The Little Parachute

by J. Robert Janes

  ‘Dissension or not,’ sighed Allard, ‘I think we have to listen. None of us will be safe until Honoré is with Châlus and has gone into hiding.’

  The room was dark and cold, and when she had somehow turned onto her back, Angélique found that breathing was still very painful.

  She tried to swallow. Gingerly she probed her rib cage, now here, now there. Her left arm seemed useless to her and she wondered if it had been broken. She ached everywhere, was stiff and sore and feeling very weak.

  I must sit up, she silently said to herself but found the effort too much.

  Martin put a wet rag to her lips and gratefully she sucked on it and could swallow more easily. ‘Can you talk?’ he whispered in English.

  ‘Un peu,’ she said and immediately he reverted to French.

  ‘They have taken Châlus upstairs again, from the next room. I have heard him moaning with such bitterness, Angélique. I whispered to him earlier through the crack that is beneath the door that connects us. I tried to get him to answer but he could say nothing.’

  ‘Châlus … ? Anthony … Your father, Martin.’

  ‘No. It’s better if we know him by his new name. He’s different now. He’s not the same.’

  ‘Where are we?’

  ‘In Bagatelle Château, in the cellars.’

  ‘The wine cellar?’

  ‘A storage room. One of them guards the outer door always.’

  ‘Sit me up.’

  ‘Lie still. Rest for a little. I’m working on a plan.’

  He left her then and she could hear him as he quietly rooted about in a far corner. He was pulling up the stones in the floor. He was digging. ‘Martin … ?’

  ‘Shh!’

  She felt her left arm, felt how sticky it was and, probing further, found where the flesh had been torn open and still oozed.

  She felt her left hand. It was so stiff. The ham of the thumb was swollen to twice or three times its normal size. The left side of her forehead and scalp had been bitten. There were lacerations, puncture wounds—her right calf, the thigh also. … ‘Martin … Martin, find that rag for me again. We have to stop the bleeding.’

  They came and they took her upstairs while leaving him all alone, and for a time he tried to follow her with his mind’s eye.

  ‘The kitchens,’ he said softly. ‘There the floor is of tile and easily cleaned, and the chairs can be replaced if necessary.’

  Would they beat her again? Would they kill her this time? ‘Angélique …’ he started to call out but warned himself not to.

  She wouldn’t hear him anyway. The cellars were too deep.

  Fortunately he hadn’t been bitten and but for a few bad bruises, bumps and scrapes, he was in perfect condition, and once the stones in the floor were removed, he could dig his way under the wall and into the next room. The wall wasn’t of stones but of boards, and equally fortunate, the Boches hadn’t swept the room clean of a flat metal strap, a rusty bit of refuse they had missed.

  ‘These old places,’ he muttered under his breath as he worked. ‘They might be beautiful but constantly damp mortar easily decays and the Boches should have thought of this.’

  There was gravelly sand below the stones but digging through it was not difficult. An hour passed—was it two? he wondered. Suddenly he had to know why they were keeping Angélique away so long but he couldn’t ask the guard. Not with the evidence heaped on the floor.

  Lugging the heavy stones over to the door, he placed them behind it to slow their entry. If he could, he would pile up as many as possible.

  He was in the next room where Châlus had been kept when he heard them coming for him. ‘The boy … The boy …’ the order rushed down the cellar stairs from guard to guard.

  They would kill him if they found him, and if they didn’t, they would soon set the dogs to looking for him but he had to try. He was their only hope.

  The door to this room was open.

  ‘THE PARACHUTIST!’ shrieked Kraus. A fistful of her hair was grabbed. Her head flew back. Someone had her by the neck. Others had her by the arms, the legs …

  ‘THERE ISN’T ONE!’ managed Angélique, only to see the water rushing at her, to try to thrash her legs and arms and struggle to free herself. ‘NO … NO … I CAN’T BREATHE!’

  Her eyes bulged, her nostrils pinched. She struggled as her face was pushed against the bottom of the bathtub.

  Vomiting—choking—panicking, she was yanked out, slapped hard, shaken and dumped onto the floor to double up and shiver uncontrollably, her mouth opening and closing as she tried desperately to breathe.

