The Occupation Secret

by The Occupation Secret (retail) (epub)

  Max grinned. He was both amused at Lucie’s unconscious use of clichés and relieved that she was no longer thinking of escaping. ‘Then of course I must have heard of her. Can you hum me one of her melodies, perhaps?’

  To his intense surprise, rather than humming to him, Lucie began to sing, in a voice as confident as her manner was hesitant:

  ‘Parlez moi d’amour,

  Redites-moi des choses tendres

  Votre beau discours

  Mon coeur n’est pas las de l’entendre

  Pourvu que toujours

  Vous répétiez ces mots suprêmes

  – Je vous aime.’

  She blushed. ‘It goes on. Very nicely. And there are more. But you’ve probably heard them all.’ She allowed one hand to flutter towards her nose. ‘I can’t really do justice to them, anyway.’

  Max launched into a silent round of applause, enchanted afresh by Lucie’s feminine willingness to parade her vulnerability in front of him. He was genuinely delighted, too, at her natural grasp of the music and at the unschooled richness of her voice. ‘That was beautiful. Quite beautiful. You have a rare talent, Mademoiselle.’

  For one fleeting instant he was tempted to take advantage of their new intimacy by asking Lucie what had happened to her face – how she had come to break her nose – but he decided to hold back for the time being, for fear of scaring her away. ‘You sing professionally, of course?’

  ‘Oh no, Monsieur. Just at marriages and la St Jean. My father accompanies me on the accordion. At least, he did…’

  Max raised a quizzical eyebrow. ‘Is he dead, then?’

  Lucie hesitated, her blushes intensifying. ‘No, Sir. He’s a prisoner-of-war. In Germany.’

  For one catastrophic moment Max was convinced that Lucie was about to ask him to help her. That the charade of the past few days had been nothing but a build-up to just this question. Her unexpected prolixity. Her sudden forwardness following the misunderstandings of their first meeting, and the resolutely public aspect of their second. The ease with which he had spun her, without ever consciously intending to, inside his web – his spider to her fly. His heart sank at the thought that she might be about to offer herself to him, if only, please Sir, if only he could do something about her father.

  ‘He’s a very good accordionist, you know,’ she continued, hurriedly, as if she too was aware of the possibility of a misunderstanding between them. ‘He used to accompany me whenever there was a call for music. Mostly funny songs, by Fréhel, Yvette Guilbert, Mistinguett. People like that. But occasionally he would let me perform the songs I really wanted to sing. Songs by Lucienne Boyer. Damia. Jean Tranchant. Charles Trenet. Tino Rossi. Ballads, mostly.’

  Max closed his eyes. ‘I am very ignorant of popular music.’

  He was also very relieved. For a brief moment, the sudden realisation of the enormous power that he held over her and what he could do with it had flashed through his mind. He had only to say, ‘Well, Mademoiselle, if you would like your father found and returned to you, you know what you must do. Let’s forget about my lunch for the time being. Go upstairs to my bedroom. If I am satisfied with you, I shall set about arranging for his release.’ The thought had no sooner occurred to him than it was put aside, as one of those dark secrets every man carries within him, and that only humanity – active humanity, Father Bauer’s sort of humanity – can obviate.

  ‘I’m sorry about your father. We are treating him well, I hope?’

  ‘The camp authorities allow us to send him food parcels, yes, Sir. And we exchange letters. He gets someone in his workgroup to write them for him. He’ll come back to us…’ Lucie stopped, nonplussed at her own stupidity.

  Max caught her gist immediately. ‘…after the Allies invade? Perhaps you’re right, Mademoiselle. It’s only reasonable that you should hope for such a thing. In the meantime, may I trust that you will not put poison in my food in an effort to hurry on the happy event?’

  ‘Oh, Monsieur. I would never do such a thing.’

  ‘I know you wouldn’t. It was a purely rhetorical question.’ He stood up, a little more abruptly than he had intended to.

  The sudden revelation of his height and presence seemed to quail Lucie, and to remind her of the realities of their respective positions, for she backed off a little to stand once again by the open doorway.

  ‘Do you have recordings of her singing?’

  ‘Of who, Monsieur?’

  ‘Lucienne Boyer. Wasn’t that her name?’

