If you're following along with the playlist at theswanandthedove. blogspot .com, we're up to Dramatic TV Playhouse Series No. 5.
Garaile peered over the low wall surrounding the roof. All seemed reasonably quiet. From the ground, one of his compatriots glanced up, took off his hat and scratched his head — the signal for "all's clear." Garaile turned back around and heard the flutter and cooing of pigeons, once again, along with the quiet taps of dust and small bits of stone bouncing off the ledges. Stupid pigeons, making so much noise, he thought. Perhaps the traditional tales of bats living in belfries would have been more welcome. Not that anyone wanted to get rabies, but at least bats were nearly silent when disturbed.
There was a muffled cooing in a different tone, and he peered upward toward the top of the tower. The American was doing it again. He had to admit, it did seem to calm the birds down. His lips took a wry twist as he once again contemplated how desperate times seemed to call for odd and unlikely measures.
Another bit of debris was jostled from above – this one a bit bigger. It must have come from the inside of the roof, because it hit with a low ping against one of the bells. Garaile winced. It was unlikely to be loud enough to hear below, but a larger stone could be a problem. He couldn't tell who was dislodging them, but the American seemed a bit clumsy, hardly trained for this sort of endeavour. Unfortunately, while his friend Sebastien was a construction worker and a very good climber, he didn't know a thing about stringing antennae.
Up near the metal cross, boots shuffled and slipped against loose roofing. The two people at the top were nearly invisible in the shadows of the structure and against the night sky, but their situation was precarious. The one nearest the top was securing a wire to the cross itself, while the smaller figure just below him whispered guidance and made sure the wire unspooled smoothly and didn't get blown out at an angle that would make it too noticeable from the street. The wind stiffened a bit, and the lower person began twisting a bit on the rope.
"Oh, fff…" came in a harsh hiss from the American. Her right hand flailed a bit, trying to reach one of the arch supports. Her fingertips caught it, and she twisted suddenly in the other direction before she stabilized herself, heart pounding.
"Mademoiselle Niehaus?" Sebastien called softly from above, and, after a moment, she responded.
"I'm good, it's all… good," she reassured him. "Just a bit windy up here."
"Hm," he responded, and she felt a small tug as he checked her line. She took in a deep breath and released it slowly.
"Okay. Okay," she murmured to herself, then raised her chin to look up at him again. "Just, uh… just secure it at the bottom the same way." She almost smirked. The irony of using a prominent religious symbol as part of a scientific endeavour did not escape her. She imagined people in the church below channeling prayers to their God in the sky up through the roof, compared to her using the bell tower to send electric signals to float sound waves miles away blindly to some unknown listener. What was it Gaizka had said when they had been pinned down, the ambulance barely hidden in some stunted clump of trees while a German transport convoy rolled by, the soldiers taking potshots at anything that moved? Her eyes had closed in relief as she let her breath out after they passed.
"I almost said a prayer for a minute there," she had mumbled, "and I don't even believe in God."
He had looked at her appraisingly from the stretcher, pale from blood loss, pain, and illness.
"This is war. There are no atheists in the trenches, Cosima," he told her, his voice clear despite his weakness, and using her first name for perhaps the only time.
She wasn't sure she agreed with him, but more and more, the random and senseless violence that had been leaving lifeless bodies around the world weighed on her. She channeled it into pushing toward goals, trying to be helpful, in her own way. But sometimes, like, for example, tonight, when her gaze turned upward for a moment to see the clouds scudding past the moon and stars, making her feel as though she was moving alongside the moon, illustrating the motion of life, the rotation of the Earth, and the endless spread of the stars into the distance of space, when the order of it all, the universe, and the unlikely path of occurrences and evolution that led to humans being on the planet, to being able to think, to discover and invent, to question their own existence and even blow each other up, seemed so amazing and orderly that… that what? Some things felt inevitable? Destined? Certainly, not… planned?
But what was our universe if not a miracle? Wasn't that as good a definition of a miracle as anything else? And if that could develop, what other near-impossible things might happen, might be hoped for?
She looked back at the wall before her when the motion of the clouds suddenly began to make her dizzy, and brought her thoughts back to her present situation. Sebastien was doing as she told him. God or not, she was imagining an alternate reality where she'd never had to join him at these dizzying heights above Paris. Hadn't the parachuting been enough? And there was something even more unnerving about this, somehow. In the previous situation, there wasn't much she could do once she'd jumped. Whether she made it was mostly up to fate… or statistical likelihood. Here, she had to count on her strength and her balance, as well as Sebastien's knots, and seeing the strongly raked roof below, then the levels of the apse further down, before finally down to the ground, seemed more real and solid than the dreamlike splay of the dark and fogged land, splashed with unworldly flashes and flames of anti-aircraft fire and tracers, so distantly below her that it seemed almost theoretical, when she was floating down suspended by fabric and air.
She was not okay with this.
But you did what you had to do.
The descent back to the roof was slower than she would have liked, but they had to recheck how they had laid and attached the wires, while drawing as little attention to themselves as possible. The whole trip took less than an hour, but felt like most of the night. Cosima breathed a sigh of relief when her feet touched solid ground, and once again thanked the heavens — or whomever — that the sky had been clear of potentially lightning-generating storm clouds that evening.
They huddled around the wireless as she adjusted it, skimming over radio broadcasts rife with propaganda from both sides, and scanning the frequencies most likely to carry what they sought from memory. She wasn't even sure if the protocols the Allies had set up before the invasion would still be at all in place, and sweat beaded on her brow. More than once they caught snippets of French voices, and listened intently only to find them about other business than what they sought. Then, Garaile held up a hand.
The voice on the transmission was marred by static, but they could just make out the altered consonants and vowels that indicated French inflected with a Spanish accent. Garaile grabbed the microphone and fired off a question.
"¿Estoy hablando con un hombre de campo?"
There was a pause. The voice responded in French.
"Please repeat. Identify yourself."
"Second division? This is Garaile Ochoa in Paris. Ari naiz herrikide batekin?"
There was another pause. It stretched.
"Ninth company responding. Hombre de campo, please give your location."
A smile broke out across Garaile's face.
"Hello, ninth company. We're in Paris. Georges Bidault sends his regards. Please hold for passwords from an agent from the U.S. Office of Strategic Services to confirm."
Cosima took the mic. She felt buoyed, and proud that her calculations for reaching the military had worked. Perhaps Paris wasn't going to be left to fend for itself, after all.
"Hi, there. This is OSS call sign 324B21 checking in. I'm here with some friends from the Liberté group of the Free French, and we want to help you from our end."