A Knight Lay Dying

a new novelette

"I picked up the statuette at Enzo's a half hour ago," Scott said. "Your phone call caught me in the middle of packing it in my bag." He glanced at his wrist watch. "If you don't get off this wire, I'll miss my train back to Rome."

"I'm calling because I don't want you to come back to Rome," Tullio said. "I want you to stay in Siena. Crager and his wife are coming up by train to have dinner with you there tonight."

Scott closed his eyes and shook his head, two hard, sharp twists, and the pain moved back, the way it always did, as though it were an intruder who had been caught and flung away from a door he had no right to enter.

"Tullio," Scott said as he opened his eyes, "when I left Rome yesterday I didn't know anything about a Mrs. Crager."

"Neither did I," said Tullio. "I thought all we had on our hands was a chump from Ohio who wanted a small bronze to take back to his Cleveland living room and you were going to Siena to pick it up and bring it back to him. This morning, when I went over to the Excelsior to have breakfast with him, it turns out he's got a wife, and when Mrs. Crager learned her husband was buying the statuette, she started sounding off about art, and next thing you know, it turns out she's crazy about cameos."

"Cameos?"

The word seemed to hang in the air, like a puff of smoke from a distant, faintly heard explosion.

"I know it sounds like a funny thing to be crazy about," Tullio said. "But we can make a killing out of this if we handle it right, so I want you to listen."

Scott did, concentrating hard on the flat, nasal voice. It was one of the tricks for outwitting the pain that Scott had learned long ago, when he first met Tullio Pazelli. In those days, soon after the war, when Scott had not yet been fully aware of the extent of the damage, his only problem had been how to eat. He hadn't wanted to go back to America, and he had no way of earning a living in Italy. When he met Tullio that problem had been solved. Tullio, who had been born in Naples, had spent 15 years on the fringes of New York's underworld before, at the age of 30, coming back to Italy. The two young men, working together, discovered before too long that there were always enough rich tourists pouring through Rome and Venice and Milan to keep a former art student like Scott, and a former thief like Tullio, in pasta and wine. When the pain became more persistent, however, and Scott met and was examined by Dr. Benatti down in Rome, and he did learn the extent of the damage, Scott also learned the necessity for outwitting it.

"That's the plan," Tullio said. "How do you like it?"

"We have Crager hooked on the bronze," Scott said. "Why not let it go at that?"

"Because on the bronze all we make ourselves is a profit of two million lire or 16 hundred bucks apiece," Tullio said impatiently. "What's that?"

It was, at the small place near Bern that Scott had picked out, a year in Switzerland. And from here on in, according to Dr. Benatti, a year was going to be to Scott a lifetime. But Tullio didn't know that, and Scott didn't want him to know it.

"Sixteen hundred dollars for each of us on one deal looks like nice money to me," Scott said carefully. "Let's not be greedy."

"Let's not be dumb, either," Tullio said. "On top of this 16 hundred, if you do like I say, we can pick ourselves up another couple of grand, easy. This Crager is loaded and his wife is nuts about cameos. The way I've got them primed, they'll go for almost any amount. All you have to do is follow instructions. What do you say?"

Scott hesitated: he knew he could manage the pain long enough to take the bronze statuette to Rome and pick up his half of the profits; he was not sure he could manage it long enough to take on this additional work.

"I don't know," Scott said. "I don't like it."

"What's the matter?" Tullio said. "You sick or something?"

"What ever gave you that idea?" Scott said sharply.

"I don't know," Tullio said. "This is the first time I ever knew you to turn down ready money."

"I'm not turning it down," Scott said. "I was just looking at both sides of the picture."

"Well, cut it out and just look at the side that shows all those great big shiny dollars," Tullio said. "You going to help me grab them off, or do I have to come up to Siena with the Cragers and do it all myself?"

Scott drew a deep, tired breath.

"Stay down there in Rome," he said. "Of course I'll help."

For several moments after he hung up, Scott remained like that, standing motionless at the hotel room window, looking down into the sunny square, wondering what it was about the change in plan as Tullio had outlined it that bothered him. Then, as the pain began to creep past the guards he kept posted at the doors to his consciousness, Scott realized that wondering could do him no good. He shook off the pain and looked at his watch. It showed a few minutes short of one o'clock. If he wanted to get back to Enzo's before the dealer closed his shop for the siesta, he would have to hurry. Scott took his hat and went out.

The uneasy, shapeless thought went with him, however, like a shadowy stranger dogging his footsteps but keeping carefully out of sight. It was not until he turned into the small side street off the sweeping Piazza Matteotti, and he actually saw the crowded window of Enzo's shop, that the answer came, or rather returned to him. It came back the way it had arrived in the hotel room, along the telephone wire from Rome, in a single word that exploded in his mind and hung there, like a puff of smoke from a distant, faintly heard explosion.

"Cameos!"

