When he felt he had mastered the schedule and saw a clear break coming up in which nobody would report to the car for at least thirty minutes, he decided it was time to move. It was about three p.m. on a sunny, if chilly, Paris spring afternoon. The ancient city’s so-familiar features were everywhere as he meandered across Boulevard Saint-Germain under blue sky. There was a music in the traffic and in the rhythm of the pedestrians, the window shoppers, the pastry munchers, the café sitters, the endless parade of bicyclists, some pulling passengers in carts, some simply solo. The great city went about its business, Occupation or no, action this day or no.
He walked into an alley and reached over to fetch a wine bottle that he had placed there early this morning, while it was dark. It was, however, filled with kerosene drained from a ten-liter tin jug in the garage. Instead of a cork it had a plug of wadded cotton jammed into its throat, and fifteen centimeters of strip hung from the plug. It was a gasoline bomb, constructed exactly to SOE specification. He had never done it before, since he usually worked with Explosive 808, but there was no 808 to be found, so the kerosene, however many years old it was, would have to do. He wrapped the bottle in newspaper, tilted it to soak the wad with the fuel, and then set off jauntily.
This was the delicate part. It all turned on how observant the Germans were at close quarters, whether or not Parisians on the street noticed him, and if so, if they took some kind of action. He guessed they wouldn’t; actually, he gambled that they wouldn’t. The Parisians are a prudent species.
Fortunately the Citroën was parked in an isolated space, open at both ends. He made no eye contact with its bored occupants, his last glance telling him that one leaned back, stretching, to keep from dozing, while the other was talking on a telephone unit wired into the radio console that occupied the small back seat. He felt that if he looked at them they might feel the pressure of his eyes, as those of predatory nature sometimes do, being weirdly sensitive to signs of aggression.
He approached on the oblique, keeping out of view of the rear window of the low-slung sedan, all the rage in 1935 but now ubiquitous in Paris. Its fuel tank was in the rear, which again made things convenient. In the last moment as he approached, he ducked down, wedged the bottle under the rear tire, pulled the paper away, lit his lighter, and lit the end of the strip of cloth. The whole thing took one second, and he moved away as if he’d done nothing.
It didn’t explode. Instead, with a kind of airsucking gush, the bottle erupted and shattered, smearing a billow of orange-black flame into the atmosphere from beneath the car, and in the next second the gasoline tank also went, again without explosion as much as flare of incandescence a hundred meters high, bleaching the color from the beautiful old town and sending a cascade of heat radiating outward.
Neither German policeman was injured, except by means of stolen dignity, but each spilled crazily from his door, driven by the primal fear of flame encoded in the human race, one tripping, going to hands and knees and locomoting desperately from the conflagration on all fours like some sort of beast. Civilians panicked as well, and screaming became general as they scrambled away from the bonfire that had been an automobile several seconds earlier.
Basil never looked back, and walked swiftly down the street until he reached rue de Valor and headed down it.
Boch was lecturing Abel on the necessity of severity in dealing with these French cream puffs when a man roared into the banquet room, screaming, “They’ve blown up one of our radio cars. It’s an attack! The Resistance is here!”
Instantly men leaped to action. Three ran to a gun rack in a closet where the MP 40s were stored and grabbed those powerful weapons up. Abel raced to the telephone and called Paris command with a report and a request for immediate troop dispatch. Still others pulled Walthers, Lugers, and P38s from holsters, grabbed overcoats, and readied themselves to move to the scene and take command.
Hauptsturmführer Boch did nothing. He sat rooted in terror. He was not a coward, but he also, for all his worship of severity and aggressive interrogation methods, was particularly inept at confronting the unexpected, which generally caused his mind to dump its contents in a steaming pile on the floor while he sat in stupefaction, waiting for it to refill.
In this case, when he found himself alone in the room, he reached a refill level, stood up, and ran after his more agile colleagues.
He stepped on the sidewalk, which was full of fleeing Parisians, and fought against the tide, being bumped and jostled in the process by those who had no idea who he was. A particularly hard thump from a hurtling heavyweight all but knocked him flat, and the fellow had to grab him to keep him upright before hurrying along. Thus, making little progress, the Hauptsturmführer pulled out his Luger, trying to remember if there was a shell in the chamber, and started to shout in his bad French, “Make way! German officer, make way!” waving the Luger about as if it were some kind of magic wand that would dissipate the crowd.
It did not, so taken in panic were the French, so he diverted to the street itself and found the going easier. He made it to Boulevard Saint-Germain, turned right, and there beheld the atrocity. Radio Car Five still blazed brightly. German plainclothesmen had set up a cordon around it, menacing the citizens with their MP 40s, but of course no citizens were that interested in a German car, and so the street had largely emptied. Traffic on the busy thoroughfare had stopped, making the approach of the fire truck more laggard—the sound of klaxons arrived from far away, and it was clear that by the time the firemen arrived the car would be largely burned to a charred hulk. Two plainclothesmen, Esterlitz, from his SS unit, and an Abwehr agent, sat on the curb looking completely unglued while Abel tried to talk to them.
Boch ran to them.
“Report,” he snapped as he arrived, but nobody paid any attention to him.
