The Complete Navarone (63 page)

He was not so sure about the Frenchmen. Jaime was sitting in a corner, coffee cup between his hands. Jaime seemed at least to know his way around. Now he was watching Hugues, who was fussing round Lisette. A lifetime spent in places where personality carried more weight than law had made Miller acutely sensitive to the way people got along. Miller had the distinct feeling that Jaime did not have a lot of time for Hugues.

Miller had his own doubts about Hugues. Sure, he knew his way round the Resistance. But he was an excitable guy. Lotta fuss that guy makes, thought Miller. And a lotta noise, too much noise. Lisette, now. They were stuck with Lisette. She was slow; she carried too much weight. But she was one tough cookie –

Jesus.

Lisette had been removing her outer clothing. She had been wearing an overcoat, two shawls, and a couple of peasant smocks of some kind. They had made her look like a football on legs. Dressed up like that, she had bicycled up a steep valley road without lights, climbed a vertical cliff and force-marched fifteen precipitous miles without sleep.

What dropped Miller’s jaw on his chest was not what she had done. It was the fact that she was just about the same shape without the winter clothes as with them. Face it, thought Miller.

If you were Hugues, and Lisette was your girl, you would maybe feel a tad over-protective yourself.

Because the reason Lisette looked like a gasometer on legs was that she was at least eight months pregnant.

Somewhere a telephone rang, the tenuous ring of a hand-cranked exchange. Down the hall someone answered it, and started shouting in frantic Basque. Miller became suddenly completely immobile, listening. The voices had stopped. Cocks were crowing. Otherwise there was silence.

But behind the silence were engines. Lorry engines, a lot of them.

In the French frontier zone at this particular time in history, there was only one group of people who had a lot of lorries, and the fuel to run them.

Miller grabbed his Schmeisser and yanked the cocking lever. The girl in the red nightdress seemed suddenly to have vanished. Marcel the baker was standing up, smiling from a face suddenly grey and wooden. The engines were in the square now: four trucks with canvas backs. The trucks stopped. Soldiers were pouring out of the backs, soldiers with coal-scuttle helmets and field-grey uniforms, their jackboots grinding the wet cobbles of the square.

A staff car rolled into the square. A tall, black-uniformed officer got out, said something, and pointed at Marcel’s lorry. Two soldiers bayoneted the tyres. The lorry settled on its rims.

As Mallory put his head out of the SAS man’s door, Andrea’s hand went out and grabbed Marcel by the shoulder. Marcel was a big man, but Andrea held him at arm’s length with his feet off the ground. He said, ‘What are these troops doing here?’

Marcel’s face was a mask of horror. ‘I don’t know … I was assured …’

In Mallory’s mind, gears rolled smoothly and a conclusion formed. ‘It’s an SS brothel,’ he said. ‘Isn’t it?’

Marcel’s face turned a dull, embarrassed purple. ‘It is a cover,’ he said. ‘A good cover. Now, gentlemen …’

Andrea dropped him. Marcel rubbed his shoulder. He said, ‘Follow me, please.’ His voice was calm and urbane: the voice of the perfect host. Already the girls had cleared away the traces of the breakfast. He pointed into the SAS man’s room. One of the girls was holding open the door of the wardrobe. The wardrobe had no back. Instead, a flight of steps led down into darkness.

Mallory trusted Marcel. But someone had betrayed them.

Who?

Andrea went to help the SAS man off the bed. The SAS man pushed him away, reached for his makeshift wooden crutch and hauled himself moaning to his feet. As Miller brought up the rear, he could hear the battering of rifle butts on the cafe’s front door.

More rats in more traps, he thought. And all for a cup of coffee and a girl in a red nightdress.

Maybe the coffee had been worth it, at that.

The back of the wardrobe slammed behind them. They went downstairs and out into a small yard, wet and empty under the sky. At the back of the yard was a shed, the lintel of its door blackened by smoke. There was a powerful smell of baking bread.

From over the wall came guttural shouts, and the barking of dogs.
‘Vite,’
said Marcel, shooing them into the shed.

