Night Soldiers

Brush your teeth with Deems

It's prurient, it seems. Pretty good, he'd have to share that with his friend Van Duyne when they met for breakfast on Sunday. Squeak. He watched the snow wander aimlessly past the window. Tonight would be dinner with hisfianc� whom he didn't especially like, and her visiting parents, whom he absolutely detested. Her broad-bottomed "Daddy," whom she "utterly adored," was a shoe manufacturer from Dayton, Ohio, and a rabid isolationist. "War in Europe?" he'd said at their last dinner, a two-hour nightmare at Longchamps. "Don't bet on it, kiddo. Not for us." He'd paused to attack his roast beef, then added, "You know who wants _that,"__ while tapping his nose and winking. Jews, he meant. The International Zionist Conspiracy to embroil the USA in a foreigners' war. Maybe, he thought, _if I move very slowly. __ He tried to get back to the typewriter without communicating his ennui to Bister, but no, it would have to be oiled. _Brush your teeth__--oh why in God's name had he slept with the girl? A hot August night at the Walker vacation house on a Michigan lake, the Walkers gone off to their bridge evening at the public library, alone in the house, a little necking, a little petting, a little more, the way her breathing changed, then the sudden, caution-to-the-winds disencumberment of her Helen Wills tennis costume, blousy and Grecian. . . and then the rest of it. Followed by a year of assumptions on her part which he found, in his general malaise, difficult to resist. Of course they were engaged--thus the way was cleared for an encore of the summer lovemaking--of course the wedding would be in June. Suddenly, it seemed to have gone long past the point where he could say that they weren't quite right for each other. Long past. She would scream, she would weep, she would be so terribly _hurt.__ That he'd _used__ her. No, he couldn't face it. He would marry and have it over with. What was he waiting for? The Walker clan had money, he'd be rid of Bister. The sobering responsibilities of family life would brace him up, steady him down--one couldn't stay single forever. And his own family would surely approve. He glanced at the calendar on the wall. December5.Friday. Friday? Friday! Suddenly, his joy was crushed by an ominousshadow that�dthe opaque green glass panel beside the open door to his cubicle. That could only be Mr. Drowne, who liked to loom up above his victims before he pounced. "Say Bob?" He leaned his upper half around the door frame. "Yes, Mr. Drowne?" "Got that Deems copy all tied up?" "Working on it, sir." "Read me what you have there." "Uh, I'm only, ah, _formulating__ here." "Bob..." "Brush your teeth with Deems, Your smile needs those gleams!" The affected perkiness in his voice sounded shrill and desperate. Mr. Drowne shook his head mournfully. "You're not selling smiles, Bob. You're supposed to be selling taste. Mint. Remember mint?" He reached over and picked up the open tooth powder can and rapped it twice on the desk. A little cloud of minted smoke puffed up through the holes. "I'll keep after it, Mr. Drowne." "Plans for the weekend, Bob?" "I'm going to the football game on Sunday. Giants versus Dodgers, at the Polo Grounds." "Yes, well, enjoy yourself, but do make certain that finished copy is on my desk when I come in Monday. Okay? If that means a litde elbow grease on the weekend, well..." "I'll get it done, sir." Mr. Drowne produced his usual departure sound--the sigh of the oft-betrayed man--then trudged off to his next victim. Out the window, the snow drifted down onto the Christmas shoppers hurrying along Lexington, carrying green and red parcels. The shop windows had wreaths and little silver bells on granular snow. Above the glass panel in front of his desk, the face of Bister rose slowly, like a sea monster. "Formulating, Bob?" His eyes glowed with spite. Eidenbaugh grabbed for a weapon, and Bister disappeared instantly with what could only be described as a _chortle. __ He looked down at his hand and saw that he'd picked up the desktop name-plate that had been a gift from his parents on the occasion of his graduation from Columbia University, seven years earlier. Robert F. EIDENBAUGH, it said. Fitting, he thought, very fitting. An intended symbol of his success in times to come, it now mocked him and his too-long tenure as a copywriter. Bister was right. He wasn't going up. He wasn't going anywhere. His father had been a captain in the American Expeditionary Forces, arriving in France in1917and fighting in the battle of Ch�au-Thierry.It had been a hellish experience, one he did not speak of easily. Yet he had fallen in love with France, and in1921,when his oldest son was eight and the youngest three, he had taken the family off to live first in Paris, then in Lyons, finally settling, six months later, in a small rented villa on the outskirts of Toulon, the Mediterranean port just east of Marseilles. Arthur Eidenbaugh was a naval architect and was able to find a position--a minor one, initially, little more than a drafting clerk--with an engineering firm associated with the Toulon shipyards. Elva Eidenbaugh was formerly a schoolteacher from Wiscasset, Maine, and no stranger to hardship. She made the money stretch and set the tone of family life--which was to be a permanent adventure, with all setbacks perceived as challenges to character and sense of humor. They were a tight, sunny family, denying each other consolation as a matter of course. A bad cold or a bad mood simply made life difficult for everybody, so best take your lumps and move ahead, sympathy was not on the schedule. As for France, they attacked it, led in the charge by Mrs. Eidenbaugh. They made forays intoboulangeriesandp�sseries, picnicked at the slightest provocation, and descended en masse on museums, carrying away every crumb of available culture. Mr. Eidenbaugh worked long hours, deflected credit to his French colleagues, and was soon enough raised to a position commensurate with his ability and education. As a family, they liked being different, enjoyed the notion of _living abroad,__ and their cheerful optimism seemed to draw pleasant experiences their way. Robert could not remember a time when somebody or other--postman, merchant, parents' acquaintance--wasn't ruffling his hair. With his new position, Mr. Eidenbaugh was able to engage a maid to care for the children, and in thisway they picked up the language naturally and effortlessly. At home, diey spoke a curious mixture of French and English. "Where can I have putl'adresse?"his mother would say. "I've looked and looked, but it seemstoute �aitperdue." Robert went to French schools, learned the rudiments of soccer, dressed in a uniform of blue shorts and white shirt, and allowed the requisite Catholic instruction to roll effortlessly off his Presbyterian soul. Family roots went back into Scotland, Wales, and Germany, on both sides, with the first Eidenbaughs reaching America in the mid-nineteenth century and settling on the coastlines of southern New England, where they engaged themselves in the building of ships. In1930,with the United States struggling in the Depression and Europe's economy falling apart, Mr. Eidenbaugh's firm won a large contract that called for the refitting of an entire naval battle group, a contract that was to support the firm throughout the early thirties. Thus, that same year, Robert was able to return to the United States to attend Columbia University, majoring in English literature with indifferent success. He was bright enough, but most of what he read seemed distant and remote and he had none of the scholar's passions. On graduation, in June of1934,he returned to France for two years, working at a succession of small jobs, first around Toulon, later in Paris. He translated business correspondence, taught at small private schools, fell in love with wearying frequency, skated on the edge of Parisian bohemian life, and took to smoking a large, curved pipe. In1936,bored with aimlessness, he returned to New York and found a job with the J. Walter Thompson Company in the copy department. With war clearly on the way in Europe, the rest of the family returned in1938,Arthur Eidenbaugh finding employment at a Boston firm of naval architects with long connection to French shipbuilding interests in Canada. On Sunday morning, Eidenbaugh met Andy Van Duyne for breakfast at a Schrafft's on the Upper West Side. Surrounded by West End Avenue garment manufacturers taking their families out for��Jbrunch after temple, they set to work demolishing a basket ofsoft yellow rolls. The basket was periodically replenished by stern Irish waitresses in black uniforms, who also kept their coffee cups full as they awaited their scrambled eggs. Andy Van Duyne was his single surviving friend from Columbia. His family owned a petrochemical brokerage associated with Standard Oil and had a season box for the Giants' football games. Clients never seemed to use them, so Van Duyne and his friends had gotten into the habit of making a day of it on fall Sundays, starting with a late breakfast. Van Duyne looked like an owl, a tall, spindly one, squinting out at the world through round spectacles with thick lenses. At college, he'd been a reliable source for decent bootleg and the occasional real thing, smuggled in from Canada. His family's vacation house on Long Island had a particularly private and convenient beach, it seemed, and, in return for looking the other way, they would at times discover the odd case left behind on the sand--clearly an appreciative offering. Van Duyne had gained some considerable prominence as a college prankster, using a rhinoceros-foot wastepaper basket he'd got hold of somewhere to make tracks in the snow leading up to the Central Park reservoir. This resulted only in a rather tentative news story, never really setting off the _rhmoceros-in-the-drinking-water!__ panic he'd imagined, though there were some who swore they could taste it for weeks thereafter. Van Duyne had barely scraped through college and was now ensconced in an oak-paneled office at Morgan Guaranty, where he'd taken to reading _Slade Rides to Laramie,__ holding the book on his lap, just below the edge of a polished antique desk. Robert Eidenbaugh and his friend shared a brotherhood of vocational anguish. Van Duyne had trust funds sufficient to fall into a sultan's leisure, but, as he put it, "things aren't done that way in my family." Nonetheless, his restlessness led him to leaving peculiar telephone messages (call Mr. Lyonat Schuyler8-3938--which of course turned out to be the Central Park Zoo) for his associates and, once, after a particularly arid day, distributing dry ke in the Morgan Guaranty urinals. He was becoming, he'd said,;"rather too trying at the bank." But, until Robert met him on Sunday morning, he had evidently seen no way through the briar;patch of the Family Obligations.

MEMORANDUM

April19, 1942 to: Lt. Col. H. V. Rossell Office of the Coordinator of Information Room29 National Institute of Health Washington, D. C. from: Agatha Hamilton Office of Recruiting--COI270Madison Ave.New York, New York subject: Robert F. Eidenbaugh In an interview arranged by my friend, Mr. Carter Delius, Vice President for Personnel, the J. Walter Thompson Company, on March30,I spent over two hours with Mr. L. L. Drowne, copy chief, in my capacity as Member of the Board, the Manhattan Eye and Ear Hospital. I told Mr. Drowne that the hospital fund-raising committee was seeking a professional copywriter to aid in its fall campaign to build a new wing for the hospital. He mentioned several other candidates before the name of Mr. Eidenbaugh (hereafter RFE) was brought up. Mr. Drowne seems to like him well enough, though he does not believe that RFE will make much of a mark in advertising. Subject was described as "completely honest" and "extremely bright," but "very much a self-starter." My overall impression was that RFE's heart isn't much in the Thompson company--they like him, but are not really sure what to do with him. On April3,as the parent of a prospective student, I visited the Brearley School and contrived to interview Mary Ellen Walker, RFE'sfianc�who teaches Fourth Form (10th grade) English and History and assists in the coaching of the field hockey team. I came on as quite the "Bolshy heiress," though her sympathies clearly do not lie in this direction. She was very polite about it all, representing the school as "more than fair to all sorts of girls, from all sorts of families." Appearing to be charmed by her (I was not, in fact), I asked a few personal questions. Miss Walkerperceives RFE as brilliant and dashing, though not yet situated in a position appropriate to his abilities. I would guess that, following marriage, she has plans to situate him in the family business. An April7digest of reports (Attachment "A") is enclosed, including credit reports from the following: Consolidated Edison, Chemical Bank and Trust, Sheffield Dairies, Joseph Silverman, D.D.S., and the414West 74th Street Management Company. Also appended (Attachment "B"), RFE's Columbia University transcript and letters of recommendation. (See esp. Professor Horace Newell, Department of English, who praises RFE's intelligence and ability and mentions a tendency "to stay somewhat in the background.") On April14RFE attended a party, given at my behest by Mrs. Cleveland Van Duyne, at her apartment at1085Park Avenue. I was accompanied by my friend,Mme.Mariade Vlaq,who reports that RFE's French is "excellent," "fluent" and "almost native." My personal impression of RFE was of a man with a certain charm that comes naturally to him. I flirted with him a little and found him courteous and responsive, though without any interest in pressing his "advantage." He is no snake in the grass. He does fade into the background, being slightly built and neither especially handsome nor unattractive. He is the sort of man who will be liked by all classes of people and who will not engender in others feelings of spite or envy. He drank moderately at the party, circulated well, and made no attempt to press himself forward. I represented myself as the wife of a man who was about to start a new advertising company and encouraged him strongly to become interested in the possibilities for his own career. He did, at last, agree to meet my "husband" for luncheon later in the week. The New York office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation has, once again, been dragging its feet and is as unresponsive in this project as it has been in all others. No report from that office to date on RFE, but same will be forwarded once it arrives--if it ever does. Can't Col. Donovan do something about this? On April171telephoned RFE at his office in the guise of Mr. Hamilton's secretary and arranged a lunch for the following Monday, April20,at Luchow's. According to the headwaiter, he askedfor "Mr. Hamilton's table" and waited twenty minutes before asking the headwaiter "if Mr. Hamilton had called." (He had been given no "Hamilton" telephone number.) He was told that Mr. Hamilton had telephoned the restaurant, apologizing for the inconvenience and requesting that RFE meet him for lunch at the Coleman Hotel on East 23rd Street and Fifth Avenue. On arriving at that location and discovering no such hotel, he consulted a telephone directory and proceeded to Coleman's, a restaurant on East 25th Street, where he asked for "Mr. Hamilton." Informed that no such person was there, he made a telephone call (in all probability to his office, since "Hamilton's secretary" had reached him there earlier), then ate lunch at the counter and left the restaurant, returning to work. My recommendation is to accept this candidate for further COIscreening.

