The Woman From Saint Germain

by J. R. Lonie

  The book he was talking about, she realised, was her own. Her instinct was to accuse him of theft, but that wasn’t instinct, that was prejudice. He’d saved it, after all. If only he’d saved her cosmetics, whose loss was even worse than losing the cigarettes. Either would have been bad enough. To lose both was a catastrophe.

  ‘I hope you enjoy it,’ she said, forcing out the words, one by one. She thought she must have sounded false and, in a way, she was, but only partly so. The beginning of the sentence might have been completely false but, by the end, it was wholly true. Except this book was the last of hers she’d want him to read. She feared how he would surely misread Selina. She’d rather die than be exposed for what had been only a momentary lapse of taste.

  A small skein of grey geese crossed the sky above, stragglers on the migration south whose calls woke Eleanor up to where she was. She looked up to see the last of them fly towards the Pyrénées. Oh, to have wings. At least she knew which way was Spain and which way was Pau. She even heard ducks on the river.

  ‘They wouldn’t survive a minute on the Seine these days,’ she mused grimly. He was quiet. Water flowed gently over rapids nearby. For a fleeting moment, as he listened, his jaw relaxed, his eyes seemed wide and blue and innocent – but then, as he struggled against the charms of the tranquil landscape, his eyes blinked, their colour clouded, as did his face, and his jaw tightened. Struggle over. He was still in enemy territory, after all.

  ‘We must go in Pau,’ he said abruptly, as if any delay might cause the outbreak of, if not friendly, at least ‘fraternal’ relations. They were of one mind on that, if only he’d realised. He set off.

  ‘You’re heading back the way you came,’ she said drily. ‘That way,’ she said and pointed. ‘How you survived in the army, I do not know.’

  ‘My lieutenant always knows the way,’ he said.

  Then she remembered the dogs. What were they going to do about them?

  What on earth was she talking about? ‘What dogs?’

  ‘The Germans have dogs. What if they walk the tracks and find where we got off the train? They’ll follow us unless we get the hell out of this nasty little town as soon as possible.’

  ‘First we must go in this nasty little town,’ he replied, which she conceded, just as he conceded they had to deal with the possibility of the dogs.

  ‘Come,’ he said, ‘bring your canteen.’

  He slipped down the bank to the river’s edge. She followed. They filled their canteens. He told her they would climb back up along the exact track they’d taken down. He splashed some of the water over the ground under the bushes, washing away their tracks and the marks they’d made.

  ‘Now we walk back along the track,’ he said. ‘Quickly, before another train comes.’ He beckoned her to walk along one rail, he on the other, their arms clasped to keep themselves balanced. He wasn’t certain it would work, he said, but hoped just one train on the line after them would confuse any trail.

  ‘I can balance myself,’ she said, but when she tried to walk along the rail, she was off after two steps.

  She steeled herself as she felt his hand and arm on hers, and she kept her head. She was astonished by his strength. He could have lifted her up and carried her – or just as easily hurled her away. In the firmness of his grip, she knew that, unlike her own feelings, she could trust him. She knew he didn’t like her one bit, for which she was currently grateful, but here they were, thanks to the Nazis, stuck to each other for the time being.

  After a short distance, they clambered up to the edge of a roadway. There was no house or farm they could see, no one to observe them. Where Eleanor found her own strength, she a light smoker who walked only to get to the Metro or from the entrance of the Louvre to whichever painting was taking her fancy, it had to be the luck of her genetic inheritance. The Gortons were a tough lot, after all, as was her mother’s family, some of whom had survived the first winter of the Plymouth Plantation.

  ‘Which way?’ he asked.

  She would go ahead on one side, he behind her on the other, she said. But first she asked him his name.

  ‘What?’ he said, irritation being his default reaction.

  ‘Your French name.’

  He hesitated. ‘Roget,’ he said, digging it out of his memory at last, but he couldn’t remember his Christian name.

  ‘Too late,’ she said, not without a sense of superiority. ‘You’re under arrest.’

  ‘Yes,’ he confirmed, ‘you are making a criminal very well.’

  ‘Anton,’ she told him. ‘Anton Roget from Toulouse. Let’s hope that’s all they ask you if we’re stopped.’

