Single to Paris

by Single to Paris (retail) (epub)

  No. Didn’t match his manner in the closing stages, that slightly contemptuous, ‘Anything else you’d like to tell me?’ All that fitted any of it – words, tone of voice, switching-off of interest – was that he’d got all he wanted out of her and would be taking care of Jacqui in some way he’d work out for himself.

  * * *

  She was woken by the scrape of the key in the lock of her cell door, then the squeak of its hinges as it was pulled open. She knew immediately where she was and all the circumstances of her being there; in the three or four seconds it took for the door to open she was wondering – guessing – Gestapo woman – Clausen – SS coming for her?

  The first guess had been right. The tall, chicken-headed one: electric torch in one hand, tin mug in the other. Something else in that hand too, pressed against the mug. A bun? Oh – lump of bread – of a kind she remembered – technically speaking black bread, actually grey, with a musty taste and odour. Pinhead had put it and the mug on a shelf at that door end of the cell.

  ‘Breakfast.’

  ‘Thank you. May I ask, what is the time?’

  ‘Gone eight. Want visit toilette?’

  ‘Yes – please…’

  Torch-beam travelling around, touching here and there. In fact one could have seen one’s way around without it now, by the seepage of light from the barred aperture high in the end wall. Pinhead had the torch in her left hand, and having the other one free now had jerked a stick or something from her belt. Riding-crop. Bone handle, silver band: Rosie saw it in close-up as she edged out past her. ‘Thank you.’

  You had to be polite to them. Stupid not to be. All you got, if you weren’t, was beaten: and – as she’d thought before – if the whole place was empty, the freaks not answerable to anyone…

  ‘To your left!’

  ‘I know. Thank you.’

  The toilette was as appalling as she’d expected. By anything like normal standards, wasn’t usable. One tried not to breathe. The woman waited with the torch shining in, her shape framed in the doorway like some great bird, possibly prehistoric. Tall, small-headed, straight-sided, exceptionally long feet.

  ‘Quick, you!’

  Wasn’t taking any longer than she had to. Wasn’t exactly longing to get back to her cell either, although of the two – yes, that was preferable. But only performing the essentials while breathing as shallowly as possible and taking – well, great care: needing the light from the torch in that respect, while avoiding that unwavering stare. Eyes like some sort of bird’s too: they’d look at anything without blinking. Rosie asked her as they passed through that end of the big urine-stinking cellar again, ‘This place was full until last night, did your colleague say?’

  ‘Résistants. Criminals.’

  ‘Big crowd of them?’

  ‘It was full, God’s sake—’

  ‘She doesn’t speak much French, does she, wasn’t easy to understand. I think she said they moved them to some other prison.’

  Turning right where the barred door stood open: dampness squeezing through the slippers and up between her toes. At the door of her own cell now though, on dryish cement again; glancing round. ‘A different prison?’

  ‘In.’ A poke with the crop; then as she moved on in: ‘Gestapo of Rue Lauriston taking them. What’s it matter to you?’

  ‘Well. Wondering how long I’ll be here.’

  ‘Not long. Tell you that – because we leaving too.’ A catarrhal snort. ‘You to your peloton d’exécution, we home Bavaria. Eat breakfast, maybe last you get.’ Backing out, the torchlight withdrawing with her and cut off with the thud of the door, leaving Rosie to grope for the lump of coarse bread and the tin mug – which contained about a third of a pint of some sort of gruel, thin and lukewarm but still better than nothing.

  Peloton d’exécution in that context meaning a firing-squad, presumably.

  All day now, she supposed. Her eyes were accustoming themselves to the semi-darkness again. She wished to God she still had her watch.

