Jackdaws

“Good enough. Diana?”

“Maude and I are secretaries working for the electric company in Reims. We’ve been to Chartres because… Maude has lost contact with her fianc‚ and we thought he might be here. But he isn’t.”

Flick nodded, satisfied. There were thousands of French women searching for missing relatives, especially young men, who might have been injured by bombing, arrested by the Gestapo, sent to labor camps in Germany, or recruited by the Resistance.

She said, “And I’m the widow of a stockbroker who was killed in 1940. 1 went to Chartres to fetch my orphaned cousin and bring her to live with me in Reims.”

One of the great advantages women had as secret agents was that they could move around the country without attracting suspicion. By contrast, a man found outside the area where he worked would automatically be assumed to be in the Resistance, especially if he was young.

Flick spoke to the driver, Chevalier. “Look for a quiet spot to let us out.” The sight of six respectably dressed women getting out of the back of a builder’s van would be somewhat remarkable, even in occupied France, where people used any means of transport they could get. “We can find the station on our own.”

A couple of minutes later he stopped the van and reversed into a turn, then jumped out and opened the back door. The Jackdaws got out and found themselves in a narrow cobbled alley with high houses on either side. Through a gap between roofs she glimpsed part of the cathedral. flick reminded them of the plan. “Go to the station, buy one-way tickets to Paris, and get the first train. Each pair will pretend not to know the others, but we’ll try to sit close together on the train. We regroup in Paris: you have the address.” They were going to a flophouse called Hotel de la Chapdlle, where the proprietress, though not actually in the Resistance, could be relied upon not to ask questions. If they arrived in time, they would go on to Reims immediately; if not, they could stay overnight at the flophouse. Flick was not pleased to be going to

Paris-it was crawling with Gestapo men and their collaborators, the “Kollabos”—but there was no way around it by train.

Only Flick and Greta knew the real mission of the Jackdaws. The others still thought they were going to blow up a railway tunnel.

“Diana and Maude first, off you go, quick! Jelly and Greta next, more slowly.” They went off, looking scared. Chevalier shook their hands, wished them luck, and drove away, heading back to the field to fetch the rest of the containers. Flick and Ruby walked out of the alley.

The first few steps in a French town were always the worst, Flick felt that everyone she saw must know who she was, as if she had a sign on her back saying British Agent! Shoot Her Down! But people walked by as if she were nobody special, and after she had safely passed a gendarme and a couple of German officers her pulse began to return to normal.

She still felt very strange. All her life she had been respectable, and she had been taught to regard policemen as her friends. “I hate being on the wrong side of the law,” she murmured to Ruby in French. “As if I’ve done something wicked.”

Ruby gave a low laugh. “I’m used to it,” she said. “The police have always been my enemies.”

Flick remembered with a start that Ruby had been in jail for murder last Tuesday. It seemed a long four days.

They reached the cathedral, at the top of the hill, and Flick felt a thrill at the sight of it, the summit of French medieval culture, a church like none other. She suffered a sharp pang of regret for the peaceful times when she might have spent a couple of hours looking around the cathedral.

They walked down the hill to the station, a modern stone building the same color as the cathedral. They entered a square lobby in tan marble. There was a queue at the ticket window. That was good: it meant local people were optimistic that there would be a train soon. Greta and Jelly were in the queue, but there was no sign of Diana and Maude, who must already be on the platform.

They stood in line in front of an anti-Resistance poster showing a thug with a gun and Stalin behind him. It read:

THEY MURDER! wrapped in the folds of OUR FLAG

That’s supposed to be me, Flick thought.

They bought their tickets without incident. On the way to the platform they had to pass a Gestapo checkpoint, and Flick’s pulse beat faster. Greta and Jelly were ahead of them in line. This would be their first encounter with the enemy. Flick prayed they would be able to keep their nerve. Diana and Maude must have already passed through.

Greta spoke to the Gestapo men in German. Flick could clearly hear her giving her cover story. “I know a Major Remmer,” said one of the men, a sergeant. “Is he an engineer?”

“No, he’s in Intelligence,” Greta replied. She seemed remarkably calm, and Flick reflected that pretending to be something she was not must be second nature to her.