Signed: Agatha Hamilton

COI--New York�������������������������������������April24, 1942 P. S. Hub, my friend Mariade Vlaqis someone you might consider taking to lunch when you are next in New York. She is formerly the Countess Marensohn--Swedish nobility--divorced two years ago, and moves easily in society. She rides and shoots excellently, is lethally charming and of a rather daring disposition. She is of Belgian citizenship and descent, and I believe would be amenable to recruitment. Her connection to Belgian, German, and Swedish circles remains strong, and her relationship with her former husband, and his family, is cordial. P. S. S. Not to end on a sour note, but here it is April and there is only silence from Washington on my February vouchers. While it is the case that fortune has smiled on me in this world, I cannot by myself assume the cost of the war effort. 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 Happing them with his fingertips. That would proveeverybodyright. 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 as1937--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 markeddo 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 Mac Leish. 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 anddu 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, Rosseilthought, _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." "Ohyeah?" 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 breech!--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 June11, 1940,Khristo Stoianev lay awake in his cell in the Sant�ison 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 hadmet 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 createda 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 straightline 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 theexercise yard he spent talking with other prisoners. D�the pimp from Montparnasse. Kreusethe 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, as1937faded into1938,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 manwill 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 Wehrmachtcolumns 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 June12,everything changed. At dusk, the mashed lentils and the gritty bread were shoved through the Judas port and his "quarter" tilled up with drinking water. Between the mound of lentils and the tin plate lay a slip of paper. Inromanletters it said BF825.Then the numerals2:30. 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 Stoia-nev?" "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 matchbook 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. "Biagodaryati, 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 of1943,on a cold October night with a quarter moon, Lieutenant Robert F. Eidenbaugh parachuted into the Vosgesmountains of southeastern France. He landed in a field north of�inal, 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, wresded 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 nomaquisardstriangulating the drop zone with bonfires, there was no container of Stenguns 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 truer�au--headquarters--for underground operations, and extend, if possible, a _courtier__--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 ther�stanceand 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 wereabo French, and the pistol in his briefcase was Belgian--a Fabrique Nationale GP35automatic, essentially a licensed 9mm 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'dtold 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 playingwith 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 animposter inthat 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. Maquismeant "brush," and that was pretty much the story at Cam-bras. 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 familyouting 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 Cambrasmaquistrickled 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 Sabl�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 servedl'Am�cainand the Cambrasmaquis. 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 tofaire 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 twentysquares 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 Cambrashad "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�inal, St.-Di�and the small towns between. _Down there__ meant tax collectors and municipal authorities and Gendarmerie and all those bloodsucking leeches who made a poor man's life a misery. Between Cambrasand _down there__ was a kind of truce, worked out over a long time, the flatlanders silently agreeing to bother the people of Cambrasonly 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 Cambrasnow took it as a divine mission to bother the _schleuhs,__ as they called them, while avoiding too much interest from those they calledla 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,__ theysaid. _Try your luck.__ So, in Cambras, until Lucienshowed up, they'd had to content themselves with mischief, testing always to see what the reaction might be. A mistake was painful. When Vigiehad somehow contrived to obtain a concussion grenade, Alceste Vau and the others had snuck inside the perimeter of a Panzer division encampment near�inaland 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 Sabl�d 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 Sabl�d 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. Cecilie, 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. Ceciliewas visited, on successive nights, by Sabl�d 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 Brebisand 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 thefield, the words crackled from the radio: _Limelight, __la th�re est ferm�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." Eiden-baugh 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�inalto 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.__ Vintage1914,he thought. A good deal of French rolling stock had traveled east to Ge.rmany--to be refitted for the different gauge--then sent on to Wehrmachtunits 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�inaland 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 gestewas 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 pastla gesteand the usual police checkpoints with the story of hismamaninsisting that the roof be retiled, just at planting time, not a seed in the ground, and rain coming. But, Gilbert shrugged, one must obey themaman. 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 ULYSSEcalled for a visit to the Bureaude Postenear 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 Libert��lit�fraternit�travail, famille, patrie. Work, family, and fatherland. In the corner of one stamp was a lightly penned address. This turned out to bea _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 anyp�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 incaf� 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. Ulysseappeared at the other end of the central aisle, his breath steaming in the cold. Ulyssewas 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 Ch�au Bretailles, overlooking the river Dordogne." "Would that I did," he sighed. "Papers?" Eidenbaugh handed them over. Ulyssespent 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,"Ulyssesaid 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. Ulyssesmiled thinly. "Where better thana _boucherie chevaline*__One leaves this uncertain life with, at least, one suspicion confirmed." Eidenbaugh laughed. Ulyssenodded 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 manymaquisarethere?" "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__r�rageis 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, Ulyssehad 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. On the way back, as he waited with Gilbert on the Belfort station platform, the two Gestapo officers made an arrest. How the fellow had gotten that far Eidenbaugh could only imagine. His clothing was torn, and blackened with railroad soot, his face was drained, white as death, and his eyes were pink from sleepless nights--he was much too obviously a fugitive on the run. They manacled his hands behind his back and he wept silently as they marched him away. A mad lady on a bicycle! Most certainly English! All in tweeds! He had gone down the mountain with Gilbert. Found, hidden in an alder grove, the old truck that was sometimes made to work. Then the two of them had sputtered off to�inalto buy provisions. When they got back to Cambras, the village was buzzing with the unusual visit. Had she been looking for him? Well, no, she hadn't said that exactly, but she had been in the house of Gilbert and had drunk many cups of tea with the old woman. Tea? There was tea in Cambras? No, the mad lady in tweeds had brought her own tea. In a box made of stiff paper. Really? Might he have a look at it? Alas, no one would expect an Am�cainto be interested in a miracle that _petit.__ Where had the box got to? In the rubbish heap, perhaps? No such dishonor. Fed to Gilbert's pigs, along with otherd�ctablesstored up in a wooden barrel in the farmyard. Oh Christ. A missed communication--in his trade one of the worst disasters imaginable. That meant an emergency trip to Belfort. He was furious with himself for missing the courier, though Ulyssehad told him it would happen while he was away. When, an hour later, he put on his gloves, he found a slip of paper stuffed down the little finger. On November14.amemorable night in the history of the village, the Cambras _maquis__drove to the drop zone, then carried dry wood on their backs for half a mile after hiding the truck well off the road. They triangulated the field with woodpiles and covered them with canvas tarps when it started to rain, a cold, icy misery that fell straight down in drops heavy as pebbles. They tried sheltering under the trees but this particular mountain meadow was surrounded by deciduous forest so that one was merely splattered by raindrops hitting the bare branches rather than nailed directly atop the head. Eidenbaugh was soaked through in minutes. At3:30a.m.sharp they lit off the woodpiles, then stood back with ceremony and watched them blaze and smoke in the rain. But there was no sign of an airplane and by a quarter to four their bonfires were no more than smoldering piles of wet, charred wood. They couldn't return to Cambras,so they groped their way into the forest in search of dead branches, falling and bruising themselves in the sodden darkness. The wet branches were piled up on what remained of the bonfires and they tried to light them, using up most of their matches and swearing the blackest curses they could summon. To no avail. At last, La Brebiscame to the rescue. Producing an old piece of rubber tubing from a coat pocket, she siphoned off the gas from the truck, using a wine bottle meant for celebration but drained dry as they sought any available warmth on the mountainside. A bottle at a time, they soaked down the wood piles while La Brebis, who had ingested a certain amount of gasoline in getting the siphon action under way, went off into the woods to be sick. At this point they heard the sound of airplane motors above them in the darkness--coming from the east! The equation for nighttime air supply operations was complex, involving fuel weight, load weight, air speed, distance, weather, hours of darkness, the phase of the moon, evasive flight paths, and fuel allowance for escape tactics in case of pursuit. Thus the bravery of the British pilot, circling above the socked-in meadow, was extraordinary. He must have used his last margin of safety looking for them and, should he encounter Luftwaffe night fighters on the return trip, was well on his way to ditching in the Channel. They never saw the plane, but they could hear the engines quite distinctly--he'd come down low to look for their signal. The gas-soaked wood woofed to life and roared against the downpour for only a few moments before the flame turned blue and danced pointlessly along the boughs, burning up the last of the fuel. But that was enough. The Lancaster pilot must have seen the orange smudges beneath the clouds and signaled his dropmaster, thus the crates with parachutes attached were manhandled out the cargo doors and floated down through the darkness, one of them hanging up in the branches of a tree until Vigiescampered up and cut the shrouds. They loaded the crates into the truck, their excitement obscuring--until Gilbert attempted to start the engine--the fact that the precious gasoline had been burned up. The Vau brothers hiked back to Cambras. At midmorning there were _schleuh__ patrols down on the road--someone else had heard the bomber--but it was raining too hard for the Germans to come up into the forest. Nonetheless, themaquisardswaited most of the morning in ambush by the trail, having voted to defend the arms no matter the cost. Just before noon, as the rain turned to snow, four of the Cambraswomen appeared at the edge of the field, pushing bicycles. They had traveled all morning, trading the heavy metal petrol cans back and forth, exposing two extra people to risk in order to make better time. The entry into Cambraswas triumphal. The entire population stood out in the wet snow and applaudedl'Am�cain, les Anglaises, and themselves. Four days later, his Limelight message was broadcast, setting the first attack on the night of November25.Seven days!That was no time at all, but he did what he could. Which meant preparing for the operation--doing the necessary intelligence background--and training hismaquisin the new equipment simultaneously. To that point, he had followed the Triangle camp teachings meticulously. His instructors and briefers had shown him that the path through danger lay in knowledge of the situation, caution,objectivity, secrecy, planning, and, above all, scrupulous attention to detail. But suddenly he was at war, so he found himself improvising, doing six things at once, making decisions quickly, in the heat of the moment. All the wrong things. But _something__ was up, he could feel it in the air--they all could--and he was carried along in the rhythm of it. There were Lancasters overhead every night, the Epinal searchlights crisscrossed the sky, and the _schleuh__ patrols were everywhere on the roads. Rumors reached them of stepped-up questioning in the basement of the�inal Mairie--the town hall, now a Gestapo interrogation center. The new guns were a matter of great excitement to the Cambras _maquis.__The Mark IISten, properly a machine carbine, was _the__ special operations weapon of the clandestine war. It was simple: a few tubular components that screwed together quickly once you filed the burrs off the threads. It was light, six pounds, essentially a skeletal steel frame carrying the most elemental bolt-and-spring firing mechanism. And it was fast, putting out rounds in a staccato spray."Beau Dieu!"Gilbert gasped after he had riddled a tree stump with one magazine-consuming burst. The Stens were less exciting to Eidenbaugh. It came to him, in an idle moment, that the weapon was manufactured by the same armaments industry that produced the Purdey shotgun--a masterpiece. But the reality of the war called for hundreds of thousands of simple death machines to be placed in willing hands. The OSS, in a perfection of that logic, manufactured the Liberator, a single-shot pistol with one bullet and cartoon instructions overcoming literacy and language barriers, then spread thousands of them throughout occupied Europe. It was the perfect assassination weapon, meant for the man or woman whose anger had outdistanced caution to the point where he or she would kill up close. For Eidenbaugh, the Stenwas the least prepossessing of his available tools. It was, for instance, cheaply made--costing around$12.50to produce. The primitive firing mechanism tended to jam, thus the thirty-two-round magazine was better loaded with thirty rounds of gmmparabellum(ball) ammunition to reduce pressure on the magazine spring. In this instance, a special filling device was to be used, but these had not been included in their arms shipment and they had to improvise. And it was "short." That is, the fixed sight was set for a hundred yards. Infantry war tended toward engagement at the extremity of the rifle's efficiency--about a thousand yards, three fifths of a mile. With the Sten, however, you operated at the length of a football field and could see the enemy quite clearly. In essence, a streetfighting weapon. The implicit message was clear to Eiden-baugh: if, as guerrillas, you had the misfortune to engage the enemy on his own terms, the best you could do was to get close enough to burn him badly before he killed you--which he would, simply drawing back out of your range to give himself total advantage. He had no intention to engage. Their target--identified in code by the courier--was the railroad yards at Bruy�s, about fifteen miles from�inal. Sabl�d a cousin who worked in the roundhouse and, on the Tuesday before the attack, it was La Brebisand not the cousin's wife who, at noontime, brought him his lunch of soup and bread. Eidenbaugh found a vantage point on a hill overlooking the yards and watched her ride in on her bicycle, napkin-covered bowl in the crook of her right arm, half a _baguette__ balanced across the top of the bowl. The German sentry waved her through. Later, Eidenbaugh was ecstatic to learn there were fourteen locomotives in the roundhouse. He would, he knew, get them all. It didn't, on the night of November25,sound like very much. A single, muffled _whumpfm__ the roundhouse and some dirty smoke that dribbled from a broken window. That was all. But it would be three months at least before these particular locomotives went anywhere. Eidenbaugh and Vigiewatched it happen from the vantage point, then retreated casually, by bicycle, back to the village. Eidenbaugh went in alone, with the graveyard shift. They were the brave ones, for they were the ones who would suffer German suspicion after the sabotage. These interrogations would not, Eidenbaugh knew, be of the most severe category, for no occupying power can easily afford to sacrifice skilled railroad workers. The men gathered around him as they trudged into the railyard. To them he was a weapon, a weapon against those they loathed beyond words, and they protected him accordingly. He wasted no time in the roundhouse, simply formed the malleableplastiqueexplosiveinto a collar around the heavy steel and wedged a time pencil into the daylike mass. Then he tied up the two roundhouse workers with heavy cord and moved them behind a wall. He snuck out the back way, through a well-used dog tunnel in the wire fence. The whole business took less than twenty minutes. For a mere thud of an explosion and a little smoke. The yard sirens went off almost as an afterthought, the firemen appeared, the French police followed, a few German officers ran about--but there was little to be done. One fireman, reducing the water pressure to the volume of a garden hose, soaked down the area for ten minutes while a yard supervisor nailed a board across die single broken window. A pursuit unit showed up, and the German shepherds went right for the dog tunnel in the fence, picked up a scent that led to the edge of an empty hill above the yards, accepted their biscuits and pats, peed, and went home. A Gestapo Sturmbannf�ook the rope that had bound the workers as evidence and put it in a leather pouch with a tag stating time, place, and date. Then they all stood around for an hour smoking and talking--bored, more than anything else. It was so insignificant. Apoplectic rage was reserved for the German transport officer, who had chosen that night to occupy a French feather bed rather than a German army cot and thus arrived late. He was the only one there who understood what had happened, for it was, after all, rather technical. It had to do with the way locomotives are turned around in a railroad yard. In the center of the roundhouse was what the French called a _plaque__tournant, simply a large iron turntable with a piece of track on it that allowed the crew to turn a locomotive around and send it back out into the yard once it had been serviced. In the interim, locomotives rested in a semicircle around the turntable, which could meet underlying track by being rotated. What the saboteur had done was to blow up the midpoint of the _plaque__tournant. The damage to the electrical system was meaningless--any electrician could wire around that in an hour. However, the explosion had also damaged the central mechanism of the _plaque,__ a large iron casting, and that would have to be reforged. With French and German foundries pressed beyond extremity by demands of the war, replacement would take at least three months. Thus, for that period, fourteen locomotives weren't going anywhere--the _plaque__ had been blown in a position directly perpendicular to the outgoing service track. The transport officer stared at the mess and said _scheiss__ through clenched teeth. The gap was less than fifteen feet. It might as well have been fifteen miles. His transportation mathematics were, by necessity,'quite efficient. Each locomotive pulled sixty freight cars and, in a three-month period, could be expected to make nine round trips to the coastal defense lines in the west and north. He multiplied by fourteen out-of-service locomotives and came up with something more than seven thousand lost carloads. And this sort of thing, he assumed, would happen throughout the French rail system. The transport officer wasn't such a bad fellow. In all likelihood he would have appreciated, once restored to his more reflective self, the words of the saboteur's British briefing officer as he reviewed the _plaque__tournantprocedure: "For want of a nail, dear boy, and all that sort of thing." In the winter of1944,on a night when the mountain was still and silent, when snow hung thick on the pine boughs and white fields shone blue in the moonlight, Khristo Stoianev went to war. As they'd meant him to do. The priest who had released him from a cell in the Sant�ison had barely spoken, but the intent of the action was self-evident. He was free. Free to fight the common enemy. The time and place he must choose for himself. Khristo sometimes thought about the priest: a small, stooped man, unremarkable, invisible. A perfect emissary for Voluta, his church, and NOV, the Polish Nationalist organization. Khristo knew that someone had kept track of him, had known he was in the Sant�butthat was no surprise. His training and experience gave him, when the time was right, a certain value, and the NOV priests would be aware of that value. Priests made excellent intelligence officers, he knew; the Vatican was said to have the world's finest intelligence service, calling on the accumulated experience of seven centuries. _Father__Voluta--it seemed a strange idea. But Ilya had claimed it to be so, and Ilya knew things. Others, certainly, had been set free from French prisons as the German tank columns neared Paris and the fall of France was imminent. Like Khristo, they had been jailed because they were dangerous. Now, for the same reason, they were released. It was one of the first ways a defeated country could fight back. That the French had let him go at the behest of the Poles surprised him not at all. The two conquered nations were old friends, sharing a taste for romanticism and idealism that had got them every sort of misery for a hundred years. But they shared also a near pathological conviction--that romanticism and idealism would in time be triumphant--which made for a battered old friendship but a durable one. Khristo walked quietly from the bedroom of the old house that had been his refuge, the polished wood floor cold on his bare feet, and dressed from a large closet in the adjoining alcove. Thick wool socks, corduroy trousers suitable for working dogs in the field--a gentleman's roughwear--wool sweater, and an old coat, shapeless but warm. Good high boots that laced up tight. From a peg on the inside of the closet door he took a Hungarian machine pistol--Gepisztoly M43--on a leather strap. It had cost four chickens, three dozen eggs, and a bottle of brandy, but it made them comfortable to have a weapon in the house. He smiled as he handled it; Sophie had oiled the cheap wooden stock as though it belonged to a fine gun kept on an estate. But then, Sophie had altered the corduroy trousers so that he could wear them, had knitted the sweater and the socks--unraveling fashionable items from better days in order to do so--and, come to that, had polished the floor as well. All her life she had done these things and saw no reason to stop just because of the war. Perhaps the war was all die more reason to do them. He took four loaded magazines from the closet shelf and put two in each pocket of the coat, dientiptoed down die hall to Sophie's bedroom to say good-bye. Her bed was empty, a heavy comforter folded neatly at the foot. Next door, where Marguerite slept, it was die same. He listened and, very faindy, heard the sound of plates and silverware in the kitchen on the first floor. Years of service, he realized, had schooled the sisters in the preparation of breakfast without waking the house.

