Escape From Paris

by Carolyn G. Hart

  The engine turned over, caught, held, roared, she slammed the car into first and it bolted up the road. She looked in the rearview mirror. The young sentry was watching after her. The sergeant had turned away, to step into the shade of the sentry box.

  Linda reached for a cigarette. Funny, she had only smoked occasionally until the Germans occupied Paris. Now that cigarettes were so hard to get, she smoked more and more. Maybe she smoked because she was afraid. She drew deeply on the cigarette. Afraid. Yes. She was afraid but she couldn’t admit her fear to Eleanor or Robert. She couldn’t tell them because Eleanor already wanted her to go home to America. “Not unless you are coming, too,” she told her sister.

  Eleanor had shaken her head. It wasn’t only that France had been her home since her marriage sixteen years before. It was more than that. She couldn’t leave Paris when she had no word from her husband since Dunkirk, and, even if the Germans would permit her to go, they might not be willing to let Robert leave. It was very hard to get permission to leave France now.

  Most Americans had left during the year of the phony war and many who had stayed late fled when the Blitzkrieg began in May. There were only a handful of Americans left in Paris.

  If Eleanor would agree to leave . . . Linda drew hard on the cigarette. But Eleanor was determined to stay.

  The military hospital was out of sight now. Over the next hill lay the Citadel. There would be another stop there, to have her papers checked. If anyone ordered her to open the trunk . . . Her hand trembled and she stubbed out the cigarette.

  “I say!”

  The wheel jerked a little under her hands. The car swerved but she brought it straight again. There wasn’t any traffic to worry about. No one had cars but Germans and their Vichy friends. The Frenchmen walking along the road, scythes over their shoulders, turned hard faces toward her car until they saw the Red Cross flag. She waited until she was past the workers to answer.

  “Yes.”

  “Sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you.”

  “That’s okay. Are you all right back there? It’s so small.”

  “Fine, thanks.” His voice was muffled but cheerful. “How far are we?”

  She realized he wouldn’t have any idea how many miles it was to Paris. “About seventy-five miles. But there isn’t any traffic.” The road began a gradual climb. She could just glimpse the Citadel through the line of poplar trees to her left. “We’ll be slowing down in a few minutes. A roadblock.”

  “Roadblock?”

  “Don’t worry. It’s just to check papers. There are five or six of them ahead.”

  Not to worry. Unless, of course, they were unlucky. An officious sentry . . . But it was late afternoon now and hot, nearing time for guards to change. They would be thinking of cold beer and food. Why should anyone pay much attention to her?

  “Look,” and the muffled voice was serious now, almost harsh, “If anyone, you know, makes you open the trunk, if they search the car, well, you just give a little scream, you know, you are absolutely surprised and I’ll say I sneaked into the trunk, hid myself.”

  She blew out a soft little spurt of air. That wouldn’t save her. But there wasn’t any point in telling him so.

  “Okay,” she said quietly, “I’ll remember. Don’t worry. We’ll be all right.”

  “Right-oh. I just meant, well, in case.”

  The road swung in an arc around the great stone pile that was the Citadel and she spoke quickly now. “Don’t say anything again until I knock twice, like this,” and she thumped the metal on the dash. She pulled up even with the sentry box.

  The guard looked perfunctorily in the backseat, riffled through her papers then returned them.

  One down, she thought, as the car picked up speed again. She thumped the dash.

  “I say, uh, what’s your name?” His voice seemed so young.

  “Linda. Linda Rossiter.”

  “I’m Michael Evans.”

  “Hello, Michael.”

  “Hello, Linda.” He paused. “That’s a pretty name, Linda. You’re an American, you say.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, what . . . I mean, how do you happen to be here, in France?”

  Linda drove slowly, carefully, and tried to explain. “Last year, just before Christmas, my parents were killed in a plane crash. They were flying up to my college to pick me up for the holidays.”

  “Oh, I say, I’m so sorry.” And she knew he was sorry, that even now when death was everywhere, he had a moment to share her grief.

  “Thank you.” Linda swallowed. It was still hard for her to talk about that hideous end to her happiest years. “I couldn’t go back to school like nothing had happened. My older sister, Eleanor, is married to a Frenchman. She came home to California for the funeral and I came back to France with them.”