Except that the explosion was hardly that. It was a girl's voice, clear, and fresh, and tinkly with the special laughter that had been so much a part of Helen Minton that Scott had never been able to think of her without hearing its very special sound. And now that he was thinking of her again, time and distance seemed to vanish in the echoes of that laughter, so that Scott was no longer standing on a sunny side street off a sweeping square in an Italian hill town on an afternoon that, according to Dr. Benatti, was one of the two or three hundred still left to him.

• • •

All at once a dozen years were gone, and there was a war on, and Scott was no longer a 34-year-old American expatriate living by his wits in Italy. All at once he was again a 22-year-old sergeant who had been hauled out of his tail gunner's blister in one of the Eighth Air Force's B-17s and sent down, under sealed orders, from his airfield base near Liverpool to the stately old mansion, about an hour out of London by train, that was known to its inmates as The Hutch.

Inmates was probably the wrong word for an American colonel, a British captain, a Welsh cook, and a WAC lieutenant, but that was the word Helen Minton had used when Scott arrived. Three weeks later, it was still the word she preferred. It went very well with her special laughter.

"Sergeant Scott," she had said on that day three weeks after he arrived at The Hutch. He had turned from the map he'd been studying on the wall of the Common Room, and Lieutenant Minton had said, "You're wanted in the Chief Inmate's office right away."

"Yes, ma'am," said Scott, and then he'd noticed that the tinkly laughter, which always accompanied her use of the word inmate, was missing from Lieutenant Minton's voice. He looked at her hard and, very quietly, Scott said, "Is this it?"

A troubled frown washed swiftly across her lovely face, and she caught her lower lip in her teeth as she tugged nervously at a button on her khaki blouse.

"My orders were to tell you that Colonel March wants you in his office at once," she said. "I can't say any more than that."

"Sorry," Scott said.

For almost two years, ever since he had been in the Army, he had heard jokes about enlisted men and WAC officers. He had even told some of these jokes himself. It was not until these past three weeks at The Hutch, however, that Scott had learned the jokes were not funny. He moved toward the door.

"Sergeant."

Scott turned back. Lieutenant Minton was still standing in front of the map. The troubled look had returned to her face.

"If this should be it, sergeant," she said, "would you stop in at my office after you're finished with Colonel March?"

"Yes, ma'am," Scott said.

He wanted to say more. For almost two weeks he'd been wanting to say a good deal more. But the words refused to come, and Scott knew that the trouble was not the difference in their rank. The trouble was that he didn't have the right to say more.

He walked out of the Common Room, down the long hall from the walls of which the Gainsboroughs had been removed when the British War Office took the house for the duration and turned it over to SHAEF. At the door to the library, which had been converted into an office for the commandant of this secret allied operation, Scott stopped and knocked.

"Come in!"

Scott went in and closed the door. Colonel March was standing at the window, his hands locked behind him, staring out across the once formal gardens that now, because of the war and the manpower shortage, had gone back to the tangled, overgrown informality preferred by nature.

"Sergeant Scott reporting, sir."

Colonel March turned from the window. He was a tall man with a slight stoop and almost white hair who had been wounded twice at Château-Thierry.

"I suppose you know why I sent for you, sergeant?"

It was the same question Colonel March had asked three weeks ago, when Scott had arrived at The Hutch under sealed orders. The difference was that now he knew the answer.

"Yes, sir," Scott said.

Three weeks ago he had not known the Army was even aware that for two years before the war broke out he had been studying art in France and living near Marlaix in Brittany.

"The orders came up from London a little while ago," Colonel March said. "You're going in tonight, sergeant."

"Yes, sir," Scott said.

The colonel's eyes narrowed slightly, and his head tipped to one side, as though he were looking at the slender young man through a film of smoke and he wanted to get a clearer view.

"Is that all you have to say?" he said.

There was so much Scott wanted to say that his heart ached with the necessity for keeping the words bottled up. But Colonel March was not the person to whom he wanted to say them.

"Yes, sir," Scott said.

The colonel stroked the side of his jaw with great care, as though he were probing for an elusive pain.

"Then perhaps I'd better be the one to say something, sergeant." He stepped across the room, toward the map of Europe on the wall behind his desk, and he looked up at it for several long, silent moments. "Three years ago, when France fell and the Germans overran Europe," Colonel March said, "the Continent was sealed off as tight as a drum. The only way to make contact with the enemy was first the RAF and later, when our country came into the war, the Eighth Air Force. It looked as though, until we were ready to launch our invasion of the Continent, that was the only way we'd be able to fight: by dropping high explosive out of airplanes onto the enemy's strategic targets."

Colonel March paused.

"Then somebody thought of another way," he said, "and The Hutch came into existence. Since it did, almost two years ago, we've been dropping something much more effective than high explosive on the enemy. We've been dropping men."

Colonel March paused again and he glanced up at the map.

