The Woman From Saint Germain

by J. R. Lonie

  ‘Fine,’ she snapped, and he had to concentrate all the harder not to say something.

  He couldn’t stand it. Her need was oppressive. ‘You speak too loudly,’ he said, dropped his pants, crawled into the bed to escape, called the cat up from the floor, where it was washing itself, and closed his eyes.

  Eleanor took up the basin. She was of a mind to tip it all over him and his wretched cat. She went back downstairs, tipped out the dirty water, washed and refilled it. At least the water was still hot. Back in the room, she took her time washing. He was asleep, although not untroubled as he tossed about, upending the cat, which decided her bed was more likely to provide a proper rest. She laughed, her mood always improved by hot water, soap and clean skin. Why hadn’t she figured this out about him before? No wonder he preferred the company of a cat. He with his emotional detachment and complete sense of entitlement was a cat too. She was safe.

  ‘What’s mine is yours, is that it, pussy?’ she said tartly as she manoeuvred herself between the sheets, upending the cat onto the floor. Though the cover was rough and scratchy, the sheets were clean. She had no need of James Joyce to send her into the arms of Morpheus; she said the Lord’s Prayer and fell asleep. Whereupon the cat jumped back up and settled itself on the pillow beside her head.

  HÔTEL COSMOPOLITAN, HEDAS, PAU

  Before 6am, Saturday, 13th December 1941

  She felt Henk’s presence, but what woke her was the cat’s protesting meow. She opened her eyes in the clammy dark to see that it had spent the night on her pillow and was not keen to move. Henk gently retracted its tiny claws from the cover, lifted it up and tucked it inside his coat.

  ‘I must go,’ he whispered. The floor creaked as he stood.

  ‘Wait,’ she said as loudly as she dared. She got up and lit a candle. She peered at her watch, just after six am.

  ‘Why so early?’ she asked. She told him the concierge mightn’t be a problem. ‘You’ll get drenched,’ she said, indicating the obvious from the clatter on the roof.

  ‘I will find shelter,’ he replied.

  ‘Why not stay here all day?’ she said.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘I would feel trapped.’ He was thinking not only of the concierge.

  She offered him money. He declined. He still had the dollars she’d given him in Lyon. Enough if something should go wrong? she wondered, but damn it all, nothing would now go wrong. When he returned in the evening, she would have two passages into Spain.

  She didn’t know what to say, so she said, ‘Don’t forget when you order, say “Je vais avoir le ragoût”, and for God’s sake, don’t feed the cat there.’

  He went to the window much more gracefully than she had managed, looked back at her and held her gaze, as close as he’d ever come to exposing to her the human being inside the carapace that his stubborn will to live had moulded around him. Then in the blink of an eye, as if he had exposed too much of himself, he turned away and told her to put out the candle. She wetted her fingers and snipped out the flame. In an instant, he was gone.

  Eleanor imagined she heard his footsteps on the slate roof. The room now felt empty and cold. It was as if he had left behind his loneliness and aloneness. He was so closed in, she wondered what he would do when escaping the Nazis was no longer his reason for being. Though she had retreated beneath the warmth of the sheets, she was too anxious to sleep further, especially as her anxieties were about him. She couldn’t in good conscience stay warm and snug while he was out in the rain and cold.

  *

  Outside, he hurried away, an unseen wraith through the murk. Why hadn’t he thanked her? he wondered. He’d intended to, but the words had failed. Words, his own, look what strife they’d got him into. Best to keep his trap shut.

  COMMISSARIAT DE POLICE, PAU

  Around 7am, Saturday, 13th December 1941

  Kommissar Bauer had risen early. Even through the dark, he had seen from his hotel window that the skies were closed over Pau. The clouds seemed only head high. Schadenfreude was the appropriate word, that German word for pleasure in someone else’s trouble.

  ‘Look out the window, Kopitcke,’ he’d said with relish once his assistant had joined him over breakfast. Something cheerful. During the night, the rain had woken him from a shallow sleep roiled by anxiety about his son. There had been no news.

