The Caves of Perigord

open ground before the chateau where Soleil had asked to meet. He looked back down the hill, walked into the middle of the road, and waved his arms to summon Francois. They always kept a hundred yards apart, to give the second man the chance to escape a trap.

“It looks quiet.”

“I don’t trust that little Marseilles maquereau one inch,” said Francois.

Manners grinned. The word meant mackerel, slang for pimp. “I’ve heard a lot of bad things about Soleil, but that’s a new one.”

“It might even be true,” laughed Francois. “But he looks like a maquereau, with his pencil mustache and gangster talk. I find that even more offensive than his half-baked ideas about Marxism. He steals arms from other groups. Sometimes I think the only sensible thing the Communists did was to condemn him to death. Pity they rescinded it. This war makes for some unsavory bedfellows.”

“Well, he kills Germans. That’s what counts. Let’s go on.”

It was surreal, a comic variant of his occasional delusions of peace, thought Manners, as he sat in the place of honor beside Soleil and looked at the impeccably handwritten menu for their banquet, with a small sun to symbolize the Soleil network drawn at its top. They were to start with tourain, the local garlic soup, and then foie gras followed by fresh trout, confit de canard, some Cantal cheese, and three different wines, all of them prewar. The champagne he was now sipping was a Dom Perignon ’33. He had never eaten a feast like this in peacetime, let alone in war. The long baronial table stretched a full ten meters before him, the old wood glowing in the candlelight, and each place set with the requisite number of knives and forks. He toyed with one. Solid silver. The glasses were heavy old lead crystal, and a butler stood attentively at Soleil’s elbow, waiting for the Resistance chief’s approval of the Puligny-Montrachet.

“Excellent, excellent, my dear Chamberlain,” laughed Soleil. It amused Soleil and his men to dub the servants with English names. Inevitably, they used the handful of politicians’ names they knew. The joke was wearing thin, though not for the thirty members of Soleil’s group. And the local farmers and shopkeepers who had been required to attend dropped their embarrassment to join in the laughs.

Manners learned that the owner of the ch‰teau had been a prisoner of war in Germany since the surrender. His wife stayed in Paris. So how did Soleil come to have use of it?

“Easy, I just turned up yesterday, told the butler and housekeeper that I wanted to stage a classic dinner, just like prewar, and left two of my men to ensure there would be no surprises. These chateaux always have lots of food tucked away, and the cellars are stocked with wine. And I am sure the owner would be only too proud to entertain the fighters for freedom. Is that not true, lads?” he roared, slugging the wine in a toast to the table, as the butler directed two elderly maids in black dresses and white aprons to serve the soup.

Just as well the maids were not young and pretty, with this bunch, Manners thought. It felt like a pirate feast. In front of Soleil’s plate, two of Manners’s Mills bombs lay wickedly on their sides, the fuses already in. A Sten gun lay beneath his chair, and he had a revolver strapped to his leather belt. Slim and dapper, and looking about twenty-one, he reminded Manners of the young RAF fighter pilots and the dashing, romantic air they cultivated. His nails, Manners noticed, had been manicured, and he was smoking Sieg cigarettes, the German Army brand. Across the table, Francois sat stone-faced, just the merest quiver of an eyelid as he saw Manners looking at him. He had not said a word since they had sat down.

“Are you another one who’s going to try to have me killed?” Soleil asked him. “I’m losing count of the people after me. The Germans, the Milice, the Communists, that aristocratic SOE agent of yours, Edgar. They all decide Soleil is too uncomfortable and try to have me bumped off. I warn you, it doesn’t work.”

“You haven’t tried to steal any of my guns yet, Soleil,” Manners said, joking to cover his surprise. “I’ve heard the stories about you, but as long as you keep killing Germans you’re too useful to me alive.”

“So why doesn’t SOE send me any parachutages? I want more guns, hundreds of guns. I’ll have a thousand men by July,” Soleil boasted.

