Topaz - Leon Uris [101]
Captain Dupont found a quiet table with André and ordered thick, sweet coffee. The La Croix recruiter asked a number of questions of André.
“This place stinks of Vichy, Captain,” André said. “All during the time we were struggling to reach here, I never thought it would be like this. They’re Frenchmen. They’ve got to fight for France.”
The Captain shook his head slowly. “It doesn’t work that way.”
“I don’t understand,” André continued, “why the Americans installed a Vichy officer over the garrisons or why they are so determined to keep us off the front or why they withhold recognition from Free France.”
“They do not want us fighting,” Dupont said, “or the colonies reunified so that we will have no word at the peace tables.”
“Why in the name of God do the Americans hate us?”
“Roosevelt has never forgiven France for bungling the phony war, sitting it out when Poland was attacked and then letting Germany crush us. He feels that France is incapable of leadership in Europe and intends to reduce us to a second-rate power. Only Pierre La Croix and a handful of Free French stand between the United States and its ambitions.”
“I must join Free France,” André cried. “I must get to Algeria. Will you help me?”
“Wait until you get a leave, then bolt. I’ll get the information on you back to Algiers.”
The tough, hard-nosed old colonials detested the proud young men in their ranks who longed to fight for Free France. André Devereaux was singled out for special punishment and humiliation. His nose was rubbed in every dirty detail and no means was spared to break his spirit. He was in a state of constant fatigue imposed by brutality. Somehow he continued to endure.
Finally, on a flimsy pretext, his commanding officer inflicted on him the most inhuman of punishments—the tombeau. André was compelled to dig a shallow trench under the flame of the desert sun, then lie in it. The trench was covered by a canvas. No food or water would be given him, nor would he leave until he pleaded for mercy.
André baked in the tombeau for thirteen daylight hours, and through the night he half-froze to death. The test of fortitude continued a second searing day. Through his agony his lips remained sealed. No plea came from him until a merciful unconsciousness consumed him on the third day.
When the canvas was lifted, he was carried off to the hospital. All the years back, of flight, prison, and semistarvation, had taken their toll. He was a sick young man, needing long hospitalization.
At the end of his stay he was granted a short leave. With furlough documents in his hand, André Devereaux boarded a train and fled to Algeria.
At last he arrived in the headquarters of Fighting France!
7
ALGIERS ROSE FROM THE sea, hugging the line of the bay for miles, while it climbed the steep hills in dazzling white terraces. From the Casbah with its fabled evil and twisted alleyways down to the broad boulevards that hovered over the quay lined with government buildings, public squares, and hotels, it swept up again to the university, which was now the seat of Fighting France in exile.
André turned himself in at once at the Arabian Bruce Palace that housed the Central Intelligence Bureau.
“We have been expecting you,” he was greeted.
The bureau, run by a smattering of former military intelligence personnel, interrogated him thoroughly before issuing him temporary papers to the effect he was now a member of the Free French.
André left the Bruce Palace still in a state of disbelief.
“André! André!”
“Robert!”
The comrades embraced and slapped each other’s backs sore.
“I phoned Jacques. He’ll be waiting for us at the Aletti Hotel.”
André patted the jeep bearing the Free French colors and Cross of Lorraine, and Robert pointed it downhill, babbling the while, trying to catch up in a single moment.
He had been appointed Chief of Western Hemisphere Intelligence in an organization being built from the ground up. As for Jacques Granville, he had fared even better.