The Occupation Secret

by The Occupation Secret (retail) (epub)

  * * *

  Max stood at the library door, his heartbeat stilled, watching her. Wordlessly, he took in Lucie’s profile, the natural poise of her body, the gentle arch of her back, the cut and turn of her calves, the trimness of her ankles. He remembered the transcendent loveliness of her face earlier that morning, as he had made love to her against the car – the movements of her mouth as she climaxed, the steady beat of a vein in her neck. How strange that he had chosen this young woman above all others, to invest with his love. What had driven his decision? Had he become so jaded, then – so addicted to the lure of danger – that even in his affective relationships he could no longer function without it? Or were his instincts, for a change, right, and she was indeed the superior person he had so impulsively divined beneath the carapace set in place by her upbringing – the rustic carapace which was all she had ever been allowed in terms of the exterior manifestation of her unspoiled and entirely natural intellect?

  ‘Meyer…’ Max’s voice betrayed the wells of his desire, and he was forced to clear his throat and start again. ‘Meyer told me where to find you.’

  Lucie gave a start, and turned around to face him. How was it possible that she had failed to hear Max’s approach? Had she been so completely lost, then, in her own thoughts? She felt disconcertingly detached from her own persona, as if the experiences of the past twenty-four hours had happened to another woman and not to her. She saw Max hesitate, uncertain whether to move towards her or to remain at the door. She valued this formality in him – this refinement of spirit – this gentlemanly delicacy and consideration when difficulty loomed. She sank back onto the piano stool, sensing, with her woman’s intuition, that this was the only way to break the deadlock of their respective stances. She did indeed feel tired – as if she could sleep the entire day through, followed by the night. Perhaps, when she awoke, life would have moved on without her?

  She was aware of his footsteps approaching. Sensed the dark presence of his uniform hovering over her. Felt the first tentative touch of his hand on her back. The gathering of her. The raising of her into his arms. She turned her face and cheek up to be kissed, and he buried himself in her, in her hair, hugging her with a strength, a fury almost, that drained her lungs of air, her heart of motion. His grip was so strong, and she so light, that her feet left the floor, and she briefly closed her eyes, hoping that Max would hug her to death – that she might die held like this inside his arms.

  He carried her to the sofa, and she let him do it, content to be consumed – content, for the moment, not to think. He laid her tenderly down and knelt beside her, his face tantalisingly close to hers. Lucie was utterly aware of him: the hint of bay rum on his cheeks from a recent shaving; his own scent, warm, with its familiar hints of leather, wool and tobacco; the colour of his hair and eyes; the turn of his nose and cheek; the shape of his ears. She remembered the whiteness of his body in the Auberge bedroom, its beauty heightened by the unexpected blazon of his battle scars. The swell of his buttocks as he walked to the window in the pre-dawn light of the oil lamp. The unselfconscious way he carried himself. The shock of his virility.

  She couldn’t let this go on. Couldn’t let him misunderstand the situation. Gently, she untangled herself from his embrace and sat up. ‘Max, listen to me.’ She stretched a warding hand towards his chest. ‘No. You must listen.’

  She paused, allowing him the time to compose himself. How well she knew him all of a sudden. How completely she understood what drove him – what drove all men. It was as if a blinding membrane had been scraped from her eyes by his touch. As though, by taking her virginity, Max had bestowed on her a mystical, almost holistic knowledge of human behaviour – a knowledge that had entirely eluded her for the first nineteen years of her life.

  ‘Listen to what?’

  ‘Hasn’t Monsieur Meyer spoken to you?’

  ‘To tell me you were waiting for me here? Yes. Of course he has.’

  ‘No, I didn’t mean that.’

  ‘What else should he have told me?’

  The sense of dread that Lucie had so ineffectively sidelined was threatening to take hold of her once again. She drew in a deep, ragged breath. ‘That my grandmother knows all about us. That she has driven me from the farm because I spent the night away with you.’

  She felt rather than saw Max flinch back at her words. She hurried on, before he could interrupt her with a battery of questions she couldn’t answer.

