World War II Thriller Collection (87 page)

“No,” she replied. “I'm telling you that I don't know. When I woke up, they had gone.”

Dieter still thought she was lying, but to get the truth out of her would take time and patience, and he was running out of both. “Arrest them all,” he said, and his angry frustration injected a petulant note into his voice.

The phone rang in the hall. Dieter stepped out of the dining room and picked it up.

A voice with a German accent said, “Let me speak to Major Franck.”

“This is he.”

“Lieutenant Hesse here, Major.”

“Hans, what happened?”

“I'm at the station. Michel parked the van and bought a ticket to Marles. The train is about to leave.”

It was as Dieter had thought. The Jackdaws had gone ahead and left instructions for Michel to join them. They were still planning to blow up the railway tunnel. He felt frustrated that Flick was continuing to stay one step ahead of him. However, she had not been able to escape him completely. He was still on her tail. He would catch her soon. “Get on the train, quickly,” he said to Hans. “Stay with him. I'll meet you at Marles.”

“Very good,” said Hans, and he hung up.

Dieter returned to the dining room. “Call the château
and have them send transportation,” he said to the Gestapo men. “Turn all the prisoners over to Sergeant Becker for interrogation. Tell him to start with Madame.” He pointed to the driver. “You can drive me to Marles.”

IN THE CAFÉ
de la Gare, near the railway station, Flick and Paul had a breakfast of ersatz coffee, black bread, and sausage with little or no meat in it. Ruby, Jelly, and Greta sat at a separate table, not acknowledging them. Flick kept an eye on the street outside.

She knew that Michel was in terrible danger. She had contemplated going to warn him. She could have gone to the Moulier place—but that would have played into the hands of the Gestapo, who must be following Michel in the hope that he would lead them to her. Even to phone the Moulier place would have risked betraying her hideout to a Gestapo eavesdropper at the telephone exchange. In fact, she had decided, the best thing she could do to help Michel was
not
to contact him directly. If her theory was right, Dieter Franck would let Michel remain at large until Flick was caught.

So she had left a message for Michel with Madame Laperrière. It read:

 

Michel—

I am sure you are under surveillance. The place we were at last night was raided after you left. You have probably been followed this morning.

We will leave before you get here and make ourselves inconspicuous in the town center. Park the van near the railway station and leave the key under
the driver's seat. Get a train to Marles. Shake off your shadow and come back.

Be careful—please!

—Flick

Now burn this.

 

It seemed good in theory, but she waited all morning in a fever of tension to see whether it would work.

Then, at eleven o'clock, she saw a high van draw up and park near the station entrance. Flick held her breath. On the side, in white lettering, she read
Moulier & Fils—Viandes.

Michel got out, and she breathed again.

He walked into the station. He was carrying out her plan.

She looked to see who might be following him, but it was impossible. People arrived at the station constantly, on foot, on bicycles, and in cars, and any of them might have been shadowing Michel.

She remained in the café, pretending to drink the bitter, unsatisfying coffee substitute, keeping an eye on the van, trying to discover whether it was under surveillance. She studied the people and vehicles coming and going outside the station, but she did not spot anyone who might have been watching the van. After fifteen minutes, she nodded to Paul. They got up, picked up their cases, and walked out.

Flick opened the van door and got into the driver's seat. Paul got in the other side. Flick's heart was in her mouth. If this was a Gestapo trap, now would be the moment when they arrested her. She fumbled beneath her seat and found a key. She started the van.

She looked around. No one seemed to have noticed her.

Ruby, Jelly, and Greta came out of the café. Flick jerked her head to indicate that they should get in the back.

She looked over her shoulder. The van was fitted out with shelves and cupboards, and trays for ice to keep the temperature down. Everything looked as if it had been
well scrubbed, but there remained a faint, unpleasant odor of raw meat.

The rear doors opened. The other three women threw their suitcases into the van and clambered in after them. Ruby pulled the doors shut.

Flick put the gearshift into first and drove away.

“We did it!” Jelly said. “Thank gordon.”

Flick smiled thinly. The hard part was still ahead.

She drove out of town on the road to Sainte-Cécile. She watched for police cars and Gestapo Citroëns, but she felt fairly safe for the moment. The van's lettering announced its legitimacy. And it was not unusual for a woman to be driving such a vehicle, when so many Frenchmen were in labor camps in Germany—or had fled to the hills and joined the Maquis to avoid being sent to the camps.

