The Little Parachute

by J. Robert Janes

  ‘Violation before or after death?’ asked Ledieu.

  ‘Honoré, control yourself!’ scolded Father Nicolas. ‘Please try to remember the dead, they have some rights.’

  Allard threw the priest a sharp look. ‘Rights? You talk of rights? Did Doumier have any?’

  ‘Honoré, please tell the good father, first that she was not a virgin, but with three children, and secondly that such things as a violent rape could well happen after death, as well as before it. He’s not to be so pious about her rights, either,’ went on Allard. ‘We shall let Coroner Chastel decide the issue. Now listen, you two. She is to remain exactly as she is, the eyes open, the hands flung back, the legs spread.’

  ‘Her hair … She had such lovely hair,’ said Ledieu. ‘She worked for me. I recommended her to the colonel.’

  ‘Her children, Honoré. Put them foremost in your mind. We will have to find homes for them elsewhere and as far from Abbeville as possible, unfortunately for all concerned, especially their poor papa.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, of course, Father,’ said Ledieu. ‘They mustn’t be allowed to suffer for her crime.’

  Allard bent over her. Though not a detective—he had been a mill owner before the Great Depression of the 1930s had taken that from him—he had seen enough murders to know one had to look beyond nearly everything one saw. ‘Her hair must have been cut off with scissors.’

  This was logical enough but … ‘But what man carries scissors?’ managed Ledieu.

  ‘Perhaps he had shaved and was about to give himself a trim when she came along the path?’ offered Father Nicolas.

  ‘You innocent! Then why, please, is her sandal lying on the path?’ demanded Allard.

  ‘Ah! she was chased from the road, of course. Forgive me, and forgive my “innocence”, Théodore. It’s a pity I’ve not seen as much of life as yourself.’

  ‘Now look, you two, we must remain resolute!’ said Father Nicolas.

  ‘Then tell him, please, that the towel was wrapped around her head before the boulder was used, and that the towel, it is from La Samaritaine in Paris. Paris, mes amis.’

  Must Théodore be so suspicious of everything? wondered Ledieu. ‘That could well mean my own household or yours, mon vieux. Towels like that are not difficult to find, especially since so many of us lost everything in 1940 and had to accept the generosity of others. In any case, everyone who passes through here has to register. I will go through the lists and have a little look.’

  ‘Then you also don’t think it was one of ours who did this, or one of the Boches,’ breathed Allard.

  Ledieu shook his head. ‘Not the Boches, and not our own. How could it have been?’

  ‘Corbeau,’ muttered Father Nicolas, staring at her stomach. ‘It’s the Cross of Lorraine all right.’

  Taken aback by what they had had to confront, they were unsettled, for they couldn’t know the ramifications. To the Germans she was an informant and her death could only mean that there really was a Résistance in the district and that it was well organized, thought Ledieu. ‘The hair …’ he said, letting the tragedy of it get to him.

  ‘But she wasn’t sleeping with one of the Boches, was she, yet that’s what the haircut indicates,’ grunted Allard. ‘She was betraying Doumier.’

  ‘It’s all the same, is it not? It’s only fornication of a different sort,’ countered Ledieu. ‘Maybe I would have cut off her hair myself, had I killed her.’

  ‘Ah, mon Dieu, you two are such a pair! Start thinking,’ insisted Allard, furiously indicating this and that and her hair. ‘If the scissors were to hand, then why the towel and the rock?’

  He had a point. ‘Perhaps they were an afterthought?’ hazarded Father Nicolas.

  ‘Precisely! Now we’re getting somewhere. We receive an unexpected visitor, a courier from Paris …’

  ‘You’re forgetting the message we received saying that just such a one would arrive.’

  ‘All right, this I acknowledge. Also that she brings us what we most desire, but what happens next, eh? We get another little bonus! Women …’

  ‘Are what, please?’ asked Ledieu. Clearly Théodore didn’t like the trend of his own thoughts.

  The sous-préfet tossed a hand. ‘Women are more inclined to have scissors, that’s all I meant.’