  ‘Yesterday morning, after I left to be with you, she had me followed.’ She could feel her defences weakening with each word she uttered. ‘That was all it took. Now everyone in the town will hear about us. I’ll be an outcast.’ The tears, so long held back, finally came, and she turned towards him, choking and sobbing, searching for support in his arms.

  Max did his best to conceal his anxiety – to hide from her how appalled he was at her words and their significance. Meyer, true to form, had indicated to him that something was seriously wrong – something with ramifications quite beyond the Najac fiasco. But with his usual intransigence he had refused to be drawn any further on the matter, insisting that Lucie should tell him about it herself. Now Max finally understood why.

  When the worst of her sobs were over, Max brushed the damp hair back from Lucie’s forehead with the palm of his hand. ‘The old girl will hardly broadcast it to the whole village, now will she? She’s not that foolish.’ His words didn’t carry much conviction. ‘How can she have known, anyway? It’s impossible. You must be mistaken.’

  Lucie managed a deep, stumbling exhalation. ‘No, I’m not mistaken.’ She was having extreme difficulty controlling the tremor in her voice. ‘She heard me leaving before my usual time. She already suspected something; she as good as told me so the other day, but I was so stupid that I refused to listen. So she sent Aimé out to spy on where I was going. He saw us meet at the shrine. That was sufficient for her.’ She took his hand and placed it against her cheek, just as a sleep-deprived child will do when seeking comfort from its parent. ‘And so she went and did the most vicious and most destructive thing that she could possibly think of doing. To punish me.’

  ‘And what was that?’

  ‘Don’t you understand yet? Don’t you realise? She went across to the farm and told Hervé all about us.’ She looked up at Max beseechingly. ‘Please, please, can’t you do something? Hervé will die because of me. Because of us. We were the only reason he was up there in the tower. You know it as well as I do.’

  Max started back in genuine surprise. ‘But he had a rifle with him. A silenced rifle. He was going to kill me.’ His thoughts, despite all his efforts to the contrary, instinctively flashed back to that first time in the library when he had falsely suspected Lucie of wishing him to intercede on behalf of her father. Would she now fulfil all his worst suspicions and revert to type?

  ‘But you surely know why, don’t you?’ Her words and tone were exhorting Max to grasp her position – to remain human. Not to abandon her.

  He shook his head roughly. ‘How can I know why? I haven’t spoken to the man yet. But I shall certainly do so. And if I find that the Maquis have been using him to get to me, I shall have no alternative but to pass the information on to a higher authority. You do understand that?’

  This time it was Lucie who drew back. ‘No. No, I don’t understand.’ Her tears had miraculously ceased. ‘I’m telling you that he went up there out of jealousy. I know Hervé. I’ve known him all my life. The thought of you and I together must have driven him mad. He wouldn’t have thought about what he was doing. He would simply have gone out and done what his instincts told him to do.’

  ‘With a silenced Lebel?’ Max stood up. He couldn’t help himself anymore. Couldn’t remain kneeling on the floor beside Lucie. He thrust his hands inside his breeches and walked a few paces towards the centre of the room, thinking. He turned abruptly back. ‘Where do you think he got the rifle and silencer from? He certainly didn’t have them hidden away inside his farmhouse. No.
He must have been given them by the Maquis.’ Max’s expression was triumphant, that of a man who feels he might yet succeed in distancing himself from a situation which incorporated an inconvenient and tiresome moral responsibility. ‘The moment I file my report, the SD will insist on taking him away and interrogating him. And when they have extracted all the information they require, they will shoot him. I can do nothing about it anymore. The situation is entirely out of my hands. Najac brought this on himself.’

  Even as he uttered the words, it was slowly beginning to dawn on Max that it might not be in anybody’s best interests to have Hervé fall into the hands of the SD, that there was no telling what the man might blurt out when those fiends got hold of him. Mutely, he cursed his own folly and that of the system he so mindlessly, and yes, at times like these so inexplicably, served.

  ‘But his death. It will be on your conscience.’

  ‘I have many deaths on my conscience. I am a soldier, Lucie. Whatever I may feel about you, and you about me, I am still at war. I am still representing my country on the battlefield.’