"All kinds of men," he said. "Poles, Frenchmen, Belgians, Danes, Norwegians. One at a time they've been going in, by parachute, in the dead of night, back to their native lands, to perform secret missions designed to harass the German invader. All kinds of men," Colonel March repeated, still looking up at the map. "And they've all gone through The Hutch, learning from us here in this house the details of their missions, staying with us until we're sure they're letter perfect before the time comes for them to go in. All kinds of men," Colonel March said once more. "And yet all exactly the same, the way the knights who long ago set out on the Crusades, no matter where they came from or what they looked like, were also exactly the same, all of them, because they had one thing in common: they were all brave men."

Colonel March brought his glance down from the map and fixed it on Scott.

"In the almost two years that I have been here," he said, "you are the first American who has come to The Hutch. We both know the reason: before the war you happened to study and live in and come to understand a section of France that is strategically important to us now. This is an Allied effort, and as commandant of The Hutch I should be satisfied with that reason and let it go at that. I'm afraid I can't," Colonel March said. "Because I am also an American."

Scott, who had been listening with only half his mind, suddenly found himself looking sharply at Colonel March. The older man met his glance.

"I have made it a policy never to pry into the private lives of the men who are placed for three weeks in my care," Colonel March said. "If I seem by what I am about to tell you, Sergeant Scott, to be prying into yours, I hope you will bear in mind that I speak, not as a superior officer to a subordinate, but as an American to a fellow American. Is that clear?"

"Yes, sir," Scott said.

But it wasn't. His contacts with Colonel March during the past three weeks had been few. It was the British officer on the staff, Captain Giddings, from whom Scott, working 10 to 12 hours a day until every piece was seared indelibly into his mind, had learned the details of his mission.

"According to the orders I have just received from London," Colonel March said, "your stay with us here at The Hutch is ended. You will be picked up in less than an hour and driven to the airfield from which you will be taking off for the Continent some time latertonight. The risks involved in a mission such as yours were explained to you long ago. It is possible, however, that you have forgotten a crucial point." Colonel March's voice dropped just a trifle. "You may never come back," he said, and he drew a deep breath. "I therefore think that if there" is anything (continued on page 38) A Knight Lay Dying (continued from page 34) you want to say to Lieutenant Minton," Colonel March said quietly, "you should say it now, sergeant, while you still have the opportunity."

Ten minutes later, on his way down the long hall, Scott was still aware of the sense of shock. For three weeks he had guarded not only his words, but his every glance. Not even the girl with whom he had so completely and so unexpectedly fallen in love had any way of knowing how he felt. How, then, had the Old Man learned his secret?

"Sergeant!"

Scott stopped and turned. Lieutenant Minton had appeared in the doorway of her office.

"Yes, ma'am?"

She smiled, and when she spoke, the tinkly laughter was in her voice.

"You haven't forgotten your promise to stop in at my office, sergeant?"

"No," Scott said. There were few things he was less likely to forget. "I just thought I'd go up to my room first and get the books and maps I've borrowed from the library and bring them down so you can check me out." Scott paused for a moment. "I don't want to leave any loose ends," he said.

The smile left her face, and when Lieutenant Minton spoke again, the tinkly laughter was gone from her voice.

"Then this is it, sergeant?"

"Yes, ma'am," Scott said.

The troubled look he had noticed earlier again washed swiftly across her face, and for a moment, as the breath caught in his throat, Scott wondered if she, too, like Colonel March, had guessed his secret. For almost three weeks, ever since -- soon after his arrival at The Hutch -- the emotions he had not anticipated had begun to run away with him, Scott had struggled fiercely to keep uppermost in his mind the knowledge that, no matter what happened, the one person who must never suspect how he felt about her was Helen Minton herself. From the very beginning, knowing what only he himself could know, Scott had known also that to allow her even to suspect would be unpardonable. Somehow, however, in spite of Scott's vigilance, Colonel March had guessed his secret. So why not Helen?

"Sergeant," she said quietly, "would you come into my office for a moment?"

Lieutenant Minton held the door open, and, as Scott stepped past her into the room from which it was her job to supervise the administrative details of The Hutch, he was afraid she could hear the sudden wild beating of his heart. She closed the door and turned to face him. For several long, long moments, during which they stared at each other in silence, Scott tried desperately to read the expression in her eyes.

Did she know how he felt? Was she puzzled by his failure to tell her? Could it be that, because pride forbade her asking the question with words, she was asking it now with her glance? Was she saying, without words, "I know how you feel. I want you to know I feel it, too. Please tell me you love me. Until you say it, I cannot say it, either"? Or did he think that was what she was saying because, more than anything else in the world, it was what he wanted to hear?

"Sergeant Scott."

For a stunned moment he did not realize she had broken the silence.

"Yes?" he said.

"I have been stationed here for almost two years, ever since The Hutch was activated," Lieutenant Minton said. "I know that Colonel March makes it a point, before a man goes off on his mission, to remind him that he may never come back." She paused, and her slender fingers began to pick nervously at a button on her khaki blouse. "I would like to remind you of something else," Helen Minton said. "You must never forget, sergeant, there is a very good chance that you will come back."

