Kaleidoscope

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The wind was bitter, the night like ink. Ruefully St-Cyr mopped his stinging eyes. Ah Mon Dieu, he ached like hell – eighteen hours on the train from Paris. Eighteen instead of four! With Hermann bitching for the past twenty and the cause of the delays … well, the Boches and their wretched controls, of course, but then some flywheel in the fledgeling Resistance had placed a pocket-bomb on one of the tracks. A minor derailment outside Lyon. A few more hours …

Hermann gave a savage grunt. ‘Heave, Louis, before I get a hernia!’

They were pushing their taxi uphill. They – two officers of the law! One a Chief Inspector of the Surete Nationale; the other … well, one from the Gestapo with the rank of a Haupsturmfuhrer. Merely an Inspector, but those guys, they had their chiefs elsewhere. Ah yes. In Paris where it was comfortable. And those chiefs did the ordering these days. Never mind that one was absolutely exhausted from a case and had only just escaped from death with a left hand that was stitched across the back and sore as hell! Never mind that Christmas was only seven days away and that one had not had the benefit of a holiday or a day off in years. Never mind that the wife and little son had only recently been tragically killed or that someone new had miraculously come along to soothe an aching heart. Never mind …

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