Chapter 38: In the Morning
The first pink dawn of June rose over the fields and glittered on the dewy spider webs that had been spun overnight in the windows of the yellow farmhouse. Joy paced the long parlor while Sorrow slept where she had left him on a couch covered in faded gold and cream jacquard. Le Feu was sleeping for the last time in her bed upstairs with Fury keeping watch. The rusty odor of death drifted through the closed dining room door.
If Clement was telling the truth and if, in fact, he even knew the truth, La Glace's orders were from the OSS. La Glace had known she was a woman – and pregnant. She doubted that they knew about the microbombs, but too many people seemed to know too much about this mission.
From outside, she heard the thwump of the End's gunshot.
The moon was almost down and the sun only a sliver of gray light in the distance when Le Feu had awakened in her bedroom at the farmhouse. Soft sheets the color of oatmeal were tucked tightly around her, and a gruff voice muttered a "good morning" from the darkness.
Fury sat on a chair by the window with a pale lump of what looked like clay in his hand. His hair was messy in the attractive style of an action hero, but his scowl belonged on a villain.
"Molds like Composition C," Fury said in English, and Le Feu understood enough to know that the clay he held was her plastic explosive.
"My own formula, actually," she said. Her face was proud and her eyes dark. She sat up in bed and leaned her head back against the wallpaper, colorless in the moonlight.
Her neck arched, and her throat vibrated as she spoke. "More stable even than your Composition C. It ignites only with an electrical current."
She stretched her legs over the side of the bed. They were shaved only to her knees.
"I didn't have the materials here, so I had the Brits drop them," she said. "Good men, more reliable than the Americans."
When she lifted her arms over her head, she winced at the pain in her shoulder.
"Your friend got me damn good."
Fuck. She was cursing in French. Fury felt his pants tighten over his thighs.
"So, is this the stuff you were using to blow this place up?" Fury asked, squeezing the explosive between his palms.
"That shit's expensive! Of course not. It's a combination of C-2 and dynamite."
"Fucking beautiful," Fury said.
Le Feu stood. She wore only her graying camisole. Her bare feet padded across the floor toward him. As she leaned over Fury, her black hair hung in curls over her bandaged shoulder and brushed against Fury's cheeks.
"If you want to fuck me," she whispered, saying the curse word in English, "you just have to say it."
"He's a gendarme," the End said over the unconscious body of a long-limbed blond man lying face-down in the wheat field.
"You sure?" Joy asked.
She stood barefoot in the dirt wearing the loose linen trousers Angelus had worn on his wide frame.
"He's got the uniform," the End said.
"Sorrow can say for sure. Was there anyone else?"
"I sensed no one else in either the field or the forest. The trees - ."
"Spare me your nature poetry," she said, lifting the man onto her shoulders so that his limbs dangled like the grim parody of a mink stole. "Sorrow can tell me that for certain too."
By the front door, two greenfinches fought over the last of the millet in a church-shaped bird feeder.
"All quiet here, boss," Fear said as Joy approached.
"I need you to check the woods to be sure," she said.
He grinned wickedly and bowed. "Yes, boss."
"I thought you said Sorrow - ," the End began.
"Yes, but there is no harm in certainty. Stay here to guard the house."
Pain was silhouetted in the golden sunlight, standing at the open back door with Tonnes's rifle. Sorrow closed the dining room door gently behind him as he met Joy in the hallway. The morning was still cold, but a smell like a butcher shop full of old pennies had already filled the lower storey of the house.
"Sorrow, I need you to talk to the real Parasite for me," Joy said.
"I can't. He is gone."
Sorrow looked past her, over her shoulder to the half-closed eyes of the man she carried. "You are going to kill him too."
"Yes, Sorrow. I think he's a German, but either way, he can't be left alive on this property."
"You should do it in there." He motioned toward the closed door. It was plain, probably cheap pine, knotty and lovingly polished. Not quite the sound-deadening door to an execution chamber.
The man was heavy on her shoulders; his weight burned in her thighs.
"Sorrow, are there any other men in the woods?"
He leaned against the wall and closed his eyes. Joy shifted the man's weight and begged her knees not to buckle.
"Only one," Sorrow said after a moment. He smiled with only his lips. "And no German. You sent the Fear out there, and he's bringing back breakfast."
Joy put her weight on the doorknob with a heavy sigh and trudged into the dining room. The smell was stronger in here but sweeter, like a child's perfume sprayed over a side of lamb left out after Easter dinner. She dropped the man onto a bloodstain like a massive shadow on the floor. The curtains were all drawn, even the ones that had been open the night before. Carrion flies and gnats flew in clouds, almost invisible in the dim but unmistakable in their eager buzzing. She opened her mouth to breath, but the air left a coppery taste on her tongue. The man sighed in his sleep – how long would the tranquilizer keep him out? Joy felt his pockets, slid her hands along the inside of his jacket. A square of thick stitches interrupted the smooth satin lining, and she plucked a thin booklet out of the hidden pocket with two fingers.
