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was Not Russia.
    This sense of Not-Russia made each day a joy.
The fact that at any moment they could be sent to
Is-Russia haunted them and drove them to new
heights of sybaritic release. Each pleasure had a
melancholy poignancy in that he who experienced
it might shortly be slamming 8.8 cm shells into the
breach of an antitank gun as fleets of T-34s poured
torrentially out of the snow at them, this drama
occurring at minus thirty-one degrees centigrade
on the outskirts of a town with an unpronounceable
name that they had never heard of and that
offered no running water, pretty women, or decent
alcohol.
    So nobody in all of France in any of the German
branches worked very hard, except perhaps
the extremists of the SS. But most of the SS was
somewhere else, happily murdering farmers in the
hundreds of thousands, letting their fury, their
rage, their misanthropy, their sense of racial superiority
play out in real time.
    Thus Basil didn’t fear random interception as
he walked the streets of downtown Bricquebec, a
small city forty kilometers east of Cherbourg in the
heart of the Cotentin Peninsula. The occupiers of
this obscure spot would not be of the highest quality,
and had adapted rather too quickly to the torpor
of garrison life. They lounged this way and
that, lazy as dogs in the spring sun, in the cafés, at
their very occasional roadblocks, around city hall,
where civil administrators now gave orders to the
French bureaucrats, who had not made a single
adjustment to their presence, and at an airfield
where a flock of Me110 night fighters were housed,
to intercept the nightly RAF bomber stream when
it meandered toward targets in southern Germany.
Though American bombers filled the sky by day,
the two-engine 110s were not nimble enough to
close with them and left that dangerous task to
younger men in faster planes. The 110 pilots were
content to maneuver close to the Lancasters, but
not too close, to hosepipe their cannon shells all
over the sky, then to return to schnapps and buns,
claiming extravagant kill scores which nobody
took seriously. So all in all, the atmosphere was one
of snooze and snore.
    Basil had landed without incident about eight
kilometers outside of town. He was lucky, as he
usually was, in that he didn’t crash into a farmer’s
henhouse and awaken the rooster or the man but
landed in one of the fields, among potato stubs just
barely emerging from the ground. He had gathered
up his ’chute, stripped off his RAF jumpsuit to reveal
himself to be a rather shabby French businessman,
and stuffed all that kit into some bushes (he
could not bury it, because a] he did not feel like it
and b] he had no shovel, but c] if he had had a
shovel, he still would not have felt like it). He made
it to a main road and walked into town, where he
immediately treated himself to a breakfast of eggs
and potatoes and tomatoes at a railway station
café.
    He nodded politely at each German he saw and
so far had not excited any attention. His only concession
to his trade was his Browning pistol,
wedged into the small of his back and so flat it
would not print under suit and overcoat. He also
had his Riga Minox camera taped to his left ankle.
His most profound piece of equipment, however,
was his confidence. Going undercover is fraught
with tension, but Basil had done it so often that its
rigors didn’t drive him to the edge of despair, eating
his energy with teeth of dread. He’d simply
shut down his imagination and considered himself
the cock of the walk, presenting a smile, a nod, a
wink to all.
    But he was not without goal. Paris lay a half
day’s rail ride ahead; the next train left at four, and
he had to be on it. But just as he didn’t trust the
partisans who still awaited his arrival 320 kilometers
to the east, he didn’t trust the documents the
forgery geniuses at SOE had provided him with.
Instead he preferred to pick up his own—that is,
actual authentic docs, including travel