Jackdaws

As Mark paid the entrance fee and exchanged commonplaces with the manager, Flick saw an alteration come over him. He grew more extrovert, his voice took on a lilt, and his gestures became theatrical. Flick wondered if her brother had another persona that he put on after dark.

They went down a flight of stairs to a basement. The place was dimly lit and smoky. Flick could see a five-piece band on a low stage, a small dance floor, a scatter of tables, and a number of booths around the dark perimeter of the room. She had wondered if it would be a men-only club, the kind of place that catered to chaps like Mark who were “not the marrying kind.” Although the patrons were mostly male, there was a good sprinkling of girls, some of them very glamorously dressed.

A waiter said, “Hello, Markie,” and put a hand on Mark’s shoulder, but gave Flick a hostile glare.

“Robbie, meet my sister,” Mark said. “Her name’s Felicity, but we’ve always called her Flick.”

The waiter’s attitude changed, and he gave Flick a friendly smile. “Very nice to meet you.” He showed them to a table.

Flick guessed that Robbie had suspected she might be a girlfriend, and had resented her for persuading Mark to change sides, as it were. Then he had warmed to her when he learned she was Mark’s sister.

Mark smiled up at Robbie and said, “How’s Kit?”

“Oh, all right, I suppose,” Robbie said with the hint of a flounce.

“You’ve had a row, haven’t you?”

Mark was being charming. He was almost flirting. This was a side of him Flick had never seen. In fact, she thought, it might be the real Mark. The other persona, his discreet daytime self, was probably the pretense.

“When have we not had a row?” Robbie said.

“He doesn’t appreciate you,” Mark said with exaggerated melancholy, touching Robbie’s hand.

“You’re right, bless you. Something to drink?”

Flick ordered scotch and Mark asked for a martini.

Flick did not know much about men such as these. She had been introduced to Mark’s friend, Steve, and had visited the flat they shared, but had never met any of their friends. Although she was madly curious about their world, it seemed prurient to ask questions.

She didn’t even know what they called themselves. All the words she knew were more or less unpleasant: queer, homo, fairy, nancy-boy. “Mark,” she said. “What do you call men who, you know, prefer men?”

He grinned. “Musical, darling,” he said, waving his hand in a feminine gesture.

I must remember that, Flick thought. Now I can say to Mark, “Is he musical?” She had learned the first word of their secret code.

A tall blonde in a red cocktail dress came swishing onto the stage to a burst of applause. “This is Greta,” said Mark. “She’s a telephone engineer by day.”

Greta began to sing “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out.” She had a powerful, bluesy voice, but Flick noticed immediately that she had a German accent. Shouting into Mark’s ear over the sound of the band, she said, “I thought you said she was French.”

“She speaks French,” he corrected. “But she’s German.”

Flick was bitterly disappointed. This was no good. Greta would have just as much of a German accent when she spoke French.

The audience loved Greta, clapping each number enthusiastically, cheering and whistling when she accompanied the music with bump-and-grind movements. But Flick could not relax and enjoy the show. She was too worried. She still did not have her telephone engineer, and she had wasted the latter half of the evening coming here on a wild-goose chase.

But what was she going to do? She wondered how long it would take her to pick up the rudiments of telephone engineering herself. She had no difficulty with technical things. She had built a radio at school. Anyway, she needed to know only enough to destroy the equipment effectively. Could she do a two-day course, maybe with some people from the General Post Office?

The trouble was, nobody could be quite sure what kind of equipment the saboteurs would find when they entered the château. It could be French or German or a mixture, possibly even including imported American machinery-the U.S.A. was far ahead of France in phone technology. There were many kinds of equipment, and the château served several different functions. It had a manual exchange, an automatic exchange, a tandem exchange for connecting other exchanges to one another, and an amplification station for the all-important new trunk route to Germany. But only an experienced engineer could be confident of recognizing whatever he saw when he walked in.

There were engineers in France, of course, and she might find a woman-if she had time. It was not a promising idea, but she thought it through. SOE could send a message to every Resistance circuit. If there was a woman who could fit the bill, it would take her a day or two to get to Reims, which was all right. But the plan was so uncertain. Was there a woman telephone engineer in the French Resistance? If not, Flick would waste two days to learn that the mission was doomed.