The Girl in the Baker's Van

by Richard Savin

  The Kommandant at Natzweiler was French, an Alsatian, but he carried an SS rank. Like many of his kind he had stood at the roadside cheering when the Wehrmacht marched into the Rhineland. He walked with Schreiber past the ranks of wooden huts fenced around with barbed wire hung on timber posts, up to the main gate; the compound and its link roads were caked in mud, churned up by the trucks that came in and out of the camp, turning it to a half-frozen grey mush. It was a miserable sight.

  ‘This prisoner I’ve been interrogating – I need you to keep him safe and well,’

  The Kommandant looked disinterested. ‘What do you want me to do?’

  ‘No beatings, and feed him – not too much, but keep him alive. I need him for a purpose; he may be useful as the cheese in my mousetrap.’ Schreiber fixed the man with a cautionary look. ‘I am holding you personally responsible for his wellbeing. Is that understood?’

  The Kommandant stiffened but resisted any argument. ‘Yes Kriminalinspector,’ he said, saluting; he then shook hands with him and ordered the guard to open the gate. Outside a car was waiting. ‘we shall go to Turckheim,’ he told the driver, ‘I want to talk with the baker.’

  In Turckheim he lodged at the Hotel des Deux Clefs, a fifteenth century building with comfortable rooms and close to the bakery.

  ‘There is a phone call for you, Kriminalinspector.’ An elderly man in a black waistcoat with a long bib and apron hung round his neck stood at the door. The man smelled of the wine cellar and Schreiber guessed he had been tapping barrels before he had been sent scurrying up the stairs on this errand. Young men were in short supply since the war; the old were everywhere and doing more than one job. ‘Will you come now or shall I tell them you will call back later.’

  ‘No,’ Schreiber said, ‘I will come now. Where is it?’

  ‘At the reception,’ the old man replied and turning walked away towards the stairs.

  ‘Ja, this is Schreiber, who is it?

  ‘Becker, Herr Kriminalinspector. Peter Becker from Albrecht Strasse.’

  ‘Ah, Becker – do you have something for me?’

  ‘The numbers in Herr Kandler’s notebook – they are file numbers in the archives. It looks like he was collecting information.’

  ‘Do we know what kind of information? Is there a pattern?’

  ‘I don’t know but I’ll work on it for you, Herr Kriminalinspector, if you wish.’

  ‘Yes, do so – and Becker, don’t let anyone else know you are doing it. Keep it to yourself and only report to me. Is that clear?’

  ‘Yes, Herr Kriminalinspector.’

  ‘Oh, and is there any news from the SD on Ludwig Kraus?’

  ‘Nothing so far as I know.’

  ‘Let me know if you hear anything.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  CHAPTER 6

  Abbeville, northern France

  The drone of the Lycoming engine hummed hypnotically; they were an hour out of Northolt as the Auster skimmed the water at less than 200 feet. Below them, under the moonlight, the Channel looked black and glassy, reflecting back the image of the silver orb like an iridescent bowling ball. They had been steadily dropping altitude since they left the cliffs at North Foreland. The chalk bastion wall that stretched, sheer faced, all the way along through Dover and Brighton and onto the Jurassic coast was now slipping away behind them. Looking back, he could still see its outline, a visible strip of white marking the margin where Britain ended and the Channel began.

  ‘Lovely little engine,’ the pilot called to him over the thrumming. ‘Never misses a beat. Shame about the crate they’ve put it in. Terrible airframe – flaps about like a string bag.’

  ‘How much longer?’ Grainger leaned over and shouted in his ear.

  ‘Twenty minutes. That’s Saint-Valery-sur-Somme over there; you can just make it out in the moonlight. We’ll keep away to the left of it, come down to around 50 feet and straight up the estuary. That should keep us under their radio detection. We’ll follow the canal the rest of the way in. It’s mostly marshes then farmland, so we shouldn’t meet anything. I’ll put you down just short of Abbeville. You’re on your own after that.’