  ‘Oh yes, Sir. Many.’

  ‘Then one day, perhaps, you will bring them? I would like to hear. That’s a gramophone over there, isn’t it?’

  Max wasn’t surprised when Lucie didn’t answer him but retreated gently, with silent delicacy, back around the door.

  The Maquis

  It had taken Hervé six good hours to labour to the top of the ridge and onto the main plateau of the Causse. The pack on his back weighed fifty kilograms, and he had been forced to stop and offload it every thirty minutes, in order to give his shoulders a rest.

  Now he stood triumphantly at the edge of the plateau, sucking in great lungfuls of air, and gazing down at the river and at the sprawl of St Gervais on the far side of it. If he squinted through his good eye, he was just able to make out the dark smudges of the German battle tanks, like flies on a butchers’ slab, with the inert proboscis of the church dominating the upper reaches of the town, and the mass of the Bastide de Murat a dimmer smudge behind it. He could even distinguish the Das Reich regimental flag, like a blemish on a much-loved face, flapping in the desultory wind.

  He drank some water from his canteen, then poured a little onto his throat scarf and mopped at his face – up here on the Causse the wind was stronger, and the sweat soon dried on his neck and shirt. In the distance he could hear the sound of the church bells floating up from the valley as they struck the midday angelus. He grimaced in satisfaction, knowing that he had made better time than expected.

  With a grunted ‘A Dieu’ – uttered more out of habit than out of conviction – he heaved the pack onto his shoulders again, let his thumb stick fall back into position, and started to walk. In his mind’s eye he began to think of an orange cut into quarters, its meat glistening with moisture. It had been years since he had even seen one, and the vision tormented him with its intangibility. He would give a lot to taste an orange again. He imagined sinking his teeth into each segment, sucking out the juice, then tearing the meat from the pith of the peel.

  When next he stopped, it was near to a bevelled stone with an inscription cut deep into its surface: DE LA PESTE, DIEU, PROTÉGEZ NOUS. He let his fingers play across the chiselled letters. Was it one of his ancestors, perhaps, who had carved it? Either way, he felt a profound sense of kinship with the man. He was briefly tempted to squat down and carve a similar message of warning for future generations: ‘Des Boches, Dieu, protégez nous.’

  Now he waited, chewing automatically on his lunchtime piece of bread, masticating it – making it last. Once he heard a scattering of pebbles and he turned expectantly, but it was only a feral goat, startled to find a man in so wild a spot. The black goat stood and stared at him for some moments, its eyes unyielding as rock, then it melted away into the brush. Later again he heard the ruffling of a sanglier and caught the sharp odour of its rutting scent, but even with his practised eyes he failed to make out its silhouette amongst the scrub brush and the holm oaks.

  Here, in early spring, the hard rocks of the Causse were spotted with flowers – saxifrage, thyme, convolvulus. The rocks themselves seemed to encapsulate them, grudgingly allowing the buds to erupt from inside their tormented fissures. Rock-roses, pinks and honeysuckle thrived where the scant hedges had been allowed to grow unchecked. Later, he knew, wild orchids would emerge, bee and marsh and pyramid, but already the Causse Bleu butterflies were at work, in a prelude to summer, shadowed by fritillaries, tortoiseshells and swallowtails of every colour, busy with their mating rituals. Hervé watched
as the females settled on the ground, their wings tightly shut, while the males danced above them in the air eddies. Every now and then the male would swoop down, and the female, as if by instinct, would open her wings at the last possible moment to let the male caress her back with his tentacles.

  ‘Ah that, that’s typical,’ he grumbled to himself.

  He saw lizards basking on the warm rocks, and once, an hour into his vigil, a couleuvre de Montpellier raised its vulpine head to scrutinize him, then slithered away through the undergrowth, its tongue flashing. He watched for some time as a family of jays mobbed a buzzard above him, and once, thanks to his stillness, he saw two partridge delicately lapping the moisture from an indentation in a rock. For one heartsick moment he longed for his confiscated shotgun, but later he found himself curiously satisfied when the birds moved unscathed away from him, back to their nests and to the business of raising a family.

  At a little after two o’clock he heard the man approaching, and stood up to show himself, feeling strangely naked in his home terrain, as if he were the spot in an alien marksman’s eye. ‘Eh! Jean-Baptiste.’

