by Kurt Magenta
The man behind the desk wore a uniform, but other than that he looked rather ordinary too, at first glance. He was plump, his jowls sagging like damp washing on a line, his thin black hair oiled sharply back from a wide and creased forehead. His eyes, however, were a cherubic blue, and they regarded Lucien with a lively interest.
The arresting officer cuffed Lucien’s cap off his head. ‘Let’s show some respect, shall we?’ Then he dropped the forged carte d’identité onto his chief’s desk. The senior man picked it up as if somebody had sneezed on it. He examined it, then Lucien.
‘My name is Hausen,’ he said. ‘Yours is…’ He glanced down. ‘…Michaud. Except it’s not, is it?’
‘Of course it is. I think there’s been a –’
The man at his side punched him in the stomach. The air exploded out of his lungs and he folded, gasping. Black spots bounced across his vision. His head felt unmoored. Finally he straightened, still retching for breath, tears pricking his cheeks.
Hausen said: ‘No, we don’t think so. We think you work for a terrorist group.’
We think. Dédé was free, then. He’d fired the gun, made a run for it, escaped…
‘Please.’ Lucien’s voice was papery. He cleared his throat. ‘Please. That’s not –’
The second punch caught him on the cheekbone, snapping his head to one side and sending his spectacles flying. The room tilted and misted, then slowly righted itself and drifted back into focus. Putain. He could no longer feel the left side of his face.
Hausen continued as if nothing had occurred. ‘Perhaps you’d like to tell us something about the man you report to?’
This time Lucien said nothing. He could feel the rage building. These were the kind of people who’d killed Chenard – he was certain of that. There was a terrorist group all right. But it was in London. He had to survive this, get back there.
The next punch came, unexpectedly, from the other side, and right on the jaw. He’d forgotten about his second escort – probably standing behind him again, just out of his line of sight. He shook his head to clear his vision. Now he could taste blood, warm and saline.
Hausen said: ‘Take him outside for a moment will you? Give him time to think.’
They stood in the corridor for a very long time. Always the sound of typing. The ping of the bell and the schlack of the carriage return, then tap tap tap. His face ached. The men leaned on the wall, arms crossed, but when he tried to do the same they shoved him upright. ‘May I have some water?’ An incredulous snort.
Finally, Hausen’s muffled order: ‘Come!’
Back to the chair. Can’t say it’s nice to see you again.
Hausen had picked up Lucien’s spectacles and was examining them. ‘Interesting. A very light correction. Very light. Interesting.’ He put them down and leaned forwards, clasping his pink hands. ‘Can you guess what I did, back in Germany?’
‘Optician?’
Lucien had meant it as sarcasm, but Hausen roared with laughter, slapping his palm on the desk. ‘Bravo! Very good! Very good. And almost right, too. But no, not exactly.’ He calmed himself, straightened his jacket. ‘No. I was an ophthalmologist. Ein Augenarzt. Opticians merely provide one’s eyeglasses. I diagnose problems. A veritable doctor of the eyes. So let’s take a look, shall we?’ He nodded at the guards.
Abruptly Lucien felt his head seized in an immobilising grip, a forearm tight around his neck. ‘What are you…?’
‘Don’t move.’ Hausen stepped from behind his desk. ‘Dooon’t move. There’s a good boy.’ He came close, bending and peering and lifting Lucien’s eyelids. First left, then right. Lucien could smell the man’s breath, garlic under the spearmint of mouthwash. ‘Yes. Yes I see. A little bloodshot. Well that’s understandable, I suppose.’
Hausen went back to his desk, sat down. ‘You know, there are many irrational fears in this world.’ He opened a drawer and removed a white swathe of cotton, which he placed gently in front of him. ‘One of them is a fear of needles.’ He twitched the cotton cover aside to reveal the syringe with its hypodermic needle. ‘And one of the greatest fears, as I’m sure you can imagine, is of having a needle stuck in your eye. Yes – the very thought makes you cringe, doesn’t it?’
Lucien struggled furiously, and the rear chair legs thumped against the boards. But the men held him fast. He was drenched in sweat.