"Thanks," Scott said. "I'll try to remember that."

"Would it help you to remember," she said, "if I asked you to bring something back to me?"

• • •

Her voice had been so low that it was only because he was standing directly in front of her, watching every flicker of movement on her face, that Scott heard the words. It seemed odd, therefore, that a dozen years later, in another country, on a sunny side street off a sweeping square in an Italian hill town on an afternoon that, according to Dr. Benatti down in Rome, was one of the two or three hundred left to him, Scott could still hear those words. He could hear them so clearly, and they evoked so vividly the image of the girl who had uttered them, that Scott forgot the ceaseless vigilance he was forced to maintain over the guards he kept posted at the doors to his consciousness, and the pain began to creep past them. He shook it off with two hard, sharp twists, one to the left and one to the right, and as the pain moved back, Scott moved down the street to Enzo's shop and opened the door.

"Signor Scott!" the dealer said in astonishment from behind the counter. "Did you not tell me less than one hour ago when you came for the bronze that you were taking the two o'clock train back to Rome?"

"There's been a change in my plans," Scott said. "My partner, Mr. Pazelli, just called me on the long distance phone.

We have a customer who is interested in cameos. Mr. Pazelli says you have a good selection."

"For your purposes, Signor Scott," the dealer said with a small bow, "I have the finest selection in Europe."

This, after almost two hours of going through Enzo's trays, proved to be no idle boast. By three o'clock Scott had found at least two, and possibly three items, that met the specifications Tullio had given him on the phone.

"I'll take all three," Scott said, "and return the ones we don't use."

"Si, signore," Enzo said. And, with a wise smile as he followed Scott to the door, he added, "Success to your venture, sir."

By the time he got back to the hotel, Scott knew the pain was getting out of hand. Vigilance alone would no longer hold it. Not for the length of time it would take to complete this additional job with which Tullio had saddled him. Standing in the middle of his hotel room, Scott made a swift computation.

It was not quite 3:30 in the afternoon. The train Tullio had said the Cragers were taking up from Rome arrived in Siena shortly after six. Since they were coming to stay at this same hotel, it wasn't really necessary for Scott to meet them at the station. If any ruffled feelings were involved, he could explain later that the quest for the cameos had detained him. So he didn't actually have to meet the Cragers until it was time for a drink before dinner, say seven o'clock, or even 7:30. This gave Scott, allowing time for a shower and a change of clothes, at least three hours. Maybe even three and a half. Not long enough, really. But better than nothing. And unless he took action at once, the pain would reduce him before long to a lot worse than nothing.

"OK," he muttered. "Let's get going."

Scott took the bottle of red pills from the suitcase on the bed and swallowed two. To take the larger blue capsule, he went into the bathroom for a glass of water. By the time he came back into the bedroom, the cutting edge of the pain had already been blunted. Scott kicked off his shoes, pulled down the knot of his tie, and dropped onto the bed. As the pain ebbed away, and sleep began to wash in, he became aware of the sounds. They were as familiar as his own name. They were the price he always had to pay for this respite from the pain ...

At first it was no more than a faint hum. Then the hum grew louder and louder until it became the roar of four B-17 motors. Above the roar Scott could hear his own voice counting, as he plunged like a rock through the blackness of the night. He counted slowly, the way he had been taught in the (continued on page 44) A Knight Lay Dying (continued from page 38) parachute school to which he had been sent before he went to The Hutch, enunciating clearly in his mind, concentrating hard on the numbers until he reached "Ten!" Then he yanked the ripcord. His tumbling body, like a potato sack that has been kicked erect by a giant foot, was jerked upright.

Scott never knew -- he certainly was never able later to trace it back accurately for Dr. Benatti in Rome -- whether the pain began at that moment, when the parachute harness snapped him out of the downward spin, or whether it began when he hit the ground. Scott knew only -- and this piece of knowledge, years later in Rome, he could reconstruct perfectly for Dr. Benatti -- that he realized almost as soon as he touched the earth that this landing in Brittany was somehow different from all the previous landings he had made on practice jumps during his stay at the parachute school in England.

He had no time, however, to do anything more than make a mental note of the difference. There was the parachute which, according to his strict instructions, had to be gathered and buried immediately. And there was the problem of getting his bearings in the dark. Neither job was easy.

By the time he finished both, Scott knew the drop had been successful. He was in a pasture about seven kilometers south of Marlaix. According to his calculations, this put him about a half hour's walk from his rendezvous point: the Auxerre farmhouse immediately north of the town.

He started across the pasture toward the dirt road that, during his two years in Brittany before the war, Scott had come to know as well as the street in Baltimore on which he had been born and raised. As he reached the stone wall that marked the end of the pasture, Scott suddenly remembered something he had said one day soon after he came up from Paris to Marlaix, an art student with a single suitcase and a box of paints and very little money, and settled down as a paying boarder in the Auxerre household.

