Nemesis

by Rory Clements

  *

  Bill Bullitt was taking the early morning air. He loved it out here in the countryside of Chantilly, to the north of Paris. He’d have to nip into the city later, to the embassy at the corner of the Place de la Concorde, where it would be as hectic as always, but doubly so with the crisis. He needed his hours here every day, riding out, swimming a few lengths in the pool, playing tennis – or just walking alone, minding his own business, as he was doing this fine, sunny August morning.

  Bullitt had saved this place from ruin, and it had been worth every goddamned cent. Paris wasn’t always easy, but it was a glory of the world compared to Moscow, his last posting, and the murderous bunch of criminals who ran the place. Now the Red swine had shown their true colours: forging an alliance of shame with that other lethal crew, the Nazis. He stopped by the trees, took a deep breath of the beautiful air, then lit a Virginia cigarette. Yes, this was better than Moscow or Berlin, war or no war.

  *

  Bois was only a hundred yards away. He could almost shoot the man from here. But the instructions had been clear. He must be within a metre of his target: one bullet to the chest then, as he goes down, the other five in his head.

  ‘Oui, of course.’ Bois knew how to fire a gun well enough. Spain had taught him that, though he had used a rifle, not a pistol, until now. But what was the difference? They both had triggers, they both pumped pieces of metal into men.

  The man, almost within touching distance now, nodded to him and smiled. ‘Bonjour, monsieur.’

  Talleyrand Bois pulled out the gun and shot his target in the heart. The man did not go down, but looked with astonishment at Bois and then clutched his chest. Bois fired again and the man’s knees began to buckle. Four more bullets flew; each one went into the man’s head. As blood spewed from the dying man, Bois threw down the gun.

  Walk away slowly and steadily, don’t look back, don’t panic. That’s what he had been told.

  But no one had told him what to do if a gendarme appeared.

  Bois panicked. He should have saved bullets: four to kill the man, two to defend himself. He began to run south towards the road. The first shot caught his shoulder and Bois spun, and then tumbled forward to his knees. A second shot hit him in the lower back and he fell flat, chin crunching into the earth. I survived Spain, he thought, but this is where I die. At least I have done my duty. At least I have rid the world of an American bourgeois dog.

  *

  A few hundred yards away, in the shadow of his beloved Chateau de St Firmin, Bill Bullitt heard six shots. They came from somewhere to the west, in the area of the palatial and much larger Chateau de Chantilly. In his head he had been composing a cable to FDR. The President needed to know that the French were still deluding themselves; still convinced that America would ride to their rescue against Hitler. But the shots put all thoughts of the cable out of his head. At first he imagined someone must be out there shooting partridge, but then he shrugged. No, that wasn’t a shotgun.

  He considered going to investigate, but thought better of it. It was French business and none of his. And there were more important things to think about: the cable, and what he was going to say to the French prime minister when he saw him later today. He had to find some way to disabuse Daladier and the rest of the French government that there was any hope of salvation from across the pond. He took a last draw of fine American smoke from his cigarette, then tossed the butt into the grass.

  As he strode back towards his grand house, he heard two more shots.

  *

  Wilde had been up since dawn, closely followed by Lydia and their hosts, Professor Talbot, his wife, Françoise, and their young son and daughter.

  ‘So then,’ Wilde said as he sipped his coffee. ‘Who’s up for a drive down to this holding camp?’

  ‘Well, I could come . . .’ Lydia said without enthusiasm.

  ‘Jacques? Françoise?’

  ‘Of course,’ Professor Talbot said. ‘You’ll need me to show you the way, otherwise you will get horribly lost.’

  Wilde and Lydia had been in France for three and a half weeks, sometimes staying with friends, other times at hotels. It was the last day of August now and they would be wending their way home in a couple of days’ time.

  They had travelled slowly down the east of the country on their planned honeymoon, stopping only one night in Paris, then on to Burgundy for three days, calling in at vineyards, feasting on the local food. Next came the Haute Savoie – Geneva, Chamonix, Mont Blanc, Lake Annecy. A lot of mountain walking; it was the region Wilde liked best.

