The Girl Who Fell From the Sky (37 page)

Who is Julius Miessen? Who is he working for?

She retreats to Madeleine’s room. For the first time she is afraid, truly afraid. Not the momentary fear of anticipating a parachute jump, or standing before a
barrage
and waiting to be searched, or finding that a man is tailing you through the streets of Paris. Not fear
of
something. Just fear, like a disease, a growth, thick and putrid, wedged behind her breastbone. Fear in each breath and each heartbeat. Fear rising up her oesophagus and souring the back of her mouth so that she finds herself swallowing a lot. Fear of what might happen, of what might be happening at this very moment while she sits, as helpless as an invalid, on the bed.

‘I’m off home, Mademoiselle,’ Marie calls through the door. ‘Monsieur Clément will be back any minute.’

She listens for the maid’s footsteps retreating down the corridor, and the front door opening and closing. What, she wonders, does Marie think about all this? Does she go home and talk about the strange, fraught woman who has appeared at the Pelletier apartment and been welcomed in by Monsieur Clément with open arms? Does she gossip? Does she talk about
poor Madame Pelletier and her lovely baby and wonder aloud what the devil is going on, what on earth Monsieur Clément is playing at? Do her words filter through the intricate fabric of the city and reach the ears of the police or the Abwehr or the Gestapo?

She finds some matches in the kitchen and solemnly, in the kitchen sink, performs the cremation of the young student Anne-Marie Laroche.

Laurence Follette from Bourg-en-Bresse in the department of Ain is the occupant of this room in the Pelletier apartment now. Laurence. Faintly androgyne, like so many French names, symbolic perhaps of a profound ambiguity at the heart of the French people who once advocated Liberty, Equality, Fraternity but now proclaim Work, Family, Fatherland; a people for whom the same word,
baiser
, does for kiss and fuck.

Laurence waits. She waits for Clément, like a patient nursing her disease and waiting for the doctor who might at least offer a palliative to soothe her pain. The sound of the front door opening brings a great flood of relief, relief that must show in her face when she goes out to greet him for, after embracing her and telling her how wonderful it is to see her again and how much he has missed her, he holds her at arm’s length and sees the cold pinch of fear in her face. ‘Are you all right, Squirrel? What’s the matter?’

‘I’m fine. It’s just …’ What should she say? Confession or obfuscation? ‘Someone followed me. I think from the station. I threw him off but he knows I’m in the city.
They
know.’

‘Who knows?’

She shrugs. ‘I’ve no idea. I met him before. He tried to pick me up the last time I came. I thought he was a pimp, or something.’
Pimp. She uses the English word. She doesn’t even know the French.
Souteneur
? Perhaps that’s it. ‘But now I wonder. Maybe he works for the police, maybe the Germans. Who knows? Anyway, now they can guess I’m staying somewhere in this area, in the Latin Quarter.’

They sit in the kitchen, which gives the illusion of being the warmest room in the apartment. The scrubbed deal table replaces the barriers between them that fear has dismantled. He opens a bottle of wine, a Romanée-Conti that, he says, his father would weep to see being drunk like this. ‘So what happens now?’ His tone is different, as though now he is somehow part of what she does.

She shakes her head. ‘Someone knows I’m here. I’m dangerous, Clément, and not only to myself. I’m dangerous to you.’

He smiles. She can see what he is about to say. It’s obvious, really. And knowing it makes her want to weep and laugh at the same time. ‘You’ve always been dangerous to me, Squirrel. From the moment I first set eyes on you.’

‘You’d be safe from me in England.’

‘I wouldn’t want that kind of safety. I’d want you with me.’

She looks up. She thinks of
le Patron
and Benoît, of all the people who depend on the circuit – Gaillard and Marcel and the collection of
résistants
who make up the
réseau
WORDSMITH.
Gabrielle Mercey, and the family at Plasonne. She can simply step out of their world, without even saying farewell. ‘You’d be willing to go if I came with you?’

He makes a small gesture of indifference. ‘I got a phone call from Madeleine yesterday. The ducks have flown, she told me. It sounds like one of those messages they transmit on the radio.’

She attempts a smile, as though she has forgotten the trick and is having to relearn it. ‘What does it mean?’

