The Woman From Saint Germain

by J. R. Lonie

  ‘It’s too dangerous,’ said Silvan. He slammed the door, not having switched off the motor. ‘You’re all safer getting there separately.’ He found the gear, released the clutch and drove away as quickly as the old crate would go. Henk raced after them, his fist raised as he cursed them in what Eleanor took to be his reddest Dutch. It certainly sounded so, though to what avail? As useful as a dog chasing cars. He stopped and walked back, his fury unabated. The French, resigned to things, had already started to enter the station building. Who knew when or even if a train was due.

  ‘If only you shouted louder,’ Eleanor muttered at him, ‘the Germans in Paris could hear you.’

  ‘Sons of bitches,’ he said, ignoring her sarcasm. Then they saw Silvan and Al driving back towards them. Henk ran onto the road to stop them. Silvan slowed, avoided Henk, pulled up by Eleanor and the Hungarian. Al leant out of the window.

  ‘The Café du Levant,’ he called out quickly, ‘in the Croix Rousse.’ With that, Silvan sped away.

  ‘What?’ Henk said and Eleanor repeated it.

  ‘Where the hell is that?’ he asked.

  ‘Lyon, presumably,’ Eleanor said, pleased at least that in winter this village was in a state of summery midday torpor. No one was about to witness this latest public declaration of their plight.

  Where exactly were they? She saw the sign but that was hardly useful. She’d never heard of the place. She went inside. Was the ticket office open? It was. She saw her fellow passengers crowding the window. Were there trains? When and where to? They could go to Vichy, or to Clermont-Ferrand and, yes, to Lyon, but the next train heading for Lyon would not be until the evening. Some bought tickets for Vichy, anything to keep moving. The Hungarian and Eleanor bought for Lyon. The man at the counter, who easily figured out what was going on, cautioned them not to sit together. He suggested the two sisters and Eleanor might sit inside, not only to get out of the cold but because this was not a busy station and the gendarmes might think it odd to see a group of people so many hours before a train was due. ‘They are nervous,’ he added. ‘More than usual.’ He didn’t know why.

  The two sisters did as he suggested. Before Eleanor followed them, she noticed Henk. He had not yet bought a ticket.

  ‘Why not?’ she asked.

  ‘I already pay to be taken to Pau,’ he said. ‘Why must I pay now to go to Lyon when I do not have enough money?’

  For once she agreed with him. She bought him a ticket.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said and sat quietly with his cat away from everyone else under the platform canopy, which was just a tin shed. If gendarmes paid another visit, he wanted to be able to get away easily.

  Eleanor came out after fifteen minutes to have a cigarette, her rationing rule forgotten. She couldn’t in conscience not offer him one.

  ‘Why do you still insist on going to Pau?’ she asked.

  ‘If you have no visa for Spain, it is the best place to cross.’

  ‘I keep telling you,’ she said, exasperated, ‘the Pyrénées are in the way and it’s winter. Cèrbère is much easier and closer, not to mention a whole lot nicer.’

  ‘The Nazis do not expect you to cross there now, so it is better,’ he said, not without some logic, she conceded. He took out the knife he’d stolen from the German soldier and began to pare his fingernails.

  ‘Would you mind putting that thing away?’ she said.

  ‘You do not like being a criminal?’ he taunted, resting the knife in his hand.

  ‘What I don’t like is being a sitting duck,’ she said. ‘I’m not a criminal.’

  ‘You travel on forged identity papers,’ he countered. ‘Is this not criminal, “Mama”?’

  ‘Well, “Sonny”,’ she said, ‘I’m doing you a big favour. I’m not, as you so put it, sitting out this war. I’m duty-bound as an American to break a bad law, and by definition, any Nazi law is bad.’

  ‘This is a point of view morally flexible, is it not?’ he said.

  ‘On the contrary, the principle couldn’t be clearer,’ she replied.

  ‘You just decide yourself what is a bad law. How is that a principle?’

  ‘A bad law,’ she said, enjoying defending herself and the American constitution, ‘is one that oppresses individual liberty.’

