He looked down into that appealing young face, aware of a tenderness that he had never experienced with any woman in his life before. It was perhaps because of that fact that he found himself speaking so frankly.
“To be honest, I’m not anything. I loathe politics. It reminds me of the senator in Rome who’s supposed to have said: ‘Don’t tell my mother I’m in politics. She thinks I play the piano in a brothel.’ ”
She laughed. “I like that.”
“Most of my former comrades are now working with the British and American Navies. I, on the other hand, was seconded on special duties to serve with the Fifth Schnell-boote Flotilla in Cherbourg. When Italy decided to sue for peace, there wasn’t a great deal I could do about it, and I didn’t fancy a prison camp. Of course, they don’t trust me enough to allow me to command an E-boat anymore. I suppose they think I might roar across to England.”
“Would vou?”
Savary returned to the bridge at that moment, and the Italian said, “Right, let’s go below now and get that coffee.”
She moved ahead of him. As he watched her descend the companionway he was conscious of a curious excitement. He’d known many women, and many who were more beautiful than Anne-Marie Latour with her ridiculous dyed hair. Certainly more sophisticated. And there was something about her that was not quite right. The image was one thing, but the girl herself, when he spoke to her, was something else again.
“Mother of God, Guido, what’s happening to you?” he asked softly as he went down the companionway after her.
Captain Karl Muller, the officer in command of the Secret Field Police in Jersey, sat at his desk in the Silvertide Hotel at Havre des Pas and worked his way though a bulky file. It was wholly devoted to anonymous letters, the tip-offs that led to whatever success his unit enjoyed. The crimes were varied. Anything from possession of an illegal radio to helping a Russian slave worker on the run or involvement in the black market. Muller always insisted on his men tracking down the writers of anonymous letters. Once uncovered, they could be used in many ways because of his threat to expose them to friends and neighbors.
It was all very small beer, of course. Nothing like it had been at Gestapo Headquarters at Rue des Saussaies in Paris. Muller was not SS, but he was a Party member, a onetime Chief Inspector of Police in the Hamburg Criminal Investigation Department. Unfortunately, a young Frenchwoman in his hands for interrogation had died without disclosing the names of her associates. As she had been involved with the principal Resistance circuit in
Paris, it had been a matter of some importance. To his superiors he’d botched things badly by being too eager. The posting to this island backwater had followed. So now, he was a man in a hurry, seeking any way he could to get back into the mainstream of things.
He stood up, a shade under six feet, with hair that was still dark brown in spite of the fact that he was in his fiftieth year. He stretched, started to the window to look out at the weather, and the phone rang.
He picked it up. “Yes.”
It wasn’t a local call, he could tell by the crackling. ‘Captain Muller? This is Schroeder, port officer at Granville.”
Ten minutes later he was standing at the window, staring out into the dark, when there was a knock at the door. He turned and went to his desk and sat down.
The two men who entered were, like Muller, in civilian clothes. The GFP never wore uniform if they could help it. The one who led the way was broad and squat with a Slavic face and hard gray eyes. This was Inspector Willi Kleist, Muller’s second-in-command, also seconded from the Gestapo and, like Muller, a former detective with the Hamburg police. They had known each other for years. The man with him was much younger with fair hair, blue eyes and a weak mouth. A suggestion of perverse cruelty there, but when confronted with Muller, so eager to please that it showed. This was Sergeant Ernst Greiser, who had been transferred from the Army’s Field Police to the GFP six months earlier.