Classic Spy Novels 3-Book Bundle (96 page)

“You miss it?”

“Who wouldn’t.”

“People are fed up,” Casson said. “Hungry, tired, can’t get tobacco, there’s no coffee. In the beginning they thought they could live with it. Then they thought they could ignore it. Now they want it to go away.”

“Wait a minute.” Juin stood up. Casson heard the faint throb of a machine in the distance. Juin reached inside his coat and took out a snub-nosed automatic.

A farm tractor towing a haywagon materialized at the end of the field, Casson and Eddie Juin went to meet it. Tonton Jules swayed in the driver’s seat. He was a fat man with one arm, and he was drunk. His nephew Lebec was dark and clever, could have been Eddie Juin’s brother. Angier had an appealing rat face, Casson guessed he would go anywhere, do anything. Easy to imagine him as a kid jumping off railway trestles on a dare.
“Salut,
Eddie,” he said. “Are we on time?”

Juin just laughed.

They heard the plane at 3:12 A.M., headed south of east. They each took a flashlight and stood in a line with Juin to one side to make the letter L. This showed wind direction when, as the plane came closer, they turned on the lights. Juin then blinked the Morse letter
J—
a recognition signal for that night only, which meant
we’re not a bunch of
Germans trying to get you to land in this field.
The plane did not respond, flew straight ahead, vanished. Then, a minute later, they heard him coming back. Juin tried again, and this time the pilot confirmed the signal, using the airplane’s landing lights to flash back a Morse countersign.

The plane touched down at the other end of the field, then taxied toward them, bouncing over the uneven ground. No savoir-faire now, they ran to meet it, Tonton Jules wheezing as he tried to keep up. It wasn’t much to look at, a single propeller, fixed landing wheels in oversized hubs, biplane wings above and below the pilot’s compartment. On the fuselage, next to a freshly painted RAF roundel, was a black flash mark and a peppering of tiny holes. With difficulty the pilot forced back the Perspex window panel, then tore the leather flying cap from his head. He allowed himself a single deep breath, then called out over the noise of the engine. “Can somebody help? Ahh,
peut-être,
can you
—aidez-mah
?”

“You are hurted?” Lebec said.

“No. Not me.”

He was very young, Casson thought, not much more than nineteen. And he certainly didn’t look the hero—tall and gangly, unruly hair, big ears, freckles. The man sitting behind him grabbed the edge of the cockpit with his left hand and clumsily struggled to his feet. Clearly his right arm had been damaged. He appeared to be cursing under his breath. Angier used the tail fin to scramble up on the back of the plane, then slid himself forward to a point where he could help the man get down to the ground.

The pilot looked at his watch. “We should move along,” he said to Casson. “I’m to leave here in three minutes.”

“All right.”

“You’ll have to help me get the tail swung round. And, don’t forget,
n’oublah
thing, the two, uh
—deux
caisses, deux valises
.” The last burst forth with the fluency of the determinedly memorized.

Lebec climbed onto the wing, then helped the pilot work two suitcases and two small wooden crates free of the cockpit. “Damned amazing, what you can get in here,” the pilot said. Lebec smiled—no idea what the pilot was saying but an ally was an ally.

They handed down the cargo—carried off to Tonton Jules’s wagon—then Lebec jumped to the ground and saluted the pilot, who returned the salute with a smile, then tossed his flying cap back on and tried a parting wave, devil-may-care, as he revved the engine. “Best of luck, then,” he shouted.
“Bonne shan!”

He reached up, pulled the housing shut. Eddie Juin took hold of the tail assembly and started to turn the plane into the wind, everybody else ran to help him. The plane accelerated suddenly, there was a blast of hot exhaust as it pulled away, then a roar of fuel fed to the engine as it struggled into the air. It flopped back down, bounced off the field, touched one wheel a second time, then caught the wind and climbed into the darkness. The people on the ground listened for a time, peering into the dark sky, then lost the whine of the receding engine among the night sounds of the countryside.

