The Little Parachute

by J. Robert Janes

  He ducked his head to one side. Even seated, he was so much taller than herself. ‘This I can’t say until the matter is settled, but the terrorists, the Résistance, you do understand, may come for you. What I can do is detail men to watch over you.’

  ‘No … No, that wouldn’t be right, Colonel. Then everyone who suspects I might have done such a thing would believe it.’

  How wise of her, how brave, but the Banditen mightn’t listen. ‘Then what, please, do you propose?’

  ‘That I face my accusers day by day and deny it.’ But had Véronique done such a thing?

  Mademoiselle Bellecour would never have turned Doumier or anyone else in, felt Lautenschläger. Though she didn’t wear her patriotism on her sleeve, he knew it was there and that he had to respect her for it. ‘A parachutist,’ he said, looking away as though lost in thought. ‘Sturmbannführer Kraus says a British agent was dropped into our area a few days before your trip to Paris. He seems to think Martin knows something of this.’

  ‘Martin? Ah no, Colonel. Herr Kraus, he is mistaken.’

  ‘He’s insisting I allow him to turn the countryside upside down and shake it until this parachutist and all who help him are arrested.’

  ‘Was Monsieur Doumier not the one to have told him of this parachutist?’

  Was she trying to protect the boy by asking? he wondered. ‘Doumier may have told Kraus many things,’ he said cautiously, ‘or, yes, absolutely nothing. But if Martin knows anything of this matter, please convince the boy to tell me before it’s too late. He may have some misguided sense of loyalty—yes, yes, I can appreciate this—but with Herr Munk and the Sturmbannführer it can only lead to tragedy. I warn you because this rumour of yourself isn’t right. Now please, there are things I must arrange. My adjutant will drive you to the farm.’

  He stood and held out a hand. As he gave her a curt bow, he said, ‘Au revoir, then, until tomorrow but come an hour or two later than usual. You’ll be tired after such a journey.’

  And monsieur le maire, she wondered, what of him?

  The road was far from straight but followed the southeastern edge of the old tidal estuary of a tributary, which had joined the Somme in distant years. Canals, flooded reaches and hortillonnages­ were now in dusk, while the uppermost leaves of the poplar trees caught the last of the light.

  Angélique sat with Martin in the backseat of the car, their suitcases between them. Gradually the road climbed out of the valley. There were more trees—everything was such a contrast to what was to come.

  At Saint-Riquier, some ten kilometres from Abbeville, the land gave up and became the battlefield of sticky, flint-encrusted clay it had been in so many wars and through so many generations of backbreaking toil. The fields could be almost endless, the hedges dividing them pulled down in the late 1920s and again in the late 1930s as the horses had been sold off and mechanization had crept in. Conversely the fields could be small, like postage stamps, for the soil, it wasn’t good, and now of course the hedges were creeping back, for the tractors had been taken even during the Blitzkrieg and then in the autumn of 1940.

  Sugar beets and other root crops were grown—potatoes, yes, and rutabagas, the former for shipment to the Reich, the latter to Paris to replace the potatoes that had gone the other way. Maize, barley and wheat were on the higher ground where the drainage was better—in places she could see the marching of their stooks. Copses lay in gullies; woods on modest rises. Oak, beech and hornbeam—Angélique could smell the scent of their rotting leaves and remember the hard, dry paper of them, the wet ones too, ah yes.

  The acorns were roasted with chicory or barley or whatever else and ground to make “coffee”. No sugar, even though there were factories that processed the sugar beets.

  Now flat and straight and desolate, yes, for she was afraid and depressed—ah, there was no hope, how could there be?—the road continued out across the pays de Ponthieu past tiny clusters of farm buildings and one isolated little village, past a few cows, chickens, goats—all that sort of thing, even a struggling orchard of the small, hard green apples that, as in Vimeu and in Normandy, would be pressed into cider.

  The mayor? she asked herself. Father Nicolas? What had happened to them? They had been ‘taken away,’ Véronique had said—Véronique. Had that poor soul really accused her of betraying Doumier to save herself?