  Hidden among the trees at the edge of the field a small band of the Abbeville resistance cell waited and listened for the sound of the Lycoming. They had learned to distinguish its soft purring, which was how they knew it was their plane – soft like a moth in the night it came in quietly. The group had formed shortly after France had surrendered. They were new at the game of resistance, but so was everyone in France. The groups were not organised, they had just sprung up, amateurs, fuelled by resentment and anger at the brutal arrogance of their occupiers. They needed arms to resist, but they had none, or at least very few.

  There were six of them with only an old Clement revolver and a Lebel rifle, a relic of the Great War, between them. They knew they would be no match for a German patrol if they were discovered, but it made them feel better – anyway help was coming, packed in boxes in the Auster: ten new Sten guns, a thousand rounds, explosives, detonators and a box of Mills bombs.

  ‘That’s bloody risky,’ Grainger shouted above the noise of the engine as they got sight of the landing flares set out below them. ‘What if Fritz sees them?’

  The pilot throttled back and adjusted the flaps. He could see the markers now, little dots of flaming oil-soaked rags laid out in a line – a rudimentary flight path.

  ‘Well, you’re not going to get down any other way – not unless you want me to stick her nose in the deck.’

  ‘Prefer not, thanks all the same.’

  The needle on the airspeed indicator dropped to 30 knots and it felt as if they were standing still, but the plane was still flying. Then there was a quiet thump, the Auster gave a little hop and a skip, then the wheels were running through the grass. The engine stuttered to a halt and there was silence. Grainger opened the flimsy door and jumped down. There was a frost; his foot slipped and the next thing he was sitting on the ground.

  The pilot laughed. ‘Try to stay upright, old chap.’

  The first member of the group reached him as he got to his feet. ‘Welcome to France,’ he said. ‘I am Michel and we are very pleased to see you.’ He hugged Grainger enthusiastically.

  The others gathered round as the pilot started to hand down the boxes of supplies. There were four young men and two women. ‘Come on,’ he called to Grainger, ‘help get this stuff out. I don’t want to hang around any longer than I have to – Jerry could turn up any time.’

  It took less than ten minutes to unload. Clear of its cargo, the pilot fired up the engine. He taxied the Auster down the field then turned for the take-off run. Minutes later the purr of the engine had faded and the silence returned.

  The men – if he could call them such because to Grainger they looked hardly more than teenagers – ferried the boxes into the trees, running as they went, while the women extinguished the burning rags, picking them up as they went along. Nobody wanted to leave a trace for the Germans or some informer to find and set off a hunt.

  ‘What now?’ Grainger asked when they had finally got everything into the cover of the woods.

  ‘Now we bury it,’ one of them said. ‘My name is Robert. This is Antoine, he is Georges and these two fair young ladies are Charlotte and Hélène.’

  Robert and Georges pulled aside a bush and grabbed at something unseen in the grass. They hauled out a wooden frame, covered in undergrowth and clods of earth to disguise it, revealing a large pit. ‘We will leave everything here and collect what we need when we need it. It is too dangerous to carry it in the dark; there are many German patrols.’

  They set out on foot, staying in the cover of the hedgerows that lined the road to Abbeville until they reached a hamlet. The sky was clouding over and the moon had gone. Somewhere a dog barked, letting everyone know that someone was out on the street. ‘Where are we?’ Grainger asked in a hushed voice.

  ‘Grand-Laviers. We’ll stay here tonight,’ Michel whis
pered, looking over to Grainger. ‘Tomorrow we can go into the city. Someone else from the group will take you from there.’

  ‘What’s that?’ Charlotte held up a hand – everyone stopped. There was the unmistakeable sound of a truck approaching.

  ‘Patrol,’ Michel called under his breath, ‘everyone over the wall!’ They scrambled over the low flint and brick bulwark that surrounded the churchyard. ‘Keep your heads down.’

