In Washington, D.C., Lieutenant Colonel H. V. Rossell leaned his elbows on the scarred wooden desk and stared at the man seated on the other side. Eidenbaugh, Robert F. His fourteenth interview of the day. He knew that if he were charming and likable the candidate would be put at ease, and the consequent forthrightness would help in making a proper decision. But he simply hadn't the strength for charm. He'd been working twenty-hour days since Pearl Harbor, and his initial burst of high-tension energy was long since dissipated. He was out of gas. What he really wanted to do was push his lips into an extended pout and make ishkabibble sounds by flapping them with his fingertips. That would prove everybody right. Since Colonel Donovan had persuaded Roosevelt that America needed an intelligence service, life had come to resemble a lunatic asylum. Rossell had some considerable experience in this work, a career in army intelligence going back ten years. As early as 1937—when war had seemed inevitable to him—he'd run small preparatory operations when his superiors would allow it, stockpiling European clothing, for instance, by purchasing it from incoming refugees, then storing it in a warehouse under squares of cardboard marked DO NOT CLEAN! Because of his foresight, agents going into Europe would, at least, not be dressed by Brooks Brothers.
But if he knew his way around the profession, few others did. Above him were Donovan and a bunch of Ivy League lawyers, bankers, and Wall Street types. They would, he knew, work out well over time. Once these people got going, the Axis powers would be subject to ferocious trickery of every kind, the sorts of things lawyers and bankers might do if they were able to give in to their cruelest fantasies. Now they were being encouraged to do that very thing. Just that morning, a memo had crossed his desk recommending that a million bats be put aboard a submarine, then released off the Japanese coast in daylight, each one equipped with timer and minute incendiary bomb. They would fly into the dark spaces of a million Japanese homes and factories and, he supposed, blow up, spattering everyone in the neighborhood with exploded bat. He could just hear one of his superiors giving him the good word: “Oh, Rossell. Be a good fellow and get me a million bats, will you? By lunch? Thanks loads!”
But that wasn't the worst of it. Donovan—with Hoover and the FBI fighting him every step of the way—was in the process of acquiring an extraordinary zoo of people. “The successful intelligence service,” someone had said, “is one which can best turn eccentricity to its own advantage.” Well, they'd have that, all right. They'd hired Marxists, led by the philosopher Herbert Marcuse. Playwrights—Robert E. Sherwood and others. Academicians, recruited by Archibald MacLeish. John Ford, the film director. A young actor named Sterling Hayden who would, he thought, eventually be sent to fight with Yugoslav partisans. Then there was John Ringling North, of the circus family, and a large, vivacious woman named Julia Child. There was Virginia Hall, about to be parachuted into occupied France with her artificial leg held under one arm lest it break when she landed. The pile of file folders on his desk climbed toward the sky. Tom Braden, Stewart Alsop, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Walt Rostow, Arthur Goldberg. Ilya Tolstoy and Prince Serge Obolensky, the hotel baron married to an Astor. He had them from Standard Oil and Paramount Pictures, he had Mellons and Vanderbilts, Morgans and du Ponts. Union organizers and tailors. He had everything. And more coming in every day.
Meanwhile, they had just been renamed. COI, the Office of the Coordinator of Information, was now to be called the Office of Strategic Services—OSS. Which local wags lately referred to as Oh So Silly, Oh So Secret, and Organization Shush-Shush. Even Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's propaganda minister, had got in on the fun. Knowing that the OSS offices were next to the experimental labs at the National Institute of Health, he had stated in a recent radio broadcast that the organization was composed of “fifty professors, twenty monkeys, ten goats, twelve guinea pigs—and a staff of Jewish scribblers!” Hey, Dr. Goebbels, Rossell thought, you left out the bats.
Slowly, his mind returned to business and he realized that the poor soul across from him probably thought he was being tested in a cold-eyed staredown, not a daydreaming contest. Rossell was in his late forties, with gray hair cut in a military brush, big shoulders and thick arms. His tie was pulled down, jacket off and shirtsleeves rolled up in useless defiance of a steam radiator that would grow orchids if they let it. And here it was May. Couldn't somebody get them to turn the goddamn thing off?
