Poets And Chess Players #6-3: In Which Miss Martin Demonstrates The Use Of A Rifle (Part Three)

(Joke’s on you, boss. What few morals I’ve got only ever start trouble.)

This is chapter 6 (part three) of Poets and Chess Players, a WWII spy adventure and drama serial. Previously, Mat and Jeannie found themselves running from the local gendarmerie for the crimes of their mutual contact Ibarra. This time, they have some hard questions for each other about where this partnership is going…

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“Jeannie? You ready to go yet?”

Jeanne sat straight up in the bath with one arm across her chest and the other on her pistol, half-ready to bolt before remembering that the door was locked. And, anyway, it was only Mr. Echevarria. 9-mil aside, he didn’t look like he could handle more than one collision between her skull and his nose. “Yeah, give me a minute,” she called, stepping out of the sloshing water and pulling the plug from the drain. She dried and dressed quickly, powdered her face in the minimum gesture necessary towards social decency, and gathered everything else loosely in her arms on her way out.

“You girls are all the same,” Echevarria said, propping his head up sideways on one hand to look at her. He was lounging across the foot of her unused bed, apparently with no sense of any impropriety. Jeanne liked that. “Guess I can’ complain too much, though, since you didn’ stop to do your hair too.” 

She kicked her suitcase open on the floor and dumped everything into it before pulling her hairbrush out of the bottom. “Hold your horses, all right? I can’t go out lookin’ like I just got kicked out of somebody else’s bed.”

He groaned and flopped back down on the bed. “Yeah, I guess not.” Jeanne watched Echevarria fidget with the latch on his suitcase while she brushed out her damp waves, mentally betting against herself as to how long it’d take him to get bored. The man just didn’t seem to know what to do with himself when bullets weren’t flying. Eighty seconds, she’d thought, being generous; but he popped the latch open and sat up again at second thirty-three. “Hey, Jeannie?” he said.

“Yeah?”

“That notebook Ibarra asked you about yesterday…is this it?”

Jeanne stared openly at the familiar cover of the volume he’d just pulled out. “Yes,” she said, finding herself suddenly several feet closer and stopping herself just short of snatching it from his hands. She reached out tentatively and let him give it to her instead. Every page was there, every note she’d made, every dispatch she’d copied. She looked back up at Echevarria and tried hard to look as grateful as she felt. “...thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” he said, rolling his shoulders a little and rubbing the back of his neck as he smiled. “It seemed important.”

“It is.” Jeanne crouched next to her suitcase, and tucked the book in reverently before throwing her hairbrush in after it and sitting on the case to force it closed. She wasn’t going to be stuck as Jeanne Martin forever. She could head straight for the coast, if she wanted, and have her own life back before they all rang in ‘42. Why, by this time next year…

Watching Echevarria slide the window open and put his head out to check the distance to the ground, she felt her heart sinking down through her stomach. Maybe she’d settled things with Ybarre now, but another line had just opened up in her ledger. “You know I’m gonna owe you for this,” she said quietly as she put her hat on.

“That so?” he said, reappearing with a lopsided grin and then carefully feeding his body back through the window, feet first. “I’ll remember that. Come on, you can start by throwing me down the luggage.”

Jeanne dropped their bags and cases down one at a time and then stepped down into his hands, pulling the window closed as he lowered her to the ground. They were around the back of the hotel, the alley silent and dark. 

“Oh, hey,” he said, pointing a finger at her like a pistol. “I figured it out. Annie Oakley, right?”

She chuckled. “It took you that long? Yeah, I wouldn’t have picked it, but Julien thought it was very funny.”

“Cut me some slack, huh? It’d be the first thing about you that does make sense,” Echevarria said. “We got some walking to do. Tell me how a girl like you ends up in the south of France, spying on the like of the Wolf.”

Jeanne sighed and turned to check his expression - no, he was quite serious about this. She wouldn't out herself now, she thought. The modifications she'd done to her cover over the past year had enough truth in them to last until she was done with Matia Echevarria. “There's a lot less to tell than you'd think,” she said as they made their way down a back street. “I was born in Québec, grew up with my dad's family out in Missouri, down around Old Mines. I went back a couple years ago to look up some cousins and wound up working for a guy who had connections in MI6, somehow - I didn't ask too many questions. Anyways, I pick up accents and languages pretty quick-”

“Oh, really? How quick?” he asked. 

He'd broken her train of thought, and Jeanne took a second to recover. Was that really relevant? “Uh - well, it depends on where I’m starting from. I already had a couple of French dialects, so standard French was easy. Maybe a month. Six months for Languedocien, ‘cause it’s not really the same thing at all. After that I started learning standard German, just in case, and I’m pretty passable. I’m still working on my regional accents for that, though. I didn’t get as much exposure as I wanted with translating interviews.”

“Neat.” Echevarria nodded his head, seeming pleased. “So, I got two questions - no, three, maybe. Have you ever killed anybody?”

She considered him briefly, but couldn't figure out what he hoped to gain by asking. “Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because I had to,” she said simply. 

A light from a house slid across Echevarria’s long face as they walked, leaving growing shadows in its wake. “Would you do it again?” he asked. 

Jeanne nodded. “If I had to.”

“OK.” His face wrinkled up like he was trying to remember where they’d been when he interrupted her. She let the silence hang between them, unwilling to help. “So you didn’ take much time to pass for native, then? Did Ibarra ever find out?”

