by Kate Mosse
Raoul swallowed another mouthful of wine, thinking hard. He wanted to go back to Coustaussa immediately. He’d hated leaving Sandrine, even though he knew she was in safe hands. But he remembered what she’d said to him last night – that she wouldn’t be able to bear it if he stopped fighting because of her. More than that, what would she think of him if he’d had a chance to save Max – assuming Max was even on the train – and hadn’t taken it? Raoul knew she still blamed herself for not intervening when Max was arrested in Carcassonne. It weighed on her mind. This might be a practical way of paying that debt for her. It was one way he could make things easier for her.
‘Are you going?’ he asked Alphonse.
The boy shook his head. ‘I’d like to, but not with the baby due any day now. Wouldn’t be fair on Coralie.’
Raoul patted his pockets, trousers and jacket, until he found a pencil.
‘Got anything to write on?’ he said quickly. ‘Anything at all?’
Alphonse looked in his own pockets and came up with a notification for a doctor’s appointment. He glanced at the date, saw it had already passed and handed it over.
Raoul quickly scribbled a note for Sandrine, telling her what he was going to do and promising to be back within the week. He hesitated, still in two minds, then folded it and gave it to Alphonse.
‘Can you pass this to Coralie,’ he said urgently, ‘and tell her to get it to Geneviève or Eloise. It’s very important she delivers it. Very important indeed. Just to let them know where I am.’
The boy nodded and put it in his pocket.
‘Do you know who’s in charge?’ Raoul asked.
‘He’s the one I heard talking about it,’ Alphonse said, pointing out a tall, lanky man with sandy-coloured hair.
Raoul stood up and held out his hand. ‘Good luck with the baby,’ he said.
‘Come to the christening, if you like,’ Alphonse said.
‘I might just do that,’ Raoul replied.
Then he crossed the wood and went to introduce himself, still thinking of how pleased Sandrine would be if he could come back with good news about Max after all this time.
Twenty minutes later, he was in a truck heading north on the unpatrolled back roads towards Carcassonne.
Alphonse walked slowly along the stony bank of the Aude back towards Couiza. The river was silver in the early morning light and the foam of the current tumbled and eddied white over the low rocks.
He reached a point where the bank disappeared and the water was deeper. He hesitated a moment, then decided to climb up to the road. He was sure he could avoid any Wehrmacht trucks or SS cars. There was so little traffic on the road, he’d hear anything coming from several kilometres away. He was pleased to be carrying a note to Coralie. She said she didn’t mind, but Alphonse thought she was too often in the shadow of her older sisters, who always knew everything first. It would be nice for Coralie to be the one with information for a change.
Alphonse tripped over a log and bashed his shin. He fell forward on to the road and cried out in pain before he could stop himself. He gave a deep sigh, then heard the sound of a safety catch.
‘Levez les mains.’
As he started to put his hands up, he saw the flash of a blue Milice beret and panicked. The woods were dense behind him. He hesitated a moment. Wouldn’t it be better to make a run for it?
He turned and charged back down the slope towards the cover of the beech trees. He heard a bullet fly over his head and embed itself in a tree. Then another shot. He kept running, back down towards the river.
It took him an instant before he realised he’d been hit. He pulled up, suddenly short of breath, then a second bullet hit him in the back and he fell, face forward, into the water.
‘Vivien, what a name . . .’ he muttered to himself.
He started to choke. Blood spurted out of his mouth, turning the silver waters of the Aude red. Raoul’s note fell into the river and was carried away unread.
Chapter 139
COUIZA
Sandrine rubbed her temples. She had her usual pre-operation headache, the period of counting down to zero hour. She rolled her shoulders, wincing as the skin around her burns stretched sore. She took several deep breaths, trying to calm herself down. The plan was almost identical to Berriac. The same signs, the same systems. When she’d come down to it, Sandrine had found herself unable to think of anything new.