  And the towel. He was still thinking of it and of Paris. ‘Then that includes the more than sixty-seven percent of the adult citizens the war has left us,’ cautioned Ledieu. ‘No doubt any woman who suspected what Véronique was up to might have wished to use the scissors only to realize that such implements, they are so scarce they’re worth a life sometimes, and would afterwards constantly remind one of the deed they had done.’

  Irritably Allard ran a hand over the dome of his head. ‘Bon! I needed to be told that. Perhaps our courier didn’t come alone then, as she has said. If one stands in her shoes, such a thing as company would best be kept quiet, at least for a little until she has grown accustomed to us. They may have done us a favour here, but if so then that implies that the réseau she belongs to in Paris knows far more about our affairs than we do.’

  He had a point there, too, the others gravely acknowledged. All three of them stood around as if uncertain of what to do. Cigarettes were offered and gratefully accepted. ‘The colonel’s,’ said Ledieu. ‘Lautenschläger left the packet on my desk the other day, saying that the French could do much better.’

  They were Gauloises bleues and made in Paris by the state-owned tobacco company.

  ‘It’s terrible, isn’t it,’ said Ledieu. ‘Carrot tops, oak leaves and sweepings from a sawpit!’

  ‘From a barn floor, I think,’ said Father Nicolas, looking curiously at the smouldering end of his cigarette. Anything was possible these days.

  They would have to be told of the other matter, thought Allard. ‘The Mademoiselle Moncontre said that the Germans might try to infiltrate us. A priest, she thought, and a novice.’

  ‘Infiltrate?’ bleated Ledieu. ‘Why did you not warn us of this last night?’

  ‘Because I didn’t hear of it until after you had all left. When we were alone, she told me.’

  ‘They’ll have to be killed. There’ll be reprisals,’ said Ledieu. ‘Ah, damn the SS and the Gestapo! The Oberst Lautenschläger will have no other choice.’

  As mayor, Honoré was always the one to have to deal with such things and therefore a worrier. ‘Not necessarily,’ cautioned Father Nicolas. ‘The Germans won’t publically admit those two in such a disguise were working for them.’

  ‘In any case, we have to find out who they are and see that they are conducted out of the district without the Boches immediately learning of it,’ said Allard firmly.

  A trip on the water, then, a voyage out to sea with iron weights.

  ‘Infiltrators will be known to the Gestapo Munk and to his visitor, the Sturmbannführer Kraus,’ cautioned Father Nicolas, ‘but not likely to the colonel.’

  ‘The control’s list of names will give me who was on that train and where they were going,’ muttered Ledieu, irritably flicking cigarette ash onto the corpse only to stop himself and throw the others a look of apology.

  Again they looked at what had once been a living, breathing human being they had all known. Each noted the sagging breasts that had been greedily suckled by every one of her children. Three, ah, damn it!

  ‘For now we must concentrate on this,’ said Allard. ‘A woman would have thought of using the scissors, the lipstick too,’ he added stubbornly. ‘A man would simply have left her in haste or pinned a note of warning to her dress. Chastel will have a better look than ourselves, due to your presence among us, Father, so we will leave the evidence up to him.’

  ‘Must you? I’m not so innocent! Besides, let me remind you, if I may be so bold, she wanted only happiness for herself and those children. We should keep that in mind and condemn our
selves for not having paid far greater attention to what was happening to her. We all knew how empty she felt. Myself, I admit, more than others, so God forgive me.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ said Allard gruffly. ‘Her brother, Henri, will have to be told. Will you do it, Father?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Then let us hope he doesn’t successfully hang himself this time. We need our electrics man now more than ever. That wireless set …’ said Ledieu.

  Honoré was right. ‘It has to be fixed. Those tubes … the railway workers. Why the hell can’t those bastard Bolsheviks be more careful?’

  ‘All of our cheminots are not Communists,’ said Father Nicolas, picking a shred of “tobacco” from his lower lip but deciding not to save it.

  ‘Perhaps you are right, Father, but that still doesn’t help us. We have to find replacements or that set of hers is absolutely useless,’ said Allard.