  The truck was moving fast; it sped through the hamlet, heading in the direction of the field they had so recently left. ‘Some bastard has seen us and tipped off the Boche,’ Georges hissed through his teeth, not bothering to hide his contempt. ‘My country

  is full to overflowing with cowards and degenerates.’

  ‘It’s true,’ Antoine agreed, ‘there are collaborators everywhere. These days they will sell you for a cup of coffee or a pack of Gitanes.’

  ‘Quiet!’ Again Michel held up a hand. ‘There’s more.’

  The sound got closer, then stopped; a motorbike with a sidecar was somewhere close. The voices of two Germans drifted across to them; they were very close. The dog began to bark again. Michel signalled they should move and started to crawl deeper into the grounds of the church. They heard the scrunch of gravel under the jackboots of the patrol and the sound of banging on a door, then shouting in German, ‘Offen, offen!’, followed by more banging.

  ‘They’re going from house to house. We can’t stay here.’

  They had made it to the back of the church but nobody had a plan. The arms they were carrying were next to useless. They could probably get the drop on the two Germans, but then what? Sound travels; the truckload that had gone through earlier would be on them like a swarm of angry wasps. Besides, less than a month before they had executed fifty citizens of Abbeville, picked out of their houses at random – a reprisal for one German officer killed by a résistant. For two German soldiers they might easily kill everyone in the hamlet, men women and children – after all what were two hundred or so French souls to these swine?

  They waited. ‘Robert,’ Michel whispered, ‘I think you should try to get to your house. If they get there before you it could be bad for your parents. Hurry – leave the rifle. We’ll hide it and get our friend here on to the safe house.’

  They left the hamlet, crossing the fields, moving from one small copse to another until they reached the outskirts of Abbeville. There they dispersed with Antoine, Georges and the two women going their different ways.

  The house was large and set back from the street behind high iron railings with pointed spearheads. On the stone pillar support of a large ornamental gate, the polished brass plate stated it was the residence of Docteur Etienne Giraud. Behind the gate what had once been an ornamental garden was now turned over to growing vegetables. Food was short, the Germans were requisitioning everything from the farms and there was less and less to be had in the markets; in the towns people were starving.

  The journey from the drop-off point to the town had been short but it had shown just how tightly controlled things were, how risky even local movement could be. ‘How are you going to get me into Paris,’ he asked the doctor, ‘moving about looks bloody difficult under these conditions?’

  Dr Giraud made a little hand gesture that said there were ways. ‘I have friends in the Deuxième Bureau. They have prepared your papers. The Germans still need them to spy on us; they can’t do it themselves – the Gestapo does not really understand the nuances of what is going on. It has been easier to leave much of the civil structure in place, which, of course, is good for us, because we can exploit their blindness.’

  ‘It’s good to know there are some grown-ups knocking around. The group that met me were hardly out of short trousers.’

  Giraud looked slightly embarrassed but he let the remark pass. ‘You’ll be better looked after in Paris. Your contact there was in the Legion; he knows what he is doing – and he’s a patriot.’

  Over dinner that evening they laid out the plans for his movement to Paris. It was over a hundred miles and the roads were not good – it would take all day even in the doctor’s new Renault, which was the latest model; he’d got it just before the declaration of war and didn’t know when, if ever, he would be able to buy another one.

  ‘I am able to travel at the moment. I have clients in Paris. I’m a consultant at the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital, but it won’t be easy because you can expect to be stopped in almost every town to show your papers.’

  His wife came into the room followed by a young girl carrying a tureen. She put it down on the table, then went back to the kitchen.

  ‘Marianne is the daughter of one of our patients,’ his wife said, with a hint of sadness in her voice. ‘Her parents were arrested; she stays with us for the moment. Nobody seems to know why or what’s going on.’ A look of distress spread across Madame Giraud’s face and Grainger thought she was going to cry. ‘It’s like living in a nightmare.’ She shook her head in a sorry gesture of resignation, then taking off the lid from the tureen regained her composure. ‘Rabbit stew,’ she said, as if apologising for it.

