The Caves of Périgord: A Novel

minimum. Maybe five. Are they using road transport or local trains to move them to Périgueux?”
    “Three local trains have been assigned. They are to be available from dawn, two days from now. But the armored train that escorted them here will stay for that. It’s too risky to ambush an armored train.”
    “If we are to try anything at all, we have to hit them before they’re ready. Malrand has more ammo for the Spandau. We’re well off for supplies.” He was thinking aloud. Take the plastic out of the Gammon bombs, and he could probably take out one pillar of a viaduct. No—the armored cars would watch the viaducts and the obvious bridges and cuttings. These men have fought partisans. Maybe this was too big a target. The priority was to have the Maquis trained and ready for the invasion, not to lose their strength and morale fighting superior firepower too soon.
    “Perhaps we should duck this one and disperse, start up again elsewhere,” Manners said.
    “They’ll torture peasants till they find the arms dumps, round up the parents of the boys who have run to the Maquis. If we leave now without a fight, the people will never trust us again,” said Marat. “I thought you might radio for an air raid on the rail station.”
    “Bomber Command doesn’t do that kind of favor. And anyway a night raid would flatten half of Limoges, kill too many civilians. Remember the way the American bombers hit Bergerac when they were trying to get the airfield. No, we’d do better to hit them early, and then disperse. Can your railway men get me to Périgueux and up that track to Limoges tomorrow? And can you get a message to McPhee and his boys to stand by?”
    “We can use one of the trolleys if we have to, claim a signal repair. I can reach McPhee.”
    “Right, wake me in good time. And send Malrand to me in the barn. We have to talk about this.”
    “Malrand will be busy,” he said with a wry grin. “Mercedes came here with me.”
    “I thought he hated Communists.”
    “She’s a woman, that’s different. And she’s a Spaniard. They love him, Englishman.”
    “I thought you said she was with McPhee?”
    “She is, when he’s around. But tonight he isn’t, and Mercedes has been at war since Franco launched his coup eight years ago. She lives for the day, and she likes men.”
    “I suppose it’s that free love idea that you Communists believe in,” said Manners, suddenly worried by the implications for the mission of a woman coming between McPhee and François.
    “Mercedes hates fascists because she spent three days being raped by Franco’s Moorish troops when she was barely out of puberty,” said Marat. “She has not had much time for your bourgeois conventions of fidelity ever since. And loving her like my own daughter, I can’t say I blame her. We’ve been fighting a different kind of war for a long time, while your friend McPhee was playing at being a novelist in Paris, and while you were playing polo.”

CHAPTER 16
Time: The Present
    H orst pulled a manila file from a fat briefcase that stood by his knee, and tossed it with casual pride onto the table beside the champagne and the roses.
    “I am honored to meet you, Major Manners. Your father is the unsung hero of this fruit of my researches. This is the war diary of the Kampfgruppe Brehmer, a specialist anti-Resistance unit, stationed in the Dordogne during April and May of 1944. It comes fresh from the Kriegsarchiv, the German military archives, where it seems I was the first visiting scholar ever to bother to study it. It was filed under the unit records for HeeresgruppeOst, the section that dealt with the Eastern Front, where the Brehmer Division was formed. By chance, I came across a reference to it in the Order of Battle for Army Group G, the command for southern France. So I put in a trace request and the librarians found it for me. And I think it points to the area where our lost cave may be rediscovered.”
    He bent forward to offer his hand to Manners, while Clothilde tried to embrace him on both cheeks, and Lydia hovered, her hand half-outstretched. Manners opened the file.
    “You read German, and German script, my dear Major?”
    “I can make a stab at it. NATO courses, you know,” said Manners vaguely, skimming through the sheaf of photocopied pages and stopping at a passage where the margin had been lined in red ink.
    “There are several references to Resistance actions,” said Horst. “The first one came even as they