  They had soon become used to the constant army manoeuvres, the march of uniformed men, the trundling of armoured vehicles ever eastward along roads both small and large, sometimes blocking their way. At first there had been few refugees on the roads, but every day brought a different story. One day war was imminent, the next day peace was assured. The people who lived on the frontier with Italy didn’t know whether to stay at home or make their way west. Wilde and Lydia had carried on south regardless.

  The Riviera was gorgeous, and they had spent ten days there at a spectacular villa on Cap Ferrat with ten acres of coastline and first-rate company. It was the home of a feted English author, an old friend of Lydia’s family, and they were among a diverse group of his acquaintances: various beautiful young men, including an Italian they took to be the author’s lover. The author said that the Nazis could come, but he wasn’t going. Anyway, he rather admired their uniforms, he added with a mischievous twinkle.

  A female American writer with an acerbic column in a New York rag did her best to monopolise the dinner table conversation, and a jazz musician who had been playing his way along the coast played for them. Oh, and there was a former beauty who gave her profession as ‘gold-digger’, but whose gold-digging days must have been waning before the Great War had even begun.

  It had been idyllic. The sound of the waves, the continuous inrush and retreat of the sea against the shore, the movement of their bodies in the heat of the afternoon, him inside her, sighing and moaning, breathing in the heady scents of salt water and wild herbs. The window was open and their sweat-slicked bodies moved with the sea.

  And from there, the drive to this ancient stone house in this village of dust and wine near Toulouse. The first leg of their trek back to the northern coast and the ferry home. Jacques Talbot held a history chair at the University of Toulouse. He and Wilde had met when he visited Cambridge on a lecture tour the previous summer. His favoured subject, the House of Guise, dovetailed neatly with Wilde’s own interest in the late-Tudor era and they had quickly become firm friends.

  ‘Well,’ Françoise said in halting but correct English. ‘I will stay here with the children, otherwise we will have to take two cars.’ She was a woman of warmth and rare beauty; plump and well-rounded with a smile that shone with almost every word she uttered.

  As they stood around Wilde’s rented blue Citroën – a fine touring car – Lydia shook her head. ‘Tom, even if I go into the back and Jacques takes the front passenger seat, we’re going to be pushed to get Marfield in here. Assuming he’s even there, of course. I’ll stay with Françoise. You two go.’

  *

  The drive was easier than Wilde had feared. To the west, they saw the dark green foothills of the Pyrenees. ‘The fighters’ route to freedom,’ Jacques Talbot said with an edge of bitterness. ‘Some freedom, huh?’

  ‘From the Spanish war?’

  ‘When the Republicans lost back in the spring, they streamed across the mountains. Our government was woefully ill-prepared for their arrival. Hence the internment camps. It was always obvious to me that this would be the outcome. Why were we not ready to help?’

  On the way, Talbot had told Wilde what he knew about the place. ‘It was originally an army barracks, but in recent months they have been putting the refugees here and in similar camps all over this corner of France, right down to the beaches in the south. Some say almost a million men, women and chil
dren have fled the Falangists and their fascist allies. I suppose they had to put them somewhere and feed them. But I don’t like it. We are French, not Nazis; this is not how democracies should treat people.’

  ‘They had to do something with them, surely?’

  Talbot wouldn’t have it. ‘They call the places “assembly centres”, but that is a euphemism. They are concentration camps by another name – and they are a stain on our country, just as Dachau is on Germany. Le Vernet and the other camps are France’s dirty little secret.’

  They made good time and arrived on the outskirts of Le Vernet before eleven. Wilde stopped the car, his heart sinking. The day was burning hot and the place was nothing but a remote railway siding with barracks attached, all enclosed in barbed wire, a wasteland of dust and rock. Jacques was right – this was not a refugee camp, but a prison. And the smell was overpowering.

  At the entrance, two armed members of the Garde Mobile stood in front of a small guardhouse built of stone. A wooden gantry over the roadway bore the words Camp du Vernet. Beyond this, an endless vista of basic barrack blocks. This place could hold tens of thousands of men.