“Well,” he finally said to the man across from him, “say something.” If you couldn't manage charm, discomfort would serve.
Eidenbaugh stared at him for a long moment, then, from a face composed in utter seriousness, came a singsong “M-i-s, s-i-s, s-i-p-p-i.”
“Oh yeah?” Rossell said. “Is that supposed to get you a job here?”
“No sir,” Eidenbaugh answered, “that's supposed to help you spell Mississippi.”
To Rossell, the laugh felt better than a week of sleep and seemed to serve the same purpose. He launched himself—once again, into the breach!—into the usual interview format. This Eidenbaugh wasn't so bad. He wasn't much to look at, but he had a nimble mind. Would he do the job? Difficult to guess until the situation presented itself. But he found himself enjoying the man, and that weighed heavily in his favor. One of those slippery qualities, hard to quantify, that could really count in the world he was about to enter.
Then there was luck.
It just so happened that while the two of them chattered away, a fly settled on the edge of Rossell's desk. Slowly, he picked up a file folder—it happened to be that of Merian C. Cooper, producer of the film King Kong—and swatted it dead.
“See that?” he asked.
“Yes sir.”
“That, son, is technical intelligence at work.
“I always get 'em,” he continued, “because I know that flies take off backward. So you swat in back of them, see?”
“Yes sir. Will I be allowed to swat Hitler, sir?”
Rossell rubbed his eyes for a moment. Christ, he was tired, and he looked like hell. But he didn't feel so bad. He really liked to do the fly trick—it put him in a good mood. “I think so, son,” he said. “We just may allow you that privilege.”
In Paris, in the early hours of June 11, 1940, Khristo Stoianev lay awake in his cell in the Santé prison and planned his “escape.” Staring at the opaque window with the tiny hole in its upper corner, he smoked up a week's tobacco ration and watched the short, summer darkness fade into early light. In two days' time it would be thirty-six months that he had spent in captivity.
He could bear no more.
His had been, he knew, a classic descent. He had braced his mind early on, willed himself to meet imprisonment as he had met other events in his life. “A man can survive anything.” He did not know where he'd heard it but he believed it, believed in it, a religion of endurance. Thus he had taken his formless days and nights and imposed on them a rigid system of obligations. Exercise—physical strength can forestall psychological collapse, a universal and timeless prisoner's axiom. Use the mind. He created a private algebra of propositions and wrestled with their solutions, mining his past life for usable circumstance: How long would it take for a man carrying his own food and water to walk in a straight line from Vidin to Sofia? From mental images of maps he contrived a route, crossing roads, streams and mountains, estimated the weight of water and food, determined the point of efficiency that lay somewhere between thirst and starvation and exertion of strength: the goal of the exercise was to arrive at the outskirts of Sofia carrying no provisions, crawling the final hundred feet.
Keep a diary. They would give him no paper, so he used the surfaces of opened-up matchboxes he bought from the prison store with his meager stipend, and kept records in pin-scratched hieroglyphs—a plus or minus sign, for instance, indicated success or failure in the two-hour mental exercise period for that day. Control is everything. He permitted himself only one hour a day for daydreaming, which was always erotic, violently colored, tones and textures scrupulously perfected by his imagination. Retain any connection at all with the world. Every moment of his time in the exercise yard he spent talking with other prisoners. Dédé the pimp from Montparnasse. Kreuse the wife-murderer from Strasbourg. He did not care who they were or what they said—to connect, that was what mattered. Read. Religious tract or boys' adventure, he sucked them dry of whatever particle of entertainment they could provide. Regret will kill you. A concept he embraced to a point where any thought that presented itself for contemplation had to be inspected for traces of hidden anger or sorrow before he would allow his mind to pursue it.
For the first year, as 1937 faded into 1938, the regime worked. He did not think of the future, he did not think of freedom, and achieved a level of self-discipline he had never imagined possible. But time—hours that became days that became months—was a killer of extraordinary stealth, and his spirit slowly failed him. He began to die. He watched it with slow horror, as a man will observe an illness that consumes his life. He would come to himself suddenly and realize that his mind had been on a journey into a violent universe of shimmering colors and bizarre shapes. He understood what was happening to him, but his understanding counted for nothing. Without the daily texture of existence to occupy it, he learned, the human soul wavers, wanders, begins to feed upon itself, and, in time, disintegrates. He saw them in the exercise yard, the clear-eyed, the ones who had died inside themselves. Thus, at last, he came upon the prisoner's timeless and universal conclusion: there is nothing worse than prison.
