by Thomas Wood
But, as I looked away from the frame, there was something about that photograph, that made the face of the young boy seem even clearer than the black and white tones would allow. I could imagine everything about him; his skin tone, the way he spoke and the way he walked. There was something about him that would haunt me forever.
“So, are you going to tell us who you are?” Mike inquired, with a tone of accusation to his voice. It did not seem like he could trust her all that much. I was far more open-minded.
“You first,” she stated. “After all, you are the foreigners here.”
Mike went to argue with her, but I stepped in this time, trying to prevent an argument between the two of them.
“Jean. Jean Pelletier.”
We both had new names now, new identities. We had lived with them for a good many months, in preparation for exactly this kind of scenario, and yet we had still found it exceptionally difficult to refer to each other by our new personas.
Jean Pelletier had been a soldier at one time, a French one that had managed to make his way back to Britain via Dunkirk. He had died of his wounds shortly after, but his death meant that I had been given a new lease of life.
We had both retained our initials, and Jean Pelletier, in particular, was so close to my old name that it was hoped that if I signed something in my old one, my scrawling handwriting would be enough to confuse any inspecting police officer. The best way to avoid detection, however, was getting it right. Something that I was finding routinely difficult to do.
“And you?”
“Michel. Houdin.”
Mike seemed in even less of a mood to play around and be polite than I was. The serious side of his face was quickly taking the rest of his emotions hostage. The tension in the room was more than palpable. Mike and I both despised the woman in front of us for her hostility, we were there to help her and her people after all. But she seemed to despise us because apparently, we had told her that we could do a better job than she could.
“And you? What is your name?”
“Suzanne Seguin,” she muttered through gritted teeth, as she apparently discovered a knot in the arch of her foot. I wasn’t sure if it was the pain that she had induced that made her speak in the way that she had done, or whether it was out of a genuine disappointment that she had had to give some information away.
The way she conducted herself was unattractive, ugly almost, but as I watched her, the creases and contortions of her face changing every so often, I came to the realisation that she could be quite attractive. She would need to iron out the ugly mannerisms and accusing glares, but her slightly freckled face was not all that unpleasant to look at.
She had long, flowing, blonde hair, that I was suddenly surprised hadn’t lit our way while we were out in the fields. Her eyes, quite uninteresting and unremarkable, somehow demanded my wholehearted attention, to the detriment of everything else that was going on in the room.
Her voice, seemingly more pleasant now that I had noticed a softer side to her appearance, was sauntering around the room, like some sort of internal angel in my head.
“We will stay here a while. Then we will travel to another safehouse. Then you might get to see some Germans.”
A door in the corner creaked open, causing me and Mike to spin suddenly in our chairs, reaching for our non-existent weapons.
“Alfred. If you are that inquisitive, why do you not come in?”
He hid behind the door once more, before he flung it open, clutching a bottle.
“It’s a bit early for all that, don’t you think?” I asked.
“We haven’t been to bed yet, so I like to think of it as really late,” Mike replied chipperly.
“Me too,” replied Suzanne. It was the first thing that they had agreed on all evening. “Besides, we are occupied. All the rules are meant to be broken. You’ll learn that soon enough.”
12
“I hear that you are to be leaving us soon, my friends.”
We both looked up, to stare at the old man that had been so hospitable to us in the last week or so. I stopped giving all my attention to the map that lay spread out before me, the unpredictable and intertwining lines making no sense to me whatsoever; without having been able to go out and pick out some of the local landmarks.
It had been a frustrating time, in Restigné, but one that I knew I should not take for granted. It was a small, farming community around there, where everyone knew everyone else’s business, which was both a nice change to what I was used to, but also an indescribable annoyance.
The news of our presence had spread faster than cholera and, before we knew it, we were the recipients of every kind of gift, from bottles of brandy, to ancient-looking goats and sheep. The former was most welcome, but we knew that we had to be careful.
Drink too much, and in the wrong company, and there was a good chance that we would be arrested before we could even get to work. It was a very real eventuality, that had been drummed into us since our first day at the training school, and one that we both saw as less favourable than death itself.
We were here to do a job, and we intended to see it out as fully as we could.
“Where did you hear that, Alfred?” I asked, patiently, as he had been so with us. We had stayed in his house every night since we had arrived, escaping only for a few hours at a time to wander around the streets and begin to accustom ourselves with the French way of life.
“Suzanne told me. She has not told you?” he asked, quite innocently, but I caught his eyes defying him as they darted over towards the fireplace. I followed, my eyes instantly drawn towards the windows, as if I had the feeling that someone had been there recently, watching the three men sitting silently in the house.
But no sooner had I thought that the young, handsome man from the mantelpiece was calling me again, as if he had known my name. For a while, I thought I had seen something of Alfred in him and thought maybe that it had been a portrait of the man, in his younger days. But at the same time, there were remarkable features that set them apart, that convinced me enough to believe that this was Alfred’s son.
