The Caves of Périgord: A Novel

his base deeper into the hills and move the attacks toward the rail network that spread out from Brive. Berger had agreed to go to ground, while Frisé would head west to his family in the vineyards of Pomerol, and start blowing rail junctions nearer Bordeaux. The golden rule of the mission was to hit where the enemy was most dispersed, to disappear when they concentrated, and to keep training, training, and training the young recruits who were now flooding to the Resistance.
    Which left him the problem of Soleil, one of the least disciplined but most active of the Resistance leaders. Nominally a Communist, but dismissed by Marat as an unreliable thug and black marketeer, Soleil ruled the district around the old fortified hilltop town of Belvès. By persuasion or by menace, almost the entire countryside had been recruited to his effort. Farmers hid his trucks and fuel supplies, fed and housed his men, and kept their anguish to themselves when the Groupes Mobiles convoys darted in to burn a barn or farmhouse in a reprisal raid after one of Soleil’s ambushes. He was too dedicated to raiding banks and tobacco stores for Manners’s comfort. But he had succeeded in intimidating the semi-trained contingent of old men of the German 95th security regiment who now stayed huddled in their barracks in Sarlat, catching malaria from the fetid swamp on which the town was built. Malrand always claimed that one of his first postwar missions would be to drain the swamp and eradicate the mosquitoes.
    Manners had never much thought about after the war. He had schooled himself to avoid any thought of such an improbably distant future, in the superstitious hope that by assuming that he would not survive the conflict, he might have a better chance of doing so. But Malrand talked of the future constantly in the shelter at night, the need for a revitalized France that would nationalize the big industries and defeat communism and modernize the country under the benign leadership of de Gaulle. He seemed to assume that Britain and France would fulfill that plan of a union that Churchill had briefly floated in the darkest days of the French collapse in 1940, with all the smaller countries dutifully following along.
    What he called “Bismarck’s disaster” of a united Germany must be broken up into the smaller provinces of Bavaria, Prussia, Saxony and Hanover, and Rhineland, which could after a suitable period of probation take their place in the Anglo-French system of a united Europe. Only then, he claimed, could Europe stand proudly with the otherwise dominant Americans and Russians. Only then could Europe recover from what he called its suicide of the 1914-18 war. Pipe dreams, thought Manners, but let him ramble on. Nobody in England was going to see France as an equal after the collapse of 1940, whatever pinpricks the Resistance might deliver to recover some of France’s trampled honor as the British and American armies mounted the great invasion.
    Manners stopped short of the top of the ridge, leaned his bike against a pile of logs, and moved stealthily forward to look down the road ahead. He always checked when he was carrying something that was certain to get him arrested. He had a haversack full of a dozen Mills bombs and their fuses, an offering for Soleil, and some spare magazines for his Sten. It seemed quiet enough, with a long stretch of woodland and then only a small parkland of open ground before the château where Soleil had asked to meet. He looked back down the hill, walked into the middle of the road, and waved his arms to summon François. They always kept a hundred yards apart, to give the second man the chance to escape a trap.
    “It looks quiet.”
    “I don’t trust that little Marseilles maquereau one inch,” said François.
    Manners grinned. The word meant mackerel, slang for pimp. “I’ve heard a lot of bad things about Soleil, but that’s a new one.”
    “It might even be true,” laughed François. “But he looks like a maquereau, with his pencil mustache and gangster talk. I find that even more offensive than his half-baked ideas about Marxism. He steals arms from other groups. Sometimes I think the only sensible thing the Communists did was to condemn him to death. Pity they rescinded it. This war makes for some unsavory bedfellows.”
    “Well, he kills Germans. That’s what counts. Let’s go on.”

    It was surreal, a comic variant of his occasional delusions of peace, thought Manners, as he sat