Free The First Wave by James R. Benn Page B

more damage to each other than to the Germans. My main concern right now was that no damage be done to me, so I glanced around for a quick exit. I looked out the one window, and it wasn’t a bad drop, except for the sentry right below. I looked back across the hall and saw Bessette leaning out his window, giving a command and gesturing to someone. Footsteps came clattering up the stairs. I was cornered.
    I wanted to shut the door quietly and hide under the desk until things settled down. It would have been the smart thing to do, but if I knew when to do the smart thing I wouldn’t have been shoeless and sweating bullets across the hall from a corpse, in the middle of a B & E.
    I kept my foot jammed against the door and pulled the handle toward me, keeping a quarter inch opening that gave me a view of Pierre’s feet and Bessette’s desk. Two enlisted men trotted down the hallway into the office. They were Army, not sailors like the others who were guarding the place. Bessette barked something at them and they rolled up Pierre in the carpet and hoisted him like two rug merchants. No surprise, no questions. As if they had done it before. They left, grunting under their load. Bessette went out after them, and as he did he looked straight at me. Instead of turning down the hall, he strode across it, and put his hand on the doorknob on his side. I released the knob on my side in the nick of time. He closed the door with a slam. Only inches had separated us and I was sure he had heard me breathe, until I realized I hadn’t drawn a breath since I saw him heading for me. I waited until I heard him walk away, and then slowly exhaled. Maybe this hadn’t been such a good idea.
    After counting to fifty, I opened the door again and stepped into silence. Bessette’s office door was still open, the one remaining candle flickering. He’d probably return after they’d removed the body from the building. I went in, stepping around a puddle of blood that had soaked through the carpet. I gave myself two minutes in there, and started counting in my head, one-one-thousand, two-one-thousand, three-one-thousand . . . as I checked the wall-map of the Algerian coastline. Bône was circled, but so were six or seven other places. Eleven-one-thousand, twelve-one-thousand . . .
    I inspected the top of Bessette’s desk. Green blotter, pack of cigarettes, keys, a fountain pen, and some sealed envelopes that he must have been addressing. No open letters. I glanced at the envelopes. The top one was for Madame Mireille Bessette, Marseilles, stamped and ready to go. Another was to Jules Bessette, Blackpool, England, sealed but no stamp. Was there mail service between Vichy territory and England? So Bessette kept up with his relations and had, what, a brother or cousin in England? Twenty-eight-one-thousand, twenty-nine- one-thousand . . .
    Damn it! I was looking for a password, not evidence that Bessette was a family man. I turned to the filing cabinet, and opened the top drawer. It was too dark to see clearly, but there were so many files, each with a tiny heading in French, I knew I’d never get through them all, much less understand what was in them. I looked in each of the four drawers; more of the same. The French Army runs on paperwork, like ours. I pulled out a few files from each drawer and flipped through them. Lots of reports, charts, numbers, carbon paper. Sixty-six-one-thousand, sixty-seven-one-thousand . . .
    I put the files back, closed the drawers, and sat at the desk. I tried the drawers on the left and found the usual junk: paper clips, rubber bands, dust. The large bottom drawer held a bottle of cognac and a revolver. What a surprise. Eighty-four-one-thousand, eighty-five-one-thousand . . .
    I urged myself to hurry! Were those footsteps?
    I checked the middle drawer and rummaged through notepaper, an old newspaper, and a few receipts from a place called Le Bar Bleu. A blue matchbook from the same place. A street map of Algiers: I