  ‘Wet down here,’ he said, ‘but higher up maybe there’ll be enough snow to block Hannibal.’

  He wasn’t so foolish as to believe this would stop people trying to get away, especially if they were desperate and young. Now would be a good time, because you could expect the weather would keep the police indoors. You’d be right as far as the French police were concerned, but not for Kommissar Bauer or the German troops now fanning out along the border in patrols.

  ‘Keep at it,’ he’d told Kopitcke as he departed.

  Kopitcke’s job was to devote the morning under the sinister gazes of Marguerite de Valois and Marie de’ Medici combing the recent Wehrmacht files on deserters for likely candidates for their killer. A perfect job for Kopitcke – methodical Kopitcke, that’s what you could say about him – who seemed not at all deterred by the size of the job in front of him.

  ‘At least you’ll be out of the weather,’ he’d said on Kopitcke’s departure.

  Bauer walked briskly into the commissariat, past a saluting officer. Contrary to his expectations, not only for a Saturday but also for the time of day, his French counterpart was already in his office. The details of the wanted woman had been distributed to all the hotels and, yes, reports had come in of women seeking rooms, but too many and too general to be of much use.

  Then, as if in passing, St Jean said that one informant had reported a woman enquiring last night in a café about a passage into Spain. By the description, she sounded one and the same. ‘A lady, that’s what our man said,’ he reported. ‘Refined, not a Jew.’

  ‘What about an American accent?’ Bauer asked.

  ‘No,’ replied St Jean, ‘from Paris, although she was smoking an American cigarette, so in that place she stood out like balls on a dog.’

  ‘Aha, someone with money and connections to the black market,’ said Bauer. ‘Though,’ he added, ‘that description could also apply to an American, don’t you think?’

  Where was the café?

  ‘Rue des Cordeliers,’ St Jean said, which meant nothing to Bauer. ‘The anarchists still hate the communists who still hate the socialists,’ St Jean continued, sniffing with contempt. ‘See what happens when people stop believing in Our Saviour?’

  Bauer smiled politely. He agreed, but that horse had bolted when Galileo first raised his telescope to the sky and saw not heaven but Venus revolving around the Sun.

  ‘What of the hotels here? Would they report anything to the police?’ he asked.

  ‘They didn’t before I came here,’ St Jean replied.

  ‘The woman could be around there?’ Bauer asked.

  ‘Not in any of the reputable hotels without my knowing,’ said St Jean. ‘The disreputable ones I still have to bring under proper control.’

  Bauer said he would visit these himself. All he needed was one or two constables to accompany him. He would also like to interview the informant himself as soon as possible.

  ‘No, m’sieur,’ said St Jean. He was obdurate. One of his telephones rang and he answered it.

  Bauer wasn’t sure if the refusal concerned talking to the police informant or included getting the assistance of the constables. He’d get some clarity once St Jean was off the telephone. But until proven otherwise, this woman was surely the American half of his quarry. He would go after her, alone if necessary.

  ‘Absolutely not,’ he heard St Jean snap into the telephone. ‘Just where do they think they are? Berlin?’

  That word alone was enough to interrupt Bauer’s thoughts about catching the woman.

  He watched as St Jean cupped his hand over the mouthpiece of the first telephone and picked up a second. ‘Send
two men to the Continental immediately,’ he ordered. ‘If the two German agents don’t leave, arrest them and bring them here straightaway.’ He replaced that telephone, took up the other to report the imminent arrival of the French police, then hung up.

  ‘Two of your Gestapo agents have been demanding entry to a room in the Hôtel Continental,’ he reported to Bauer heatedly. ‘This is France, Herr Kommissar, not Germany.’

  Much as he admired St Jean’s firmness about French sovereignty, and much as he would by instinct find himself on the same side as the French concerning the Gestapo, he knew there was more to this than a matter of French pride.

  ‘Duels!’ exclaimed St Jean, whose outrage was feeding on itself. ‘Who do your colleagues think they are, the three musketeers?’

  Bauer heard the words, but really, duels? Musketeers? What on earth was St Jean foaming at the mouth about?