From the gossip in the exercise yard, he knew that Wehrmacht columns were approaching Paris and that the country would fall in a matter of days. In shame, he prayed for this to happen. Bulgaria had joined Germany, Italy, Hungary and Romania in an alliance against Western Europe. He was, no matter the Stateless Person designation of the Nansen Commission, a Bulgarian national, thus nominally an ally of the Germans. When they took Paris, he would send them a message and offer his services. Initially, he would make his approach as Petrov, the former waiter, imprisoned for striking a blow against the Bolshevists. They would approve of that, he knew, despite their treaty of convenience with Stalin, and would more than likely accept him on that basis. If, perchance, they knew who he really was, he would brazen it out. Yes, he had fought them in Spain. But witness, Herr Oberst, this change of heart. Witness this attack on the NKVD itself—could they doubt his sincerity after that? He marveled at how the past could be refigured to suit the present, at how fragile reality truly was when you started to twist it.
Once he was out of prison, he would return to Spain, a neutral country, by deceit—a notional mission, perhaps, that he would lead them into assigning him—or by underground means: the mountains or the sea. He thought of the little towns hidden back in the hills, with too many young women who could not find a husband after the slaughter of the civil war. They would not look too closely at him, he was sure, if he worked hard. That was how they measured people down there and to that—if the blessed day ever came—he was more than equal.
But, on the night of June 12, everything changed.
At dusk, the mashed lentils and the gritty bread were shoved through the Judas port and his “quarter” filled up with drinking water. Between the mound of lentils and the tin plate lay a slip of paper.
In roman letters it said BF 825. Then the numerals 2:30.
The shock of it nearly knocked him to the floor.
For the intervening hours he dared not sit down, pacing the small cell and hurling his body about as he pivoted at the far wall. Then the door whispered open to reveal a man in black who stood in the shadowed corridor and waited to enter. Two words, spoken quietly, came from the darkness: “Khristo Stoianev?”
“Yes,” he answered.
The man stepped forward. He was a priest. Not the prison chaplain, a fat Gascon with a wine-reddened face, but a thin, ageless man with paperlike skin whose hands hung motionless at his sides.
“Is there anything here you will want?”
He grabbed his matches, a few shreds of tobacco folded in paper, his two letters and the matchbox diaries. He had nothing else.
“Let us go,” the priest said.
Together they walked through the darkened corridors, past the night sounds of imprisoned men. There were no guards to be seen. All the doors that would have normally blocked their path were ajar. In the reception area, a long wooden drawer sat at the center of a rough table. He found his old clothing and all the things that had been in his pockets on the day of his arrest. Also, a thick packet of ten-franc notes.
The priest took him to the front entry of the prison, then pushed at the grilled door set into one of the tall gates. The iron hinges grated briefly as it swung wide. For a moment, the city beyond the prison overwhelmed him with the sounds and smells of ordinary life and, for that instant freedom itself was palpable, as though he could touch it and see it and capture it in his hands. Then his eyes filled with tears and he saw the world in a blur.
“Blagodarya ti, Otche.” He needed, in that moment, to speak the words in his own language. Then added, in French, “It means ‘thank-you, Father.' ”
The priest closed his eyes and nodded, as though to himself. “Go with God,” he said, as Khristo walked through the door.
In the autumn of 1943, on a cold October night with a quarter moon, Lieutenant Robert F. Eidenbaugh parachuted into the Vosges mountains of southeastern France.
