Well, life was full of possibilities.
Michael followed the French girl, and the forest sheltered them.
2
After more than an hour of fast walking in a southwesterly direction, crossing a few fields and roads with Gaby’s Schmeisser cocked and ready and Michael’s ears pricked for sounds, she said, “We wait here.”
They were in a stand of trees at the edge of a clearing, and Michael could see a single stone farmhouse ahead. The house was a ruin, its roof collapsed; destroyed, perhaps, by an errant Allied bomb, a mortar shell, or German SS troopers hunting partisans. Even the earth around the house had been charred by fire, and a few blackened stubs of trees were all that remained of an orchard.
“You sure you have the right place?” Michael asked her; a pointless question, and her chilly gaze told him so.
“We’re ahead of schedule,” she explained, kneeling down with the Schmeisser across her lap. “We won’t be able to go in for…” She paused while she checked the luminous hands on her wristwatch. “Twelve minutes.”
Michael knelt beside her, impressed by her directional skills. How had she navigated? By the stars, of course, or else she simply knew the route by heart. But though they were apparently where they were supposed to be by a given time, there was nothing in the area but the single destroyed farmhouse. “You must’ve had some experience with tanks,” he said.
“Not really. I had a German lover who was the commander of a tank crew. I learned everything from him.”
Michael lifted his brows. “Everything?”
She glanced quickly at him, then away again; his eyes seemed to glow like the hands of her watch, and they held steady. “It was necessary that I… do my duty for the benefit of my country,” she said, a little shakily. “The man had information about a truck convoy.” She felt him watching her. “I did what I was supposed to do. That’s all.”
He nodded. The man, she’d said. No name, no emotion. This war was as clean as a slashed throat. “I’m sorry about what happened at the village. I-”
“Forget it,” she interrupted. “You’re not to blame.”
“I watched the old man die,” he went on. He’d seen death before, of course. Many times. But the cold precision of Boots’s kicks and stomps still made his insides writhe. “Who was the man who killed him? Harzer called him Boots.”
“Boots is-was-Harzer’s bodyguard. An SS-trained killer. Now that Harzer’s dead, they’ll probably assign Boots to some other officer, perhaps on the Eastern Front.” Gaby paused, staring at a fragile glint of moonlight on the Schmeisser’s barrel. “The old man-Gervaise-was my uncle. He was my last blood relative. My mother, father, and two brothers were killed by the Nazis in 1940.” It was stated as hard fact, without any hint of emotion. The emotion, Michael thought, had been burned out of her as surely as the life in that orchard.
“If I’d known that,” Michael said, “I would have-”
“No, you wouldn’t have,” she told him sharply. “You would have done just as you did, or your mission would be over and you’d be dead. My village would be burned to the ground anyway, and all the people there executed. My uncle knew the risks. He was the man who brought me into the underground.” Her gaze met his. “Your mission is the important thing. One life, ten lives, a village lost-it doesn’t matter. We have a greater purpose.” She looked away from his gleaming, penetrating eyes. If she could tell herself that over and over, it might make death more than senseless, she thought. But deep down in her charred soul, she doubted it.
“It’s time to go in,” Gaby said when she checked her watch again.
They crossed the clearing, Gaby ready with the Schmeisser and Michael sniffing the air. He smelled hay, burned grass, the apple-wine fragrance of Gaby’s hair, but no odor of sweating skin that might’ve meant soldiers hiding in ambush. As Michael followed Gaby into the ruined farmhouse, he caught just a hint of a strange oily smell; a metallic odor, he thought. Oil on metal? She led him through the tangle of broken timbers and stones to a heap of ashes. He found the oily metal smell again, around this ash pile. Gaby knelt down and inserted her hand into the ashes; Michael heard the hinges of a little compartment open. The ashes were not all entirely ashes, but a cleverly painted and arranged mass of camouflaged rubber. Gaby’s fingers found an oiled flywheel, which she turned to the right several revolutions. Then she drew her hand out, and Michael heard the noise of latches being unbolted under the farmhouse floor. Gaby stood up. A hatch smoothly lifted, the rubber ashes piled on top of it. Oil gleamed on metal hinges and gears, and there were wooden steps descending into the earth.
“Entrez,” a dark-haired, sallow young Frenchman said, and motioned Michael down the stairs into, literally, the underground.
Michael entered the hatch, with Gaby following right behind him. Another man, this one older, with a grizzled gray beard, was standing in the passageway ahead, holding a lantern. The first man closed the hatch and spun the flywheel shut from the inside, then threw three latches. The corridor was narrow and low-ceilinged, and Michael had to crouch as he followed the man with the lantern.
Then they came to another descending stairway, this one made of stone. The earthen walls were chunks of rough, ancient rock. At the bottom of the steps was a large chamber and a series of corridors snaking off in different directions. Some kind of medieval fortress, Michael assumed. Light bulbs hung from cables overhead and gave off a dim glow. From somewhere else came whirring noises, like sewing machines at work. On a large table in the chamber, laid out under the light bulbs, was a map; Michael approached it, and saw the streets of Paris. Voices swelled, people talking in another room. A typewriter or coding machine clacked. An attractive older woman came into the chamber with a file folder, which she deposited in one of several filing cabinets. She glanced quickly at Michael, nodded at Gaby, and went back to her business.
“Well, laddie,” someone said in English, a voice like the rasp of a handsaw, “you ain’t a Scotsman, but you’ll have to do.”
Michael had heard heavy footsteps a few seconds before the voice, so he wasn’t startled. He turned, and faced a red-bearded giant in a kilt.
“Pearly McCarren, at your service,” the man said, with a rolling Scots burr that made spittle and steam fly out of his mouth into the chilly underground air. “King of Scottish France. Which is from that wall to the one yonder,” he added, and brayed with laughter. “Hey, André!” he said to the man who’d carried the lantern. “How about breakin’ out a good glass o’ wine for me and me guest, eh?” The man left the room through one of the corridors. “That’s not really his name,” McCarren told Michael, holding his hand to his mouth as if he were confiding a secret, “but I canna pronounce most of their monickers, so I call ’em all André, eh?”
“I see,” Michael said, and had to smile.
“You had a little problem, didn’t ya?” McCarren turned his attention to Gaby. “Bastards been chewin’ up the radio for the last hour. They almost clip your tails?”
“Almost,” she answered in English. “Uncle Gervaise is dead.” She didn’t wait for an expression of sympathy. “So is Harzer, and quite a few other Nazis. Our associate is a good shot. We also took out a tank: a panzerkampfwagen two, bearing the organizational symbol of the Twelfth SS Panzer Division.”
“Good work.” He scribbled a note on a pad, tore off the page, and pressed a little bell beside his chair at the map table. “We’d best let our friends know the SS Panzer boys are prowlin’ around. Those Mark Twos are old machines; they must be scrapin’ the barrel’s bottom.” He handed the note to the woman who’d brought the file folder, and she hurried off again. “Sorry about your uncle,” McCarren said. “He did a helluva fine job. You get Boots?”