Soon after midday they reached Sainte-Cécile. Flick noted the sudden miraculous quiet that always fell on French streets at the stroke of noon, as the people turned their attention to the first serious meal of the day. She drove to Antoinette's building. A pair of tall wooden doors, half-open, led to the inner courtyard. Paul leaped out of the van and opened the doors, Flick drove in, and Paul closed the doors behind her. Now the van, with its distinctive legend, could not be seen from the street.

“Come when I whistle,” Flick said, and she jumped out.

She went to Antoinette's door while the others waited in the van. Last time she had knocked on this door, eight days and a lifetime ago, Michel's aunt Antoinette had hesitated to answer, jumpy on account of the gunfire from the square, but today she came right away. She opened the door, a slim middle-aged woman in a stylish but faded yellow cotton dress. She looked blankly at Flick for a moment: Flick still had on the dark wig. Then recognition dawned. “You!” she said. A look of panic came over her face. “What do you want?”

Flick whistled to the others, then pushed Antoinette back inside. “Don't worry,” she said. “We're going to tie you up so the Germans will think we forced you.”

“What is this?” Antoinette said shakily

“I'll explain in a moment. Are you alone?”

“Yes.”

“Good.”

The others came in and Ruby closed the apartment door. They went into Antoinette's kitchen. A meal was laid out on the table: black bread, a salad of shredded carrots, a heel of cheese, a wine bottle without a label. Antoinette said again, “What is this?”

“Sit down,” Flick said. “Finish your lunch.”

She sat down, but she said, “I can't eat.”

“It's very simple,” Flick said. “You and your ladies are not going to clean the château tonight . . . we are.”

She looked baffled. “How will that happen?”

“We're going to send notes to each of the women on duty tonight, telling them to come here and see you before they go to work. When they arrive, we will tie them up. Then we will go to the château instead of them.”

“You can't, you don't have passes.”

“Yes, we do.”

“How . . . ?” Antoinette gasped. “You stole my pass! Last Sunday. I thought I had lost it. I got into the most terrible trouble with the Germans!”

“I'm sorry you got into trouble.”

“But this will be worse—you're going to blow the place up!” Antoinette began to moan and rock. “They'll blame me, you know what they're like, we'll all be tortured.”

Flick gritted her teeth. She knew that Antoinette could be right. The Gestapo might easily kill the real cleaners just in case they had had something to do with the deception. “We're going to do everything we can to make you look innocent,” she said. “You will be our victims, the same as the Germans.” All the same, there remained a risk, Flick knew.

“They won't believe us,” Antoinette moaned. “We might be killed.”

Flick hardened her heart. “Yes,” she said. “That's why it's called a war.”

MARLES WAS A
small town to the east of Reims, where the railway line began its long climb into the mountains on its way to Frankfurt, Stuttgart, and Nuremberg. The tunnel just beyond the town carried a constant stream of supplies from the home country to the German forces occupying France. The destruction of the tunnel would starve Rommel of ammunition.

The town itself looked Bavarian, with half-timbered houses painted in bright colors. The town hall stood on the leafy square opposite the railway station. The local Gestapo chief had taken over the mayor's grand office and now stood poring over a map with Dieter Franck and a Captain Bern, who was in charge of the military guard on the tunnel.

“I have twenty men at each end of the tunnel and another group constantly patrolling the mountain,” said Bern. “The Resistance would need a large force to overcome them.”

Dieter frowned. According to the confession of the lesbian he had interrogated, Diana Colefield, Flick had started with a team of six women, including herself, and must now be down to four. However, she might have joined up with another group, or made contact with more French Resistance cadres in and around Marles. “They have plenty of people,” he said. “The French think the invasion is coming.”

“But a large force is hard to conceal. So far we have seen nothing suspicious.”

Bern was short and slight and wore spectacles with
thick lenses, which was presumably why he was stationed in this backwater rather than with a fighting unit, but he struck Dieter as an intelligent and efficient young officer. Dieter was inclined to take what he said at face value.

Dieter said, “How vulnerable is the tunnel to explosives?”

“It goes through solid rock. Of course it can be destroyed, but they will need a truckload of dynamite.”

“They have plenty of dynamite.”

“But they need to get it here—again, without our seeing it.”

“Indeed.” Dieter turned to the Gestapo chief. “Have you received any reports of strange vehicles, or a group of people arriving in the town?”

