Michael Grant - Purple Hearts

He starts toward her, grinning, then stops, abashed, and snatches up his shirt. He is ready to call her by name, but stops himself. “Mademoiselle, it is good to see you.”

“Marie,” she says, making a deprecating face.

“Marie, is it?” His laugh says he knows it’s an alias. “Good choice, you could certainly be a Marie. And I suppose you must call me Philippe.”

Hands are shaken, introductions made.

Rainy is wary of judging a book by its cover, but her instinctive reaction is that she likes Philippe. He’s bright, alert, quick and not at all bad-looking, though he has eyes only for Marie. Still, she remembers Étienne’s remark about Communists. The Communists, whose primary loyalty is to the party and its Moscow overlords, is not technically an enemy of the United States. Quite the contrary, President Roosevelt bends over backward to excuse Stalin’s brutality in the interests of maintaining a shaky alliance with the communist dictator. But that, Rainy knows, is not the opinion of the military who see the Communists as the likely next enemy, once Hitler is destroyed.

“What brings you to Tulle?” Philippe asks, buttoning his shirt while Marie blushes.

“Our truck blew a tire,” Étienne says. “We hoped you might be able to help.”

“Indeed?” Philippe says. “Well, that is not so easily done. Come with me, please.”

He leads them out the back door of the barn to a crude lean-to with a piece of canvas for a door. The roof is low and slanted, there are no windows, and the candle that Philippe lights illuminates a collapsing cot, an empty crate used as a table, and one chair.

Philippe does not offer the chair. Instead he uses the side of his foot to scuff at the dirt floor and uncover a wooden trapdoor. He pries it up revealing rough-hewn wooden steps. They follow him down into a cool, damp-smelling, dirt-walled cellar. By the light of a single candle, Rainy sees two men.

And to her amazement, they are wearing uniforms. It takes her only a few seconds to realize that these are Royal Air Force uniforms, dirty, sweat-stained, and in one case blood-stained, but unmistakably RAF.

“Gentlemen,” Philippe says, “I have the honor to introduce Mademoiselle Marie, her brother . . .” He hesitates, and Étienne says his name. “Étienne, of course. And this is Lieutenant Alice Jones, of the American army.”

One of the Brits stands up and offers his hand. “Flight Lieutenant David Wickham, and this is my wireless operator, Sergeant Hooper. You’ll have to forgive Hooper, his knee is a bit wobbly.”

Rainy smiles at the inevitable British understatement: the ‘wobbly’ knee is clearly broken, and given the blood it’s a serious fracture. Hooper is not wobbly, he’s crippled.

Hands are shaken. Hooper remains lying on a duplicate of the cots above. Neither Wickham nor Hooper can be over twenty-one, maybe twenty-two years of age. The sergeant is a slight man, with a bent nose and nervous hands.

Flight Lieutenant Wickham looks like a recruiting poster model of an RAF flyer: tall for a pilot, with a wave of blond hair, blue eyes, a clear pale complexion, casual attitude, and an accent that speaks of good schools.

He reminds Rainy uncomfortably of her brother, Aryeh, a marine fighting in the South Pacific. Uncomfortable because any thought of Aryeh comes with anxiety. And uncomfortable too, because she finds herself attracted to Wickham, and that is not a thought that should occupy the same mental space as “reminds me of my brother.”

“They were shot down near Strasbourg,” Philippe says. “They have been brought this far, and now we await an opportunity to move them south into Spain, where they can be repatriated.”

Wickham grins sheepishly and says, “I’m very much afraid that I strayed right into the path of German ack-ack.” Then he frowns. “Everyone jumped, but we became separated after coming down. Our French friends have been sheltering us ever since. Three weeks now. May I ask, Lieutenant: what news of the war?”

The cellar is little more than a hole in the ground, with a plank ceiling low enough to force the six-foot-tall Wickham to crouch slightly. There is a wine rack holding a dozen bottles. A quarter of the room is filled with a pile of charcoal.

Rainy sits on the end of Wickham’s cot. Philippe gallantly brings a chair down from above for Marie. Étienne leans against a battered china cabinet that holds a radio on its top.

“I don’t know anything about the war that you don’t know,” Rainy says. “The Russians are on the move. General Clark took Rome.”

“And the invasion?” Wickham asks.

“We wait constantly on news of the war,” Philippe says. “We expect the signal any day now. Any hour.” He looks questioningly at Rainy.

Rainy shrugs. She has no specific information on the date or time of the invasion. But the fact that she has been sent to spy on the Das Reich, and that her operational plan involves exfiltrating in ten days, suggests strongly that it is coming very soon. “General Eisenhower seldom consults me for my advice,” she says dryly, earning a laugh from Wickham and a nod from Philippe.

“Information must always be compartmentalized,” Étienne says somewhat pompously. Rainy watches Philippe carefully for his reaction. He minimizes but cannot entirely conceal a dislike for Étienne. Is that because he does not trust Étienne? Is it because he simply does not like his tone of voice? Or is it perhaps that Étienne is a protective big brother to Marie in whom Philippe is clearly interested?

The old farmer who disappeared earlier now comes clumping down the steps to the cellar, carrying a mixed set of glasses. Behind him comes his wife, equally old but clearer of eye, carrying a tray of bread, cheese and a hunk of salami.

“ Merci, madame et monsieur ,” Wickham says in tortured French, obviously a phrase he has learned recently.

“ Je vous en prie ,” the old woman says.

The old couple leave. Philippe selects a dusty bottle from the rack and pops the cork.

“Who shall we drink to?” Hooper asks, sitting up, wincing in pain but trying gamely to be part of the conversation.

Wickham says, “To our American guest.”

They drink to Rainy, or rather to “Alice.”

Then Rainy raises her glass. “To the brave men and women who fight for the honor of France. And to the Royal Air Force.”

With that out of the way they portion out the bread and cheese and Marie slices the salami. There is nowhere near enough to go around, but each is content with what they have, aware that what they eat comes from the meager supplies of the old couple. Then Philippe checks his watch. “It is time. Marie?”

Marie goes to the radio and switches it on. The channel selector is already tuned to the BBC. It takes a while for it to warm up, but then at last comes crackly music, the opening notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. The clear beats of that Beethoven opener have long since come to be represented by the Morse code:

Dit dit dit . . . dah.

Morse code for the letter V. V for victory.

“Your watch runs fast,” Marie says to Philippe.

“Perhaps I am in a hurry,” Philippe says.

“Yes, men are often in a hurry.”

“Because pleasure delayed can become pleasure denied.”

“Pleasure worth having is pleasure worth waiting for,” Marie counters, with a small sniff of dismissal that earns a wry grin from Philippe.

There is subtext there, a flirtation, and Rainy conceals a smile, noting that Wickham too is charmed by young love.

Then . . . “ Ici Londres. Les Français parlent aux Français. ”

This is London. The French speak to the French.

“Two days ago we received the code to prepare. We await the final word,” Philippe says.