The shed was a bakehouse. There were two bread ovens. The one on the left was shut. The one on the right was open. In front of the oven door was a big stone slab. On the slab lay a metal tray, six feet long by four feet wide. A small, one-eyed man in a dirty apron did not even glance at them. ‘On the tray,’ said Marcel. ‘Two at a time.’

‘Where are the others?’ said Mallory.

‘In the brothel. They speak French,
bien entendu
. Their papers are good.
Vite
.’

Miller jumped up onto the tray, and lay with his boxes on the big wooden paddle. Mallory climbed up beside him. ‘When the tray stops, roll off,’ said Marcel. ‘Cover your faces.’

Mallory could hear German voices. A trap, he thought. Another, smaller trap. After this trap, absolutely no more –

He was lying on the tray with his pack on his stomach. He covered his face with his hands. Someone shoved the paddle. A ferocious heat beat on the backs of his hands. He thought of the parabolic brick roof of the oven, smelt burning hair.
The ammunition
, he thought.

But the heat was gone, and they were shuffling off the paddle and onto a stone surface that was merely warm. Mallory raised his head. It was dark, black as ink. After six inches his forehead hit the roof. There seemed to be air circulating.

The tray returned, bearing Andrea and the SAS man. The SAS man was breathing hard and tremulous as Andrea shoved him off the tray. Somewhere, stones grated. That’s it, thought Miller. You’ve got your bread oven, circular, made out of bricks. And there’s a little door in the back of it, and we’ve been pushed through, and now they’ve closed the door –

Scraping noises emanated from the oven.

– and now they are going to bake a little bread.

He tried to raise his head, to see where the air was coming from. He hit the ceiling. Eighteen inches high, he thought. And nothing to see. Buried alive.

He put out his hand, touched his brass-bound boxes. On the way, his hand touched Mallory’s arm.

The arm was rigid, vibrating with what must have been fear.

No. Not Mallory. Mallory was cool as ice. Mallory had scaled the South Cliff at Navarone, when Miller had been mewing with terror at its base.

All right, thought Miller. But down in the middle of every human being there is a place kept locked tight, and in that place lives the beast a person fears most. But sometimes the locks go, and the beast is out, raging in the mind, taking over all its corners.

Mallory’s beast was confined spaces.

Dusty Miller stared at the invisible ceiling six inches above his nose, and listened to the sounds coming through the brick wall of the oven. There was a brisk crackling, and a sharp whiff of smoke. They had lit a fire in there, to heat the oven for the next batch of baking. How long do we have to stay in here? he thought. What if Mallory can’t take it?

He began to sing. He sang softly, ‘Falling in loaf with loaf is like falling for make-believe –’

‘Shut up,’ hissed the SAS man.

‘This is not well bread of you,’ said Miller.

‘For Christ’s
sake
–’

‘I’m oven a lovely time,’ said Miller. ‘And you’re baking the spell –’

Mallory knew it was the torpedoing all over again: the little metal room with four men jammed together, the thunder of the terrible blue Mediterranean pouring into the hull, four faces in six inches of air under the steel ceiling, the air bad, hot,
unbreathable
– and Mallory was going to die, of suffocation, certainly, but first of terror …

Someone seemed to be talking. Talking complete drivel, in a soft Chicago drawl. Beyond the drawl, far away, there were other voices. German voices.

Miller.

The terror went. Mallory found himself thinking that there were worse things than small spaces. Dusty Miller’s puns, for instance.

Miller felt Mallory’s hand prod him sharply in the side. He shut up. Mission accomplished.

Suddenly a dog was barking close at hand. Much closer than the far side of the fire in the oven. The compartment where the four men were hiding filled with the scritch of claws on stone. The air holes, thought Miller. There must be air holes, and the goddamn dog’s smelt us through them.

They lay looking up at the ceiling they could not see, in the dark that was full of the clamour of the dog. The little cell behind the oven grew steadily hotter. They began to sweat.

