The Collaborators

by Reginald Hill

  The two cyclists stood on the pedals and raced away up the boulevard. But now the trap was sprung as Pajou’s men came out of a building ahead of them and began blazing away with machine pistols. The gendarme was hit instantly and went flying over his handlebars. The workman wrenched his bike round, the front wheel rearing as though he were riding a horse. He held himself low and bumped up the pavement to give himself the protection of the lampposts. Windows shattered alongside him as the stream of bullets whiplashed in pursuit.

  Boucher’s Luger was out. The fugitive was being driven straight towards him. Janine had come out of the doorway and was standing close behind, watching with horror.

  ‘Right, you bastard,’ said Boucher raising his gun.

  And Janine cried, ‘Miche! No!’ and flung her arms around his body, as the cyclist went hurtling past them down the side-street and out of view.

  Shaking himself free, Boucher turned to Janine and said disbelievingly, ‘That was him. That was your husband, wasn’t it?’

  She nodded, hardly able to speak from the shock.

  ‘Did you know, Jan?’ demanded Boucher. ‘Quick. Tell me!’

  She shook her head and gasped, ‘No, Miche, I swear it.’

  Men came running up, among them Pajou.

  ‘What the fuck are you playing at, Miche? You must have been within spitting distance of him.’

  ‘Spit was all I could do,’ said Boucher. ‘Bloody gun jammed.’

  ‘Yeah? Did you get a look at his face?’

  ‘Not much. He was all muffled up.’

  ‘Great.’ His eyes turned suspiciously towards Janine.

  ‘Who’s this?’

  ‘My cousin, Janine. She works close by. I saw her and told her to keep her head down.’

  Another man joined them.

  ‘The one we got’s dead,’ he reported. ‘Also the car driver and one of the officers. The other one’s still alive, the major. But he’s all smashed up. Burnt too. He’ll be lucky to make it. Or maybe not so lucky.’

  ‘That should please the boss anyway,’ said Pajou. ‘Better get back and report. Coming, Miche?’

  ‘I’ll catch you up.’

  He waited till his companions were out of earshot then said disbelievingly, ‘Look, Jan, are you sure you had no idea what Jean-Paul was up to?’

  ‘Of course I had some idea,’ she retorted. ‘But I didn’t realize…’

  ‘That it involved blowing people to pieces?’ Boucher completed the sentence for her. ‘One thing’s sure; he’ll get caught or killed sooner or later. Get out while you can. The Gestapo won’t believe you’re not in it too. Join the kids at Mireille’s place and sit the war out there, that’s the wise move.’

  Of course it was the wise move. She’d heard it from both sides now so it must be so. But now more than ever she knew she had to stay. Her cousin had finished her sentence wrongly. It wasn’t the slaughter, shocking though it was, that had appalled her. It had been the sight of Jean-Paul’s face as he raced past. Fear she would have expected to see there, and perhaps even excitement. But all that she had seen was wild exultation, a glow of sheer joy, giving him the face of a prophet who had just been vouchsafed a vision of paradise and was now more careless than ever of the grey shadows of mortal existence.

  There was no way that she could think of leaving him now.

  2

  ‘Hey, Paris-piglet!’

  Pauli Simonian ignored the cry. He was sitting on a stone by a pond watching a flotilla of ducks and wondering what it must be like to spend most of your life with your legs and belly in cold dirty water.

  ‘Are you deaf as well as stupid, youpin?’

  It was Christophe calling, the youngest of ‘Aunt’ Mireille’s three sons. The two older boys had accepted the arrival of the newcomers with indifference, but Christophe, a burly nine-year-old, had been antagonistic from the start. Somehow he’d picked up that their father was a Jew and he’d taken to calling Pauli yid and youpin. A clout round the ears from Mireille had shut him up at home, but his persecution continued at school, and set the pattern for the other children’s attitude to Pauli. He bore the abuse stoically, happy to see that Céci’s open, guileless nature had worked its usual charm and made her everybody’s friend.

  ‘See if your dirty ears can hear that then!’

  A stone struck the water in front of him, splashing droplets in his face. Another larger one followed. Céci, playing a few yards away, looked up in delight at this new game and laughed merrily. But the next stone hurled by Christophe went astray and instead of splashing Pauli, sent a spray of cold water over his sister. Laughs turned to sobs. She began to move away from the water’s edge, slipped, fell to the muddy ground, and cried even harder. Pauli rose, fists clenched. Christophe, seeing that he had at last found a way of stinging his unwanted ‘cousin’, now began to aim at Céci. Pauli ran towards the other boy, who regarded his approach with pleasurable anticipation. A year older, two inches taller and a stone heavier, Christophe didn’t doubt he could put the Paris-piglet in his place. He planted his feet firmly in the earth, leaned slightly forward and raised his already brawny arms to ward off the expected frontal onslaught.