“Report!” he screamed.
Abel looked over at him.
“I’m trying to get a description from these two fellows, so we know who we’re looking for.”
“We should arrest hostages at once and execute them if no information is forthcoming.”
“Sir, he has to be in the area still. We have to put people out in all directions with a solid description.”
“Esterlitz, what did you see?”
Esterlitz looked at him with empty eyes. The nearness of his escape, the heat of the flames, the suddenness of it all, had disassembled his brain completely. Thus it was the Abwehr agent who answered.
“As I’ve been telling the lieutenant, it happened so quickly. My last impression in the split second before the bomb exploded was of a man walking north on Saint-Germain in a blue pinstripe that was not well cut at all, a surprise to see in a city so fashion-conscious, and then whoosh, a wall of flame behind us.”
“The bastards,” said Boch. “Attempting murder in broad daylight.”
“Sir,” said Abel, “with all due respect, this was not an assassination operation. Had he wanted them dead, he would have hurled the Molotov through the open window, soaking them with burning gasoline, burning them to death. Instead he merely ignited the petrol tank, which enabled them to escape. He didn’t care about them. That wasn’t the point, don’t you see?”
Boch looked at him, embarrassed to be contradicted by an underling in front of the troops. It was not the SS way! But he controlled his temper, as it made no sense to vent at an ignorant police rube.
“What are you saying?”
“This was some sort of distraction. He wanted to get us all out here, concentrating on this essentially meaningless event, because it somehow advanced his higher purpose.”
“I—I—” stuttered Boch.
“Let me finish the interview, then get the description out to all other cars, ordering them to stay in place. Having our men here, tied up in this jam, watching the car burn to embers, accomplishes nothing.”
“Do it! Do it!” screamed Boch, as if he had thought of it himself.
Basil reached the Bibliothèque Mazarine within ten m
inutes and could still hear fire klaxons sounding in the distance. The disturbance would clog up the sixth arrondissement for hours before it was finally untangled, and it would mess up the German response for those same hours. He knew he had a window of time—not much, but perhaps enough.
He walked through the cobbled yard and approached the doors, where two French policemen stood guard.
“Official business only, monsieur. German orders,” said one.
He took out his identification papers and said frostily, “I do not care to chat with French policemen in the sunlight. I am here on business.”
“Yes, sir.”
He entered a vast, sacred space. It was composed of an indefinite number of hexagonal galleries, with vast air shafts between, surrounded by very low railings. From any of the hexagons one could see, interminably, the upper and lower floors. The distribution of the galleries was invariable. Twenty shelves, five long shelves per side, covered all the sides except two; their height, which was the distance from floor to ceiling, scarcely exceeded that of a normal bookcase. The books seemed to absorb and calm all extraneous sounds, so that as his heels clicked on the marble of the floor on the approach to a central desk, a woman behind it hardly seemed to notice him. However, his papers got her attention and her courtesy right away.
“I am here on important business. I need to speak to le directeur immediately.”
She left. She returned. She bade him follow. They went to an elevator where a decrepit Great War veteran, shoulders stooped, medals tarnished, eyes vacant, opened the gate to a cage-like car. They were hoisted mechanically up two flights, followed another path through corridors of books, and reached a door.
She knocked, then entered. He followed, to discover an old Frenchie in some kind of frock coat and goatee, standing nervously.
“I am Claude De Marque, the director,” he said in French. “How may I help you?”
“Do you speak German?”
“Yes, but I am more fluent in my own tongue.”
“French, then.”
“Please sit down.”
Basil took a chair.
“Now—”
“First, understand the courtesy I have paid you. Had I so chosen, I could have come with a contingent of armed troops. We could have shaken down your institution, examined the papers of all your employees, made impolite inquiries as we looked for leverage and threw books every which way. That is the German technique. Perhaps you shield a Jew, as is the wont of your kind of prissy French intellectual. Too bad for those Jews, too bad for those who shield him. Are you getting my meaning?”
“Yes, sir, I—”
“Instead I come on my own. As men of letters, I think it more appropriate that our relationship be based on trust and respect. I am a professor of literature at Leipzig, and I hope to return to that after the war. I cherish the library, this library, any library. Libraries are the font of civilization, do you not agree?”
“I do.”
“Therefore, one of my goals is to protect the integrity of the library. You must know that first of all.”
“I am pleased.”
“Then let us proceed. I represent a very high science office of the Third Reich. This office has an interest in certain kinds of rare books. I have been assigned by its commanding officer to assemble a catalog of such volumes in the great libraries of Europe. I expect you to help me.”
“What kinds of books?”
“Ah, this is delicate. I expect discretion on your part.”
“Of course.”
“This office has an interest in volumes that deal with erotic connections between human beings. Our interest is not limited to those merely between male and female but extends to other combinations as well. The names de Sade and Ovid have been mentioned. There are more, I am sure. There is also artistic representation. The ancients were more forthright in their descriptions of such activities. Perhaps you have photos of paintings, sculptures, friezes?”
