The Little Parachute

by J. Robert Janes

  Up close, she was handsome, not beautiful but good looking, a Parisienne, ah oui, but was such plainness of dress really her nature?

  Taking a pair of tweezers from his shirt pocket, Vallin arranged the fragments into two small squares, each the size of a one-franc, twenty-centime postage stamp. ‘That one is for daytime use, the other for night.’

  ‘And the one for emergency use?’ she asked and felt his hand momentarily stiffen and then begin to tremble again.

  She had such beautiful eyes. Very clear and of that deep, brown shade so often termed “bedroom”.

  The fine brush of her eyebrows was noted, the texture of her complexion. No makeup, no lipstick, no earrings even. Ah, thought Marie-Hélène, he tries to note everything.

  ‘The emergency crystal, yes. That’s the one I want to ask you about,’ he said. ‘You see, ma chére Mademoiselle Moncontre—yes, I have your name. Jean-Pierre, he gave it to me when he and Father Nicolas brought the set last night to what is now this house of grief.’

  She waited. He watched as her chest rose and fell—was he looking for hesitation there? she wondered. Had the sous-préfet Allard and Father Nicolas got to him today? Had they told him to watch out, that they had met her near Bois Carré and had had a little chat?

  ‘The emergency crystal, yes.’ Again he reached under the workbench with his right hand; she still holding the left one with its fragments.

  He opened the matchbox using only the fingers of his free hand. ‘You see, it’s not broken, is it?’ he said of the crystal.

  He let her look at that thing nestled in cotton wool in that little box. ‘Not broken?’ she heard herself asking.

  ‘Why, please, should the emergency crystal survive and the others be smashed?’

  No one in Gestapo Paris-Central had told her a thing about any of this. No one, the idiots! ‘I … I don’t know. How could I? They just told me to deliver the set to you people, that’s all.’

  But was it? he wondered. Moisture had gathered in those lovely eyes of hers. Her chest rose and fell a little too quickly.

  ‘The frequency is for daytime use only. 5,965 to 5,995 kilocycles per second. I measured it. You have to use something in the 6,000 range in the north for daytime transmissions, more if you’re in the south near Toulon, say, or Marseille. At least 8,000 kcs there, but that’s okay except that one would have thought nighttime best and something around 3,000.’

  ‘Look, I don’t know what you’re trying to say. I’ve done nothing but risk my life!’

  Anger made the colour come into her cheeks. He would try to smile so as to calm her. Yes, that would be best.

  Removing his hand from hers, he put everything safely away, then looked up at her for the longest time and finally said, ‘Do you find it disquieting to have to face a cripple?’

  ‘Of course not! The Germans will suspect you less. It’s perfect. Why should I?’

  Perfect, was it, not to have any legs?

  He nodded and held up a hand to stop her. ‘So okay, I’ll tell you. There wasn’t a code book with the set. If we should be able to get it working, we would have to send it clear and at a frequency predetermined by that emergency crystal. Does that not strike you as exceedingly foolish, given that for all we know, the Gestapo could well be listening in for that particular range of wavelength?’

  She shrugged, and that gesture encompassed all of her, but then she glanced past him to the open doorway into the kitchen.

  ‘Maman, her heart is broken,’ he said, still watching her closely. ‘One son dead, another like this, and the daughter she always favoured and praised, dead also but in disgrace.’

  ‘I know nothing of this. Please, I’m so very sorry to hear such things. I came only to see if there wasn’t something my people in Paris could do to help get that set in working order.’

  ‘Then tell me, please, how these “people” of yours came by it in the first place?’

  He suspected the truth—that was clear enough. ‘I only do as my chief commands. The set was recovered from a field near Le Mans and sent on to us because its parachutist operator had broken his neck on landing, but as we already had our own, this one could be spared. There’s a great urgency about what is going on in Bois Carré. Everything we can do must be done, so it’s been given the green light. Top priority.’

  He thought about this and then asked, ‘Would you care for coffee? It’s not the real stuff but one gets used to it as one does all else.’

