The Devils of D-Day by Graham Masterton Page A

he said. ‘And, perhaps one day they will understand
themselves.’
     
    I met Madeleine for a glass of wine at lunchtime, in a small smokey cafe unappealingly called the Bar Tour- istique . A grossly fat woman in a floral housecoat served
behind the bar, and occasionally forayed out to slap at the red formica -topped tables with a wet rag, as if they were
disobedient dogs who kept playing up. The house wine was robust enough to clean
your family silver with, but I’d managed to find a stale pack of Luckies in the local tobacconist’s, so my palate wasn’t
complaining quite so vigorously as it had this morning.
    Madeleine came in through the plastic-strip curtain looking
very pale and waif-like, and when she saw me she came across the bar and put
her arms tight around my neck.
    ‘Dan, you’re all right.’
    ‘Of course I’m all right. I’ve only been talking to Father Anton.’
    I took her speckled tweed coat and hung it up next to a sign
that warned Defense de Cracker. She was wearing a plain turquoise-blue dress
that was probably very fashionable in Pont D’Ouilly ,
but in Paris was about eight years out of style. Still, she looked good; and it
was a lift to meet someone who really cared about my welfare.
    Ten-ton Tessie behind the bar brought us our wine, and we clinked glasses like onetime lovers meeting in a seedy bar
at the back of Grand Central Station.
    ‘Did you play Father Anton the tape?’
    ‘Well, kind of.’
    She touched my hand. ‘There’s something you don’t want to
tell me?’
    ‘I don’t know. I guess we’re at a crossroads right now. We
can either open the tank up, and find out what’s in
there, or we can forget it for ever , just like
everyone else has.’
    She reached up and stroked my cheek. Her pale eyes were full
of concern and affection. If I hadn’t been feeling so goddamned sick last
night, lying doubled-up in the Passerelle’s draughty
spare bedroom, I think I might have tiptoed along the corridor and tapped on
Madeleine’s door, but I can tell you from first-hand experience that making
love is the last thing you feel like after puking a mouthful of maggots; and I
guess that even those who love you dearly find it kind of hard to give you a
wholehearted kiss.
    She sipped her wine. ‘How can we leave it there?’ she asked
me. ‘How can we just leave it there?’
    ‘I don’t know. But the mayor and the civic authorities and
even Father Anton himself seem to have managed to leave it there for thirty
years.’
    Madeleine said: ‘You must think that I have a bee in my
bonnet.’
    ‘Where did they teach you to say that? The
school of colloquial English?’
    She looked up, and she wasn’t smiling. ‘The war was over
years and years ago.
    Didn’t we lose enough? Enough fathers and
brothers and friends? They still sell postcards of Churchill and
Eisenhower at the seaside resorts, and that makes me angry. They saved us, yes,
but there is nothing glorious to celebrate. To fight wars is not glorious, not
for anyone. It is better to forget. But, of course, they have left us their
tank, and we can never forget.’
    I sat back in my cheap varnished chair. ‘So you want to open
it up?’
    Her eyes were cold. ‘The thing itself said that it wanted to
join its brethren. What can it want with us? If we let it out, it will go to
meet its friends, and that will be the end of it.’
    ‘Father Anton said that opening the tank would be as good as
committing suicide.’
    ‘Father Anton is old. And anyway, he believes that demons and
devils have power over everything. He told me that once, in catechism class.
“Madeleine,” he said, “ if it weren’t for Jesus Christ,
the whole world would be overrun with demons.” ‘
    I coughed. ‘Supposing we open it up and there is a demon?’
    She leaned forward intensely. ‘There must be something, Dan.
Otherwise we wouldn’t have heard that voice. But demons don’t have horns and
forks. There’s probably nothing inside there at all that