"I'm getting to know this area so well I could find your father's house in the dark," Scott had said to Jeanine. Now, four years later and three years after he had last seen the Auxerre farm, Scott added to himself grimly, "This is your chance to prove it!"

He never got the chance.

A moment after the thought crossed his mind, Scott became aware of a smudge of darkness against the slightly paler darkness of the stone wall. The smudge had moved. Scott dropped in his tracks, rolled carefully into the deeper shadows at the base of the wall, and held his breath. It was a few minutes short of three o'clock in the morning, and it was bitter cold. Anything capable of movement that was outdoors on such a night should have barked. Not a sound, however, came from the shadows.

For several agonizing moments the silence was broken only by the sound of Scott carefully letting out his breath. Then, very slowly, so slowly that at first he didn't believe he had seen it, Scott saw the smudge of darkness move again. A moment after that he saw that it was moving toward him. Scott's hand, groping toward the hunting knife strapped to his boot, suddenly stopped. A faint whisper had come out of the shadows. Scott replied with a whisper of his own.

"Jeanine?"

The answer was a swift flurry of movement as the shadow came hurtling along the stone wall.

"I knew you would come back," Pierre Auberre's young daughter whispered. "I never doubted," she said. "I knew you would come back."

Some time went by before Scott could trust himself to talk. When he did, he didn't know how to say what was in his heart.

"You're cold," he said instead. But that didn't sound right, even though it was true enough. She was shivering in his arms. He made an effort and forced his mind back to the details of his mission. He said, "What is happening at the farmhouse?"

"The instructions were that you would arrive at midnight," Jeanine said. "We turned out the lights at the regular hour, as though we were going to bed, but actually we remained in the kitchen, Papa and Mama and I, near the stove, waiting." She shivered again, and Scott held her closer. "By one o'clock we were very worried," Jeanine said. "By two o'clock Papa said there was no point in waiting up any longer, since the night of the drop must have been changed for some reason at the last moment, and we would receive instructions on what other night you would be coming, and now it was best to go to bed. So we all went to bed. But I could not sleep. I knew what Papa had said made sense, but my heart would not listen to sense. My heart told me you were coming tonight, as arranged, and that you had merely been delayed."

"We took off from England an hour late because of the weather," Scott said. "And over the Channel we had to detour all the way out to sea for almost two hours because our radar picked up an unexpected flight of Messerschmitts."

"I knew it was only a delay," Jeanine said. "So I waited until Papa and Mama were asleep, then I put on my clothes, and I stole out of the house, and I came along the road to meet you."

Then they were quiet again, and finally Scott forced his mind back once more to the details of his mission.

"We'd better get to the farmhouse," he said. "I've got to wake them up."

Jeanine stiffened in his arms.

"No," she said. "The morning is time enough."

Scott hesitated. The thin trickle of information that had been coming out of Brittany to England since the fall of France indicated clearly that, while no functioning resistance movement had yet begun to take shape, the people of the area were ready for it, and Pierre Auxerre and his family were ready to assume its active leadership. Scott was bringing a plan, complete with tables of organization, demolition programs, and communications codes, which would enable such a movement to synchronize itself with the life blood that would feed it: regular U.S. Air Force and RAF parachute drops of ammunition and supplies. His instructions were clear. He must deliver the papers to Pierre Auxerre and be gone from the farmhouse before dawn.

"The morning is too late," Scott said. "My instructions are -- --"

Jeanine put her hand over his lips.

"I have not seen you for three years," she whispered. "The morning is time enough."

Scott hesitated again. His instructions were clear, but his conscience was not. He had not known, when he was sent to The Hutch, that a girl named Helen Minton existed. Their meeting was an accident. But Scott was the victim of that accident. If he had not controlled the conditions that had brought about his meeting with Helen Minton, neither could he control the consequences of that meeting. He had to tell Jeanine about Helen.

"All right," Scott said. "The morning is time enough."

But he was wrong. When he woke up, the sun was streaming into the hayloft in which he had spent the night. Remembering where he was, Scott remembered also how he had got there, and his face flushed with the recollection of his cowardice. At the last moment, when he had steeled himself to tell Jeanine about Helen, the words had failed him. They must not fail him again. Scott turned toward Jeanine. But she was gone.

He sat up quickly, his hand groping at the hay that held the faint outlines of her body. The hay was still warm.

Jeanine had obviously gone across to the farmhouse to tell her parents that he had arrived, and to fetch him some breakfast. Scott wondered if it was safe to risk a stealthy trip down to the pump in the barnyard. Some cold water on his (continued on page 58) A Knight Lay Dying (continued from page 44) face would feel good.

He was debating with himself whether to take the risk as he rolled across the hay toward the hayloft window when, at precisely the same moment, Scott saw the gray-green car at the front door of the house, with the parachute he had buried the night before flung across the hood, and he heard the first scream.