He wants to know who I’m willing to lie to, she thought, suddenly seeing the roundabout sweep of Echevarria’s thoughts. He took a while to get where he was going, but he’d get there. He already knew what she could do, of course - aim and shoot, keep a cool head, handle most vehicles, mimic voices, take care of herself. This interview was a spy’s version of the one Graves had set up to get her the domestic job with her original target: that was to say, really, it was about her morals.

Joke’s on you, boss. What few morals I’ve got only ever start trouble.

“He always knew,” she said. “I came over on my Canadian passport. MI6 installed me with a diplomat they suspected of trying to start a Communist revolution, and then had me trace the locals as he made contact. Ybarre’s the one who thought I’d make a good courier - first between him an’ my boss, then for everything else.”

Jeanne paused, still deciding whether the probability of Echevarria’s approval was worth having to tell the whole story. She might as well try. “At least…that’s how it started. But the way it had ended up, the whole operation rested on me keeping their trust. They were all talk, mostly, but sometimes he’d get orders from a contact in Paris - steal this, create a diversion here. I helped out. My handlers didn’t like that…then they cut everything and ran when the Germans invaded last year¹. At that point I figured, what with the change of government, I might as well be on Ybarre’s side anyway. Not entirely, but - close enough.”

Echevarria nodded, smiling tightly. “I know what you mean.”

“Really?” she said, hoping to deflect.

He snapped up the bait. “Yeah, really. I mean, I wasn’ a spy or anything, but…we weren’ on the same side exactly, either. See, my old man had to flee Navarre back in the ‘90s. The Spanish wanted to take the few laws of our own we had left, and his brother got shot by Sagasta’s men in the riots². Aita got caught planning to assassinate the president in revenge, and my grandparents had to smuggle him out of the country. I think it all blew over before too long, but he always said he wasn’ going back until a man’s etxea³ could truly be his own again. No people should ever rule over another one.”

“Uh-huh.”

“That’s how I got into the war,” Echevarria said, finally clarifying. “The government made a deal to get the Basque army on their side, and he took me along. We were only ever s’posed to be fighting for our own land. It, uh - it didn’t end that way.”

Jeanne nodded to show she knew what he meant, too.

“So? Then what?” he asked.

She shrugged. “I thought you knew that part. Ybarre killed three people an’ blew our cover, and I got to spend all winter hiding in country outbuildings, doing their cooking and mending for my keep like Snow White.”

“And that’s why you left for America?”

Jeanne inhaled slowly, realizing she’d talked herself into a corner. This was why she couldn’t lie for long. “No,” she grudged. “I didn’t mind any of that, really. I still thought it was worth it to give Vichy a hard time, and I figured MI6 might realize at some point that they still needed me. It was this one job he did for the Soviets.”

Echevarria was quiet for a minute while she tried to find acceptable words, their footsteps and the sounds of the waking city muffling her thoughts.

“He and I have very different ideas about what kinda collateral damage is acceptable,” she said, eventually. “My tolerance is pretty high, but…there’s one or two lines I don’t cross for anything or anybody. I couldn’t look the bastard in the face after that. Sorry if that’s gonna be a problem for you.”

“Oh, I wouldn’ worry about that,” Echevarria said, offering her a smile. “Jeannie girl, how would you feel about coming to Switzerland with me?”

That was the big question, wasn’t it? It wasn’t an idea that excited her, for several reasons. On the other hand, she did owe him whatever she felt it was worth to finally go home. “That depends,” she said, haltingly. “This old friend of yours, Vic.”

“Yeah?”

She managed to meet his big cow eyes, at least for a couple of seconds, so he’d know she was serious. “Are you jumping back onto his side, or staying on Mr. Brennan’s an’ mine?”

“I’m not on anybody’s side,” he said, sharp.

Jeanne shook her head. “I’m just saying, I think it's clear that whatever the Reds want with Dr. Haber has to be investigated. That's gonna be hard enough to keep from blowing up politically without your loyalty, or sentiment, or whatever getting in the way. Not to mention, I never met one of Ybarre’s friends - except maybe you - that didn’t have his own way of bein’ just as bad as he was.”

“Vic's not like that,” he protested.

“I'll believe it when I see it,” she said.

“How about this, hey?” he said, putting a hand out and just missing her shoulder. “It would only be worse if you weren’ there. This way, you can be my conscience.”

She nearly laughed at the thought. “God forbid.” 

“Just politically, I mean - if the political stuff’s what you’re worried about.”

Jeanne looked ahead. They were nearly there; she could see the sky starting to lighten above the railway station, and imagine the sun creeping up behind the horizon. “I ain’t worried,” she said. “But you’d better make it two for Geneva, just in case.”

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1. We haven’t had a book rec in a little while, have we? Max Hastings’ The Secret War offers some entertaining coverage of just how ineffective most WWII-era espionage efforts were, including MI6’s miserable prewar record and the intelligence pickle caused by the 1940 emergency evacuation of all their agents in France.

2. ‘The night of Sagasta’s shootings’ and related events during the Gamazada uprising are another topic I wish I could read the sources on without a machine translator.

3. A difficult word to fully translate. Etxea is not just a house, but the historical family home and all that it represents for the Basque culture.