  ‘And how do you defeat these tyrants? With nice words in book?’ He ostentatiously sheathed the knife back inside his sock. ‘Is it not a bad law that the few have all the wealth while the many have nothing?’

  ‘That’s got nothing to do with law. That’s human nature,’ she countered. ‘In the United States of America, if you have money, it’s your duty to help the less fortunate, just as I paid for your lunch. And your train ticket.’

  Get yourself out of that, she said to herself. She might not have convinced him, but she’d argued him into a corner and it pleased her that he frowned and could say nothing.

  A pair of pigeons flapped above them in the canopy, the only signs of life. Outside, the place was deathly still. Not a breath of wind, just the damp cold.

  ‘Tell me, why did you save me back there?’ she asked. Henk turned away from her. ‘You needn’t have,’ Eleanor persisted. ‘You could have stayed hidden.’

  Henk ignored her. He could see where she was going, the trap.

  ‘I’ll tell you why,’ Eleanor said, not allowing him to escape. ‘Because underneath all this left-wingery, you’re a human being with compassion. You can run all you like, but you can’t escape your condition.’

  ‘You see things differently when suddenly you are on the bottom,’ he said.

  ‘Oh?’ she said. What was this?

  Too late he realised he had let slip something about himself. A truth. He must be more careful with his anger in future and use it to save, not endanger, his own neck.

  Trains passed by in both directions but only one stopped, taking some of their number to Vichy. Eleanor tried reading James Joyce, which she found was still a perfect sedative. She dozed the rest of the afternoon away. When, much later than advertised, well into the evening, still unseen, a locomotive whistled its approach up the railway track, they ignored it. Presciently, the locomotive kept announcing its arrival, although it took quite a while before it rattled into the tiny station and stopped, exhausted. None minded it was already overcrowded, as long as it moved, which it did.

  GARE DE LYON-PERRACHE, LYON II

  Towards 6am, Thursday, 11th December 1941

  Lulled by the rhythm of the train or merely stupefied by the exertions of her journey, Eleanor dozed most of the way to Lyon. Only when the rhythm was interrupted – crossing points or a short stop – did she open her eyes. Each time, there was Henk, awake, gimlet eyes on her, fiddling with the locket on a chain around his neck, petting his cat. He was the chain around her neck, she thought, looking forward to Lyon and freedom. That was a long time coming, a night of anxiety. Something was up, though all she had to go on was her imagination, fed by the anxieties of those crowded in around her. The train stopped many times and, when it did move, one could frequently have walked as fast.

  When at last they came out of the tunnel onto the bridge over the Saône, with the Perrache station just on the other side, it was around 6am. Then the wretched train stopped yet again. Tempers flared. They’d all had enough. Soon the chatter reached their carriage. Another train was ahead of them and the station was in uproar because of a disturbance.

  A riot? Communists? Yes, the reds were at it again.

  Eleanor saw Henk come alive when he heard the only word in any language that excited him. He looked to her for explanation.

  ‘Your pals are causing trouble,’ Eleanor stated the obvious.

  ‘What about?’ Henk demanded, trying to look out the window.

  It was about prices, although as everyone, including Eleanor, knew, it was really about helping the Soviet Union.

  ‘Pity they weren’t so helpful in May last year,’ Eleanor said, although she wondered how this disturbance might help the gallant ally unde
r threat so far away. She tried to look out the window. This train was going nowhere. Passengers began opening the doors and soon were pouring down the sides and along the rail line like a swarm of invading ants. They crossed the bridge in front of the train and headed towards the station, or they went back to the mouth of the tunnel so they could climb down to the road on this side of the river. Henk stood to join them.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Eleanor asked.

  ‘It is better than staying here,’ he replied, which she conceded. She clambered down after him. On the track, Henk turned to cross the bridge leading to the station on the other side of the river, where the riot was still happening. A red moth to a redder flame, she thought, a bad idea at the moment, and she said so.

  Did she know better? he demanded. Did she know of the café?

  Eleanor had no idea. She wanted merely to put distance between them and the railway station. Truth to tell, she wanted to put as much distance between herself and him, and soon she would do just that.

  ‘I’ll take you to the café, then you’re on your own, buster.’