  Instead, Pauli came to a halt a couple of feet in front of him, then with great force and accuracy kicked his cousin just beneath the left kneecap.

  Christophe screeched in pain and hopped on his right leg which Pauli’s right foot immediately scythed from under him. He fell on his back. Pauli dropped both knees into his belly and proceeded to beat him savagely about the chest. Finally, still not having uttered a word, he rose and, leaving his blubbering cousin prostrate on the dank grass, he went to collect Céci and took her back to the farmhouse to get dry.

  Next morning at school, Pauli approached Christophe and addressed him in a friendly fashion. Normally Christophe would have replied with scornful abuse. Today he hesitated. A playground fight no longer seemed the attractive proposition it once had. To everyone’s surprise, when he replied his tone was almost as friendly as Pauli’s though his mind stored up its resentment.

  After that, things got much better. Pauli still didn’t make any close friends but as long as Céci was happy, most of the time he preferred to be alone. Soon he was almost as familiar with the surrounding countryside as he’d been with the streets of Paris.

  Mireille was at first unhappy about his long absences.

  ‘Janine said he was a bit of a wanderer, but that was in the town where he knew his way around.’

  ‘Less chance of coming to harm in the country,’ said her husband with the sympathy of one independent mind for another.

  ‘Less chance than in the town? What do you know about it, you don’t spend more time in the village than you have to!’ mocked his wife.

  ‘I went to Paris once and look what happened to me there,’ said Lucien Laurentin. It had been during a holiday visit to Paris that he’d met, wooed and married Mireille in the course of a week. That had been twelve years ago. She had borne him a son in each of the first three years of marriage and local opinion was cautiously moving towards the possibility that Laurentin might have done all right for himself.

  ‘Well, keep an eye out for him in your wanderings. There’s too many wild men with shotguns up in the hills for my liking.’

  It was a double-edged remark. Since the Occupation there’d been a steady trickle of men taking to the hills and woods. Their reasons varied but their cause was common: hatred of the Boche. These were the Maquis. At first the largest threat many of them offered was to tobacconist shops, which they raided whenever the cigarette ration came in. But as organization improved, they began to prick the Germans with acts of sabotage and there’d already been reprisals against the families of men known to be involved.

  ‘I promised you, I’m not going to join,’ said Laurentin wearily. ‘I’ll not put my family at risk for a gesture. But these lads have got families too. I’ve known their mams and dads since I was a boy. I’ll not turn my back on them. Dropping the odd sa
ck of vegetables is the least I can do.’

  ‘As long as it stops at that,’ said Mireille who had observed how deep these country loyalties could go and was determined to put her family first.

  ‘I’m going up today,’ said Laurentin bluntly. ‘Old Rom will be working in the barn if you want anything.’

  Rom was the farm labourer, a taciturn man of unguess-able years.

  Despite the burden of a sack over his shoulder, the farmer made his way rapidly up into the hills which rose gently at first on all sides of the farm. After half an hour he stopped for a breather, resting against the vegetable sack.

  Twenty yards behind, Pauli halted too. His heart was pounding from exertion and excitement. He guessed where his uncle was going and was longing to glimpse these wild outlaws the boys at school talked or, if they were lucky, boasted about. He lay on the cold earth and watched the outline of the knobbly sack against which his uncle was reclining in the long grass. Above, grey clouds played with a pale sun, alternating patches of dark and bright across the rolling landscape. He lay in sunlight but now a shadow swept over him, more intense somehow than a cloud’s shadow, and he screamed like a young rabbit in terror as the nape of his neck was seized by a strong hand and he was dragged roughly to his feet.

  ‘Watch the beast not the burden,’ said Laurentin’s voice in his ear. ‘Next man you follow may reckon it’s safer to blast away with his shotgun than come crawling back here to trap you live.’

  He released the boy whose legs felt so weak he almost collapsed back to the ground. But he forced himself to stay upright and stood looking silently at his uncle, waiting for his verdict.

  ‘Straight back to the farm,’ ordered Laurentin. ‘Don’t mention this to anyone, least of all your aunt. Understood?’

  ‘Yes sir,’ said Pauli.

  ‘Then go. I want to see you run.’

  Twenty minutes later a breathless Pauli came running down the long meadow which sloped towards the farmhouse just as an old truck spluttered into sight round the bend of the farm track.

  Non-military vehicles were rare enough to bring Mireille to the door and old Rom out of the barn. The truck halted noisily. There were two men in it, one round and gross and untidy, the other small, slim and dapper. This one got out first, leaping nimbly to the ground.