  Max could hear himself mouthing the set phrases, whilst at the same time realising with an unsettling sense of shock at his own fickleness that he no longer fully believed them. That his loyalties, after years of unthinking obedience to the notional mistress of duty, were effectively being sundered in two.

  ‘But that’s madness. What if something is evil? Fundamentally evil. What then? Wouldn’t you do something about it?’ Lucie was perched on the edge of the sofa, her body straining towards him – desperate to convince him of the worth of what she was saying.

  ‘Of course I would.’

  ‘Well, this is evil. We caused this situation. Both of us. We drove him to it. What we did was wrong.’

  Max threw himself down onto the piano stool. One part of him instinctively believed her; the other part, experienced and brutalized by years of warfare, knew what men were capable of, and accorded their urgings and their dubious motivations short shrift.

  She pointed wildly across the room at the opened window. ‘He knew that I was singing here and that you were accompanying me. The whole town knew. My grandmother told me so.’ She swallowed awkwardly. ‘And I was avoiding him. I admit that. Each time we met he tried to make love to me, and I didn’t want him doing that because I love you, not him. So even when I heard that he was unhappy, that he was drinking too much and saying wild things about me, I paid no attention. I was so besotted with you, I couldn’t think of anything else.’

  ‘That is all very well—’

  ‘So it’s our responsibility, don’t you see? Please. Can’t you hold back your report until after you’ve spoken to him?’

  Max struck himself dramatically on the forehead. ‘Lucie, you astonish me. You’ve just been driven out of your home because of me. Cut loose from all your moorings. Disowned by your family. And your first thoughts aren’t of yourself or of what I’ve caused to happen to you, but of this fool Najac.’

  She sensed the beginnings of an opening and threw herself in. ‘Because I could never be happy with you, knowing that we had caused his death.’

  ‘He will have caused his own death. Nobody asked him to act in such a foolhardy manner. Nobody put a rifle in his hands and told him to go out and shoot a perfect stranger. Or perhaps they did? I don’t know.’

  ‘Then find out. You owe it to him.’

  ‘I don’t owe him anything.’

  She sat up straighter. ‘Well, you owe it to me, then.’ She could feel her will faltering in the face of his obstinate maleness, but she resolved not to show her indecision. ‘I already love you. I’ve already given myself to you. I can’t do anything about that and I don’t regret it. Not a moment of our time together. But love is not enough. Not anymore. I want to be able to respect you as well.’

  Max turned deathly pale, and for a moment Lucie feared that she had pushed him too far. That he might be about to stride across the room and strike her. But deep inside herself she knew that she had nothing left to lose. If he didn’t respond to her now – if she couldn’t reach him – they were, both of them, irretrievably lost.

  To his astonishment, one part of Max, the logical, pedantic, left-brained side, still desperately wanted to explain the realities of warfare to Lucie – to lay out before her the different rules that applied in times of conflict. The other side, the intuitive, right-brained side, grasped her position completely, and secretly commended the stance that she was taking. How Father Bauer would have admired her!

  In the event, he managed to summon up the vestige of a thin smile. How wonderfully ironic that it had taken Lucie’s emotionally charged intervention to stop him committing the potentially catastrophic error of involving the military authorities in their illegal affair.

  ‘Very well then. If you insist on turning this into a moral issue, then you leave me no choice. I promise to talk to Najac before filing my report. If everything is as you say, I will keep him here – for the time being, anyway – and not hand him over to the Sicherheitsdienst. You do realise that if this ever comes out, I will be in serious trouble?’

  ‘That’s not worthy of you. To say that.’

