“Mademoiselle Herault?” he asked the clerk.
“In back, Monsieur.” Her voice was tiny.
Mademoiselle Herault sat at a desk in the office. She was in her forties, he guessed. But older than her years. A hard face, lined and severe. As though she dealt in candy from contempt for human appetite, not a desire to sell the world something sweet. Or maybe it was the silent store, the trays of stale orange drops, a small business failing by slow, agonizing degrees.
He identified himself—Guillaume for this meeting, and her eyes searched his, to see if he could be trusted. She was, he thought, not a particularly attractive woman, but she had probably never lacked for lovers, being one of those women who understands that attraction hasn’t much to do with it.
“May I take a minute of your time?” he asked.
She looked at him a little sideways—minutes, hours, she had nothing but time. Very slowly she worked a Gauloise free of its pack, tapped one end against her thumbnail, held it in her mouth with thumb and forefinger, handed de Milja a box of matches and leaned toward him so he could light it. “Thank you,” she said.
She opened a drawer in the desk, searched through papers, found an unsealed envelope and handed it to him. “Here it is,” she said.
He took out what looked like a polite note, written in purple ink on bordered paper sold in stationery stores. His eyes ran along the lines, trying to decipher the penmanship. Then, when he realized what he had, he read it through again.
“This is—this is extremely important,” he said.
She nodded in a sort of vague agreement—yes, so it seemed to her. She drew on her Gauloise and blew a plume of smoke at the ceiling.
“Was there a reason you did so much? The occupation?”
“No,” she said. “I am not French,” she added.
“What then?”
“I’m a Pole, though I’ve lived here a long time.”
De Milja came close to responding in Polish. He wanted to—then raged at himself for being so stupid. Guillaume was Guillaume— nobody. “Herault?” he said.
She shrugged. “That was my father’s attempt to fit in.”
“Did he fit in?”
“No,” she said. They were silent for a moment. “I don’t think I’ll tell you any reasons,” she said. “For what I’ve done, that is. I don’t especially believe in reasons.”
De Milja ran his eyes back over the paper. Kampfgeschwader 100, Pathfinder, Knickbein beam. De Milja was stunned at the quality of what he had in hand. He’d gotten the woman’s name from Fedin—an old contact from the late ’30s, nothing very productive, but an address that placed her, quite by accident, on the front line of the German offensive against Britain. Fedin had made the initial contact, then a signal from Vannes reached Paris that meant I have something for you. But this was well beyond anything de Milja had expected.
“Please, Mademoiselle. I must ask you to tell me how you managed this.”
A ghost of a smile passed over the woman’s face. She found his urgency a little bit pleasing. She nodded her head toward the front of the shop. “Veronique,” she said.
“Who?”
“My little clerk.”
She almost laughed out loud, so stupid and lost did he look. Then, when she saw the mist clear, she said, “Yes, that.”
“By design?”
She made a face: who could say? Paused a moment, leaned closer, lowered her voice. “Ugly as sin, poor thing. But for everyone there is someone, and for poor Veronique there is poor Kurt. Eighteen, away from home for the first time, short, homely, with bad teeth and bad eyes. In his unit the lowest of the low: he helps the mechanics who fix the aircraft. I believe engine parts are washed in gasoline. Is that so?”
“Yes.”
“He does mostly that. Red hands the result. But he is a conqueror, Monsieur Whatever-you-call-yourself. And he has discovered, in this shapeless lump of a child, le vrai passion. He drives her, I assure you, to the very edge of sanity. No, beyond.”
“And in bed, he tells her things?”
“No, Monsieur. Men don’t tell women things in bed. Men tell women things when they are trying to get them into bed. To let women know how important they are. Once in bed, the time for telling things is over.”
“But Veronique continues.”
“Yes. She loves Kurt. He is her man, hers alone. National borders are here transcended. You understand?”
“Yes.”
“Of course they do chatter, in the way people do, and she tells me things—just to gossip, just to have something to say. They are innocent, Monsieur.”
De Milja nodded sympathetically.
“Someday, you might be asked to do something for Veronique.”
“What is that?”
“Well, national borders are never transcended. Love doesn’t conquer all. In Veronique’s mind, the Germans will be here for forty years. Should she wait until she’s fifty-nine to go on with life? Of course not. Unfortunately for her, I suspect the end of this war may come sooner than forty years. And then, the women who have made love with the enemy will not fare well. The people here who have collaborated silently, skillfully, the ones who talk but do nothing, they will take it out on the poor Veroniques of the world. And they can be very cruel. When this happens, perhaps I will find you, or somebody like you, and you will try to do something for poor Veronique.”
“How do you know these things?”
“I know. I’m a Pole—it came to me in my mother’s milk. Will you help?”
“If I can, I will,” he said. “In the meantime, stop. Don’t do anything—and don’t permit her to do anything—that could lead to exposure. The most important thing now is that nobody finds out what was discovered.”
It rained in Paris. Slowly, endlessly. The bare branches of the chestnut trees dripped water in the gray light. At five in the afternoon, Anton Stein stared out the window above his coal yard. A freight train moved slowly along the track. Its couplings rattled and banged as it maneuvered—stopped, jerked ahead a few feet, stopped, backed up. The board siding of the freight cars and the cast-iron wheels glistened in the rain.
On his desk, March earnings. They were doing well—Zimmer was implacable. All day long, in his clean gray smock, he tended the business. Spillage. Theft. Truck fuel. Suppliers’ invoices with added charges. Defaulting customers. Margin of profit, date of delivery. Anton Stein made money.
And Captain Alexander de Milja spent it.
Rental of the apartment on the rue A, where a W/T operator enciphered and transmitted, moving like a butterfly among a hundred different bands to elude the Funkabwehr technicians. Rental of the apartment on the rue B, where an alternate W/T operator was based. Rental of the villa in the suburb of C, where a wounded British pilot was in hiding. Not to mention the apartment on the avenue Hoche, each window dressed with jabot and festoon.
He was tired now. Spirit worn away by the tide. Clandestine war since September of 1939—it had gone on too long, there’d been too much of it.
He forced his eyes away from the freight cars, back to a sheet of cheap paper on the desk. Huysmanns’s desk. Scarred oak, burns on the edge where somebody had rested a cigarette, little drawers full of used rubber bands and thumbtacks and dried-out inkpads for stamps.
On the paper, in his own informal code, the first draft of a report to London: at the Luftwaffe base at Vannes was Kampfgeschwader 100, a unit of Pathfinders—pilots who flew along a radio beam, called a Knickbein beam because it had the shape of a dog leg. The job of these Pathfinders was to lead flights of bombers to the target, then drop incendiaries, to light fires for the guidance of the planes behind them.