that a pattern had been established. The Frenchman needled the American, even when he did not mean to. There was a constant irony in everything that Francois said, and a bitterness that he did not bother to conceal. Jack took it equably. He had come across far odder types in the desert, and had learned to tolerate eccentricities in the regiment.
They were comrades in arms, bound together by duty and by a common mission, and he admired the Frenchman’s brains and grit even if he didn’t follow the chap’s obsession with politics. But the American seemed in his own way as clever and as well read as Francois, just as attuned to the political minefield they were heading into, but somehow less nimble than Francois in discussing it.
“I never asked you, Jack,” Francois broke in. “How do you speak French so well?”
“A governess I had before I went away to school. She was French. And then skiing at Chamonix in the winter, Cap d’Antibes in the summer, I kept in practice. Just seemed to have an ear for it. And never much liked lying on the beach, so I’d go and talk to the fishermen and the waiters,” Jack replied. “Then, the interpreter’s course was something to do while I was in Quetta. Couldn’t play polo all the time. So I was assigned to liaison duties during the phony war, based in a corps HQ at Longwy on your Maginot line. I suppose that’s how we first met, when they were looking through the files in Cairo for any odd bod whose docket said he spoke French when you came back with General Koenig’s boys, after Bir Hakeim.”
Francois nodded. “And you, McPhee. Your French is good, too.”
“Usual way, Francois. A sleeping dictionary, a
“Perhaps we should try to find you a pretty teacher of demolitions,” laughed Jack. “Then you’d sort out your fuses and your ammonal fast enough.”
“Explosions in bed,” grinned Francois. “There’s an idea.”
“Don’t worry about me, you guys. We have the best part of another year of training before we get sent in. Figure it out. We in the Jedburgh teams are meant to drop into France just before the invasion to help coordinate the Resistance. There’ll be no invasion this year, not with the American troops still coming in, and the new front in Italy. Besides, the summer’s just about over and we can’t cross the Channel with the storms coming on. We’d never be able to ensure supplies to the beachhead. So the invasion will be next year, May or June, ’44. So we’ll drop into France in May. That gives us nine, maybe ten more months. More training. Winter in Scotland, underwater demolitions training in those freezing lochs. I have all the time in the world.”
“You are right, of course,” Francois said. “Except for one thing.”
“What’s that”?
“The Germans. More precisely, the Abwehr and the SD, the Sicherheitsdienst, and the Gestapo. They are not idle. They roll up the Resistance cells with a dismaying regularity. If the clever chaps in Baker Street who devised this whole operation think that there are too few networks on the ground for us to work with when we drop in, they may send some of us in early, to have the time to build up our own teams. At least, that is what my Free French masters think in Duke Street. And since Jean Moulin managed to forge the various Resistance factions into a single structure, the Gaullists probably know the situation better than the Englishmen in SOE.”
“But Jean Moulin has gone, disappeared, arrested,” said McPhee. “Night and fog, that good old German way.”
“It is a dangerous game, Resistance, and a lot of people disappear. It will be dangerous in Europe for a long time I think. After the Germans, we might be playing it against the Russians,” said Francois. “And I think we three will be playing it long before next May, McPhee.”
CHAPTER 4
Lydia had expected to find Clothilde difficult. She would have been entitled to be furious at a wasted trip. Instead, she found the Frenchwoman a comfort, as she helped satisfy the demands of the police for an authoritative opinion on what the stolen rock was and what it might be worth. She was quite splendid with the man who came from the insurance company, informing him that he might count himself fortunate that Lydia had listed the value at a mere ten thousand pounds.
“For once, we can use the word priceless and mean it,” she had snapped, eyes ablaze with professional righteousness. Lydia found her admirable. And Clothilde was even useful with the hapless Justin, who was obviously terrified of her. And she bullied the directors into matching the ten thousand pounds she decided her museum could offer as a reward. So after the paperwork and the meetings with directors and the police and insurance affairs had all been dealt with, it was evening, and when Clothilde asked Lydia if she could recommend a quiet hotel, she insisted that the Frenchwoman come and stay with her. It was, she felt, the least she could do. Clothilde wanted to go to Chinatown for dinner, saying it was the one food she missed in Perigord. She devoured most of the Peking duck she insisted they eat, attacked a vast plate of Szechuan beef, chattered amusingly about a holiday she had taken in China, drank three beers, and tried to pay the bill. Lydia, who had seldom enjoyed an evening more, firmly refused.
“I accept only if your auction house is paying,” said Clothilde. “And if they are not trying to blame you for all this mess.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because they will want to blame somebody, and you are a woman. That is how male-dominated organizations tend to work. And that was the impression I had at your office.”
“I’m afraid you might be right. They were dropping some pretty strong hints about my desk failing to bring in enough money even before this happened.”
“Not enough product, or not enough rich clients?” Clothilde grinned. “I know something about your auction houses.”
“Not enough of either, not for my preclassical area. I don’t seem to be very good at rounding up rich collectors.”
“A friend of mine in one of the Paris auction houses, an Egyptologist, had a similar problem,” said Clothilde. “So she got the list of all the people who had come to the last few sales of Napoleon’s materials-and that is a very big thing in France-made a deal with a travel agency, and offered to guide historical tours of Napoleon’s Egyptian expedition. She took them to the site of the battle of the Pyramids, told them about the Rosetta Stone, and then took them down the Nile in a luxurious boat. By the end of the trip, she had a whole new list of clients and made a lot of money. You could do the same.”
“That’s a splendid idea,” said Lydia, trying not to think about the lack of Napoleonic enthusiasts in Britain, or the reluctance of wealthy collectors to visit those remoter parts of Iraq and Central Asia that produced the bulk of her treasures. Quickly, she signed the bill she had charged to her credit card. “That advice is certainly worth a good dinner, even if my company were not paying. Which they are,” she lied. But she let Clothilde pay for the taxi.
“You are being very reasonable about this theft,” Lydia said when they were back at her apartment, sipping the malt scotch that had sat untouched in the cupboard since the end of the affair with David. “In your place, I would have been outraged.”
“Oh, I can be outraged if there is a point to it. But there isn’t,” said Clothilde. “I am fatalist about thefts, ever since I was burgled as a student. They are a fact of life. And if the police find the rock, then all will be well. But I doubt that they will, so we are left with an even deeper mystery. But then we had a mystery to begin with. Where did it come from, where is the cave of its origin, and why this bull, which is almost certainly by the hands of Lascaux, should be the only miniature we know of? That is three big mysteries that already confront us, and now we have a fourth. Who took it and why?”
“That makes five. Add a sixth-where is it now?”
“I assume an art thief who knew what he was doing somehow heard about the find and broke in. If so, he will try to sell it, and we may hear of it that way. Or when he realizes there is no market for these things, he will find a way to accept the reward we have offered. And then we are back where we started, examining the rock for any clues to its provenance. But I shall start on that next week. We have a national laboratory that does computer