  Max leaned forwards and placed his head inside his hands. He muttered something under his breath, then drew his fingers down over his eyes and stared at her through the gaps. ‘You’re right. You’re scarcely even nineteen, and you’re right.’ He let his hands slide down his face and dropped them wearily onto his lap. ‘That must be why I’m so attached to you.’ He glanced across at her. ‘Yes.’ His voice sounded tired. ‘Yes. How to explain it otherwise?’ One hand inadvertently strayed to the crucifix hidden beneath his collar. ‘I’ll do my best to keep the fool away from a firing squad. Is that what you want? Is that what you expect of me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The Meeting

  Saturday 3rd June 1944

  Private Ewald Eberle, newly demoted following his shenanigans with a series of largely unwilling local women, fiddled ineffectually with the antique mortise lock on Hervé’s cell door, as if it were somehow beneath his dignity to engage in any form of manual labour. What was the commandant doing anyway, visiting the prisoner unannounced? There was trouble brewing – Eberle could feel it in his bones. And if his recent experiences were anything to go by, it was heading directly for him.

  ‘For God’s sake, man, get a move on! I haven’t got all day.’

  ‘The lock needs oil, Herr Sturmbannführer. These French never look after anything.’ Eberle stepped back triumphantly. ‘But I think I’ve got it now.’

  ‘Then you can leave us, Schütze. You may return and service the lock later on.’

  Eberle glanced furtively around the edge of the cell door. Thank Christ. The bastard was still moving. ‘But the man is dangerous, Herr Sturmbannführer.’ He fingered the trigger guard on his machine pistol. ‘He was trying to assassinate you.’

  Max glanced swiftly inside the cell, then back at Eberle. ‘He doesn’t look very dangerous to me. Was it you who beat him up?’

  Eberle put on a mock-apologetic face. ‘The prisoner made as if to escape, Herr Sturmbannführer. First thing this morning, when I brought him in his breakfast.’ Meyer would have him cleaning the bloody latrines after this, that much was for certain – just his luck for the old man to choose this morning, of all mornings, to come cold-calling. ‘I shouted for Siebe, and we physically restrained him. It was a miracle neither one of us was injured.’

  Max grunted, masking the true expression in his eyes. ‘I repeat. You can go now. But remain outside the building, with your weapon at the ready. If he tries to escape again, shoot him.’

  ‘Jawohl, Herr Sturmbannführer!’

  Eberle could hardly believe his luck. The commandant was letting him off the hook. Must be the skirt effect, softening him up. Everyone in the barracks was talking about the major’s fling with the daughter of the owner of the Bonne Auberge. It was all right for some, of course. The moment an enlisted man got caught ch
asing the French poultry, he was as good as cashiered.

  Max paused briefly at the door. Hervé was curled up in a heap in a far corner of the cell. His jailors hadn’t even bothered to provide him with a bed, a blanket, or a waste pail. ‘Come with me, Najac.’ The weight of the war and the actions permitted in its name hung heavily on Max’s shoulders.

  Hervé eased himself up from the floor until his back was resting awkwardly against the stone wall. He looked like a fragment of somebody’s nightmare. ‘Are you going to shoot me?’ His voice was weak and his head was nodding with delayed shock. ‘Or are you just going to beat me up again?’ He was missing two of his upper teeth, and his one good eye was closed and puffy. He blotted his remaining eye with the shoulder of his torn shirt and squinted uncertainly into the light. ‘Oh. It’s you, is it? I thought it was those thugs at the door, coming back to re-tenderise the veal.’ He gave a hollow, flinching laugh, his fingers anticipating the pain from his torn lips. ‘You couldn’t resist coming yourself, could you? To gloat.’

  Max stretched out one hand. Hervé shook his head and stared down at the floor.

  ‘Come on, man. I’m not going to hurt you.’

  Hervé hesitated, his one visible eye flashing through the bruised flesh that enclosed it.

  ‘Take my hand. You’ll never make it up on your own.’

  Hervé nodded his head in grudging affirmation. He reached out and gripped Max’s hand and allowed himself to be pulled to his feet. He rocked to and fro for a second, groaning, while the blood trickled back into his frozen limbs. Max steadied him with one hand, the other hovering near his pistol.

  ‘Oh, it’s all right. I’m not about to jump you, Major. I’ve a feeling you’d see it coming, anyway.’ Some saliva dribbled from the corner of his mouth, and Hervé dabbed at it gingerly with the back of his fist. ‘I think those cunts broke my jaw. I can’t close my mouth anymore.’

  ‘Did you really try to escape?’