“Longer than that,” she said indignantly. “For six months, every night except when she was in town.”
“In your house?”
“I have an apartment. Very small. But it was enough for two… two people who loved each other.” She continued to cry.
Dieter strove to maintain a light conversational tone as he obliquely approached the topic he was really interested in. “Wasn’t it difficult to have Helicopter living with you as well, in a small place?”
“He’s not living there. He only came today.”
“But you must have wondered where he was going to stay.”
“No. Michel found him a place, an empty room over the old bookshop in the rue Moliere.”
Walter Goedel suddenly shifted in his chair: he had realized where this was heading. Dieter carefully ignored him, and casually asked Gilberte, “Didn’t he leave his stuff at your place when you went to Chatelle to meet the plane?”
“No, he took it to the room.”
Dieter asked the key question. “Including his little suitcase?”
“Yes.”
“Ah.” Dieter had what he wanted. Helicopter’s radio set was in a room over the bookshop in the rue Moliere. “I’ve finished with this stupid cow,” he said to Hans in German. “Thru her over to Becker.”
Dieter’s own car, the blue Hispano-Suiza, was parked in front of the chƒteau. With Walter Goedel beside him and Hans Hesse in the backseat, he drove fast through the villages to Reims and quickly found the bookshop in the rue Moliere.
They broke down the door and climbed a bare wooden staircase to the room over the shop. It was unfurnished but for a palliasse covered with a rough blanket. On the floor beside the rough bed stood a bottle of whisky, a bag containing toiletries, and the small suitcase.
Dieter opened it to show Goedel the radio. “With this,” Dieter said triumphantly, “I can become Helicopter.”
On the way back to Sainte-C‚cile, they discussed what message to send. “First, Helicopter would want to know why the parachutists did not drop,” Dieter said. “So he will ask, ‘What happened?’ Do you agree?”
“And he would be angry,” Goedel said.
“So he will say, ‘What the blazes happened?’ perhaps.” Goedel shook his head. “I studied in England before the war. That phrase, ‘What the blazes,’ is too polite. It’s a coy euphemism for ‘What the hell.’ A young man in the military would never use it.”
“Maybe he should say, ‘What the flick?’ instead.”
“Too coarse,” Goedel objected. “He knows the message may be decoded by a female.”
“Your English is better than mine, you choose.”
“I think he would say, ‘What the devil happened?’ It expresses his anger, and it’s a masculine curse that would not offend most women.”
“Okay. Then he wants to know what he should do next, so he will ask for further orders. What would he say?”
“Probably, ‘Send instructions.’ English people dislike the word ‘order,’ they think it’s not refined.”
“All right. And we’ll ask for a quick response, because Helicopter would be impatient, and so are we.”
They reached the chƒteau and went to the wireless listening room in the basement. A middle-aged operator called Joachim plugged the set in and tuned it to Helicopter’s emergency frequency while Dieter scribbled the agreed message:
WHAT THE DEVIL HAPPENED? SEND INSTRUCTIONS. REPLY IMMEDIATELY.
Dieter forced himself to control his impatience and carefully show Joachim how to encode the message, including the security tags.
Goedel said, “Won’t they know it’s not Helicopter at the machine? Can’t they recognize the individual ‘fist’ of the sender, like handwriting?”
“Yes,” Joachim said. “But I’ve listened to this chap sending a couple of times, and I can imitate him. It’s a bit like mimicking someone’s accent, talking like a Frankfurt man, say.”
Goedel was skeptical. “You can do a perfect impersonation after hearing him twice?”
“Not perfect, no. But agents are often under pressure when they broadcast, in some hiding place and worried about us catching up with them, so small variations will be put down to strain.” He began to tap out the letters.
Dieter reckoned they had a wait of at least an hour. At the British listening station, the message had to be decrypted, then passed to Helicopter’s controller, who was surely in bed. The controller might get the message by phone and compose a reply on the spot, but even then the reply had to be encrypted and transmitted, then decrypted by Joachim.