Hausen rose again, picking up the syringe. ‘The funny thing is, it’s a perfectly safe procedure. I have injected many people in the eyes. A small sting, a little hole that closes soon enough.’ He stepped around the desk. ‘As long as there’s no infection, all will be well.’
Lucien writhed again. He barely moved a millimetre. The men who held him were panting with exertion.
‘So perhaps,’ Hausen said, ‘before we continue, you’d like to reconsider your position. Tell me a few names.’
‘I…I can’t.’
‘Well. That is a shame.’ He looked up, snapped: ‘Hold him!’
Lucien tried to wrench his head aside, but the biggest of them had him in some kind of wrestler’s grip. Lucien was not their first patient.
Hausen leaned in with the needle. ‘You know, the more you squirm, the more chance there is that I’ll get this wrong.’
Lucien jammed his eyelids tight, but Hausen managed to peel one of them back anyway. ‘Ach! Keep still, I said!’
As the needle probed, Lucien screamed.
Chapter 21
Not Our Trade
The journalist Sam ‘Inky’ Goucher sat in a pub on The Strand. It was called The Coal Hole, and Goucher liked it because it was a reasonable stroll from the paper in Fleet Street but beyond the operating limits of his colleagues, who never liked to walk too far for a drink. Although it was just after six on a Monday evening, there was already a scrum at the bar: people wanted to get a couple of pints down before the warning sounded. Goucher himself had only arrived just in time to snag his favourite table in the corner, beside one of the pub’s leaded windows.
With its dim lighting and vast bar of polished oak, beyond which shelves of optics, glasses and bottles rose like battlements, the pub looked like the kind of place a gargoyle might come for a pint.
Here, with a copy of the Herald hot off the presses and a double whisky before him, Goucher could think. He had a lot on his mind.
For a start, his investigation into the young Frenchman’s murder had stalled. He could find no trace of any vengeful ‘Maltese mob’. Although it was well known that at least one Maltese clan was running a string of dubious Soho nightspots, there was no evidence that they had been involved in any contract killings. As one ‘friend of the family’ had told him confidentially in a Dean Street coffee bar: ‘Our business is pleasure, Mr G. We might cut you about a bit if you step on our turf, or if you try an’ steal one of our girls, but we ain’t killers for hire. Not our trade, not at all.’
So be it. Goucher had returned to the East End to find Mrs Lau’s nightclub shuttered and abandoned. Solomon Cantello had vanished. Abroad, some said. Others insisted he’d been killed in a raid. Goucher had no idea where he lived or who his people were.
And now Goucher’s young friend from The York Minister, Lucien Cortel, had disappeared from circulation too. Nobody in the usual nightspots seemed to know where he was. Perhaps he’d show up eventually, bobbing in the Thames. But why? What had Cortel and Chenard been mixed up in – apart from de Gaulle’s barmy army?
There was a sort of shadow on the horizon, a distant hint of a lead. He had picked it up at the hospital, where they told him an Englishman had called asking about Chenard soon after he’d been brought in. What Englishman? Oh, we can’t tell you that. Confidential. But it seemed that both the British and the French were interested in this apparently innocuous young man.
Goucher knew he’d have to come up with something soon, if only for the sake of his job. His editor
was getting tired of half-baked reports about the doings of the French community, no matter how exotic they might be. Hanging around at The York Minister had become a source of comfort rather than inspiration.
The girl was part of the reason, of course: Valerie Dancourt. Val. What was really going on there? Their relationship had never progressed beyond mild flirtation. An occasional stolen kiss when they were both too drunk to care, but he knew perfectly well that he was far too old for her.
Like many middle-aged men during that period, Goucher was enjoying an unexpected return to bachelorhood. The family home in Clapham lay empty and he had rented a tiny flat near Goodge Street so he could play at being an air raid warden at night.
The truth was that, after a few weeks of savouring his liberty, he had begun to miss his family. In particular the baby, Angus. The arrival of that little parcel had been an even bigger revolution than the outbreak of war. The child’s ability to pierce through even the deepest layers of sleep with its cries never ceased to amaze him. Sometimes, instead of lying awake, Goucher would toss the covers aside and follow his wife into the front room, where she breastfed Angus by the soft golden light of the standard lamp. When she had finished, she passed him the baby without a word and returned to bed.
