But the Sturmbannführer let the receiver rest on its cradle. He finished the final paragraph of his report, initialed the lower corner, and then answered the phone. The frequency was the same as last night, Heinrich reported. Grahnweis thanked him, turned on his receiver, fiddled with the dial until the transmitted numbers came through crisp and clear. Several of the senior officers and a few people on his own staff drifted into the large office, close enough to Grahnweis’ desk to hear what went on.
The two Loewe-Opta radio trucks had been in position since early evening, strategically placed on either side of the Montmartre hill. Grahnweis gave them a few minutes to get a fix on the transmission, then called Truck Number One to come in on his communications
radio.
“I can confirm the forty-nine meters—are you getting it?”
“We hear him, but the direction is a little blurred. The way we’re receiving, he’s bouncing between eighteen and twenty-three degrees.”
“I see.” Grahnweis studied his city map for a moment. “Then go up to the rue Caulaincourt, try for a reading there and call me back.”
From the second truck, on the boulevard Barbès side of Montmartre, the news was better. Their signal was clear, just about precisely on 178.4 degrees. Grahnweis made certain the celluloid disc was perfectly centered, then ran the silk thread out along the degree line. “Could be in Sacré-Coeur,” he said. “Perhaps in the belfry. I wonder— have they also a hunchback, like Notre-Dame?”
The first RDF truck came over the radio a few minutes later. “Not much better, Herr Sturmbannführer. Maybe it’s the elevation—but something’s deflecting here, something’s hurting the reception.”
“But not in London, we hope.”
There was a pause as the radio technician tried to decide how to answer this. Grahnweis saved him the trouble. “We’re doing just fine. Stay where you are, I’ll be back in a moment.”
The technician said Yes sir briskly and signed off in a hurry. This working for a legend required a steady nerve.
Grahnweis reached into his desk drawer and retrieved a special map of Paris, in book form, printed on heavy paper, showing every street, every alley, the number of every building. He then dialed his intercom and instructed his chief clerk to telephone the northern electrical power substation. Moments later he was talking to the French night supervisor, asking to be connected with the office of Leftenant Schillich.
As he waited, he could hear the deep hum of the station’s giant turbines. Leftenant Schillich, he thought to himself, you had best be available for this call, and don’t make a fool of Grahnweis.
“Leftenant Schillich,” said a youthful voice.
Grahnweis explained what he needed, starting at the rue Caulaincourt side of Montmartre and working along a certain line toward the east, street by street. Then he turned up the volume on his receiver and silently begged the W/T operator to keep on transmitting.
“Starting at Caulaincourt, now,” Schillich announced.
From the speaker: 562 511
“Next on the list is the avenue Junot, from number thirty to the end.” Grahnweis’ audience was hushed and anticipatory, sensing that the moment of the kill was near. At the leftenant’s direction, the substation engineers worked their way east, across the grid of steep, crooked streets that made up the old village high above Paris.
“Next we have,” said Schillich, following his own edition of Grahnweis’ map, “the rue Lepic.”
Grahnweis found the street and marked it with his index finger.
From the receiver: 335.
Then 428.
Then silence.
In the Hôtel Bretagne, the room went dark. Janina’s hand froze on the dead key and she tore the earphones from her head. But there was nothing, other than the evening hush of an occupied city, for her to hear. For a few seconds she sat there, then, before she could do anything, the lights came on, the red filaments in her radio tubes glowed back to life.
It was just a brief outage, she realized, some problem with the electricity.
A few miles south of the roadblock, Fedin pulled off the E2 and drove a little way down a farmer’s dirt path. There was no need to discuss what had to be done—he simply took the weapon from beneath the seat and walked out into the strip of forest that separated two fields. Theoretically they would note where it had been dumped and, some day, return to collect it.
De Milja smoked pensively and stared out over the countryside. The peasants, working in the last light of the late summer dusk, were harvesting wheat with horse-drawn mowing machines. There was a haze of dust in the air, cicadas whirred madly, the mowing machines swayed as they cut through the ripe grain. He got out of the truck to stretch his legs and felt a slight vibration in the ground. For a moment, there was no sound. Then there was just the beginning of it, thunder in the distance. Fedin returned, stood by the side of the truck, and squinted up into the darkening sky.
The ground trembled, then shook. The sound swelled, then seemed to explode the air, growing louder and louder until de Milja could feel the waves of it hammering against his heart. In self-defense he knelt down, then tried to count the dark shapes that moved slowly across the sky, returning from London, or Liverpool. Perhaps fifty Heinkel-IIIs and maybe the same number of Ju-88s, the best of the German bombers, and their escort, possibly thirty Messerschmitt-110s.
He had seen it in Warsaw, how the fronts of the buildings slid into the street in a cloud of dust, the silhouette of a fireman on a roof— arms and legs thrown wide like a gingerbread man by the blast, white fire and blue fire, the young woman a block away from harm who sits down and dies without a mark on her. He knew the Germans for the fine engineers they were.
Above him, one of the bombers trailed a delicate strand of white smoke from beneath its wing. Another flew very low and far behind the formation, de Milja could hear its engine; ignition, then silence, ignition, silence. It seemed restless; a wing dipped, the nose of the plane lowered, then righted itself. Perhaps the plane and the pilot were both damaged, de Milja thought. But, two planes among a hundred—only two planes. Others in the sea, maybe. One in poor Mrs. Brown’s kitchen. But most of the bombers would be back at it the following day. Even fire hoses wore out eventually, de Milja knew, the white, frayed threads visible through the broken rubber.
The sound faded slowly to the south, toward the Luftwaffe base near Merville. The cicadas started up again, the huge horses plodded along and the mowers creaked as they rolled through the wheat. A Norman peasant walked beside his plow horse—walked slowly, head down, like an old man—one hand riding on the horse’s shoulder.
It worked. Once you determined the street by turning off the electricity until the transmission stopped, your sound trucks could identify the building by strength of signal. They radioed back to Grahnweis: Hôtel Bretagne. The hunting party was hastily organized; two Gestapo detectives—thick-bodied types—a few senior officers with their side arms, and Walter and Helmut, who squeezed into the second car, encouraged by Grahnweis’ wink. The two cars sped through the Paris night, arriving at the rue Lepic in good time—the W/T operator was still at it, according to the technicians in the Loewe-Opta trucks.
The actual entry into the hotel was restricted to the two detectives, along with two of the senior officers who could not be told no, as well as Walter—representing Grahnweis’ faithful staff—and Grahnweis himself.
The night clerk, an old man with a white eye, trembled with fear when the Gestapo uniforms swept through the door. He showed them the registration book; they picked out, immediately, the woman “Marie Ladoux,” who for ten days had occupied a top-floor room. Rented for her by a cousin, the man said, a week before she arrived. “She doesn’t sleep here at night,” he confided to one of the detectives. “God only knows where she goes.”