Till We Meet Again (60 page)

A Paris banker stuck here—well, they certainly didn’t feel sorry for him; they were stuck in Champagne themselves—but, on the other hand, he was not as difficult to deal with as were so many of the others, not by a long shot. What’s more, Lancel was smart enough to ask for advice when he needed it, which was often, and not too stiff-necked to take it and use it. If more of the French were like Lancel, their own jobs would be made considerably easier. And, come to think of it, more pleasant. They didn’t enjoy being away from their homes and families, they didn’t enjoy living with the infernal paperwork from Berlin, with the pressure to supply the quotas of wine, or with the studied invisibility with which most of the population of Rheims and Epernay treated them.

With Bruno de Lancel, not one of the inspectors was treated as an occupier, none of them ever suspected his well-hidden pride or his normal arrogance. Yet Bruno’s policy was undetectable by any Frenchman who might bother to observe him. It lay purely in a crucial nuance of manner, in an agreeably neutral shading, in his naturally pleasant voice, in a willingness to look at them directly, to venture a small and harmless joke, to make an assumption that they shared a common humanity, all done with the bred-in-the-bone graciousness
with which he had gone fishing for banking commissions not many years ago.

Within months of his arrival at Valmont, Bruno had obtained an
Ausweis
, the paper that let him travel to Paris. Authorization for his trip had not been difficult to arrange, since his previous residence in Paris gave him every explanation for an absence of several days to make sure that his house was intact.

As he approached his front door he saw a German soldier standing guard. Cautiously he went around to the delivery entrance and rang the bell. Georges, his old butler, opened the door and exclaimed, with surprise and happiness, “Monsieur le Vicomte, thank God!”

“How did you get back, Georges?” Bruno asked after he entered the “office,” a sort of catch-all pantry outside the kitchen. “When I came through Paris after the Armistice I found the house empty.”

“We all fled Paris,” Georges answered, “and after we managed to return, we learned that you had gone to the château. We understood, of course—your duty lay there.”

“Who lives here now?” Bruno demanded, noticing in a swift glance that Georges had been polishing his best silver when he had arrived. From the kitchen came the smell of roasting beef, and every surface of the office was shining with cleanliness.

“The house was requisitioned by a General von Stern. He works for General von Choltitz, in the bureau of cultural affairs, and speaks excellent French. We have been fortunate, Monsieur le Vicomte, the general has kept everyone on, even your valet, Boris, who is convinced that von Stern has never had the services of a valet before. He is, thank God, a very quiet man, interested in antiquities, a great admirer of your collection of armor and books. Nothing has been changed, Monsieur, the house is exactly as you left it.”

“He has no wife, no children?”

“I doubt it. There are no photographs of them, and that’s a sure sign, in my experience. Often he brings home a woman of the streets, but he never keeps her overnight.”

“Does he entertain?”

“Occasionally a few other officers, quiet men like himself. They discuss painting and architecture, not the war.” Georges shrugged. “The dinners are far from brilliant, Monsieur, but
they eat heartily and they enjoy the best bottles from your cellar.”

“A small price to pay, Georges. You reassure me. Perhaps it would be prudent, for the sake of all of you, if I showed this general the courtesy of thanking him for taking care of my treasures?” Bruno murmured.

“Purely temporary care, would you say, Monsieur le Vicomte?” Georges asked in a low tone of hope.

“Naturally only temporary, why should you even question it?” Bruno responded. He gave his card to the butler. “Present this to von Stern. Ask him if I may come by tomorrow at his convenience to thank him. I should like to see for myself what kind of man is sleeping in my bed.”

“I understand, Monsieur le Vicomte. What is the news of Mademoiselle de Lancel? And of Madame your grandmother and Monsieur your grandfather, if I may ask?”

“Sad, Georges, sad. Mademoiselle Delphine seems to have shut herself away from everyone … even I have no news of her … and my grandfather is finally showing his age. Only my grandmother still has retained any of her old spirit.”

“We all count on you, Monsieur le Vicomte. You are much in our thoughts.”

“Thank you, Georges. Leave word about my meeting with your general at my hotel.”

“Never ‘my general,’ Monsieur le Vicomte,” Georges protested as he let Bruno out.

“A joke, Georges. We must still laugh, must we not?”