  Walls of pain kept closing in on her. White hot and tearing … Her chest was on fire. Her lungs refused to expand.

  They grabbed her by the hair and neck. Naked, she was upended and thrust under again to fill her lungs all but to the point of drowning, then yanked out to puke it up and blindly cough it out.

  Evacuating herself, she received their curses, their punches, their kicks but wasn’t really conscious of them. Was too terrified …

  ‘Bring her round,’ swore Kraus. The bitch had splashed the bathroom so much, he was drenched. Two of the Waffen-SS began to work on her. While one grabbed her round the waist and hoisted her from the floor, the other rammed his fingers into her mouth to pull out her tongue.

  Draped over the arms, she yielded up more water. They shook her, slapped her cheeks and pounded her back.

  ‘Cognac …’ gasped one of them.‘Give it to her.’

  They forced the neck of the bottle between her jaws and tried to pour some down her throat. Bruised, cut, torn, battered, she threw up again and again, dragging in a scant breath each time.

  Her chest heaved and rattled. Her breasts were blotched with red and blackened blue, her arms, her neck. Blood rushed from wounds that had tried to close. Two molars had been lost and lay in the swill at her feet.

  Kraus screamed into her ear, ‘THE PARACHUTIST!’

  She tried to tell him. She really did.

  The door burst in. ‘ENOUGH!’ yelled someone, though she was hardly conscious of it. ‘VERDAMMT! HAVE I NOT ALREADY TOLD YOU NO OFFICER OF THE REICH SHOULD DO SUCH A THING?’

  A silence came but only vaguely was she aware of this. Kraus threw the colonel a scathing look that said much. Armed Waffen-SS had crowded into the room behind the colonel.

  Lautenschläger swore under his breath but said more calmly, ‘Will you not listen? What she said was true. The boy simply drew the parachute after his name or instead of it. It was his way of telling himself—himself, Sturmbannführer—how he had come to be in France.’

  ‘No parachutist … Is this what you’re saying?’

  ‘None. It was all a figment of his imagination.’

  The oak stave that had leaned against the end of the bathtub but would normally have been used to bend the prisoner at each ducking, shot through the air. Her lower jaw dropped. Blood spurted from her nose. She gasped, tried to cry out—stiffened—tore at the floor with her fingernails, jerked once, twice and passed out.

  ‘Now are you satisfied?’ asked Lautenschläger with barely controlled fury. ‘That woman and her son …’

  ‘HE’S NOT HER SON!’

  ‘The boy then. They were completely innocent. They didn’t even know they were being used when they went to Paris.’

  Kraus tossed his head. ‘Arrest him. Take the colonel to his room and keep him under guard.’

  Lautenschläger held up his hands to gain a moment’s respite. ‘Consider carefully what you do, Sturmbannführer. You invade my jurisdiction, you take command and issue orders without the proper authority. Arresting a colonel isn’t wise. Believe me, the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht will take a very dim view of your actions. Instead of protecting the security of the Retaliatory Weapon sites, you have drawn immense attention to them.’

  Kr
aus was livid. He’d been sweating profusely and now his hands shook so much, he fumbled for his cigarettes and barely got one alight. ‘Continue,’ he grated.

  One of the men was holding a bottle of ammonia under the Bellecour woman’s nose and each time she got a whiff, her head jerked back. They had thrown her into a chair.

  ‘Very well, I will, Sturmbannführer. Did you think you could hush up the killing, the looting and burning? The news has spread like wildfire and can only work against us. Instead of the twenty-two you senselessly killed or had killed—murdered, you understand—it will be sixty or seventy. Who knows how large the number will become as word is passed? Instead of eighteen farms razed to the ground, their badly needed crops destroyed or left to rot, it will be fifty.’

  ‘That is what Reichsminister Himmler wishes!’

  ‘Then he has little understanding of the roots of the Résistance and its sympathizers. The Führer will hear of this, Sturmbannführer. If I’m arrested, there will, of necessity, have to be a court of enquiry. Do you really want this, you who have made such a total blunder?’