  Was he stalling in hopes of company? she wondered. ‘Un café … ? Yes. Yes, of course. We have to drink that wretched stuff in Paris. There’s nothing else, is there?’

  He called out to the mother who, without a word, got up to do as bidden.

  I have to kill him, thought Marie-Hélène. I can’t have him asking such questions, not when sous-préfet Allard and Father Nicolas are also questioning things. But are those two about to descend on us—was that it—or the one who had delivered the wireless to him, Jean-Pierre?

  ‘Could I go and help her?’ she asked and heard him say, ‘Suit yourself. She’ll only give you a flood of remorse.’

  ‘She needs comforting. It’s not good to be left alone at such a time.’

  ‘My father has gone to pick a quarrel with Father Nicolas about the burial. They should be here soon.’

  Had he said it as insurance? Pressure to the vagus nerve would cause instant death. The mother was old, distracted, confused in her grief and unsuspecting, but it was no use. She’d have to come back.

  Kraus, she said to herself. Go to him and give him the names. Hans isn’t here. You’re completely on your own, but if she did, Kraus would win and take command of everything, herself included.

  Flames leapt from the hay rooks and granaries at the farm where Angélique Bellecour and the boy had been living. Cattle bawled. The woman, Marieka, looking swollen and bigger than a house, gnashed her teeth and tore her hair. Begging God to intervene, she set up a constant blubbering so guttural it was impossible to understand.

  ‘THE PARACHUTIST, YOU HURE!’ demanded Kraus.

  The littlest of the brats milled about the woman’s bare feet and puffy ankles, which were mired in dung and mud. They cried. They begged her to comfort them—several tried repeatedly to climb into her arms and clawed at her dress and swollen breasts. One of the older boys broke free and dashed in to save his mother only to have an arm and shoulder broken.

  ‘I will ask you once more,’ seethed Kraus. ‘WHERE HAVE YOU HIDDEN THE BRITISH PARACHUTIST?’

  She didn’t comprehend. The boy tried to tell him there wasn’t one and for this, he received the butt of a rifle.

  ‘Stupid cow,’ swore Kraus and, cocking his pistol, placed its muzzle against her brow.

  She fell to her knees among the brats, her big, rough hands clasped in prayer and when he fired, she gave a blank look and rocked back a little before falling face down in the muck.

  The children shook. The littlest ones tried to speak. Noses ran, mouths gaped. An ice-cold rain began to fall.

  ‘Fire the house and barns. Let this be a lesson to them.’

  Half the paltry belongings were strewn about in the yard. The husband had been in the fields with two of the oldest boys. All had dropped their scythes and tried to make a run for it. Beaten, they had given but the same answer. No parachutist. ‘Lies … they were all lying!’

  Dragged back to the farmyard, they had been beaten senseless and now lay near death.

  Kraus went from one to another to finish things. ‘Now the next farm,’ he said, ‘and we don’t stop until we have him.’

  The rain was constant. It beat upon the roof of the car and struck the windscreen, flooding over the struggling wiper-blade. It formed puddles in the fields and on the road and washed the blood away.

  Angélique sat in the backseat. Ahead of them perhaps sixty heavily armed Waffen-SS tr
udged along the road oblivious to the rain. Mud clung to their boots. Some of the soldiers had taken things from the farms they had raided and had bulging pillowcases thrown over a shoulder. One had a collection of six or so women’s black leather handbags, another a chicken under each arm, another a rucksack, another a suitcase. Food and money, what little there was of this last unless the Louis d’or had been tucked away for years in some secret hide. Jewellery, too, and family heirlooms. Anything that could be snatched. A pair of candlesticks but without the candles.

  The Hauptmann Scheel had come to the drying shed in search of her. There hadn’t been any sense in not going out to him. The mayor and the others needed time and this she had given. But now? she wondered. Now would they all be arrested and shot?

  She turned away to search the fields for some sign, bit her lower lip so hard, the taste of blood filled her mouth as she cried out inwardly, Martin … Martin, do you see where it has all led?

