The Executioner

by Thomas Wood

  “Oh, and Mr Lewis,” he said, holding the door open and spinning on his heel, “unfortunately the others did not make it. The Germans had set up a random checkpoint on their route. They were killed by machine gun fire.”

  “What?!” I exploded, forcing him to shut the door, “How on earth did that happen?! There was no one around earlier when we walked there!”

  He thought for a moment or two, before looking at me dead in the eyes. He shrugged before grunting, “I told you, these things happen Mr Lewis. There is nothing that we can do about them.”

  I wanted to lunge for him, to grab his neck and crush it until it turned a purple colour. There was nothing more that I wanted in that moment than to see Joseph dead because, as far as I was concerned, he was the only one that I didn’t trust in this entire network. I owed it to Jacques and Julien to kill him, he had betrayed them and got them killed, I was sure of it.

  But, in the event, I could do nothing, my feet were bolted to the floor. I was dumbstruck. The stitches that were holding my cheek together began to twitch uncomfortably, as the burning sensation of the wreckage returned to my face once again, this time out of a pure fury. I watched him as he left the house and paced it up the road, my mouth slightly open in utter shock at what had happened.

  If I hadn’t been reassigned, I would have been killed. I wondered who had known that they would meet their fate on that escape. I wondered if Jimmy had known. Had that been the reason I had been moved?

  No matter what had happened, that was in the past, I would need to refocus on what my next objective was and then think about trying to get home safely. Throwing the door open, I practically sprinted back to the next best thing to home, I ran to Louis.

  12

  The location for the dead drop had been a specially picked place. It was the one bit of information that Joseph had entrusted to Louis and he had taken a great pleasure and excitement from being able to tell me exactly where the next phase of my operation would begin.

  Someone had been here before, perhaps the person doing the dead drop, or maybe someone else working alongside Jimmy, who had earmarked specific locations for where a drop could take place.

  The church was Romanesque, with the main chapel being of a splendid architecture, with small enclosed windows and a large clock tower that rose up over the rest of the local landscape. It was quite an impressive building, I noted as I walked around its perimeter, but still quite small and modest at the same time.

  But it wasn’t because of the architecture or splendour that this church had been chosen, it was because of the way the rest of the village had been laid out around it. The church was the focal point of the small village that it was in, which opened out into a large open, courtyard type space, which had benches and a small decorative water fountain, that trickled from a lion’s mouth and into the pool below.

  Around the edges of the small square that it had formed were a small parade of shops, many of the owners opting to sit outside and bask in the wintry sunshine that this small commune of France was enjoying over recent days. They called out to one another and chatted in shop doorways, the influx of customers clearly not due for another hour or two.

  I visited the young lad on the corner of the square who had been trying to get rid of all of his newspapers before heading home, and I bought one and began scanning its pages for any kind of article that I would be able to roughly translate. There were a few that I could read, mainly about how the German occupation was doing wonders for the infrastructure and welfare of its French citizens, and how many people were in fact more favourable to the occupation than to President Lebrun’s France of the year previous.

  I perched myself on one of the small stools that sat outside the village’s solitary café and felt that I may have annoyed the owner when I had asked her for a cup of coffee to drink. Her reluctance to do any work may have stemmed from the fact that it was blatantly obvious that I wasn’t French, and I wondered for a moment if she thought I was a German on leave and had spat in my coffee. She obviously hadn’t been one of the people interviewed in the newspaper that I read.

  The paper was littered with flagrant German propaganda, explaining how life under the Third Reich would continue to get better, and that the constant threat of German aggression was something that no one should live in fear of. I read it all, taking in every single word, reading it slowly so that I didn’t finish the paper itself until the drop had occurred.

  The longer that I stayed sitting in the café, or milling around the village square, the riskier my time there would become. It was a cute little village, but not really one that was so ideal for a drop. It was too quiet.

  While I had been in Paris I was able to hide in plain sight, frequently taking trips out to the local landmarks and even dining in a restaurant flooded with German officers. But here, I stuck out like a sore thumb. There were hardly any other people here and the ones that were, didn’t much fancy sitting outside for three hours, reading a copy of the day’s newspaper, when the snowfall that had settled all around was still having trouble in melting.

  I ordered another coffee as I moved inside the café to warm up, sitting by the window. I didn’t particularly feel comfortable with being in there; if I was outside, then I would have been able to run in any direction if something happened but, in the café, there would only really be one way out, and it was likely that would be where the German soldiers would come flooding in from, if it did kick off.

  The café owner was even more frustrated the second time around and I thought about offering to make the coffee for myself, if I wanted a third helping. I was beginning to get odd looks as I looked up from my newspaper, the various shopkeepers all starting to convene in one another’s doors to talk about the strange looking man that keeps ordering coffee and taking hours to read his newspaper.