  They came quickly to a road.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘not this one.’

  ‘But it goes to the town,’ she argued. ‘Look, you can see it, up there.’ She pointed.

  ‘No, this road is not wise,’ he said. It was a main road; the enemy would use this road. They had to find another way, a side road where they would not stand out. Eleanor thought it didn’t matter which road they took. As she’d seen in the mirror of her compact, she looked much worse than any local. No one here would miss her, or him, for what they were. Refugees. She withdrew Mrs Teixeira’s cross from inside her blouse so that it showed over the top of her coat.

  RAILWAY MARSHALLING YARD, GARE DE PAU

  Around 3pm, Friday, 12th December 1941

  Bauer waited at the entrance to the marshalling yards near the main railway station close to the confluence of the Gave de Pau and a smaller river below the town. A cold wind was gusting. He had heard rain was forecast so was relieved to see French flags streaming against a blue sky from the chateau along the ramparts above. He heard the train approaching and soon the locomotive with its haul of boxcars behind crawled onto the track he’d reserved. No one could slip away, especially as each car had been locked a few kilometres down the line on his orders.

  ‘That’ll surprise them,’ he’d told Kopitcke. They had only recently learnt that the cars were being kept unlocked as a help to escapees.

  The train had passed through Toulouse and Tarbes and Lourdes under close observation without stopping. If they’d disembarked along the way, to what purpose when their goal had to be Spain, and Pau was the gateway? He’d soon have them, if not this train, the next, due in four hours, or the one after. The gendarmes were at the railway station, ready to check the papers of those on board the next passenger train, due in about twenty minutes. They too had dogs.

  The freight locomotive released its steam and expired. The wind blew along the track and whistled through the nearby passenger shed. The guard stepped down nervously from his van to find Bauer and the dogs chafing to be let loose. While Kopitcke kept the locomotive crew back, Bauer had the guard unlock each boxcar, one by one, and pull back the door. The dogs sniffed everything, even running back to Bauer to sniff him. They kept doing it until the fourth car, where, even before the guard hauled back the door, they quivered with excitement and leapt up, barking.

  Two young men stood at the door, downcast and defeated. All this way, their faces said, and right at the border we’re caught. An older man and woman quailed in the corner. Bauer ordered them down and had the dogs inspect the males closely to find if they were carrying a cat. Fleas and lice probably, by the way they scratched themselves, but no cat. The four were taken to a nearby holding shed. Towards the guard’s van, Bauer found another two men in a car and, dear God, with them, a small boy who had the most abusive mouth on a child he had ever encountered, a criminal in the making if ever he saw one. Neither of his companions had a cat. He ordered them all taken to the holding room.

  ‘Juifs?’ he asked once inside with the first captives. He demanded their identification papers, which had them all being as French as Marshal Pétain. ‘Juden?’

  ‘Français,’ the older man insisted. ‘Français.’ So Bauer addressed him in French, which the fellow could not speak.

  ‘Sind Sie Juden?’ Bauer asked again but in a kind voice.
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  The older man and woman burst into tears. ‘Bitte, bitte,’ they both begged him – please, please. They were Austrian.

  ‘Sie auch?’ Bauer asked of the two young men. You too? They nodded. He had them searched for knives, just in case, but both were clean. The fight in them was long gone. They weren’t made for this: one minute leading a comfortable Viennese bourgeois life and the next day outcasts. Bauer could see they wouldn’t make it, and that wouldn’t be because of him. He wasn’t the slightest bit interested in them. He was glad he’d detailed Kopitcke to make a proper search of each boxcar, otherwise he’d have had no end of trouble explaining why he wasn’t going to waste time over a bunch of assimilated Jews caught on the wrong side of a frontier.

  ‘Los,’ he said. ‘Los nach Spanien. Geh mal!’ Go on, go to Spain. Go.

  They didn’t believe he meant it, thinking they’d be shot if they took him at his word. He repeated himself, opened the door, and even then, they were too afraid.

  ‘Um Gottes Willen, los!’ he snapped, and they ran.

  He turned to the two young men with the foul-mouthed child. They said they were brothers and French and had papers saying so, even the disgusting child. They were coming south to work on their uncle’s farm, because they were too poor. And so on. They probably were brothers, all three, but the elder two were smugglers and their little brother, an apprentice in the trade, a useful decoy. He sent them to the gendarmes.

