He shook his head with sorrow. “So,” he said, “so then what. You step into it, if you’re a certain sort. But then you’re taking sides, and you’ve written yourself down for an appointment with the butchers. There’s a waiting list—but they’ll get around to you, never fear. Christ, look at me, killed by my own side.” He paused a moment, then said, “Damn fine bomb, though, even so. Made in Birmingham or somewhere. Didn’t hit any factories, this one didn’t. But it settled with the Double Eagle club once and for all. And it settled with General Fedin.”
Fedin laughed, then his mood changed. “Listen, I know all about what you did on the docks that night. Running off to die because you couldn’t stand to live in a bad world. What the hell did you think you were doing? You can’t do that, you can’t resign.” He thought a moment, then said sternly, “That’s not for you, boy. Not for you.”
He sighed, wandered a little, said something, but too quietly for de Milja to hear. De Milja leaned closer. “What did you say?”
“I want to rest for a minute, but don’t let me go yet,” Fedin said.
De Milja sat back, hands on knees, in the gloom of the darkened church. He looked at his watch: just after one in the morning. Now the night was very quiet. He sensed somebody nearby, turned to see a woman standing next to him. She had gray hair, hastily pinned up, wore a dark, ill-fitting suit, had a stethoscope around her neck. She stared at Fedin for a long moment, knelt by his side and drew the blanket up over his face.
“Wait,” de Milja said. “What are you doing?” She stood, then put a hand on his shoulder. He felt warmth enter him, as though the woman had done this so often she had contrived a single gesture to say everything that could be said. Then, after a moment, she took her hand off and walked away.
17 April. 3:20 a.m. West of Bourges.
Bonneau drove the rattletrap farm truck, Jeanne-Marie sat in the middle, de Milja by the window. They drove with the headlights off, no more than twenty miles an hour over the dirt farm roads. The truck bounced and bucked so hard de Milja shut his mouth tight to keep from cracking a tooth.
Three-quarter moon, the fields visible once the eyes adjusted. With airplanes on clandestine missions, you fought the war by the phases of the moon. “The Soulier farm,” Jeanne-Marie said in a whisper. Bonneau hauled the wheel over and the old truck shuddered and swayed into a farmyard. The dogs were on them immediately, barking and yelping and jumping up to leave muddy paw marks on the windows.
A huge silhouette appeared in the yard, the shadows of dogs dancing away from its kicking feet as the barking turned to whining. A shutter banged open and a kerosene lamp was lit in the window of the farmhouse. The silhouette approached the truck. “Bonneau?”
“Yes.”
“We’re all ready to go, here. Come and take a coffee.”
“Perhaps later. The rendezvous is in forty minutes and we’ve got to walk across the fields.”
The silhouette sighed. “Don’t offend my wife, Bonneau. If you do, I can reasonably well guarantee you that the Germans will be here for generations.”
Jeanne-Marie whispered a curse beneath her breath.
“What? Who is that? Jeanne-Marie? Ma biche—my jewel! Are you going to war?” The silhouette laughed, Bonneau put his forehead on his hands holding the steering wheel. To de Milja he said, “Soulier was my sergeant in the tank corps.” Then, to the silhouette at the truck window, “You’re right, of course, a coffee will be just the thing.”
They entered the farmhouse. The stove had been lit to drive off the night chill. On a plank table there was a loaf of bread and a sawtooth knife on a board, butter wrapped in a damp cloth, and a bottle of red wine. Madame Soulier stood at the stove and heated milk in a black iron pot. “We just got this from Violet,” she said.
De Milja teetered dangerously on the edge of asking who Violet was—then from the corner of his eye caught Jeanne-Marie’s discreet signal, a two-handed teat-pulling gesture.
Madame Soulier gathered the skin off the top of the milk with a wooden spoon, then whacked the spoon on the rim of the zinc-lined kitchen sink to send it flying. “That’s for the devil,” she muttered to herself.
De Milja knew this coffee—it was the same coffee, black, bitter, searing hot, he’d drunk in the Volhynia before going hunting on autumn mornings. He held the chipped cup in both hands. The cities were different in Europe; the countryside was very much the same.
“And the Clarais cousins? They’re coming?” Bonneau said.
Soulier shrugged. It scared de Milja a little, the quality of that shrug. He understood it, he feared, all too well—the Clarais cousins hadn’t shown up where they’d promised to be since the spring of 1285, likely tonight would be no different. Jeanne-Marie’s face remained immobile, perhaps the Clarais cousins were not crucial to the enterprise but had been asked for other reasons.
“Townspeople,” Soulier said to him, a confidential aside that explained everything.
“Better without them?” de Milja asked.
“Oh yes, no question of that.”
Soulier sucked up the last of his coffee and emitted a steamy sigh of pleasure. He rose from the table, pushing with his hands on the plank surface, then said, “Must have a word with the pig.”
When he returned, the aroma came with him. He stopped at the open door, wiped the muck off his boots, then entered, his arms full of rifles. He laid them out on the kitchen table and proceeded to strip off the oiled paper that had protected them. He dumped an old tin can on the table, moving bullets with a thick forefinger, and counted to eighteen. “Souvenirs of the war,” he said to de Milja.
There were four rifles, Soulier and Bonneau each took one. Jeanne-Marie wasn’t expected to use such things, and de Milja declined. He carried a 9 mm Italian automatic that had found its way to him, part of the Anton Stein persona, but he had no intention of shooting at anybody.
Soulier examined one of the rifles. “We kept these with us in the tank just in case,” he said.
Just in case, de Milja thought, the 1914 war started up again. They were bolt-action rifles, with five-round magazines, and far too many soldiers in the French infantry had carried them in 1940.
De Milja looked meaningfully at his watch. Soulier said fondly, “Ah my friend, do not concern yourself too much. We’re not in the city now, you know. Life here happens in its own time.”
“We’ll have to explain that to the pilot,” de Milja said.
Soulier laughed heartily—sarcasm was of absolutely no use with him. “There’s no point in worrying about that,” he said. “These contraptions have never yet been on time.”
The BBC Message Personnel—delivered in a cluster of meaningless phrases to deny the Germans analysis of traffic volume—had been broadcast forty-eight hours earlier. In the afternoon, visit the cathedral at Rouen. Then confirmed, a day later, by the BBC’s playing Django Reinhardt’s “In a Sentimental Mood” at a specified time.
They had avoided offending the hospitality of Madame Soulier, but the Bonneau reception committee was now behind schedule. They tried riding their bicycles across the countryside, but it was too dark, and most of the time they had to walk, following cattle paths that wound around the low hills, soaking their feet when the land turned to marsh, sweating with effort in the cold night air.
De Milja had been right, they were late getting to the field Jeanne-Marie had chosen. But Soulier was right too—the contraption had not been on time. A triumph of what was called System D, D for the verb débrouiller, to muddle through, to manage somehow. First used to describe the French railway system’s response to supply obligations in the war of 1914, it explained, in a few syllables, the French method of managing life.