"Rudolph Fischer," she read aloud from the SS soldbuch. "Sorry, Rudy."
She knelt with her knee on his back and pressed her gun against the top of his spine. Then she lifted it a few inches and fired. His body shuddered under her, and she heard Sorrow tense against the door.
"You could have come in with me," she called, and in fact she almost wished he had.
"I thought perhaps…," he said quietly. "I thought it was perhaps something for you to do alone."
Rudolph fell still, and Sorrow breathed a long sigh on the other side of the door.
"He was German," Sorrow said.
"I know," said Joy, pulling the door open and waving the soldbuch. "Gestapo, I'd say."
"You would be wrong," Sorrow said sadly. "He - ."
Joy raised a finger to his lips. "Nothing more. I think it may be better not to know. You and the Pain get packed up. I need to get our resident pyros."
"Good God, Le Feu, where'd you learn to do that?" Fury asked, letting out a gray breath of smoke.
She lay on her naked stomach across his knees, pale and spotless as new china.
"Hell, after that, even your shitty cigs taste good."
With a frown like the curled edge of a rose, she looked up at him. "Was I bad?" she asked in English.
"Fuck, no. I mean… English isn't my first language either. I - ."
"Shh!"
The brass doorknob creaked, and Fury threw the sheets over Le Feu, who laughed. Then Joy was in the doorway, fresh blood dotting her arms and blue eyes narrowed dangerously.
"Aw, fuck, boss," Fury groaned, leaning his bare back against the white-washed headboard.
Le Feu tossed the sheets off of her head like the hood of a cloak and grinned up at the Joy.
"You've had enough 'fuck' this morning, Fury," Joy said with no hint of a smile.
"Seriously, Joy. I haven't fucked anything but cheap whores and… and… cheap whores for five years! At least - ."
"Get dressed. We're leaving. Did you hear the gunshot? The Gestapo found us."
The door slammed behind her as punctuation. Le Feu cackled with laughter so hard that she tumbled to the floor.
"You heard the bi – boss. Get dressed," Fury snapped.
Le Feu stifled her giggles as she examined the ragged hole Fear's bolt had left in her best jacket.
The Cobra Unit and Le Feu made slow progress in the daylight. Going east instead of west toward Molay-Littry, Joy felt they were retreating. In the June sun, the linen clothing she had taken from Le Feu's house was cool and comfortable compared to the worsted wool uniform SAS had provided. As Joy could not crouch and crawl easily, she and Sorrow walked close to the edge of Mathieu, carrying their supplies in heavy wool bundles. Joy hoped they looked like refugees but still avoided going near enough to the town for anyone to approach them. Her French would never fool a native speaker, and they had neither French nor German papers.
Le Feu had changed her long skirt for trousers – tree bark brown and loose around her waist. She swept silently through the fields, slightly ahead of Fear and Fury. Her hair was pulled tightly under a floppy cap, and her bare neck curved like the handle of a porcelain teacup.
Three miles from the farmhouse, she turned, her eyes focused over Fear and Fury's heads and a green case like a leather-bound book in her hands. She opened it with a tiny key and turned a dial inside. The soft, plowed earth beneath them trembled for a moment, but the sound of the explosion itself was like a faraway train at night. Le Feu glanced once at Fear, then at Fury, dark eyes betraying her thoughts only to Fear, and continued into the sparse pine grove ahead. As he looked back at the thick smoke pouring over the hill, Fear wondered what the victory was that gave Le Feu her triumphant expression.
Sorrow shuddered with the ground beneath him as the farmhouse exploded.
"That's a lot of power," Joy said, shifting the pack on her shoulders.
The sun was still ahead of them, but deep shadows cut across her cheeks. She plodded toward their target, sometimes slipping into the rhythm of a march before catching herself. She drank from her canteen without stopping.
La Glace cursed in Sorrow's mind as if he were only now dying. During Sorrow's hour-long walk, La Glace had done nothing but moan despairingly that Le Feu was a traitorous whore worthy of an afterlife of the punishment specified by her code name. If only Sorrow were to kill her, La Glace cried, his death would be avenged, and he could rest. Sorrow ignored him. After a few days, his voice would fade into the rest.
After the explosion, La Glace was silent for a few minutes before he said calmly, "Michel, Le Feu is leading you into a trap."
Sorrow made no reply.
"Don't you wonder why I locked La Joie up, why I wanted to take over the mission?"
The Joy's hair had grown to her shoulders, held back like a sheaf of wheat by her dark bandanna.
"Do you wonder why she left Le Feu alive?"
A scar as thin as a fountain pen mark crossed under her left ear.
"They are both working for the Philosophers."
Philosophers? Sorrow repeated involuntarily.