  * * *

  All day. Dozing a little and trying to dream of Ben. Thinking for maybe the four-hundred-and-ninetieth time about how it would be when the war was finished, these bastards back in their own country, not bloody goose-stepping all over Europe and England too as they’d planned and had expected. Ben had told her about that, having seen a translation of captured printed orders which had been issued to the German 9th and 16th Armies for the invasion and occupation of Great Britain, including mention of an SS extermination outfit which would have had its headquarters in London and gas-chamber units, Einsatzgruppen, in specified locations across the country. There’d been details such as setting one up at the southern end of the Forth Bridge, unless the bridge had been destroyed in the course of the invasion, in which case another would be needed to the north of it. Ben had pointed out, over drinks in a bar-restaurant called the Wellington, in Knightsbridge, ‘Won’t happen now because whether or not they know it we’ve got ’em licked. But for instance – every male between seventeen and forty-five to be sent to slave labour over there. How about that? I tell you – you marvellous, marvellous object, you – any time between now and eternity I set eyes on one I’ll have in mind how it would have gone if they’d had us licked!’

  It was about then that she’d said, ‘Do let’s move to Australia, when it’s over?’

  He’d talked about it before, as something they might do together. There’d been some Australian government scheme announced, an offer to ex-servicemen of grants of land which if the grantee had cleared of scrub within a certain time he’d then be entitled to another vast adjoining slab of territory: end up (he’d told her) with a spread about the size of – hell, Kent or Sussex. He’d been attracted to the idea, only doubtful as to how she’d take to what would be a rough life, comparative isolation and so forth. She’d told him she thought she’d take to it like a duck to water – above all, of course, with him.

  But with his gammy leg now? Clearing hundreds of square miles of bush – and being stuck with it then no matter how the old leg reacted?

  Well – if he was fit to have been sent back to sea now, maybe…

  She spent a lot of the time pacing up and down her cell, also did press-ups and sit-ups and running-on-the-spot. Pinhead came about twelve hours after her morning visit, bringing a supper that was every bit as good as breakfast, and allowed her another outing to the toilette.

  * * *

  Midnight, roughly. In fact it must have been at about this stage that she’d lost her sense of time – effectively, lost a whole day. Whether either Pinhead or the gorilla had missed a visit or even two, or whether she’d gone through it as an automaton, like sleep-walking – weird enough, but actually the more likely, since otherwise she’d surely have been even hungrier than she was, missing two of those great meals – anyway, she came to realise afterwards that she must have been thinking of this being Tuesday night when actually it was Wednesday. Wondering about Leblanc and – what was his name, the ex-soldier – Leblanc had mentioned it… No doubt of it though, she’d been thinking about them as if it was tonight they’d be raiding the Milice armoury, tomorrow night maybe attacking the Rue de la Pompe house.

  Fernagut was the man’s name. Not bad, Rosie – seeing that Leblanc only mentioned it that one time. But how would they go about it, she wondered. More exercise for the brain – for the imagination anyway. A strongish force, ten or twenty men, say – well-armed, if last night’s raid on the armoury had been successful. If it hadn’t, she guessed, they’d be sitting tight. But assuming they’d got the Schmeissers and grenades – smash in, using all they had, or break in softly-softly like burglars?

  Visualising it: remembering that road and the cream-coloured house, only having to picture it now in darkness. There might be just a sliver of moon but maybe not, maybe not risen yet, she thought. Might even be moonless – would be, somewhere about now: it had been full on the night before the attack on the factory in St Valéry, and that had been – the nint
h of this month. In which case the dark period would start tomorrow night, you’d need to allow for some moon now – worse luck. Whether in any case it would light the front of the house – the ground inside that shrubbery behind the railings… You wouldn’t get in that far unseen anyway – there’d surely be a guard or two. Approach might be possible from the back, although the gestapists would have taken care of that as well – if they’d even considered the possibility of being attacked. Anyway – if one had had to plan it oneself, here and now, on as little as one knew or could guess: OK, a truckload of at least a dozen men, say. With automatic weapons, obviously. In by the gate which if it wasn’t open you’d either smash through with the truck or have a couple of them drop off to open it – giving them covering fire from the truck if necessary – then rush either the front door and/or windows or the side or back door – or all of them if there were enough of you – smashing in with axes or sledge-hammers, but anyway making it so fast and furious they wouldn’t get time to kill their prisoners.