  “Why are you still here?”

  “It was just the phony war then and when everything happened so suddenly last spring, I didn’t want to leave Eleanor. When Andre didn’t come back, he was at Dunkirk, I didn’t feel like I could leave.”

  “Oh, yes. I understand that. So you live in Paris with your sister?”

  “Yes, with Eleanor and her son, Robert.”

  They rode in silence for awhile.

  “I say,” Michael asked uneasily, “do you suppose she’ll mind you bringing me there?”

  Major Erich Krause paused long enough in the magnificently decorated lobby to look at his reflection in the ornate mirrors. The death’s head on his black cap glittered in the light from the chandeliers. His black boots glistened with polish and his SS uniform, black as death, fit perfectly. He permitted a rare smile that stretched his grayish lips back over yellowed sharp teeth. He nodded shortly at Sgt. Schmidt.

  Sgt. Schmidt jumped and stood stiffly at attention.

  Krause went into his office, a rare feeling of good humor twisting his mouth into a brief smile. He hung his cap on a coat tree, crossed to his desk. His desk, Erich H. Krause’s desk. He’d come a long way since the miserable days during the Great War when he’d been a gassed corporal, struggling back to Germany after the Armistice. Corporals were doing well these days. His smile broadened.

  Then he saw the sheet of blue paper slewed almost carelessly in the center of his smooth and bare desk.

  He never left loose papers about. Krause frowned. He picked up the blue sheet with a newspaper clipping attached. As he read, his hand began to shake, ever so slightly, until he willed it to be still. His face reddened. A vein pulsed in his forehead. He read the message again: Slackness won’t be tolerated. Remedy this.

  The insolent scrawl angled across the page. A thick-bodied signature dominated the flimsy sheet. Despite his will, Krause’s hand shook again. Helmuth Knocken, chief of the Gestapo in France, second only in power to Heydrich. Knocken had direct access to Hitler. If he thought a man wasn’t doing his job, that man didn’t have long to live.

  The reddish flush died away, leaving Krause’s face a sickly white. He reached down, jammed his finger against the buzzer on his desk.

  Sgt. Schmidt came immediately. “Sir.”

  “Who wrote this article?”

  Schmidt looked blank. “It was in the Paris Soir. I saw it yesterday.”

  “You didn’t mention it to me.”

  Sgt. Schmidt swallowed. He hadn’t dared. He knew Krause’s temper.

  Krause stared at him and, once again, a vein throbbed in his forehead. “You should have told me. You should have told me,” and his voice rose to a shout.

  Schmidt waited miserably. “I didn’t know,” he began. Then he said desperately, “I thought it was all a lie.”

  Krause’s ice-green eyes looked down at the clipping. It was all the fault of the clipping.

  RAF FLIERS CONTINUE TO ESCAPE

  Local authorities in Northern France report a puzzle: RAF pilots daily bail out of damaged aircraft yet German soldiers have captured only three fliers in the past two weeks.

  “It is clear,” Capt. Bruno Wal
ther, Fifth Army Group, announced Wednesday, “that French civilians are hiding pilots and smuggling them south.”

  The captain concluded that stricter penalties soon to be enforced will encourage civilians to surrender downed fliers.

  Capt. Walther accounted for the disparity in the number of pilots shot down and the number captured by pointing out that once a pilot is picked up and hidden by civilians, it is no longer a military function to discover him, but a duty of the police.

  Krause’s eyes moved back to Knocken’s terse message: Slackness won’t be tolerated. Remedy this.

  As if he was slack. He worked long hours and he had so many responsibilities, rounding up Jewish emigres, searching out the authors of the new and scurrilous newsletters being published undercover in Paris, hunting for British airmen who should have the decency to be prisoners of war.

  He would make sure Knocken had no reason to accuse him of slackness. “Schmidt!”

  The sergeant stiffened, then realized with relief that Krause’s anger was no longer directed at him. “Sir.”

