Soldier No More

'And for yourself, Captain.'

His hand shook. How incredibly sure the Comrades must have been of him, to feed him the truth to use, confident that he would accept it as untruth!

'I'm all right, thank you, Madame.' He watched her sip the Monbazillac.

She inclined her head. 'Very well... so I will apologise to you, young man—of course. . . But not unreservedly.'

'Not. . . unreservedly?' He was glad she was forcing him to forget the humiliation of his previous thoughts.

She nodded. 'You have set one of my fears at rest. You must understand that I have certain responsibilities so far as Alexandra is concerned. Alexandra is—shall we say—

vulnerable?'

Roche smiled. 'Or susceptible?'

'Vulnerable, Captain. To be fair to you, since I am apologising for this, I will tell you that last year she formed a liaison with a young man—not such as yourself, but a foreigner, Captain.'

That was rather hard on Lexy's CIA boyfriend, thought dummy5

Roche. And doubly hard, since the CIA man was technically not a foreigner so far as Lexy was concerned, as well as being very much like Captain Roche in another way.

'Altogether not suitable, in fact?' he said mischievously.

'Unlike me?'

She sipped her wine.

'But then . . . I'm not in the least interested in Alexandra, of course,' added Roche.

She set the glass down carefully. 'Just so, Captain. But then what is it that interests you? And I beg you not to tell me anything more about bastides ... I am certain that you know all that there is to know about them. But I am equally convinced that you are not in the least interested in them.'

She paused momentarily. 'Are you acquainted with 'bum steers', Captain?' This time the pause was even briefer. 'I presume you are, so you will understand me when I say that I believe you are endeavouring to sell such an animal to me, and I am not about to purchase it.'

Roche managed to close his mouth, but decided that he had better not question this animal's precise pedigree.

'I said that you had. . .allayed—that is the word— allayed. . .

one of my fears. I suppose that an old woman, and a stranger also, might be flattered that you have told me so much ... so much of such a very personal nature . . . in order to reassure me as to Alexandra's safety. But not this old woman, Captain.' Madame Peyrony paused yet again, this time for dummy5

effect. 'For now this old woman has another fear, which you have not allayed. And I will tell you why, in order to spare us both the waste of time which bastides, and whatever else you have ready, might otherwise . . . otherwise ...' she searched for the appropriate English word, but in vain.

' 'Occasion'?' Roche discovered that his mouth was dry from lack of use.

' 'Occasion'?' She filed the verb away for checking, but without accepting it into her vocabulary, as though it might be another 'bum steer'. 'Very well ... so you have given me your confidence, which I do not believe a man such as you gives easily, and least of all after you have been insulted to your face . . . and by 'an old witch', which is Alexandra's favoured word for me, yes?'

But Roche was back to tight-lipped silence. If she knew that then she probably knew the maker's tag on his underpants, and she certainly knew too much for comfort.

But how? And, just as important—or more important— why?

'So . . . there will be a reason for that, because no young man from Fontainebleau, who is interested in bastides, but not in Alexandra, wastes his time with 'an old witch'—to tell her that he is a para. . . and also in some sort maybe a policeman too—'

She cut off there, at 'policeman', quite deliberately, to let him react. But of course she had known that all along, probably even without the scattered groundbait of Fontainebleau and what he had deliberately told her.

dummy5

'Policeman, Madame?' If she wanted him to react then he would do so. But he kept denial out of his voice.

'Of a particular type. Does it surprise you that an old witch should know about policemen?'

No, it didn't surprise him—not this old witch . . . of all old witches. If she had run escaping aircrew through her backyard, the men who had left their vernacular in her vocabulary, and lived to tell the tale, then she would know about policemen indeed; and not just the village gendarme, who was probably in her pocket, but other more particular and deadly types, from Darnand's original Vichy bully-boys and their Milice francaise successors to the professionals of the Abwehr and the Gestapo, who had decimated the resistance movement between them.

So—no lies now, except life-and-death ones. Because if she had passed herself off to all those in-some-sort policemen as an innocent old lady, then an innocent old lady she most certainly wasn't. 'No, Madame. It doesn't surprise me.'

She stared at him in silence for a moment. 'But naturally,'

she said drily. 'I am . . . like the bastides of course.'