“You can’t keep a thousand men round here, let alone feed them. And a thousand men would need twenty parachute drops just for the guns. We can’t do it, Soleil. We have other groups to help, our own sabotage operations,” said Manners. “I’ll ask London to lay on as many drops as they can, but you’ll have to find the sites and landing grounds. And I’ll have to know where your men will be, what targets they are going for, and when the operations will be.”

“Targets, Englishman? The targets are every bloody German for miles around, and those Milice pigs. I’ll take care of the targets. You just get me the guns.”

“We have been through this often before,” interrupted Marat, his round spectacles glinting in the candlelight. “We cannot afford independent actions without central direction. We have a command structure, and the party insists that you are part of it, Soleil.”

“You can stuff your party up your arse,” belched Soleil. “Where was your command structure when I was killing Milice from here to Villefranche? Passing a death sentence on me, that’s what your command structure tried to do.”

He splashed some red wine into the tourain that remained in his soup bowl, brought the bowl to his mouth with both hands, and slurped it down. Manners noticed that the wine was a Leoville ’38.

“We call that faire chabrol, finishing the soup the way the peasants do it. Try it, Englishman!” He pulled out his pistol, and hammered the butt on the table. “Hey, boys,” he shouted. “I’m teaching Winston Churchill’s man to faire chabrol. When we’ve killed all the Boches, we’ll go over to London and teach Churchill himself, eh?”

“We’re going to Spain first,” shouted a swarthy-looking desperado in a heavy Spanish accent. “First we settle Hitler, then we settle Franco. We’ll faire chabrol with Franco’s blood.”

Manners had heard a lot of this. Many of the Maquis were Spaniards who had fled from Franco’s victory, most of them Communists, and somehow were quite convinced that Churchill and Roosevelt would turn their armies south across the Pyrenees as soon as the war in Europe was over. Manners did not have the heart to disabuse them. Just by refusing to let German troops through Spain to take Gibraltar, Franco had earned himself the gratitude of the Allies.

The Spaniard lumbered to his feet, and with a great cry of “Arriba Espana,” came around to Malrand’s place and lifted him into a powerful embrace. “I salute you, Malrand, for flying with us and fighting with us. We will feast in Madrid, by the steps of Franco’s gallows.”

Malrand patted the big Spaniard on the back, pushed him back to his place, and sat to attack his foie gras. “Let’s be thankful the Germans didn’t take all of this,” he laughed, and toasted the Spanish refugees across the table. Then he turned and began talking quietly to the man at his right, a neatly dressed older Frenchman with the look of a lawyer, out of place among these burly men with their thick hands.

“I’ll forgive that Malrand a lot, because of what he did in Spain,” said Marat.

“What about the work he’s doing now for France?” asked Manners.

“Oh, that is to be expected. He’s a patriotic French aristocrat, with interests to protect. This summer, with the invasion, you’ll see the entire gentry of France join the Resistance and claim to have been in the underground all along. By the time your Montgomery gets his tanks to Paris, you will find an entire nation of forty million brave resisters, with a few token scapegoats like Petain and Laval to be put on trial as collaborators. They will be France’s alibi, as we all conveniently forget that in 1940, we had forty million collaborators who were happy to settle for Petain and a quiet life. My own party went along for a while, because of that damned Nazi-Soviet pact. I’m French enough to admire de Gaulle for standing up in 1940. And Malrand. He picked his side early, I’ll give Malrand that. But to fight for France is in his blood, in his character. Fighting for Spain was not. That’s what makes him an interesting man, and possibly a dangerous one.”

“He’s dangerous to Germans, that’s for certain. You should have seen him with the Spandau.” The maids stood at their shoulders to serve the trout. Automatically, Manners turned his shoulder to make way for the woman, and noticed that Marat did not. He just continued smoking his pipe, staring quizzically at the Englishman, forcing the maid to wait.

“Some of the boys tell me Malrand’s a good teacher and a good leader. Almost as good as you, they say.”

“He’s better than me,” said Manners. “He gets that automatic respect that’s the mark of a natural