Grahnweis stayed behind with one of the senior officers to examine the real prize—the clandestine radio. Which turned out to be the good old Mark XV transceiver—actually its first cousin, the Paraset—but, Grahnweis thought, standard MI-6 equipment. He nodded to himself with satisfaction and relief. The British scientists made him nervous— sometimes great bumblers, sometimes not. He feared that under pressure of war they might outperform themselves and conjure up some diabolical apparatus that would make his life a hell. But, so far, nothing like that, as far as he could tell, in the Hotel Bretagne.
Standard stuff. Two transmission frequencies—from 3.3 to 4.5 megacycles and from 4.5 to 7.6 megacycles. Four to five watts of power—enough to get to London. Three American metal tubes, a 6V6 crystal-controlled pilot, cadmium steel box, silver finish. A calibration curve, to assist the operator, was mounted in the upper-left-hand corner, essentially a graph chart with a diagonal line. Grahnweis took a soft leather tool pouch from the pocket of his uniform jacket and selected a screwdriver for the task of getting behind the control panel. To the senior officer looking over his shoulder he said, “Maybe something new inside.”
There was.
Grahnweis left the hotel by the Saint-Rustique side of the building; meanwhile, the senior officer exited on the rue Lepic—this parting company a mysterious event that nobody ever really explained. For a time it wasn’t clear that Grahnweis was ever going to be found, but, with persistence and painstaking attention to detail, he was. Crown on the second bicuspid molar, fillings in upper and lower canines, a chipped incisor. Yes, that was Grahnweis, if a tattered charcoal log under a jumble of brick and tile could be called any name at all.
The junior officers of the Funkabwehr were extremely put out by this turn of events. It was, at its heart, rude. And rudeness of this sort they would never have ascribed to the British character. Had they known, of course, that it was the Poles who’d sent their leader from the room they would have thrown up their hands in angry recognition.
The British were, in fact, perhaps a little worse than the Poles, but the Germans wouldn’t come to understand that for some time. “Personally,” said Heinrich, “it is the very sort of thing I find I cannot forgive.”
7 September, 2:30 p.m.
Genya Beilis seated herself by a window in the Cafe Trois Reines, next to the St. Pierre cemetery in Montmartre. She was a vision, even in the end-of-summer heat. A little white hat with a bow, set just to one side of her head, a little white suit, three dashes of Guerlain. Not the usual for this neighborhood, but who knew what business royalty might have up here—maybe a call on a poor relative, or a bouquet for a former lover, who somehow wound up in the local boneyard. Whatever the truth, she shone, and her tea was served with every courtesy, and every drop still in the cup.
Very damn inspiring, the way she walked. Maybe you didn’t believe in heaven but you certainly could believe in that. Chin and shoulders elevated, back like fine steel, the emphatic ring of high heels on the tile floor of a cafe. In the
A few blocks away, a number of Gestapo gentlemen read newspapers in cars and doorways all the livelong day as the mess in the rue Lepic was cleaned up, but that was hopeless and they knew it. Nobody was going to be coming around to see what happened to X. The abrupt halt in transmission, the absence of coded start-up signals— missent call sign, incorrect date—and the London people would know their network communication had been cut. One sent the newspaper readers out to the cars and doorways, but one knew better.
The lovely lady in white returned to the
Though she had never seen her correspondent she felt sad, enough a veteran of the business to know what uncollected mail implied. Then too, she had walked past the spontaneous renovation at the Hotel Bretagne, noted newspaper readers in the vicinity, noted the absolute silence of the Parisian press on the subject of local explosions, and wondered if it all might not somehow fit together.
But hers not to reason why. Hers to travel down to the Banque de Commerce Nationale in Orleans, humiliate the most vulgar, oily little bank man that God ever made, and collect a new set of procedures.
Now it was the sixteenth arrondissement.
Now it was the Cafe du Jardin.
Now the adjacent cemetery was in Passy.
Starry night in the village of Aire. In 1430, the Roman bridge over the river Lys had been replaced and the Martagne family had built a fine house at the end of it, so the cool air that hung above the water made the stone rooms pleasant on summer evenings.
Martagne, the port supervisor from Calais, had a red face and black hair, a big cleft nose and a big mustache. He sat in the dark kitchen with de Milja—Fedin was waiting at the edge of the village— drinking farmer-made Calvados from a stone crock. “Take another Calva,” he said. “Uncle made that in 1903.” Martagne liked to spend his time in the bars with the Polish dockyard workers, and they put him on to Fedin and de Milja when he got frustrated with the Germans and threatened
Now he was drunk. He stared down at the scarred old table and brooded. Finally he said, “You a spy?”
“Yes.”
Martagne made a face. “I’m a Norman,” he said. “Not French— whatever that means. But we fight their damn battles. They’re good at insults, not so good at fighting. Bad combination, you’ll agree.”
“Yes.”
“It’s fighting—you’ll find a Martagne. Crecy, Agincourt, Sedan, Poitiers, the Marne, Jena, Marengo. Probably went over the Channel with William the Conqueror—last time anybody managed to do that, by the way. Probably somebody looked like me, with my ugly face.” Martagne laughed at the idea. “Can’t stand the English,” he said. “You care?”
“No,” de Milja said.
“They care?”
“No.”
Martagne laughed again. “Me neither,” he said. He stood, swayed a moment, then left the room. Through a crack in the closed shutter de Milja could see that moon and starlight lit the old village and he could hear splashing water where the Lys ran over a small weir. Somewhere in the house Martagne was banging drawers open and shut. Finally he reappeared and handed de Milja three sheets of used carbon paper.
“Sorry I didn’t bring the originals,” he said. “We’ll take one more Calva.” He poured generously, the fragrance of distant apples drifted up to de Milja. “Now, Monsieur Spy, one little story before you go.”
De Milja sipped the Calvados.
“The last week in June, on the day of the surrender, when Petain got on the radio about how he was preserving the honor of France, my grandfather put on a nightshirt he’d never worn in his life and got into his bed. He was a healthy old bird, pissed like a fountain. But now he stayed in bed, he didn’t speak, he didn’t smile, he just stared at the wall. The doctor came, a childhood friend. Didn’t help. He made the old jokes, said the old things, left a tonic on the nightstand. But a week later, my grandfather was gone. ‘He has died of shame,’ the doctor said. So now, what you have in your hand, that is his revenge—and mine. Do you understand?”
“Yes, I understand,” de Milja said. He proved it by standing up to leave. Martagne looked away; angry at what he’d done, angry at the world for having made him do it. De Milja said good night and slipped out the door.
Gold in hand, it turned out.
12 September. In Nieuwpoort, just across the Belgian border, dust from the wheat harvest hung in the warm air and the fields shimmered in golden light; the docks were burning, the harbor smelled of dead fish, an RAF Blenheim-IVF came tearing over the jetty at fifty feet with its gunports twinkling. The windows of the Cafe Nieuwpoort fell in on a dead fisherman and a dead waiter and a German corporal came running out of the toilet with his pants around his ankles. A mackerel boat caught fire and the cook jumped into the harbor. Eight rounds from the .303 guns, including an incendiary tracer, stitched up the side of the harbor gasoline tank, thirty feet high, and absolutely nothing happened. The cook yelled he couldn’t swim; a couple of taxi drivers ran to the edge of the pier, but when the Blenheim screamed around the town in a banked turn they threw themselves on their bellies and by