  “Establish a permanent checkpoint at the Gare du Nord. The papers of every man of military age must be checked. If there is anything suspicious, accent, clothing, a group of young men traveling together, pick them up.” He paused, “Prepare a report for Obersturmfuehrer Knocken on our continuing investigation into the smuggling of British soldiers. Tell him that we are sending out Gestapo agents, who speak English, in captured RAF uniforms. We will soon put a stop to all this smuggling and the damned French will pay for their double-dealing.”

  The sun shone across the English Channel, too. Picnic weather. Not this August. Jonathan Harris sprawled in the shade of the dispersal tent, drinking a cup of tea but he lay tensely, waiting. The field telephone rang. “Scramble,” Squadron Leader Mitchell shouted. “Seventy-plus, angels one-six.”

  Jonathan and the other pilots jumped up and ran toward the waiting ranks of Hurricanes. He led the dash for the planes, calling over his shoulder to his best friend, Reggie Howard, “Hey Reggie, follow me. I’ll show you how it’s done.” Reggie had shot down three Heinkels the day before. He grinned as he ran past to his plane.

  The Hurricanes took off, one after the other, as fast as they could clear the airstrip. But the warning hadn’t come in time. The last plane was just airborne when Squadron Leader Mitchell called, “Bandits . . . bandits, 80-plus. Angels one-seven, three o’clock.”

  The Messerschmitts, slanting out of the early morning sun, peeled down from 17,000 feet onto the hapless Hurricanes.

  Jonathan Harris was in the third Hurricane up. He climbed as fast as he could, then at the last possible instant, dived in a tight circle. The ME-110 bearing down on him overshot. For a brief mind-searing instant, Jonathan’s Hurricane roared at tree-top level toward an orchard. Jonathan saw the trees in a blur. If the plane didn’t lift now, it would be too late. He pulled on the stick with all his strength. He smelled oil and exhaust fumes, heard the squeal of the engine. Abruptly, the nose pulled up and he was climbing. Planes broke away from each other, streaking wildly across the sky, as formless as scattered marbles.

  To Jonathan’s left, a yellow-nosed ME110 stalked a Hurricane. He turned. Now the sun was behind him. He flew down. Closer, closer, close enough. His gloved thumb pressed the red button in the center of the control column. Bullets curved in a broken white line. The ME110 exploded. Jonathan immediately pulled up, higher, higher. His head swung violently right and left. Was anyone behind him? Anyone? Anywhere?

  Another ME110 slipped away beneath him. He veered, was turning to follow when he heard Jimmy Kinkaid shout, “Reggie, Reggie! Bandit . . . six o’clock.”

  Jonathan looked through the windscreen at Reggie’s plane. It didn’t take more than eight seconds to happen. The ME110 was already firing. Jonathan had time to think how much the stream of tracer bullets looked like confetti and to see the ragged series of black holes in the fuselage of Reggie’s Hurricane before flames puffed up behind the engine. For an instant, there was a thin wavering line of fire, no stronger or wilder than flickering flame in a fireplace. For an instant. Until the petrol tanks exploded and a searing roiling sheet of yellow flame enveloped the entire Hurricane. The plane’s metal was dark inside the flames and, dimly, horribly, Reggie shriveled into a blackened mass.

  “Reggie . . . Oh Jesus . . .” Jimmy Kinkaid’s Hurricane wavered, turned toward the molten fiery tangle of wreckage as the wreckage plummeted mindlessly down. Then the sky was empty of battle, the Messerschmitts pulling away over the gray-blue waters of the Channel, the Hurricanes swinging homeward.

  That was the first scramble.

  The second sounded at eleven. Kendrick had to ditch in the Channel but he was picked up by a motor launch. Freeman and Croft were killed.

  Now they waited again, sprawled in the sun around the dispersal tent. Jonathan finished his tea. He didn’t want any bread and jam. Instead, he looked worriedly at Jimmy Kinkaid. Jimmy’s mug sat beside him, ignored. Jimmy lay on the ground staring upward, his young face slack and puddly like an old man’s.

  Jonathan reached into his tunic pocket and pulled out a packet of Players. He fumbled for a minute in his trouser pocket then walked over to Jimmy. “Got a light, Jimmy?”

  Jimmy looked up blankly. For a long moment his eyes were unfocussed, then he reached into his jacket, found a lighter and held it out to Jonathan.

