“I might be able to walk now,” he said. “The pain is easing.”
Flick slipped the pass into her shoulder bag. Antoinette did not notice. Flick said to her, “Help me get him up.”
The two women raised Michel to his feet. Antoinette pulled up his blue canvas trousers and fastened his worn leather belt.
“Stay inside,” Flick said to Antoinette. “I don’t want anyone to see you with us.” She had not yet begun to work out her idea, but she already knew it would be blighted if any suspicion were to fall on Antoinette and her cleaners.
Michel put his arm around Flick’s shoulders and leaned heavily on her. She took his weight, and he hobbled out of the building into the street. By the time they reached the car, he was white with pain. Gilberte stared through the window at them, looking terrified. Flick hissed at her, “Get out and open the fucking door, dimwit!” Gilberte leaped out of the car and threw open the rear door. With her help, Flick bundled Mitel onto the
The two women jumped in the front “Let’s get out of here,” said Flick.
CHAPTER 4
DIETER WAS DISMAYED and appalled. As the shooting began to peter out, and his heartbeat returned to normal, he started to reflect on what he had seen. He had not thought the Resistance capable of such a well- planned and carefully executed attack. From everything he had learned in the last few months, he believed their raids were normally hit-and-run affairs. But this had been his first sight of them in action. They had been bristling with guns and obviously not short of ammunition-unlike the German army! Worst of all, they had been courageous. Dieter had been impressed by the rifleman who had dashed across the square, by the girl with the Sten gun who had given him covering fire, and most of all by the little blonde who had picked up the wounded rifleman and had carried him-a man six inches taller than she-out of the square to safety. Such people could not fail to be a profound threat to the occupying military force. These were not like the criminals Dieter had dealt with as a cop in Cologne before the war. Criminals were stupid, lazy, cowardly, and brutish. These French Resistance people were fighters.
But their defeat gave him a rare opportunity.
When he was sure the shooting had stopped, he got to his feet and helped Stephanie up. Her cheeks were flushed, and she was breathing hard. She held his hands and looked into his face.-'You protected me,” she said. Tears came to her eyes. “You made yourself a shield for me.”
He brushed dirt from her hip. He was surprised by his own gallantry. The action had been instinctive. When he thought about it, he was not at all sure he would really be willing to give his life to save Stephanie. He tried to pass over it lightly. “No harm should come to this perfect body,” he said.
She began to cry.
He took her hand and led her across the square to the gates. “Let’s go inside,” he said. “You can sit down for a while.” They entered the grounds. Dieter saw a hole in the wall of the church. That explained how the main force had got inside.
The Waffen-SS troops had come out of the building and were disarming the attackers. Dieter looked keenly at the Resistance fighters. Most were dead, but some were only wounded, and one or two appeared to have surrendered unhurt. There should be several for him to interrogate.
Until now, his work had been defensive. The most he had been able to do was fortify key installations against the Resistance by beefing up security. The occasional prisoner had yielded little information. But having several prisoners, all from one large and evidently well-organized circuit, was a different matter. This might be his chance of going on the attack, he thought eagerly.
He shouted at a sergeant, “You-get a doctor for these prisoners. I want to interrogate them. Don’t let any die.”
Although Dieter was not in uniform, the sergeant assumed from his manner that he was a superior officer, and said, “Very good, sir.”
Dieter took Stephanie up the steps and through the stately doorway into the wide hall. It was a breathtaking sight: a pink marble floor, tall windows with elaborate curtains, walls with Etruscan motifs in plaster picked out in dusty shades of pink and green, and a ceiling painted with fading cherubs. Once, Dieter assumed, the room had been filled with gorgeous furniture: pier tables under high mirrors, sideboards encrusted with ormolu, dainty chairs with gilded legs, oil paintings, huge vases, little marble statuettes. All that was gone now, of course. Instead there were rows of switchboards, each with its chair, and a snake’s nest of cables on the floor.
The telephone operators seemed to have fled into the grounds at the rear but, now that the shooting had stopped, a few of them were standing at the glazed doors, still wearing their headsets and breast microphones, wondering if it was safe to come back inside. Dieter sat Stephanie at one of the switchboards, then beckoned a middle-aged woman telephonist. “Madame,” he said in a polite but commanding voice. He spoke French. “Please bring a cup of hot coffee for this lady.”
The woman came forward, shooting a look of hatred at Stephanie. “Very good, monsieur.”
“And some cognac. She’s had a shock.”
“We have no cognac.”
They had cognac, but she did not want to give it to the mistress of a German. Dieter did not argue the point. “Just coffee, then, but be quick, or there will be trouble.”
He patted Stephanie’s shoulder and left her. He passed through double doors into the east wing. The chateau was laid out as a series of reception rooms, one leading into the next on the Versailles pattern, he found. The rooms were full of switchboards, but these had a more permanent look, the cables bundled into neatly made wooden trunking that disappeared through the floor into the cellar beneath. Dieter guessed the hail looked messy only because it had been brought into service as an emergency measure after the west wing had been bombed. Some of the windows were permanently blacked out, no doubt as an air-raid precaution, but others had heavy curtains drawn open, and Dieter supposed the women did not like to work in permanent night.
At the end of the east wing was a stairwell. Dieter went down. At the foot of the staircase he passed through a steel door. A small desk and a chair stood just inside, and Dieter assumed a guard normally sat there. The man on duty had presumably left his post to join in the fighting. Dieter entered unchallenged and made a mental note of a security breach.
This was a different environment from that of the grand principal floors. Designed as kitchens, storage, and accommodation for the dozens of staff who would have serviced this house three hundred years ago, it had low ceilings, bare walls, and floors of stone, or even, in some rooms, beaten earth. Dieter walked along a broad corridor. Every door was clearly labeled in neat German signwriting, but Dieter looked inside anyway. On his left, at the front of the building, was the complex equipment of a major telephone exchange: a generator, enormous batteries, and rooms full of tangled cables. On his right, toward the back of the house, were the Gestapo’s facilities: a photo lab, a large wireless listening room for eavesdropping on the Resistance, and prison cells with peepholes in the doors. The basement had been bombproofed: all windows were blocked, the walls were sandbagged, and the ceilings had been reinforced with steel girders and poured concrete. Obviously that was to prevent Allied bombers from putting the phone system out of action.
At the end of the corridor was a door marked Interrogation Center. He went inside. The first room had bare white walls, bright lights, and the standard furniture of a simple interview room: a cheap table, hard chairs, and an ashtray. Dieter went through to the next room. Here the lights were less bright and the walls bare brick. There was a bloodstained pillar with hooks for tying people up; an umbrella stand holding a selection of wooden clubs and steel bars; a hospital operating table with a head clamp and straps for the wrists and ankles; an electric shock machine; and a locked cabinet that probably contained drugs and hypodermic syringes. It was a torture chamber. Dieter had been in many similar, but still they sickened him. He had to remind himself that intelligence gathered in places such as this helped save the lives of decent young German soldiers so that they could eventually go home to their wives and children instead of dying on battlefields. All the same, the place gave him the creeps.
There was a noise behind him, startling him. He spun around. When he saw what was in the doorway he took a frightened step back. “Christ!” he said. He was looking at a squat figure, its face thrown into shadow by the
