They acknowledged later, quietly, among themselves, that she had been very brave. The young French girl or English girl or whoever she was—really very brave. When they kicked the door open she simply turned and stared at them as though they’d been impolite, her hand poised on the telegraph key. “Strange she had no watchers,” Walter said later to the others in the Funkabwehr office on the boulevard Suchet.
“A patched-together business, I think,” Helmut said. “Extemporized.” A sad little smile, and the shrug that went with it: the British were losing now, knocked silly by German bombs, waiting for the blow to fall as a tough, predatory army waited on the chalk cliffs at Boulogne. The same cliffs where Napoleon’s Grande Armée had waited. And waited. But this wasn’t Napoleon. And the junior officers quite properly read desperation in the girl’s mission—one could say sacrifice. Clearly nobody had expected her to survive for very long.
She shocked them, though. The rules of the game specified that the W/T operator give up, accept interrogation, accept the consequences of spying, which hadn’t changed in a hundred years—the courtyard, the blindfold. But though she did not struggle when they took her, they got her only as far as the backseat of the Gestapo Mercedes, securely handcuffed, with a detective on either side. Yet she managed to do what she had to do; they heard the crunch of bitten glass and a few seconds later her head fell over like a broken doll and that was the end of “Marie Ladoux.”
Grahnweis stayed behind with one of the senior officers to examine the real prize—the clandestine radio. Which turned out to be the good old Mark XV transceiver—actually its first cousin, the Paraset—but, Grahnweis thought, standard MI-6 equipment. He nodded to himself with satisfaction and relief. The British scientists made him nervous— sometimes great bumblers, sometimes not. He feared that under pressure of war they might outperform themselves and conjure up some diabolical apparatus that would make his life a hell. But, so far, nothing like that, as far as he could tell, in the Hôtel Bretagne.
Standard stuff. Two transmission frequencies—from 3.3 to 4.5 megacycles and from 4.5 to 7.6 megacycles. Four to five watts of power—enough to get to London. Three American metal tubes, a 6V6 crystal-controlled pilot, cadmium steel box, silver finish. A calibration curve, to assist the operator, was mounted in the upper-left-hand corner, essentially a graph chart with a diagonal line. Grahnweis took a soft leather tool pouch from the pocket of his uniform jacket and selected a screwdriver for the task of getting behind the control panel. To the senior officer looking over his shoulder he said, “Maybe something new inside.”
There was.
Grahnweis left the hotel by the Saint-Rustique side of the building; meanwhile, the senior officer exited on the rue Lepic—this parting company a mysterious event that nobody ever really explained. For a time it wasn’t clear that Grahnweis was ever going to be found, but, with persistence and painstaking attention to detail, he was. Crown on the second bicuspid molar, fillings in upper and lower canines, a chipped incisor. Yes, that was Grahnweis, if a tattered charcoal log under a jumble of brick and tile could be called any name at all.
The junior officers of the Funkabwehr were extremely put out by this turn of events. It was, at its heart, rude. And rudeness of this sort they would never have ascribed to the British character. Had they known, of course, that it was the Poles who’d sent their leader from the room they would have thrown up their hands in angry recognition. What could you expect? But the British were different: Aryan, northern, civilized, and blessed with certain German virtues—honor in friendship, and love of learning.
The British were, in fact, perhaps a little worse than the Poles, but the Germans wouldn’t come to understand that for some time. “Personally,” said Heinrich, “it is the very sort of thing I find I cannot forgive.”
7 September, 2:30 p.m.
Genya Beilis seated herself by a window in the Café Trois Reines, next to the St. Pierre cemetery in Montmartre. She was a vision, even in the end-of-summer heat. A little white hat with a bow, set just to one side of her head, a little white suit, three dashes of Guerlain. Not the usual for this neighborhood, but who knew what business royalty might have up here—maybe a call on a poor relative, or a bouquet for a former lover, who somehow wound up in the local boneyard. Whatever the truth, she shone, and her tea was served with every courtesy, and every drop still in the cup.
Very damn inspiring, the way she walked. Maybe you didn’t believe in heaven but you certainly could believe in that. Chin and shoulders elevated, back like fine steel, the emphatic ring of high heels on the tile floor of a café. In the cabinet de toilette, Madame whipped off a lambskin glove and slipped a brown envelope behind a radiator. Then she returned to her tea.
A few blocks away, a number of Gestapo gentlemen read newspapers in cars and doorways all the livelong day as the mess in the rue Lepic was cleaned up, but that was hopeless and they knew it. Nobody was going to be coming around to see what happened to X. The abrupt halt in transmission, the absence of coded start-up signals— missent call sign, incorrect date—and the London people would know their network communication had been cut. One sent the newspaper readers out to the cars and doorways, but one knew better.
The lovely lady in white returned to the quartier of the Café Trois Reines on two occasions, but she found no chalk mark on M. Laval’s gravestone and the letter in the toilette mailbox went uncollected, so that, in the end, the latest news on canals and barges in the Channel ports went unread.
Though she had never seen her correspondent she felt sad, enough a veteran of the business to know what uncollected mail implied. Then too, she had walked past the spontaneous renovation at the Hôtel Bretagne, noted newspaper readers in the vicinity, noted the absolute silence of the Parisian press on the subject of local explosions, and wondered if it all might not somehow fit together.
But hers not to reason why. Hers to travel down to the Banque de Commerce Nationale in Orléans, humiliate the most vulgar, oily little bank man that God ever made, and collect a new set of procedures.
Now it was the sixteenth arrondissement.
Now it was the Café du Jardin.
Now the adjacent cemetery was in Passy.
Ghouls, she thought.
Starry night in the village of Aire. In 1430, the Roman bridge over the river Lys had been replaced and the Martagne family had built a fine house at the end of it, so the cool air that hung above the water made the stone rooms pleasant on summer evenings.
Martagne, the port supervisor from Calais, had a red face and black hair, a big cleft nose and a big mustache. He sat in the dark kitchen with de Milja—Fedin was waiting at the edge of the village— drinking farmer-made Calvados from a stone crock. “Take another Calva,” he said. “Uncle made that in 1903.” Martagne liked to spend his time in the bars with the Polish dockyard workers, and they put him on to Fedin and de Milja when he got frustrated with the Germans and threatened to talk to somebody.
Now he was drunk. He stared down at the scarred old table and brooded. Finally he said, “You a spy?”
“Yes.”
Martagne made a face. “I’m a Norman,” he said. “Not French— whatever that means. But we fight their damn battles. They’re good at insults, not so good at fighting. Bad combination, you’ll agree.”