have not spent all our time fighting each other and being suspicious of the English. But then we have known the English for a long time around here. All this land used to belong to them, though it has been ours now for five hundred years. And I don’t think the Germans will last here nearly as long as the English did.”
“If you know the land that well, I sure hope you have found us a better-base than this,” said McPhee.
“We have indeed. But this is where we stay until we are sure the Germans are not sending out patrols to look for you. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t. But they always hear the planes, and they always mark the area where it came down. So we never use the same field twice, and we never use the same barn twice. You have learned security in a schoolroom, my dear American ally. We have learned it in a harder school. So never think of me as Christophe again. I am known as Berger.”
Jack found himself nodding in understanding as Christophe spoke. He had heard that tone of bitter, undisguised resentment before, when the British spoke of the American troops and airmen flooding into their country. Overpaid, oversexed, and over here. That was the phrase. And the British still had all the pride that came from never have been invaded, from never having given up. For a Frenchman, living with the defeat of 1940 and the shame and guilt of surrender, and seeing German troops occupying their land, it must be a thousand times worse.
“McPhee,” he interrupted. “Calm down. Remember what these chaps have been through, what they put up with day after day. To have survived this long, they know what they’re doing.”
Christophe didn’t even glance at the Englishman, nor did he seem to notice McPhee’s half-apologetic shrug. He just carried on talking with cold control, like a teacher handing out punishments to a schoolboy.
“From here, you will be taken to a house where there is the meeting with your man Hilaire. Then you will go east, into the hills of the Massif, to meet your first Maquis. Your radio operator is already on his way there, as you would have been except I was ordered at the last moment to arrange security and facilities for your meeting. This has not been easy. I have not slept for three nights because of this. And if you think I am suspicious, wait until you meet those frightened young scarecrows who have just wanted to escape this war. I don’t think many of them are going to be too eager to use those weapons of yours, at least not until the invasion comes and they can see that you mean it. What you will find is a handful of men that I trust, and who will listen to you and train with you because I tell them to and they trust me. Most of them have known our family and me all our lives. Most of them are old soldiers, some from the Great War and a few from 1940. They know the country and they know how to fight. They need you only to bring them weapons and explosives, and to show them how to use them. As far as they are concerned, and as far as I am concerned, this is a French battle, with French leaders, French blood, and French objectives. You may think we are all on the same side. In my view, we simply happen to share a common enemy.”
“Lest an impure blood pollute our thresholds,” mocked McPhee, half-singing the line from the “Marseillaise.”
“Shut up, McPhee, and grow up. Please,” Jack interrupted. He was feeling sick again. He also felt that all McPhee’s protests had missed the most important single feature of the night’s events. The flurry of activity and unloading as they had landed had left all the guns and all the explosives in the hands of Christophe’s men. And he knew that they would stay under Christophe’s control, with carefully rationed items made briefly available for educational purposes only. Any shooting or demolition that would take place would be at Christophe’s behest. So what? — so long as they killed Germans. And he was going to have to learn to call the man Berger. The American was looking at him aggressively. Jack reached across for the brandy bottle. “This war’s going to last a long time.”
They knew that Hilaire’s network was a legend, one of the biggest of the SOE’s networks in France and one of the most productive. They had been told no more by Baker Street, for what they did not know they could not betray. But there was always gossip at the training camps, where someone had said that the agent known as Hilaire had been promoted again, to lieutenant colonel, the highest rank of any SOE officer in France. And there was more loose talk from the RAF boys at Tempsford, who told them of two RAF aircrew from a downed bomber walking in uniform into a certain bar in Toulouse and asking a stunned waiter in schoolboy French for help. The waiter dropped the tray in astonishment on top of a table occupied by plainclothes Gestapo, and Hilaire himself had spirited them out and away in the confusion, and got them over the Pyrenees. It was one of the RAF pilots who had dropped the name Starr. And it had been Francois who had said casually one evening that Monsieur le Maire had originally landed by boat in southern France, and got to Lyon just as the circuit known as Spruce was being broken up by the Gestapo, and decided to move to Gascony.
“Monsieur le Maire?” Jack had asked.
“Starr’s cover is so good that that he has been made deputy mayor of some little commune,” Francois had said, shrugging as if everyone knew that. Jack had shivered at the looseness of SOE’s security.
Just after dawn, they had left the barn and driven south in the small truck over a country road, crossed a larger road when the coast was clear, and darted across a small bridge and railway line into a thick apple orchard. They left the truck hidden, and walked half a mile through wooded country until they reached what had once been a formal garden, laid out with gravel paths, with a small chateau at the end of the drive. The shutters on the narrow turret windows were all open, which Berger said meant all was well. They went into a side door, which led to the cellars smelling of oak and long-spilled wine, where a middle-aged man with a mustache and Sten gun nodded deferentially to Berger, and gave a vast grin when he saw Francois. He gestured at a table where a bottle of wine and some water stood beside a big loaf of country bread, some apples, dry sausage, and a large cheese.
“Strange bread,” said Jack, swallowing a mouthful of the yellow-brown dough.
“Made from chestnuts, which is the flour the peasants used around here for centuries,” said Francois. “Now there is a shortage of wheat again because the Germans take it. So people have gone back to the old ways. Try the sausage. It’s sanglier, wild boar.”
Another door opened and a woman came in quickly, tall and gaunt with gray hair and a distracted look. Francois leaped to his feet and hurried across the room to embrace her. She began to cry quietly as she looked at him, patted his cheek, rubbed the rough British serge of his uniform. Berger joined them and kissed her on both cheeks. Jack suddenly realized that this chaeau was Francois’s family home, a frightening risk to take however little time Berger had been given to set up the meeting.
“My mother,” Francois introduced her. Jack stood, somehow constrained to bow. But then a short, squat man with a round head and a dimple in his chin followed her into the cellar, moving fast but lightly on the toes of his feet like a boxer. His hair was short and neat, his gray trousers pressed, and his shoes polished. But for the open collar, he looked like a prosperous lawyer. Behind him, another man came in wearing a dark suit and carrying a revolver. He closed the door and leaned against it.