  Wilde sniffed the air and grimaced. A stinking miasma spoke of disease.

  ‘This is horrible,’ Talbot said.

  One of the sentries walked casually towards them. In one hand he held a rifle, with the other hand he curled his fingers slowly but insistently, tilting his unshaven chin towards the sky, signalling to them to get out of the car.

  ‘Let’s do as the man says, Jacques.’

  As they got out, around twenty men approached the gateway from the central area of the camp, heads shaven, bare against the scorching sun. Their bodies were hung with rags and their feet wrapped in scraps, as Honoré’s had been. They carried spades at their shoulders in the way that marching soldiers carried rifles. A couple of bored-looking Garde Mobile officers, carrying riding crops, accompanied them: ‘Left-right, one-two, one-two . . .’

  ‘Good God.’ Wilde looked at the men with dismay. He watched the work party pass along the road at the edge of the rail track.

  Talbot turned to the sentry.

  ‘What crime have those men committed?’

  The guard wiped sweat from his brow and shrugged. ‘Their crime? They lost a war.’

  It was not a conversation worth pursuing. ‘We wish to speak with your commanding officer.’

  ‘You think he has nothing better to do than take tea with tourists? Who are you, monsieur, that the CO should speak with you?’

  ‘I am someone who can make your life very difficult if you seek to impede me.’ Greying and handsome, Professor Talbot had the unmistakable air of authority.

  The guard suddenly looked less confident. ‘Name?’

  ‘Talbot. Professor Jacques Talbot.’

  ‘What organisation do you represent?’

  ‘It is a private matter concerning one of the internees. I will discuss it with the camp commandant, no one else. But you can tell him that I am a very good friend of Maurice Sarrault.’

  The guard shrugged. The name meant nothing. He nodded towards Wilde. ‘And who is he?’

  ‘His name is Wilde. Professor Thomas Wilde. He is an American citizen.’

  ‘Wait here.’

  CHAPTER 5

  Within five minutes they were inside the camp commandant’s office. To Wilde, the CO looked like the caricature of a nineteenth-century French military man: extravagant moustache, proud chin, a belly that told of a great love of food.

  He introduced himself as Major Cornet and grudgingly offered them seats.

  Talbot did the talking. ‘We believe there is an Englishman here among the refugees from the Spanish war. He is an undergraduate at the Cambridge college of Professor Wilde, my companion here. We would very much like to see him and find out if there is anything that can be done to repatriate him.’

  ‘An Englishman? There are no Englishmen here.’

  ‘Well, we believe he is and we intend to find him.’

  ‘Monsieur, there are nine thousand men in the camp, I cannot know them all. What is this man’s name?’

  ‘Marcus Marfield. He is in Hut 32.’ Wilde spoke in halting French.

  ‘Hut 32? They are mostly German communists. International Brigaders. What makes you think he is here?’

  ‘We were told this.’

  ‘By whom?’

  ‘I cannot say, but that is not the issue.’

  Cornet tutted. ‘One moment.’ He pulled back his shoulders and left the office, his boots clicking on the stone floor. Wilde and Talbot could hear him addressing a subordinate. A minute later he returned. He looked less sure of himself. ‘My adjutant tells me it is possible there is an Englishman in the camp. He doesn’t speak and won’t give his name, so we don’t know who he is – but others say he is English.’

  ‘May we see him, Major?’ Talbot asked.

  ‘These are dangerous men, messieurs. They are all communists and anarchists. Whatever your student was before, he will not be the same person now. I can promise you that.’

  ‘Still, we would like to see him.’

  ‘You told the sentry you know Monsieur Sarrault, the editor and proprietor of La Dépêche de Toulouse?’

  ‘Indeed.’

  The major blinked, weighing the matter up. One should not cross people such as the Sarraults; they wielded great influence.

  Talbot continued. ‘Maurice Sarrault is a close family friend. And I am sure you know, too, that he is the elder brother of Albert Sarrault, minister of the interior.’