  A little parachute, a piece of make-believe he had dreamed up to shield himself from the reality of what had happened to him. The absence of his father, the living in France—certainly she had told him straightaway on that road south from Paris three years ago that his father was alive and had had to leave them. The times she had lain awake cradling him in her arms. The constant nightmares. The terror of that road. Her finding him lying beneath the man who had shielded him.

  Blood and brains … How had she found the courage to wipe them off, she desperately crying out … ‘Martin … Martin, have you seen your father?’

  The nights, the dreams, the whispered reassurances, ‘He’s safely in England, mon petit. He did get away and is thinking of us all the time, and when this war is over, he’ll return to take us from this place.’

  The farm, the pig shit, the overripe stenches, the petty thefts, the constant bickering, the enforced drudgery of hard labour in the fields after a day’s work at the Kommandantur and the long bike ride home.

  The constant hikes in the rent. The loss of all privacy.

  There were no prisoners with the soldiers and when she forced herself to ask, the Hauptmann Scheel said, ‘None are apparently being taken.’

  The rain filled the furrows to overflowing. The clay tended to soak it up yet also keep it out, as it had during the Blitzkrieg, but would Anthony and that girl Yvette Rougement have even the remotest chance of escaping across those fields?

  Not with the dogs after them. The dogs.

  When the road that turned off towards Bois Carré was reached, she asked the Hauptmann to take her to the farm first but he shook his head. ‘It’s not possible.’

  ‘The woods are forbidden,’ she said, but he didn’t respond.

  The rain blotted out the landscape. She tried to see the farm but it really wasn’t visible from this road at the best of times. Would there be fire there too? she wondered. Would Anthony and Yvette have been trapped—caught waiting for her and Martin to return?

  Would they have already been killed?

  Anthony would have known Isabelle Moncontre was an infiltrator. He would have planned how to deal with her. How could the woman have done the things she must have? And Martin? she asked as the car entered the woods, passing by an odd-shaped concrete-block structure, a railway tunnel perhaps, but above ground.

  Martin would be heartbroken. Perhaps he didn’t need to be told yet about his Isabelle. Perhaps there wouldn’t be time in any case.

  The Oberst Lautenschläger was waiting. ‘Please tell your son he mustn’t do this, mademoiselle.’

  ‘Do what, please?’

  ‘Come. Come and see for yourself.’

  The “coffee” wasn’t bitter as it should have been nor had it been sweetened with saccharin. At least two heaping teaspoons of real sugar had been used.

  Alarmed, Marie-Hélène glanced past the legless veteran in his wheelchair to the mother who had refused all help but now stood silently watching from the doorway to her kitchen.

  The taste of the sugar lingered. The rain came hard on the corrugated iron. Dampness brought an intruding chill.

  ‘Is the coffee not to your liking?’ asked Vallin.

  Someone must have come to the back door. Father Nicolas perhaps—no arguments about the daughter’s burial. Just word of an infiltrator. Herself. ‘It’s only that I’m not used to sugar,’ she said apologetically. Vallin had tasted his and had known right away that all his doubts about her had been true.

  He set his coffee aside and pushed that hank of black hair from his brow. ‘Véronique gave maman half of the nearly two kilos she received from the Gestapo Munk as her immediate reward for betraying Doumier. Oh for sure, mademoiselle, my little sister lied to us about how she had come by it. That’s nearly twenty-five hundred francs worth on the marché noir. She said one of the German sergeants had taken so much off the back of the butter-and-eggs lorry and in such a hurry, he had dropped a sack. Her good fortune. We even laughed with her and celebrated.’

  ‘Ah!’ she softly exclaimed, tossing her head a little. ‘Then why, please, has your mother chosen to use it?’

  She set her cup and saucer down amid the workbench’s clutter. Vallin told her to finish it. ‘Her heart is broken. Please don’t smash the fragments into smaller pieces.’

  ‘I can’t. I’d best be going.’

  How wary she was. ‘It’s raining. You’ll only be drenched. Wait a little. The rain will soon pass.’