  Watching them go, he was filled with a sudden and bitter resentment. Why were these two brothers here, petty criminals to boot, and his two sons were not? He’d heard nothing more about Georg. No news wasn’t necessarily good news. The wind whistled through the gaps in the wooden walls of the shed.

  Kopitcke burst in. ‘Herr Kommissar,’ he called out excitedly. He was carrying a valise. ‘The dogs found this in one of the cars, female clothing inside.’ He placed it on the table and opened it.

  ‘En français, Kopitcke, français,’ Bauer said through gritted teeth as he pulled on his white gloves and started to go through the valise. Yes, woman’s clothing – underwear, brassiere, damp socks – and good quality by the feel of the material. A dress whose lower parts were still damp. He smelt it. Unmistakeable. This wasn’t water from a city or town tap with its chlorine. This was from a river or creek. Yes, a well was a possibility, but it was unlikely given the circumstances. With access to his crime-lab boys back home, he’d be able to prove it, probably even which river, given a little more time. Now his olfactories would have to do; they rarely failed him. Until proven otherwise, this dress had waded the Allier. A carton of cigarettes. Chesterfield. Here was further proof, but also temptation for Bauer. He allowed himself a moment to acknowledge the benefit of Kopitcke’s Hitler Youth devotion to clean living, only to dismiss it: he’d take the cigarettes for his boys. They were a good omen that Georg was safe. Then he found a large bag tucked into the bottom of the valise. He opened it to find it packed with cosmetics: hand crème, face crème, two lipsticks – neither a colour a respectable woman like his wife would wear, he thought – and three bottles of scent. He looked at the makes. Corday, Patou, Schiaparelli. He had no idea but figured they were costly.

  ‘There’s so much,’ said Kopitcke. ‘Maybe she’s smuggling.’

  ‘Possibly,’ Bauer replied absently. ‘But vanity seems more likely as each has been used.’ It was a wrench handing over the cosmetics to the police rather than his wife, but he had a higher purpose. ‘Fingerprints please,’ he said. ‘Urgent.’

  ‘So, Kopitcke,’ he said. ‘You’re a rich woman who needs to get over the line for whatever reason. Why, once you’re in Vichy, do you travel in a boxcar? What’s your theory?’

  Kopitcke hesitated; he always did. Just in case.

  ‘Come on then,’ Bauer encouraged.

  ‘She’s a foreign Jew,’ he replied, ‘not French.’

  ‘Agreed,’ Bauer said but diminished Kopitcke’s pleasure by adding, ‘except what is the evidence here to say she’s a Jew?’

  He followed Kopitcke to the boxcar.

  ‘How did she get past us, eh?’ he asked. Kopitcke knew the question was rhetorical. ‘She was warned,’ Bauer answered himself. ‘Who warned her? Why, the guard warned her, because only the guard knew.’

  ‘We’ll arrest him,’ said Kopitcke, ‘and get it out of him.’

  ‘We’re in Vichy France, young man,’ Bauer reminded him. ‘But why warn the woman and not the Jews, eh? Or the French brothers?’ he asked. He chuckled, warming to his subject. ‘Because she paid him, that’s why, and the others didn’t.’ Kopitcke could have told him that. You didn’t need to be a genius to work that out. She was rich and, he was convinced, a Jewess.

  ‘This it?’ Bauer asked.

  He hoisted himself up, not without a stretch: he was beginning to feel his age. Getting one-armed Kopitcke up was no effort at all. Losing one arm had put the strength of two into the one remaining.

  ‘Let’s have a look here,’ said Bauer.

  Kopitcke sneezed, his eyes watered, his nose streamed.

  ‘It’s only the dust,’ Bauer said.

  ‘No, sir,’ said Kopitcke. ‘Cats. They make me sneeze.’

  Bauer snorted, in a mix of annoyance and elation. ‘Why tell me that now?’ he demanded. ‘I needn’t have organised those dogs if I’d known your nose would do it.’ But he’d sniffed something else. ‘Hah,’ he said, pushing his face closer into one of the corners. ‘My nose isn’t too bad either. Look at that.’

