Free Liquidate Paris by Sven Hassel Page B

decoration.
    'Just get on and do the job as you were told,' he said, loftily. 'Don't come pestering me about it. I have other things on my mind, I can't be bothered with petty matters of this nature.'
    For two days Duchez worked hard at his painting. People grew used to seeing him about the place and for the most part ignored him. Not until the afternoon of the third day did he risk a look behind the portrait of the Fuhrer. The blueprints were still there. He had not expected them to be, and the sight of them threw him into a state of renewed panic. He decided to leave them there, but at the last moment he snatched them up and hid them in a roll of wallpaper.
    As he was leaving the building, he was called to a halt by the sentry. It was a new man, one he hadn't met before; one who didn't know him and didn't trust him. Duchez felt suddenly, violently sick. The man patted his pockets, looked inside his canvas bag.
    'O.K., you can go.'
    Duchez walked out of the gates.
    'Wait a minute I What have you got in those buckets?'
    'Paste,' said Duchez, meekly.
    'Paste?'
    'For the wallpaper.'
    Duchez jerked his head at the paper, rolled up beneath his arm with the blueprints hidden in the centre.
    'Ah-huh?' Suspiciously the sentry stirred the thick mess in the buckets with the tip of his bayonet. 'O.K., I just wanted to make sure. Can't always trust Frenchmen, unfortunately.'
    Duchez gave an unhappy laugh and walked away on tin legs. As soon as he could, he presented himself at the Cafe des Touristes, the headquarters of the Resistance in that area, and handed over the wallpaper and the blue prints. He was heartily glad to be rid of both: by now even the wallpaper had come to seem incriminating.
    From Caen the blueprints were smuggled to Paris, to a Major Toumy in the Champs-Elysees. Major Toumy, on realizing the full: significance of the coup, declared himself to be both stunned and staggered. He added almost immediately that that was an understatement but that words failed him.
    'Fantastic! Brilliant!' he declared, when speech returned. He tapped the blueprints with one finger, rather nervously, as if they might crumble to dust. 'This man-- what's his name? Duchez?--this man has brought off the most magnificent coup of the whole war... And that,' he added, thoughtfully, 'is another understatement.'
    BILLETING
    The little amphibious V.W. lurched past the first few straggling houses that marked the start of the village, and Gregor pulled her to a halt with an unpleasant squealing of brakes. Sub-machine-guns at the ready, we peered out at the apparently deserted street. The least sign of a suspicious movement in the shadows, from a doorway, at a window, and we were fully prepared to shoot. We were beasts on the prowl. We could not afford to take any chances. Too often you took a chance only to discover that quite suddenly the tables had been turned and it was you the prey and the unknown the hunter.
    The silence was thick and unnatural. It hung over us like a heavy blanket. Porta was the first to leave the car, followed by the Old Man and by me. Gregor stayed behind the wheel, his gun resting against the windscreen, his finger resting on the trigger.
    The road was rough and winding, meandering through the village between the sad grey houses and the devastated gardens and finally disappearing in the distance into fields and woods. The village itself was little more than an obscure cluster of dwelling-houses, marked on only the smallest scale maps. Thirty kilometres away, few people had ever heard of it.
    With guns at the ready we bore down upon the nearest houses. We knew from experience that people would protest, and sometimes quite violently, against these incessant demands for billets for the German troops. We sympathized with them, but you couldn't afford to waste time arguing or explaining: it was our job to arrange billets for the companies now on their way to the village, and if the job wasn't done by the time they arrived we should