So Goucher would hold the little form at his shoulder until it emitted a soft gasp of wind. And then he would settle into his favourite chair with Angus in his arms, the intense warmth and milk-smell of him, and the child would fall asleep on Goucher’s chest with its fat little pink fist curled below its mouth. And Goucher would doze too, wrapped in contentment, rising just before dawn to put the baby in its cot.
Goucher sighed and drained his whisky. Well, that period of his life was over. Wife and child were where they needed to be: out of harm’s way. In the meantime, he could perhaps try to track down some of Cantello’s former associates. There was a chance that the Maltese lead had been a deliberate attempt to send him down the wrong track: perhaps the killing had been carried out by somebody far closer to Madame Lau’s than its owner had let on.
He folded the newspaper, shoved it into the pocket of his coat, and put on his hat. Then he headed out onto the street. The evening was bitter and misty. He began the slow trudge back to his flat.
Goucher was already installed in his armchair with the paper’s crossword puzzle – another whisky on the occasional table beside him – when the doorbell rang, startling him. He walked into the hall and paused at the door.
‘Who is it?’
‘You the reporter?’
‘What do you want?’
‘It’s about the French lad. Information.’
Goucher paused. He was a careful man, generally. Careful, and sceptical. Val had once told him: ‘If a door says “pull”, I bet you push it just to make sure it isn’t lying.’
But between prudence and the chance of a story, he tended to put the story first.
He opened the door, and immediately realised he’d made a mistake.
Chapter 22
Broken Circuit
They dragged Lucien out of the building and bundled him back into a car. His right eye stung and wept, blurring his vision. His balance was off and acidic waves of vomit scoured his throat.
He had no idea what was happening to him. After the injection, Hausen had stepped back and slapped him once across the face, hard. Then he had said simply: ‘Bring him back in the morning.’
So here he was. Outside it was dark, the windows flecked with drizzle. Apart from that, he had no idea what time it was. He thought he still had his watch – but his hands remained shackled behind his back. He rested his head against the upholstery, shut his eyes. Bright lights swum and divided there like amoeba. His head pounded slowly and rhythmically, a machine forging bad dreams.
The car stopped. He was forced out into another courtyard, larger this time. The cold made his eye smart even more; a tear dribbled down his cheek. They hustled him into a lobby that reminded him of a hospital waiting room, with a reception desk and rough chairs against the wall.
His handlers dumped him in one of them and went to speak to the desk clerk. There were guards on the door and another at the back of the room. A man in a dishevelled black suit paced up and down, talking quietly to himself, gesturing with an unlit cigarette. Two chairs down from Lucien a middle-aged couple sat huddled together. The man’s lip was split and the woman sobbed quietly.
The desk clerk glanced over at Lucien and back at the two Gestapo men. He indicated some kind of ledger in front of him. The lead Gestapo man – the one with the rain-pale eyes, who had arrested Lucien – leaned forward and spoke in urgent hissing phrases. The clerk made the same gesture, spread his hands. The Gestapo man sighed and wrote something in the ledger.
The duo returned to Lucien. The pale eyes flickered across him with a trace of irritation. ‘Fucking bureaucrats. You’d think this place was a hotel. Up we go.’
They pulled him out of his seat and took him in the cage lift to the fifth floor, where another guard awaited them. The dull grey corridor augmented the impression of being in a grim hospital. A series of wooden doors were painted diarrhoea brown. Lucien guessed that long ago these had been servants’ rooms, now converted into makeshift cells. The guard opened one of them.
‘Wait,’ said the man who had arrested him. He took some keys from his raincoat pocket and unlocked Lucien’s handcuffs. Lucien rubbed his metal-scorched wrists, absurdly grateful.
‘Better not play with yourself.’ The man shoved him into the cell. ‘You might go blind.’
The man’s laughter and that of his colleague echoed down the corridor as they walked away.