  *

  Kommissar Bauer stood with his assistant, Kopitcke, at a window looking down over the melee on the concourse of the Perrache station, part amused, part astonished. The gendarmes were being led a chase by what seemed to him to be very few troublemakers. Like rats, they darted out from holes and then ran back into other holes, leaving the gendarmes confused. This was causing trouble just for trouble’s sake. His French counterpart, Sub-Inspector Girard, told him the real purpose was to clog the railway in order to interrupt shipments of goods north into the occupied zone.

  Thence to the Germans, he might have added.

  A good snarl would take ages to fix, connections would be missed, schedules interrupted. The reds, it was always the reds, were getting good at these sorts of seemingly random actions, Girard added.

  ‘They know they’re invulnerable,’ suggested Bauer. ‘Hang a few.’

  ‘Gladly,’ said Girard, ‘if I were in charge.’

  Where Bauer was shambolic and comfortable, Girard in his neat uniform was stiff and correct. His sympathies were entirely with the marshal in Vichy; he was one hundred percent travail, famille, patrie, and these reds were the enemy who had helped France to defeat. He was a detective, here to help Bauer, a German colleague, with his investigation, a murder, a criminal matter. Bauer, he had found so far, was correct and deferential. A professional. His French was perfect, with the hint of an Alsatian accent. He had even noticed the way Bauer tried to limit the grating effect of his unfortunate underling.

  Bauer was trying very hard. Kopitcke had changed into civilian clothes, as ordered. Looking at him, though, Bauer had no doubt that any half-blind Frenchman would see Kopitcke exactly for what he was. The new fedora was enough, but even without the hat, his hair, which was fair, was bristle-short on the sides with a severe part in the middle; his blue eyes were not friendly; his suit was suspiciously classy, while no other part of him was; and he still clicked his heels all the time. Bauer expected him to ‘Heil Hitler’ too, because that was what he had been taught. So far, it had come out only once. The heel clicking, though. ‘Kopitcke, please don’t do that,’ he said. ‘The French don’t go for it.’ He apologised to Girard about Kopitcke when first they met. ‘Don’t mind him,’ he said. It was more often that Kopitcke forgot to speak French to his boss. ‘Français, Kopitcke, français,’ Bauer kept having to remind him. ‘Ici nous sommes invités.’

  They had come to the station so that Bauer and Kopitcke could look over people picked off the trains by the police. If in doubt, nab them. Young or male or Jewish – that description accounted for most of the detainees. Bauer was most interested in the foreigners. They were all Jews, it turned out, mostly female, mostly older, defeated and demoralised, not the sort who’d knife two Wehrmacht soldiers to death. Besides, if any had possessed a knife, they’d since gotten rid of it. Then the riot had erupted, so Bauer, Kopitcke and Girard returned to police headquarters.

  Girard knew hostages had been taken on the other side because of the murder of the two soldiers. He knew the Germans were angry enough to start shooting if suspects weren’t produced. He was of a mind to produce a someone, no matter who it was. In Bauer he discovered a curious, old-fashioned morality.

  ‘No, inspector,’ Bauer said. ‘I want the real killer.’

  ‘But you have French hostages,’ Girard said.

  ‘All the more reason we get on with it,’ said Bauer in his charming French, although he did admit that his stomach was growling, so Girard’s offer of breakfast was timely.

  LA CROIX ROUSSE, LYON IV

  Around 7am, Thursday, 11th December 1941

  Eleanor had only a name, Café du Levant, and, she presumed, the area, La Croix Rousse, of which she had never heard, in a city that she, the Parisian, had visited only once. She asked a passer-by. Her elegant French was not lost after all. Her respondent, an elderly gentleman rugged up against the morning chill, told her it wasn’t a nice place for a lady. In as firm but ladylike a manner as possible, she said she had no choice. He led her to the quayside by the Saône.

  ‘Up there,’ he said, pointing ominously to the top of the hill on the other side of the river. ‘La Croix Rousse.’ Through the smoke and grime from the chimneys of the city, she could see tenements rising from its steep slopes. Her confidence that she would come to no harm in a place like that was, she admitted to herself, because of Henk and his knife, although, on reflection, her confidence didn’t take into account his ability and willingness to use it.

