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installations against
the Resistance by beefing up security. The occasional prisoner had yielded
little information. But having several prisoners, all from one large and
evidently well-organized circuit, was a different matter. This might be his
chance of going on the attack, he thought eagerly.
    He shouted at a sergeant,
"You—get a doctor for these prisoners. I want to interrogate them. Don't
let any die."
    Although Dieter was not in uniform,
the sergeant assumed from his manner that he was a superior officer, and said,
"Very good, sir."
    Dieter took Stéphanie up the steps
and through the stately doorway into the wide hall. It was a breathtaking
sight: a pink marble floor, tall windows with elaborate curtains, walls with
Etniscan motifs in plaster picked out in dusty shades of pink and green, and a
ceiling painted with fading cherubs. Once, Dieter assumed, the room had been
filled with gorgeous furniture: pier tables under high mirrors, sideboards
encrusted with ormolu, dainty chairs with gilded legs, oil paintings, huge
vases, little marble statuettes. All that was gone now, of course. Instead
there were rows of switchboards, each with its chair, and a snake's nest of
cables on the floor.
    The telephone operators seemed to
have fled into the grounds at the rear but, now that the shooting had stopped,
a few of them were standing at the glazed doors, still wearing their headsets
and breast microphones, wondering if it was safe to come back inside. Dieter
sat Stéphanie at one of the switchboards, then beckoned a middle-aged woman
telephonist. "Madame," he said in a polite but commanding voice. He
spoke French. "Please bring a cup of hot coffee for this lady."
    The woman came forward, shooting a
look of hatred at Stéphanie. "Very good, monsieur."
    "And some cognac. She's had a
shock."
    "We have no cognac."
    They had cognac, but she did not
want to give it to the mistress of a German. Dieter did not argue the point.
"Just coffee, then, but be quick, or there will be trouble."
    He patted Stéphanie's shoulder and
left her. He passed through double doors into the east wing. The château was
laid out as a series of reception rooms, one leading into the next on the
Versailles pattern, he found. The rooms were full of switchboards, but these
had a more permanent look, the cables bundled into neatly made wooden trunking
that disappeared through the floor into the cellar beneath. Dieter guessed the
hall looked messy only because it had been brought into service as an emergency
measure after the west wing had been bombed. Some of the windows were
permanently blacked out, no doubt as an air-raid precaution, but others had
heavy curtains drawn open, and Dieter supposed the women did not like to work
in permanent night.
    At the end of the east wing was a
stairwell. Dieter went down. At the foot of the staircase he passed through a
steel door. A small desk and a chair stood just inside, and Dieter assumed a
guard normally sat there. The man on duty had presumably left his post to join
in the fighting. Dieter entered unchallenged and made a mental note of a
security breach.
    This was a different environment
from that of the grand principal floors. Designed as kitchens, storage, and
accommodation for the dozens of staff who would have serviced this house three
hundred years ago, it had low ceilings, bare walls, and floors of stone, or
even, in some rooms, beaten earth. Dieter walked along a broad corridor. Every
door was clearly labeled in neat German sign writing, but Dieter looked inside
anyway. On his left, at the front of the building, was the complex equipment of
a major telephone exchange: a generator, enormous batteries, and rooms full of
tangled cables. On his right, toward the back of the house, were the Gestapo's
facilities: a photo lab, a large wireless listening room for eavesdropping on
the Resistance, and prison cells with peepholes in the doors. The basement had
been bomb proofed: all windows were blocked, the walls were