Jackdaws Read Free

piqued his interest.
    She was with an attractive man who
was not very interested in her—probably her husband. Dieter had asked her to
take a photo only because he wanted to talk to her. He had a wife and two
pretty children in Cologne, and he shared his Paris apartment with Stéphane,
but that would not stop him making a play for another girl. Beautiful women
were like the gorgeous French impressionist paintings he collected: having one
did not stop you wanting another.
    French women were the most beautiful
in the world. But everything French was beautiful: their bridges, their
boulevards, their furniture, even their china tableware. Dieter loved Paris
nightclubs, champagne, foie gras, and warm baguette. He enjoyed buying shirts
and ties at Charvet, the legendary chemisier opposite the Ritz hotel. He could
happily have lived in Paris forever.
    He did not know where he had
acquired such tastes. His father was a professor of music—the one art form of
which the Germans, not the French, were the undisputed masters. But to Dieter,
the dry academic life his father led seemed unbearably dull, and he had
horrified his parents by becoming a policeman, one of the first university
graduates in Germany so to do. By 1939, he was head of the criminal
intelligence department of the Cologne police. In May 1940, when General Heinz
Gudenan's panzer tanks crossed the river Meuse at Sedan and swept triumphantly
through France to the English Channel in a week, Dieter impulsively applied for
a commission in the army. Because of his police experience, he was given an
intelligence posting immediately. He spoke fluent French and adequate English,
so he was put to work interrogating captured prisoners. He had a talent for the
work, and it gave him profound satisfaction to extract information that could
help his side win battles. In North Africa his results had been noticed by
Rommel himself.
    He was always willing to use torture
when necessary, but he liked to persuade people by subtler means. That was how
he had got Stéphanie. Poised, sensual, and shrewd, she had been the owner of a
Paris store selling ladies' hats that were devastatingly chic and obscenely
expensive. But she had a Jewish grandmother. She had lost the store and spent
six months in a French prison, and she had been on her way to a camp in Germany
when Dieter rescued her.
    He could have raped her. She had
certainly expected that. No one would have raised a protest, let alone punished
him. But instead, he had fed her, given her new clothes, installed her in the
spare bedroom in his apartment, and treated her with gentle affection until one
evening, after a dinner of foie de veau and a bottle of La Tache, he had
seduced her deliciously on the couch in front of a blazing coal fire.
    Today, though, she was part of his
camouflage. He was working with Rommel again. Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, the
"Desert Fox," was now Commander of Army Group B, defending northern
France. German intelligence expected an Allied invasion this summer. Rommel did
not have enough men to guard the hundreds of miles of vulnerable coastline, so
he had adopted a daring strategy of flexible response: his battalions were
miles inland, ready to be swiftly deployed wherever needed.
    The British knew this—they had
intelligence, too. Their counterplan was to slow Rommel's response by
disrupting his communications. Night and day, British and American bombers
pounded roads and railways, bridges and tunnels, stations and marshaling yards.
And the Resistance blew up power stations and factories, derailed trains, cut
telephone lines, and sent teenage girls to pour grit into the oil reservoirs of
trucks and tanks.
    Dieter's brief was to identify key
communications targets and assess the ability of the Resistance to attack them.
In the last few months, from his base in Paris, he had ranged all over northern
France, barking at sleepy sentries and putting the fear of God into lazy
captains, tightening up security at railway