‘That’s my nickname for Augustine.
Mon petit canard
. The ducks are her and Rachel. It means they’ve got across the
border into Switzerland. So I’ve no reason to stay in France, have I? And if you were to come with me …’

That evening she goes up to the roof again and sends a wireless message out into the wild autumnal air, a message as quick as she can make it, as sharp and clear as she can be. I have been followed, she wants to write. Someone knows I’m in the city. The city itself is watching, waiting, the detector vans listening for the faintest hint of me. The wolves are circling, sniffing the air, baying for blood. This message – they are listening to this message. But all she transmits is:
MECHANIC IS CONFIRMED

She knows what they’ll think at Grendon, and in the offices in Baker Street, as it comes off the teleprinters: Alice is winning. But she’s not; she’s panicking. And when you panic, you drown.

She closes the transmission. The fragile lifeline with England is snapped. She packs the wireless set away and carries it downstairs, struggling to keep afloat, talking to herself, reassuring herself, trying to see the clear light of dawn in the dark of the evening. Fear is like a tide, under the influence of the waxing moon. She can feel gravity’s hand, that elemental pull draining the blood from her face and drawing it from her body. The moon period. What was it she told Benoît all that time ago in Oxford? We’re minions of the moon. Minions, slaves, worshippers. She takes the pistol from the spares compartment of the wireless case and puts it in her shoulder bag. ‘The full moon is next Saturday so we’ll go sometime this week,’ she tells Clément. ‘I’ll find out tomorrow.’ She feels the weariness in her smile. ‘I want to be safe, just for a few minutes I want to be safe. It’s so bloody tiring being afraid all the time.’

The café in the rue Saint-André des Arts is exactly the same as it was. Small, dull, of no consequence. As far as she can see no one has followed her. She walks in, feeling the weight of the
pistol in her pocket, in the pocket of Madeleine’s coat that she has borrowed, the hound’s-tooth check that says, on the label, Molyneux. The man at the bar, a different man from her last visit, looks up with an equal indifference.

Is
la patronne
around? He shrugs and calls over his shoulder – ‘Madame Julienne! Someone for you’ – and the door at the back of the bar opens and there she is. Claire. Looking worried, looking suspicious, giving a faint smile of recognition. ‘Come,’ she says. ‘Come round the back.’

Claire’s little room has the same pictures, the same calendar with the same messages scrawled against the same dates. How do you recognise a traitor? What are the hints that give betrayal away? What are the lineaments of treachery? Claire is brisk and organised, like a travel agent who has booked an unusual but not entirely unknown itinerary. ‘It’s all arranged for the day after tomorrow, as long as the weather lifts. You’ll have to see Gilbert about the details.’

Gilbert. She recalls that strange, oblique conversation in the office overlooking Portman Square, the tall and awkward Colonel with his even taller superior.
Jill Bear’s our air movements man for the Paris area.
The whole thing seemed a kind of fantasy, something that might never happen. And now it is happening – Gilbert is expecting her; she has to meet him in the Tuileries, on the other side of the river. She has to be there at a specific time, at the circular basin in the Grand Carré, beside the statue of Cain. The correct place at the correct time. She must make sure.

‘You know the Gardens, don’t you?’

‘Of course.’

And there is a little rigmarole they’ll have to go through, a bit of question-and-answer. She and Claire rehearse it. ‘Make sure you get it right. He’s a stickler for detail.’

‘I’ll get it right.’ She takes her hand from her pocket and holds it out. ‘Thank you,’ she says. At the door she pauses, as though the thought has that moment struck her. ‘Why do you do it?’

Claire looks puzzled. ‘Do what?’

Alice gestures as though to indicate the bar but in reality meaning everything, the planning, the danger, the looking over your shoulder and minding your back, the whole nightmare anxiety of the clandestine life. Fear is a caustic that soaks into everything – your clothes, your possessions, your skin. Perhaps you smell of fear as a heavy smoker smells of tobacco or an alcoholic smells of booze. ‘All this,’ she says. ‘For the Organisation.’

The woman frowns. ‘Don’t ask fucking questions. You should know better than that. Questions require answers, and you don’t always know the answer so you start making things up. I just do it, right? I just do it. So do you.’

