“Aber naturlich,”Skorzeny answered. “And when we find a cafe, you can order yourself some vichyssoise, too.”
“Vichyssoise?” Jager said, and then, a moment too late. “Oh.Ja. The French gave up before we got down here, and this part of France wasn’t occupied. Then the Lizards came, and they gave up to them, too. They’re good at it.” He grunted. “And a whole lot of them are alive now who would be dead if they’d fought more. Does that make them cowards, or just smarter than we are?”
“Both,” Skorzeny answered. “Me, though, I’d rather stand up on my hind legs and not lie down till somebody knocks me over-and I’ll try and kick the feet out from under him as I’m falling, too.”
Jager thought that over. He slowly nodded. A bell sounded behind him. He stepped aside to let a French policeman on a bicycle roll past. With his kepi and little dark mustache, the fellow looked like a cinema Frenchman. In the carrying basket under the handlebars, he had a couple of long, skinny loaves of bread and a bottle of red wine. Perhaps his mind was more on them than on anything else, for he rode by the Germans without a second glance.
They strode past the little hamlet of Ambialet. A long time ago, a lord had built a castle on a crag that stuck out into the Tarn. Later, a church and a monastery sprang up close by. They were all ruins now, but the hamlet remained.
Not far beyond it, they came to a farmhouse screened off from the road by a stand of willows. Ducks quacked in a pond close by. From off in a barn, a pig grunted. A stocky, stoop-shouldered Frenchman in a straw hat that almost made him look American put down the bucket he was carrying when the two Germans approached.
“Bonjour, monsieur,”Jager said in his halting, heavily accented French.“Avez-vous une cigarette? Peut-etre deux?”
“I regret,monsieur, that I have not even one, let alone two.” The farmer’s shrug was so perfectly Gallic that Jager forgot about the straw hat. The fellow went on, “You will be from Uncle Henri?”
“Oui,”Jager said, completing the recognition phrase. He didn’t know who Uncle Henri was: perhaps a Frenchified version of Heinrich Himmler.
“Come in, both of you,” the farmer said, waving toward the building. “My wife and daughter, they are staying with my brother-in-law down the road for a few days. They do not know why, but they are glad to visit Rene for a time.” He paused. “You may call me Jacques, by the way.”
That didn’t necessarily mean his name was Jacques, Jager noted. Nonetheless, he said,“Merci, Jacques. I am Jean, and this is Francois.” Skorzeny snickered at the alias he’d been given. Francois was a name for a fussy headwaiter, not a scar-faced fighting man.
Jacques’ eyes had heavy lids, and dark pouches under them. They were keen all the same. “You would be Johann and Fritz, then?” he said in German a little better than Jager’s French.
“If you like,” Skorzeny answered in the same language. Jacques’ smile did not quite reach those eyes. He, too, knew aliases when he heard them.
The interior of the farmhouse was gloomy, even after Jacques switched on the electric lamps. Again, Jager reminded himself no one had fought a war in this part of France for generations; the amenities that had been here before 1940 were still likely to work.
Jacques said, “You will be hungry, yes? Marie left a stew I am to reheat for us.” He got a fire going in the hearth and hung a kettle above it. Before long, a delicious aroma filled the farmhouse. Jacques poured white wine from a large jug into three mismatched glasses. He raised his. “For the Lizards-merde.”
They all drank. The wine was sharp and dry. Jager wondered if it would tan his tongue to leather inside his mouth. Then Jacques ladled out the stew: carrots, onions, potatoes, and bits of meat in a gravy savory with spices. Jager all but inhaled his plateful, yet Skorzeny finished ahead of him. When drunk alongside the stew, the wine was fine.
“Marvelous.” Jager glanced over at Jacques. “If you eat this well all the time, it’s a wonder you don’t weigh two hundred kilos.”
“Farming is never easy,” the Frenchman answered, “and it has grown only harder these past few years, with no petrol at hand. A farmer can eat, yes, but he works off his food.”
“What kind of meat is it?” Skorzeny asked, looking wistfully back toward the kettle.
“Wild rabbit.” Jacques spread his hands. “You must know how it is,messieurs. The livestock, it is too precious to slaughter except to keep from starving orpeut-etre for a great feast like a wedding. But I am a handy man with a snare, and so-” He spread his work-gnarled hands.
He made no move to offer Skorzeny more stew, and even the brash SS man did not get up to refill his plate uninvited. Like Jager, he likely guessed Jacques would need what was left to feed himself after the two of them had moved on.
Jager said, “Thank you for putting us up here for the night.”
“Pas de quoi,”Jacques answered. His hand started to come up to his mouth, as if with a cigarette. Jager had seen a lot of people make gestures like that, this past year. After a moment, the Frenchman resumed: “Life is strange,n’est-ce pas? When I was a young man, I fought youBoches, you Germans, at Verdun, and never did I think we could be allies, your people and mine.”
“Marshal Petain also fought at Verdun,” Skorzeny said, “and he has worked closely with the German authorities.”
Jager wondered how Jacques would take that. Some Frenchmen thought well of Petain, while to others he was a symbol of surrender and collaboration. Jacques only shrugged and said, “It is late. I will get your blankets.” He took for granted that soldiers would have no trouble sleeping on the floor. At the moment, Jager would have had no trouble sleeping on a bed of nails.
The blankets were rough, scratchy wool. The one Jager wrapped around himself smelled of a woman’s sweat and faintly of rose water. He wondered whether it belonged to Jacques’ wife or his daughter, and knew he couldn’t ask.
Skorzeny had already started snoring. Jager lay awake a while, trying to remember how long it had been since he’d lain with a woman. Occasional visits to a brothel didn’t really count, except to relieve pressure like the safety valve of a steam engine. The last one that mattered had been Ludmila Gorbunova. He sighed-most of a year now. Too long.
Breakfast the next morning was slabs of bread cut from a long, thin loaf like those the policeman had carried in his bicycle basket. Jager and Skorzeny washed the bread down with more white wine. “You might prefer coffee, I know,” Jacques said, “but-” His Gallic shrug was eloquent.
“By me, wine is plenty good,” Skorzeny said. Jager wasn’t so sure he agreed. He didn’t make a habit of drinking part of his breakfast, and suspected the wine would leave him logy and slow. Skorzeny picked up the loaf from which Jacques had taken slices. “We’ll finish this off for lunch, if you don’t mind.”
His tone said Jacques had better not mind. The Frenchman shrugged again. Jager would have taken the bread, too, but he would have been more circumspect about how he did it. Circumspection, however, did not seem to be part of Skorzeny’s repertoire.
To smooth things over, Jager asked, “How far to Albi, Jacques?”
“Twenty kilometers, perhaps twenty-five,” the farmer answered indifferently. Jager projected a mental map of the territory inside his head. The answer sounded about right. A good day’s hike, especially for a man who was used to letting panzers haul him around.
The sun beat at the back of his neck and Skorzeny’s when they set out. Sweat started running down his cheeks almost at once.The wine, he thought, annoyed. But it was not just the wine. The air hung thick and breathless; he had to push through it, as if through gauze, to move ahead. When the sun rose higher in the sky, the day would be savagely hot.