He landed in a field north of Épinal, breaking the big toe of his left foot—by doubling it over against the ground when he landed with his foot in the wrong position—and splitting the skin of his left index finger from tip to palm—he had no idea how. Limping, he chased down the wind-blown chute, wrestled free of the harness straps, and paused to listen to the fading drone of the Lancaster that circled the field, then turned west toward the OSS airbase at Croydon. From a sheath strapped to his ankle he took a broad-bladed knife and began digging at the ground in order to bury the chute. Fifteen minutes later, sweat cooling in the mountain chill, he was still hard at it. This was not the same turf he had encountered in practice burials at the old CCC—Civilian Conservation Corps—camp in Triangle, Virginia, a few miles east of Manassas, where he had trained. This grass was tough and rooty and anchored well below the surface of the ground. At last he abandoned the knife and began ripping up large sods with his hands—holding his split index finger away from the work—until he'd exposed a jagged oval of dark soil. Next he gathered up the silk and shrouds of the parachute, forced the bulk into a shallow depression, and covered it with a thin layer of dirt. He laid the sods back over the dirt and stamped them into place, then walked away a few feet to see what it looked like. It looked like someone had just buried a parachute.
Typically, there would have been a reception committee on the ground and their leader would have bestowed the chute—the silk was immensely valuable—on one of his men, a spoil of war bestowed for bravery in a tradition as old as the world. But this was a “cold” drop. There were no maquisards triangulating the drop zone with bonfires, there was no container of Sten guns and ammunition dropped along with him—to be carried away by men and women on bicycles—and he had no radio. The mission, code-named KIT FOX, called for him to contact a loosely organized group of French resistance fighters in the village of Cambras, direct their sabotage efforts, turn them into a true réseau—headquarters—for underground operations, and extend, if possible, a courrier—secret mail system—throughout that part of the Vosges. His contact for supply was code-named ULYSSE (after the Homeric hero Ulysses), a senior officer of the résistance and his one resource on the ground, based in the small city of Belfort, not far from Switzerland. His only direct line of communication with OSS was to be coded messages personnels from the foreign service of the BBC.
His true mission was, in fact, unknown to him.
He was not alone in the area. There were several British communication and sabotage nets nearby, but he had been briefed—twice, first at OSS headquarters in London, then at the MI6 center in Battersea, located at what had once been the Royal Victoria Patriotic Asylum for the Orphan Daughters of Soldiers and Sailors Killed in the Crimean War—to stay well away from them. Both American and British briefers had been emphatic on that point.
Which left Robert Eidenbaugh alone in a French field with a broken toe and a split finger. His hands were blackened with dried blood and French earth, and he was hobbling badly. A toe was almost a silly thing to hurt, but the pain made him grind his teeth on every step. He thought to bind up the finger with his handkerchief but decided against it. He disliked the idea of a white cloth flashing in the darkness as he moved about. He set off for Cambras—eight miles along a series of mountain ridges—on the narrow road a mile from the drop zone. His index finger throbbed and continued to ooze blood. How the hell had he done that? He leaned on a maple tree whose dry leaves rattled in the night breeze and took off his right shoe, then bound his sock around the finger, cutting off a piece of shoelace to secure the binding. He had, he realized with some horror, nearly removed his left shoe, which would have been an error because his toe had swollen so badly that he would never have been able to get the shoe back on. Limping, he held his zip-up briefcase under his right arm and moved through the darkness toward Cambras.
His hat, suit, tie, shirt, socks and underwear were all well worn, and all of French manufacture. The suit had been altered by a French tailor at the OSS clothing depot on Brook Street in London. His toilet articles were also French, and the pistol in his briefcase was Belgian—a Fabrique Nationale GP35 automatic, essentially a licensed 9 mm Browning with a thirteen-round magazine. He had been warned never to carry it in public during daylight hours. His cover name was Lucien Bruer, accented on the final syllable in the French manner, and he was supposedly the sales representative of a Belgian company selling agricultural implements and fertilizers. He had been born on the French island of Martinique, raised in Toulon, a bachelor. His documents were quite good, he'd been told, for examination by French police or German street patrols. Should he fall into the hands of an intelligence section—Gestapo or SD—however, that would be that. We've learned, they'd told him, that the sooner you run after capture, the better your chances of a successful escape.
He did not intend to be captured. He did not intend to mingle with Germans. He did not intend to be “brave”—had in fact been specifically cautioned against it. He would move cautiously in daylight, at most another French face in a French countryside, and play the game at night. A few wild souls back in Virginia had been eager to crawl about and slit throats. Their time would come, but for the moment they either trained their days away or disappeared back into regular service units.