At the front of the ovens, Marcel was sweating too. His apron was smeared with flour and the ash of the bracken stalks he used to fire the oven. But he was not thinking about baking. He was looking at the SS officer who was leaning against the doorpost, slapping the barrel of his Luger into the palm of his black leather glove. The SS officer was smiling with great warmth, but his stone-grey eyes were the coldest thing Marcel had ever seen. ‘Where are they?’ said the officer.

‘Pardon?’
The yard was full of soldiers. A dog-handler came through, dragged by an Alsatian on a choke-chain. The Alsatian’s tongue was hanging out, and it was panting eagerly.

The officer said, with patient friendliness, ‘The dog has come from the brothel above the café. It is following the scent of someone who was sitting in one of the chairs in the brothel. The scent leads straight to your oven. Why do you think this would be?’

The oven was burning well now. Smoke was pouring out of the door, crawling along the ceiling of the shed and billowing up at the rainy sky above the yard. Marcel pointed into the oven door at the incandescent glow of the burning bracken. ‘What are these imaginary people?’ he said. ‘Salamanders?’

The smile did not waver. The SS man said, mildly, ‘If these people are imaginary, why would the dog be so interested?’

‘A mystery.’

The SS man said, ‘I have the strong impression that there are people in this village who have no business here.’

Marcel said, ‘What gives you this impression?’

The SS man smiled, but did not answer. His eyes slid over the bakehouse. He said, ‘And what is inside the other oven?’

Marcel yawned. ‘Who knows?’

‘It is in my mind,’ said the SS man, fingering his long, Aryan chin, ‘to pull this oven to pieces.’

‘Non,’
said Marcel, his eyes discs of horror. ‘My livelihood. Georges. In the oven. What is in the oven, in the name of God? Tell this gentleman.’

‘Pains Flavigny,’
said the one-eyed man.

‘Ah!’ said Marcel, his face cracking into a large grin.
‘Voilà!’

‘Bitte?’

‘Georges is from Alsace,’ said Marcel. ‘So he bakes from time to time
pains Flavigny
, whose vital ingredient is aniseed, beloved of dogs. They do not sell so well, of course. But you know how it is. One must keep the staff happy. It is so hard, in a war, to find –’

The SS man allowed the barrel of his pistol to swing gently towards Georges. ‘Open the oven,’ he said.

‘But the
pains –
’

‘Open it.’

‘They will be destroyed.’

The officer’s finger moved onto the trigger. Georges shrugged. He said, ‘It is a crime. But if you insist.’ He flicked up the catch on the door and shoved in a small wooden paddle. When he brought it out there was a cake on the end, round and brown. ‘Not yet cooked,’ he said. ‘See,
nom d’un nom
. Sacrilege. Ruin. It is sinking. They will all be sinking.’

The SS officer took the cake and crumbled it in his glove. The dog jumped up, lathering his hand with its tongue. He kicked it in the stomach with his jackboot. It shrank away, yelping. Delicately, he sniffed the crumbs. They smelt powerfully of aniseed. ‘Excellent,’ he said, still smiling. He turned, and walked out into the yard. The dogs have led us astray, I fear. But there are other methods of arriving at the truth.’

Marcel had followed, wiping his hands on his apron.
‘Pardon, monsieur?’

‘Your countrymen have been very stupid,’ said the SS man. ‘Stupid as pigs. There are rules. We both know that. Rules have been broken. In Jonzère last night, there was fighting, with deaths. You people must learn that laws are to be obeyed. I fear you will find the lesson painful.’ The smile. Marcel stood smiling uncertainly back, his insides congealed with terror, watching the icy eyes. ‘There is a way of making it less painful. There are British agents in this village,’ said the SS man. ‘When I find them, I will leave.’ He walked through the baker’s shop, and into the square, and rested a negligent hand on the tonneau of the staff car. ‘Feldwebel!’

A sergeant crashed to attention.

‘Knock on the door of each house in this square,’ he said. ‘Politely. Whoever answers the door, bring them out into the square, and request them to stand …’ the cold eyes checked, then settled on the long, blank north wall of the church, ‘against that wall. While you are doing that, I want a Spandau set up under the trees.’