A single bed with a metal frame and a bare mattress spattered with russet stains. A chamber pot peeping from beneath it. Raw concrete floor. A small high window, barred from the inside with a grille that had been bolted hastily to the wall. Below the window, surprisingly, a heavy cast iron radiator; a pewter-coloured monster from the past, squatting on lion paws. Not so surprisingly, it was stone cold.
Lucien was too exhausted to care. He pulled his coat tighter around him and sprawled on the filthy mattress, hugging himself for warmth. His eye throbbed as if it had a heartbeat of its own. A few moments later, the lights went out.
The eye hurt again when light blazed into the room. He opened the good one a crack and immediately closed it. Somebody shook his shoulder. He sniffed, coughed, took another look with both eyes this time. A man was standing over him, a stranger.
‘Let’s go.’
This one was darker, sleeker – a Doberman Pinscher in human form. Lucien didn’t recognise the uniform.
‘Hurry it up. Tick tock.’
Lucien coughed again and swung his feet to the floor. His face still felt tender. The damaged eye was sore but less watery. He glanced at his watch. Unbroken, but not working.
‘On your feet. Focus!’
Lucien stood shakily and the man led him out by gripping his upper arm. He was getting used to this treatment. Soon he would retaliate, but not yet.
The guard saluted and hauled back the heavy lift door. Inside, the newcomer did not look at him, simply stood exuding cologne. Back down to the lobby. It was empty now, and a different desk clerk was on duty. Only one guard on the door.
‘Wait here,’ the newcomer commanded.
Lucien waited, swaying slightly with fatigue.
The man crossed to the desk clerk. He gestured at Lucien and said something urgently. The clerk frowned. The man repeated himself and Lucien caught a word: ‘Abwehr.’ Military intelligence. Now he was alert and fully awake. What was going on?
Suddenly the man took the desk clerk by the scruff of the neck and crashed his head onto the desk. At the same time he drew his gun and ground its muzzle into the clerk’s cheek.
‘If there’s one thing I hate more than the French,’ said the Abwehr man, in a loud voice, �
��it’s the fucking French who don’t know how to take orders. I said, this man is now in my charge.’
The clerk grunted.
‘Shut it or I’ll blow your fucking jaw off. I repeat, the prisoner comes with me.’
He let the clerk go.
The Abwehr man retrieved Lucien and dragged him towards the door. The guard – barely out of boyhood – looked astounded by this behaviour, eyes goggling. The man waved his gun and spat something in German, although it’s meaning was perfectly clear: Out of my way, unless you want this across your face.
The guard stepped aside.
They marched across the courtyard and out of the porte cochère, past the sentry boxes. The guards saluted.
Up the road a stretch and into a shiny black Renault sedan, Lucien in the back. Another man was waiting for him on the bench seat, face as red and closed as a brick.
‘Nice isn’t she?’ said the driver, starting the engine. ‘Nerva Grand Sport. Belonged to some rich Jew. Enjoy the ride.’
Lucien stayed quiet. So now he was in the hands of German intelligence. Hausen’s decision? Send him up the line and out of mind? Or did they think they could turn him and slip him back into circulation? Either way, these men were arrogant and careless. He was not cuffed, and the door on his side was unlocked.
The car hissed through the deserted early morning streets. There was a premonition of dawn, the dark buildings lightening into grey, a glimmer of pale sky silvering the damp tarmac. When they slowed to take a turn, Lucien moved.
He slammed his elbow hard into the face of the man next to him. Right on the nose, literally – he could hear the cartilage crunching. He dived for the door handle and wrenched it down, pushing and leaping at the same time. Hit the tarmac and rolled, cracking his skull badly and skinning his elbows and knees, then scrabbled to his feet and fled. The car had only just shrieked to a halt, the driver taken by surprise.
Lucien dodged down one turning and then another, breath searing his chest. In the flat calm of the morning he could hear their echoing footsteps. This gave him an idea, and he risked a pause to take off his shoes and stuff them into his coat pockets. Then he sprinted on, soundless, the pavement hard and cold and wet through his socks. Now their footsteps were fading. They were already too far behind. And they didn’t know Paris as well as he did.
