“You bastard!” he said.
“Not me, you for letting it happen.” Martineau had his identity card out. “I think you’d better look at that.”
The sergeant’s face dropped. “Colonel, sir!” He sprang to attention.
“That’s better. You’re going to need a doctor. Tell chummy here when he’s capable of listening that I hope he’s learned something. Next time it could be the death of him.”
As they drove away, Sarah said, “You don’t hesitate at all. do you?”
“What’s the point?”
“I think I understand what Jack Carter meant. You have an aptitude for killing, I think.”
“Words,” he said. “Games in the head. That’s all I had for years. Nothing but talk, nothing but ideas. Let’s have some facts. Let’s stop playing games in black satin dresses with our hair blonded. You know what the first technique is that the Gestapo employ in breaking down any woman agent who falls into their hands?”
“You’re obviously going to tell me.”
“Multiple rape. If that doesn’t do the trick, the electric shock treatment comes next. I used to have a girlfriend in Berlin. She was Jewish.”
“I know. Carter told me about her as well.”
“How they tortured, then murdered her in the Gestapo cellars at Prince Albreehtstrasse?” Martineau shook his head. “He doesn’t know everything. He doesn’t know that Kaufmann, the head of the Gestapo in Lyons who I killed last November, was the man responsible for Rosa’s death in Berlin in nineteen thirty-eight.”
“I see now,” she said softly. “Sergeant Kelly said you were different and he was right. You hated Kaufmann for years and when you finally took your revenge, you found it meant nothing.”
“All this wisdom.” He laughed coldly. “Going over there and taking on the Gestapo isn’t like one of those movies they make at Elstree Studios. There are fifty million people in France. You know how many we estimate are active members of the Resistance?”
“No.”
“Two thousand, Sarah. Two lousy thousand.” He was disgusted. “I don’t know why we bother.”
“Then why do you? Not just for Rosa or your grandfather.” He turned briefly and she said, “Oh, yes, I know about that too.”
There was a silence. He opened his cigarette case one-handed. “Do you want one of these things? A bad habit, but a great comfort in the clinches.”
“All right,” she said and took one.
He gave her a light. “Something I’ve never talked about. I was due to go to Harvard m nineteen seventeen. Then America joined in the war. I was seventeen, officially under age. Joined up on sheer impulse and ended up in the trenches in Flanders.” He shook his head Whatever you mean by hell on earth, that was the trenches. So many dead you lost count.”
“It must have been terrible,” she said.
“And I loved every minute of it. Can you understand that? I lived more in one day, felt more, than in a year of ordinary living. Life became real, bloody, exciting. I couldn’t get enough.”
“Like a drug?”
“Exactly. I was like the man in the poem, constantly seeking Death on the battlefield. That was what I ran away from, back to Harvard and Oxford cloisters and the safe world of classrooms and books, everything in the head.”
“And then the war came round again.”
“And Dougal Munro yanked me out into the real world…. And the rest, as they say, you know.”
Later, lying in bed smoking a cigarette, listening to the rain tapping at the window, he heard the door open. She said softly through the darkness, “It’s only me.”
“Really?” Martineau said.
She took off her robe and got into bed beside him. She was wearing a cotton nightdress and he put an arm around her automatically. “Harry,” she whispered. “Can I make a confession?”
“You obviously intend to.”
“I know you probably imagine, along with everyone else that I’m a delicate little middle-class virgin, but I’m afraid I’m not.”
“Is that a fact?”
“Yes, I met a Spitfire pilot at the hospital last year. He used to come in for treatment for a broken ankle.”
“And true love blossomed?”
“Not really. More like mutual lust, but he was a nice chap and I don’t n-gn-t it. H- was shot down over iht Channel three months ago.”