Jackdaws

“Charlie Standish—of course!” Flick remembered another fair boy in tweeds, taller and slimmer than Helicopter, but probably no cleverer-he had not taken a degree. Charlie spoke fluent French, she recalled—something they had had in common.

“You came to our house in Gloucestershire once, actually.”

Flick recalled a weekend in a country house in the thirties, and a family with an amiable English father and a chic French mother. Charlie had had a kid brother, Brian, an awkward adolescent in knee shorts, very excited about his new camera. She had talked to him a bit, and he had developed a little crush on her. “So how is Charlie? I haven’t seen him since we graduated.”

“He’s dead, actually.” Brian looked suddenly grief-stricken. “Died in forty-one. Killed in the b-b-bloody desert, actually.”

Flick was afraid he would cry. She took his hand in both of hers and said, “Brian, I’m so terribly sorry.”

“Jolly nice of you.” He swallowed hard. With an effort he brightened. “I’ve seen you since then, just once. You gave a lecture to my SOE training group. I didn’t get a chance to speak to you afterwards.”

“I hope my talk was useful.”

“You spoke about traitors within the Resistance and what to do about them. ‘It’s quite simple,’ you said. ‘You put the barrel of your pistol to the back of the bastard’s head and pull the trigger twice.’ Scared us all to death, actually.”

He was looking at her with something like hero-worship in his eyes, and she began to see what Percy had been hinting at. It looked as if Brian still had a crush on her. She moved away from him, sat at the other side of the table, and said, “Well, we’d better begin. You know you’re going to make contact with a Resistance circuit that has been largely wiped out.”

“Yes, I’m to find out how much of it is left and what it is still capable of doing, if anything.”

“It’s likely that some members were captured during the skirmish yesterday and are under Gestapo interrogation as we speak. So you’ll have to be especially careful. Your contact in Reims is a woman codenamed Bourgeoise. Every day at three in the afternoon she goes to the crypt of the cathedral to pray. She’s generally the only person there but, in case there are others, she’ll be wearing odd shoes, one black and one brown.”

“Easy enough to remember.”

“You say to her, ‘Pray for me.’ She replies, ‘I pray for peace.’ That’s the code.”

He repeated the words.

“She’ll take you to her house, then put you in touch with the head of the Bollinger circuit, whose code name is Monet.” She was talking about her husband, but Brian did not need to know that. “Don’t mention the address or real name of Bourgeoise to other members of the circuit when you meet them, please: for security reasons, it’s better they don’t know.” Flick herself had recruited Bourgeoise and set up the cut-out. Even Michel had not met the woman.

“I understand.”

“Is there anything you want to ask me?”

“I’m sure there are a hundred things, but I can’t think of any.”

She stood up and came around the table to shake his hand. “Well, good luck.”

He kept hold of her hand. “I never forgot that weekend you came to our house,” he said. “I expect I was a frightful bore, but you were very kind to me.”

She smiled and said lightly, “You were a nice kid.”

“I fell in love with you, actually.”

She wanted to jerk her hand out of his and walk away, but he might die tomorrow, and she could not bring herself to be so cruel. “I’m flattered,” she said, trying to maintain an amiably bantering tone.

It was no good: he was in earnest. “I was wondering… would you… just for luck, give me a kiss?”

She hesitated. Oh, hell, she thought. She stood on tiptoe and kissed him lightly on the lips. She let the kiss linger for a second, then broke away. He looked transfixed by joy. She patted his cheek softly with her hand. “Stay alive, Brian,” she said. Then she went out.

She returned to Percy’s room. He had a pile of books and a scatter of photographs on his desk. “All done?” he said.

She nodded. “But he’s not perfect secret agent material, Percy.”

Percy shrugged. “He’s brave, he speaks French like a Parisian, and he can shoot straight.”

“Two years ago you would have sent him back to the army.”

“True. Now I’m going to send him off to Sandy.” At a large country house in the village of Sandy, near the Tempsford airstrip, Brian would be dressed in French-style clothes and given the forged papers he needed to pass through Gestapo checkpoints and buy food. Percy got up and went to the door. “While I’m seeing him off, have a look at that rogues’ gallery, will you?” He pointed to the photos on the desk. “Those are all the pictures MI6 has of German officers. If the man you saw in the square at Sainte-Cécile should happen to be among them, I’d be interested to know his name.” He went out.