"Ah," La Glace laughed. "Now we speak the same language. You wonder how I know?"
No. One lock of Joy's hair was curlier than the others. It twisted over the waves like a vine up a tree.
"You will stop ignoring me when you arrive and find nothing."
Joy pressed her hands against the small of her back, sighed, and turned to Sorrow with a tired smile. La Glace's voice faded into a buzz like a radio on in another room.
"Are you alright, Sorrow?" Joy asked, slowing to walk beside him.
Sorrow drew his hands into fists as her fingertips touched his knuckles.
"Is someone talking to you?" she asked.
"It may be too late when you get there. You should listen to me," La Glace taunted.
Sorrow tried to concentrate on her warm hands cupping his. The air was chilly with late fog, but sweat still glued Joy's shirt tight to the skin under her breasts.
"I'm… fine. Very fine," Sorrow said. "I hear… just all of their voices at once. The ones we… the people we killed."
"Do they know something?" she asked. "About our mission?"
"What?" Could she somehow hear La Glace? He pulled his hand away, and she laughed.
"I can't read your mind, Sorrow. I just wondered. You said – when we were on the plane - ."
Joy's flat leather shoe squelched as it sank into the mud. Without thinking, Sorrow had halted at the edge of a deep rut that ran across the field. Joy stepped back onto the hard ground, her shoe covered in clumpy mud.
"Makes me wish I could wear my boots," she said, knocking the largest clods into the wheat.
"They are tracks," Sorrow said.
A pair of ruts ran dark and deep into the forest to the north.
"Yeah, and something heavy made them," Joy said. "The dirt hasn't even hardened. Whatever it was must have come through just before dawn."
"Should we - ?"
"No time. We'll check them closer on the way back – if we're not hot with Nazis on our trail."
Joy sprang lightly over the first rut and clutched her stomach.
"The hell was that for?" she muttered. "That was nothing to parachuting."
The End and the Pain waited by a honeysuckle-wrapped tree a half-mile from their first target.
"A much nicer smell than that old farmhouse," the End said as a gust shook the leaves of the honeysuckle vine.
He perched on a flat-topped rock, eyes wide and wary with no hint of fatigue. The Pain's hornets and bees circled the tiny golden flowers.
"It's a good mission," Pain said, "a real mission."
"How so?"
"'Go here. Destroy this. Kill them.' None of the games we played pretending to be German. It's like old times."
"Before we knew about the Philosophers?"
The branches of the vine-covered tree sighed in the silence.
"Someone's coming," the End said. "Three of them."
"Time to go, my beauties," Pain said, gathering the hornets onto his gloves.
"Sensed anyone yet?" Joy asked ten minutes later when she and Sorrow finally arrived.
"Haven't notice anything yet," the End said, "but we're still far away."
"Sorrow?"
"I…"
"There's nothing there, no rocket, no Nazis," said La Glace gleefully.
"Spit it out," Fury said.
"I…," Sorrow said. "I don't know anything yet."
"He's lying," Fear snapped. His red eyes glared sideways at Sorrow.
Sorrow's own eyes were round as the full moon.
"Sorrow…," Joy said.
Le Feu smiled wryly. "I hate to tell you what to do, La Joie, but perhaps we should rely on brains over super powers. Let's press on."
She took Fury's arm and disappeared into the bushes.
Not wanting to shout after her, Joy followed them silently and waved for the other Cobras to spread out.
"I could go ahead," Fear hissed beside her ear.
She nodded and watched him scramble up a tree. As they neared the clearing, Joy hung back. She wore nothing like camouflage, and she wanted to know how many men there were before taking time to change. Fear swept down from the trees and landed in the leaves with a soft thud.
"It's safe, boss," he said with a grin. "There's no one ahead."
"What do you mean?"
"Went up to the clearing. No one there."
"That's not right. You must have gone to the wrong - ."
"Boss!" came the Pain's voice through the trees. "You should see this."
Joy drew her pistol and ran at a crouch until she broke through the bushes into a wide clearing. Old tire tracks crossed the ground, dry brown ruts spotted with new grass. Pain, Fury, and Le Feu stood in the tall weeds, staring at the ground. An enormous cement slab covered half of the clearing, its many cracks filled with moss and clover.
"Like I said," Fear panted. "Nothing here."
Historical Notes:
Composition C was the original name of the RDX-based plastic explosive that would become C-4. By 1943, C-2 was the most commonly used Composition C explosive. Le Feu's compound is fictional and not meant to be C-3, which was invented around the same time this scene takes place.
"Gendarme" is a term used by the French to describe a military force that carries out police duties in France.
A European greenfinch is a small finch of a greenish-yellow color.
I'm taking a bit more of a realistic turn with the Gestapo now by giving the man Joy assumes to be Gestapo an SS soldbuch. Real Gestapo wore SS uniforms and seemed, to a casual watcher, that they were normal SS officers.