“No, she hasn’t told us,” Mike said with a forceful aggression. “You just wait till I see her! Do we not deserve to be the first to know?!”
Mike flew from his chair, pacing the floor so much that I worried that the soles of his shoes would be worn thin.
I remained silent, opting instead to stare straight at the old man opposite me.
“I am sorry, my friend. I thought she would have told you by now.”
I nodded in Alfred’s direction, to acknowledge what he had said, but my mind was immediately anywhere but the room that I was in. I was concerned, so was Mike, but I was able to internalise my emotions and keep them to myself. It was a weakness of his.
The questions began to appear in my mind instantly, as my eyes fell on the window where I had been convinced there was someone watching. I could feel my thoughts becoming more irrational, as the paranoia grew, but I could see no other way of thinking.
Why had she not told us? There could have been a thousand reasons why, some more justified than others. Maybe things had not been finalised yet, in which case I could understand why we had been kept in the dark.
But why then had she told Albert, the middle-aged man who, as far as I could tell, would have nothing to do with us the minute that we stepped out of his door for the last time? Why did he have a right to know something that we didn’t?
Things began to add up to answers that weren’t all in alignment.
I began to question Suzanne, and whether or not she was up to the job. She had been less than secure when coming out to meet us, nonchalantly wandering around the fields with a rifle cradled in her arms. Anyone could have seen that and tried to challenge us.
From what we could tell as well, she had not had anyone with her, it was just her alone that had come out to meet us. Which, in itself was a danger. But maybe it was because she did not like men telling her what to do
that had made her opinion of security so lax.
The final question was that she had not bothered to check any of the codewords with us, the ones that we had been straining to remember for weeks beforehand. It was only at that moment that I realised that neither Mike nor myself had challenged her in her neglect, which made us just as culpable as her.
My mind began to play grand, elusive and elaborate tricks on myself, as I began to see steel helmets appearing at the bottom of the windowpane, as Wehrmacht soldiers crouched down to gain entry to the house.
The eyes of the young man on the mantelpiece began to follow my movements and maintain his steely stare on me, as I imagined him in the crisp, black uniform of the Schutzstaffel.
We had been in Restigné for less than a week, but already I could feel each of my nerves being slowly shredded as if each one of them was slowly being frayed with every second that ticked by on the large clock behind Alfred’s head.
“You are both okay, yes?”
“Of course, Alfred. Of course. There are just a few things about Suzanne that do not sit right with us. Do you know much about her?”
He shuffled uncomfortably in his seat for a second, before looking down at the ground. It was unusual, to see a man of his age and experience, being humbled in such a way by a woman not even present, who was young enough to be his daughter.
“She told me not to talk to you in this way. We could talk about anything apart from one another and our backgrounds.”
“That’s rather odd, wouldn’t you say, old fruit?” He paced over to me, switching to a fast-paced English in an attempt to confuse our host. “She’s quite happy to disregard blatant security measures when our lives are at risk. But the minute it comes back to her it’s more secure than the Bank of England.”
I looked across at Alfred, trying to read his face and work out if he had understood or not. His eyes, still staring down at the floorboards, gave me the impression that he knew he was not allowed to listen in.
“Alfred. Alfred, regarde moi. Look at me.”
He did as he was told, his face completely forlorn. There was something in his eyes that told me that he was used to being ordered around, and would do anything that anyone told him, as long as it meant that he would have had an easier life. He would have made a first-rate footman.
“What do you know about her? Is she committed to her cause?”
“I have known her a good many years,” he began muttering, ignoring the second, and more important question. He pulled out a handkerchief from his pocket and began rummaging away at his nose. It was an ornate article, with the letters ‘A.S’ stitched into it in a lavish red embroidery. It captured my attention, although for what reason I did not know. “I knew her parents very well. They lived here in Restigné. But then she moved away. To be married. That was a few years ago now.”
“Why did she come back?”
“The same reason why everyone else began to move,” he looked up, with a resigned shrug. “The war. She told me that she had been up on the coast somewhere and after the armistice, she came back. Wanted to be with her parents.”
“Then why you? Why are we not with her parents?”
He sighed, “Hector and Esther Seguin died in the German bombing. Two days before the armistice.”
“And she did not know?”
“Nobody thought that she would want to. She did not exactly get on very well with her parents.”
“Why was that?”
“The same reason as I fell out with mine, my friend. We fell in love with the wrong people, or so our families thought. You see, both my family and the Seguin family were proud Frenchmen. They believed in marrying those of the same nationality.”
Both Mike and I inadvertently shuffled to the ends of our seat, so that we did not miss another word that proceeded from Alfred’s lips.
“I married an English girl,” he said, looking up and into my eyes for the first time since he had started. “Her name was Helen. I always loved the way that you English people say it. The French way is so nonchalant, so…airy. The English way is far more pronounced. As if it means more to them. She meant a great deal to me.”