In two days, there had been no word from Raoul. No word from Monsieur Baillard. She told herself it wasn’t any different from any other mission they’d done, but it was her first since coming back to Coustaussa.
Her first since she knew what it was like to be caught.
‘Blow the whistle twice if you see anyone coming. Three short blasts if you hear a vehicle – car, motorcycle, petrolette, anything.’
Liesl nodded.
‘Twice for a person,’ Sandrine repeated, ‘three for any kind of vehicle.’
‘I know,’ Liesl said quietly.
Sandrine looked at her watch. Seven forty-five.
Lucie and Marieta were at home with Jean-Jacques. Marianne was on lookout, watching the road from the south. Suzanne was covering the bridge and Geneviève was making her way towards the electricity substation with a basket packed with explosives. It had worked in Berriac, so why wouldn’t it work again?
She looked at her watch again. Seven fifty.
‘I’m going now,’ she whispered to Liesl. ‘Don’t forget, if anyone comes, whistle. We don’t want anyone hurt. If all goes to plan, when you hear the blast, leave straight away.’
‘I know,’ Liesl said patiently.
Sandrine came out of the shadow of the empty chicken coops. She felt as if she couldn’t breathe. There was no one about. At the war memorial, a black and white dog, scruffy, thin, sat as if guarding the dead.
‘Good boy,’ she whispered. It was rare to see an animal nowadays and the last thing she wanted was for the mongrel to bark, alerting the village to her presence.
Sandrine reached the small, colourful house in the far corner. Suzanne had identified the porch as a good spot to wait, not least because the owners were away. Or detained.
She checked the time again.
‘Three minutes,’ she murmured to herself. ‘Three minutes.’
At eight o’clock, the bells began to ring. Perfectly on time, Geneviève came into view. She walked towards the substation, put the basket against the door and carried on up the track without breaking her stride.
Sandrine waited until she was out of sight, then stepped forward. She lifted the red and white tablecloth, located the fuse in the jumble of wires and pipe, then tried to strike the match. Her hand was shaking so badly that it guttered, flared, and went out. Sandrine took another, scraped it along the strip, and, holding her right hand in her left, this time, the flame held steady. Tonight she felt no satisfaction at the hiss of the cord, only relief.
She gave it two seconds, to check it had taken, then made it out to the track behind the vegetable gardens before the bomb went off. She experienced a vivid flashback to Berriac, remembering how exhilarated she had felt that night. Now she felt nothing but fear and loathing for the things she had to do.
She started to run, but a sharp, jagged pain in her lower abdomen forced her to stop. She doubled over, feeling the heavy, dull drag, and knew she was bleeding again. She waited as long as she dared, then carried on. The hope that Raoul might have returned was what got her up the hill.
Liesl and Marianne were waiting for her, both safe, as was Geneviève. There had been no word from Eloise, but no reason to think anything had gone wrong there either.
‘And Raoul?’
‘Nothing so far,’ Marianne said quietly.
‘He’ll be back,’ Lucie said.
Marieta made her a glass of lime tea with plenty of saccharine, then helped her with her bloodied clothes. Lucie sat with her until she went to sleep.
Chapter 140
CARCASSONNE
&nb
sp; Carcassonne was in darkness as Raoul made his way along the Canal du Midi.
He’d got out of the truck on the Villegly road. From there, it had been a short tramp over the hill to come down into the Bastide via the cimetière Saint-Vincent. He had not thought to be back in Carcassonne so soon and, now that Sandrine was no longer here, he was shocked at how alien the city seemed to him.
Below him, boulevard Omer Sarraut – where he had lifted Sandrine’s broken body from the panier à salade – was silent. Even now, Raoul could hardly bare to look at it. All he saw was her bruised face and her branded skin and the blood dripping from the leather of the seats on to the floor of Robert Bonnet’s car.