Prison had changed him. He came to understand that on his first day of freedom. The Nikko Petrov papers were no longer of use, so he walked restlessly about the streets of the city--frantic knots of people on one block, deserted silence on the next--as it waited to see what Occupation might bring. Eventually, he found a young man approximately his height and size and strong-armed him in a doorway, taking his passport. He bought glue ina _papeterie, __then founda caf�pried his photograph from the Nansendocument and made himself a French passport. The franking marks across the corner of the picture did not quite match, but one had to look carefully to see that. He ordered a steak, ate it so fast he barely noticed the taste, then left thecaf�th the steak knife in his pocket. A few blocks away he founda _mont de pi�__--"mountain of piety, " as the French ironically termed their pawn shops--held a knife to the pawnbroker's throat, and stole a small French pistol. He could have bought it, he had money from the priest, but he knew that money meant survival and he intended to survive. Nearby, he saw a finely dressed gentleman getting into a car, held him at bay with the pistol, and drove away in the car, a five-year-old Simca Huit, dark blue, with nearly a full tank of gas. For as long as he was able, he drove south and west. Away from the advancing Germans, headed for the coast or, perhaps, Spain. He would accept whatever the fates offered. But the farther south he drove, the worse the nightmare. The roads were clogged with people and their possessions, cars had been pushed into the fields when they would no longer run, abandoned cats and dogs were everywhere. He saw a woman pushing a baby carriage with a grandfather clock in it, he saw unburied dead by the side of the road, bloated and flyblown in the early summer heat. The anarchy of flight was exacerbated by Stuka bombing runs on the refugee columns so that people had to run for the ditches and, here and there, a tower of smoke rose into the sky from a burning car. The Germans had learned the tactic in Spain, refined it in Poland: clogged roads made reinforcement and supply impossible--tanks would simply not drive over their own people, at least not in this part of Europe. So the Stukas'objective was to sow panic andterroramong the fleeing civilians, and they buzzed low along the roads for a long while before they used their machine guns or dropped a bomb. This effort was aided, on the ground, by German agents who spread horror stories and rumors among the civilian population. Khristo came upon such a man at dusk on the first night, holding the terrified attention of a small group of refugees by the roadside with stories of German atrocities. Khristo stopped the car and stood at the edge of the crowd and listened to him, a master storyteller who didn't miss a detail: the screams, the blood, the horror. He was a heavy, blunt-featured man who clearly enjoyed his work and was adept at it. When Khristo could no longer bear the looks on the faces of the listeners, he pushed his way through the crowd and took the man by the scruff of the neck. "This man is trying to frighten you," he said. "Don't you see that?" They stared at him, paralyzed, not understanding anything at all. In disgust, Khristo marched the man behind a tree and chopped his pistol's trigger guard across the bridge of the man's nose. The man yelped and ran away across the field, bleeding all over himself. But when Khristo turned back to the crowd he saw that they too had run away. He had frightened them, had only made it worse. On the second day, somewhere on the N52where it ran along the Loire between Blois and Tours, the car began to stall. All day it had crept along, in first and second gears, stopping and starting, locked in the stream of cars and bicycles and people on foot. By now, the Simca was full--and heavy: a mother and daughter, the latter having somehow injured her knee, a wounded French artilleryman who sang to keep their spirits up, and an old woman with a small, frightened dog that whined continually. His passengers got out of the car and sat in a resigned group among the roadside weeds while he opened the hood. The smell of singed metal from the engine reminded him of the flight from Madrid, only here no little man on a bicycle showed up to help. _Perhaps it wants water,__ he thought, treating it more like a horse than a car. Someone volunteered a bottle and he slithered down the bank to the edge of the Loire, holding the bottle against the gravel and letting water trickle in. It was peaceful by the river; cicadas whirred in the heat, a small breeze stirred the air. "Ah, monsieur, thank God you have come." He turned toward the voice and discovered the woman he would come to know as Sophie. She looked to be in her middle fifties, with anxious eyes and a broad, placid face. She wore a "good" dress, black with white polka dots, sweated through in circles beneath the arms. He must have looked puzzled, for she elaborated: "We have been praying very hard, you see." "Oh?" "Please," she said urgently, "there's little time." Around the curve of the river he found another woman, similar to the first though perhaps somewhat younger--he took them to be sisters--and an old man in a formal white suit laid back against the grassy bank. His tie was undone and his face was the color of paper. The younger woman was fanning him with his hat. Khristo knelt by his side and placed two fingers against the pulse in his neck. The beat was faint and very fast and the man was comatose, an occasional flutter of the eyelids the only sign of life. "I'm afraid I can do nothing," he said. "This man is dying, he needs to be in hospital." The elder sister answered a little impatiently. "We know he is dying. But he must receive unction, you see, the last rites, so that his soul may rest peacefully in heaven." Khristo scratched his head. The women reminded him of nuns, innocent and strong-willed at once. "I am not a priest, madame. I'm sorry." The elder sister nodded. "That we can see. But my sister and I are Protestant, and we do not know the proper ceremony for these matters." He turned back toward the man. "I cannot say it in French," he said. "No matter," the elder sister replied. "God hears all languages." Then, as a slightly horrified afterthought: "You are Catholic, of course." "Of course," he said. He was Bulgarian Eastern Orthodox--closer to Catholicism than a Protestant, in theory, but the rites were different and the customs not at all the same. From his training he knew that European Catholics expected "Hail Mary" and "Our Father" and an Act of Contrition. What he was able to offer, however, were _preds-murtna molitva,__ prayers for the dying. There should have been _soborauat,__ elders, present to pray a dying man into the next world, but God would have to forgive this requirement. As for the prayers themselves, they were supposed to be improvisational, in whatever form was appropriate to those present. He therefore leaned dose to the man--whispering so quietly that the sisters could not hear him--and asked God to ease his entry into heaven, to forgive him his sins, and to unite him with those he'd loved in this life who had preceded him. Finally, returning to the Catholic tradition, he anointed the man with river water in place of holy oil, touching his face in the sign of the cross and saying, in French, "In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit." The man's lips were cold as snow, and Khristo suppressed a shiver. "Go to God," he added, then stood, indicating that the ritual was concluded. Both sisters were weeping silently, dabbing at their eyes with small white handkerchiefs. "Poor Monsieur Dreu." The younger sister spoke for the first time. "His heart..." "It is the war," the other sister said. "Was he your husband?" Khristo asked. "No," the elder answered. "Our employer. For many years. He was as a father to us." "What will you do?" They simply wept. Finally Sophie, the elder sister, said, "Monsieur Dreu intended that we should go to the little house--we would have been safe there. We tried, but we could not make way. Everyone wants to go west. Monsieur Dreu tried to drive the car, all the way from Bordeaux, but the strain on him, the planes, the people on the road..." Something in her voice, in the inflectiono�etite maison, caught his attention. "Little house?" "In the mountains, to the east, toward Strasbourg. There is no road there, you see, and no people. Just an old man who chops the wood." "Chariot," the younger sister offered. "Yes. Chariot." "How would you live?" he asked. "Well, there is every sort of food, in tins. Monsieur Dreu always saw to that. 'One must be prepared for eventualities,' he used to say. 'Some day there will be turmoil,' he said, 'another revolution.' He said it every summer, when we all went up there to clean the house and air the linen. Monsieur Dreu had great faith in air, especially the air one finds in the mountains. 'Breathe in!' he would say." Both sisters smiled sadly at the memory. East, he thought. No one was going east--perhaps if they took the country lanes between the north-south highways. _No road. Tinned food.__ In his mind, the words narrowed to a single concept: sanctuary. But there was his own group to consider; he would not simply toss them from the Simca. "Have you an automobile?" he asked. "Oh yes. Up on the road, a very grand automobile. A Daimler, it is called. Can you drive such a car?" Sophie stared at him with anxious eyes. He nodded yes. The younger sister cleared her throat, the knuckles of her reddened hands showed white as she twisted the handkerchief. "Are you a gentleman, monsieur?" "Oh yes," he said. "Very much so." "Thank God," she whispered. He went up onto the road and inspected the great black Daimler, polished and shimmering in the midday sun. The gas gauge indicated the tank was a little less than half full, but he knew they would have to take their chances with fuel, no matter what, and if his own money didn't hold out, he was certain Monsieur Dreu had provided amply for the run to his mountain retreat. And if he had any question at all about the change of plan, a visit to his fellow refugees, gathered about the Simca, answered it for him. At the direction of the old lady with the dog, they had pooled their money, purchased a pair of draft horses from a nearby farm, and were in the process of harnessing the animals to the car's bumper. Khristo explained that he would be leaving them and gave the car keys to the old lady, who now assumed command of the vehicle. They all wished him well, embracing him and shaking his hand. As he walked back toward the river, the artilleryman called out, _"Vive �a France!"__ and Khristo turned and saluted him. At the river, he waited patiently with Sophie and Marguerite and, as the sun went down, the old man died peacefully. Using the Daimler's tire iron and their hands, they scratched out a shallow grave by the river and laid him to rest. Khristo found a piece of board by the roadside and carved an inscription with the knife stolen from a Pariscaf�Antonin Dreu 1869-1940 The sisters had cared for Monsieur Dreu for more than thirty years, thus Khristo, as his replacement, found himself pampered to an extraordinary degree. The old man had been the last of a long line of grainn�ciantsin the city of Bordeaux and the family had acquired significant wealth over time. Dreu himself had been, according to Sophie, something of an eccentric: at times a Theoso-phist, a vegetarian, a socialist, a follower of Ouspenskian mysticism, a devotee of tarot, the Ouija board, and, especially, s�ces. He "spoke" to his departed mother at least once a month, claiming to receive business direction from her. Whatever the source of his commercial wisdom, he had prospered in good times and bad. He had never married, though Khristo had a strong suspicion that he had been the lover of both his servants. Dreu had also believed that a great social upheaval would overtake Europe, and to this end had obtained the little house in the southern Vosgesmountains, a long way from anything, and stocked it with food, firewood, and kerosene for the lamps. Thus in the first months of Occupation Khristo had lived on canned Polish hams, tinned Vienna sausage and brussels sprouts, and aged wheels of Haute-Savoiecheese. The well-stocked wine cellar, he knew from his time at Heininger, was exceptional, and the three of them often got tipsy around the fire in the evenings. As time passed he ventured out, walking many miles to a tiny hamlet--itself a mile or so from any road--populated by the sort of mountain people who have been interbreeding for too many generations. He became known as Dreu's nephew, Christophe, and was simply accepted as another eccentric from _up there.__ When their tins of food at last ran out, they bought a rooster and several hens, a milk cow, enough seed for a large garden, and replaced staples as necessary at the little village. Khristo journeyed only once into�inal, the nearest town of any size, to buy a weapon on the black market and to see the Germans for himself. In the sparse, occasional gossip of the mountain village he heard little ofr�stance, so bided his time and turned his attention to matters of daily existence. By the end of1941,Khristo and the two sisters had fallen into a rhythm of rural obligations: wood had to be chopped, weeds pulled, animals fed, vegetables canned. The roof needed repair, a root cellar had to be built, once you had chickens you needed a chicken house and then--local predators were abundant--a strong fence. Given the absence of ready-made materials, improvisation was the order of the day and every new project demanded endless ingenuity. Such demands constituted, for Khristo, a kind of paradise. By turning his hand to unending chores he gradually cured his spirit of the black despair that had descended on it in the Sant�ison. Down below, in mountain villages and valley towns, the war subsided to the numbing routine of Occupation. Twice, in1942,he left the mountain and contrived to make contact withmaquisunits but in both instances he found himself confronted with the political realities of the earlyr�stance.The active groups in the region were dedicated communists, fighting both to defeat the Germans and to obtain political power for themselves. They were suspicious of him--he turned aside their ideological questions, and could find no way to be forthcoming about his past. When further meetings were suggested, in remote areas, he did not attend. But by the fall of1942he had determined to put his caution aside and join the fighting no matter the danger. His conscience gnawed at him, and the peaceful joys of his existence turned bitter. He fabricated a history that could not, he thought, be vetted by themaquisorganizations and prepared himself to withstand hostile interrogation. The fabrication was, however, not to be tested. He spent the late fall and early winter in bed; a yellow blush tinged his cheekbones, his kidneys throbbed with pain, and his physical energy simply drained away. The two sisters cared for him as best theycould, he would emerge from bouts of fever to find Sophie wiping the perspiration from his body with a damp cloth. He was, during the worst moments, delirious, joining a spirit world where every age of his life returned to him in vivid form and color and he called out to childhood friends and NKVD officers as they floated brightly past his vision. He was again a waiter in Paris, wept at Aleksandra's absence, rowed his father across the Dunav, and hung his head in shame in the Vidin schoolhouse. "Who is May?" Sophie asked tenderly when he woke to reality on a winter afternoon. He whispered that he did not know. On another occasion,--a week later or perhaps a month, he had lost track of time--he came to his senses to discover both sisters huddled against the bedroom wall, their eyes wide with fright. What had he said? Had he confessed to phantom deeds, or real ones? With all his meager strength he turned himself toward them and held out his hands, pleading silently for forgiveness. He recovered slowly. It was June before he could properly strip the udder on the milk cow. Rebuilding a sawhorse, he counted twenty hammer strokes before a nail was thoroughly driven. He had all his life taken physical strength for granted and was appalled at how slowly it returned to him. At times he feared he would never again be the same. Then, in the late autumn of1943,they had a visitor, a boy from the village down below. After a whispered conference, he was invited in and fed lavishly. The food and wine made him loquacious. He had come to enlist the services of Christophefor the Cambras _maquis,__he said. Everyone could do something, even Christophe.There were Stenmagazines to be loaded, bicycle wheels to be repaired. He spoke grandly of one Lucien,who would lead them to glory in forays against the hated Germans.Christophemight well be allowed, after sufficient service, to fire one of theformidable Stens. Khristo only pretended to mull it over. There was a debt to be paid, to a French priest, more particularly to those whose sacrifices had enabled him to appear at the Sant�and Khristo meant to repay it by service in the one trade he knew. Thus, on a clear night in December, he ate fresh bread and warm milk in the kitchen, accepted the tearful embraces of Sophie and Marguerite, and, long before dawn, walked out across the fields with the machine pistol slung over his shoulder. His boots crunched the hard crust of snow and he marched in time, the brilliant moonlight casting a soldier's shadow before him.

