The Caves of Périgord (33 page)

There were six Bren guns, twenty-seven Sten guns, thirty-six rifles, and forty Mills grenades in the standard drop of twelve containers, along with some twenty thousand rounds of ammunition. Marat had been promised a third of the drop, but there had been a nasty moment when François had shouted a warning and the two of them had guarded the containers with their own Sten guns to ensure that Marat’s men did not take more than their share.

McPhee had resolved the standoff, putting his own gun down, opening a container, and pulling out one gun at a time. He laid them down in separate piles and chanted, “One for you and one for me.” He made a childish game of it, and got the men grinning, although Manners saw he was careful to leave the ammo unpacked. Then McPhee walked across to Marat to drape a fresh new Sten gun, slick with oil, over the man’s shoulder. Marat had taken to his American “Red,” and his men were delighted to have a real Yanqui to themselves. Communists seemed to like Americans, while assuming that all the British were capitalists and agents of the Bank of England. He was the first of these mythical transatlantic allies they had ever seen, and they were charmed by his insistence on wearing his uniform and his astonishing haircut. Manners had heard they would go to extraordinary lengths to find McPhee new razor blades to keep his scalp trimmed.

But the mission was being fulfilled. The railways, telegraph, and telephone links were in a constant state of disruption. For a three-day period, McPhee’s and Marat’s men had blown all the rail lines into Périgueux, and the next week Manners had done the same to Bergerac. London and Hilaire were both pleased with them, but Manners was
waiting for the inevitable German counterattack, the coming of the Brehmer Division of which Marat had warned him. They had begun to arrive in Périgueux and Bergerac, or at least the heavy units. There was a battalion of armored cars, mostly the half-track SPW troop carriers with mortars and machine guns, and some of the eight-wheeled
Panzerspahwagen
with the 20mm cannon that he remembered from the desert. He had yet to see them, but had heard that each of the Brehmer Division units carried a big arrogant B painted on the sides of their vehicles. There was a company of combat engineers, and another of the
Feldgendarmerie
military police, and roadblocks and armored patrols were now constant hazards. But General Brehmer was still waiting for his four battalions of infantry before starting offensive operations.

As soon as he heard from Marat that they were on their way by train, Manners planned to shift his base deeper into the hills and move the attacks toward the rail network that spread out from Brive. Berger had agreed to go to ground, while Frisé would head west to his family in the vineyards of Pomerol, and start blowing rail junctions nearer Bordeaux. The golden rule of the mission was to hit where the enemy was most dispersed, to disappear when they concentrated, and to keep training, training, and training the young recruits who were now flooding to the Resistance.

Which left him the problem of Soleil, one of the least disciplined but most active of the Resistance leaders. Nominally a Communist, but dismissed by Marat as an unreliable thug and black marketeer, Soleil ruled the district around the old fortified hilltop town of Belvès. By persuasion or by menace, almost the entire countryside had been recruited to his effort. Farmers hid his trucks and fuel supplies, fed and housed his men, and kept their anguish to themselves when the
Groupes Mobiles
convoys darted in to burn a barn or farmhouse in a reprisal raid after one of Soleil’s ambushes. He was too dedicated to raiding banks and tobacco stores for Manners’s comfort. But he had succeeded in intimidating the
semi-trained contingent of old men of the German 95th security regiment who now stayed huddled in their barracks in Sarlat, catching malaria from the fetid swamp on which the town was built. Malrand always claimed that one of his first postwar missions would be to drain the swamp and eradicate the mosquitoes.

Manners had never much thought about after the war. He had schooled himself to avoid any thought of such an improbably distant future, in the superstitious hope that by assuming that he would not survive the conflict, he might have a better chance of doing so. But Malrand talked of the future constantly in the shelter at night, the need for a revitalized France that would nationalize the big industries and defeat communism and modernize the country under the benign leadership of de Gaulle. He seemed to assume that Britain and France would fulfill that plan of a union that Churchill had briefly floated in the darkest days of the French collapse in 1940, with all the smaller countries dutifully following along.

What he called “Bismarck’s disaster” of a united Germany must be broken up into the smaller provinces of Bavaria, Prussia, Saxony and Hanover, and Rhineland, which could after a suitable period of probation take their place in the Anglo-French system of a united Europe. Only then, he claimed, could Europe stand proudly with the otherwise dominant Americans and Russians. Only then could Europe recover from what he called its suicide of the 1914-18 war. Pipe dreams, thought Manners, but let him ramble on. Nobody in England was going to see France as an equal after the collapse of 1940, whatever pinpricks the Resistance might deliver to recover some of France’s trampled honor as the British and American armies mounted the great invasion.

Manners stopped short of the top of the ridge, leaned his bike against a pile of logs, and moved stealthily forward to look down the road ahead. He always checked when he was carrying something that was certain to get him arrested. He had a haversack full of a dozen
Mills bombs and their fuses, an offering for Soleil, and some spare magazines for his Sten. It seemed quiet enough, with a long stretch of woodland and then only a small parkland of open ground before the château where Soleil had asked to meet. He looked back down the hill, walked into the middle of the road, and waved his arms to summon François. They always kept a hundred yards apart, to give the second man the chance to escape a trap.

“It looks quiet.”

“I don’t trust that little Marseilles
maquereau
one inch,” said François.

Manners grinned. The word meant mackerel, slang for pimp. “I’ve heard a lot of bad things about Soleil, but that’s a new one.”

“It might even be true,” laughed François. “But he looks like a
maquereau,
with his pencil mustache and gangster talk. I find that even more offensive than his half-baked ideas about Marxism. He steals arms from other groups. Sometimes I think the only sensible thing the Communists did was to condemn him to death. Pity they rescinded it. This war makes for some unsavory bedfellows.”