“None at all. There is only one hotel in town, and at present it has no guests. My men visited the bars and restaurants at lunchtime, as they do every day, and saw nothing unusual.”

Captain Bern said hesitantly, “Is it conceivable, Major, that the report you received, of an attack on the tunnel, was some kind of deception? A diversion, as it were, to draw your attention away from the real target?”

That infuriating possibility had already begun to dawn on Dieter. He knew from bitter experience that Flick Clairet was a master of deception. Had she fooled him again? The thought was too humiliating to contemplate. “I interrogated the informant myself, and I'm sure she was being honest,” Dieter replied, trying hard to keep the rage out of his voice. “But you could still be right. It's possible
she
had been misinformed, deliberately, as a precaution.”

Bern cocked his head and said, “A train is coming.”

Dieter frowned. He could hear nothing.

“My hearing is very good,” the man said with a smile. “No doubt to compensate for my eyesight.”

Dieter had established that the only train to have left Reims for Marles today had been the eleven o'clock, so
Michel and Lieutenant Hesse should be on the next one in.

The Gestapo chief went to the window. “This is a westbound train,” he said. “Your man is eastbound, I think you said.”

Dieter nodded.

Bern said, “In fact there are two trains approaching, one from either direction.”

The Gestapo chief looked the other way. “You're right, so there are.”

The three men went out into the square. Dieter's driver, leaning on the hood of the Citroën, stood upright and put out his cigarette. Beside him was a Gestapo motorcyclist, ready to resume surveillance of Michel.

They walked to the station entrance. “Is there another way out?” Dieter asked the Gestapo man.

“No.”

They stood waiting. Captain Bern said, “Have you heard the news?”

“No, what?” Dieter replied.

“Rome has fallen.”

“My God.”

“The U.S. army reached the Piazza Venezia yesterday at seven o'clock in the evening.”

As the senior officer, Dieter felt it was his duty to maintain morale. “That's bad news, but not unexpected,” he said. “However, Italy is not France. If they try to invade us, they'll get a nasty surprise.” He hoped he was right.

The westbound train came in first. While its passengers were still unloading their bags and stepping onto the platform, the eastbound train chugged in. There was a little knot of people waiting at the station entrance. Dieter studied them surreptitiously, wondering if the local Resistance was meeting Michel at the train. He saw nothing suspicious.

A Gestapo checkpoint stood next to the ticket barrier. The Gestapo chief joined his underling at the table. Captain Bern leaned on a pillar to one side, making
himself less conspicuous. Dieter returned to his car and sat in the back, watching the station.

What would he do if Captain Bern was right, and the tunnel was a diversion? The prospect was dismal. He would have to consider alternatives. What other military targets were within reach of Reims? The château at Sainte-Cécile was an obvious one, but the Resistance had failed to destroy that only a week ago—surely they would not try again so soon? There was a military camp to the north of the town, some railway-marshaling yards between Reims and Paris . . .

That was not the way to go. Guesswork might lead anywhere. He needed information.

He could interrogate Michel right now, as soon as he got off the train, pull out his fingernails one by one until he talked—but would Michel know the truth? He might tell some cover story, believing it to be genuine, as Diana had. Dieter would do better just to follow him until he met up with Flick. She knew the real target. She was the only one worth interrogating now.

Dieter waited impatiently while papers were carefully checked and passengers trickled through. A whistle blew, and the westbound train pulled out. More passengers came out: ten, twenty, thirty. The eastbound train left.

Then Hans Hesse emerged from the station.

Dieter said, “What the hell . . . ?”

Hans looked around the square, saw the Citroën, and ran toward it.

Dieter jumped out of the car.

Hans said, “What happened? Where is he?”

“What do you mean?” Dieter shouted angrily. “You're following him!”

“I did! He got off the train. I lost sight of him in the queue for the checkpoint. After a while I got worried and jumped the queue, but he had already gone.”

“Could he have got back on the train?”

“No—I followed him all the way off the platform.”

“Could he have got on the other train?”

Hans's mouth dropped open. “I lost sight of him about the time we were passing the end of the Reims platform. . . .”

“That's it,” said Dieter. “Hell! He's on his way back to Reims. He's a decoy. This whole trip was a diversion.” He was furious that he had fallen for it.

“What do we do?”

“We'll catch up with the train and you can follow him again. I still think he will lead us to Flick Clairet. Get in the car, let's go!”