They operated quietly in the first months of1944- The _plaque__tournantoperation had been one of an enormous range of Anglo-American actions concentrated over a period of a few days, including operations against railroads, factories, shipping, and communications: an intelligence feint, the first in a series leading up to the Allied landing in Occupied Europe. The Germans knew a major attack was coming but the _when__ and _where__ factors were critical, and the chief Allied intelligence mission was to create a structure in which deceptions could succeed. At the London intelligence bases, they knew that pins went up on maps in the Abwehrand Sicherheitsdienst(SS)analysis centers--where they understood intelligence feints and deceptions quite well themselves. Thus some of the operations had to be transparent, some translucent, and others opaque. In certain instances, all three characteristics could be combined in a single action. The technique was not new, the tactics of deception and disinformation and special operations behind enemy lines had been well known and used by Hannibal, in the Punic Wars against the Romans. All in all, it was like an orchestra led by an invisible conductor--sometimes the violins played, sometimes the reeds disappeared--and it drove the Germans slightly mad, which it was also intended to do. Locomotives were not the principal objective in the attack on the Bruy�srailyards. This was not Sabotage, General--it was Sabotage, Specific. The actual target was an ammunition train making up in the yards from various parts of Occupied Europe and due to leave forty-eight hours after the attack, bound for the defense lines that protected a span of beaches in Normandy. There would be no major landing in winter, the Germans knew that, but they also knew about dress rehearsals, and the _plaque__tournantaction, along with others that week, was ultimately read as a deceptive action, meant to mislead German planners intobelieving that a dress rehearsal was in progress for a future attack against the sheltered beaches at the edge of the Cotentin Peninsula--precisely where, six months later, they were to take place. German intelligence in the�inalregion was not able to find out precisely who had attacked the Bruy�syards, but gossip did reach them, was intended to reach them, that it was no more than a bunch of village toughs led by a low-level Special Operations technician. They sent a platoon up to Cambras--one of several villages that interested them--but themaquislookouts on the road passed the word and the group took to the brush with time to spare, cramming themselves into a woodcutter's hut high up on the mountain and waiting it out. Cambrascovered by a thin layer of snow was even less impressive than Cambrasin its normal condition. The German officer looked in the houses and smelled the smells and saw frightened eyes peering from doorways and the chicken sitting on the fountain and, with Teutonic respect for symbols--of power or insignificance--wrote it off. So, ultimately, in Berlin it was a white pin they stuck in Bruy�sand not a red one. The information was wired back from Berlin to counterespionage field units in the Belfort sector and, because a Polish factory worker had stolen a German cipher machine at the very start of the war and Polish and British cryptanalysts had broken the codes, the Allies knew they'd succeeded. And put a pin in their own map. Eidenbaugh's mission called for ongoing operations at a low level, so, in response to a coded Limelight message, he continued to harass the _schleuhs.__ But gently, gently. A telephone pole cut down. Children's jacks with sharpened points strewn about to blow the tires of the telephone repair vehicle. The occasional tree felled across the road. Which halted supply columns while convoy troops plodded through the snowy woods, making sure there wasn't a nasty surprise around the curve. There was no ambush, just a tree, but it kept the Germans nervous, kept them busy, kept them frustrated. What they were getting, that winter, were pranks, at a level calculated to exclude reprisal against civilians. The Cambras _maquis__blew up thecoeursd'agu� metal castings that enabled the switching of locomotives from track to track. They pry-barred rails apart so that a locomotive plowed up hundreds of ties as itderailed, then left a charge behind for the railroad crane that would arrive to put the damage right. But only a small charge, meant to damage a wheel, to keep the huge thing out of action'for a week. They also, under Eidenbaugh's close direction, recruited new members. Ulysse, in their second meeting--at a commercial traveler's hotel between Belfort and�inal--altered the KIT FOX mission by relieving Eidenbaugh from any further attempt to installa _courrier.__That assignment had been an error--Eidenbaugh had all he could do to operate his own small group and find andtrain newmaquisards. He got all sorts. There were soldiers of fortune--calledcondottieriintraditional intelligence parlance--former criminals who hoped to make their fortunes in wartime targets of opportunity. There were everyday citizens, who had held themselves out of the fighting until they saw which way the wind was blowing and now rushed to get in on things before it was too late. Service in the underground, they now saw, would count professionally after the war. Such types were called, with some contempt, naphtal�s--mothballs. Meanwhile the Cambrasmaquis--the original group in the immediate area, lest anyone forget--strutted about grandly with cigarettes stuck in one corner of the mouth, eyes well slitted, and Stens slung diagonally across the back, mountain style. Mountain style.Better because it left the hands free, enabling one to move swiftly and safely on the treacherous paths, better for riding a horse or a mule, and better because that was the way it had always been done there, since the time the village ancestors had slung muskets across their backs and gone off to fight as _chasseurs,__ mountain troops, in the Grande Arm�f Napoleon. Against the ancestors of the very Germans they were fighting in1944. You had to learn the mountains. The new recruits, installed on straw mattresses throughout the houses of the village, were certainly patriotic and surely brave, but they were flatlanders, ignorant of the ways of the high forest--the sudden blizzards, the white mist that struck a man virtually blind. They had to be trained, and the Cambrasmaquiswere pleased to take on the training mission. One day in late January, Daniel Vau and La Brebistook two of the new recruits--Christophe, the nephew of the old loon who'd built a house up on a neighboring mountain, and Fusari, a dark-skinned Corsican from St.-Di�out on practice maneuvers. The objective was to teach them some mountain lore and to familiarize them with the network of deer trails that ran through the forest between the road and the village. The day was crisp and cold, the sky bright, a good morning to be in the forest, and Daniel Vau and La Brebistraveled down the path at great speed, testing the stamina of their pupils by setting a fast pace and, consequently, leaving them far behind. A good lesson, let them struggle. They had to learn to be part goat in this region, it could well save their lives. The twomaquisardswould glide down a section of path, then wait for the other two, who would arrive panting and red-faced. Just as they came into view Daniel would say, "Rest period over. Time to go," and set out again, leaving the novices to get along as best they could, leg muscles twanging from the shock of a downhill lope. The German officer--no one really saw his rank--was bird-watching on his day off. Daniel and La Brebiscame around a corner of the path and there he was, attended by a bored Feldwebel, probably his driver, who leaned against a tree and picked his nails while his superior alternately peered into the sky through binoculars and consulted a field guide on birds of the southern Vosges. He was in search of a species of mountain hawk often seen in the region, which concerned the villagers only insofar as it competed for the available stock of brown hare. The two Germans and the twomaquisardssaw each other at about the same moment and, for a long second, they froze and nothing happened. It took each of them some time to realize they were in the presence of enemies because they were engaged in innocent pastimes--simply not at war that day. It was less than strange to meet a French boy and girl on a mountain path and all would have been well but for the Stens. The officer, a little to one side of the path for a better view up through the pines, got a good look at the weapons, and it wasn't very long before he came to understand exactly what they meant. There followed a moment of comedy: the officer scrabbling at the flap of his holster, the Feldwebelattempting to grab his rifle--resting butt down against a tree--and knocking it over, Daniel and Brebishaving the most difficult time of all, trying to struggle free of their slung weapons. It took them a hopelessly long time to do so and, in fact, they never did manage it. The officer drew his pistol, thumbed the safety off, shot each of them once, then ran away down the trail, the Feldwebelgalloping after, dragging his rifle along the ground by its strap. Khristo heard the shots and dove off the path, landing on his belly with the machine pistol pointing in the direction of the gunfire. Fusari he could not see. He heard, below him, the sounds of flight and a series of moans. It took him a minute to sort it out: someone had fired, someone else had run away. Since those who fled were headed downhill, toward the road, he assumed they were the enemy and that the moaning was coming from Daniel or Brebis, one or both of whom were hit. Both. He circled wide of the trail and came in from the flank; Fusari arrived from the other direction at about the same time. Khristo gestured down the trail and Fusari took off in that direction, crouched, moving quickly and gracefully. It wa& clear to Khristo that he was not new at this. The guide to birds of the southern Vosgeslay open on the ground, along with Daniel Vau's Stengun. Daniel lay flat on his stomach. He looked at Khristo, a plea in his eyes: _please help me__La Brebisseemed worse off, lying on her back across Daniel's lower legs, head hung backward, treading her feet like a nursing cat. She had covered her face with her hands and was moaning softly every few seconds. "Be careful with her," Daniel said. "Are you hurt badly?" He shook his head that he didn't know. "She has my legs pinned," he said. "It's somewhere down there." "Is there a doctor in the village?" "A midwife." He circled Daniel and knelt by La Brebisand gently pulled her hands away. It was very bad. She had been shot in the face.�Just below and to the outside of the right nostril, a red bead of�flesh extruded from a puffy circle shaded blue at its exterior edge. Suddenly, she grabbed hold of his wrists and gagged. He realizedshe was swallowing blood, shook one of his hands loose and raised her head. "Thank you," she breathed. "Can you spit it out?" She tried but couldn't manage, a string of red saliva hanging from her lower lip. He took his other hand back and cleaned her mouth, then wiped away the water that ran from her eyes. "It is the wound," she said. "I do not weep." "I know," he said. Very gently, he opened her mouth. There was a swollen ridge across the top of her palate. He reached around her head and probed gently in the hair at the base of her skull, looking for an exit wound, but couldn't find anything. God only knew where the bullet was, somewhere inside her face. He realized that Fusari was standing above him, breathing hard. "They're gone," he said. "I heard the car take off." Khristo nodded. It meant they would be back in force--perhaps in an hour or a little less. He said to Daniel, "I don't want to move her. Is she crushing your legs?" "I don't feel anything," he said. "Can you move your feet? Your toes?" "No." His heart sank. Fusari swore softly. From the trail above him, he heard running footsteps. The sound of the shots had apparently reached them--the cold air carried sound much as water did. Lucien--the American--and Gilbert came galloping down the path a few moments later. The former was pale and shaken. Gilbert carrieda Stenand a tattered old book with its covers missing. "What happened?"Lucienasked, breathless. Daniel told him. La Brebislaid her head back in Khristo's arms. One side of her face had swollen so that her right eye was a slit, and she was beginning to struggle for breath as the damaged passages swelled shut. Khristo spoke to Gilbert, who was hunting through his book, a medical manual belonging to the village for many years, used primarily to set broken bones and to treat burns. "Is there a doctor?" "In Epinal," Gilbert answered. "You better get him," Khristo said. La Brebiswas dying. Lucienspoke. "We must bring them down there," he said. "No," Gilbert said. "It's impossible. The _schleuhs__ will be all over the place--and they'll be here soon enough. They've seen the Stens." "Where is the truck?"Luciensaid. "By the logging. On the other side of the road." "Is there gasoline?" "A little." "Let's go," he said. "Did you not hear me?" Gilbert asked. "It doesn't matter. We're going. Christopheand Fusari, take La Brebis. Gilbert and I will follow with Daniel." "Lucien,"Gilbert said, grim, "they'll get us all." "No they won't." Daniel said, "I am sorry, Lucien. We didn't..." They waited while Lucienran back up the path and warned the village that a German search party would be coming. The remainder of themaquisand the new recruits took the arms and ammunition and moved up the mountain. Alceste Vau was not told of his brother's wound; he would have demanded to accompany them to Epinal and there were already, too many of them for the old truck. When Lucienreturned, they carried the wounded down the path, across the road, and loaded them carefully into the back of the truck. They covered themselves with a canvas tarp while Gilbert drove, alone in the cab. The ride down the mountain road seemed to go on forever. The brakes were virtually useless on the steep curves and every time Gilbert downshifted, the flywheel screamed and threatened to blow the transmission all over the road. The truck swayed and bounced, Khristo lay on his side in the darkness beneath the tarpaulin and tried to keep La Brebis's head from moving with the truck's motion, but it was a losing battle. In the beginning, she cried out when they were jolted by a downshift, but as they went farther down the mountain she made no sound at all, and Khristo could feel her skin growing cold. _Let her die,__ he thought. His training told him to sacrifice one in order to save another--and to stop might put all their lives in jeopardy. But this was Lucien's decision, he realized, and finally he shifted over next to him and, raising his voice above the truck's roaring motor, said,"Lucien, Brebisis asphyxiating. She won't make it." Lucien's voice answered a moment later. "Are you sure?" "No. But feel how cold she is." "It could be shock." "It could be, but I think it's her windpipe closing up." When there was no immediate answer, he tried to help Lucienmake a decision. "We can still save Daniel, if we continue." "No,"Luciensaid. He crawled along the truck bed, then reached out from beneath the tarp and pounded on the rear window of the cab. Gilbert slowed--they could feel him pumping the brakes gingerly--then pulled off the road onto the grassy shoulder. The truck was canted at a dangerous angle, and Gilbert raced the engine so it would not stall. On the other side of the road a German staff car and a truckload of soldiers tore past, but they paid no heed to the truck by the side of the road. "Hold her head,"Luciensaid. Khristo cradled her head in his lap and pressed his hands against the sides of her face. Fusari crawled over next to him and raised the edge of the tarp to let in some light. Lucienreached into his pocket and brought out a cheap fountain pen. He unscrewed the two halves, then broke off the nib end and cleaned up the shattered edge as best he could with a knife. He pulled his shirttail out and wiped ink from the open tube he'd fashioned. Khristo could see that his hands were snaking. "Ready?"Luciensaid. Khristo nodded. "Open her mouth." Khristo pulled her teeth apart. He could see Luciensweating in the cold air as he pressed Brebis's tongue down with his left index finger. When he forced the tube down the back of her throat, the pain brought her back from stupor and she screamed, a hoarse, choking sound that made Khristo shudder. When Lucienwithdrew his hand there was blood on it. Lucienwasted no time. He pounded on the cab window again, and Gilbert moved back out on the road while Fusari resettled the tarp and they were in darkness once again. La Brebistriedto move her hand to her mouth, but Khristo held tightly to her wrist. "Just breathe," he whispered by her ear. "Can you?" After a moment, she moved her head up and down to tell him that she could. In�inal, they heard the sounds of other vehicles and bicycle bells and the truck slowed, bumping along the cobbled streets. At last, Gilbert made as if to park, swinging over toward the curb. Then, suddenly, he took off quickly, with all the acceleration the old engine could muster. Khristo let go of the wounded girl and found the grip of his machine pistol. But nothing happened. They drove for several minutes, then rolled to a stop. Khristo peeked beneath the tarp and saw the�inalrailroad station. At Lucien's direction, Fusari checked out the other side and reported that Gilbert was entering the H�de la Gare, which was, Khristo knew, to be found across the street from virtually every railway station in France. Some minutes later Gilbert appeared at the back of the truck and spoke in an undertone. "There wasa _geste__ carparked in front of the doctor's office--they know there's been a gunshot wound. I'm going to drive around to the back of the hotel. Once we get there, move quickly and get them inside." The truck inched down a narrow alley, cornered, and stopped. They threw the tarp off and saw two men in dark suits with pistols in their hands. Khristo immediately armed his weapon and covered them. "What's this?"Lucienasked. "Pimps," Gilbert answered, climbing up on the truck bed to help with the wounded. "We're at the�inalwhorehouse. It's the only place in town where the doctor comes--and no questions asked. They've already sent one of the girls to get him." They carried Brebisand Daniel through the small bar that adjoined the lobby, then upstairs to a dingy room with faded wallpaper. A mustached man in long underwear jumped out of the bed when they entered the room. "See here," he said. "Take a walk," one of the pimps answered, showing the man his pistol, "this is for France." A heavy woman in a dressing gown appeared as they lowered the wounded to the rumpled bed. Without a word she handedthe customer a sheaf of ten-franc notes.�He, in turn, drew himself up to his full dignity, baggy underdrawers and all. "Never!" he said, with great solemnity. Slapped the money back into the woman's hand, saluted crisply, and marched from the room.