  His dark blue eyes never left her for a moment. Her bag was on the workbench and nearer to her. The mother hadn’t moved. Sentinel to their little confrontation, the woman lingered. There was still no sign of Father Nicolas or of the husband. Were they waiting too, in the kitchen, waiting for someone else to enter the shop through the front door? Châlus … Was it Raymond Châlus?

  ‘Look, I have to leave,’ she said and started for her bag. He shot forward in that chair of his. He ran it right into her and tried to grab her. The mother let out an insane cry and dashed into the shop wielding a meat cleaver …

  Knocked to the floor, Marie-Hélène tried to get a fix on them. The son was coming at her again with that chair, the mother was now right behind him. …

  The woman gave the chair a brutal shove. Marie-Hélène rolled out of the way and scrambled to her feet. ‘Don’t!’ she shouted and lunged for her bag. The cleaver hit the metal-topped bench. The woman swung it hard. She ducked. The bitch swung it again. ‘Maman!’ cried the son, but it was too late. The Luger leapt, the woman collapsed, the cleaver skidded across the concrete floor and went in under the bench.

  Breathlessly clutching her bag and pistol, Marie-Hélène backed away towards the front door. Again the rain hammered on the corrugated iron.

  Father Nicolas had still not appeared, nor had the husband.

  Châlus … is it to be Raymond Châlus? she wondered.

  ‘Kill me too!’ cried Vallin, but by then she had reached the door.

  Bolting it, she began to walk towards him, he to back away. There were tears. The loss of his mother, the bitterness he felt at the unfairness of life, the hatred he had for people like herself. ‘Châlus,’ she said. ‘It’s him, isn’t it?’

  She seemed so sad—afraid and desperate and not unlike a lover who has lost out and must now suffer.

  When he refused to answer, she told him Châlus was Martin Bellecour’s father. ‘For three years now he has operated out of Paris, living and moving about freely as a German officer, a Leutnant Thiessen, but building escape lines and organizing réseaux. When he discovered I was back in business and following his people in Paris, he set about finding me.’

  Still there was no answer. The wheels of the chair had come full stop against the body of the mother. ‘Châlus was the only one to get away from us in Lyon,’ she said and tried to smile but it was no use.

  Vallin wet his lips in uncertainty. ‘Châlus?’ he managed.

  ‘Yes! He�
��s the best of them. Far cleverer than the Sturmbann­führer­ Kraus who wants him desperately, cleverer also than my lover, the Standartenführer Dirksen.’

  Did she have a need to tell him this? wondered Vallin uneasily. Just why the hell hadn’t Father Nicolas or one of the others intervened?

  ‘He’s travelling with a student, a girl named Yvette Rougement of the rue Férou in Paris. I followed her into the bookshop of M. Patouillard, and of course, I followed Dr. Vergès to whom you people had sent your message with the boy. That was clever of you, but not nearly clever enough.’

  Though he wanted to sting her with cries of traitor, Vallin knew it would do no good. ‘Châlus will get you. He’s with us, mademoiselle. He and the girl Yvette are out there in the lane. They’re waiting for you now. You’ll never get away from them. Never! Do you understand? Not when you know so much about us and can give our names to those who would hunt us down. Hey, ma petite Parisienne, what does it feel like to see résistants caught in your web? Do you experience a little rush of pleasure, eh, le grand frisson, peut-être?’

  She was very close to him now. If he tried, he might just take the pistol from her, thought Vallin. Could he manage it?

  The sound of a car came to them through the din of the rain and she held her breath, wondering if it was the sous-préfet. Vallin wanted the gun in her hand. He wet his lips again, knew he ought to try, but imperceptibly she moved a little closer. ‘Go ahead,’ she said. ‘Show me you have the balls to give a girl such an orgasm.’

  His hand shook. Furtively he glanced at the Luger, then lifted his eyes to meet hers. ‘Châlus,’ he wept but was blinded by the blood on his hand.

  There was no one in the kitchen, nor in either of the two small rooms that served so many purposes, and when at last she had gone out into the rain to find her bicycle, she found its tyres flattened. There was no other sign of Châlus, nor of Father Nicolas, only punctures she couldn’t repair.