Paris: The Novel

cave.”
    Luc said nothing.
    “You were trying to save me,” Thomas continued. “You tried to save your brother. I know it.” He put his arm around Luc. “Do you remember when I fought Bertrand Dalou after they took your balloon?” He held his brother closer. “It’s always just been you and me. And now you tried to save my life. Do you know what that means to me?”
    “You’re my brother,” said Luc.
    “But you have to tell me one thing. How did you know it was a trap? Who’s your contact? Is it one person, or are there many? I need to know so I can protect you.”
    “I don’t think you can.”
    “I can. Didn’t I always?”
    Luc looked down at the floor. Then he took a deep breath.
    “It’s just one man. Schmid. He’s Gestapo. Works out of the avenue Foch offices.” He still didn’t look up.
    “Are you with others, or alone?”
    “Alone.”
    “And Corinne?”
    “He asked me who it was. I didn’t know. I just made a list of all the possible people I could think of. Coco Chanel, Marc Blanchard … A whole lot. That was all. He didn’t seem very interested. But then he told me he was setting a trap. That’s all I knew. I didn’t even know if yesterday was the trap, but I thought it might be. So I told you not to go.”
    Was it the truth? Perhaps. Probably not the whole truth. But it was enough. Luc had informed. He’d let the others walk into a trap, and made an attempt to save his brother. A feeble one. Not enough to blow his own cover.
    “I’ll take care of Schmid,” Thomas said. “You don’t have anything more to worry about.”
    “Really?”
    Thomas smiled.
    “We have to do something now. We need to move Charlie’s body. We can’t use the passage with it lying there. It wouldn’t be too pleasant. We should take it all the way down into the chamber at the end.”
    “Now?”
    “I think so. Then we’re going to burn it. It won’t smell so bad. I brought some petrol.” He indicated the knapsack. “Enough to get started.”
    Luc shrugged.
    “As you like.”
    So they went into the garden, and Luc carefully opened the entrance into the passageway and lit a lamp, and led Thomas down to where the body was.
    Then Thomas put the knapsack down and he took Charlie’s body under the shoulders, and Luc took his feet, and they slowly carried Charlie down to the chamber. They stopped twice to rest on the way. It took them nearly a quarter of an hour. Finally Charlie was laid to rest in the center of the chamber.
    “Give me the lamp,” said Thomas, “and I’ll get the petrol.”
    He moved swiftly up the passage and found the knapsack. He opened it to check that everything was in order. Then he started back down the passage again.
    As he reached the chamber, Luc appeared in the lamplight, looking pale.
    Thomas put the lamp down by Charlie’s head, then in the shadow, he squatted over the knapsack and began to open it. He looked up at his brother.
    “You needn’t have worried, you know,” Thomas said quietly. “I’d never have let them hurt you.”
    Luc nodded.
    Thomas smiled.
    “I love you, little brother.”
    “I know.”
    Luc never saw the big Welrod with its silencer in his brother’s hand. Thomas fired once. The shot went straight into Luc’s heart. Thomas stepped over and quickly put a second shot into the back of his head.
    The shots made a sound in the cave, but not much. Outside the cave, there was no sound at all.
    Fifteen minutes later Thomas met Max and handed him back the knapsack containing the Welrod.
    “It was him. It’s done,” he said.
    “The contact?”
    “Gestapo. Schmid.”

    If the Allies had hoped they would sweep across northern France, they had been disappointed. All through June the fighting in Normandy was intense. The western port of Cherbourg was taken on the twenty-first, but the Germans left its deepwater harbor almost inoperable. Reinforced, the panzer divisions at the old city of Caen held out, into July. Even a month after Cherbourg fell, the Allies had been able to take only the heights south of Caen. In the last week of July, the Allied forces in the far west began to swing around below the Germans, but the going was still tough.
    Then, early in August, news came that General Patton’s Third Army had joined this forward swing. One of the divisions serving under him was French. Drawn from the Frenchmen who had managed to get abroad, and by troops from Algeria and other parts of North Africa, General Leclerc’s Second Armored