His eyes were suddenly filled with tears and, although we were itching to know what it was he would say about Suzanne, now did not seem like the right time to press him for answers.
“Suzanne was young when she got married. Her family did not feel like she had thought it through entirely. I would suppose that they were right in one regard. He died in some fighting somewhere, I cannot remember where now. But, I suppose, if she had not married him, she could well have died in the same raid as her family. So, there is that blessing I suppose.”
“Her husband, he was a soldier?”
“Of sorts, he was a—”
The lock on the door began to rattle viciously, as a key was thrust into the lock. As if he was petrified of what might lay in wait for him if he was caught, Alfred shot up from his chair, sending it scratching over the wooden floor, as he made a leap towards the sink. It seemed as if he was trying to distance himself as much as he could from us so that whoever it was coming through the door could do anything but accuse him of talking to Mike and me.
Sensing the fury that might suddenly erupt, I rededicated my attention on the map in front of me, as Mike opened his book up to re-read the same chapter that he already had done.
Suzanne stood in the doorway, her small frame somehow appearing far more threatening than when she had had the rifle in her grasp. There was something about her timing that panicked me, as if she had pressed her ear up to the keyhole to hear what Alfred had been saying about her, only to burst in at what could have been a vital moment.
The invisible eyes that I had been sure were observing us were beginning to form up in my mind. They were a steely grey, emotionless, and attached to the pretty face of Suzanne Seguin.
“We are leaving. One hour. Pack up everything that you need. You will not be coming back here again.”
I could tell that Mike was trying his hardest to act surprised, as if we didn’t already know that we were soon to depart.
“That is a frightful shame,” he began. “This is perhaps one of the most splendid hotels that I have ever had the pleasure to stay in.”
He looked across at Alfred, who had turned away from the sink to face us, a big grin on his face.
“The pleasure has been all mine, gentlemen. I pray for your safe return. Maybe we will see one another again, someday?”
“Don’t start all that Alfred. They will not be returning here.”
I wondered how she could be so sure and questioned the meaning of her statement. Had she meant that we would not be coming here again, as we went about the pursuit of our duties? Or had she meant that we would not live long enough to be able to return?
Either way, there was only one thing that I was certain of. Suzanne Seguin was one that I could not trust.
13
Our journey to Tours was marked with a perfect silence, the likes of which I had never experienced in my life before. Not even Mike seemed capable of breaking it in order to confront Suzanne. She had an air about her that made it almost impossible to quiz her, to question why she had done what she did and her motivations behind it.
It was almost like we were both scared of her.
The silence in the car, a noisy but surprisingly comfortable Citroen, was broken only by a few coughs and splutters, mainly from its occupants, but worryingly from the engine also.
While we had stayed in Restigné, we had become accustomed to the French way of life, almost untouched by the occupation. However, the closer we got to our destination, Tours, the more we began to realise that our stay there was going to be one characterised by being in daily contact with our enemy. It was a fact that did not sit particularly comfortably with me.
We had been trained how to kill these men, whether it was with our bare hands or with a pistol or knife. We had undergone thorough training in how to communicate with them if we need
ed to, and how to identify various high-ranking officers and different regiments.
But each time we had been on an exercise, it finished, we were able to go home safe in the knowledge that we weren’t about to be arrested or executed. But in Tours, there was no end to the game. We were, as the Major had put it, “actors in the largest play imaginable. A play in which the curtain will not be drawn for a good many months.”
It seemed as though Suzanne had completely forgotten the fact that we were less than impressed with her performance so far. It was only because we had no other choice of what to do that we were even sitting in the car with her. If there was something else we could have done, we would have done it. But we needed her, and she knew that.
She smiled throughout the entire journey, occasionally waving to pedestrians and cyclists as we chugged our way down the main road into the city. It was like she considered herself royalty.
As we passed yet another Opel Blitz truck, mercifully empty of any troops, but still nonetheless occupied by a curious German passenger in the cab, Suzanne turned to face us.
“There are many like that. They will stare at you, try to break you silently. They can spot a spy from a kilometre away. They have orders to bring in at least one resistance worker a week.”
“You can’t possibly know that. How could you know that?”
“I have some very good friends, in some highly unusual places.”
I suddenly felt the urge to ask about her husband, as I had the most peculiar feeling in the pit of my stomach, one that told me that she wasn’t as pretty and clean as her appearance would have us believe. There was a dark side to her, an ugly side, one that had not truly reached the surface with us yet.
As I went to quiz her, she interrupted me.
“Tours is a dangerous place to be,” she repeated. “One of your English agents was arrested only two days ago in Orléans. He made a very stupid mistake.”
She spat her last few words, as if she was incensed that the English agent had been so foolish that it had amounted to a personal attack on her.