  The farm was not big and it was some distance off a side road that just waited for the next rain to make her life a misery. The buildings, like most other farms in the pays, were long and low and had no windows facing west because that was the direction the wind and rain mostly came from. Here they didn’t whitewash their walls whose plaster had been daubed onto sticks. Here, like elsewhere in Picardy, they did tar the base of each wall against the dampness of rain and seeping manure and cattle piss, but God forgive you if you asked for whitewash to pretty the walls or attempted to grow flowers.

  They had no time for such things. Not when work began before dawn and one went to bed long before the curfew ever thought of starting.

  The roofs were of faded, S-shaped, reddish-brown Flemish tile that funnelled the rain, and these tiles caught the bleakness of the setting sun.

  The dogs didn’t even bark—they seldom showed any inclination to friendliness but were kept solely as beasts of burden and for other chores.

  The youngest children, streaked with dirt, sucked their thumbs or stood in their rumpled dresses or whipcord breeches with leather knees and seats, falling kneesocks or none, and wooden sabots or bare feet, as if staring at visitors from the moon.

  Had the older ones, the boys especially, armed themselves with flints to throw?

  All her furniture—every last stick of their meagre possessions—was heaped haphazardly in the dung- and straw-­littered yard within the broken quadrangle around which both house and barns and her little two-room “cottage” huddled under one continuous roof.

  ‘Ah, mon Dieu, what the hell is this?’ she exclaimed, bolting from the car. ‘Marieka, you Flemish cow! Felix, you bastard Walloon! You go too far. This, it is the limit!’

  They had accepted the rumour and had thrown her and Martin out. No warning. Just like that. Fini.

  Her appeal to their respective ancestries landed on deaf ears. The grizzled moon face, with its big eyes and flat, wart-encrusted nose, was impassive and Angélique saw at once where Martin had acquired that dumb-ox gaze. Now in her eighth month and proud of it, Marieka folded her arms over her bulging apron and spat, ‘Corbeau! Putain! Parisienne chatte! How could you have deceived us?’

  The car started up, the Hauptmann Scheel considering it prudent to leave.

  Two old, black bicycles with worn tyres and the promise of patching kits taped to the frames in front of their rusty, unpadded seats, leaned against the wall of the “cottage”. Cattle bawled, chickens rooted about, the pigs were noisy in their sties next door and all the things she had put up with and had conquered and come to, yes, appreciate if nothing else, rushed at her.

  ‘The mayor,’ hissed Marieka, giving a toss of a head that looked as if hewn from frost-tinged plaster and festooned with a tired mop of blond wool, ‘and the curé, so please don’t keep the people’s voice waiting, nor that of the Lord.’

  ‘How pious of you!’ shrilled Angélique. ‘I know my rights, you two. Me, I’m going to court over this—yes, yes! Even if it’s the last thing I do.’

  ‘We’ll see, then, shall we?’ taunted Marieka. ‘But remember, my fine mademoiselle from Paris, the corpses of les corbeaux are never plucked for the pot in these parts as they are now in that city. Here they are always left hanging upside down from the skeins of barbed wire to warn away others. Yours will no doubt create quite a stench!’

  The bitch! ‘I nursed you when you were ill with that terrible flu last winter. I fed your brats and that … that husband of yours. A bad marriage, your father always said and shook his head
in despair and to think that I took your part and preached patience and understanding to that kindest of men. “Love”, I said. Ah, mon Dieu, how foolish of me!’

  Martin tugged at her hand. Monsieur le curé, he mouthed the reminder. Monsieur le maire.

  They were inside the cottage, sitting in the straight-backed chairs they had rescued from the heap.

  ‘What’s this, then?’ she said scathingly. ‘A court of its own? One of enquiry, eh? And here I thought you both had been arrested. Me, I grieved. I distressed myself with thoughts of you both in prison and up before the post! But now … Ah, Sainte Mère, what the hell is going on?’

  If a performance, it had been a good one, felt Father Nicolas, looking her over and only then saying out of compassion perhaps, ‘Please sit down. Here, you may take my chair.’

  ‘It’s mine, I think.’

  ‘Please don’t be so bitter, Mademoiselle Bellecour. These things, they are necessary,’ grumbled Honoré Ledieu.

