Night Soldiers

The boy pondered that for a moment. Then shook his head vigorously beneath the helmet. “Madame Rossot,” he said, “though she becomes very angry if we go behind her barn.”

“Are you sure?” Lucien said.

“The schleuh killed her husband, in the Great War.”

“You are very brave,” Lucien said. He stood and searched in his pockets.

Khristo thought at first he was looking for money, then realized he wanted something to give the boy- something he could keep. Khristo knew the very thing and fished about for it in his pocket. His good luck charm. That he had kept with him in Spain. That had been stored in Sante prison with his civilian clothes. He stood, then waved the boy to his feet. “I decorate you for bravery,” he said, giving the boy what he’d taken from his pocket. He extended his hand and the boy shook it formally, very much like a soldier receiving a medal, then looked in the palm of his other hand, at the white pawn resting there.

“Merci, monsieur,” he said.

“You are dismissed,” Lucien said. “Now be careful, will you?” The boy moved off along a trail through the brush, and then he was gone.

They rested for an hour, then, as dawn approached, worked their way cross-country to their emergency fallback position-a downed maple tree a mile short of Cabejac, on the road to Abonne. They waited the rest of the day for Vigie, eating a chocolate bar from Lucien’s pocket and, once darkness fell, cleaning themselves by the river. They hid out that night and all the next day, but Vigie did not appear. He was never seen again.

In the town of Abonne there were three small pulp mills that processed wood fiber from the forests of the Vosges into newsprint and inexpensive papers of all kinds. It smelled dreadful, like all the wood-pulp towns of the world, and life there was lived amid a sulfurous haze of rotten eggs. Such conditions the Germans found sharply discordant with their vision of La Belle France and they tended to stay away from the place-occupying armies have a habit of discovering strategic value in towns where life is comfortable and pleasant, and the Germans were no exception to the rule.

Left to themselves, the townspeople had organized a particularly predatory and efficient maquis, concentrated among the millworkers and led by the local union boss, a tough old bastard called Vedoc. When the remnants of the Lucien team walked back into Abonne, hollow-eyed and exhausted, they were taken immediately to Vedoc’s house. His wife and sister cleaned out the larder to feed them while Vedoc himself provided an ample supply of that year’s basement wine, aged all of eight months and considered pretty good for what it was. The one called Lucien was too quiet, too much inside himself, so Vedoc, who had seen this sort of thing before, kept him reasonably drunk and sent an old lady off on a series of local trains to Belfort.

The Bugatti pulled up in front of Vedoc’s house a week later. Ulysse, shadowed as always by the cold-eyed Albert, was his usual elegant self: calm, aloof, an island of Gallic sanity in the stormy seas. Winter was gone and the pearl-colored topcoat with it; a stylish raincoat now served as cape. Only Khristo, perhaps, noted a tiny razor nick to one side of his Adam’s apple and inferred that Ulysse himself was having to withstand a storm or two.

They were debriefed at length-first separately, then together-on the trap at Cabejac. Ulysse showed them a series of photographs, which Albert then carefully burned in the fireplace. They could identify only the “gendarme,” and he was, they both believed, likely dead. They talked for hours over a two-day period while the room turned blue with smoke. They told the story again and again. Ulysse listened with infinite patience, Albert took notes in some private code of his own.

During this time, Khristo gained some understanding of the aristocrat’s character. He was obviously an acute observer of human beings, their strengths and weaknesses, what they could take and what they couldn’t. It was as though he had long ago ceased to judge behavior and had, instead, given himself over to the pure study of it. Further, it became clear to Khristo that war was this man’s time, that war ran in his blood, heritage of an aristocracy that had led men in battle for centuries and continued to do so. And that it was precisely this comprehension, this set of instincts, that Ulysse had put at the disposal of the American intelligence services in order to defeat his traditional enemy.

Thus he was not at all surprised when Ulysse suggested a walk in the woods behind Vedoc’s house on an afternoon when the weather was cold and gray. Lucien had been sent off on a small errand. Albert, shotgun in hand, waited at the edge of the trees.

Ulysse strolled slowly, hands clasped behind his back, and his mood was soft and tentative. With a rather arch apology for the lack of makhorka (“My tobacconist stocks it only once in a great while”), he offered Khristo a Gitane and lit it with a snap of his gold lighter.

“Of course I must not ask you about Lucien,” he said as they walked.

“No,” Khristo responded.

“Loyalty to a comrade-in-arms is everything.”

“Naturally, that is so.”

“Americans, Americans,” he said, despair in his voice. “They do not accept casualties at all well, do they. They take it to heart, and they blame themselves. A kind of false pride, surely, yet one must admire them for it. Do you?”

“Yes,” Khristo said, “I do.”

“Yet a man of your experience must also see that it is their weakness.”

“Perhaps a weakness. Or a strength. Or both at once, perhaps.”

“Yes,” Ulysse mused. “Still, not an ideal trait for an officer class, you’ll admit that.”

“I suppose not,” Khristo said.

“Lucien has done very well, you know, in the way these things are judged. Quite a number of trains, and one must add what other groups have been able to do with his assistance, and what they will do in the future. Considered altogether, a most gratifying boil on Hitler’s backside. But, we ask ourselves, can he continue? I’ve not told Lucien, by the way, but the village of Cambras has been entirely decimated.”

Khristo winced and shook his head in sorrow.

“Yes, I’m afraid so. A servant girl betrayed them to the Gestapo, and they were taken by surprise. She had been made pregnant by Gilbert, poor thing, and was terrified she would be cast out of the village, to live in the woods, and in her state of mind the Germans seemed like saviors, who could rescue her from her predicament. I don’t look forward, I must tell you, to the moment when Lucien learns of this.”

“He has no lack of courage,” Khristo said.

“Not remotely in question,” Ulysse said. “But do you suppose he would be willing to sacrifice the lives of others, should it become necessary?”

Khristo was silent.

“Please forgive me,” Ulysse said, “for having to ask you that.”

“The world will go on,” Khristo said.

“It will.” He paused to light another cigarette. “And then, where will you be?”

“God may know that,” Khristo answered honestly, “I do not.”

“In your homeland, perhaps? To marry and make a life? It is what most of us will do, in time.”

“No,” Khristo said, “I do not think so. Though there are times when I would give anything to be back where I was born, even for one hour. But I have seen the world, and whoever runs that country will want to start fresh-they won’t have much use for people who have seen the world. It will be under the Russians, I think, and there won’t be anything we can do about it. Our history is a sharp lesson on the subject of borders.”

Ulysse nodded in sympathy. “We’re going to exfiltrate Lucien to Switzerland, in a day or two. Would you like to come along?”

They walked along the path through the mist; the sound of dripping trees filled the silence. “Yes,” Khristo said.

“You’ll be interned, in a sort of way, so that our understandings with the Swiss will be, at least, nominally observed. But your circumstances can be most comfortable, and, who knows, you may just make some new friends. American friends. Would you like that?”

“Yes,” Khristo said, “I would.”

Long before dawn, the horse-drawn carts began lining up on the French side of the Voernstrasse bridge. There wasn’t all that much produce to take into the Saturday market-you got little variety in early May-but the farmers brought what they could: cabbage, broccoli, spinach, wintered-over carrots, and early greens of every sort. Across the bridge, in the well-swept squares of the city, the housewives of Basel awaited their French vegetables-