  ‘Must you be so suspicious of the Mademoiselle Moncontre?’ sighed Ledieu. ‘The risks she took, the danger—have you forgotten this? She couldn’t have known the tubes would be broken. Henri has said the Mark One is notoriously delicate. She’s a woman, too, not an expert in electrics or wireless sets, and she comes to us in good faith. Please let’s not think otherwise.’

  One had best step into it, thought Father Nicolas, or these two would be at each other and shouting over the corpse. ‘The glass from the tubes was still in the set, the tubes themselves still plugged into their circuit board.’

  ‘Then you both believe she really is okay?’ asked Allard.

  Must he still have doubts? wondered Ledieu. ‘Isn’t it a little late for us to be questioning such?’

  ‘It’s never too late and you know it!’ But had Véronique come here to meet someone? ‘Just what the hell was this one doing here, eh? This spring isn’t on her route home. She had the children to attend to, the urgency of their evening meal, all such things.’

  ‘What about the funeral?’ asked Father Nicolas—it had to be asked.

  ‘There won’t be one,’ said Allard firmly. ‘I want the casket closed, Nicolas, and don’t give me any talk of absolution. Let the people imagine what she looks like, and let her be buried in an unmarked grave and outside the cemetery.’

  ‘You really mean that, don’t you?’

  ‘As your God is my witness. She must be an example to others—can you not see that? It’s a tragedy, yes, yes, of course, but let’s not have any more of them.’

  ‘He’s right, Nicolas. That’s how it has to be,’ said Ledieu. ‘Into the ground, yourself beside the open grave, no one else. They can all watch from a distance, should any wish to.’

  ‘Even her children?’

  Nicolas had baptized her, and then later, her children, and he had conducted the marriage service as well before those had come along. ‘Even them. Please,’ said Ledieu, taking him by the arm, ‘this is the way it has to be. Oh for sure, we would all wish it otherwise, but it would be foolish of us to grant her anything more.’

  ‘Then the Boches, they will take note of it and condemn you both.’

  ‘Ah, they can think what they want, as they will most certainly in any case, but if I have to, I’ll tell them I received a threat in the night. Nothing on paper. Simply words given after the pebble at the window had awakened me; words from the “Banditen”.’

  And with that, thought Father Nicolas sadly, you confirm the seriousness of our existence in their midst.

  The wind came sharply on the Monts de Caubert and when Marie-Hélène set aside her alias of Isabelle Moncontre as she looked up at the Christ on that heavily timbered cross, the wind stung her eyes and made her lips part.

  Buffeted, her dark brown hair was blown across her face. She tried to brush it aside but it was no use. Crouching, she forced the stems of the tight bouquets of red chrysanthemums into the holders, then stood back with hands together in prayer, head bowed.

  Afterwards, after this single minute or two, she stood rigidly to attention and gave the solemn salute of a résistante.

  There, she told herself, it’s enough. But was it? she wondered. No one else was about, or was there? No one watched her every move to judge and condemn, or did someone?

  Through some whim of sensibility, the Oberst Lautenschläger had had the antiaircraft batteries emplaced on the heights well to the north of the Calvary. She knew she couldn’t even see those 88 mm cannon from where she stood, so was safe from others suspecting she had gone there to meet someone among the enemy.

  The note from Hans had been brief. She still couldn’t believe he had come all the way from Paris to meet her in secret. She was anxious to see him, to hold him and be held, but had she been followed from Abbeville?

  Nerves … Was it just nerves and the excitement she felt at the prospect of seeing him again and so unexpectedly?

  Far across the flat floor of the Somme Valley, where the sinuosity of the river and the straightness of its canals melded with the verdant hectares of trees and farms, the seemingly endless plain of Ponthieu stretched away and into the east.

  Raymond Châlus is over there, she reminded herself. He can’t have doubled back and come here to find me, not yet. He can’t have, she repeated, trying to reassure herself. And searching the distant landscape, let her hair blow forward to cowl her face while sunlight shone on swaths of ripening maize, wheat and barley, a patchwork quilt of them and of newly plowed fields. There were woods and copses too, and the tiny, huddled clusters of farm dwellings and villages.