“Sir, this is a respectable—”
“It is not a matter of respect. It is a matter of science, which must go where it leads. We are undertaking a study of human sexuality, and it must be done forthrightly, professionally, and quickly. We are interested in harnessing the power of eugenics and seek to find ways to improve the fertility of our finest minds. Clearly the answer lies in sexual behaviors. Thus we must fearlessly master such matters as we chart our way to the future. We must ensure the future.”
“But we have no salacious materials.”
“And do you believe, knowing of the Germans’ attributes of thoroughness, fairness, calm and deliberate examination, that a single assurance alone would suffice?”
“I invite you to—”
“Exactly. This is what I expect. An hour, certainly no more, undisturbed in your rare book vault. I will wear white gloves if you prefer. I must be free to make a precise search and assure my commander that either you do not have such materials, as you claim, or you do, and these are the ones you have. Do you understand?”
“I confess a first edition of Sade’s Justine, dated 1791, is among our treasures.”
“Are the books arranged by year?”
“They are.”
“Then that is where I shall begin.”
“Please, you can’t—”
“Nothing will be disturbed, only examined. When I am finished, have a document prepared for me in which I testify to other German officers that you have cooperated to the maximum degree. I will sign it, and believe me, it will save you much trouble in the future.”
“That would be very kind, sir.”
At last he and the Reverend MacBurney were alone. I have come a long way to meet you, you Scots bastard, he thought. Let’s see what secrets I can tease out of you.
MacBurney was signified by a manuscript on foolscap, beribboned in a decaying folder upon which The Path to Jesus had been scrawled in an ornate hand. It had been easy to find, in a drawer marked 1789; he had delicately moved it to the tabletop, where, opened, it yielded its treasure, page after page in the round hand of the man of God himself, laden with swoops and curls of faded brown ink. In the fashion of the eighteenth century, he had made each letter a construction of grace and agility, each line a part of the composition, by turning the feather quill to get the fat or the thin, these arranged in an artistic cascade. His punctuation was precise, deft, studied, just this much twist and pressure for a comma, that much for a (more plentiful) semicolon. It was if the penmanship itself communicated the glory of his love for God. All the nouns were capitalized, and the S’s and the F’s were so close it would take an expert to tell which was which; superscript showed up everywhere, as the man tried to shrink his burden of labor; frequently the word “the” appeared as “ye,” as the penultimate letter often stood in for th in that era. It seemed the words on the page wore powdered periwigs and silk stockings and buckled, heeled shoes as they danced and pirouetted across the page.
Yet there was a creepy quality to it, too. Splats or droplets marked the creamy luster of the page— some of wine perhaps, some of tea, some of whatever else one might have at the board in the eighteenth century. Some of the lines were crooked, and the page itself felt off-kilter, as though a taint of madness had attended, or perhaps drunkenness, for in his dotage old MacBurney was no teetotaler, it was said.
More psychotic still were the drawings. As the librarian had noticed in his published account of the volume in Treasures of the Cambridge Library, the reverend occasionally yielded to artistic impulse. No, they weren’t vulvas or naked boys or fornicators in pushed-up petticoats or farmers too in love with their cows. MacBurney’s lusts weren’t so visible or so nakedly expressed. But the fellow was a doodler after Jesus. He could not compel himself to be still, and so each page wore a garland of crosses scattered across its bottom, a Milky Way of holiness setting off the page number, or in the margins, and at the top silhouetted crucifixions, sketches of angels, clumsy reiterations of God’s hand touching Adam’s as the grea
t Italian had captured upon that ceiling in Rome. Sometimes the devil himself appeared, horned and ambivalent, just a few angry lines not so much depicting as suggesting Lucifer’s cunning and malice. It seemed the reverend was in anguish as he tried desperately to finish this last devotion to the Lord.
Basil got to work quickly. Here of all places was no place to tarry. He untaped the Riga Minox from his left shin, checked that the overhead light seemed adequate. He didn’t need flash, as Technical Branch had come up with extremely fast 21.5 mm film, but it was at the same time completely necessary to hold still. The lens had been prefocused for 15 cm, so Basil did not need to play with it or any other knobs, buttons, controls. He took on faith that he had been given the best equipment in the world with which to do the job.
He had seven pages to photograph—2, 5, 6, 9, 10, 13, and 15—for the codebreaker had assured him that those would be the pages on which the index words would have to be located, based on the intercepted code.
In fact, Sade’s Justine proved very helpful, along with a first edition of Voltaire’s Pensées and an extra-illustrated edition of Le Decameron de Jean Boccace, published in five volumes in Paris in 1757, Ah, the uses of literature! Stacked, they gave him a brace against which he could sustain the long fuselage of the Minox. Beneath it he displayed the page. Click, wind, click again, on to the next one. It took so little time. It was too sodding easy. He thought he might find an SS firing squad just waiting for him, enjoying the little trick they’d played on him.
But when he replaced all the documents in their proper spots, retaped the camera to his leg, and emerged close to an hour later, there was no firing squad, just the nervous Marque, le directeur, waiting with the tremulous smile of the recently violated.
“I am finished, monsieur le directeur. Please examine, make certain all is appropriate to the condition it was in when I first entered an hour ago. Nothing missing, nothing misfiled, nothing where it should not be. I will not take offense.”