  ‘Mmm, smells good to me,’ Grainger said, trying to lighten the mood.

  ‘Well, it would to a man who has been travelling for as long as you have,’ the doctor laughed. ‘I don’t suppose a bite has passed your lips since you left England,’ and he put out a hand to touch his wife on her arm and gave it a little rub to comfort her.

  ‘Now,’ the doctor said, changing the subject, ‘we need to do something about your papers. They’re good but they don’t fit you.’

  Grainger pulled a look that said, ‘How so.’

  ‘Your French is commendable but your accent is all wrong. A German might not notice but a gendarme would. Worse, there is the Carlingue – have you heard of them?’ Grainger nodded.

  ‘They are more dangerous than the Germans because they will hear your accent and know you are not from France. I have an idea to arrange papers that are impeccable. You will be a member of the SS security agency the Sicherheitsdienst, the SD. Your home town will be Saarbrucken, right on the old German border in the Lorraine region, a place where the accent is so awful most French would not understand it – and neither do most Germans, for that matter. It will take two days but they will be proper papers, not poorly made fakes like many are, and you will be able to go anywhere you need without problems.’

  He paused for a moment, looking Grainger up and down. ‘And we shall have to get you a change of clothes. Those don’t look right – you look like an Englishman.’

  As they finished the remains of their meal the doctor produced a bottle of apple brandy. ‘This,’ he said with a look of resignation, ‘will fortify the coffee – which is real, but this is the third time we have used the grinds. Everything has to be made to go further these days.’ Then he added, ‘Black market, a gift from one of my patients. We shut the windows when we brew it in case the neighbours smell it and inform on us; no one is supposed to have real coffee any more. Sad what we have come to.’

  Grainger looked puzzled. ‘I don’t understand why there are so many informers.’

  ‘Oh, it’s not so hard to understand really. Times are bad, people are insecure, many of them think the Germans will win this war. There are some who hope they will; they want to be rid of the old regime.’

  As he lay in the comfort of a soft bed that night he found himself thinking how surreal it was to be drifting off in the middle of enemy territory – right under their noses.

  CHAPTER 7

  The Priest of Saint-Sacremont

  There was the shrill of a whistle; she felt the carriage jerk; they were moving. Evangeline was out of Dijon, but into what? She was adrift and cut off. The train was gathering speed and in less than an hour it would reach Chalon-sur-Saône, the border with Vichy. She did not have a travel permit for Vichy. Her papers showed that her grandmother was from a German family living in the new Rhineland state of Alsace – Alsace was considered as part of t
he homeland by the German authorities; that might get her through but she knew it was slim. Rushed along by the speeding train, she was being propelled into a danger she could not avoid; she was like a drowning woman grasping at any bit of flotsam that might save her. It occurred to her that she might escape the net that lay in wait by getting off at Chalon and trying to pass undetected from the station: a lot of provincial towns, she knew, had stations with open-ended quais that just drifted off into the open surroundings. If she could evade the security there was a chance she could slip across the border into Vichy by one of the small farm tracks that threaded through the fields linking the hamlets and villages together.

  A man on the seat opposite her leaned forward. ‘Are you all right, mademoiselle?’ he said, showing some concern. ‘You look very pale.’

  She shook her head. ‘I am fine, just a little tired that’s all; I find travelling very taxing.’

  ‘Have you come far then?’

  This was a conversation she did not want to have. She could not afford to arouse suspicion or look out of place. Any one of the people around her could be an informer just looking for signs of the unusual to report to the authorities. ‘I’m from Alsace,’ she said, trying to think of a way to halt the conversation, but he wouldn’t leave it there.

  ‘Are you travelling far?’

  ‘To Lyon.’

  She wished he would shut up; others sitting near her now started to take an interest in the conversation. A woman sitting next to the man joined in, uninvited. ‘Do you have relatives living there?’ She looked hard at Evangeline – maybe she was suspicious.