  * * *

  From a front bedroom window in number 107 Nico watched the house, which from this angle when the small remnants of a moon showed as it was doing intermittently through slow-moving cloud – there’d been rain earlier, might well be more coming – was in dark silhouette against it, the house’s moon-shadow reaching all the way to the gravelled entrance drive and the gate across it. The gate was shut, as it had been when Nico had stopped to fix his brakes on Monday. It was 12.20 now: Thursday. Zero-hour 12.30, in ten minutes. No guard on the gate anyway, as there had been then. There’d been one individual moving around, but Nico hadn’t seen him in the past half-hour. It would be very convenient if they’d withdrawn him, called him inside to join a card-game or something. Nico was standing well back from the sash window, but had it open so he could hear as well as see; old Vignot had opened it for him hours ago, in daylight, everything natural and above-board, a window opened on a hot afternoon by the owner of the house, no one across the road there sharp-eyed or bright enough to notice that it had still been open at nightfall. It was draughty in the house since the wind had got up, and the old boy had groused a bit about it. But he was a good sort, they’d been lucky with him. How it had come about was that Nico had said, when Leblanc and Fernagut had been conferring in the Dog this morning, ‘If we had access to one of the places opposite, wouldn’t be so bad. See what comes and goes, get an idea of the numbers we’ll be up against?’

  ‘Boy’s damn right.’ Fernagut, former sergeant-major. Nico turning pink with pleasure as Fernagut told Leblanc, ‘We’d find one we could use, too, bet your life. With a choice of say these five, that’d be close enough?’ They had a map spread on the table. Fernagut continuing, ‘Since every son of a bitch in Paris is calling himself a résistant now – needing only one out of five?’

  Vignot’s had been the third they’d tried – Fernagut himself and Nico with him, the old soldier simultaneously making his own recce of the surroundings. Ostensibly, if challenged, he was in the business of buying antique furniture at knockdown prices. At the first house the woman was stone-deaf and wouldn’t let them in, and it mightn’t have been too healthy having to bawl your head off on a doorstep right opposite the Bonny-Lafont establishment; at the second no one came to the door, and at the third they’d found old Vignot, a dapper octogenarian who’d had some managerial position at Longchamp, loathed the occupants of that house as much as he detested Boches and had expressed delight at being allowed to help.

  He was on the stairs now, in easy calling distance from Nico’s position in the bedroom, had his telephone with him at the full length of its flex from where it was plugged in, in the hall. He also had a torch and the ’phone number of a house two blocks away where Fernagut was waiting inside and a truck with fifteen men in it was parked with its gazo engine chugging in an alleyway beside it. In any emergency Nico would call Fernagut, otherwise Fernagut would call and check before he got going at 25 minutes past the hour.

  Getting close to that time now. Vignot calling, ‘Still all quiet, lad?’

  ‘Yes. How long now?’

  ‘Three minutes. I suppose you’ll—’

  ‘Hang on.’

  Lights – powerful torches. The guard had had one when he’d been there, and there’d been light visible in some windows from time to time, but most of the blinds were drawn – and nobody had come out with torches as they were doing now. Rumble of artillery then, on the wind from the south-west. Nico and his host had been listening to it earlier and speculating about the hoped-for arrival of the Americans. He wasn’t listening to it now though – instead, to the sound of some heavy vehicle approaching from the direction of Avenue Foch.

  Definitely coming this way. A petrol engine.

  ‘Monsieur Vignot – call him up please, say wait, don’t move!’

  ‘Oh, my…’

  You could see the truck now – flicking masked headlights approaching from the right. Not necessarily coming here – there – but with virtually no other traffic in the past couple of hours, and a lot of activity over there now – men, torches, voices, a whole crowd of them milling round suddenly: and they were opening the gate…

  Evacuating?

  ‘Tell him something’s definitely happening, don’t move!’

  Vignot had Fernagut on the line: ‘He says to wait, monsieur, not to move. Apparently there is – activity, of some kind.’

