Blood Game, page 23
Paul shook his head. “I've been assigned to the press corps.”
“How is the wound?” Callish asked.
He didn't consider it a serious wound, after seeing other wounds, body parts.
“Just a scratch. I've had worse hunting in the Highlands.” That was a bit of an exaggeration but the only one he was going to make. There had been that penicillin shot that hurt like bloody blazes, a fresh bandage by a passing corpsman, and he was back at it.
He'd received the news earlier, about the re-assignment when he'd turned in the latest rolls of film to be sent off to London in the next dispatch.
Callish nodded. “I heard one of the journalists was taken prisoner at Verdun. They executed the poor blighter.”
Paul had heard the same.
“We leave in the morning. They say the Germans are planning a big offensive, a last stand if you will, in the north,” Callish said, lighting up a cigarette.
“The Yanks are pushing after them, and the 49th has joined up for support. Bloody Christ! I didn't sign up for a trip to Germany.”
Had any of them?
But after the bombings in London, U-boats in the North Sea, and the past four years of bombing raids from their airfields, few were naive enough to think it was all just going to go away—bloody lessons from the first World War.
“Keep your head down,” he told Callish. The man was always complaining about something—the weather, cold rations, the lack of toilet paper—they were rationed three squares a day, while the Yanks had it to spare.
They were all in this bloody mess together and they usually got along, talking about familiar places they both knew in London, Callish's studies at university that had been put on hold with the war, and the girl he hoped to marry.
Paul had his position at the Mirror waiting when he returned—if he returned.
The thought of taking photographs of babies and newly wedded couples wasn't his life's ambition. There was more to be seen through the lens of a camera. Stories to be told in those black-and-white images. Hundreds of stories in the expressions of the soldiers who had seen too much, in the stark images of a battlefield barren of every last tree and shrub, the earth scarred by a violent struggle, and the heart-wrenching images in a small town one had never heard of but was somehow like every town where women wept and children begged for food.
All stories needed to be told.
They made their farewells in that way. The words weren't said, but it was there, along with the usual 'I'll be seeing you' and the agreement to meet at Leicester Square after it was all over, with no notion that they would see each other again.
The press corps was a composite of Yanks, Canadians, and Brits, some who had landed with the Allies, others that had been flown in days after the invasion. They all met in a correspondents’ meeting with military command.
There were certain messages that were to be put out, for distribution to radio stations and newspapers, after approval in London. Photographs were to be carefully screened before they were released. They didn't want people back home to be seeing corpses loaded on transports, the wounded in field hospitals, or bodies floating in the surf on those beaches.
“That doesn't mean we won't see it or know about it,” Robert Dunnett of the BBC said, standing beside him in that briefing. “Or write about it later, eh? And who's to say,” he added, “that you send all those rolls of film back to the desk in London?”
Paul had read Dunnett's pieces that appeared from time to time in the London Times, and knew of his work for the BBC. He liked him immediately. Dunnett stuck out his hand.
“My photographer got lost in the shuffle,” he explained, which was a polite way of not saying that the man had either lost his way or ended up a casualty.
“What say we team up? I'll write the articles and you take the pictures.”
An opportunity to work with Dunnett would probably never have happened under any other circumstances. But these weren't other circumstances. He shook Dunnett's hand.
That handshake set him on a difference course, one that took him to the front of the march that was headed north, and an encounter with someone he thought he might never see again from those first desperate days after the Allied landing.
They had reached Lisieux the day before, troop transports churning the dirt roads into seas of mud after days of rain. Ahead of them, the German army was in retreat, laying down mines to slow the armored onslaught, tanks setting up defense perimeters in what was rumored to be the build-up for a brutal offensive near the Belgium border—the Bulge, they called it.
Dunnett had been kept busy, fingers flying over the typewriter he packed along, looking up through a haze of cigarette smoke, only to swallow back more coffee in a frenzy to make the latest dispatch back to London.
Paul’s work with the camera had been limited to the encampment, hundreds of soldiers burrowed in just beyond the village, waiting.
“You still taking your pictures with your little camera?”
Micheleine smiled at him from across the fire that struggled against the misty rain, the first campfire they'd been allowed in the last few days. She had been among the civilian Resistance that had joined up with them, reporting back on advanced enemy positions.
Paul smiled. “Someone once told me that I need to take them so that people will know what happened here.”
The smile deepened as she ducked under the overhead canopy that protected against the rain and joined him beside the fire.
“Someone should teach you to build a fire.”
“Aye, well, everything is wet, and command doesn't want us giving away our position.”
She leaned in closer, as if sharing a secret. “The Germans know your position, but they are too busy trying to figure out theirs.”
They talked, ironically of things old friends talk about when they haven't seen each other in a long time. War had a way of doing that, compressing everything into small pieces of time—months ago became yesterday, yesterday became today.