For most of the night he walked alone on the road—barely two lanes wide, with no center line—built of whitish pebbled aggregate with ragged edges bordered by tall weeds. In some places it was frost-rippled from the previous winter; in others, the lush roadside growth had cracked the paving. He saw the brief silhouette of a hunting owl. Something whispered away from his shoe through the tall grass. Then, as the moon waned, he heard a distant engine and hobbled quickly to cover. He listened intently to the two-stroke sputter of the engine and decided it was a motorcycle. He was correct. Watched the German dispatch rider go by, sighting on him with a sockbound index finger and silently mouthing bam just at the proper moment, then heard the sound fade into the distance in a symphony of gear changes. No need to shift that much, he thought. The German, alone on the road, was playing with his machine, lying low over the handlebars like a racing driver. But he too, leading the rider for a single perfect shot, had been playing. That would change.
What caught his attention, however, in the reality of that first, nebulous contact with the enemy, was the intimacy of it. The meaning of his job now came to him in bold letters for the first time—what he was really going to do and how it would feel to do it. Professional soldiering he respected—where would the Allies be without a corps of trained officers?—but he could never be more than an imposter in that world, his personality was not made for uniforms. He had, in civilian life, competed in a world of commonplace weapons: typewriters, telephones, perceptions, insights. In that world he had neither won nor lost, but now the battle was rejoined, with the prize for winning or the cost of losing vastly increased.
The British, believing their social system and its exigencies prepared them for clandestine life, had their doubts about the ability of the American personality to adapt to a world where nothing was quite what it seemed. Were these blunt and forthright people capable of subtlety, deception, the artful ruse? Some thought not. But they had not lived and trained with Robert Eidenbaugh and his colleagues. They did not entirely understand that the dark side of the American personality was the adventurer's side and that a time of war was the perfect climate for its flowering.
Maquis meant “brush,” and that was pretty much the story at Cambras. In first light he'd found the chipped stone mile marker on the inner curve of the road, heard, a few minutes later, the sound of a woodcutter at work in the forest—recognition signal number one—then saw a pile of cow dung, confirming the first signal, by a dirt path that wound up the mountainside to the village.
Cambras, backlit by a cold mountain sky, was a mud square surrounded by a handful of stone cottages with tightly shuttered windows and a rust-stained fountain with a tattered hen standing motionless atop the spigot, its feathers ruffled by the breeze. There were several small, brownish dogs, who glared at him unpleasantly from a safe distance, but no people. The village smelled like damp earth and pig manure. Eidenbaugh suddenly recalled a family outing to the mountains of the Var region, north of Toulon, where at lunchtime they had encountered just such a village. He could still see the look on his mother's face as she'd said, “Not here, Arthur.”
The Cambras maquis trickled from the doors of the cottages and formed up, more or less, in the square. There was a period of awkward silence, then they began to introduce themselves. There were the Vau brothers, both tall and hulking with spiky blond hair, clearly the village bullies and, he thought, a little slow. Henri Veul, called Sablé—Sandy—watchful and silent, a shotgun slung, barrel down, diagonally across his back. La Brebis—the ewe—in fact Marie Bonet, a stocky, young woman whose broad forehead and tiny eyes suggested the face of a sheep. And Vigie, which meant “lookout man,” the youngest, perhaps sixteen. The Vau brothers, he thought, were no more than nineteen.
“Lucien?” It was Alceste Vau, the senior brother, who spoke.
“Oui,” he said.
He hadn't any idea what they'd expected, but he slowly began to understand that they found him all too mortal. They were disappointed. They had probably anticipated a ten-foot-tall Texan bristling with machine guns and breathing fire. Well, he thought, too bad. They had instead a rather lean, plain young man, formerly an advertising copywriter, with a sock wound around a bloody finger and a bare right ankle. Probably, he thought, we deserve each other.
