The shot filled the hollow silence of the basement, and then she felt a body striking her.
She opened her eyes and screamed as Bill Andrews crumpled forward and his heavy body toppled on her kneeling form.
The entry door was open and two men with drawn pistols were framed in it. They were impossibly young, she thought. Too young.
“Are you all right?”
They pulled the dead body from her, and one tenderly lifted her to her feet, and she realized she was not going to die. Not now.
That was when Mrs. Neumann felt it was appropriate to faint, and let her weight sink gently into the strong arms of the two young men who held her.
29
Calle stared down at the wide village street from the window of his room. He had arrived in darkness the night before. He had worn a medal from the war and they thought he was a pensioner, come to the village for the celebration. No one asked him questions; everyone treated him well. The concierge had brought him a bowl of soup and a bottle of wine and some rough country bread. He had slept well on the soft mattress in the small, clean room.
Below the window, the street was festooned with flags. There were flags of the French intertwined with the striped flag of the British. The flags were all new, and their colors sparkled in the sun.
The village was marking the anniversary of the liberation. It had come at precisely four forty-five P.M. on the day of the Normandy Invasion, D day, June 6, 1944. The British troops had fought with a small, forlorn pocket of Germans on the western outskirts of the Village des Deux Églises in the early part of the afternoon, but the battle had been turned when six members of the Maquis — elements of the underground resistance unit — circled behind the German nest and killed a dozen troops with hand grenades. The British had been received with kisses and tears; there had been a mass in the new church the next morning, and the bells had been rung for the first time since the Occupation began. The “new” church was five hundred years old; the second church, the “old” church, was actually the remains of an abbey that had existed when the English still owned this piece of France. After the English had been driven from Normandy, the French burned it down and killed the English abbot there.
Calle had liked that part of the story when he heard it the first time. “Perhaps the French will not be charitable to the English again,” he had said, smiling his yellow-toothed smile. Tomorrow afternoon, at approximately the time when the English had liberated the tiny Normandy village, the president of France would receive in formal welcome the representatives of the thinning remains of the British army unit that had taken part in the operation. It was not a great fête, but the mayor of the village and several powerful councilors in Paris had prevailed upon the president to take part. After all, the village had been a spearhead of socialist sentiments, even in bad times.
By his own tradition, the president took part each spring in a memorial walk through a part of Normandy where the Underground had fought the Nazis and helped pave the way — with information and with key acts of sabotage — for the invasion by the Allies. At last, the president had agreed.
And the members of La Compagnie Rouge could begin their plan.
The bomb that would blow up the president and the members of the 9th British army taking part in the ceremony had been secreted three days before in the sewer that ran beneath the high street. The small detonation device had been pushed into the walls of the sewer, with the gelignite recast on the walls of bricks.
Calle would push the transmitter lever at the appropriate moment from his window perch in the Hôtel du Bois Anglais. Everything that could be done had been done.
He had received a signal to proceed from the farmhouse near Tours to the village twenty-four hours before. There had been certain changes in the plan along the way, and the latest event had not been expected — Jeanne Clermont had been kidnapped after it was revealed she was a traitor.
“What are you going to do with her?”
Calle had spoken over the phone to the man he had never seen. He was simply called “Three,” which had no significance at all. Calle had spoken to him a hundred times and had drawn a mental portrait of the other man: He was a native, a Parisian in fact, by the sound of his accent. He was an older man because the voice sounded heavy and raspy at times, as though he had a cold or as though he had smoked too many Gauloises over the years.
Three had replied: “Eliminate her as soon as you have acted. Madame Clermont will be of some use to us after all. As will the American agent, Devereaux.”
“How?”
“Madame Clermont, a loyal servant of the government, will be killed as part of the larger conspiracy that will include the attempt to kill Marchais and to kill Mitterand. And we will have Devereaux to present to the Palace of Justice, protesting his innocence all the while.”
“Another American agent.”
“Yes,” Three had said. “We are all ready for the afternoon of June sixth.”
Calle had traveled from the farmhouse, then up the broad, hilly range of the west to lonely Normandy, stuck out in the face of the North Atlantic ocean in the west of France, a region isolated by language and tradition and even sympathy from the capital. The Normans, at times, seemed more English than French, even though they thought of themselves as neither.
There was a knock at the door.
Calle pulled himself out of the chair by the window and went to the wooden door and opened it. The concierge smiled at him.
“Would you like café au lait? And some eggs, fresh this morning?”
“Madame,” Calle said, bowing deeply.
“I could bring them to you,” the old woman said. “It is so good that so many of you have come to our celebration.”
“I could not miss it,” Calle said. “I am an old soldier and all I have are memories of glory.” He exaggerated the final words as only French permits and the sounds of the words brought tears to the eyes of the old woman.
“God bless you,” she said. “Will you join us then?”
“Yes, madame,” Calle replied, again inclining his head in a slight bow.
“God bless you.”
Yes, he thought, closing the door behind her. God will bless us tomorrow.
He smiled as he thought of the black transmitter resting in the cardboard suitcase under his bed.
30
Le Coq struck her again. He had struck her a dozen times in the past three hours. She had not broken, she had not wept. But she could not keep from crying out at the blows. When the police had tortured her fifteen years before, she had held out for a long time before she had reduced to humiliating tears, to begging for their mercy. But she had cried out from the first at the pain of the blows.
She tried to remember that early time as she sat on the chair and stared at Le Coq. She tried to remember her hatred for the policemen who had tortured her. She tried to keep the knifepoint of hatred in front of her so that the pain she felt would be turned back into hatred for her captor.
Devereaux was manacled to the hot-water pipe that ran along the baseboard near the far wall. They were in some sort of large loft room. The windows were closed and covered with dirty curtains. It was still dark. They had been held for nine hours. Le Coq had reminded her of the time because he had said she had only so many more hours of life left to her.
They had fastened manacles to her hands and then to the back of the wooden chair in which she sat.