  ‘Necessary?’ she shrilled. ‘We didn’t even know who that man they tortured was. Ask the colonel. He’ll tell you it was Véronique who gave Doumier away.’

  ‘Véronique?’ gasped Ledieu, throwing a look of utter despair at the curé, the ramifications of such a revelation tumbling through both. ‘Father, what is this she’s saying?’

  ‘That the eviction was as winter’s first storm. Premature.’

  Honoré Ledieu hunkered forward to take up the pipe he had let grow cold. Father Nicolas stood to offer her the chair again.

  They had been using an overturned nail keg as a table, and on this there was a lighted stub of a candle. One of her own, no doubt. Stolen by the children or by their mother or their father, only to be requisitioned by these two.

  ‘Look, I can’t be certain it was Véronique and I hope and pray it wasn’t, but as I stand before you both, I swear we had nothing to do with betraying that poor man.’

  Father Nicolas irritably ran a hand over his crinkly, iron-grey hair. ‘Martin,’ he said, not looking at him, ‘please go outside. We have things to discuss with your mother.’

  ‘Martin, you stay right by me. They would only beat him terribly, Father, and I can’t have that. Besides, he has something for monsieur le maire. Martin, please return the pencil to him. And here … here,’ she reached into her handbag, ‘is the doctor’s note requesting that Martin be allowed to return to Paris in a week.’

  The Sturmbannführer Kraus would kill her if she told them she had been forced into working for the SS. This way she had a few days, a week at most, to decide how best to warn them. Anything could happen in that time. Anything and, yes, Isabelle Moncontre had said they were to do exactly as they had been told. The return message from these two would be intercepted on its way to Paris and another put in its place.

  The pencil and the scribble from Vergès for returning to Paris next week were held only for a moment then abruptly set next to the candle, the mayor’s deep brown eyes searching her own for the slightest hint of trouble. Tall, broad shouldered—a bull of a man in his youth—Honoré Ledieu was all nose. That thing through which he breathed was cleaved forward like the blade of an axe, while the rest of his face, the thick and dark brown moustache, the bushy greying eyebrows … even the ears, all were as if pinned back and he perpetually facing into a gale.

  At the age of sixty-two, he had suffered many defeats, including the loss to the Stuka dive bombers of the fine old house that had been in his family for over two hundred years.

  He knew men. He owned and ran two of the largest breweries in Abbeville, a roaring business these days, ah yes, and yes, he had been arrested for the affair of the illegal piglet-rearing but that had really been a cooperative effort, his turn at the time of the arrest and seizure of his automobile. Father Nicolas had been just as guilty, as had the sous-préfet, the dentist, et cetera, et cetera. Seven of them in all but only one arrest.

  They were old friends.

  ‘Tell us what really happened in Paris,’ he said, and she noted that Father Nicolas had moved to block the door and was now leaning against it.

  Half lies would be best. ‘It’s true we were picked up and questioned.’

  ‘By the Sturmbannführer Kraus?’

  ‘Yes, but … but he let us go.’

  ‘Now did he?’ asked Father Nicolas. Well educated, well read far beyond the needs of the church and parish, he was of medium height. Piercing dark eyes sought saint and sinner alike. Badly wounded in the trenches of that other war, he had lost the top half of his left ear, the tip of his nose, the eyelashes, which still struggled to grow in, and four fingers of his left hand. A grenade he had scooped up and had thrown back while attempting to grant absolution to one of the enemy.

  He had a wry sense of humour, a liking for children, creamed turbot and smoked eel, a firm belief in God and in being fair, especially when listening closely to the condemned.

  ‘Kraus got nothing from us,’ she said, her voice distant. ‘We did hear them torturing someone—this Doumier, I think it must have been—but we never saw the man and I don’t think he gave them anything useful. I’m certain of this but’—she shrugged as she recalled things—‘but I can’t really say why I feel this way.’

  ‘And the parachutist the Germans claim has landed?’ asked Ledieu suspiciously.

  It would be wrong to smile, no matter how strong the temptation. ‘Martin drew it in the dust on one of the windows. His little signature, yes? I … I didn’t realize this until after we had been released. Martin, he … he told me then.’