They took him into one of the houses and announced him as Lucien. Breakfast was cabbage fried with fat bacon and hunks of heavy bread washed down with cups of chicory. An older man, Gilbert, and his youngish wife served l'Américain and the Cambras maquis. After the meal, a grandmother appeared, five feet tall and swathed in black, and examined his finger, sucked her teeth in sympathy, and applied a healing paste of pounded lizards.
Finger rebound with strips of gray cloth, he headed outside to use the stone lean-to in the backyard. As he left, his host mumbled something about the American's learning to faire le cent-onze—to make one hundred eleven. He knew the expression, which referred to the marks of three fingers down a wall. But they laughed in vain. The parting gift of his commanding officer had been twenty squares of French newspaper, wedged in his pocket at the moment of their final handshake.
It was a war of mischief.
That became apparent in the week that followed his arrival. Gilbert, in whose house he lived, said one evening that the people of Cambras had “always hated those bastards down there.” It was the contempt of mountain people for flatlanders, and it would not have been unusual to find such sentiments in parts of Tennessee or Kentucky, similarly expressed. Down there meant Épinal, St.-Dié, and the small towns between. Down there meant tax collectors and municipal authorities and Gendarmerie and all those blood-sucking leeches who made a poor man's life a misery. Between Cambras and down there was a kind of truce, worked out over a long time, the flatlanders silently agreeing to bother the people of Cambras only a little, and the mountain people accepting just about that much botherment. They lived with each other—just.
When, however, you added a heavy-handed Teutonic authority to this chemistry, a certain amount of hell was bound to break loose. The people of Cambras now took it as a divine mission to bother the schleuhs, as they called them, while avoiding too much interest from those they called la geste. The Gestapo. The French version of the name carried with it a certain amount of irony—bold deed—but it was quite clear to everyone that these Gestapo people were better left alone. They had made that evident early on. Had then taken to strutting about in leather coats and tearing around the roads in Grosser Mercedes sedans. Here we are, they said. Try your luck.
So, in Cambras, until Lucien showed up, they'd had to content themselves with mischief, testing always to see what the reaction might be. A mistake was painful. When Vigie had somehow contrived to obtain a concussion grenade, Alceste Vau and the others had snuck inside the perimeter of a Panzer division encampment near Épinal and dropped it into a septic tank that served the officers' latrine—just about the time it was in full use. Judging from the noise level inside the barrack, the result had been spectacular. Fountains. And, better yet, there'd been no response from the Germans. But when Sablé had become obsessed by an obnoxious poodle—the adored pet of a headquarters Feldwebel, who spoke German babytalk to it on the street—and had blown the thing's fluffy head apart with an old army pistol stolen from Gilbert, the local pharmacist and his wife had been stood against a wall. Reprisal. The townspeople took the orphans in, but they had a good notion of who had done it, and Sablé had to visit relatives in another village for a time. They'd learned that angry people are dangerous, that one couldn't be sure what they'd do, especially when the means to a hard lesson were so near at hand—the right word in the right ear was all it would have taken.
In that same week, Eidenbaugh began to have a feel for the currents that ran beneath the surface of village life. There was a young girl, perhaps fifteen, who lived with Gilbert and his family. Cecille, she was called, a poor thing treated as servant or dishonored cousin by the rest of the household. Heavy, with a wan, immobile face, she stared at the floor when spoken to. She had come visiting one night, approaching his straw pallet in the corner of the eating room and standing there until he awoke, suddenly, startled by an apparition in a soiled flannel nightdress. He had sent her away—in kind fashion, he hoped—for the briefers had been crystal clear on this point, especially the aristocratic Englishman—known only as Major F.—who had lived for years in Paris. “Village life is sexually quite complex, dear boy, don't be drawn in,” the British officer had cautioned. And it soon became obvious that he'd been right. Cecille was visited, on successive nights, by Sablé and by Daniel Vau, the younger brother. Daniel, in addition, looked at Gilbert's youngish wife in a quite explicit way. Eidenbaugh hadn't any idea how Gilbert reacted to it—he seemed not to notice.