By the time he got down out of the hayloft and across the barnyard to the kitchen window, he didn't really have to look. Scott could tell what was happening. He could tell from the screams. Nevertheless, because of the training he had received at The Hutch, Scott did look. He saw all three members of the Auxerre family strung up by their thumbs, and he saw the four Gestapo men who were working on them, and he saw that so far as Jeanine's parents were concerned he was too late, because there was no longer anything anybody could do for them, and Scott saw that if anybody was going to do anything for Jeanine it would have to be done fast. He saw that clearly.

The fact that he could, the fact that Scott was able to look at what was happening in the Auxerre kitchen in spite of what was happening inside himself, was a tribute to the training he had received at The Hutch. But at the moment Scott was not thinking of tributes. In spite of what his heart was doing, in spite of the sickening rage that kept mounting inside him like a roaring blaze in which he knew he must in a matter of seconds be engulfed, Scott was making a calculation. Swiftly, racing desperately to keep his thoughts ahead of the consuming fury, he weighed the urgings of his heart against the inflexible clarity of his orders.

He was no match for four Gestapo men. Scott knew that. But he knew also that he could do enough damage before he was overwhelmed to stop them from doing to Jeanine what they had already done to her parents. He would probably die while doing it, but Scott knew the effort would save Jeanine's life. He knew also, however, that in making the attempt he would be dooming the plan he had been trained at The Hutch to bring into Brittany.

• • •

It was always at this agonizing moment of indecision -- when once again he held in his hands the life of Jeanine Auxerre and he stood at the farmhouse window, weighing her life against his sworn duty -- that Scott woke up. He always woke up the same way, soaked with perspiration, his ears ringing with Jeanine's tortured screams, his heart racing wildly, the pain that had been temporarily lulled by Dr. Benatti's drugs beginning to stir again.

This time, however, it was different. This time, when Scott woke up, something new was happening. For several dazed moments, while the pain gained ground and he tried to thrust the past back where it belonged, he wondered what it was. Then he heard the bell again and Scott realized it was the telephone. He sat up on the bed and put the instrument to his ear.

"Hello? Mr. Scott?"

The voice sounded vaguely familiar.

"Yes," Scott said. "Who is this?"

"Henry Crager," the voice said. "Tullio told me this morning down in Rome that -- --"

"Oh," Scott said. He made the two short, sharp movements with his head. one to the left and one to the right. "Hello, Mr. Crager," he said. "Where are you?"

"Right here in the hotel," Crager said. "Our train got to Siena half an hour ago, and we're just having a bath and a change of clothes."

"We?" Scott said.

"Why, yes, Mrs. Crager and I," Crager said. "Didn't Tullio tell you my wife was coming up from Rome with me?"

"Of course," Scott said. He pushed himself off the bed. It was always easier to handle the pain when he was on his feet. "I spent the afternoon tracking down those cameos," he said. "I was sort of pooped when I got back to the hotel a little while ago, so I took a nap. I was still asleep when the phone rang."

Mr. Crager laughed.

"Sorry to disturb you," he said. "It's just that I'm anxious to see the statuette and my wife is anxious to see the cameos."

"I'm anxious to show them to you," Scott said. "Where and when can I do it?"

"How about downstairs in the bar in about, oh, say half an hour?"

"I'll be there," Scott said.

He was a few minutes early, but Mr. Crager was already waiting.

"My wife will be clown in a minute," he said. "What will you drink?" Scott told him, and the bartender moved away to fill the order, and Mr. Crager said, "May I see it now?"

"Of course," Scott said.

He put the small bundle on the bar, and he undid the chamois wrapping, and he stood the small bronze beside Mr. Crager's highball.

"Boy!" Mr. Crager breathed. "Wait till they see this in Cleveland!"

Scott was aware of a small inner release of tension. He had never had any doubts about the sale. It was nice to know definitely, however, that his year in Switzerland was assured.

"I hope your wife likes it as well as you do," he said.

"How can I possibly help it?"

The words came from behind him, and Scott had to turn around toward them, but even in the moment of shock, before he could manage to make his body obey, before he actually saw her, Scott knew who she was and how he had recognized her. It was the tinkly laughter in her voice.

"Sergeant Scott!" she said.

She had recognized him, too, and for a long, long moment he didn't answer. He couldn't. He just stood there, staring into her lovely face, probing beneath the surface of her amazement for the answer to the question that, when he had last seen her on the night of his departure from The Hutch, Scott had not had the right to ask. His probing glance told him no more now than it had told him then.

"Lieutenant Minton," he said.

She laughed, and Scott took her hand, and then there were several confused moments during which everybody seemed to be talking at once. She was explaining to her husband about The Hutch, and Crager was explaining to Scott how he had met and married her in Cleveland soon after she got out of the WAC when the war ended, and then, all at once, the explanations were finished, and it was as though the 12 years had never happened.