  The gate was open and one of them was out on the pavement signalling to the approaching truck. Big, a three-tonner, dark-coloured: turning in off the road, lumbering up through the open gateway and the crowd inside there surging towards it. Those with torches, as Nico made it out, were herding others – who had their hands up. The truck’s tailgate crashed down, forming a ramp up which the prisoners were now being driven. He caught glimpses of Schmeissers, heard shouts and derisive laughter. He called to Vignot: ‘I’m coming. Tell him I’m coming, I’ll explain…’

  Chapter 18

  Clausen got home to the flat just before midnight, which was bad enough but less so than it had been on Monday or Tuesday, when she’d waited up for him until well into the small hours – early hours of this morning, in fact. Not that she blamed him for it – with so many of them already gone, his work-load obviously was tremendous, had been building up steadily in the last fortnight or so; and tonight at least she’d known he was going to be late, he’d managed to telephone her earlier. Often he couldn’t – private calls being difficult, depending on where he was and who was with him.

  Anyway, here he was now. For the moment at least, all well.

  ‘You must be whacked.’

  ‘Probably less so than you. Sitting around waiting…’

  ‘Haven’t had your marching orders yet, anyway?’

  Asking this while taking a bottle of Cognac and two glasses out to the table on the balcony. He’d said if he went straight to bed he wouldn’t sleep, needed time to relax with her for a while, and talk: there was still ground to cover. He’d had supper in the mess in l’Hôtel Continental – from where he’d made his call – and it had been a hurried, working meal – talking shop, of course. Answering her question now with a headshake: ‘Not yet. If I had been, you’d know, wouldn’t need to be asking me.’

  ‘But they might have given you some – indication—’

  ‘The first thing I’d do’ – holding her again, talking into her hair – ‘I’d come out here at once to tell you, discuss it with you, finalise plans for your move. That is, if we haven’t got you away first – which I’d prefer, is what I’m aiming for.’ A tighter hug, a long kiss… ‘Believe me. No matter what order I received, or from whom—’

  ‘Of course I believe you. It’s just that’ – he’d released her and she flopped down, leaving it to him to pour the brandy – ‘as you say – waiting around, no idea what’s going on or how long…’

  ‘I know how it must be for you. Busy or not, you’re in my head pretty well all the time.’

  Sliver of a moon u
p there, in and out of cloud. This side of the house was sheltered from the wind and the air was warm despite earlier rain. The view in fact was beautiful – even over rooftops and chimney-pots, shifting patterns of light and shadow and the shine of still-wet slate; and, of course, the dark mass of the Bois de Boulogne behind all that.

  He’d poured the Cognac; paused with the bottle in his hand, listening to the distant rumble of artillery. ‘Hear it?’

  ‘Been hearing it off and on all evening. How far away, d’you think?’

  ‘God knows.’ Raising his glass to her. ‘Far enough that it needn’t spoil our sleep.’

  ‘Closer than last night, though.’

  ‘Doesn’t necessarily make it an advance on Paris. Indications are still that they’ll bypass us here. Paris is not essential to them. What they want – in fact must have – are the ports. They may leave us to stew for – oh, another week, even.’

  ‘Or a day or two?’

  ‘Days, plural, in any case. The direction of their advance – American and British and a so-called Free French division – is eastward and north-eastward. Paris would only bog them down. But yes, all right, time is limited – especially as far as I’m concerned, finalising details in regard to you and getting you on your way. But you don’t need to worry. Well – I say not worry – I mean over detail, which I really do have well in hand; but in saying this I’m not for a moment – oh, trying to make less of – of the heartbreak we’re facing, you and I. I was going to say the tragedy but that’s too strong, isn’t it, the word implies a permanence which in our case does not apply – we both know this, uh? – believe in it?’

  ‘Of course.’ Gazing at him: ‘I do, and I don’t doubt you for a moment, my darling. Despite your French going funny sometimes.’ Smiling at him: knowing he’d never found it easy expressing any depth of feeling in her language, despite his fluency in it otherwise. Maybe even in German he’d be like this. All she knew – or cared – was that the feelings he expressed so stiltedly were genuine, that as long as she wanted to – needed to – she could rely on him.