February, in the mountains, was like a white island. Cut off from time, lifeless, inert. A place where snow showered from the pine boughs, a place where the wind died and the water froze to perfect crystalline ice. In Cambras, Khristo Stoianev kept to himself. He lived, like the rest of the village, on turnips and rutabagas. Sometimes there was bread. Most of the recruits had been sent home--with instructions to return after the March thaw--because the village food-stocks could not support them. But Khristo and the Corsican, Fusari, were asked to stay. The shooting of La Brebisand Daniel Vau continued to reverberate in Cambrasand not in comfortable ways. They had both survived, for which everyone was thankful. But Daniel had been wounded in the spine, would never walk again, and Gilbert's young wife had taken this very badly. She had been, everyone supposed, Daniel's lover, and her broken heart showed for all to see. This situation oppressed Gilbert's domestic life to a painful degree and he was rumored to have shifted his sleeping quarters to the bed of the strange servant girl who lived in the house. The doctor had arrived within minutes that day at the H�de la Gare, awhite-hairedprofesseurof a man who wore an old-fashioned silk vest beneath his suit. He had patched up La Brebisas best he could, then ordered both wounded removed to a convent near the town of Vittel, some twenty miles distant, and there operated on Daniel Vau. Both had remained and were said to be recovering as well as could be expected. The family of La Brebis--the Bonet clan--muttered continually of revenge on her behalf. Gilbert and Lucienresisted, reluctant to attack the Germans in this way, fearing what they would do to the village in return. The murder of an individual German soldier had elsewhere in France been repaid by the killing of more than a hundred civilians. A high price for the Bonet honor. But the stalemate could not last indefinitely and late one afternoon an aristocratic Frenchman appeared in Cambras: tall, hawk-faced, silver-haired, even in February wearing a fine topcoat over his shoulders like a cape. He was accompanied by a bodyguard called Albert, a watchful man with lank brown hair parted in the middle, a caf�iter's mustache, and eyes the color of the winter sea. He carried a short-barreled pump shotgun, a weapon never before seen in the village--what birds you could get with _that__--and wore a Walther pistol in an armpit holster. _The Killer,__ they called him, when he wasn't around to hear. He reminded Khristo of his past. Which now, in February, seemed like another life lived by another man. With war in Russia, he thought, they must all be dead by now. Sascha, Drazen Kulic, all the others from Arbat Street. Perhaps not Ilya. Ilya would always find a way to survive. And he rather thought Volutawas alive somewhere; he was like air, hard to get hold of and thus hard to kill. What, he wondered, would they think of this American who called himself Lucien. For he was surely not French, no Frenchman ever walked like that, free-striding, body leaning forward. And he was not British. He did not have the British face, that odd, speculative stillness. He was, apparently, what Khristo had been. An intelligence officer, sent, no doubt, to organize and focus resistance to the Germans. And he was approximately Khristo's age. Yet he was very different. His training was different--there was another angle to him. He was nothing like Sascha Vonetsor Yaschyeritsa or Ozunov. Nor was he like Roddy Fitzware. What made him distinct, in Khristo's eyes, was his decision to save the lives of the two wounded villagers. At not so much jeopardy to his life--that was expected--as jeopardy to his mission. That was not expected. And it was wrong. An error. But it was the nature of the error that provoked 'Khristo's curiosity. The man's component parts, compassion interwoven with aggression, reminded him of Faye Berns, who could be sentimental one moment and entirely practical the next. He had thought her personality to be singular, but he now understood that she was one of a class. To which add Winnie Beale, who had, on the spur of the moment, committed an entirely altruistic act and could have died for her trouble. A wealthy bitch, suddenly swept away by unselfish couragein the face of a machine gun. The combination was attractive, very appealing, but, in the case of Lucien, he had to wonder how it managed to resolve itself to the crueler exigencies of intelligence work. The French aristocrat, in Khristo's experienced eyes, seemed to be Lucien's superior, but that was not so very unusual; his own experience of being a non-national in another country's service supported that observation. During the three days the man stayed at the village, he spent most of his time soothing one or another of the Bonet family, explaining to them the facts of life in regard to revenge killings. But he also sought Khristo out, chatted with him now and again in the most general sort of way, and finally invited him to have a brandy at Gilbert's house. When Khristo arrived, after a turnip supper, he discovered that Gilbert and his family were absent, as was Lucien. The brandy was a gift from heaven. He'd spent most of his nights in the mountains as close to a fire as he could get, but it was the first time in many weeks that both sides of him were warm at the same moment. It was private at Gilbert's house. There was only the light of the fire--a big one, Gilbert was liberal with his wood--reflected in the frost flowers that covered the small windowpanes. As Khristo sipped at the aristocrat's brandy and relished the warmth that crept through his body, the Frenchman took a pouch of tobacco from his pocket and rolled two cigarettes. The smell reached Khristo all the way from the man's lap. _Makhorka.__ Dark tobacco, strong, and there was no mistaking the aroma. Silently, the man handed him a cigarette, then extended a gold lighter. "Do you like it?" the man said. "Oh yes." "Just like home, eh?" Khristo sat for a time and stared into the fire. There'd been no doubt in his mind that this would happen eventually, that he would be challenged to explain who he was. He would never be considered French--perhaps by the villagers but never by someone who knew the world. And you had to be somebody, you had to belong somewhere, you had to have a nationality of some sort. _Even in heaven,__ he thought, _where Saint Peter is the border guard.__ He discovered that he was angry, not so much at the Frenchman as at the circumstances of his own existence. He looked into the aristocrat's eyes for a moment and realized suddenly that the man was in Cambrasnot to gentle the Bonet clan, but to find out about him. _Very well,__ he thought, _you shall find out.__ "I am not Russian," he said, holding the _makhorka__ cigarette in the air between them to show the man that his tactics were well understood. "No?" "No. I am from Bulgaria. A possession of Turkey for centuries, now an ally of the Germans, soon to belong to someone else. It is the bulwark of southeastern Europe--Christian Europe--against Islam. It is a neighbor and, often, an enemy of Greece, your conquered ally. It has always been greatly desired by Russia, your unconquered ally. Romania, its northern neighbor and sometime enemy, was most recendy the domain of British interests, even though the Romanian ruling class looks to France for their culture and has sided with Germany in this war. It is also part of the Balkans, and the southwestern area of the country has tended to be sympathetic to the interests of Macedonia--divided between Greece and Yugoslavia, a country presently occupied by Germany, with willing assistance from the Croatian minority, except for those Croats who are communist and fight with Tito, whose father was a Serb and mother a Croat. And yes, I like the tobacco quite well." The aristocrat nodded to himself for a moment, something or other had been confirmed. "You are, sir, something of a politician." "I am, sir, a lot of things, but that, thank God, is not one of them." The man across from him laughed appreciatively, then leaned forward. "I am not here to interrogate you, and I am not accusing you. I am only concerned with the politics at hand, not the politics of the Balkans. You must understand that in France there are severalr�stancemovements, Catholic, communist, Gaullist, even those who would restore the Bourbon monarchy. We make common cause against the Germans, but the day is coming when the future of this country will be decided--and it will be decided by those who come out of the conflict with the greatest strength. The Cambras _maquis__is something ofa Gaullistunit, as much as it's anything, and if you would be happier in a different politicalsetting, well, that can be arranged for you, and no hard feelings. Well, what about it?" "My war is right here," Khristo said. A connoisseur of traps, he felt that this was surely the softest one ever laid for him. "Good. You'll be of assistance--no question about it. On that basis, another brandy?" "Thank you, yes." "Some day, you must tell me your story." "I think you would find it interesting," Khristo said. They busied themselves with the brandy for a moment. For Khristo, the room grew deliciously warm. "This war," the aristocrat said, "in some sense it makes you happy." "That's true," Khristo said. "Why?" "The world turned me upside down a long time ago. Now the world itself is turned upside down. For the moment, we--the world and I--are congenial." "But it must end." "Some day." "And then?" "I don't know. I don't think about it. For now, a man with a gun can be whoever he likes. With any luck, I'll be dead before the world turns right side up again." The aristocrat looked into his eyes for a moment, calculating. "I don't think you really mean that." Khristo sighed. "No, you're right. I don't mean it." "Don't give up hope," the aristocrat said. "Everything may be put right in the long run." He handed Khristo the remaining tobacco, then rose from the chair and tossed a small log onto the fire. Khristo accepted that as a signal, chatted for a few moments more, and left soon after. He walked across the tiny mud square of Cambras, back to the house where he slept and ate. The night was clear, the ground frozen rock hard. He looked up at the stars, sharp as diamonds in the black sky, and wondered what the Frenchman had meant by saying "everything may be put right in the long run," because he had meant something by it.