Within minutes Bruno had taken the measure of General von Stern. A Prussian of the most minor aristocracy, he judged, from a long-impoverished family, a man who no more fit the title of general than Bruno himself, a scholar in early middle age, who, because of his specialized knowledge, was one of Goering’s handpicked experts, spending his days seeking out the greatest works of art in France, to be sent to Germany for the Marshal’s personal collection. A mild enough man, von Stern, Bruno realized, not unattractive and sufficiently well bred to be faintly uneasy with Bruno, as if he knew that, conqueror or not, he had no right to the magnificent house on the Rue de Lille. Bruno was quick to put him at his ease.

“I had heard horror stories of houses, General, historic
houses, that have been treated like barracks—you can imagine how relieved I am to see that you love and understand beauty,” Bruno said, looking around his library with an air of the perfect guest, as if he had no proprietary connection with the room, yet felt free to admire it as it deserved.

“It is one of the most beautiful houses in this most beautiful of all cities, Vicomte,” von Stern said, pleasure, well-hidden yet still visible, in his eyes.

“It was built while Louis Quinze was a young man. I have always maintained that those lucky enough to live in it are only caretakers, like the fortunate curators of museums.”

“You are a museum-goer, Vicomte?”

“It was my passion, my reason for living. Before the war I spent every free hour in museums, every vacation was devoted to travel—Florence, Rome, London, Berlin, Munich, Madrid, Amsterdam—ah, those were the days, were they not, General?”

Von Stern sighed. “Indeed they were. But they will return, I am convinced of that. Soon, under the Führer, all Europe will be at peace.”

“We must hope for peace everywhere, General, or else all the beauty in the world will be destroyed. I think we can agree on that without any problem.”

“Shall we drink to peace, Vicomte?”

“Willingly, General, most willingly,” Bruno agreed. Rules against fraternization with the enemy were meant for German soldiers and French whores, not for gentlemen who might have something of mutual interest to offer each other. Von Stern was not a man who was alone by choice, of that he was certain, he thought as he relaxed in his armchair, waiting for the invitation for dinner that he knew would soon be forthcoming.

I love you, I love you, thought Freddy in rapture. I love every one of your one thousand two hundred and fifty fierce and mighty horses, I love the clear bubble of your perspex canopy, I love your tapered, ellipse-shaped wings and your noisy, don’t-give-a-damn exhaust and your snug narrow cockpit and your crazily crowded instrument panel, I even love the too-long cowling of your sublime Merlin engine that blocks my forward view on landing and takeoff, and your nose-heaviness that means I have to brake you like a baby carriage, I love you ten times more than any reliable, Hawker
bloody businesslike Hurricane I’ve ever flown, and I’d give anything to throw you around the sky, to battle-climb you all the way upstairs at full throttle with two thousand eight hundred and fifty fucking wonderful RPMs and then put you into a screeching, diabolical power dive, until we’d both had ourselves a bit of well-deserved fun, and, for dessert, trim you off at four hundred and sixty miles an hour and fly your lovely ass off, because I know I could do it, and, God knows, everybody knows you can, because once you’re off the ground you’re a snap to fly. A pussycat! Just a simple, forgiving love of a pussycat. I’m talking to you, my Mark 5 Spitfire. What do you have to say for yourself?

“Bloody bugger,” she said out loud, as the sight of a familiar chalk pit far underneath, in the toy landscape that was England, reminded her that she was routinely delivering a Spitfire from the Vickers Supermarine factory in Eastleigh to an airdrome at Lee-on-Solent. From her altitude she could clearly see across the Channel to the green fields of France, where the German raids were daily launched against England.

Today, in September of 1941, the day was made for flying. No fog, not even any haze over England, and only a few big scattered clouds out over the water. The late-afternoon sun, sharply angled and unusually bright, warmed the back of her neck between her helmet and her collar. On this rare day, after two other ferry jobs, Freddy had been given much too short a trip for her taste, one that took only a half hour. Worse, the new Spitfires were flown by the ATA at their two-hundred-miles-per-hour cruising speed, to break in their powerful engines, a procedure that, to Freddy, was utterly frustrating, no matter how accustomed she was to it.

She now flew Spitfires every day, for she and Jane had been sent to temporary duty at the 15th Ferry Pool at Hamble, to work clearing the Vickers factory of the sleek, sophisticated warplanes they were making with greater speed each succeeding month. There was great danger in allowing any group of new planes to sit on the field outside the factory, providing a natural target for a hit-and-run German bomber, so they had to be moved as quickly as possible.