She motioned to the small table where Dunnett had been pounding out his story for the BBC, then had run off to meet the dispatch. A can of rations sat beside the typewriter.
“That is supper?” she asked, her dark eyes wide with disapproval.
“A gourmet meal when you're allowed to heat it up,” he replied.
She made a sound that could only be interpreted as disgust and shook her head.
“Come.” Her hand wrapped around his. “The French people are poor after these past years, but the least we can do is share a warm supper that is not found in a can.”
Her idea of a supper that wasn't in a can came compliments of one of the residents in Lisieux. He and his wife were supporters of the Resistance.
The food was simple, roast chicken and summer vegetables in a thick wine sauce, with the rest of the wine in their glasses at the table. A fire burned in the fireplace that heated the rest of the two-story house that had been in the owner’s family for a few hundred years.
After weeks of rations, usually eaten while on the march, a hot, home-cooked meal was like a feast, and the wine was smooth, warming through him with a faint glow.
“Their son is somewhere in the south of France,” Micheleine explained, taking a sip of the wine.
“He went before the occupation. They have not heard from him in some time.” The rest went unspoken.
“But now, with the Allies in France and General de Gaulle gathering the free French into an army, they hope it is almost at an end.”
Hope. There were times it was the only thing that was left.
“What about you?' he asked.
She shrugged. “I will be going north with the others. There is still work to do. The snake has not yet let go of my people.”
North, toward Belgium and that offensive that was building up.
“What about you, Paul Bennett?”
He smiled at the way she said his name. “The word is that we'll be going to Paris.”
She took another sip of wine. “We will take back our city,” she said, with a sudden fierceness.
“And crush the snake.”
The fire had burned low.
“What will you do after the war?” she asked.
What would he do? Not weddings and birth announcements. The war had changed that.
“I would like to see the Highlands again.” Didn't everyone want to see home again?
For him, the Highlands would always be home, no matter how far or how long he was away. It had a way of imprinting itself on you—the jagged peaks, misty glens, with rainbows forcing their way through the clouds. And the smell of it.
It was there even over the smell of that home-cooked meal and the haze from the wine, the memory strong.
“It is like the forest, I think,” she said. “Different from the city. It reaches inside you and won't let you go. I remember the smell of the grass in summer when the sun is hot.”
“You're from the country?”
She'd told him little about herself in that way that people protected that part of themselves, especially in war.
“Oui!” she said with an impassioned laugh. “My father's farm at the edge of the forest, very much like this. He raised sheep. We had a garden. It was my mother's home, from her family many generations back. Very quaint, you would say. Provincial. I hated it growing up, so far from everything. But we explored everything, all the old places. Now, I miss it very much.”
Growing up? She was all of nineteen, yet years older in experience he knew. They all were.
“Tell me about the Highlands.”
Where to begin, he thought.
“It is a wild place,” he said, remembering the last time he and friends took a motorcar far into the north, past the Cairngorms, into those wild places.
“There is a certain smell of it—the land, mountains green in the summer, snow in the winter, and the sky changes from one moment to the next—so blue it makes your eyes hurt, then the clouds come rolling in and the water churns with magical creatures in deep pools—water horses,” he said with a mock serious expression.
“Water horses?”
“Of course, they're magic. And then there is the heather, the hills full of it in spring. But the winters, they are my favorite, fierce, powerful, storms crashing down from the mountains and you can hear the spirits crying on the wind.”
“Spirits crying on the wind?” she asked with an amused expression.
“Well, that's the way the old folks tell it. And the finest whisky in all the world, made from the water that comes down out of the mountains with the smoky taste of peat and just a wee bit of spice. Very different from your wine.”
The wine was gone.
“There is a room at the back of the house, an old storeroom with an outside entrance.”
She stood and held out her hand, that smile and a question in her dark eyes.
“What about the owner and his wife?”
Her hand tightened around his.
“They will not bother.”
The room was small. Shelves against one wall held spices, canned foods, powdered milk, and fresh food—baskets of carrots, potatoes, shallots, and several bottles of wine.
“I see that they have enough food when I am here,” she explained. “In exchange, they report on things they hear and see, and hide our people.” She set her backpack on the chair.
A bed sat against the other wall, with a worn but clean coverlet. Extra clothes, simple garments one might find among the people in the French countryside, hung on hooks. A basin with a pitcher sat on the washstand. There was a small cast-iron stove for heat. She lit it, carefully setting the wood, then closing the door.
Did she know what those simple things meant? Simple things that weren't a cot or bedroll on the ground, a porcelain basin that wasn't a helmet that he'd shaved and bathed from, a roof overhead that wasn't a tarp or lean-to after weeks sleeping out in the open.
“Micheleine...?”
She pressed her fingers against his lips.
“No questions, Paul Bennett.”