The thaw came in late February and everything turned to mud as sheets of water ran across the mountain roads. In�inal, astudent named Le Beq was caught writing slogans on a wall. He was detained by the Gestapo and tortured. To make his comrades believe he had confessed--and thus get them running, out in the open--he was almost immediately released. He went home to his family, but was unable to speak. The following day, he walked up to a Gestapo sedan parked in the main square and drove a boning knife--all the blade and half the handle--into the driver's chest. The other officer leaned across the seat and shot him several times. But he had the strength of a madman, and managed to walk several blocks to the doctor's office where he collapsed and died on the front step. Immediately, a number of prominent citizens were rounded up and ten men and women were hanged from plane trees on the main street of the city. The doctor who had attended Daniel and La Brebiswas one of them, as was the prostitute's customer who had chanced to be in the H� de la Gare. Onthe first day of March, friends of Le Beq stretched a wire across the road that passed below Cambrasand decapitated--more or less--a motorcycle dispatch rider who had neglected to lie low over his handlebars. This action produced, in turn, a platoon of garrison troops and some SD officers snooping about at the foot of the mountain trails that led up to Cambras. Nobody would have been foolish enough to commit such a murder virtually on his own doorstep (the Cam-brasmaquissuspected a rival resistance group, jealous of their armaments--airplanes didn't come for just _anybody),__ but counter-insurgency investigation is given to a kind of plodding momentum, a leadfootedness that will in fact not dismiss, out of hand, the owner of said doorstep. Vigie, posted across the road, watched the SD officers in conference at the foot of the Cambrastrail and began to mistrust his ability to outflank and outdistance them--to warn the village before the troops arrived--so set his fire selector on single shot and popped off a round over their heads. This produced frantic radio calls and an intenseratissage, but Vigiemelted through the woods like a faun and the only result of the sweep was a few turned German ankles and a good deal of ammunition expendedon swaying tree limbs. The fuss was, as well, more than enough to send the Cambras _maquis__scuttling up the mountain with weapons in hand. Ulysseheard about the business, through his own sources, and the final result of Le Beq's wall writing was that Lucienwas pulled out of Cambras. The KIT FOX mission was about to move into a new phase, and Ulysse smelledlots of trouble in the air around�inal. It was, he thought, the thaw itself, which had melted self-control as well as snowbanks and let loose passions that had remained too tightly wound throughout the winter. KIT FOX was, after all, not a guerrilla campaign, it was a sabotage mission, and there was a feeling in the General Staffs that all-out _partaan__ operations, such as the Russians applied to the invading Germans, would lead to the sort of bloodbath that would eliminate a lot of German non-coms--but at the cost of much of themaquisleadership. It was not entirely put aside, but was reserved for the week of the grand invasion itself if it was going to happen at all. At Ulysse's direction,Lucienbecame the wandering pedagogue of the Belfort Gap, an ancient and traditional attack route up the valley of the Rhine River between the French Vosgesand the German Schwarzwald.Two cities, Belfort and Basel, the Swiss border point for France, sit athwart this opening between mountain ranges like stone lions guarding a palace. In the early spring of1944,the intelligence planners had one objective that led all others: the German high command was now to be exquisitely sensitized to every soft point in Europe that might serve as an Allied invasion route. There was the Balkan route, the Italian route, the beaches of southern France, which led to the Belfort Gap, and the beaches of northern France. Each area had to show heightened levels of sabotage: strategic assets damaged, repaired, then damaged again. Just the sort of thing that goes on before a fleet looms on the horizon. The Lucienteam included Khristo, Fusari, and Vigie,each chosen by Ulyssefor a different reason. Khristo, at first, because Ulyssewanted to keep an eye on him. Later, it became apparent that he had a considerable knowledge of the craft in his own right and shared instructional chores with Lucien.Fusari was appointedsecurity chief and bodyguard, their official thug. Dark and suspicious, he looked the part, and in fact had Union Corse connection in his background. He was forever cutting an X into the nose of each 9mm round, dumdumming it so that what went in the size of a fingernail flattened out, by the time it exited, to the diameter of the circle made by thumb and forefinger. He was, like many professional criminals, violently patriotic, and focused all his attention on giving the Germans a proper screwing. On the other hand, he made it clear that should Ulysserequire the abduction of a bank manager or the interdiction of a payroll, he would be only too pleased to lend his wisdom and experience to the cause. As for Vigie, Ulyssehad recognized his special value early on. He looked younger than his sixteen years and had the scrubbed innocence of an altar boy. He could go anywhere, seemed always a natural part of the environment, and a lie in his mouth was like a hymn. In short, a born lookout. He had, also, an uncanny knack with women--what they did with Vigiedidn't really count as infidelity, for some reason, and he returned from his nighdy tomcatting with various morsels of pillow talk. These never particularly served the Allied intelligence effort, but they might have, and they did function to keep everybody's spirits up, so Vigieretained a permanent dispensation, denied the other three, from Ulysse. They bitched about that, referring to their leader as "Mother Superior," but the point of it was later to be driven home in an extremely ugly way. Like itinerant scholars of an earlier time, the unit crisscrossed the back roads of the Belfort countryside. It was hard, boring work, completely without glamour and very dangerous. There were young Frenchmen who served the Germans asmilice, militia, and they maintained loose networks of spies and informants who might not themselves wish to be seen collaborating with the enemy. People had their own reasons--sometimes, alas, very good ones--for making backchannel arrangements withla geste, thus the possibility of betrayal was constant. But the mission of the Lucienteam was of critical importance. The knowledge they provided turned plain men and women into sharp weapons against the Occupation infrastructure. If you knew enough to cut an electrical plug off its cord--perhaps stuff apiece of rag in the end so the flash wouldn't burn your hand--you could use any convenient wall socket to blow all the power in a building. It could take half an hour to replace the fuses--a long time if, for instance, the building housed ground controllers for the German air defense system. They taught railroad workers how to spike a _plaque__tournant. They taught teenagers that cutting a telephone line makes it easy to find the break--but that pushing a thumbtack into a signals cable makes it very difficult and time-consuming. They taught the disruption of rail signals. They taught that a single cube of sugar in a gas tank would caramelize on the pistons and freeze the engine solid. If you didn't have a sugar cube, a potato wedged in the tailpipe of a vehicle would choke the exhaust system, blow a hole in the muffler, and could cause carbon monoxide to leak into the driver's compartment. They taught the use of cyclonite explosive, round pellets ofplastique(invented by Julian Huxley, the biologist) that looked like innocent goat droppings and would blow out a truck tire. They taught villagers that if they buried a soup tureen upside down, with the silhouette showing up through the dirt, it looked exactly like an inexpertly laid land mine and could stop a column of tanks while a mine disposal unit was brought up. They taught switchboard operators how to disable a teleprinter by wedging a feather in the armature, they taught roadworkers how to blow up a bridge using simple construction dynamite. Every strategic entity--communications, rails, roads, bridges, power--had its weak points, and the French people were taught how toattack them. _But you must wait for the code words on the radio,__ theywere told. Grimly, they obeyed. Watched the foreign troops marching up and down the streets where their grandmothers had been born, kept their eyes on the ground whenla gestecame by, held on tight to their new and special secrets, and listened every night to the BBC. And waited. During this period, Ulyssetook on the aspect of an omniscient ghost. He would appear at unlikely times, in unexpected places, so far aboveground as to be virtually hidden by prominence. He moved about the Belfort area in a grand, prewar Bugatti, with Albert, in a gray chauffeur's uniform, behind the wheel. The Germans could only assume him to be a Vichy fascist favored bysome very high personage within their own ranks. He had the car, and the gas to make it run, and his hawklike face was the epitome of Gallic aristocracy. If challenged, he radiated the superficial sweetness of the powerful, being so acutely helpful and decent that German officers saluted from the spine. They knew such people, or rather knew of them, and one was well advised to keep out of their path or, if noticed, to make a good impression. They had spent their lives in submission to the gods of Authority, and Ulysse wasvery godlike indeed. They approached the village of Cabejacjust before midnight and paused at the edge of town. Vigie rodein on his bicycle to check things out, the other three sat by the side of the road and smoked and talked in low voices. They had bicycled up from the town of Abonne, some eighteen miles away, and they were tired and sweaty from the ride. It was late April, one of those warmish, unsettling nights when sleep, if it comes, is beset by restless dreams. Staring up at the town, Khristo found himself jittery. Something in the air, the sort of intuition that will cause animals, drinking at water holes,- to look up suddenly. Lucien--in hisbleudetravailworker's jacket and trousers, old sweater and beret, the very image of a small-town garage owner--was slowly assembling his Stengun, patiently screwing the pipelike parts together. The weapon's use in clandestine operations was in part attributable to the fact that it could be carried in a knapsack and assembled quickly. From the north, the drone of a bomber flight reached them. All three looked up, but there was only a night sky lit by a quarter moon. "Good hunting," Fusari said. "Amen to that,"Lucienanswered, giving the Stenbarrel its final quarter turn. For the last two weeks, the sky above them had been at war. With improving weather, Allied air sorties intensified--American by day and British by night--B-24S and Lancasters flying deep into Germany to bomb factories and railyards. At night, the Lancasters' flight path often took them over the Belfort area, and the sky came alive with probing searchlights and the white flash of antiaircraft burst that illuminated, for one instant, its own haloof smoke. Sometimes German squadrons rose to attack and there were arcs oforange-red tracer, like spark showers from a bonfire, and once there had been an enormous explosion that lit up the clouds--a fully armed bomber had been hit. The following night they had seen the white of a parachute and had watched in silence as it drifted below the horizon. Vigieappeared from the darkness, coasting downhill on his bicycle, standing with his left foot on the right-hand pedal and coming to an acrobatic skid in front of Lucien. "Bravo," Fusari said sourly. Vigiesaid something in incomprehensible mountain slang. "Yes?"Luciensaid. Vigieshrugged. "Cabejac," he said, and spat on the road. Khristo looked up at the dark town but there was little to see, only an irregular roofline of square silhouettes. Cabejac was an ancient village, chiseled into the limestone cliffs that rose above the Leul, a swift, narrow mountain river that ultimately emptied into the Doubs. Th�ad curved along a cut in the cliff, then switched back suddenly and rose steeply into the town. Fusari had told him on the ride up that the place had a bad reputation. Blood feuds. Marriage in the old tradition: abduction, rape, and then the priest to put things right. People carried shotguns and there were too many dogs about. From time to time, a clan of Gypsies had made the village a temporary encampment, but the reputation of the place had nothing to do with them. No matter, Khristo thought, they have a desire to fight, and they have been approved by Ulysse. And all the sayings about strange friends in time of war were true. _Still,__ he thought. "Lucien,"Fusari said, "we can go back to Abonne." Luciendid not answer, stood pensively while the others finished assembling their Stens. Khristo had hidden the Gepisztoly at Cam-bras--it was a weapon for _partizans__ in the forest, not suited to this work at all. He watched Lucien asthe American tried to come to a decision. He could abort an operation any time he felt the wind was blowing wrong, but he was also, dearly, under pressure not to do so. "Vigie," Luciensaid quietly, "was there anything at all up there? Anything out of place?" "No,"Vigieanswered. "Nothing." He slung the Stenon his shoulder and stood on the pedals of his bike, trying to make it stand in place by wiggling the front wheel back and forth. He kept falling over onto one foot, then trying the trick again. "I am not in love with this place," Khristo said. Lucienwalked his bicycle forward. "Nice and slow," he said. Vigiesighed, hopped off his bike, and began pushing. "The women of Cabejac are said to be hairy, like beasts," he confided to Khristo. Lucienhad overheard him. "You stay close while we are here, copain." "Pfiit,"Vigiesaid, contemptuous of any suggestion that he could not take care of himself. They headed into the town, looking for the Gendarmerie, the post of the military police who traditionally patrolled the countryside and the smaller roads. They had met ther�stanceincaf� schoolrooms, church sacristies, dining rooms, soccer stadiums. Tonight it was to be a police station, not all that unusual. But they could not find it in the lower town. Unseen dogs barked at them, passing them along from one to the next, and all the houses were dark and shuttered. The April night was warm, yet it seemed that spring had not yet been acknowledged there. _Normal,__ Khristo thought. _All is normal.__ He pushed his bicycle with one hand and steadied the weapon with his other--just making sure it was there. Looking to his right, he noticed a narrow, stone-paved alley set between high walls. There was some sort of truck parked down there, only the snubbed-off front end visible. The street dead-ended at a high wall. They turned left up a long flight of white stairs, the center of each step worn to a sloping valley by centuries of use. Fusari, bumping his bicycle upward, swore under his breath. When they reached the upper town they were high above the road and the river appeared as a winding ribbon, a long way down, its banks suggested by white curls of moving foam. Fusari touched Khristo above the elbow and nodded up the street to a dim spill of light from a partly open shutter. A metal sign, gendarmerie, hung from a stanchion above the door and the windows were barred. "There must be another road down," Khristo said. "Why?" "Who puts a Gendarmerie at the top of a flight of steps? Don't they drive cars?" Fusari responded with a dismissive grunt. He made a point of being Corsican, claiming often to be puzzled by the French and their logically illogical way of doing things. The door of the station opened, and a man stood in the smoky light from within. "Come along then," he said, "we've been waiting." He wore military uniform, red flashes on khaki, and the circular crowned hat often associated with the French Foreign Legion. Broad-shouldered and big-bellied, he had deep anger lines around his mouth and stood with hands on hips, impatient, out of temper. Down below, the dogs started up again. The French officer had his right hand close by a holstered sidearm. Khristo could hear another sound that lay beneath the excited barking, a muted rumble of some sort. He pushed his bicycle forward until he could see inside the partly open door. There were several men in the room, faces indistinct in the dim light, behind a high wooden counter. Standing, apparently. Waiting to greet them. _The rumbling,__ he thought. What was that? The narrow alley. The snubbed-off front end of the truck. The truck? No. Not a truck. Kummelwagen. The open command ear used by the Wehrmacht. No French truck ever idled like that; that was a military engine, tuned, powerful, and this was a trap. He turned his back to the waiting officer and clapped Lucienon the shoulder and spoke through a laugh, in English, with the intonation of a casual joke between friends. "We are in trouble," he said. All the little wrong things. The counter was what you found in a police station, not a Gendarmerie. Police rode bicycles. Gendarmes drove cars. Someone had converted a homey Poste de Police--a place where you filled out forms--to a trap. Perhaps there had beena _r�stance__cell among the gendarmes of Cabejac, at one time made known to Ulysse, butno more. Lucienwas very quick. The "gendarme" kept his eyes on the Sten. Hewas surprised when Lucien's left hand came up from his pocket with a small automatic and shot him twice in the heart. He held his breast with both hands and made the face of a manwith indigestion as he knelt down. Vigieleapt for the door and slammed it shut, moving his body to one side of the portal and hanging on to the door handle. Something very fast went off inside the station and chewed a line of holes in the wood of the door. Fusari ran toward the building, got one foot against the rough stone surface and sprang upward, snatching the rain gutter that ran below the eaves, then throwing one leg over the edge of the sloping roof and hauling himself the rest of the way. A second burst came through the barred window--one round struck an iron bar and went singing away into the night. Khristo and Lucienbacked up. Khristo put a short burst in the door, aiming well away from the clinging Vigie. Lucienfired at an angle through the window shutter. The sound of an engine changing gears cut through the noise of the dogs, which had changed from barking to howling when the gunfire started. Fusari's dark outline appeared on the rooftop. He pulled the pin from a grenade and short-armed it down the chimney. There was an explosion in the shaft, most of its force directed upward. A muffled bang, then the chimney turned into a cloud of smoke and bricks and, a long second later, Fusari's body rolled off the roof and hit the street like a bag. As brick shards rained down on the street, somebody inside kicked the door open, sending Vigieflying backward. Khristo fired into the press, of bodies that appeared within a rolling cloud of black smoke and soot--mouths wide open, hands pressed to ears, faces squeezed with agony, eardrums apparently punctured by compression from the explosion in the chimney. The door was pulled shut just as the Stenjammed on a dud round--no blowback, no next shot. Khristo swore. Lucienran past, squatted briefly by Fusari, then stood up and grabbed his bicycle. Khristo got his own bike up and moving. He could hear a man screaming inside the building. All three of them took off like Furies, pedaling wildly as they reached the stairway. Khristo hung on for the first two bounces, then the handlebars tore away from his hands and he was in the air. He landed on shoulder and hip, the impact knocked him senseless, and the bike clattered the rest of the way down the steps, landing with a metallic jangle in the street below. Immediately, a high-power beam probed the dead-end wall until it found the bike, then went dark. Lucienand Vigiesomehow got themselves stopped before they reached the street. The next thing Khristo knew, he was being helped up. Someone yelled in German at the top of the stairway. Vigiepointed at a roof, level with the stairs midway up, and they ran to it, climbing over an iron railing. It was just a step up to the next roof and, as they reached it, the light came back on and all three went flat. Khristo's chest heaved against the chalky stone as he fought for breath. From below, they could hear a whispered conversation in German, only ten feet away. Vigieslithered across the roof, peered over the edge for a bare instant, then scrabbled backward until he lay next to them again. He held all his fingers in the air, opening and closing his hands. Too many to count. Khristo did not think. He cleared the jam on his Sten, snapped in a fresh magazine from his jacket pocket, and made sure the safety was off. He pointed Lucienand Vigietoward the next roof down, then moved toward the edge of the roof to create the necessary diversion. It was simple training, a lifetime of it. One fires, others escape. Just before he reached the edge, a hand caught his ankle and stopped him. He pulled as hard as he could, then, in a rage, turned to see Lucienhanging on to him. He fought to suppress the curses rising to his lips, made a low angry sound instead. Lucienpulled on his ankle with such force that it moved him back a foot. Suddenly, a trap door in the roof opened. Khristo swung the Stenaround and tensed on the trigger. A small face appeared. A boy, perhaps ten, beckoned to them urgently, then touched his lips for silence. They moved quickly. The face disappeared. There was a rough ladder below the door and they found themselves in the front room of a house. In the darkness, they could see a young woman in a nightdress standing terrified in one corner, hands in mouth. The boy materialized from another room, wearing a thin shirt and shorts, with an old French infantryman's helmet on his head. He had to hold it on with one hand. He snatched Khristo by the sleeve and pulled him toward a back door. Then he turned suddenly and whispered, _"Anglais?"__ "Non,"Khristoanswered."Am�cain." "Bon Dieu!"the boy exclaimed sofdy, eyes widening with excitement. Then he turned and dragged Khristo through the door into a tiny garden plot in back of the house. The garden butted up against a stone wall topped by a sagging fence of rusted wire. There was a wooden barrel positioned at the base of the wall. The boy let go of Khristo, reached the top of the barrel with a practiced leap, then stepped up onto the wall and waved for them to follow. The wall was twelve inches wide with broken bottles cemented down the middle but there was just enough room to get a foot on either side of the jagged glass and the boy scuttled along quickly, crouched low, hanging on to his helmet with one hand. The German troops seemed to be all around them: they heard shouted commands, boots pounding on the street, the sound of a truck shifting between reverse and first gears as the driver attempted to get it turned around in the narrow street. They ran along the wall past four or five houses, then the boy jumped off onto another barrel--no doubt in the backyard of his war-game companion--and onto the ground. The moment Khristo landed, the boy took hold of his sleeve again, they ran forward a few feet, dienstopped abruptly. They were at the twin of the alley that Khristo had seen earlier and the soldier game clearly called for scooting down the narrow space and crossing the street. But as they turned the corner the boy's hand quivered and a small cry of fright escaped him. A German officer stood in profile at the end of the alley, waving both hands toward himself as though directing traffic. They flattened back against the wall while the boy thought it over. For a moment, Khristo knew die thing was finished, but the boy peered around the corner, diendarted across the alley and, one by one, they followed him. On the other side, they found him straining at a cast-iron grating set level with the ground. Khristo bent to help him and together they pushed it to one side. The boy lowered himself down, then moved forward head first, sliding on his stomach. Khristo followed, listened to make sure Vigiecould pull the grating back over by himself, then continued ahead. The stone beneath him was covered widi slime, which easedprogress, though the reek of long-stagnant water was nearly overpowering. A storm drain, he thought, with its other end somewhere well east of the Germans if they had any luck at all. He heard the scamper and the tiny squeaking somewhere up the sewer ahead of him--he knew what that meant but forced himself not to think about it. Suddenly, the stone moved beneath him and something roared above his head. He stopped, then realized they were under the street and a truck had just passed over him. He closed his eyes in order to concentrate and resumed crawling, slowly and in rhythm, elbow, knee, elbow, knee, and he could now begin to hear the sound of breathing, his own, and the others', as the motion became an effort. His elbow touched the boy's foot twice before he figured out that the boy was tiring and slowing down. _"Moment,"__ he whispered, and lay still. He reached above him, found the ceilingjust over his head. The drain had narrowed. He cinched the strap of the Stentighter and tried to recover his strength. Behind him, Lucien's voice was barely audible: "How far? Ask him." Khristo did. The boy answered that he didn't know. Khristo passed the word back to Lucien. Lucienasked Vigieif he'd heard. Vigiedid not answer. Lucien, in a stage whisper, called out,"Vigie. "No answer. Luciendoubled his knees up to his chin and managed to get himself turned around. Khristo heard him belly-crawling down the pipe, his breath hoarse with effort. He was gone, it seemed to Khristo, a very long time. Finally, the sound of his progress returned, and Lucienarrived a minute later. He moved as close to Khristo as he could and spoke by his ear. "He's not here." "I heard him. He closed the grating." "Closed it behind us." "What?" "Perhaps he was afraid. Close spaces. Rats. I don't know." "Goddamn him," Khristo said. "He'll get out,"Luciensaid. Khristo whispered to the boy. "Are you all right?" "Oui, Capitaine,"came the answer, but the voice told a differentstory."C'est letunnelinterdit,"the boy explained. _The forbidden tunnel,__Khristo thought. Because you will get dirty? Because you will getlost or frightened? Or why? "You have been before?" Khristo asked. Yes, the boy said. Once. For a few feet only. Never this far. Khristo thought it over for a moment but there was no alternative. Unless to stay here until the following night, then try to escape through the streets. But Vigie's absence made even that impossible. If he were caught, he would be made to show the Germans where they'd gone. For he had been seen by those in the police station, would not be able to talk his way out of trouble. On command from Lucien, they continued forward. For a long time, there seemed to be no end to it. His adrenaline from the attack was long dissipated, and when they stopped to rest he could feel that the skin on his knees and elbows was ripped and bleeding. The dead, oily water attacked the open skin like quicklime. How could the water be so stagnant, he wondered. If water still ran through the storm drain, it should renew itself every few days in the spring rains. Unless a diverter pipe had been removed from the entry and a grating fixed in its place. And the tunnel forbidden. Because its other end was sealed. An hour later, they came to a grating fixed over the end of the pipe. But the tunnel had widened, and the stone was soft and rotted, and both he and Lucienhad knives, so they were able to dig the rusted staples out of the crumbled masonry. Khristo doubled his body back and kicked the grating out. They heard it crashing down a hill. Crawling out into the tangled underbrush of a hillside, they could hear the sound of the river just below them. For a time, Khristo sat with his head in his hands, breathing deeply, wanting more sweet air each time he exhaled. He was filthy, his trousers soaked with watery slime and, where the cloth had worn away, the skin of his knees showed through, bright red and beaded with blood. Luciensat down beside him and beckoned die boy to join diem. In the faint moonlight Khristo could see tear tracks that ran through the dirt on the boy's face, but he'd made not a sound in the tunnel. "Where are we?"Lucienasked the boy. "Below the road," he said, "on the hill in back of the barn of Madame Rossot." "Do you have someone to go to?"Lucienasked. "Someone who willclean you up and take you home so the Germans don't see you?" The boy pondered that for a moment. Then shook his head vigorously beneath the helmet. "Madame Ross�he said, "though she becomes very angry if we go behind her barn." "Are you sure?"Luciensaid. "The _schleuh__ killed her husband, in the Great War." "You are very brave,"Luciensaid. He stood and searched in his pockets. Khristo thought at first he was looking for money, then realized he wanted something to give the boy--something he could keep. Khristo knew the very thing and fished about for it in his pocket. His good luck charm. That he had kept with him in Spain. That had been stored in Sant�ison with his civilian clothes. He stood, then waved the boy to his feet. "I decorate you for bravery," he said, giving the boy what he'd taken from his pocket. He extended his hand and the boy shook it formally, very much like a soldier receiving a medal, then looked in the palm of his other hand, at the white pawn resting there. "Merci, monsieur,"he said. "You are dismissed,"Luciensaid. "Now be careful, will you?" The boy moved off along a trail through the brush, and then he was gone. They rested for an hour, then, as dawn approached, worked their way cross-country to their emergency fallback position--a downed maple tree a mile short of Cabejac, on the road to Abonne. They waited the rest of the day for Vigie, eating a chocolate bar from Lucien's pocket and, once darkness fell, cleaning themselves by the river. They hid out that night and all the next day, but Vigiedid not appear. He was never seen again.

