ticket.
‘Just your money,’ she said.
PT found a stool with a view out on to the street and kept an eye on Bistro le Baron. Men in porter’s overalls came and went and it looked like shady business was happening in the rooms above the bar.
Most of the visitors were going back and forth between the bistro and a storage depot 100 metres up the road. It had high wooden fences topped with barbed wire, and all PT could see beyond them were the pitched roofs of warehouses stretching back more than 50 metres.
Carts came and went. People knocked on a wooden gate in the fence. Their baskets went in empty and came out full. The contents were always covered, but the odd protruding celery stick or a glimpse of an aluminium can gave the game away. This was clearly a major black-market operation. And as it had taken PT ten minutes to work out what was going on, there was no way it could operate without the local Germans taking a cut.
‘Do you want another bowl?’ the waitress asked.
PT patted his stomach and turned on the charm. ‘I can’t – unless you’re offering credit.’
The girl smiled back, but spoke firmly. ‘We have a queue. I must ask you to leave.’
PT wanted to watch some more. ‘I’ll get a coffee,’ he said.
‘No. I’m sorry, sir,’ the waitress said. ‘It’s lunchtime and we’re busy.’
PT pointed his thumb back at some men near the counter. ‘They’ve not taken a bite since I got here.’
‘They’re friends of the owner.’
Rather than argue further, the waitress made a hand signal to the men at the counter and backed away. A mountainous man who couldn’t have looked more villainous if he’d tried moved up to PT’s stool and cracked his knuckles.
‘Is there some difficulty with the house rules?’ he said, in a voice that sounded like it was coming through organ pipes.
PT didn’t hang around to be asked a second time. He thought about heading off, but as he stepped off the kerb a bicycle squealed to a halt and a tall man stepped off a bike. He wore a linen suit rather than a navy Milice uniform, but it was clearly Pierre Robert.
Gangsters obviously ran things around here, so it wasn’t the kind of place where you could stand around gawping. Excited by the sighting of Robert, PT decided to take a risk. He strolled purposefully across the street and approached the entrance of Bistro le Baron a few paces behind his target.
The place could seat a hundred, but the only customers sat at two distant tables. Robert leaned his bike against a wall near the door and joined a group of eight men at the room’s biggest table. PT found a table by the window. It was close enough to overhear most of what Robert’s group said, without making it seem obvious that he was listening.
PT ordered coffee. It was no surprise when a couple of senior German officers emerged from upstairs with sacks over their shoulders. One even had a large box of Swiss chocolates tucked under his arm.
‘What brings you here?’ the waitress asked, as she put down a cup of coffee that smelled like the real stuff.
PT wondered if the waitress was bored, or under orders to be nosy. ‘Came out for a walk and ended up here,’ he said, before blowing on his hot coffee.
‘I always wonder if it really makes a difference,’ the waitress said.
PT looked confused. ‘What makes a difference?’
‘Blowing,’ the girl said. ‘Does it cool your coffee down?’
PT laughed. The girl was attractive and seemed to like him, but he felt conned when she crossed to the big group sitting with Robert and used the same banter on them.
He spent fifteen minutes sipping a coffee and pretending that he wasn’t listening to the conversation between Robert and his friends. They spoke about the war and the Germans looking jumpy. A few comments suggested that most of them had put on Milice uniform at some stage, but mostly they discussed the Allied advance.
‘New rulers, same tricks,’ Robert said. ‘I don’t care if communists, Yanks or Free French take over from the Nazis. There’s not a regime in history that hasn’t been open to a black market, bent politicians and swindles.’
This line raised a big laugh.
PT was getting frustrated. He had a hunting knife and a small .22 pistol under his shirt, but it would be suicidal to attack Robert while he was sitting on home turf with eight friends.
His