  The Wehrmacht wasn’t often soft on civilians. Indeed, they had atrocities of their own to account for, but men like Lautenschläger—wealthy Prussians of the landholding class—could sometimes be far too soft. ‘The terrorists must be stamped out, Colonel. Their mayor is one of them. Already my men are looking for him, for he has much to tell us.’

  ‘Like Châlus?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘But that one, like the surveyor Doumier, I gather, told you nothing. Neither got a chance, did they?’

  One of the men forced his way into the room to find the Sturmbannführer. Lautenschläger noted how agitated the young SS-Oberschütze was and that the salute he gave was clumsy.

  He heard the acid of, ‘Find him! Find the little bastard and bring him to me alive or dead!’

  Martin had escaped.

  At dawn the rain had stopped. Now fog filled the Valley of the Somme and water dripped from every branch and leaf on the slopes above Bagatelle Château and it was cold—cold like the feeling one had always had moments before a final assault.

  Hastily Ledieu crossed himself and, in uncertainty, wet his lips with the tip of his tongue. ‘It’s impossible, Théodore,’ he whispered. ‘There are far too many of them at the château.’

  Camouflaged lorries were parked end to end on the metalled drive. The colonel’s car was off to the left, next to the Sturmbannführer’s. Winging in from the river, swans had come to forage the lawns, ducks too, and geese, and soon the sounds of them echoing in the fog were joined by the raucous threats of the peacocks.

  Allard let his gaze sift slowly over the lorries. If only they could set them afire, if only they could put one of the cars out of action and steal the other.

  ‘I wouldn’t get far and you know it,’ confided Ledieu, having read his mind. ‘I might just as well go down there and give myself up.’

  ‘And let them find out where your wife and family are in hiding, your grandchildren too?’

  The family were downstream at one of the hortillonnages of Jean-Pierre’s uncle. Ah! it wasn’t good, it was terrible. ‘Will the Sturmbannführer Kraus go to the de Fleury woman alone?’

  This was critical. ‘Probably not.’ She was being held in the ruined hut on the slopes of the Monts de Caubert directly across the valley from them, and yes, she had led them there to a Schmeisser and two hundred rounds but … ‘Why not wish me luck?’

  ‘You’ll need more than that. Frau Hössler may already have told Kraus it was your car that brought Angélique to us yesterday from the Kommandantur.’

  ‘I talked my way around her. I said the terrorists had commandeered me and the car at gunpoint. I made heroes out of you all. Nicolas would have been proud of me.’

  ‘Knowing Frau Hössler as I do, I can well believe she swallowed it but . . .’

  ‘She did. She even gave me a telex to deliver.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘A telex from the Standartenführer Dirksen to Kraus.’ He ripped the envelope open and read it aloud. ‘“Vergès and concierge Hermé Lemoine arrested Paris 1600 hours. Book-seller Patouillard a paid Gestapo informant the terrorists attempted to finger. Am leaving for Berlin at dawn. Heil Hitler”.’

  ‘She’ll be disappointed,’ said Ledieu.

  Allard ignored the wry humour. ‘But not the Sturmbann­führer. If what she told us is true, Honoré, this may be the thing that causes him to go to her alone.’

  ‘Hope is far too fickle at such moments.’

  Allard shrugged off the remark and gave him the envelope to burn but not the telex. ‘Now I must play postman, eh? Already the mail has been delayed too long.’

  What would he find, what would the day bring? ‘Bonne chance, then. Au revoir, mon ami de la guerre secrète.’

  ‘À toi aussi.’

  They shook hands and held on to each other as old soldiers would. Allard found his cigarettes and self-consciously stuffed them into Honoré’s jacket pocket. ‘Those are for all the ones I borrowed over the years and failed to repay.’

  ‘They’ll do. They’re like gold.’

  He left then. He went back up to the road to find his car and was soon lost from view. Their little réseau was so few in number and now dispersed over such a wide area. Two had stayed with the wife and family, two were guarding the infiltrator at the ruined hut. One kept the Kommandantur under surveillance. ‘And I wait here while Théodore risks his life.’

