“My dear brother-in-arms Roger,” said Basil, “the bridge will be blown, that I assure you. The only thing in doubt is whether Lieutenant Beets—”
“Leets.”
“Leets, yes, of course, whether Lieutenant Leets and his team of maquis from Group Phillippe will make it out alive. Without the Brens, they haven’t a chance, do you see?”
“Phillippe is a pig, as are all his men,” said Roger. “It is better for them to die at the bridge and spare us the effort of hunting them down to hang after the war. That is my only concern.”
“Can you say to this brave young American, ‘Leftenant Beets, you must die, that is all there is to it’?”
“Yes, it’s nothing,” said Roger. He turned to Leets with uninterested eyes. “‘Leftenant Beets, you must die, that is all there is to it.’ All right, I said it. Fine. Good-bye, sorry and all that, but policy is policy.”
He signaled his two bodyguards, who after rattling their Schmeissers dramatically film-noir style, rose and began to escort him up the cellar steps.
“Well, there you have it,” said Basil to Leets. “Sorry, but it looks like your number is up, leftenant. You get pranged. Sad, unjust, but inescapable. Fate, I gather. Yours not to reason why, et cetera et cetera. Do you know your Tennyson?”
“I know that one,” said Leets glumly.
“I suppose one could simply not go. I think that’s what I’d do in your shoes, but then I’m not the demo man, you are. I’m the head potato, so I’ll supervise quite nicely from the treeline. As for you, if you decide not to go, it would be embarrassing, of course, but in the long run, it probably doesn’t make much difference whether the bridge goes or not, and it seems silly to waste a future doctor of all the fabled Minnesotans on such a local Frenchy balls-up between de Gaulle’s smarmy peons and that giant, stinking, garlic-sucking red butcher.”
“If I catch it,” said Leets, “I catch it. That’s the game I signed up for. I just hate to catch it because of some little snit between Group Roger and Group Phillippe. Stopping Das Reich is worth it; helping Roger prevail over Phillippe is not, and I don’t give a shit about FFI or FTP.”
“Yet they can’t really be separated, can they? It’s always so complicated, haven’t you noticed? Politics, politics, politics, it’s like chewing gum in the works — it gets in everywhere and mucks up everything. Anyhow, if you like, I’ll write your people a very nice letter about what a hero you were. Would you like that?”
As with much of what Basil said, the words were pitched in a key of meaning so exquisite Leets couldn’t exactly tell if they were serious or not. You could never be sure with Basil; he frequently said the exact opposite of what he meant. He seemed to live in a zone of near-comedy in which nearly every damned thing was “amusing” and he took great pleasure in saying the “shocking” thing. The first thing he said to Leets all those weeks ago at Milton were, “It’s all a racket, you know. Our richies are trying to wipe out their richies so they can get all the nig-nog gold; that’s what it’s really all about. Our job is to make the world safe for nig-nog gold.”
“Jim Leets,” Leets had said, “Sigma Chi, N.U. ‘41.”
Now Basil said, “I can, however, in my tiny British pea brain, concoct one other possibility.”
“What’s that?”
“Well, it has to do with a radio.”
“We don’t have a radio.”
The radio was lashed to Andre Breton’s body which, unfortunately, had hit the earth at about eight hundred miles an hour when Andre’s parachute ripped in half on the tail spar of the Liberator that had dropped them the night of the invasion. Neither the radio nor Andre had been salvageable, which is why Team Casey was down 33 percent strength before its other two-thirds landed under their chutes a minute or so after Andre had his accident.
“The Germans have radios.”
“We’re not Germans. We’re good guys, remember? Captain, sometimes I think you don’t take this all that seriously”
“I speak German. What else is necessary?”
“This is crazy. You’ll never—”
“Anyway, here’s my idea. I cop a German uniform tomorrow, and walk into the garrison headquarters at eleven a.m. With my command presence, I will send Jerry away. Then I will commandeer his radio and put in a call. A fellow owes me a favor. If his groundwork is solid, it just might work out.”
“Jerry will put you up against a wall at 11:03 and shoot you.”
“Hmm, good point. Possibly if Jerry is distracted.”
“Go ahead, I’m all ears.”
“You blow something up. I don’t know, anything. Improvise, that’s what you chaps are so good at. Jerry runs to see. While Jerry’s got his knickers in a wad, I enter the garrison headquarters, all snazzed up, Jerry-style. It’s easy for me to commandeer the radio, make my call. Five minutes and I’m out.”
“Who are you trying to reach on radio?”
“A certain fellow.”
“A fellow where?”
“In England.”
“You’re going to radio England? From a German command post in occupied France?”
“I am. I’m going to dial up Roddy Walthingham, of the Signals Intelligence Branch, in Islington. He’s some kind of mucky-muck there and there are sure to be lots of radios about.”
“What can he do?”
“You didn’t hear this from me, chum, but it’s said he’s one of the pinks. Pink as in red. Same team, just different players, for now. Joe for king, that sort of thing. Anyhow, he’s sure to know somebody who knows somebody who knows somebody in the big town.”
“London?” asked Leets, but Basil just smiled, and Leets realized he meant Moscow.
So Basil turned himself into a passable German officer with little enough trouble. The uniform came from an actual officer who had been killed in an ambush in 1943, and his uniform kept in storage by the maquis against the possibility of just such a gambit. It smelled of sweat, farts, and blood. It was also a year out of date in terms of accoutrements, badges, and suchlike, but Basil knew or at least believed that with enough charisma he could get through anything.
And thus at eleven a.m., as Leets and three maquis from Group Phillippe prepared to blow up a deserted farmhouse half a mile out of town the other way from the bridge, Basil strode masterfully to the gate of the garrison HQ of the 113th Flakbattalion, the lucky Luftwaffers who controlled security there in Nantilles. The explosion had the predictable effect on the Luftwaffers, who panicked, grabbed weapons and other equipment, and began running toward the rising column of smoke. They were terrified of a screwup because it meant they might be transferred somewhere actual fighting was possible.
Basil watched them go, and when the last of several ragtag groups had disappeared, he strode toward the big communications van next to the chateau, with its thirty-foot radio mast adorned with all kinds of Jerry stylistics; this one had a triangle up top. These people!
It helped that the officer whose uniform he wore had been a hero, and a lot of ribbons and badges decorated his breast. One, in particular, was an emblem of a tank, and underneath it hung three little plates of some sort. The other stuff was the usual mishmash of bold colored ribbons and such, and it all signified martial valor, very impressive to the distinctly nonmilitaristic Luftwaffers who hadn’t run to the blasts and didn’t know skittles about such stuff but recognized what they took to be the real McCoy when it appeared.
Basil got to the radio van easily enough and chased the duty sergeant away by proclaiming himself Major Strasser — he’d seen Casablanca, of course — of Abwehr 31, top secret.
He faced a bank of gear, all of it rather H. G. Wellesian in its futuresque array of dials, switches, knobs, gauges, and such forth set in shiny Bakelite.