Meanwhile, he familiarized himself with his surroundings, spent a good deal of his time walking the fields and forests around Cambras, learning the trails from La Brebis and Vigie, and listening each night to the messages personnels on the wireless, which held an honored position on a table in the center of the room. The volume of traffic surprised him, though a portion of it was certainly dross, designed to mislead the Germans as to the actual level of underground activity. Finally, ten days after he'd landed in the field, the words crackled from the radio: Limelight, la théâtre est fermé. His activation signal. He told Gilbert he would be away for a time, and the man offered to accompany him. “Now that you are here,” he said, “it is all different. Nothing against the young ones, they are the patriots of Cambras, but I am a patriot of France, a veteran of the war. The schleuhs gassed me at Verdun.” Eidenbaugh thought about the offer for a moment—by the rules, he was supposed to go alone—but there was something of a test in Gilbert's manner, and he decided to trust the man. “Unless you are monumentally stupid or terribly unlucky,” the briefers had told him, “the Germans won't catch you. On the other hand, the chances of being betrayed, for any number of reasons, political or otherwise, are better than one would like.”
But he had to trust somebody, so he trusted Gilbert.
The train ride from Épinal to Belfort was nasty—cold and sweaty at once—and he vowed not to do it again. In the aisle was a great press of bodies, including German soldiers and airmen, making for two hours of sour breath, wet wool, a baby that wouldn't shut up, vacant faces, tired eyes, and icy drafts that blew through spaces between the boards of the ancient wagon-lit. Vintage 1914, he thought. A good deal of French rolling stock had traveled east to Germany—to be refitted for the different gauge—then sent on to Wehrmacht units near Moscow, there to vanish forever.
It took them two hours to travel forty-two miles, over oft-damaged and repaired track, shunted aside for flatcars carrying artillery pieces to the Atlantic coast, unable to attain much speed because of coal adulterated by sand and gravel. Gilbert, however, turned out to be a traveling companion of great comfort, prattling away the whole time about the health of his pigs and the price of cheese and “Lucien's” mother—supposedly Gilbert's sister—and every sort of mindless gossip that made for soothing cover and got the journey over with as quickly as possible. For his part, Eidenbaugh grunted and nodded, went along with the game, and acted as though he were pretending to listen to his boring uncle.
At both the Épinal and Belfort stations—especially the latter, which was close to Switzerland and thus a magnet for just about anything in occupied Europe that wasn't nailed down—la geste was much in evidence, pointedly in the business of watching. To Eidenbaugh they had the feel of provincial police inspectors, stocky and middle-aged, clumsy looking in their high-belted leather coats, and very stolid. Their eyes never stopped searching, a stare beyond rudeness that picked your life apart from subtle clues almost absurdly evident to their experienced gaze. Clearly a game but, just as clearly, a game they were good at. It scared Eidenbaugh so badly that a muscle ticked inside his cheek. When they saw something—what?—one of them would snap his fingers and beckon the individual over for a document check, holding the paper up to the white sky above the station platform. Gilbert, bless his heart, faltered not a whit, blabbering him past la geste and the usual police checkpoints with the story of his maman insisting that the roof be retiled, just at planting time, not a seed in the ground, and rain coming. But, Gilbert shrugged, one must obey the maman. What else could one do?
It was not the usual Gilbert who went to Belfort. The usual Gilbert sported a permanent gray stubble of whisker beneath a beat-up old beret, layers of shapeless sweaters, baggy wool pants, and rubber boots well mucked from the farmyard. The Belfort Gilbert, understanding without being told that he was to be no part of the business there, had shaven himself raw and produced a Sunday suit that wore its age proudly. In the street outside the station, he bade Eidenbaugh farewell and went off whistling, with a light step. Clearly, his mission in Belfort was a romantic one.
Contact procedures for ULYSSE called for a visit to the Bureau de Poste near the railroad station. Eidenbaugh stood in line, at last approached the counter attended by a woman in her fifties with two chins, blazing lipstick, and an immense nest of oily black hair. He pushed a letter across the marble counter and requested six stamps in addition. The woman barely glanced at him, weighing the letter—addressed to a certain name in a certain town—and tearing six stamps off a sheet with bureaucratic ceremony. He looked at the stamps, an occupation issue prominently featuring the new national motto that, the Germans insisted, had now replaced Libertà, egalité, fraternità—travail, famille, patrie. Work, family, and fatherland. In the corner of one stamp was a lightly penned address.