He stopped to catch his breath for a moment. Was Robert still alive? Gaston? Or Dr Giraud, who had saved Sandrine’s life? What about Aimé Ramond and Jean Bringer? He had not even had time to grieve for his mother. Raoul shook his head. Trying to clear his mind. There would be time to mourn, for those taken or lost, but not now.
The blackness made it easy for him to make his way unobserved towards the offices of the railway transportation department. Although it was being called the ghost train, the truth was that there were records. Every stretch of the line, every day the prisoners spent confined to the cattle trucks, was written down. All Raoul needed to do was find the information and let his comrades know. Then, at least, they would have a chance of delaying the transport.
He climbed the embankment and crawled out over the line. There was no hum of metal. The gravel between the tracks cracked and crunched, but no one seemed to hear. Raoul stepped over one sleeper, then the next, like a child playing a game in the schoolyard. He was surprised there was no patrol, but assumed perhaps that the Gestapo – that Authié – were concentrating their attention closer to the station buildings.
Without too much difficulty, Raoul located the station master’s office at the far end of the westbound platform. Even in the dark, the plaque seemed to gleam: CHEF DE GARE.
The door was solid oak. There was no way of breaking it without making enough noise to get the guards running all the way from the Caserne Laperrine. Instead, Raoul climbed on to the metal bench beneath a small window and reached his hand up. The catch had been left à l’espagnolette, to allow a shaving of cool air in, so it wasn’t difficult to lever the fastening up with his hunting knife.
He slithered through, head first, then lowered himself carefully down to the tiled floor. As his eyes adjusted to the gloom, he could make out the metal filing cabinets in the corner of the room and the huge leather-bound diary in pride of place on the station master’s desk.
He struck a match and turned the pages, looking for today’s date. There was nothing recorded. He frowned, then turned the pages back, looking for something that might tell him where the train had been, at least, if not where it was going.
After a few minutes, he found it. A list of names, Max Blum among them, and an hour-by-hour record of how the prisoners from Le Vernet were to be transported up the eastern border. Through Provence to Bourgogne, then into Lorraine and on to Bavaria in southern Germany. Heading for Dachau.
Raoul leant forward and traced the route with his finger. This was all he needed. If they moved quickly, they could position themselves to block the line and stop the train moving forward. If the rumours were true and the Allies were launching a second attack from the sea, then all they had to do was delay the train.
He put the spent match in his pocket, imagining Sandrine’s face when he told her – and her pleasure at being able to explain to Lucie and to Liesl what had happened. He moved a chair beneath the window and had put his hands on the sill, ready to pull himself up, when without warning the door was flung open. Raoul went for his gun as the electric light was switched on.
‘Halten Sie.’
His heart hammering in his chest, he turned slowly around. Four against one, Gestapo. He put his hands above his head.
‘Come down.’
Raoul had no choice but to do as he was told.
‘Name?’ one of the Germans barked.
Raoul didn’t answer.
‘Your name?’ he said again, shouting this time.
Raoul met his gaze.
The Nazi stared at him, then so quickly that Raoul didn’t even see it coming, he raised his rifle and swung it into the side of Raoul’s head.
Chapter 141
TARASCON
Audric Baillard sat at the table with the Codex before him. The shutters were open and the light of the moon came in through the window and lit the beautiful letters of the ancient Coptic script. He let his thin white hand hover over the papyrus, his skin mottled with age, then withdrew it again.
The story of its long journey was finally clear in his mind. Arinius had smuggled the Codex from the community in Lyon to the mountains. Baillard suspected it was not the only version of the text. There were rumours about excavations in Egypt close to the Jabal al-Tarif cliffs, not far from the settlement of Nag Hammadi. He thought of his old friend Harif, dead many years now. It was Harif who’d taught him to understand the ancient languages of Egypt – Coptic and Demotic, hieroglyphs – and had told him of the network of some hundred and fifty caves on the west bank of the Nile two days’ ride north of Luxor, used as graves. A hiding place too? A secret library entombed in the rocks?