  ‘What?’ St Jean said, agape. ‘You don’t know?’

  Bauer certainly did not.

  ‘Late last night, the military attaché at your consulate severely wounded a Gestapo agent in a duel,’ St Jean reported. ‘If I find it happened on French soil, I’ll have both arrested.’

  Bauer certainly shared St Jean’s astonishment. A duel? In this day and age? He had no need to ask who the Gestapo man was, but St Jean immediately confirmed his guess. Pichler. Now the Gestapo were trying to gain entry into Lieutenant Wolf’s room at the Hôtel Continental, where the German consulate personnel were housed.

  ‘Is the lieutenant there now?’ Bauer asked.

  ‘No, the Gestapo picked him up outside when he returned in the early hours of this morning,’ said St Jean. ‘Yet another outrage against French sovereignty.’

  ‘Jesus Maria,’ muttered Bauer. Of all things, and at the worst time. He had to see to this. Lieutenant Wolf was a serving Wehrmacht officer.

  ‘Do you know where they’ve taken him?’ he asked.

  ‘I can guess,’ St Jean replied. ‘They’ve rented a villa on Avenue Trespoey. They think we don’t know. They do nothing without my knowing.’

  Armed with the exact location and name, Bauer ordered up his car.

  ‘Please leave this to me, inspector,’ Bauer said, promising to report back immediately, which suited St Jean perfectly. The moment he was free of Bauer, he would have the water to the Villa St Albert cut off. A difficult leak that would take as long to fix as the Gestapo were causing him grief.

  From the car, Bauer ordered Kopitcke over to the commissariat. It would be a wasted effort sending his assistant into Hedas after the woman; he was just too damn German. But he was good at being a pest to the French.

  ‘Bring those files with you,’ he continued. ‘You can keep working on them at the commissariat.’

  RUE BERNADOTTE, THE CAFÉ DES DEUX POISSONS, PAU

  After 8am, Saturday, 13th December 1941

  Eleanor descended the stairs as quietly as she could, hoping she mightn’t alert Madame Dumas, but too bad, there was Dumas, bonjouring gaily, hoping Madame Roget had slept well, she was sure she had, but surely madame wasn’t going out in this weather. Eleanor replied that she had no choice. Alas, said Dumas, she had already lent the umbrella to someone else, she was so sorry.

  Outside, the rain was easing, but the pathway was waterlogged and muddy, so she had to pick her way carefully to get to the alleyway that led up to the street. The concierge’s smiles and kindnesses were easier to take from afar. At the exit to the street, she realised she had no idea where to go. She’d omitted to ask the Spaniard the night before where Rue Bernadotte was, and the last person she was going to ask for directions was the concierge. Now, with the weather keeping everyone else indoors and Eleanor wary of asking around, she’d have to find it herself. Given Bernadotte had been one of Napoleon’s generals, she assumed he hadn’t started life in the medieval quarter but on its edge. Surely the town would celebrate one of their own becoming king of Sweden. After some traipsing up and down, she walked twice along one street, up to where it came to a large square, and voila, the Caserne Bernadotte. Then she saw the sign, Rue Bernadotte. She made her way back, though initially without seeing any sign for a café with the two fish.

  ‘Oh for God’s sake, Pisces!’ she cried out in frustration. To her astonishment, her voice conjured the place up, just as if she were Ali Baba with his ‘Open sesame’. There it was, staring at her, the Piscean symbol painted on the window, not hanging from a sign, and the café was right beside the house, well marked, where Napoleon’s general-become-king-of-Sweden had been born. She was in a daze from hunger.

  The windows were befogged, which at least indicated it was open and occupied. She pushed through the door into the now-familiar stench of cigarette smoke, bad breath, ersatz coffee and damp, unwashed clothes. She couldn’t have been happier. Her hat and Claude’s coat were hardly in any better condition than the clothes of her fellow rats. She found a place to hang them near the heater and sat at a table, where she ordered the breakfast stew everyone else was having, with or without coupons, it didn’t seem to matter. Whatever it was, it was delicious. Sitting back with her fake coffee, she congratulated herself on how well she fitted in but wondered if her disguise might be too effective to attract the promised attention. She needn’t have worried. A waiter approached and beckoned her to follow. She was, after all, just about the only woman, and the smoke from her morning Chesterfield was as outstanding as the finest Cuban cigar in a place where everyone else was smoking a mixture of cheap local tobacco cut with sunflower seeds and hay left over by the Germans.

