“I suspect he’s learned his lesson,” Mercier answered. “He’ll never again meet a seductive woman without wondering.”
For the long term, the problem was harder, and Mercier and Jourdain spent hours on possible solutions. Mercier was surprised to discover how much he cared, but, like all the best military officers, he felt a great depth of responsibility for those under his command, and injury to one of them, no matter his opinion of that individual, affected him far more than the civilian world would ever understand.
Given: Uhl could never go back to Germany. And he couldn’t go to South Africa either; German agents would be waiting for him. Also given: the Deuxieme Bureau of the General Staff wasn’t going to provide a lifetime of support for their former spy-Uhl would have to work. Under a new identity, his life history rewritten in an office at 2, bis, in Paris. Work where? Martinique and French Guyana were no more than brief candidates, Canada was the logical choice-Quebec, where the French General Staff had friends who could help them out, and make sure that Uhl lived a quiet, and very private, life. This project was being worked on in Paris, and Mercier expected to hear about it when he reached the city. Ordered to go to Paris, he thought, smiling to himself. How life is hard! He’d written to his cousin Albertine, so his rooms in the vast Mercier de Boutillon apartment in the Seventh Arrondissement would be made up and waiting for him. The steady drone of the engines made him sleepy; he stared out at Cloudland below him, a kingdom of children’s books, and dozed off.
When he woke, they were flying over Germany: crisp little towns, then crisp little farm fields. Beneath him, the snow thinned out, then stopped, leaving the woodlands dark and bare as winter came. From his briefcase he took a popular new book, currently a bestseller in Germany, called Achtung-Panzer! by Colonel Heinz Guderian, commander of Germany’s 2nd Panzer Division. With a French/German dictionary on his lap, Mercier went to work.
We live in a world that is ringing with the clangor of weapons. Mankind is arming on all sides, and it will go ill with a state that is unable or unwilling to rely on its own strength. Some nations are fortunate enough to be favored by nature. Their borders are strong, affording them complete or partial protection against hostile invasion, through chains of mountains or wide expanses of sea. By way of contrast, the existence of other nations is inherently insecure. Their living space is small and in all likelihood ringed by borders that are inherently open, and lie under constant threat from an accumulation of neighbors who combine an unstable temperament with armed superiority.
Well, surely he’s read de Gaulle’s book-and produced a similar opening paragraph. Mercier turned pages-skimmed through a history of British and French tank attacks in the latter half of the Great War-then came upon Guderian’s description of the situation in the first months of 1937.
At the beginning of 1937 the French possessed … more than 4,500 tanks, which means that the number of tanks exceeds by a wide margin the number of artillery pieces, even in the peace-time army. No other country shows such a disproportion between armour and artillery. Figures like these give us food for thought!
True, Mercier thought, the numbers were known, but what to do with these machines? Ah, that was the dessert of the food for thought.
Toward the end of the book, Mercier found the tactical conclusions: the successful use of tanks depended on surprise, deployment en masse, and suitable terrain. These were, Mercier knew, precisely de Gaulle’s conclusions, in his book and in successive monographs, urging the formation of tank units which he called Brigades du Choc. Shock formations-to break the stalemate of a static trench war. Tanks should fight together, in numbers, not be scattered to support companies of infantry. As for terrain, Mercier would have to read fully, but Guderian seemed to concentrate mostly on the subject of national road systems to bring tanks to the front, and avoidance of ground broken by shellholes-natural tank traps-or churned to liquid mud by preparatory artillery barrages. These, in the Great War, sometimes went on for days, as massed field guns fired as many as five million shells.
And forests? Not specifically mentioned, though perhaps more lay buried in the text. And, Mercier thought, now that Uhl was lost, he would have to find some other way to observe the planned Wehrmacht maneuvers at Schramberg.
At five-thirty, leaving a taxi in the rue Saint-Simon, Mercier felt the Parisian mystique take hold of his heart: a sudden nameless ecstasy in the damp air-air scented by black tobacco and fried potatoes and charged with the restless melancholy of the city at the end of its day. Oh, this was home all right, he knew it in his soul-not the autumn mists of the Drome, not his pointers running free in a field, but home nonetheless, which some part of him never left.
Here, in the depths of the Seventh Arrondissement, the residents were rich, quiet, and cold, stewards of the inner chamber. A walled city, its walls hiding formal gardens and silent monasteries, Napoleonic barracks and foreign embassies. One saw the residents only now and again: retired army officers in dark suits, women of the nobility, perfect in afternoon Chanel.
Halfway up the narrow street: 23, rue Saint-Simon. Mercier rang the bell by the familiar door-built for the height of a carriage-and the concierge, who’d known him for twenty years, let him in. He crossed the interior courtyard, ignored by the twittering sparrows, his steps on the stone block loud in the thick silence of the building, and climbed to the second floor, unlocked the door, and entered the apartment: bought in the middle of the nineteenth century by his great-grandfather, only the plumbing updated, the rest as it had always been-leaded glass windows in small panes, vast, gloomy carpets, massive armoires and chests. Not elegant, the furnishings, but sturdy. The Merciers lived on country estates, and the women of the family had always treated the Paris apartment as a tiresome necessity-people of their class always had to go to Paris for one reason or another, and the alternative was hotels, and restaurants. Unthinkable. Thus they’d been economical in the purchase of slipcoverings and draperies, everything dark, not to show use and meant to last. The fabrics were protected by closed shutters and heavy drapes-the sun was not allowed in here.
Mercier dropped his briefcase and valise in the bedroom and found a note from his cousin Albertine on the night table.
Dearest Jean-Francois,
Welcome. I am out for the afternoon but I shall return at six-thirty, and we can go out for dinner, if you like, or I can cook something if you’re too tired. Looking forward to seeing you,
Albertine.
In Mercier’s past, Cousin Albertine occupied a very special niche. She was the youngest daughter of his father’s favorite brother, later to die in the war, and they’d grown up as neighbors-his uncle’s property a few miles away from their own-so together often: at Christmas and Easter, in summer when they were home from their respective boarding schools. Surely she’d always been the odd one out of the Mercier clan: tall, awkward, pale, serious, and curiously redheaded-auburn, really-with freckles scattered across her forehead. Where, the family wondered, had she come from? All the other Merciers were dark, like Jean-Francois, so, it was theorized, some ancient gene had surfaced in his cousin and made her different. The other possibility was never considered-or, rather, never spoken aloud….