  ‘Salut, Hervé.’

  Hervé raised a hand in greeting and waited patiently for the other man to join him. The man wore a sleeveless sheepskin tunic with the leather on the outside, over a homespun shirt. On his head he wore a blue felt beret with a feather stuck jauntily through it. His sunburned face and hands were ingrained with dirt, giving him a false air of health, but the pallid chest skin that peeked out through his open-necked shirt showed the telltale red blotches of a poor diet.

  ‘Come on, I’ll take that now.’ The man eased the pack off Hervé’s shoulders and transferred it to his own. ‘Putain. It’s heavier than my grandmother. What have you got in it?’

  ‘It’s the bread that weighs so much. There’s dried ham, too. And beans. And potatoes. Also some goose fat for cooking, and a little rolling tobacco. Even a bottle of cognac donated by the Bar Des Amis. Old Fombert must be hoping to store up goodwill for the Liberation.’

  ‘We already know who our enemies are. Lice like Fombert are irrelevant. But they can be dangerous, nevertheless. How did he know you were coming?’

  Hervé shrugged. ‘He listens. He watches. I don’t think we have much to fear from him. The sight of the black Germans in his bar turns his knees to jelly. I noticed the other day he has taken down his photograph of Pétain.’

  Jean-Baptiste grunted. ‘Did you do as I asked?’

  ‘I have the numbers of men. The details of their transport. The estimated tally of their weapons. They’re too strong to attack in St Gervais. They have the town sealed up.’

  ‘We’re in no hurry. The Albions sent a man out to talk to us a few days ago. To talk to all the groups. To beg us to hold back. The invasion will come very soon, I think.’

  ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘Why would they send the man otherwise? To ask us not to fight?’ Stones cascaded in rivulets down a nearby gully, sparking off their hobnailed boots. ‘Everything must be put on hold till afterwards, it seems. Then we must all attack together. Slow up the Schleuhs on their way north. We are already making plans. Coordinating. That’s what we must do, he told us. Coordinate.’ Jean-Baptiste rolled the words out of his mouth as if he could taste them.

  ‘Can you control the men? It would be madness if one or two of them took the law into their own hands. We would have reprisals. These SS are monsters.’

  ‘If there is no violence, how is France to know there is a Résistance?’

  Hervé slowed his pace. ‘That’s not you talking?’

  Jean-Baptiste smiled. ‘No. You’re right. Tillon said it. “Il faut bouziller les gars.” I’m personally going to execute any Miliciens I find, when the Liberation comes.’

  ‘I’ll join you in that.’

  They stopped for ten minutes at a little after three, to drink water and chew on some bread. Jean-Baptiste ran a hand wearily across his face. ‘They didn’t, by any chance, teach you how to use a Thompson when you were in the army?’

  Hervé sucked in his cheeks. ‘Not a Thompson, no. But something similar. The principle is pretty much the same.’

  ‘Can you show the men?’

  ‘Do you have anywhere we can fire safely?’

  ‘No. We can be heard from everywhere up here.’

  ‘Do you have a soldering iron, then?’

  Jean-Baptiste stopped in mid-chew, his head canted quizzically to one side. ‘What do you think? That we have a workshop all set up and ready to go?’

  Hervé laughed. ‘I ask this because I heard of a good trick from a man I once served with. You file a cross into the head of each .45 Thompson bullet, then pull piano wire through it, dab a drop of solder on top, and put it back inside its casing. That way, when you fire the Thompson, the weight of the bullet against the piano wire, about five metres in front of the weapon, will separate it into four parts. They say the normal rate of fire of a Thompson is roughly seven hundred and fifty rounds a minute – in fact they fire so fast that you have to, quite literally, hold the barrel down, otherwise they climb up and smack you in the face. And their accurate range is only about thirty or forty metres. So, if you doctor the bullets this way, it means that, in close combat – a ten metre radius, let’s say – you have created something that fires not seven hundred and fifty rounds a minute anymore, but three thousand.’

  ‘Putain! You’re not serious?’

  ‘It’s deadly. If you get ambushed you don’t lie down but simply spray everything you have at the enemy. They won’t know what hit them.’