There are few people around when she gets to the gardens. She remembers a painting in the Ashmolean museum in Oxford, something by Pissarro –
The Tuileries Gardens in Rainy Weather
. Reality mimics the painting: the autumnal trees, a scattering of rain, gusts of wind blowing women’s skirts, puddles gleaming like silver coins, the whole view blended and blurred into cloud and drizzle. She finds the statue of
Cain Coming from Killing His Brother Abel
and strolls towards it, looking for likely watchers. A couple of off-duty German soldiers approach and try to engage her in conversation.

‘I’m waiting for a friend,’ she tells them.

‘Un Français?’

‘
Bien sûr
.’ The gun, now in her shoulder bag, weighs heavily.

‘Germans are better men.’

‘Not if they haven’t got any manners.’

She is saved – it’s ridiculous, an absurd risk – by a shout of, ‘Goodness, it’s been a long time hasn’t it?’ from a man who comes striding across the gravel towards them. He’s good-looking with a mop of wavy hair and eyes that do a lot of smiling. He nods at the Germans and takes her arm to draw her away. ‘Didn’t we last meet at Aunt Mathilde’s?’

‘It was ages ago,’ she agrees. ‘Before she moved to Montpellier.’

He kisses her on both cheeks, then turns to the watching soldiers. If they don’t leave his cousin alone they’ll find themselves explaining their behaviour to their superior officer. Their expressions fall and they wander off. Gilbert grins. ‘The thing about our brave conquerors is that they always obey orders as long as they feel they’re coming from someone important.’

‘And you are important?’

‘I
sound
important. That’s what matters. And they have a sneaking suspicion that I have contacts.’

‘And do you?’

He laughs. ‘You must have contacts in order to survive in this damned city. Let’s go somewhere a bit more comfortable.’ He folds her arm in his and leads her off towards the rue de Rivoli to a café where he is known, and where you can actually get real coffee if you speak to the right waitress. Over coffee they chat for a while about nothing very much – what he used to do before the war, how he was a pilot, how he wants to get back to flying – and when he has paid, they go round the corner to a flat that he has, a two-roomed place with barely any furniture beyond a couple of chairs and a table and two mattresses on the floor. She feels like a tart, a casual pick-up preparing to negotiate terms. ‘You must remember everything I say,’ Gilbert tells her. ‘Can you do that? Commit nothing to paper.’

‘Of course.’

‘Claire said two passengers …’

‘It all depends.’

‘The pianist from
CINÉASTE
?’

‘I’m not sure about her. I’ve got a meeting.’

‘What’s the trouble?’

She shrugs. She isn’t going to be quizzed about matters that don’t concern him. She should never have mentioned it to Claire, and Claire shouldn’t have told Gilbert. This is how things come unravelled. ‘I’ll have to see. But the other passenger is all right.’

‘So we play it by ear, do we?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘I’ll need your help at the landing ground. You’ve organised drops, I presume? Pick-ups are a bit different.’ He grins disarmingly, a little boy planning a prank. ‘Of course they’re different. The damned kite has to land for a start. But that’s the problem – you’ve got to stand there as it lands, turns and taxies back to the take-off point. It makes the devil of a noise, seems enough to wake the dead, never mind the local police. So you need a bit of nerve to stick to it. Do you have nerve?’ He looks her up and down.

‘I’ve got nerve.’

‘I’ll bet you have. Now listen carefully. We use a three-light L with the long side upwind.’ He puts coins on the table. ‘A, B and C. A is the touchdown point, and that’s where the reception party stands. B is one hundred and fifty metres downwind, but of course you need a greater total length for a landing ground.’

‘Six hundred metres—’

‘Minimum. And good solid ground underfoot. We had a Lysander bog down last spring and ended up having to torch her. It took a month to get the pilot back home, never mind the passengers. Still, we’ve not lost anyone yet.’ His grin reminds her of Benoît’s, the pure insouciance of it, the suggestion that he is sharing something intimate with her. ‘The third light, C, is fifty metres to the right. That’s the turning marker once the kite is down. He’ll turn on that and then come back to A ready for take-off. We stand to the left of A and approach the plane from the port side once it’s ready. That’s the left.’

‘I know it’s the left. I know all this. I was briefed in London.’

‘Then you’ll know it twice. The pilots have instructions to shoot anyone approaching from the other side. It hasn’t happened yet.’

‘No one’s approached from the right, or no one’s been shot?’