  Blinking to clear her eyes, she took a breath and dropped them to the cards she had fastened to the stems so that each bouquet held the same message: Doumier. Remember Henri-Paul. Keep him always in your thoughts.

  After receiving the note that had been left at the pension where she was staying, she had bought the flowers and with them in her carrier basket had ridden out of Abbeville and up the road that had climbed so steeply to the heights. Caesar had built an encampment here in 57 B.C. Fully fourteen legions—from forty-two thousand to eighty-four thousand men—had been bivouacked here, surrounded by earthen ramparts and entrenchments. Now all that remained was the agger, the mound and upon this, the Christ on the cross had been raised.

  What would he think of her, this Christ of her childhood? Would he condemn her to eternal damnation for having killed Véronique Dussart? Caesar would have praised all such things as noble acts of war.

  Abbeville, when seen from the heights, lay even more dramatically in ruins, the heart of it all but completely destroyed. De Gaulle, la grande asperge* some were now fondly calling him, had pulled his forces back to here in late May 1940. They had tried to readvance across the Somme, had tried to push Rommel and his panzers out but it had been of no use.

  In the end, his men like so many of the others, had fallen into retreat and, yes, she said, into what had quickly become a disgraceful rout.

  It had said something about the French, then, the Defeat. It had divided the nation into two groups. Those who welcomed the Occupier with open arms and legs, yes, and those who were forced to solemnly go along with things if only to survive.

  But now? she asked, looking again across the valley to Ponthieu but searching for a far distant little woods, that of Bois Carré. Raymond Châlus, a priest travelling with a novice but no longer as those. Châlus had been a man of many talents. An actor and a good one, that rarity of rarities, a man who through the accident of war had become his true self.

  She had so little time. A day, two days—perhaps less. The backup Kraus had deliberately turned away might have come with Hans, but she doubted this.

  Still afraid she had been followed, she walked the bicycle along the path that ran from the Calvary southward at the top of the escarpment. There were no springs up here. They would be far below her among the trees at the base of the escarpment but still the path became so similar to the one Véronique Dussart had timidly
climbed, it made her heart race and as the path went downslope a little among the trees and underbrush, it narrowed until, at last, in a cul-de-sac of grey, lichened rocks, there was a place to leave the bicycle.

  A stone bench gave perfect views across the valley, though a constant reminder of Ponthieu stretched away. Sounds tended to come up the escarpment but were far distant. She took the time to look closely around and back up the path, even to retracing her steps about a hundred metres.

  From a point just off the path, she waited among the trees and underbrush … waited for whoever it was to come along but either they were far better at it than herself, or not here at all.

  Uncertain still, she returned to the bench and from there, climbed nimbly to the ruins of a stone hut.

  It was empty. The scattered refuse of the soldiers who had used it in May of 1940 lay about. A French helmet with a bullet-dented rim met her eye, a tattered, bloodstained gaiter, a boot whose lace had been cut to free it from a shattered leg, a cross that had been whittled out of softwood, empty sardine cans and broken wine bottles. Shell casings were everywhere.

  The much-thumbed photograph of a naked girl who offered herself from the coverlet of a rumpled bed lay impaled on a wall nail.

  The smell of old sheep’s dung, urine, stale sweat and mouldy straw came to Marie-Hélène, that of sulphur dioxide too, baked from the rocks in the walls by the heat of the sun. The sound of the wind was here, in the cracks of the roof through which she could, in her silence now, see the sky quite clearly.

  I have no gun, no weapon of any kind, she said to herself. Ah, damn, I wanted Hans so badly, I believed totally in the note that had been left for me. I didn’t question it and should have.

  There was someone outside, and that person was taking their time.

  Crouching, she picked up the broken neck of a wine bottle and, by unrolling the right sleeve of her shirt-blouse, managed to hide the thing in her hand.

  Come then, she said. Come in and let us meet face to face, me with my back to the wall.

  Far out on the plain of Ponthieu, Angélique caught a breath. Slowly, as if in a nightmare, she stopped pedalling and stood with the bicycle between her legs.