"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.
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"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 française 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."
Madame?"
"You have done your homework on me."
Well. . . here was a necessary lie, if not a life-and-death one: she would surely find the truth of the combined incompetence of the British and the Russians unflattering, if not unbelievable.
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"Not quite like the bastides, Madame." Roche decided to outflank the lie with a compliment. "Your defences are in better order."
She accepted the statement with the ghost of a smile, but in silence. She wanted more than that.
"But I would be fascinated to know . . ." he let himself trail off deliberately. "That is to say, I've never thought that I looked like a policeman— of any type." He gave her a wry smile, as boyish as he could make it, backing his instinct that if she had a weakness it might be for a young ex-para, albeit an English ex-para and an in-some-sort policeman, who could take defeat like a gentleman, with good grace.
Again, the moment's stare in silence. "On the face of it you don't, Captain. But also you remind me of someone, and in part it is because I see him in you, I think." The ghost-smile remained, but now it haunted a sad memory. "I think also . . .
perhaps I should not tell you."
"Tell me." Roche knew, with self-revealing eagerness, that if she told him this then she would withhold nothing. "Please."
"He was an enemy." She weakened.
"A Frenchman?"
"No. A German, I think."
"You . . . think?"
"He claimed to be a Surf Efrican. Perhaps he was, though he was not the Surf Efrican whose identity discs he had."
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Roche frowned. "A Surf—?"
"From Trekkersburg in the province of Natal. Pete—Pi-et—
Prinsloo was his name. Or not his name."
South African! Her impeccable ear had picked up the original sound, and had retained it across the years.
"He was very young and very brave—to do what he was doing needed courage, even though he was our enemy. And handsome . . ." Her eyes glazed for an instant, then focussed sharply on Roche. "You understand, Captain, that we ran an escape route through this place during the war?"
Roche nodded wordlessly.
"Of course—you know!" She nodded back. "But what you do not know is how a good escape route works—not as a continuous road, but a series of independent links which do not touch each other, so that if one link is broken the others are still safe. And . . . and so the way to destroy the route is not to break it, but to introduce one of your men into it, to pass along it from link to link until the last one—and then ..."
She blinked at Roche. "But perhaps you know all this?"
Roche said nothing.
"No matter. We were on our guard against such men—we had our methods too. And we could not afford to have any mercy on them, for the sake of our own lives as well as our work." She gazed at Roche sadly. "But he was beautiful, was Pi-et. He helped me cut—" she frowned "—no, prune is the word—prune the roses in the garden, by the wall near the dummy5