When Freddy handed the Spitfire off at its new base, it would be painted with identification numbers, armed, perhaps fitted with special fuel tanks for long hops, or cameras if it was to be used as a spy plane; it would receive the painted insignia of the nationality of its pilot, and if he was a Squadron
Leader or Wing Commander, his initials would be inscribed on its rear fuselage. It would become some lucky fighter pilot’s very own kite, his most prideful possession, which no one else would fly unless its master was sick or dead. Now, only now, was it hers, totally hers.

She had just glanced to the left to see how far she was from her coastline destination, when, from out of a particularly large cloud mass over the water, two specks appeared on her newly polished canopy. Something about them drew Freddy’s instant attention and she looked hard, with all the extraordinary power of her vision. There was an abnormality there, even at this distance. Like half of England, she was no stranger to observation of aerial combat from the ground, but now, aloft, the relative positions of the two planes told her instantly that one of them was chasing the other.

She should lose altitude and get out of the way, she told herself, even as she gained altitude so that she could observe them. She was invisible, with the sun at her back. The planes had rapidly reached a place in the sky, perhaps a mile away, where she could recognize them. The first machine, fleeing for its life, was another Spitfire, one wing lower than the other in an attitude that meant its aileron controls had been hit. The second plane, a Messerschmitt 109F, whose performance rivaled that of any Spitfire, was gaining on the English plane, clinging to its tail. The Spitfire was jinking violently to avoid the bullets coming from the Messerschmitt, bullets now clearly visible to her, since they were tracers used to inform pilots when they were about to come to the end of their ammunition.

“No!” Freddy screamed as the Spitfire’s oil tank was hit and the flames started spreading backward from the engine toward the cockpit. The hood of its canopy popped open and its pilot tumbled out. She held her breath until she saw the chute open. The victorious Messerschmitt, flaunting its Maltese cross and its swastika, circled the area. Making sure of the kill, she thought. But then, instead of heading for home when the Spitfire hit the Channel, it continued to circle, without opening fire, in descending spirals around and around the dangling Spitfire pilot. The bastard’s going to shoot him while he’s in the air, she realized, and since he’s low on ammo, he’s taking his time, waiting for the perfect shot.

Immediately, Freddy opened her throttle to the maximum and charged ahead, her engine responding instantly. As
she did so, all that she had ever learned about dogfights from Mac, all the RAF lore that Tony had taught her, all the flying stunts she had planned for the movies, fused in her mind into one piece of absolute knowledge: the only hope lay in a head-on attack.

She had exactly one chance, in an unarmed plane, to drive off a Messerschmitt. She had to pounce at full speed directly into his cannon. He had to be convinced that she was approaching to blaze away at his windscreen and that she intended to wait until the last second to fire.

He saw her coming now, she realized, as he stopped circling and veered about, presenting his windscreen head-on. They were about three thousand yards apart, Freddy estimated automatically. An accurate shot was made at two hundred and fifty yards. She held her reckless, relentless course as the two planes sped toward each other, in an instant that hung in the air, like a static painting of a war dance. Some three hundred yards away, at the last possible split second, the Messerschmitt swerved, made a tight, climbing turn, and fled east.

“Got you, you fucker, got you!” she screamed, bounding in her seat in victory as she started chasing after the German fighter. It took her minutes before she came back to her senses and realized that she was acting like a maniac. Pulses pounding, higher on adrenaline than she’d ever been before, she reluctantly listened to the voice of reason and turned back to the west, where she could see the pilot of the Spitfire jut about to hit the water.

Wearing his Mae West life jacket, he struggled out of the harness of his parachute, and while she throttled back and swung protectively over him, he inflated his single-seat “K” dinghy, the tiny, puffy, oval rubber boat that had saved the lives of so many Allied airmen. The pilot brandished his double-bladed paddle reassuringly at her, but Freddy continued to circle low over his head until she spotted one of the Air-Sea Rescue launches, leaving from a station on the beach, and approaching him. She couldn’t resist slowing the Spitfire down to its lowest speed, just above the sixty-four miles an hour at which it would stall. Impulsively she pushed back the hood of her canopy and leaned out to try to exchange some sort of greeting with the pilot, bobbing about in a brisk current. Only the blur of his tanned, grinning face was clearly distinguishable.