In the town of Abonnethere were three small pulp mills that processed wood fiber from the forests of the Vosgesinto newsprint and inexpensive papers of all kinds. It smelted dreadful, like all the wood-pulp towns of the world, and life there was lived amida sulfurous haze of rotten eggs. Such conditions the Germans found sharply discordant with their vision of _La Belle France__ and they tended to stay away from the place--occupying armies have a habit of discovering strategic value in towns where life is comfortable and pleasant, and the Germans were no exception to the rule. Left to themselves, the townspeople had organized a particularly predatory and efficientmaquis, concentrated among the millwork-ers and led by the local union boss, a tough old bastard called Vedoc. When the remnants of the Lucienteam walked back into Abonne, hollow-eyed and exhausted, they were taken immediately to Vedoc's house. His wife and sister cleaned out the larder to feed them while Vedoc himself provided an ample supply of that year's basement wine, aged all of eight months and considered pretty good for what it was. The one called Lucienwas too quiet, too much inside himself, so Vedoc, who had seen this sort of thing before, kept him reasonably drunk and sent an old lady off on a series of local trains to Belfort. The Bugatti pulled up in front of Vedoc's house a week later. Ulysse, shadowed as always by the cold-eyed Albert, was his usual elegant self: calm, aloof, an island of Gallic sanity in the stormy seas. Winter was gone and the pearl-colored topcoat with it; a stylish raincoat now served as cape. Only Khristo, perhaps, noted a tiny razor nick to one side of his Adam's apple and inferred that Ulyssehimself was having to withstand a storm or two. They were debriefed at length--first separately, then together--on the trap at Cabejac. Ulysseshowed them a series of photographs, which Aibert then carefully burned in the fireplace. They could identify only the "gendarme," and he was, they both believed, likely dead. They talked for hours over a two-day period while the room turned blue with smoke. They told the story again and again. Ulysselistened with infinite patience, Albert took notes in some private code of his own. During this time, Khristo gained some understanding of die aristocrat's character. He was obviously an acute observer of human beings, their strengths and weaknesses, what they could take and what they couldn't. It was as though he had long ago ceased to judge behavior and had, instead, given himself over to the pure study of it. Further, it became clear to Khristo that war was thisman's time, that war ran in his blood, heritage of an aristocracy that had led men in battle for centuries and continued to do so. And that it was precisely this comprehension, this set of instincts, that Ulyssehad put at the disposal of the American intelligence services in order to defeat his traditional enemy. Thus he was not at all surprised when Ulyssesuggested a walk in the woods behind Vedoc's house on an afternoon when the weather was cold and gray. Lucienhad been sent off on a small errand. Albert, shotgun in hand, waited at the edge of the trees. Ulyssestrolled slowly, hands clasped behind his back, and his mood was soft and tentative. With a rather arch apology for the lack of _makhorka__ ("My tobacconist stocks it only once in a great while"), he offered Khristoa Gitaneand lit it with a snap of his gold lighter. "Of course I must not ask you about Lucien,"he said as they walked. "No," Khristo responded. "Loyalty to a comrade-in-arms is everything." "Naturally, that is so." "Americans, Americans," he said, despair in his voice. "They do not accept casualties at all well, do they. They take it to heart, and they blame themselves. A kind of false pride, surely, yet one must admire them for it. Do you?" "Yes," Khristo said, "I do." "Yet a man of your experience must also see that it is their weakness." "Perhaps a weakness. Or a strength. Or both at once, perhaps." "Yes,"Ulyssemused. "Still, not an ideal trait for an officer class, you'll admit that." "I suppose not," Khristo said. "Lucienhas done very well, you know, in the way these things are judged. Quite a number of trains, and one must add what other groups have been able to do with his assistance, and what they will do in the future. Considered altogether, a most gratifying boil on Hitler's backside. But, we ask ourselves, can he continue? I've not told Lucien, by the way, but the village of Cambrashas been entirely decimated." Khristo winced and shook his head in sorrow. "Yes, I'm afraid so. A servant girl betrayed them to the Gestapo, and they were taken by surprise. She had been made pregnant by Gilbert, poor thing, and wasterrif�she would be cast out of the village, to live in the woods, and in her state of mind the Germans seemed like saviors, who could rescue her from her predicament. I don't look forward, I must tell you, to the moment when Lucienlearns of this." "He has no lack of courage," Khristo said. "Not remotely in question,"Ulyssesaid. "But do you suppose he would be willing to sacrifice the lives of others, should it become necessary?" Khristo was silent. "Please forgive me,"Ulyssesaid, "for having to ask you that." "The world will go on," Khristo said. "It will." He paused to light another cigarette. "And then, where will you be?" "God may know that," Khristo answered honestly, "I do not." "In your homeland, perhaps? To marry and make a life? It is what most of us will do, in time." "No," Khristo said, "I do not think so. Though there are times when I would give anything to be back where I was born, even for one hour. But I have seen the world, and whoever runs that country will want to start fresh--they won't have much use for people who have seen the world. It will be under the Russians, I think, and there won't be anything we can do about it. Our history is a sharp lesson on the subject of borders." Ulyssenodded in sympathy. "We're going toexfiltrate Luciento Switzerland, in a day or two. Would you like to come along?" They walked along the path through the mist; the sound of dripping trees filled the silence. "Yes," Khristo said. "You'll be interned, in a sort of way, so that our understandings with the Swiss will be, at least, nominally observed. But your circumstances can be most comfortable, and, who knows, you may just make some new friends. American friends. Would you like that?" "Yes," Khristo said, "I would." Long before dawn, the horse-drawn carts began lining up on the French side of the Voernstrasse bridge. There wasn't all that muchproduceto take into the Saturday market--you got little variety in early May--but the farmers brought what they could: cabbage, broccoli, spinach, wintered-over carrots, and early greens of every sort. Across the bridge, in the well-swept squares of the city, the housewives of Basel awaited their French vegetables--one more Swiss cauliflower might well have driven them mad. The border guards came in two versions: the Vichy French, theoretically still in charge of their own boundaries, and the Germans--Gestapo or military--who considered the Swiss border far too sensitive to entrust to French authorities. In any event, there were far more Germans than French at this particular crossing and they milled about ceaselessly, sharp-eyed and suspicious--there was always some wretched idiot hidden away under the produce and fishing him out meant extra leave. So they took their time, while the horses stood patiently, and checked the farmers' well-worn passports long before the wagons actually reached the bridge. Khristo held the reins loosely in his hand while Lucienappeared to doze at his side. Behind them, the old wooden cart was piled high with cabbages. The German corporal who approached them was no more than eighteen, a country boy with red cheeks and a stiff shock of blond hair who licked his callused thumb to turn each passport page. He looked from faces to photographs--up and down, up and down--a dozen times before he was satisfied. But he could find nothing amiss because the French passports were in every way perfect, legitimately issued to real French citizens and full of exit stamps from previous market Saturdays. He next turned his attention to the two farmers, forcing them to empty their pockets onto the seat of the cart and pawing through a collection of string, wire, horseshoe nails, a few strands of pipe tobacco, half-used ration cards, and a miscellany of French and Swiss coins--all gloriously redolent of horse manure. But the corporal was a farmboy and did not mind at all. At last, he turned his attention to the huge whitish-green mound of cabbages piled in the cart. He lifted them up, rolled them aside, peered down among them, and seemed intent on spending the rest of his days in contemplation of a pile of cabbages. Finally, the driver turned halfway round in his seat and called out to thecorporal in a loud voice, his market German cut by a strong Frenchaccent: "Hey back there! What are you doing? Counting the farts?" The Germans roared with laughter and waved him ahead--any mention of such matters hit them hard in the funnybone. And somebody knew that too.

