They walked down the hill to the station, a modern stone building the same color as the cathedral. They entered a square lobby in tan marble. There was a queue at the ticket window. That was good: it meant local people were optimistic that there would be a train soon. Greta and Jelly were in the queue, but there was no sign of Diana and Maude, who must already be on the platform.
They stood in line in front of an anti-Resistance poster showing a thug with a gun and Stalin behind him. It read:
THEY MURDER! wrapped in the folds of
OUR FLAG
That’s supposed to be me, Flick thought.
They bought their tickets without incident. On the way to the platform they had to pass a Gestapo checkpoint, and Flick’s pulse beat faster. Greta and Jelly were ahead of them in line. This would be their first encounter with the enemy. Flick prayed they would be able to keep their nerve. Diana and Maude must have already passed through.
Greta spoke to the Gestapo men in German. Flick could clearly hear her giving her cover story. “I know a Major Remmer,” said one of the men, a sergeant. “Is he an engineer?”
“No, he’s in Intelligence,” Greta replied. She seemed remarkably calm, and Flick reflected that pretending to be something she was not must be second nature to her.
“You must like cathedrals,” he said conversationally. “There’s nothing else to see in this dump.”
“Yes.”
He turned to Jelly’s papers and began to speak French, “You travel everywhere with Frau Remmer?”
“Yes, she’s very kind to me,” Jelly replied. Flick heard the tremor in her voice and knew that she was terrified.
The sergeant said, “Did you see the bishop’s palace? That’s quite a sight.”
Greta replied in French. “We did-very impressive.” The sergeant was looking at Jelly, waiting for her response. She looked dumbstruck for a moment; then she said, “The bishop’s wife was very gracious.”
Flick’s heart sank into her boots. Jelly could speak perfect French, but she knew nothing about any foreign country. She did not realize that it was only in the Church of England that bishops could have wives. France was Catholic, and priests were celibate. Jelly had given herself away at the first check.
What would happen now? Flick’s Sten gun, with the skeleton butt and the silencer, was in her suitcase, disassembled into three parts, but she had her personal Browning automatic in the worn leather shoulder bag she carried. Now she discreetly unzipped the bag for quick access to her gun, and she saw Ruby put her right hand in her raincoat pocket, where her pistol was.
“Wife?” the sergeant said to Jelly. “What wife?”
Jelly just looked nonplussed.
“You are French?” he said.
“Of course.”
Greta stepped in quickly. “Not his wife, his housekeeper,” she said in French. It was a plausible explanation: in that language, a wife was une femme and a housekeeper was une femme de menage.
Jelly realized she had made a mistake, and said, “Yes, of course, his housekeeper, I meant to say.”
Flick held her breath.
The sergeant hesitated for a moment longer, then shrugged and handed back their papers. “I hope you won’t have to wait too long for a train,” he said, reverting to German.
Greta and Jelly walked on, and Flick allowed herself to breathe again.
When she and Ruby got to the head of the line, they were about to hand over their papers when two uniformed French gendarmes jumped the queue. They paused at the checkpoint and gave the Germans a sketchy salute but did not offer their papers. The sergeant nodded and said, “Go ahead.”
If I were running security here, Flick thought, I’d tighten up on that point. Anyone could pretend to be a cop. But the Germans were overly deferential to people in uniform: that was part of the reason they had let their country be taken over by psychopaths.
Then it was her turn to tell her story to the Gestapo. “You’re cousins?” the sergeant said, looking from her to Ruby and back again.
“Not much resemblance, is there?” Flick said with a cheerful air she did not feel. There was none at all: Flick had blonde hair, green eyes and fair skin, whereas Ruby had dark hair and black eyes.