“What do you have in mind?” Guido asked.
“God knows. I never could stand just sitting around and waiting, that’s all.”
Martineau drove into the courtyard at Septembertide and braked to a halt. He helped Kelso out and the American followed him, swinging between his crutches. The door was opened by the corporal. As they went in, Baum appeared from the sitting room.
“Ah, there you are, Vogel! And this is the young man you told me about?” He turned to the corporal. “Dismissed. I’ll call you when I want you.”
Baum stood back and Kelso moved past him into the sitting room. Martineau said, “There’s been a change of plan. Muller came looking for me at de Ville Place. As it happens, I wasn’t around at the right moment, but Sarah was. They’ve taken her to the Silvertide.”
“Don’t tell me, let me guess,” Baum said. “You’re going to go to the rescue.”
“Something like that.”
“And what about us?”
Martineau glanced at his watch. It was just after seven. “You and Kelso keep to your schedule. Getting him out of here is what’s important.”
“Now look here,” Kelso began, but Martineau had already walked out
The Kubelwagen roared out of the courtyard. Kelso turned and found Baum pouring cognac into a glass. He drank it slowly. “That’s really very good.”
“What goes on here?” the American demanded.
“I was thinking of Martineau,” Baum said. “I might have known that under all that surface cynicism he was the kind of man who’d go back for the girl. I was at Stalingrad, did you know that? IVe had enough of heroes to last me for a lifetime.”
He pulled on his leather trenchcoat and gloves, twisted the white scarf around his neck, adjusted the angle of the cap and picked up his baton.
“What are you going to do?” Kelso demanded.
“Martineau told me that the important thing about being Field Marshal Erwin Rommel was that everyone would do what I told them to do. Now we’ll see if he’s right. You stay here.”
He strode through the courtyard into the road and the men leaning beside the personnel carrier sprang to attention. “One of you get Captain Heider.”
Baum took out a cigarette and fitted it in his holder. A sergeant sprang forward with a light. A second later Heider hurried out. “Herr Field Marshal?”
“Get through to the airport. A message for Major Necker. I shall be a little later than I thought. Tell him also that I shall leave for France, not in my Storch, but in the mail plane. I expect it waiting and ready to go when I arrive, and I’d like my personal pilot to fly it.”
“Very well, Herr Field Marshal.”
“Excellent. I need them all, fully armed and ready to go in five minutes. You’ll find a wounded sailor in September-tide. Have a couple of men help him out and put him in the personnel carrier. And they can bring the corporal you loaned me with them, too. No sense in leaving him hanging around the kitchen.”
“But Herr Field Marshal, I don’t understand,” the captain said.
“You will, Heider,” the field marshal told him. “You will. Now send that message to the airport.”
Muller had drawn the curtains in his office and Sarah sat on a chair in front of his desk, hands folded in her lap, knees together. They’d made her take off her coat and Greiser was searching the lining while Muller went through the handbag.
He said, “So you are from Paimpol?”
“That’s right.”
“Sophisticated clothes for a Breton girl from a fishing village.”
“Oh, but she’s been around this one, haven’t you?” Greiser ran his fingers up and down her neck, making her flesh crawl.
Muller said, “Where did you and Standartenfiihrer Vogel meet?”
“Paris,” she said.
“But there is no visa for Paris among your papers.”
“I had one. It ran out.”
“Have you ever heard of the Cherche Midi or the women’s prison at Troyes? Bad places for a young woman like you to be.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I Ve done nothing,” she said.
Her stomach contracted with fear, her throat was dry.