  With most of the army still in German prisoner-of-war camps, waiters were usually boys or over forty-five, but this waiter was slap bang in the ripest military age group, twenty-one or two, and looked strappingly fit. She wondered how he’d escaped, but only in passing. She had more urgent matters to deal with.

  She expected him to lead her to someone else, like the Spaniard in the Hedas, as if every café in Pau were running a similar operation – and indeed, many were. But this time, once they were out of ear and eye, he himself was the one to talk to.

  ‘Is this for you?’ he asked abruptly.

  ‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘And one other.’

  ‘Another woman?’

  ‘No, a young man.’

  ‘Where is he?’ he demanded.

  ‘He’s not here,’ she replied.

  ‘I can see that,’ the young waiter said. ‘Why not? We don’t take people unseen.’

  ‘I’ll bring him later,’ Eleanor offered.

  ‘No need,’ said her interlocutor. ‘Nothing doing.’

  ‘What?’ she asked.

  ‘You’re an old woman,’ he said.

  Eleanor knew she had a short fuse. She had been trying to make it longer, but this young tough – for that’s what he was, no wonder the army hadn’t been able to nab him – she had a mind to whack his face.

  ‘You’d take me if I were a man, is that it?’ she said, sitting on the volcano inside her.

  ‘Sure,’ he replied, ‘for the right price.’

  ‘But I’m willing to pay,’ Eleanor said with as much reasonableness as she could summon.

  ‘Sorry, lady,’ he replied, ‘we like dough but our guides like their lives better.’

  ‘I’m as strong as any man,’ Eleanor argued.

  ‘Lady, you got no idea,’ he said. ‘It’s been raining here, not too badly. But up in the high passes? You figure it out. Besides, the Germans have started patrols up there now.’

  ‘What?’ she exclaimed. ‘I thought – ’ He cut her off.

  ‘Don’t matter what you thought,’ he said. ‘Even if you were a man, the price has doubled.’

  ‘Then I’ll find someone else whose courage matches mine,’ she snapped, turned on her heels and stalked out, hat and coat in hand. Behind her, the waiter shrugged though gave her the finger.

  Eleanor carried herself and her outrage out to the street. At least the rain had stopped. There was nothing for it but to keep on, although s
he did wonder about the trail she might be leaving behind. Was she blind in trusting to all these waiters? What, though, was the alternative? For passeurs, it was a seller’s market, and she was a buyer.

  She pushed herself on, glancing at her watch. Half the morning wasted.

  VILLA ST ALBERT, AVENUE TRESPOEY, PAU

  Later that morning, Saturday, 13th December 1941

  While Bauer had no idea what precisely had caused Lieutenant Wolf to fight a duel with Pichler, imagination was enough to know it had been Wolf the aristocrat who had challenged, and that he’d had good reason. From experience, he knew the Gestapo, made up of thugs with their gutter tactics, always played to win. The only way to deal with them was to treat them as they treated others, by feeding their fears. He had considered ordering a squad of soldiers from the German guard at the Armistice Commission to back him up but felt even this would have taken up time he did not have. He had to strike quickly. He would brazen this out alone. As he set out with his driver, he slipped another Pervitin pill into his mouth.

  The house the Gestapo had taken was like many of its neighbours, a late-nineteenth-century mishmash of a villa, which, with its timbered upper story under a hipped roof and tower, might have been built by a German homesick for Rhenish castles. No guard nor any other sign indicated the Gestapo were in residence, and for a moment Bauer doubted St Jean’s information.

  When his car stopped at the front gate, a man appeared, and while he was not in uniform, everything about him, including his demand in bad French to piss off, wiped away Bauer’s doubts.