  It wasn’t good. Ledieu watched the flames destroy the envelope, then checked the Lebel—the Luger had been necessary elsewhere. One by one he removed the black-powder cartridges they had had in the Great War, already damp then, by storage since the Franco-Prussian War, and one by one he replaced them. ‘These old bullets,’ he said, ‘sometimes they misfire.’

  The fog made sounds carry. It shut out the light of day and caused the dawn to grow but slowly. Still in her wet clothes and freezing, Marie-Hélène tried not to shiver. She had until noon. If Kraus didn’t come to her, one of these two would have to kill her. A burst from the Schmeisser would be far too risky. Would he use a knife, his hands, or a boulder as she had with Véronique Dussart?

  The two of them had left her alone in the darkness and now in that greyest of lights. Marchand, the foreman, was taciturn and ultracautious. It was he who had insisted her hands be tied behind her back, her mouth gagged and her ankles bound together. He, alone, held the Schmeisser and all attempts by the cylinder-spinner to get his hands on it had been refused. They seldom spoke. Occasionally they shared a cigarette but usually Jean-Pierre was sent to be lookout.

  All the broken bottle glass and bits of rusty metal had been carefully removed from where she sat on the floor, leaning against the back wall. Marchand had even ripped the prostitute’s photo from its nail and had destroyed it.

  He’d kill her. He wouldn’t leave it up to Jean-Pierre, knew his compatriot’s failings far too well.

  Kraus wouldn’t come alone. If he came at all, he would bring so many, the three of them would be killed instantly.

  The light grew a little and it revealed the rubbish that had been pushed aside, the bullet-dented helmet, the cartridge casings, empty tins, a water bottle, a cut-open boot, shreds of bloodstained gaiter and webbing.

  They would kill her if she moved from where they had left her—Marchand had warned her of this and he’d do it too, no matter what. He didn’t want to be here at all, thought it nothing but a huge mistake.

  She had to do something but they often checked on her. The gag made her throat parched and when the foreman ducked in to look at her, she tried to tell him she was thirsty.

  ‘Kraus hasn’t come yet,’ he said. There was no other expression but that of hatred and distrust.

  She tried to speak, to beseech him with her eyes. ‘Urinate in your clothes,’ he grun
ted.

  Violently she shook her head and nodded towards the thermos they had brought with them.

  ‘Ah!’ he said. ‘It’s empty.’ She was trouble—Marchand felt it so strongly. She still had that look about her. Not of defeat, ah no, but of a wariness he didn’t like.

  ‘You have much to answer for,’ he said. ‘May God forgive you, but I doubt He will.’

  Again he left her, and when, some twenty minutes later, Jean-Pierre ducked in, he grinned, but then he, too, left her but left a pair of scissors hanging on a nail beside the splintered door.

  The scissors had opened widely because only one grip encircled the nail. They were old scissors, and in the growing light, the patina of their long usage grew and she thought they were those of a seamstress or tailor, and she wondered if the one who had guided her to the church last night hadn’t been a sailor at all.

  Shears … they’re a tailor’s shears, she told herself but couldn’t touch her hair to feel it.

  The parachute with its secret agent had been drawn in blood on the bathroom mirror. It had been drawn on the windows too, and when Martin wet his finger again, he drew it on the inside of the door.

  ‘It’s of dark blue silk,’ he muttered softly. ‘It has a great big yellow moon and brilliant stars so as to be invisible against the night sky, and you steer it by pulling or letting up on the straps.’

  Angélique was no longer lying on the floor where she must have lain but they hadn’t taken her clothes. Châlus wasn’t here either, but some of their hair had been found floating in the bathtub—he had known the ones that were hers and had thought the others must be Châlus’s. And for each he had glued hairs to the straps of his parachute.

  ‘They have killed her,’ he whispered as he added flying bombs to the picture on the door. ‘They have killed the résistant Châlus also and now I’m the only one that is left.’ The bombs were being dropped by himself but they had wings so that they could glide, and some were already exploding as they hit the ground. There were dead Boches everywhere, but he only made dots to represent those.