CHAPTER 39

IN THE EARLY hours of Sunday morning, Paul Chancellor parachuted into a potato field near the village of Laroque, west of Reims, without the benefit-or the risk-of a reception committee.

The landing gave him a tremendous jolt of pain in his wounded knee. He grit his teeth and lay motionless on the ground, waiting for it to ease. The knee would probably hurt him every so often for the rest of his life. When he was an old man he would say a twinge meant rain- if he lived to be an old man.

After five minutes, he felt able to struggle to his feet and get out of his parachute harness. He found the road, oriented himself by the stars, and started walking, but he was limping badly, and progress was slow.

His identity, hastily cobbled together by Percy Thwaite, was that of a schoolteacher from Epernay, a few miles west. He was hitchhiking to Reims to visit his father, who was ill. Percy had got him all the necessary papers, some of them hastily forged last night and rushed to Tempsford by motorcycle. The limp fitted quite well with the cover story: a wounded veteran might well be a schoolteacher, whereas an active young man should have been sent to a labor camp in Germany.

Getting here was the simple part. Now he had to find Flick. His only way of contacting her would be via the Bollinger circuit. He had to hope that part of the circuit was left intact, and Brian was the only member in Gestapo custody. Like every new agent dropping in to Reims, he would contact Mademoiselle Lemas. He would just have to be especially cautious.

Soon after first light he heard a vehicle. He stepped off the road into the field alongside and concealed himself behind a row of vines. As the noise came closer, he realized the vehicle was a tractor. That was safe enough: the Gestapo never traveled by tractor. He returned to the road and thumbed a lift.

The tractor was driven by a boy of about fifteen and was pulling a cartload of artichokes. The driver nodded at Paul’s leg and said, “War wound?”

“Yes,” Paul said. The likeliest moment for a French soldier to have been hurt was during the Battle of France, so he added: “Sedan, nineteen-forty.”

“I was too young,” the boy said regretfully.

“Lucky you.”

“But wait till the Allies come back. Then you’ll see some action.” He gave Paul a sideways look. “I can’t say any more. But you wait and see.”

Paul thought hard. Was this lad a member of the Bollinger circuit? He said, “But do our people have the guns and ammunition they need?” If the boy knew anything at all, he would know that the Allies had dropped tons of weaponry in the past few months.

“We’ll use whatever weapons come to hand.”

Was he being discreet about what he knew? No, Paul thought. The boy looked vague. He was fantasizing. Paul said no more.

The lad dropped him off on the outskirts, and he limped into town. The rendezvous had changed, from the cathedral crypt to the Cafe, de la Gare, but the time was the same, three o’clock in the afternoon. He had hours to kill.

He went into the cafe, to get breakfast and reconnoitre. He asked for black coffee. The elderly waiter raised his eyebrows, and Paul realized he had made a slip. Hastily, he tried to cover up. “No need to say ‘black,’ I suppose,” he said. “You probably don’t have any milk anyway.”

The waiter smiled, reassured. “Unfortunately not.” He went away.

Paul breathed out. It was eight months since he had been undercover in France, and he had forgotten the minute-to-minute strain of pretending to be someone else.

He spent the morning dozing through services in the cathedral, then went back into the cafe, at one-thirty for lunch. The place emptied out around two-thirty, and he stayed drinking ersatz coffee. Two men came in at two forty-five and ordered beer. Paul looked hard at them. They wore old business suits and talked about grapes in colloquial French. They were eruditely discussing the flowering of the vines, a critical period that had just ended. He did not think they could possibly be agents of the Gestapo.

At exactly three o’clock a tall, attractive woman came in, dressed with unobtrusive elegance in a summer frock of plain green cotton and a straw hat. She wore odd shoes: one black, one brown. This must be Bourgeoise.

Paul was a little surprised. He had expected an older woman. However, that was probably an unwarranted assumption: Flick had never actually described her.

All the same, he was not yet ready to trust her. He got up and left the cafe,.

He walked along the pavement to the railway station and stood in the entrance, watching the cafe,. He was not conspicuous: as usual, there were several people hanging around the station waiting to meet friends.

He monitored the cafe,’s clientele. A woman walked by with a child who was demanding pastry and, as they reached the cafe,, the mother gave in and took the child inside. The two grape experts left. A gendarme went in and came out immediately with a packet of cigarettes in his hand.

Paul began to believe this was not a Gestapo trap. There was no one in sight who looked remotely dangerous. Changing the location of the rendezvous had shaken them off

Only one thing puzzled him. When Brian Standish had been caught at the cathedral, he had been rescued by Bourgeoise’s friend Charenton. Where was he today? If he had been keeping an eye on her in the cathedral, why not here, too? But the circumstance was not dangerous in itself And there could be a hundred simple explanations.

The mother and child left the cafe,. Then, at three thirty, Bourgeoise came out. She walked along the pavement away from the station. Paul followed on the other side of the street. She went up to a small black car of Italian design, the one the French called a Simca Cinq. Paul crossed the street. She got into the car and started the engine.

It was time for Paul to decide. He could not be sure this was safe, but he had gone as far as he could with caution, short of not making the rendezvous at all. At some point, risks had to be taken. Otherwise he might as well have stayed at home.

He went up to the car on the passenger side and opened the door.

She looked coolly at him. “Monsieur?”

“Pray for me,” he said.

“I pray for peace.”

Paul got into the car. Giving himself a code name, he said, “I am Danton.”

She pulled away. “Why didn’t you speak to me in the cafe,?” she said. “I saw you as soon as I walked in. You made me wait there half an hour. It’s dangerous.”

“I wanted to be sure this wasn’t a trap.”

She glanced over at him. “You heard what happened to Helicopter.”

“Yes. Where’s your friend who rescued him, Charenton?”

She headed south, driving fast. “He’s working today.”

“On Sunday? What does he do?”

“Fireman. He’s on duty.”

That explained that. Paul moved quickly to the real purpose of his visit. “Where’s Helicopter?”

She shook her head. “No idea. My house is a cut-out. I meet people, I pass them on to Monet. I’m not supposed to know anything.”

“Is Monet all right?”

“Yes. He phoned me on Thursday afternoon, checking up on Charenton.”

“Not since?”

“No. But that’s not unusual.”

“When did you last see him?”

“In person? I’ve never seen him.”

“Have you heard from Leopardess?”

Paul brooded as the car threaded through the suburbs. Bourgeoise really had no information for him. He would have to move to the next link in the chain.

She pulled into a courtyard alongside a tall house. “Come inside and get cleaned up,” she said.

He got out of the car. Everything seemed to be in order: Bourgeoise had been at the right rendezvous and had given all the correct signals, and there had been no one following her. On the other hand, she had given him no useful information, and he still had no notion how deeply the Bollinger circuit had been penetrated, nor how much danger Flick was in. As Bourgeoise led him to the front door and opened it with her key, he touched the wooden toothbrush in his shirt pocket: it was French-made, so he had been permitted to bring it with him. Now an impulse seized him. As Bourgeoise stepped into the house, he slipped the toothbrush from his pocket and dropped it on the ground just in front of the door.

He followed her inside. “Big place,” he said. It had dark, old-fashioned wallpaper and heavy furniture, quite out of character with its owner. “Have you been here long?”

“I inherited it three or four years ago. I’d like to redecorate, but you can’t get the materials.” She opened a door and stood aside for him to go first. “Come into the kitchen.”

He stepped inside and saw two men in uniform. Both held automatic pistols. And both guns were pointed at Paul.