Verneuil, Brézolles, Laons—Casson drove east toward Paris in the spring dawn.

The end of the operation had been complicated.
Système D,
Casson thought, always
Système D,
make do, use your ingenuity, improvise—it was simply the way life was lived. They’d left the field headed for a small village nearby, where a man who drove a milk truck to Paris twice a week was supposed to pick up the supplies delivered from England, leaving Casson and the operative free to take the train into the city. But the truck never appeared, so Eddie Juin had to come up with an alternative. Off they went to another village, where a barn on the outskirts hid a Renault—a four-year-old Juvequatre model, slow, steady, inexpensive, a family car.

Casson drove through first light, staying on the 839. The two crates and two valises were in the trunk. Next to him, the man he had come to think of as the sergeant—though he used the name Jerome—bled slowly into the pale-gray upholstery.

“It’s not so bad,” he said. “You could hardly call it shrapnel. More like, specks. But, iron specks, so I’ll have to see a doctor, sooner or later. Still, not bad enough for me to go back to England—no point at all to that.”

“What happened?”

“Well, at first everything went perfectly. We came in at eight thousand feet over the coast at St.-Malo—no problem. Picked up the rail line to Alençon a minute later—we spotted the firebox on a locomotive going east and we just flew along with him. Next we had yellow signal lights, for ten miles or so, coming out of the big freight junction in Fougères. After that, the track was between us and the moon and we just followed the glow on the rails. But somebody heard us, because ten minutes later a searchlight came on and they started shooting. Nothing very serious, a few ack-ack rounds, and Charley thought maybe a machine gun. Then it was over, but my arm had gone numb and I realized we’d been hit.”

Casson slowed down for a hairpin turn at the center of a sleeping village, then they were back among the fields.

He saw now how they worked it. First came Mathieu, the university man, getting the system organized. Next came the sergeant—almost certainly a technician. Why else bring him in? Short and muscular, working-class face, speaking French in a way that would fool nobody. Not his fault, Casson thought. Likely something he’d taken up years ago in hopes it would advance him in the military. So he’d put in his time in classrooms, dutifully rolled his
r
’s and nasalized his
n
’s, but finally to very little purpose—he might as well have worn a derby with a Union Jack stuck in the band and whistled “God Save the King” for all the good it was going to do him.

Casson slowed for a one-lane bridge, the stream below running full in spring flood, water dark blue in the early light. The sergeant had winced when he tapped the brake. “Sorry,” Casson said.

“Oh, it’s nothing. Twenty minutes with a doctor and I’ll be fine.”

“It won’t be a problem,” Casson said.

Well, he didn’t think it would be. What doctor? He only knew one doctor, his doctor. Old Dr. Genoux. What were his politics? Casson had no idea. He was brusque, forever vaguely irritated by something or other, and smelled eternally of eucalyptus. He’d been Casson’s doctor for twenty years, since university. One day Casson had noticed his hair was white. Good heavens! He couldn’t be a Vichyite or a Fascist, could he? Well, if not him, who else? The dentist? The professor at the Sorbonne faculty of medicine who lived across the street? Arnaud had once had a girlfriend who was a nurse. No, that wasn’t going to work, old Genoux would just have to do the job.

He worked his way through the medieval town of Dreux, intending to pick up the 932 that wound aimlessly into the Chevreuse valley. But then he somehow made a mistake and, a little way beyond the town, found himself instead on the N 12, with a sprinkling of early traffic headed for Paris. Well, all the roads went to the capital, the N 12 was as good as any other.

Going over a rail crossing, the springs plunged and the cargo gave a loud thump as it shifted in the trunk. The sergeant opened his eyes and laughed. “Don’t worry about
that,”
he said confidently.

An explosion, is what he meant. The shipment from England included radio crystals, which would allow clandestine wireless-telegraph sets to change frequencies, 200,000 francs, 20,000 dollars, four Sten carbines with 4,000 rounds of ammunition, time pencil detonators, and eighty pounds of the explosive cyclonite, chemically enhanced to make it malleable
—plastique.