  Small lumps of cat shit, recently deposited.

  ‘They’re here in Pau,’ Bauer said with a smile and clasped his hands. It gave him hope for his son, ridiculous as that might seem under the cold light of reason, and wholly without evidence – in great contrast to the cat shit and the valise they’d just found.

  ‘You take the dogs to where the train was stopped. See if you can find a trail and report back.’

  *

  Kopitcke, the French handlers and their two dogs, went back along the railway line to where the train had been stopped, Kopitcke and the dogs with enthusiasm, the two handlers at a sullen trudge. The dogs quickly found their quarries had slipped away from the train and down to the river.

  ‘How deep’s the river?’ Kopitcke asked and was directed to the rapids not far away. They could have walked along the edge in the water and crossed there.

  Kopitcke agreed, but then they heard the approach of the next passenger train from Toulouse and watched from below the embankment as the overcrowded cars staggered past behind a locomotive that belched vast plumes of dirty brown smoke.

  Driven by eyes and mouth, which were smarting from the smut filling the air, and with his sinuses overflowing, Kopitcke hurried to cross the river. But on the other bank, no matter that the dogs sniffed up and downstream for some hundreds of metres, they picked up no scent. Returning to the railway embankment, he had the dogs sniff up and down the line. At first they found what might be something, but soon lost it and then they dithered, awaiting direction. Moments later, one found the scent of a rabbit, which leapt from its hiding place with the two dogs in excited chase. The handlers, ignoring Kopitcke’s shouts to return, followed with an enthusiasm previously entirely lacking, and though they came back empty-handed, they were still excited and began extolling the virtues of rabbit casserole to Kopitcke, for whom French cuisine was a torture of foreign tastes, textures and smells.

  These French, he grumbled inwardly. He’d tell the boss exactly what he thought of them.

  *

  The guard who had locked the doors and the engineer who had helped him were outside, grumpy and aggrieved but also fearful. They figured, being German and in civilian clothes, Bauer had to be Gestapo. What had they done to be apprehended? they complained to Kopitcke as he came out of the boxcar. The engineer who’d been roped into this by the guard was particularly indignant. Bauer barked at them to be patient. He would see them one at a time.

  Bauer’s perfect French tempered the mood only momen
tarily after the guard was brought in, he who had indeed warned Eleanor and Henk to escape. He kept his cigarette and puffed furiously on it as he aggressively protested his innocence. Too much, thought Bauer. He calmly assured the guard that he only wanted information about a young man and an older woman travelling together. The evidence indicated they’d been in that particular boxcar. He wasn’t at all concerned whether the guard had warned them to escape or why. If he’d been in the same situation, he said, and money had been offered, well, he’d have taken it too. Times were tough. All he wanted was descriptions of the two, as detailed as possible.

  ‘They – the young man, most probably – murdered two German soldiers in cold blood – not at the front, not as an act of warfare, which would have been entirely legitimate if committed by a soldier of the opposing forces. No,’ Bauer explained, ‘this was a cowardly ambush on two poor nineteen-year-old kids, barely out of their mothers’ hands. The woman is his accomplice.’

  The guard didn’t trust the German, and he was putting an awful lot of trust in his colleague. ‘Shut your gob about me saying the lock wasn’t working,’ he’d said the moment they knew they were to be questioned. ‘This is half what they gave me,’ he’d said and had handed over a third, which the engineer had taken, no questions. Not the cigarettes, however. They were secret gold. ‘You betray me, everyone will know,’ he’d added.

  ‘You got any kids?’ Bauer asked him now.

  ‘Yes,’ the guard replied, taking the cigarette offered by Bauer. ‘A couple of girls and a boy.’

  ‘How old’s the boy?’ Bauer asked. This terrified the guard.

  ‘No, m’sieur,’ he pleaded. ‘He’s only ten. You can’t.’

  Bauer kicked himself mentally, realising perfectly well the manner in which his words had been received. He apologised. He hadn’t meant to threaten the man’s kids.

  ‘I was thinking only of when your boy goes into the army,’ he explained. ‘A fight fair and square between two opposing forces – we’ve lived through that and we know, you and I, that you’d want your boy to survive. But what if the fight’s not fair? He’d have no chance. That’s what we’re dealing with here.’