This turned out to be a boucherie chevaline—horsemeat butcher—in a working-class neighborhood an hour's walk from the center of town. There he was waited on by a girl of nineteen or so, in hairnet and white butcher apron, nonetheless beautiful, her hands bright red from handling iced meat. “Do you have any pâté of rabbit?” he asked, naming a product never sold in such a store. She didn't miss a beat. “You can't buy that here,” she said. “Well,” he answered, “my wife craves it and she is pregnant.” “Ah,” she said, “you must return in twenty minutes, we might have some then.” He circled the neighborhood—it was better to keep moving; hanging about in cafés, if you weren't local, drew too many eyes—and returned on the minute. “So,” the girl said, “perhaps we have some in the back.” He went through the door she indicated, found himself in a coldroom amid rows of hanging quarters on ceiling hooks. Ulysse appeared at the other end of the central aisle, his breath steaming in the cold.
Ulysse was in his fifties, handsome and silver-haired, clearly an aristocrat, in a finely cut gray suit with an overcoat worn around his shoulders like a cape.
“Who are you, then?” he asked. It was city French he spoke, each word shaped as though it meant something, not the fast patois of the countryside.
“Lucien.”
“Yes? And who am I?”
“Ulysse.”
“And where do I live?”
“At the Château Bretailles, overlooking the river Dordogne.”
“Would that I did,” he sighed. “Papers?”
Eidenbaugh handed them over. Ulysse spent some time thumbing through the pages. “Excellent,” he said. He handed back the papers and called out, “Very well, Albert.”
It was cleverly done. Eidenbaugh never saw “Albert.” There was some motion to one side of him that caused the red haunches to sway on their hooks, then the sound of a shutting door. He assumed there had been a gun aimed at him.
“Suspicion abounds,” Ulysse said lightly. “Forgive the surroundings,” he added, rubbing his hands against the cold, “but it does keep meetings short.”
“Not too short, one hopes,” Eidenbaugh said, nodding toward the area where the gunman had stood. He had never, to his knowledge, had a gun sighted on him, and he was faintly unsettled by it.
Ulysse smiled thinly. “Where better than a boucherie chevaline? One leaves this uncertain life with, at least, one suspicion confirmed.”
Eidenbaugh laughed. Ulysse nodded politely, very nearly a bow, acknowledging appreciation of the jest. “What will it be, then?” he asked.
“The usual. Stens, ammunition—enough for training as well as normal use—plastique, cyclonite, taconite, time pencils. A few hand grenades, perhaps.”
“How many maquis are there?”
“Five. Probably six.”
“Not enough, Lucien. You must recruit.”
“Is that safe?”
“Hardly. But you'll take losses—everyone does. Say twelve new recruits to start. Ask your people, they'll know whose heart beats for France. What have they right now? ”
“Rabbit guns. An old pistol. A few cans of watered gasoline.”
“Dear, dear, that won't win the war.”
“No.”
“You shall have it, but wait for your message personnel before you move. Understood?”
“Yes.”
“And the drop zone as agreed?”
“I've been there. It looks good to me.”
“There will be a courier for the date. You won't see him. Anything else?”
“Will I be in radio communication? In the future?”
“In time, Lucien, but not now. The German radio réparage is too good. They have mobile receivers that move about the countryside, and they'll find you quicker than you think. Besides, once you are in contact with your base, they will want things, all sorts of things—you'll find yourself counting utility poles day and night. I would suggest that you enjoy your independence while you have it.”
“Very well.”
“I am certain that they are working on the radio problem, and once you have one, it will be something dependable. And safe.”
“I see.”
“By the way, why are you limping? Part of your legend? Or have you injured yourself?”
As far as Eidenbaugh knew, Ulysse had not seen him limp. Most likely he had been watched all the way to the contact. “Broke a toe,” he said, “when I landed.”
“Do you need a doctor?”
“No. It will heal by itself—you can't splint a toe.”
“Well, a limp is distinctive, so try and stay off it if you can.”
“I'll do that.”
“Good-bye, then. See you another time.”
They shook hands. At Ulysse's indication, he used a door that opened onto an alley behind the shop.