The heat in the room, the wine, the touch of her hands as she unbuttoned his shirt answered the only question that mattered.
In the shadows of that small room with only the glow of the fire from the cast-iron stove, they undressed each other. Beneath the sound of the rain on the roof, they came together, skin against skin, their breaths mingling, his hands in her hair, her legs wrapping around his.
Whispers, words that made no sense, or needed to. Touches, as old as time, as new as that moment. Then flesh against flesh, a silent question in the stillness of that room, and then he was moving inside her.
“Now I know,” she whispered afterward, sprawled across him, their bodies slick in the warm cocoon of that room.
“What do you know?” he asked.
“What lies beneath the kilt,” she replied, making him smile.
“Are you certain?” he asked, opening one eye to look at her.
She reached beneath the blanket, her hand closing over him.
“You must show me again,” she whispered huskily, her mouth moving over his, even as she moved over him, her breasts brushing his chest as his head went back at the things she was doing.
“Micheleine!” he whispered, different this time, not a question, his fist closing around her hair. Her answer was in the heat of her body as she took him inside her.
“When will it finally be over?” she asked, as they lay together that next morning.
“The build-up will take weeks,” he replied, what he had heard from Dunnett, not exactly a secret any longer.
“That will take us into winter.” He looked over at her. The comfort of a fire, a bed, and four walls. Not a cold cot or soggy blankets.
They should have slept well the night before. Except that they hadn't slept at all. They'd made love, hands reaching, needing the contact, needing those moments when they came together. Human touch, the assurance that the world as they knew it wasn't completely gone. Hope.
“Will you be safe?” He had tried not to ask it, knowing full well they were both headed into uncertain places. But after the past hours...
She shook her head as she came to him then, pulling him down for her kiss, her body opening to him, and all he wanted was this.
“No questions,” she whispered.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-FIVE
PRESENT DAY, LE NOIR, PARIS
The rain had let up.
The streets filled with people in spite of the cold—tourists, locals, and those who lived in the shadows—Paris by night, the gleam of the Eiffel Tower over the skyline, that gleaming glass pyramid outside the Louvre museum, admired for its architectural simplicity, loathed by Parisians of all generations, an insult in the midst of historical French culture, the Seine, a river with two identities—the right bank lined with exclusive shops, and the iconic left bank with its Bohemian history that included world famous artists and writers, and the Rue St. Denis with its prostitutes and junkies.
Two hundred years earlier, Paris had collected them all—misfits, anarchists, revolutionaries. Now there was a new generation of misfits, anarchists, and revolutionaries. They were called terrorists, and they left their mark on the city.
The call finally came as they sat outside the all-night Café. The message was brief. Anthony tucked the phone back into his jacket pocket.
“He'll meet with us. But he won't be at the club until around midnight.”
James nodded. “I want to make another stop first.”
The Eiffel Tower loomed to the east as Anthony eased the motorcycle around a corner a half block away, and cut the motor.
Farther down the boulevard, the gallery occupied the ground floor of one of those iconic 17th-century buildings spread throughout Paris, with an alley along the back. They left the motorbike in the alcove of a building and walked that short distance.
The front entrance was locked with the faint glow from the alarm system keypad in the reception area of the gallery. The hours for the gallery were stenciled in gold lettering on the glass beside the door with a number to call for an appointment.
The gallery was dark, making it impossible to see anything inside. James motioned for Anthony to follow him to the alley at the back of the building.
They waited.
“Perhaps no one will come tonight,” Anthony suggested.
“They'll come,” James replied.
Regular as clockwork, according to the information Innis had found, shipments twice a week, at night. The question was, what was in those shipments?
They rounded the corner of the building, then stopped as headlights flashed from the opposite end of the alley. A signal?
James held up a warning hand and they retreated back around the corner of the building. When those headlights didn't appear as the truck rolled toward them and out onto the street, he eased back around the corner keeping to the shadows at the wall of the building.
The truck had stopped midway down the alley and turned in, headlights gleaming off large roll-up doors.
He left Anthony at the street, then continued down the alley. The driver of the truck cut the motor, followed by a brief conversation in French as he slipped inside the opening of the bay, at the off-side of the truck.
He glimpsed two people, one tall, the other shorter, slender, their features hidden by shadows inside the loading bay. It was only a momentary glimpse, but there was something about the shorter figure as he fell into step behind the taller man, the way he moved, then the slamming of a door as they entered the back of the gallery.
There were steps at the far end of the loading area that led up to a landing with a light over the back entrance of the gallery. He glanced at the overhead security system, then edged around the back of the truck. It was enclosed with high sides and a lift gate, the type used for transporting cargo or furniture.
He kept to the shadows and moved silently along the side of the truck. When he reached the driver's door, he peered inside the window. The cab was empty, except for the weapon—automatic, short barrel with a long magazine, tucked into the backpack that lay on the other seat.