  ‘Mademoiselle, what is this you’re saying? That it’s all a mistake?’ demanded Ledieu, throwing Father Nicolas a startled glance.

  ‘Oui. Look, I’m sorry but that’s the way it was.’

  She was lying again, thought Martin. She had known all about the parachute up in that torture room. The lies, they would pile up until the house of their cards would have to tumble.

  Should they trust her? wondered Ledieu, again looking past her to Father Nicolas who shrugged this time and shook his head, both casting agreement and doubt, as was his custom. Always, then, he was right, either way.

  Angélique Bellecour had never raised more than a first whisper of concern, and in the past three years they had found no cause to doubt her loyalties. ‘Was there any trouble with the pencil?’ demanded Ledieu. ‘Please don’t lie to us, mademoiselle. We are only too aware of what our German friends might do.’

  She shook her head a little too hastily, he thought. If she was working for the avenue Foch, all was lost.

  ‘My child …’ began Father Nicolas from behind her by the door.

  ‘I’m not a child, Father. Please don’t patronize me.’

  ‘Forgive me, but if you have anything to add, you had best confess. Too many lives are at stake—Martin, your silence is absolutely necessary. Don’t write notes to anyone about it. If you do, you’ll burn in hell for all eternity and I won’t be around to grab the extinguisher.’

  The Mademoiselle Isabelle would be making contact with them soon. Martin wanted so much to tell them this, but had already been sworn to secrecy.

  It was the mayor who said, ‘The Germans are to “sweep” Abbeville and the pays de Vimeu and Ponthieu clean in their search for this “parachutist”. Were things not so desperate, I would enjoy laughing at Kraus and the Gestapo Munk for the fools they are about to make of themselves.’

  ‘Every farm will be searched,’ warned Father Nicolas grimly, but why did he still look at her as if she had betrayed them? wondered Angélique. ‘They’ll come here too,’ he added.

  ‘But will find our things out there,’ she said. ‘Ah, mon Dieu, Father, if you really do love God, as everyone says, please ask Him what the hell am I to do.’

  ‘Ah! of course. I’ll see that your things are put back.’

  ‘And for now you will trust me, Father? Is this what you�
��re saying?’

  She was tough and no doubt could be brave, but would that tongue of hers not get in the way? ‘Until the matter is settled, yes.’

  ‘Then tell them, please, to stop hiking the rent. Me, I’m not paying another sou. Tell them also to give back everything they’ve stolen in the past three years and if they read my private letters again, be sure to say I’ll torch their barns and houses in the dark of night!’

  ‘Ah!’ He leapt, tossing a hand. ‘I’m glad I never married!’

  The priest left them and when the door had closed behind his comrade and friend, Ledieu told her what she ought to know. ‘That couple, your landlords, are not related to you in any way. Long ago Father Nicolas and myself did what had to be done to protect you and your “son”.’

  The registry … the residence cards that had been given without question, she thinking she had fooled everyone! The ration tickets … all such things.

  ‘Johannes Vanderlinden is known to us as well as to yourself, mademoiselle. We learned of the letter of introduction he gave you for that daughter of his.’

  ‘Marieka’s really quite happy with her Félix.’

  ‘Yes, yes, but you chose Ponthieu in the early days of the Defeat. Perhaps it is that you remembered how isolated these little farms could be?’

  ‘In June of 1940, Monsieur Vanderlinden helped Martin and me get back through Paris and away. He was an associate of my employer. That is how he knew me. He advised me to stay at the farm and lie low, and it was he who wrote we were related to his daughter, Marieka.’

  Good, she was telling the truth. ‘Now, please, the rest of what happened in Paris. Did Vergès receive the pencil before or after Kraus had examined it?’

  Something would have to be said. ‘The Sturmbannführer didn’t examine it. He shrieked at Martin to give him his name and when Martin couldn’t, he … he released us.’

  More lies, thought Martin, fingering the gold wedding band in his pocket.

  ‘Was Vergès compromised?’ asked Ledieu.

  ‘No! I … How could he have been?’