All at once, in this hotel bar in Siena, it was to Scott as though they were standing face to face in Helen Minton's office at The Hutch in the late afternoon of the day the orders had come up from London saying he was going in that night. Once again, as on that day a dozen years ago, Scott was afraid she could hear the sudden wild beating of his heart as he found himself trying desperately to read the expression in her eyes.

Did she know how he felt? Was she still puzzled by his failure to tell her? Could it be that, because the presence of her husband forbade her asking the question with words, she was asking it now with her glance? Was she saying, without words, "I know how you felt 12 years ago. Even though now it's too late, I want you to know I felt it, too. Why didn't you tell me then that you loved me? Couldn't you understand that, until you said it, I couldn't say it, either?"

Or did he think that was what she was saying because even now, after a dozen years and with only another one left to live, it was still the only thing in the world he wanted to hear?

"I've often wondered what happened to you," Helen Crager said. "I heard the drop was successful, of course, and every now and then, checking through intelligence reports for Colonel March, I'd run across something the underground (continued on page 68) A Knight Lay Dying (continued from page 58) had done in the Marlaix sector of Brittany, so I knew you were still alive and working in the area. But then I got transferred to the Pacific and I sort of lost touch. Until a year or two after I got married. One day in Cleveland I saw in the paper that the French government wanted to award some sort of medal to an American sergeant named Scott for work he'd done with the underground during the war, but they couldn't locate him, and I immediately thought of you." She paused, and she looked at him curiously. "Was it you?"

"Yes," Scott said. "I've been living in Italy since the end of the war."

"Doing what?"

"Oh," Scott said with a shrug, and he touched the bronze statuette on the bar, "one thing and another."

"But I thought it was France you loved?" she said. "That's where you lived and studied and painted before the war."

Scott shrugged again.

"After the war Italy suited me better," he said.

She didn't answer. For several moments they stared at each other in silence.

"The medal," she said finally. "Why didn't you go back to accept it?"

"I didn't think I deserved any medals," Scott said.

"I see," she said, but of course she didn't. Nobody could see. Not even Scott. That was the whole point. It had been the point for a dozen years, ever since that terrible morning in Brittany when he had stood outside the Auxerre farmhouse, peering into the kitchen. It would continue to be the point as long as he walked the earth, and drew breath, and had a brain capable of summoning up the past and forcing him to live it again and again and again. Helen Crager cleared her throat. "The last time we saw each other, 12 years ago, just before you went off on your mission, I asked you to do something for me," she said. "Do you remember?"

Scott put his hand into his pocket and he pulled out the package of cameos he had selected that afternoon from the crowded trays in Enzo's shop for the wife of what Tullio on the phone from Rome had called a rich American sucker. Scott undid the tissue-paper wrapping, and he placed the three cameos on the bar, beside the statuette.

"You asked me to bring something back for you," he said. "Take your pick."

She gave him a funny glance, but it wasn't nearly so funny as the glance her husband gave him.

"Say!" Mr. Crager said in puzzled voice. "What's this all about?"

"My small contribution to the war effort," his wife said. "These men we were always sending off from The Hutch, dropping them all over Europe by parachute, Poles and Frenchmen and Belgians and Danes and Norwegians, Colonel March used to say they were like the knights who went off on the Crusades, and like those knights, there was no telling if they'd make it or not. So I worked out this system of my own to help them make it. Whenever a man went off on his mission, I'd take him aside and ask him, as a personal favor, to bring me back a cameo. I've always been crazy about cameos, and I've collected them all my life, and I found during the war, when I was stationed at The Hutch, that if I believed a man was going to bring one back to me, why, I could believe he wouldn't be killed and his mission would be successful." She paused, and she looked a little embarrassed, and then she shook her head with a touch of defiance. "I suppose it sounds silly now," Helen Crager said. "But it wasn't silly at that time," she said. "It was my own private way of knocking on wood for all those brave men."

Scott was glad, as the full meaning of her words sank in, that her husband so obviously wanted to say something. Scott couldn't say anything himself. Not for a while, anyway. He just stood there, watching Mr. Crager stare at the cameos on the bar, then at his wife, and finally back at the cameos.

"But that was 12 years ago," Mr. Crager said. "These things." He touched the cameos. "I thought you rounded them up this afternoon, Mr. Scott, because your partner called you from Rome and told you a couple of customers were coming up to Siena to look at them?"

Scott drew a deep breath.

"That's right," he said. "I did."

The answer didn't seem to help Mr. Crager.

"Maybe I'm not very bright," he said. "But I don't see the connection between the promise you made to my wife 12 years ago, and these cameos you rounded up here in Siena today for a customer you thought you'd never met."

"There is no connection," Scott said. It was an accident that had brought him and Helen Minton together a dozen years ago. It was an accident that had brought him and Helen Crager together today. It was not her fault that, as a result of the first accident, since that terrible morning in Brittany his life had been a walking death. Scott said to Helen's husband, "I made a promise 12 years ago. It never occurred to me that I would ever have the chance to keep it. Now that the chance has been dropped in my lap, I'm sure you won't take it away from me." Scott turned to Helen. "Won't you choose one of these three cameos?" he said. "As a present from me?"