V��

In December of1944,Robert Eidenbaugh was transferred to administrative duty in the United States, with a thirty-day furlough to precede his appearance at the OSS offices in Washington, D.C. He flew from Croydon airfield on a MATS C-47, landed at a military air base on the eastern seaboard, and made his way to Boston to see his family. It was a happy, emotional reunion, lacking only his younger brother, who was serving as a gunnery officer on a destroyer in the Pacific. The family had devoted themselves to the war--his father's firm now entirely taken up with designs for a new battle cruiser, his mother managing blood donor drives for the Boston Red Cross, various cousins and uncles spread across the globe in a variety of uniforms. One of his mother's Wiscasset nephews had died in New Guinea but they were thankful that, otherwise, the casualty lists had not touched them, and the grace said before meals was no longer the casual mumble it had once been. The family found Robert leaner, stronger, and a good deal older than when he'd left, and they made a considerable fuss over him. Privately, Arthur and Elva Eidenbaugh thought their son had changed. He seemed lonely, edgy, isolated and, sometimes, angry for no discernible reason. They decided that what he needed was to raise a little hell and, to that end, slipped ten ten-dollar bills in a new wallet and shooed him off to New York. Before he was even out of Grand Central Station he'd treated himself to an elaborate dinner at the Oyster Bar. He managed to promote a special serviceman's room at the Biltmore and was given, a privilege of uniform, a ticket to a Broadway show. For two days he wandered around midtown Manhattan, bought a few Christmas presents, and enjoyed the anonymity of being part of a busy city; looking at faces, listening to conversations, trying to pick up the thread of American life. Walking down the street he was only one uniform among many, yet now and again he did sense the quiet approval of strangers. He called some old friends, but most were not around. Dropped in at the OSS office on Madison Avenue, where Agatha Hamilton, the genteel lady who had been involved in his recruitment, treated him to the lunch at Luchow's he was supposed to have had three years earlier. Walking back up to the Biltmore--it was a sunny, cold day--he ran into one of the J. Walter Thompson telephone operators, and she invited him to the big Christmas party that Thompson was throwing late that afternoon. When Eidenbaugh arrived, just after five, there were already more than a hundred people milling about. The Thompson staff had made a major effort for the party. By marshaling their considerable design resources, they had managed to make the rather utilitarian space seem festive and seasonal. There were no balloons--latex had been declared a strategic material for the duration--but there was everything else: streamers of colored crepe paper, red and green Santas driving paper-bag cutout reindeer across the walls, and a huge Norfolk pine tree cut from the Stamford property of one of the senior partners--so fulsomely decorated its lower boughs touched the linoleum floor. There was every sort of liquor and large trays of sandwiches, cookies and fruit cake--the entire office had pooled sugar rations for the party. The opaque green glass that divided the cubicles was decorated with posters done by Thompson for various wartime campaigns: recruiting, blood donation, war bonds, aluminum collection, and the cautionary ones advising defense plant workers not to talk about what they did. When Eidenbaugh arrived, they made him very welcome indeed. He felt like a hero. He was kissed and hugged and slapped on the back, a triple-strength Scotch and soda appeared in his left hand, a giant Christmas cookie in his right. Looking about, he could see several uniforms moving through the crowd. He was in the midst of earnest conversation with a young woman from Barnard, who did something in the production department, when Mr. Drowne, his old boss, stood on a desk at the center of the room and banged on a drinking glass with a knife. "Oh Gawd," his new friend said, "here goes Drownie." Mr. Drowne cleared his throat. "On behalf of the J. Walter Thompson Company, I want to take special notice of some of our fighting men and women who are here with us tonight. Some of them are former employees, their friends, whoever you may be, all are welcome! We think it would be fitting if each of you would step up and say a little something and give us folks on the home front a chance to express our appreciation." This announcement was received with cheering, and the parade began. Marine Captain Bruce Johnson from the billing department, who had lost a leg at Tarawa. Army Lieutenant Lee Golden, former account executive, now instructing pilots in Oklahoma. Naval Lieutenant Howard Bister, from the copywriting department, who had participated in the D-Day landings the previous June. Bister, looking sharp in his dark blue officer's uniform, faced the crowd and waited that brief moment which usually signals that the speaker has something significant to say. As prelude, he thanked Mr. Drowne and the Thompson management for one helluva fine party, as well as for their hard work in bond drive and recruiting campaigns. Then he placed his drink on the desk next to him and took off his glasses. "On D-Day, " he said, "I found myself aboard the U. S. S. _Bigelow, __ an APA, which, for the uninitiated, is an attack transport that loads assault troops into landing craft for their final run to the beach. We were carrying several hundred reserves, whose job it would be to replace casualties taken in the first day of the attack. My job--it sounds important but let me tell you people that every job is important in an operation like this, from the mess stewards all the way to the admirals--my job was flag signals officer to Rear Admiral Orville G. Brants. At dawn, the sixth of June, I brought the admiral his coffee on the bridge, where he was standing with the ship's captain as we circled out in the Channel. Just as I reached the bridge, we were bracketed by two shells from a shore battery. I won't say it was close, but I did get some spray on me. 'Careful, Lieutenant,' Admiral Brants said to me, 'don't spill thatjava.'Not a word, you understand, about the shore batteries. Well, I spent most of the day up on that bridge, while the battle raged ashore, and I just want to say that I've never been so proud to be an American. Thank you." Applause thundered out for Bister's speech. The young woman from Production, standing next to Eidenbaugh, squeezed a cocktail napkin tighdy in her fist and her eyes followed Bister as he walked away from the table. Mr. Drowne cleared his throat before he was able to speak again. "Thank you, Howard," he said. "We are all very proud of you. Next"--he peered out over the crowd--"I think I see Bob Eidenbaugh. Bob?" Eidenbaugh moved slowly to the front of the room, then turned and looked into the expectant faces before him. "I'm Captain Robert F. Eidenbaugh," he said. "I used to work in the copy department. And I want to thank the Thompson people for a terrific party. As for my war, well, I was involved in staff work in London, lots of details, nothing very glamorous I'm afraid. Anyhow, I do want to wish everyone a merry Christmas." There was a scattering of polite applause as he made his way through the crowded room and Mr. Drowne stepped in quickly to fill the gathering silence. "And I'm sure that work was important!" he said firmly as his eyes sought die next speaker." Eidenbaugh returned to his new friend as a Marine corporal described the landing at Okinawa. "Well," she said, much too cheerfully, sensing his mood, "someone's got to do the paperwork." Robert Eidenbaugh stayed at the party for a half hour, then he went back to the Biltmore. In Basel, Khristo Stoianev lived in a rooming house on the Burgen-strasse and walked to work every morning on little streets shaded by lime trees. Legally, he had been interned in neutral Switzerland for the duration of the war. In fact, he read Bulgarian newspapers and transcripts of radio broadcasts and fought the Germans with scissors and paste. His task involved abstracting the truth from the Nazi-controlled Bulgarian press and radio. If they said a certain fact was true, he was to comment on the degree of falsity in the claim. Would the Bulgarians believe it? Which ones would know it to be false? Did he think it true? His English improved as he wrote copious, longhand answers to these questions, and he became adept at working through systems of lies: the shades and tones, the subtleties, the tiny crumb of truth diat sweetened the digestion of afalsehood. He dealt also with the "hammers"--designed to bash the population on the head with information until some of them at least believed that two and two made seven and weren't they the lucky ones to have so much. This particular approach--studying newspapers and transcripts--had been severely maligned by the NKVD instructors at Arbat Street. At the direction of Comrade Stalin himself. All worthwhile intelligence, _razvedka,__ had to come from secret channels, undercover agents, and suborned informants. The rest--the use of open sources--was deemed mere research, women's work, not befitting the heroic Soviet intelligenceapparat. The dictum, as put by Western intelligence services, ran, _we only believe__what we steal. For Khristo, the work was boring and repetitive--a long, difficult test, he rather thought. He worked for a former college professor from Leipzig, a gentle soul who watered his plants every day, and neither praised nor criticized--simply accepted his work as though it were, each day, each time, a happy surprise, saying "Ah!" when he appeared in the doorway to hand in a thick batch of reports. But it was clean where he lived and where he worked, quiet, Swiss, and it would be warm, he knew, in the wintertime. He had a casual woman friend who entertained him on Thursday nights. He had become entirely addicted to R�, a crisp pancake of fried potatoes and onions. He lived in a room of his own, and he had a radio. When the people he worked for asked him questions--about his former life and work--he answered them. As the summer turned hot and silent, he burrowed to the center of his circumscribed life and nested safe and sound. He thought about Aleksandra only now and then, when the summer nights were too quiet for sleep. In late August, communist _partizans__ rose in Bulgaria and threw the Germans out. Bulgarian fascists were executed. The Bulgarian Communist party immediately allied itself with the Soviet Union, and the newspapers and radio transcripts took an entirely different line--the propaganda remained much as it had under the Germans but was, Khristo felt, more artfully developed. The massed children's choirs who had "spontaneously" sung carols in Hitler'shonorthe previous Christmas now sang anthems dedicated to Joseph Stalin. By the ninth of September,1944,the change of government had been completed. Parades were held. A news photograph from Vidin came across Khristo's desk. The old Turkish post office, on the same street where his brother had been murdered by fascists, was hung with two-story banners: portraits of Lenin, Stalin, and Dmitrov. Then, as the summer ended and the German armies of occupation fled east from Paris, a curious thing happened. A coincidence. He opened a folder of news clippings and saw that a mistake had been made. This folder contained news items not from the Balkans--but from the United States. He glanced at the clipping on top of the pile and saw a photograph of Faye Berns. The article was taken from the business page of a newspaper in Manhattan, and it said that Miss Faye Bems had been appointed fund-raising director of the New York office of the World Aid Committee, which would seek to assist Displaced Persons in returning to their homelands once the war ended. The article was brief, but it did give the address of the World Aid Committee, and he copied it out on a piece of paper. In the photograph, a three-quarter angle, he could see the changes. Her hair was shorter, there was a line to her jaw that hadn't been there before, and she had smiled for the photographer in a way that he didn't recognize. It was an artificial smile, posed and official. For a long time he stared at the photograph, shocked by the degree to which memory had betrayed him, deceived him. Because he had always remembered her as she was in Paris, on die afternoon they had met by accident in the bookstore. He had, unwittingly, frozen her in time, kept her as she had been on a June day in1937.He remembered her as she cried for Andres, remembered her as someone who would dare to love a man like Andres, who did not desert him, who paid the price of that love, and then survived. He remembered her as a girl who had flung herself against the world without caution, without a care for her safety. Now she was a woman who had grown up to accept the artifice of a smile, poised and confident, for a newspaper. He remembered, particularly, both times they had touched: when she had slept on his shoulder in the car parked at the Bilbao docks, and when she had held his hands while they waited for the train to depart at the Gare du Nord. Did men and women ordinarily remember the times when they'd touched each other? He did not know. Once again his eye ran over the article. Miss Faye Berns. Soshe had not married the man she had mentioned in the letter that had reached him in prison. He decided to write to her, and spent the better part of an hour at his desk, composing in English. But it was not to be. The letter seemed to him, when he drew back from it, strange and wrong: a man she had once known, briefly, writing poorly in a language not his own and apologizing for it. He tore it up. The girl he had known in Paris might respond to such a letter, but the fund-raising director of the World Aid Committee would, he feared, find it awkward, even pathetic. He took the folder into the professor's office. "This is not for me," he said in explanation, setting the folder on one corner of the desk. "Ah!" the professor said, surprised that such a thing could happen. And why, he wondered, returning down the hall to his little room, _are they toying with me?__ The "misdelivered" news clipping was no coincidence. It was a provocation. It was their way of letting him know that they were aware of his relationship with Faye Berns. What could that matter to them? What could they mean by it? And how had they known about it? More important, what did they expect of him now that he'd seen the clipping? He didn't know. And decided to ignore the incident. If this were something truly significant, they'd press him further. He turned his attention to other matters, determined to put the entire episode out of mind. He bore down on his work for the rest of the afternoon, then, since it was Thursday, went off to visit his woman friend. She was, as usual, responsive, falling in with his mood and treating him with a certain casual tenderness that he'd always found very comforting. Yet he was not his best self, distracted by the image of a woman with a professional smile in a grainy photograph. He imagined himself a great realist, and that passion withoutsentimentsuited him perfecdy. But at work on Friday morning he experienced a surge of emotion, more gratitude than love, and sent his friend a bouquet of flowers. Foiwhich she thanked him, with a certain casual tenderness, the following Thursday. In Basel, the autumn came on quickly, and by October the mornings were frosty and clear. One such morning he arrived punctually for work and, on opening the vestibule door, came upon Ulysseand Albert and two other men he did not know. They were rolling down their sleeves and putting on their jackets and yawning--he had the impression they had been up all night and working hard. Ulysse's eyes lit up when he saw Khristo and he smiled broadly. "Well, well," he said, in perfect American English, "look what the cat dragged in." Khristo grinned sheepishly, a little taken aback, and they shook hands warmly. Ulysseturned to leave, his overcoat, as always, worn capelike over his shoulders, and his bodyguard followed. As Albert moved past, he winked at Khristo and banged him affectionately on the shoulder with his fist. "Hey buddy," he said.

Bessarabia

In December of1944,at the Utiny gold fields on the Kolyma River, in a far southeastern corner of the Siberian USSR, Captain Ilya Goldman sat before a table of unpeeled birch logs in one of the interrogation rooms of Camp 78a. Alone for the moment, he held his head in his hands, closed his eyes to shut out the world, and listened to the timbers creak and snap in the frozen air. A light wind blew in off the East Siberian Sea, sighing in the eaves, rising and falling. Otherwise, there was nothing. On the table before him were two stacks of files, which represented prisoners already processed and those yet to be seen. A bare bulb dangled from the ceiling on a long cord. At his feet, a malevolent cold flowed up through the floorboards, seeping through his boots and socks, a kind of icy fire that caused the skin to itch and burn simultaneously. This he accepted. Traveling the Utiny camps, he had come to admire the cold, a cunning predator that used the human body as a wick, crawling upward in search of the center of warmth. The heart--that was what it wanted. And welcome to it, he thought. He took a deep breath, closed his mind to anger, and tried to concentrate on the notes he had just completed. They were scratched on the stiff, waxy paper native to Soviet bureaucracy--wood-flecked, pale brown stuff meant to last for a thousand years. The millennium, therefore, would know that at least one inmateof Camp782had claimed that the bread ration was more than adequate, perhaps excessive, and gone on to suggest that food allocations be reduced, so that the heroic men and women of the patriotic Red Army might better strengthen themselves for the fight against the fascist invader. So said Prisoner389062,a nameless yellow skull that had sat nodding and trembling before him, twisting a cap in his hands in the ancient gesture of the peasant and attempting, toothless mouth stretched to its limits, what could have been taken for a smile. The statement had been dutifully recorded and signed by Captain I. J. Goldman, Office of the Inspector General, Bureau of Labor Camps, Fourth Division, Sixth Directorate, NKVD. Thus, in bureaucratic terms, he had been buried alive. Since the inception of his service in^Spain, Ilya Goldman had moved exclusively in the upper echelons of the NKVD--First Chief Directorate, Fifth Department--the prized Western Europe posting. Ideologically, he was trusted. Professionally, he was considered clever and sharp-witted, a man who played the game and avoided the pitfalls: protecting his friends and protected by them, gaining influence, banking favors every day. Words of thanks were, casually, waved away. _Some day, __ he would tell his newfound friends, you can help me out. But when the great day came--a punitive transfer to the office responsible for the labor camps--his friends did not answer their telephones, and down he went. Into an abyss where grace and wit counted for nothing. Here you needed only a steel fist and an iron stomach, though it helped to be blind and deaf. He despised himself for allowing such a thing to happen, for not comprehending that it could happen. He had stood so high in his own opinion: brilliant, deft, an intelligence officer who _belonged__ in Madrid, in Paris, in Geneva. A smart little Jewboy from Bucharest--he mocked himself--sophisticated and urbane, in NKVD argot a _cosmopolite,__ deserved no less. The service would never send such a fine fellow off to the Gulag, to listen to memorized speeches from a parade of exhausted skeletons. Oh no, they'd never do that. But he had failed them, had tried to deceive them, and they'd found out and punished him. His downfall had come about in Romania, of all places, the homeland he had not seen for ten years. Sad, wretched place, backwater of southeastern Europe with its ridiculous decayed nobility and peasants who had believed, truly believed, Iron Guard leader Codreanu to be the reincarnation of Christ. Their leaders had sided with Hitler, and the Romanian divisions had fought bravely enough, in the Crimean peninsula and elsewhere, before the massive Russian counterattacks had inevitably rolled them back. The country had surrendered early in September. To the United States, Great Britain, and the USSR, theoretically, but the Russians were little interested in the diplomatic niceties of shared power and, within days, had presented their bill to the Romanians. Then sent NKVD personnel, Ilya Goldman among them, to make sure it was paid. In full. And on time. It was, for a country that had just finished fighting four years of war, a bill of some considerable magnitude. Seven hundred million lei--about fifty million U.S. dollars--easily exceeding the contents of the Romanian treasury. But this was merely the first item on the bill. The government had to provide, in addition, the following: all privately owned radios,2,500,000tons of grain,1,700,000head of cattle,13,000horses, and vast tonnages of vegetables, potatoes, and cigarettes. All telephone and telegraph lines were to be torn down and shipped east in boxcars--once the latter had been refitted to accept the Russian rail gauge. Twelve divisions to be formed immediately to fight the Germans and the Hungarians. The list went on: ambulances, doctors, gold, silver, watches, timber--whatever they had, the entire national wealth. Further, the USSR would now control all means of communication, the merchant marine, all utilities and industries, all factories and storage depots, and all radio stations. If the Romanian population couldn't listen to them, with all the radios shipped east, foreign monitors could. The directives went out and the peasants, by and large, obeyed. Ilya saw them shuffling into the villages and market towns with their livestock and the contents of their granaries and root cellars--even next spring's seed grain. God had directed their leaders, they seemed to feel, now God had forsaken them. Ilya watched their faces, and the sight broke his heart. To his superiors, ofcourse, he was not a Romanian, he was a Jew--that was a nationality, a race--and they saw no reason he should feel allegiance to a country adopted in the distant past by some wandering peddler and his family. He was supposed to know these people, their little tricks and deceits, and he was supposed to squeeze them. Not that his bosses meant him to do any of the rough stuff himself. No, they had special personnel for that, many of them former Iron Guardsmen who had now "seen the light" of progressive socialism. No more than thugs in uniforms, but they served a purpose. When there was shooting to be done, they did it. But Ilya heard it, and saw the bodies sagged lifeless on the posts behind the barracks. Sometimes one didn't have to shoot, a simple beating would suffice. When the peasants were beaten, they cried out for mercy from the lord of the manor--an old tradition. Clearly, they did not understand what was happening to them, protested their innocence, swore it before God. Most of them, however, did as they were told. Brought in everything they had, garlanded their beasts before they were led away so that they might make a good impression on their new masters and be treated with kindness. One old man, parting with his plow horse, slipped a carrot in Ilya's pocket. "He's a stubborn old thing," he'd whispered, believing Ilya to be the new owner, "but he'll work like the devil for a treat." For the first few weeks, as the Carpathians turned gold in early autumn, he had steeled himself to it, took it as a test of courage, inner strength. But his superiors had not been entirely wrong about him; he did know these people, their little tricks and deceits. In fact, he knew them much too well. He knew the look in the eyes of a man who sees a lifetime's labor flicked away in an instant. So he cheated. Just a little, here and there, principally sins of omission, a matter of not reporting what he saw. But, as the weeks went by, the accounting was turned in and the numbers rose up through the apparatus to those whose job it was to compare, to set unit beside unit in order to judge production. And the showing of his group grew poorer and poorer until somebody caught on and sent somebody else down there to see what the hell was going on and it only took a little while before they got onto him. The transfer followed immediately. He tried making certain telephone calls. But they'd marked him, and his friends knew enough to leave him alone lest the virus touch them as well.

At Camp 78a, the procession of inmates continued all through the winter afternoon as the wind sang in the eaves. One left, another entered. Each prisoner had been judiciously selected by the camp commandant, so their statements were well rehearsed. It was all to do with self-sacrifice, patriotism, hard work, shock brigades that labored through the night to meet a production norm. And, of course, undying faith in the Great Leader. Ilya Goldman wrote it all down and signed it, an automaton, playing his assigned role in the ritual. The mute agony of these places--themselves lost in the silence of the endless, frozen land--would finish him if he permitted himself to feel it, so he had, by self-direction, grown numb, and now felt nothing about anything. There was no other defense. By early evening, only one file remained to be processed.