  I didn’t think that I was about to be lynched at all, my French was quite good, and I hoped that the café owner had not been able to guess at my native tongue by the way that I spoke. I would just have to take a confidence in that they thought I was simply a German soldier or, even better, a member of the Gestapo sent to observe what the locals were like.

  If they believed that, then they would hopefully leave me be.

  I began trying to piece together the situation that I had found myself in, whilst staring blankly at my newspaper, not really taking in the picture of the bomb-damaged factories of Paris that the Allies had mercilessly flattened.

  Louis had revealed a great piece of information to me that Jimmy and Joseph had in fact been great friends, where Jimmy had forgotten to mention the personal connection between the two of them when he had first briefed me. But now, there were two options over where they had met. Had it been at university? I did not know Jimmy well enough to know exactly where he had gone to university, I only knew that he had. Had they struck up a bond there while studying for their various degrees?

  If they had met there then I could only assume that their relationship was a perfectly innocent one, but what Louis had told me about Joseph on our walk to the house had troubled me greatly. If Joseph had been in French military intelligence, then it was entirely possible that that was how Jimmy and Joseph met, in the inner circles of intelligence gathering and sharing. The circles of the dark world of military intelligence concerned me somewhat, and I began to think up a host of stories as to how they first crossed one another’s paths and what they had done together.

  I began to question why Jimmy had trusted Joseph enough to tell him the true nature of the operation that I was going to go onto. If they truly were the best of friends as it seemed, then surely, he would have no qualms about telling his French counterpart all that was going on and, in return, he could have given me more assistance in the matter.

  The more I thought about him, the more I was glad that I was away from him for good, as if Jimmy couldn’t trust the man, and the way that Louis had mentioned that he was more than likely capable of great evil, then I wouldn’t be able to p
ut my faith in him, especially while the country I was in was swarming with enemy soldiers.

  But then, as I flicked over onto the last page of my newspaper, I thought that maybe there was a possibility that he was innocent of all the accusations that I was throwing his way mentally. Just because he was of a deplorable character, an assumption I had made soon after meeting him, reinforced by the way that he had treated Louis, it didn’t necessarily mean that he was in the Germans’ pocket. It was still possible that he was a true French patriot, and, by extension, he would help the British to further their cause in the hope that one day his country may be liberated once again.

  I didn’t know what to make of the situation and resolved to just put it to the back of my mind for now and focus on what I was meant to be doing. If I was to do this, there was a chance that I would be back home soon enough, and I would be able to put all of my questions to Jimmy himself; he wouldn’t lie to me the same way that I thought Joseph was capable of.

  Checking my watch, I folded the newspaper up and placed it on the corner of the table. It was approaching midday and my presence would soon become an unwelcome one if I was forced to stick around for too much longer. I would have to find some other sort of vantage point of the church, that gave me a purpose in the village, because it was that lack of doing anything of any worth that was making the locals suspicious.

  Just as I went to ask the owner for a sandwich or something else to eat, I caught movement up at the church. I readjusted myself in my chair and began staring at the figure that had emerged intently, hoping that they would give a sign of some kind that everything was okay.

  I was surprised to have seen a woman approaching the church, for some reason I had found myself assuming that a man would be coming, a pistol tucked down his trousers ready to take out anyone that challenged him. But the girl was small, thin almost and didn’t look like the sort of person that I was expecting at all. She walked slightly hunched forward, as if something was giving her a great pain as she stumbled towards the cast iron railings that marked the perimeter of the church.

  She had a shawl pulled up and over her head, presumably to keep the cold from biting at her lips, but also doing a good job of hiding her face from anyone that might have been looking at her, such as me. She hobbled over to the railings and clutched hold of one, as if she would suddenly collapse if she was to let go.

  Slowly pivoting round on one foot, she turned to face the church and stared at it for a moment or two, as if she was offering some sort of prayer to it from the outside. After a few seconds, she removed her shoe, shook it to remove something from it and replaced it back on her bony foot.

  She was my drop, she had been the one that I had been waiting for. I had to resist every urge in my body to run up to her and thank her for all her help, or to simply see a face that I knew would be willing to help me, rather than the stern-faced glare of the café owner or her cronies.

  She hobbled away from the square and up one of the side streets that left the main focal point of the village. I let her get a bit of a head start on me and left her for about ten minutes. My goal was not to talk to her, but to simply stop the prying eyes all around me from realising that the unknown foreigner had just received something from the poor, thin girl that had just limped her way through the square.

  I sat for a few minutes more, bouncing my knee up and down in anticipation and for some reason finding myself holding off from throwing the shawl back on the girl to reveal Cécile’s face. I knew that, even if she was alive, that she wouldn’t be in this part of France. It was a big country and she would be hidden well away from any sort of legitimate targets to the Allies, for fear of drawing her back into the carnage that she had been in previously.