  Jonathan lit the cigarette. “Thanks.”

  Jimmy put the lighter back in his pocket.

  “What are you doing tonight?” Jonathan asked.

  “Tonight?” Jimmy repeated it like a word in a foreign language.

  “Porter’s taking a car up to London. There’s a new band at the Bag O’Nails. It should be quite a bit of fun.”

  Jimmy Kinkaid looked beyond Jonathan, looked back up into the shimmering blue sky. “Reggie always sat across from me in the mess. Freeman sat on my left.”

  A prickle of cold moved down Jonathan’s back.

  Jimmy Kinkaid looked at him now, his eyes wild. “Croft sat on my right. What does that tell you?”

  “Not a bloody thing except you’re talking like a fool. Like an old woman looking at tea leaves. That’s bloody stupid for a man who has to take a plane up any . . .”

  The ring of the field telephone turned every face. Squadron Leader Mitchell answered, listened for an instant, shouted to the tense waiting flyers, “Scramble. Seventy-plus, angels one-six,” and they were running, all of them, toward the waiting ranks of Hurricanes.

  Jonathan reached his ship, the Mad Monk. Right foot into the stirrup step, left foot on the port wing, a short step, then right foot on the step inset in the fuselage and into the cockpit. His rigger, Alfie, passed the parachute straps across his shoulders, then the Sutton harness straps. Jonathan clipped on his mask, slid shut the canopy, gave the thumbs up signal to the ground crew and they pulled away the chocks. Jonathan’s was the fourth plane to lift off from Hawkinge Field and turn up and out over the blue-gray waters of the Channel. Up, up, up. As they climbed he scanned his horizon, his eyes flickering back and forth and up, always up. He had learned that. Every flyer still alive had learned that. They hadn’t known at first, hadn’t realized what an advantage height and sun could be. It didn’t take long to learn. They lost six planes on one day in July when the ME’s came down out of the sun. They learned, too, that their tight wingtip to wingtip formation was suicidal. They were so busy watching their mates, keeping five feet apart in an air show V, that loosely bunched Messerschmitts ticked them off like ducks in a shooting gallery. Now they fanned out in fours like fingers on an outstretched hand.

  The cockpit was hot and stuffy. Jonathan slid the canopy open and welcomed the cool rush of air. The sun hung in the Western sky. If they climbed high enough, fast enough, the sun would be behind the squadron. Then, out of the East, he saw the Germans. Fine black specks came clearer and closer. Now they hurtled through the sky beneath him, coming to be killed, oh hell, yes. Come on now, come
on, you bastards. The sky filled with planes, lumbering Heinkels with their bombloads ticketed for the coastal airfields and, above, guarding them, black and dangerous, ME109s.

  He saw, out of the corner of his eyes, a flight of Spitfires. Good enough. The Hurricanes would go after the Heinkels, easy meat, while the faster, more maneuverable Spitfires took on the quick and lethal ME’s.

  Jonathan curved down toward the spreading mass of Heinkels, choosing his prey. Suddenly planes began to climb, fall or twist. There was no form or order left as each pilot fought to survive. Jonathan swerved left, dipping nearer and nearer, then he pressed the firing button and watched bullets stitch across the belly of the Heinkel. The plane flew on for a moment longer then slowly rolled on its side, and, lazily, as if it didn’t matter very much, the bomber turned over and slipped sideways down toward the water.

  The sharply blue sky was marked with ragged trails of white, curves and curls and swirls of contrails, a ghostly fast fading imprint of the battle, still existing when some of the men who made those trails were already dead.

  One Heinkel down, two down. Jonathan talked to himself, shouted when he saw Brewster make a hit. As he climbed up again, searching for another Heinkel, the thick nose of a Messerschmitt sliced by him. Jonathan craned his head to the left. There was no time to radio, no time to shout a warning, scarcely time to see as the ME109 bore down on a Hurricane, machine guns rattling. Jonathan saw, above the Hurricane’s wing, the cavorting mouse, Miss Minnie, and knew it for Jimmy Kinkaid’s plane even as the ME109’s cannon shell struck the cockpit and the Hurricane disintegrated.