Baillard wished he knew what had happened to Arinius himself. Had he lived to make old bones? Had he remained close by, keeping watch over the Codex? Had it lain here undisturbed for hundreds of years until called upon by Dame Carcas to drive the invaders from the walls of La Cité?
He knew that the border regions in the fourth century had been violent, lawless places. Whole tribes decimated and villages put to the sword. But had Arinius’ settlement survived? Part of it, at least? Eloise and Geneviève Saint-Loup – Sandrine and Marianne Vidal too – were descended from those early Tarasconnais Christian families. The iridescent glass bottle containing the map that had been passed down from hand to hand to hand was proof of that. And even though Baillard now knew that the map had been bought by Otto Rahn from Monsieur Saint-Loup – when he’d been forced to sell the family possessions – Rahn, in turn, had sent it to Antoine Déjean in 1939, thereby returning the map to the land from whence it had come.
Baillard closed his ears to the noise of the world and lifted his eyes to the mountains, picturing in his mind’s eye the dark path he would take up to the Pic de Vicdessos. He believed that the power of the words would be strongest spoken there, where they had lain safe for so long.
There was a tap on the door. He stood up. Leaving the cedarwood box on the table, he placed the Codex in one pocket and his revolver in the other, then stepped out to join Guillaume Breillac.
‘Any word from Eloise?’ Baillard asked. He knew the young man was worried about his wife.
‘Not yet, sénher,’ Guillaume replied.
‘It is only a matter of time, I am sure.’
Guillaume didn’t answer.
‡
Codex XXII
‡
GAUL
TARASCO
AUGUST AD 344
The invading army attacked at dawn. From the cover of the trees, they began to beat their swords against their shields. They shouted strange and foreign battle cries. The ground started to shudder beneath their stamping feet as grey smoke twisted up into the blue sky and across the face of the rising August sun.
‘There are so many, peyre,’ said one of the youngest men nervously.
‘They are making noise to make you think they are more numerous than they really are,’ Arinius replied, although he didn’t know if it was true. ‘They want to scare us.’
‘I’m not frightened,’ the boy said immediately.
‘Nor should you be,’ said Lupa. ‘Not when God is on our side.’
The boy nodded and tightened his grip around the club in his right hand, though Arinius saw his left steal into Lupa’s. She smiled down at the child and he saw how her courage and calm strengt
hened him.
‘Why don’t they advance?’ she said.
‘They hope to weaken our spirit by delaying.’
‘Can you see anything?’
‘Not yet.’
The shouting and the beating of the shields continued. Arinius looked along the line, seeing the boy’s fear reflected in the faces, young and old, of the men of Tarasco. But his wife’s expression was steadfast. She saw him smiling.
‘What was it that you hid within the mountains?’ she said quietly. ‘So important that it all but cost you your life?’
Arinius stared at her. In the two years he had loved her, she had never asked what had brought him to Tarasco. She had never asked what he had been doing in the Vallée des Trois Loups. Never asked why he wore the green bottle like a talisman round his neck, nor what he had placed inside it.
‘Did you think I did not know?’ she said gently. ‘Why else do you think there are stories of the mountains being haunted except to keep those with sharp eyes and quick fingers away from the box?’
‘You have seen it?’
Lupa had the grace to blush. ‘At the very beginning, before I knew you. I was curious.’
Arinius looked at her fierce, intelligent face, then he smiled.
‘It contains a precious text, a codex, stolen away from the library in Lugdunum. It is considered a heresy by the Abbot, but I believe future generations will see it differently.’
‘You have not read it yourself?’
‘It is a language I do not understand,’ he said, ‘though there are some phrases I have heard spoken.’
‘What do they promise?’
‘That when the words are spoken aloud, in a place that is sacred – and by one prepared to give his life so that others might live – death is conquered. That the quick and the dead will stand side by side. An army of spirits.’