  ‘Can you do the same thing with a Sten?’

  ‘No. The bullets are too small. But if you wrap a wet cloth around the butt, you can make it sound like a heavy machine-gun.’

  Jean-Baptiste scratched his head in amazement. ‘How do you come to know all this?’

  ‘The man in the bed next to me at the hospital. We had a long time to talk. He knew he was dying. He wanted to pass stuff on to me before it was too late for him. He knew I would want to revenge myself on the Boche for… well… you understand.’ Hervé brushed an unconscious hand across his corrugated forehead, as if dislodging a fly.

  ‘Can you get us a soldering iron? Piano wire?’

  Hervé grunted. ‘Maybe. Maybe not. The next time I come, I’ll try to bring some. You’ll have to prepare a closed-in oven to heat the solder. Make some charcoal. In the meantime, you can get your men to file crosses in the bullets with their knives. It will give them something to do.’ Noticing the strain on Jean-Baptiste’s face, Hervé quietly transferred the pack back onto his own shoulders.

  ‘The Albions dropped us plastique, too. And fuses. But we don’t know how to use them. The instructions got damaged in the storm. Dédé tried cutting some up, then used his knife to eat with and made himself sick. He puked for three days. If someone had jostled him he would have exploded.’

  Laughing, they made their way through a narrow defile that led down to an abandoned limestone quarry. Jean-Baptiste placed himself in the middle of the clearing and blew on a whistle. Tattered, shabby figures emerged from the surrounding undergrowth like phantoms from a graveyard.

  Hervé hissed through his teeth at the sight of them.

  ‘Yes. I know.’ Jean-Baptiste smiled ruefully. ‘We don’t look good. There’s not enough to eat, and we are saving all our water now, and not using it for washing or shaving. Tobacco’s our biggest problem, though. They’ll fight, though, when it comes to it.’

  ‘We all will.’

  ‘I know that.’

  ‘I wish I could have brought more. But I can’t risk using old Leclerc’s mule. The Boche have spyglasses. They watch everything. That’s why I started up in the dark.’

  ‘What would you tell them if they caught you?’

  ‘That I am taking up provisions for the shepherds. Summer pasture. The transhumance. That we store up food in the burons to last the men through until autumn.’

  ‘Do you think they w
ould believe you?’

  ‘Who knows? I don’t intend to get caught, anyhow.’

  ‘Who does?’

  * * *

  That night Hervé consciously held back from eating, so as not to deprive the men. ‘There’s a sanglier up at the top of the pass. Probably a whole family. I saw a wild goat, too.’

  ‘What good are they to us when we can’t risk shooting?’

  Hervé sat back a little on his haunches. It was true. Most of these boys were only youngsters, their lives curtailed by the war. But still…

  ‘Give me three men when I start back in the morning, and I will show them how to set traps. It shouldn’t be too hard to find the sanglier’s run – just look for a trail, and mud marks a metre or so high on the bushes. If the first beast you catch is a male, cut off his balls and smear yourself all over with them – that way, when he scents you, the next male will think you belong to his herd, and then… pataam! The wild goat, of course, is another matter.’ He glanced around the men’s faces in the firelight, which diffused thinly out past the protective stones to reflect off the steep walls of the quarry. ‘I think, looking at them, that they will have to forget about the wild goat.’

  It made Hervé feel good to be giving advice to the FTP. To be bringing them food and cognac. It was only up here that he felt like a true veteran, and proud of his scars as if they were a mark of heroism and not simply of bad luck. He enjoyed the sense of brotherhood and common purpose, and he found himself wishing that the war would never end, and all these boys return to their homes, and farms, and sweethearts. He was one of their few links to the outside world, and it contented him.

  Later that night, as he lay huddled beneath his blanket, he caught himself dreaming that Lucie was there to see him. He had thought of telling her what he was up to, but Jean-Baptiste was adamant that as few people as possible should know about the group. That way, when they finally attacked, there would be total surprise. There was only one obvious road out of St Gervais that the Germans could take, and the FTP had already marked out the place where they would make their stand. They would blow down trees in front of and behind the tanks. Throw grenades into the lorries. Spray the SS with their Stens and Thompsons. Then escape back into the hills.