The Caves of Périgord: A Novel

eyelids.
    “I cannot leave you like this, Sybille, but I cannot stay,” he murmured.
    “Don’t go,” she said, her arms tightening around him, and she began to move beneath him, her hips rising gently to press him in a rhythm that she controlled. It was slow and insistent, like the rocking of a boat in the tug of the tide, and it surprised him with her strength. A part of his mind was still detached, observing, as she seemed to make love to him and to pleasure herself by an act of pure will. Her urgency released a great wave of tenderness in him that swept him almost peacefully away, until his breathing slowed again and the room came back into focus and he saw that her face was wet with tears.
    “I’ll come back, Sybille,” he said. “I’ll always come back. This is my home now, with you.” With a final, lingering kiss, he rose and dressed and was washing his face at the kitchen sink when the soft rapping came at the back door.
    It was Lespinasse, looking grim and frightened. “There’s bad trouble at Terrasson,” he said. “Young François has a car.”
    This was a strange new period for Resistance work, both safer and more dangerous at the same time. The Germans and the Vichy forces had both started concentrating their troops in order to mount big sweeps and searches to attack the growing numbers of Maquis bands. But it meant they had withdrawn posts from the smaller towns, and there were hardly any small patrols, so it was safer for the Resistance to move around and to steal and requisition cars and trucks. The gendarmes who remained at their small local posts were siding, more or less openly, with the Resistance. So Manners, who had started on foot and then progressed to a bicycle, was now accustomed to racing around the countryside by car. If they did meet the enemy by accident, it probably spelled disaster because the Germans now traveled in big and well-armed columns. And there were no more soft targets on the rail networks.
    “It’s that bastard Marat with those guns you let him have,” François spat, when Manners joined him on the road above the cemetery. “He took his men into Terrasson last night, probably with the agreement of the gendarmes. He blew down their door, took their pistols and rifles, robbed the post office, and then shot the local legion chief and some woman they accused of informing.”
    “So?” said Manners. “This must be the ninth or tenth time he’s pulled something like this. That’s the FTP strategy. What’s the fuss? And did you hear the message from London, the alert?”
    “Yes, I heard about the invasion. I’ll believe it when I see it. But I’m angry because Marat told the townspeople that he was acting on your orders, and the English capitaine and the Gaullists had guaranteed that there would be no reprisals. Terrasson is supposed to be under your and my personal protection.”
    “Will they believe that?”
    “They believe the fact that McPhee was with him. Everybody in Périgord knows about the Red Indian from America. McPhee is the living proof that Marat is obeying our orders, and McPhee is fool enough not to stop him. And they’ll believe the fact that he didn’t shoot the gendarmes. Don’t you see what Marat is trying to do, the trap he is laying for us? He tells the people that he’s acting under our orders and that we will protect them, and then we fail, and what’s left of the town turns Communist because they’ll never trust us again. This is what I warned you he would do all along. It’s the Communist way,” François said urgently.
    “And another thing. That alert message, the fairy’s beautiful smile. There was no confirmation of that from our Bureau Central, nothing from General Koenig in the Gaullist broadcast. Whatever alert signal is coming from London is from you and the Americans—not from Free France.”
    “I have to follow orders, François. You know that. I’ve had the Plan Vert signal, which means an all-out attack on the rail network. I’m sorry about Terrasson but there’s nothing I can do.”
    “I have friends in Terrasson. So do you—people who’ve fed you when their own kids were hungry.”
    “The sooner the invasion succeeds, the sooner they’ll eat. You know that.”
    François stared at him fiercely. “So we don’t lay an ambush on the Terrasson road?”
    “What with? Bren guns and Gammon bombs, against the panzers and the artillery they’ll send out from Périgueux? As soon as they hear our