  I also knew that no one would have put us both in the situation where we knew the other was involved. It was too risky and the one thing that Jimmy had gone to great lengths to prevent was some sort of compromise. I pushed the idea from my mind with a great reluctance and began to think about the one thing that continued to dominate my thoughts along with everything else.

  The dream had returned to me again the night before, the horrible darkened figure getting closer and closer to me each time I saw him, never saying anything, but placing his hand on my shoulder, or on my head, each time drawing breath to speak but never quite getting to the point where he could.

  I continued to wake in floods of perspiration, but I simply put the whole thing down once again to exhaustion and the high stress of the situation that I found myself in.

  It was no wonder, I told myself as I rose to leave the café, that I was having these disjointed and almost irrational thoughts, when my head was all over the place and I failed to get more than two or three hours rest each night before the dream disturbed me.

  I waved a friendly goodbye to the owner as I left her company, which was not returned, and I picked up my pace and disappeared up a side street in the opposite direction to the young girl.

  13

  My feet were like ice blocks as I made my way back to the village, the feeling in them completely abandoning me and subjecting me to an incredible pain each and every time I made contact with the ground. I trampled my way through the undergrowth, before opting to walk along the road itself. I figured that at one o’clock in the morning, I wouldn’t be coming across too much traffic anyway. If I did, I was just a leap away from the stinging nettles and brambles that I would bury myself in.

  I now had my bag in tow with me, the one that was stuffed full of all the goodies that I might be needing for this operation. Louis had helped me to pack it while trying to persuade me that a bottle of milk would be a good idea to help stave off the hunger. I was glad that I had turned it down now, the bag was already far too heavy with all my other belongings requisitioned from the resistance.

  The most noticeable addition to my wares for my return to the village was the pistol that I had tucked down the waistband of my trousers. I was hoping that I wouldn’t have to use it, but the number of enemy soldiers that I would encounter in a small village in the early hours of the morning would hopefully mean I might be able to blast my way out of this one.

  It took me just over an hour to walk from the forest where I had been hiding up and into the village, the big freeze of the night making it near impossible to think straight about what I was doing. It was a cold that I had never before experienced, one that seemed to attack the core of my body and chill every area of it. There was not one part of my body that was exposed to the mercilessness of the wintery night, but there was not a single inch of me that could have been considered warm in any way.

  My breath puffed out great clouds of vapour as I panted, almost like I had jumped into a large vat of water and was struggling to acclimatise to the new temperature that I was being subjected to. Holding my breath as I peered around the corner of the building that would lead me out into the square, I saw that the entire village appeared utterly deserted, a perfect scenery spread out before me.

  The café where I had spent so many hours earlier on was all shut up, the tables and chairs dragged inside and the awning that had protected me from the snowfall was now all folded away, now sheltering itself. I imagined that if I was to try and get in there, that my newspaper would still be on the very same table that I had left it earlier in the day.

  It was perfectly peaceful throughout the rest of the village. All of the benches were empty, and the slow trickle of the fountain had seized up and surrendered to the icy chill of the night, having frozen over completely. The light dusting of snow was doing its best to reinforce itself and a decent blanket had been pulled up and over the square, right from the café door all the way to the church.

  I was ever so slightly nervous as I ventured out into the abandoned square, conscious that my feet would leave great prints in the fall like a yeti or some other mythical snow creature. If anyone was to venture out into the snow themselves, it was likely that they would soon spot my prints and have no problem at all in tracing
them back to my hiding place.

  There was nothing I could do about it, instead resorting to hoping that the snowfall would suddenly intensify after I had left the square, to cover up my tracks and conceal my route of retreat.

  The church was still unmistakeable even in the darkness, looming so much larger than all the other shadows in the village, becoming one even darker silhouette in the inkiness of the midnight sky. The darkness, unlike the snow, played in my favour somewhat. If someone was suddenly coming through the village for whatever reason, I would have plenty of places that I could seek refuge in, and hopefully wait it out for them to leave.

  I began scurrying from one end of the village to the other, aiming for what appeared to be the darkest corner of the square thanks to the rising shadow of the church, blocking out even the faint attempts at moonlight that was trying to break out from the clouds. I took great pains to move swiftly, but carefully, not wanting to slip over and cause any unnecessary noise. It was for this reason that I was running on my tiptoes because, although I was confident that the snow would subdue some of the noise, it was not yet thick enough to conceal the full snaps and cracks that my heels would make when they hit the ground.

  My calves were burning by the time I got to the water fountain, and I had to flatten my feet the second I reached it, to try and stop the agonising pain from making me call out in anguish. I took stock, as I squatted behind the frozen fountain, and noticed that the snow was already making its best efforts to conceal the few footsteps that I had managed to leave behind me. In an ideal world, I wouldn’t even be making the pickup tonight, I would have waited until the situation was slightly easier, specifically, warmer, so that my tracks couldn’t have been picked up by anyone that came to the village.