Again she gave him that funny little look. But now Scott had no illusions about what it meant.

"I know enough about cameos to know that all three of these are extremely valuable," Helen Crager said. "I've done nothing to deserve such a present."

She had done more than Dr. Benatti and his medicines had been able to do in a dozen years. She had answered the question Scott had not dared ask her at The Hutch.

"I wish you would take it," Scott said, and he turned to Crager. "I hope you don't mind?"

Crager scowled for a moment or two as he chewed, his lower lip. Finally, he shrugged.

"No, of course not," he said. "If you know what you're doing."

"Thanks," Scott said. For the first time in 12 years he knew exactly what he was doing. He turned back to Helen. "Won't you take one?" he said. "Please?"

"Only if you assure me that you can afford it," she said.

He could afford anything now. Paying for the cameo would take every penny he would get from Tullio for his half of the profits on the statuette deal, and that in turn meant he could not have his year in Switzerland. But what he had just learned from Helen was worth more to Scott than all the money he had made on all the deals he and Tullio had been involved in since the end of the war.

"I assure you I can afford it," he said.

Very quickly, without bothering to compare or choose, Helen picked up a cameo from the bar. It was the one nearest her.

"Thank you very much," she said.

Scott didn't answer. The pain, which had been creeping up unnoticed, had slipped past the guards. He turned to the bar, took the two remaining cameos, and rewrapped them in the tissue paper. He did it slowly. He always needed a few moments, when the pain overpowered him, to get back on top of it before he could talk.

"Well, now that we've settled that," Mr. Crager said, "let's all have another drink."

"Thanks, not for me," Scott said. "I must catch a train."

"You mean you're not going to have dinner with us?"

Mr. Crager couldn't seem to believe it.

"I'm afraid I can't," Scott said. "I must get back to Rome."

Now that he couldn't go to Switzerland, he wanted to find out from Dr. Benatti how much time he had left.

"But that's not fair!" Helen Crager (concluded on page 92) A Knight Lay Dying (continued from page 68) protested. "We haven't had a chance to talk!"

"I'm sorry," Scott said, and he was. He really would have liked to stay. But he was no longer his own master. The bribe of a year in Switzerland now being beyond him, from here on in he would have to obey the pain that, for the first time in 12 years, he had ceased to think about as an enemy. "I really must go."

"But there's so much I want you to tell me!" Helen Crager said. "About Brittany and the underground and what you did!"

"I'm sorry," Scott said again. "There's nothing to tell."

Not to her. Or to her husband. Or to the people in France who handed out medals. He would save it all for the one person who was entitled to hear it.

"Good-bye," Scott said.

He shook hands with Mr. Crager, and he bowed to the girl who was now Mr. Crager's. wife, and then, carrying the pain carefully, as though it were a sleeping child that must not be aroused, Scott turned and started out of the bar.

"Sergeant Scott!" Helen Crager called.

He continued moving toward the door. She had done her part in setting him free from the chains that had held him for a dozen years. He could not expect her to do more. Nobody could help him with the question that had forged the chains in the first place:

On that terrible morning in Brittany, when he stole away unnoticed from the kitchen window of the Auxerre farmhouse, carrying to safety the plans he had brought from England, had Sergeant Scott been obeying orders, or had he been obeying the dictates of his own heart?

Had he allowed the Gestapo to kill Jeanine Auxerre because it was his duty not to jeopardize the plans he carried on his person? Or had he allowed her to die because her death was an unexpected and simple solution for a troubled man who had fallen in love with an American girl in England but could do nothing about it because he was secretly married to a French girl in Brittany?

"Sergeant Scott! Please!"

He did not turn back. To do so would have been merely polite, and he was beyond politeness. For a dozen years he had lived alone, locked away with the secret agony of that unanswered question. Now, however, for the first time in those dozen years, the question no longer mattered. All that mattered now was what he had learned from Helen: that he'd never had a chance; if he had told her how he felt, he would have been no better off than all those other men for whom she had knocked on wood. She had not loved them. She had merely wanted them to live.

Only one person had ever wanted more for him than that he should merely go on living. Only one person had ever loved him. He was glad now that, on that first night of his return to Brittany, he had lacked the courage to tell her the truth. At least he had spared her that.

"Sergeant Scott!"

He moved forward lightly, through the door of the bar, toward the future, with an eagerness for what lay ahead that, since the night in Brittany when the pain began, Scott had thought he would never know again. For the first time in a dozen years he was not thinking of the pain. For the first time in a dozen years there was only one thought in his mind: soon the long loneliness would be over.

Jeanine had waited three years for him to come back to her in Brittany. Now that he was free at last, she would surely wait the little time that remained before he came back to her forever.