  After thanking her helper, she and Henk crossed the river from the old city and took a tram north, as directed. On further direction, they took a dubious-looking funicular up the sharp incline to La Croix Rousse, sparking Eleanor’s writerly imagination. She was hardly da Gama rounding the Cape, but she did feel the shiver of excitement that came from venturing into uncharted and possibly dangerous waters. Her imagination, at least, was not disappointed. The air was foul and she had to cover her face with her scarf against the grime. The laneways and alleys had names that spoke of the old silk-weaving industry, which still partially survived. On their way to work, Canuts, weavers in smocks and wooden clogs, slipped past like ghosts from another time, although the clogs were due more to the lack of leather, all taken by the Germans for the boots that stood on the French neck, than to any romantic attachment to the past.

  ‘There,’ she said in triumph when the Café du Levant appeared through the murk on a rare part of a street that was level, just where the man who had given her the directions said it would be. The large dirty window, the faces of the men and women inside, fogged in cigarette smoke – it perfectly fitted her imagination, still under the spell of writerly fancy.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she asked as Henk went to go inside.

  ‘The contact,’ he replied. ‘I shall ask. They owe me.’

  ‘You can’t be serious,’ she objected.

  ‘You are a rich bourgeois,’ he said with contempt. ‘Here that is not good.’

  ‘Better than being a Jew who doesn’t speak French,’ she snapped. She was at the end of her patience. She saw him smile, more a triumphant sneer. Immediately she regretted her words. Handing him the merest hint of moral superiority was intolerable. ‘I didn’t mean it like that,’ she said. She had, and he knew she had.

  ‘It is best we are honest,’ he said, handing her his wretched kitten.

  ‘Oh, no you don’t,’ she said, handing it back. ‘We’ll both go in. You sit at a separate table and leave things to me.’

  Once they were inside, eyes that ignored him picked her out like searchlights would an enemy bomber. The little shit might be right, she conceded with bad grace. This was no set for La Bohème; the cast could not leave after the curtain went down. Here conversation grumbled rather than hummed, fed on discontent and poverty. The smell of sour beer and the food, even in her hunger, made her gag. The faces lost their romantic halos.


  She lit a cigarette to settle her stomach. The searchlights picked out the packet. She could feel them. No imagination necessary.

  She glanced at her watch. Once she had found his contact, she would leave as if she really were just an extra in La Bohème. She would find herself a comfortable hotel in the main part of the city and fetch her suitcase from the railway station. Surely the riot would be over. Later, after lunch, she would go to the Spanish and Portuguese consulates, where they would stamp her American passport with the necessary visas. Soon she would be on her way home to Providence via Madrid and Lisbon, and this would be as a passing nightmare.

  She had beckoned a waiter twice. Eventually, he appeared at her table, sour-faced and surly.

  ‘Beer,’ said Eleanor. ‘Et un passage,’ she added, as if asking for a bowl of soup. The waiter nodded and left. Henk was owed his escape through to Spain, but what was the point of asking for a contact whose name she did not know when, worse, doing so might require her to explain something that was better left unexplained? The witness to their argument back in Saint Pourçain hadn’t looked as if he’d keep his mouth shut or for long. She and Henk, she figured, were on borrowed time.

  Henk sat one table away. He knew how to ask for a beer. She’d given him a cigarette and saw him lean over to a man among a small group at the table between them to get a light. And if he then didn’t take out that blasted cat. In moments, a piece of bread landed on his table from the same small group. Faces that Eleanor had found sinister and unfriendly under matted hair and worker’s caps now smiled at Henk and the cat through unshaven rutted cheeks and broken teeth. They wore rough dungarees and in their huge hands were bottles of beer, which they drank from the spout.

  ‘Pour le chat,’ said one. Henk smiled, nodded his thanks.

  ‘What’s his name?’ another asked.

  ‘Stalin,’ he replied, having foreseen the question.

  If Eleanor had been in a better frame of mind, she would have laughed. Like cat, like owner, poor thing. She saw these workers’ faces react in surprise and then they broke into broad grins. Henk’s zealous blue eyes glowed in response.