  The officer began to sweat. ‘Perhaps a glass of wine, gentlemen? I will have the Englishman brought in short order. But you know it will not be possible for him to leave Camp du Vernet? Not without the proper permissions.’

  ‘First things first, major,’ said Talbot. ‘Let us meet the fellow.’

  ‘It may take a little while to locate him.’ Major Cornet sounded uneasy. ‘I am told he has suffered an injury and is in the camp sanatorium.’

  Talbot stiffened. ‘Injury? What kind of injury.’

  ‘He was shot, monsieur.’

  *

  Even shaven-headed, in rags, limping and bruised, his left arm in a filthy bloodstained sling, Marcus Marfield was immediately recognisable.

  Slender, fair-haired with sea-blue eyes and golden skin, he lit up the room the same way he had at Cambridge. He had an aura that defied description but which none could ignore: in chapel, in lectures, in Hall and in supervision, but most of all singing, with a voice as pure as bells. To Wilde, he had always had a little of the look and ethereal romanticism of a young T. E. Lawrence. And yet, as with Lawrence, there was, too, a steely determination.

  And yet now he was so weak, the guard was holding him upright. Wilde leapt out of his seat and took the boy’s uninjured arm, which, like the rest of his body, was shaking as though he had a fever. Marfield stumbled forward, and then his eyes met Wilde’s and flickered in recognition.

  Marfield sat down and slumped forward, breathing heavily, his left hand flopping on his thigh, quivering. His face had retained its luminescence, but his hands were those of a farmhand, swollen, red and calloused.

  Wilde turned to Talbot. ‘Jacques, this is appalling. Marfield needs medical attention. He has a fever.’

  The major tried to explain the bullet wound. ‘Someone took a potshot through the wire. By chance this man was hit – but it could have been anyone.’

  ‘Who shot him?’ Wilde demanded.

  ‘Most certainly, a local man.’ The major shrugged. ‘The villagers are angry about this camp. They do not like all these fighters held so close to them and their women.’

  ‘I don’t believe him,’ Wilde said to Talbot in English.

  The French professor turned to the major and spoke quickly and angrily. ‘One of your guards has done this.’

  The commandant threw up his arms. ‘No, no, monsieur, that is not so! We cannot patrol every centimetre of our fence. Nor are we nursemaids. We have a
pittance from the government to feed nine thousand exhausted fighting men. There are bound to be . . . incidents.’

  ‘I want to use your telephone,’ Talbot said. ‘Get me a line. Call La Dépêche. The operator will provide the number.’

  *

  The real reason Lydia had opted out of the journey was that she couldn’t face the drive. She didn’t feel at all well and wanted nothing more than to lie in the cool of her room – but not wishing to appear rude to her hostess, she compromised by stretching out on a reclining chair in the courtyard. She had offered, half-heartedly, to help with the chores, but Françoise had refused all offers of assistance. And so Lydia read poetry and dozed in the shade while her hostess busied herself around the house.

  Of all the people they had met these past weeks, Françoise and Jacques were her favourites. Françoise was in her mid-thirties – a little older than Lydia and about ten years younger than her husband. She not only ran a busy home but also had a career – she was that rarity in French hospitals, a female doctor. While she worked, the children had a nanny. But now Françoise was on holiday, and so was the nanny, who had returned to her family in Nantes for a few days.

  Lydia was asleep when she felt a touch on her shoulder. She woke with a start.

  ‘Would you care for a little lunch, Lydia? I have some fresh sardines and tomatoes from the market. Perhaps with some bread? And I thought you might like a lemon cordial to cool off?’ She spoke in her own tongue, because Lydia’s French was good. They only reverted to English when Wilde was about.

  ‘Yes to the drink, Françoise, but I’m not awfully hungry yet.’

  Françoise smiled. ‘How long is it?’

  Lydia frowned, not sure how to reply.

  ‘I’m sorry. Perhaps I am intruding but I think that you are suffering from le mal de matinée. It is much the same expression in English – morning sickness – is it not?’

  ‘How did you guess?’