“Well, he kills Germans. That’s what counts. Let’s go on.”

It was surreal, a comic variant of his occasional delusions of peace, thought Manners, as he sat in the place of honor beside Soleil and looked at the impeccably handwritten menu for their banquet, with a small sun to symbolize the Soleil network drawn at its top. They were to start with
tourain,
the local garlic soup, and then foie gras followed by fresh trout,
confit de canard,
some Cantal cheese, and three different wines, all of them prewar. The champagne he was now sipping was a Dom Perignon ’33. He had never eaten a feast like this in peacetime, let alone in war. The long baronial table stretched a full ten meters before him, the old wood glowing in the candlelight, and each place set
with the requisite number of knives and forks. He toyed with one. Solid silver. The glasses were heavy old lead crystal, and a butler stood attentively at Soleil’s elbow, waiting for the Resistance chief’s approval of the Puligny-Montrachet.

“Excellent, excellent, my dear Chamberlain,” laughed Soleil. It amused Soleil and his men to dub the servants with English names. Inevitably, they used the handful of politicians’ names they knew. The joke was wearing thin, though not for the thirty members of Soleil’s group. And the local farmers and shopkeepers who had been required to attend dropped their embarrassment to join in the laughs.

Manners learned that the owner of the ch‰teau had been a prisoner of war in Germany since the surrender. His wife stayed in Paris. So how did Soleil come to have use of it?

“Easy, I just turned up yesterday, told the butler and housekeeper that I wanted to stage a classic dinner, just like prewar, and left two of my men to ensure there would be no surprises. These châteaux always have lots of food tucked away, and the cellars are stocked with wine. And I am sure the owner would be only too proud to entertain the fighters for freedom. Is that not true, lads?” he roared, slugging the wine in a toast to the table, as the butler directed two elderly maids in black dresses and white aprons to serve the soup.

Just as well the maids were not young and pretty, with this bunch, Manners thought. It felt like a pirate feast. In front of Soleil’s plate, two of Manners’s Mills bombs lay wickedly on their sides, the fuses already in. A Sten gun lay beneath his chair, and he had a revolver strapped to his leather belt. Slim and dapper, and looking about twenty-one, he reminded Manners of the young RAF fighter pilots and the dashing, romantic air they cultivated. His nails, Manners noticed, had been manicured, and he was smoking Sieg cigarettes, the German Army brand. Across the table, François sat stone-faced, just the merest quiver of an eyelid as he saw Manners looking at him. He had not said a word since they had sat down.

“Are you another one who’s going to try to have me killed?” Soleil asked him. “I’m losing count of the people after me. The Germans, the Milice, the Communists, that aristocratic SOE agent of yours, Edgar. They all decide Soleil is too uncomfortable and try to have me bumped off. I warn you, it doesn’t work.”

“You haven’t tried to steal any of my guns yet, Soleil,” Manners said, joking to cover his surprise. “I’ve heard the stories about you, but as long as you keep killing Germans you’re too useful to me alive.”

“So why doesn’t SOE send me any parachutages? I want more guns, hundreds of guns. I’ll have a thousand men by July,” Soleil boasted.

“You can’t keep a thousand men round here, let alone feed them. And a thousand men would need twenty parachute drops just for the guns. We can’t do it, Soleil. We have other groups to help, our own sabotage operations,” said Manners. “I’ll ask London to lay on as many drops as they can, but you’ll have to find the sites and landing grounds. And I’ll have to know where your men will be, what targets they are going for, and when the operations will be.”

“Targets, Englishman? The targets are every bloody German for miles around, and those Milice pigs. I’ll take care of the targets. You just get me the guns.”

“We have been through this often before,” interrupted Marat, his round spectacles glinting in the candlelight. “We cannot afford independent actions without central direction. We have a command structure, and the party insists that you are part of it, Soleil.”

“You can stuff your party up your arse,” belched Soleil. “Where was your command structure when I was killing Milice from here to Villefranche? Passing a death sentence on me, that’s what your command structure tried to do.”

He splashed some red wine into the
tourain
that remained in his soup bowl, brought the bowl to his mouth with both hands, and slurped it down. Manners noticed that the wine was a Léoville ’38.

“We call that
faire chabrol,
finishing the soup the way the peasants
do it. Try it, Englishman!” He pulled out his pistol, and hammered the butt on the table. “Hey, boys,” he shouted. “I’m teaching Winston Churchill’s man to
faire chabrol
. When we’ve killed all the Boches, we’ll go over to London and teach Churchill himself, eh?”

“We’re going to Spain first,” shouted a swarthy-looking desperado in a heavy Spanish accent. “First we settle Hitler, then we settle Franco. We’ll
faire chabrol
with Franco’s blood.”

Manners had heard a lot of this. Many of the Maquis were Spaniards who had fled from Franco’s victory, most of them Communists, and somehow were quite convinced that Churchill and Roosevelt would turn their armies south across the Pyrenees as soon as the war in Europe was over. Manners did not have the heart to disabuse them. Just by refusing to let German troops through Spain to take Gibraltar, Franco had earned himself the gratitude of the Allies.

The Spaniard lumbered to his feet, and with a great cry of “
Arriba España,
” came around to Malrand’s place and lifted him into a powerful embrace. “I salute you, Malrand, for flying with us and fighting with us. We will feast in Madrid, by the steps of Franco’s gallows.”

Malrand patted the big Spaniard on the back, pushed him back to his place, and sat to attack his foie gras. “Let’s be thankful the Germans didn’t take all of this,” he laughed, and toasted the Spanish refugees across the table. Then he turned and began talking quietly to the man at his right, a neatly dressed older Frenchman with the look of a lawyer, out of place among these burly men with their thick hands.

“I’ll forgive that Malrand a lot, because of what he did in Spain,” said Marat.