“Oui, Mon Commandant.”
“And now, before DuPres shows up here with the Leica-ed Odessa material, load two cases of the Crémant d’Alsace into our car, so that our friends here can take them, as a gesture of our appreciation, with them in their airplane.”
“Oui, Mon Commandant.”
“There’s no way we can get two cases of champagne into an L-4,” Cronley said.
“One case?”
“One case’ll fit,” Winters said.
“Then we’ll put one case in your airplane, and the second in Capitaine DuPres’s jeep,” Fortin said.
As if on cue, the heavy curtain separating the alcove from the rest of the basement restaurant was suddenly pushed aside by a man so strange-looking that Cronley started to reach for his pistol.
He was very tall, had a very dark complexion, large dark eyes, and was wearing a turban and what looked like a bathrobe. A Thompson submachine gun hung from his shoulder. Two stick magazines for the Thompson and a knife almost large enough to be called a sword were jammed behind his wide leather belt.
Cronley relaxed when a second man came into the alcove.
This one was a very short, very thin French Army officer, who, like Fortin, wore U.S. Army ODs with the insignia of his rank—in this case, the triple stripes of a capitaine—on shoulder boards.
The capitaine marched up to Fortin, saluted crisply, and when it was returned, laid Cronley’s briefcase on the table.
“Gentlemen, may I present Capitaine DuPres?” Fortin said.
Captain DuPres exchanged salutes with Cronley and Winters separately before shaking their hands.
“Capitaine DuPres is another of us who I think you should trust,” Fortin said. “In support of that argument, he ran off from Strasbourg in 1941 at age seventeen to join first the Underground, and then the Free French in Morocco. During the war, the Milice rounded up the Jews in Strasbourg
, DuPres’s entire family among them, and shipped them off to the ovens in Germany.”
Without thinking about it, Cronley did the math.
I’ll be damned.
I am not the only twenty-two-year-old captain in the world!
“May I ask who this fellow is?” Winters asked, nodding at the turbaned man.
“When DuPres managed to get himself out of France,” Fortin went on, “he was given a commission as a sous-lieutenant and assigned to the 2nd Moroccan Tabors—these are mostly, as is Sergent-chef Ibn Tufail, Berbers from the Atlas Mountains. As the Goumiers were approaching Strasbourg—”
“Tabors? Goumiers?” Winters interrupted.
“Tabors are regiments, essentially, of Moroccan native troops, who are known as Goumiers. If I may continue?”
“Sorry, sir. You told me I might ask questions.”
“If you’re going to be in this business, Thomas, you’re going to have to learn not to take anything anyone tells you at face value.”
Jesus, there he goes again with that Cronley-like sarcasm.
“I’ll make a note of that, Mon Commandant,” Winters said.
“To resume,” Fortin said, “as the Goumiers were working their way toward Alsace, DuPres came to my attention.”
“How?” Cronley asked.
“I was about to explain that before you interrupted me.”