“The trick,” he added, “is actually getting it to go off.”

The town of Houdan. A place Casson had always liked, he’d come here with Marie-Claire for picnics in the forest
—long
ago and far
away.
They’d owned a set of chairs and a table that could be folded up and carried in the trunk of the car. She always brought a cloth for the table, he would pick up a pair of langoustes with green mayonnaise from Fauchon, and they’d sit by a field for hours and watch the day.

The road turned north, the sun was up now, light glistening on the wet fields, the last of the ground mist gathered over the streams. The sky had turned a delicate, morning blue, with a rose blush on the horizon. Something world-weary about these dawns in the country around Paris, he’d always felt that
—well,
all right, one more day if you think
it’s going to do you any good.
The next village on the road seemed closed up tight, the shutters still pulled down over the front of the café. Casson spotted a road marker and decided to take the 839. The town ended, there was a bridge, then a sharp left-hand curve through a wood, which straightened out to reveal some cars and trucks and guards with machine pistols.

Control.

They had a moment, no more. Casson hit the brake, rolled past five or six policemen who waved him on, down a lane formed by portable barriers—crossbraced
x
’s of sawn logs strung with barbed wire. Coming up on the control, Casson and the sergeant had turned to each other, exchanged a look:
well, too bad.
That was all. Then Casson said, “Close your eyes. You’re injured, unconscious, almost gone.”

A young officer
—Leutnant—
in Wehrmacht gray appeared at the window.
“Raus mit uns.”
He was impatient, holster unsnapped, hand resting on his sidearm.

Casson got out and stood by the half-open door, nodded toward the passenger side of the car. “There’s a man hurt,” he said.

The
Leutnant
walked around to have a look, bent over and peered into the car. The sergeant’s eyes were closed, mouth open, head back. A bloody rag around his arm, a dark stain on the upholstery. The
Leutnant
hesitated, looked in Casson’s direction. Casson saw a possibility. “I don’t really know exactly how he got himself in this condition but it’s important that he see a doctor as soon as he can.” He said it quickly.

The
Leutnant
froze, then squared his shoulders and walked away.

The road lay in shadow—six in the morning, shafts of sunlight in the pine forest. Five cars had been stopped, as well as two rickety old trucks taking pigs to market. Amid the smell and the squealing, a German officer was trying to make sense of the drivers’ papers while they stood to one side looking sinister and apprehensive. By the car ahead of Casson, four men, dark, unshaven, possibly Gypsies, were trying to communicate with a man in a raincoat, perhaps a German security officer. Suddenly angry he yanked the door open, and a very pregnant, very frightened woman struggled out with hands held high in the air.

The young
Leutnant
came striding back to Casson’s car, a policeman in tow—an officer of the
Gendarmerie Nationale,
French military police with a reputation for brutality. The gendarme was angry at being asked to intervene. “All right,” he said to Casson, “what’s going on?”

“This man is injured.”

“How did it happen?”

“I’m taking him to a doctor.”

The gendarme gave him a very cold look. “I asked how.”

“An accident.”

“Where?”

“Working, I believe. In a garage. I wasn’t there.”

The gendarme’s eyes were like steel.
Salaud—
you bastard—trying to play games with me? In front of a German? I’ll take you behind a tree and break your fucking head. “Open the trunk,” he said.

Casson fumbled with the latch, then got it open. The intense odor of almonds, characteristic of plastic explosive, came rolling out at them. The
Leutnant
said “Ach,” and stepped back. “What is it?” the gendarme said.

“Almonds.”

The two valises were in plain sight, packed with francs, dollars, radio crystals, and explosive. Tonton Jules, just before they left, had tossed an old blanket over the two crates holding the sten guns and ammunition. Casson, at that moment, had thought it a particularly pointless gesture.