  ‘Madame, how pleasant to meet you again,’ he said walking up to Mireille. ‘How are you? Do you hear from that reprobate brother of yours?’

  As recognition struggled into Mireille’s face, Pauli arrived, driving his flagging legs into a sprint.

  ‘Monsieur Melchior! Monsieur Melchior!’ he cried.

  ‘Monsieur Corder, you mean,’ said Melchior reprovingly, but he smiled as he swept the delighted boy up into his arms.

  Two minutes later, he was seated in the kitchen drinking coffee with his companion whom he’d introduced as his business partner, Octave Timbal.

  ‘But monsieur, when you left the children with me at the station last year, I thought you said you were travelling on to Marseille?’

  ‘Such was my plan,’ said Melchior. ‘But first I needed rest. My nerves were quite ragged. I took a room in the Hôtel Terminus just across from the station. A short respite of perfect peace, then on I would go to join the dear matelots of Marseille. Can you imagine how I felt a few days later when I heard this dreadful din of grinding engines and marching feet and looked out of my window to see the Cours de Verdun filling up with the fearful Hun? How it took me back to 1940. Naturally I tried to leave but they had taken over the station and all travel was restricted. Worse, when I returned to the Terminus, they had taken that over too and my luggage was in the lobby. Naturally I refused to pay my bill. I found other lodgings and resolved to leave as soon as things settled. But it soon became apparent that it wasn’t just Lyon which had been infested but the whole of France. Why flee when there is nowhere to flee to?’

  ‘So what did you do, monsieur?’ asked Mireille, delighted after so many years of slow country conversation to be hearing this rapid, lively Parisian flow again.

  ‘Happily I make friends easily. Also I had a few sous set aside for emergencies. So eventually I decided to set up in business with my dear friend Octave here.’

  Mireille had been eyeing Timbal with some misgiving. He had risen from the table and started wandering round the room, peering into cupboards and drawers. Now he went out into the yard and seemed to be examining the barn and the byre.

  ‘And what is your business?’ asked Mireille, beginning to guess.

  ‘Retailing,’ said Melchior. ‘We bring surpluses and shortages together, particularly in the field of fresh comestibles.’

  ‘You mean you’re in the black market,’ said Mireille.

  Melchior spread his hands and smiled.

  ‘We are suppliers,’ he said. ‘Octave was fortunate enough to get a small supply of petrol from a grateful client. We decided to invest it in a buying trip into the countryside and I recalled that you lived somewhere in this vicinity and I thought how nice it would be to see my young friends again.’

  He ruffled Céci’s hair and winked at Pauli.

  ‘And you thought we might have something to sell, eh?’ said Mireille.

  ‘Good Lord. It never crossed my mind. But of course if there should happen to be anything…a ham perhaps, some fresh vegetables…we would offer the very best price, or even better to a friend.’

  Mireille began to laugh. Melchior joined in. Soon the children, not knowing what they were laughing at, but with spirits lifted by this visitor from their previous life, were laughing too.

  Now Mireille lowered her voice and said, ‘All right. But I’ll want a favour. Janine’s coming to see the children soon. She says she’d rather see them in Lyon than come out to the farm. Something about getting more time with them that way, but I reckon…well, that’s family business. But if you could find somewhere for them to stay a few days in town, somewhere half-decent…’

  ’My pleasure,’ said Melchior.

  ‘Thanks,’ said Mireille rising. ‘Now let’s see what we can find.’

  They went out into the yard. Most of the clouds had cleared now and the sunshine was beginning to have some warmth in it.

  Céci had taken Melchior’s hand and as he stood and enjoyed the sun on his face, he felt his free hand grasped too.

  He looked down and smiled.

  ‘You see, Pauli, everything works out for the best. Bearing gifts of gold, that’s me, my boy. Never forget it. I think I’ve fallen on my feet at last!’

  3

  Early in the summer Günter Mai returned to Paris.

  The Abwehr chief at the Lutétia said, ‘I’m sorry if you feel mucked around, Mai, but Bruno Zeller was always adamant that you knew as much about the work in his section as he did.’

  Mai smiled secretly at the under-estimate.

  ‘How is the major?’ he asked.

  ‘Lucky to be alive. Or perhaps not,’ said the chief, an anxious, melancholy man with the look of an overworked academic. ‘He’s lost his right arm and the best part of his left foot and he was badly burnt about the face and the upper torso. They’ve shipped him back home for treatment.’

  Mai felt a cowardly relief. He had not relished the thought of visiting that once handsome young man whose elegance and poise he had always resented.

  ‘Anything special I ought to know, sir?’ he asked.

  ‘It’ll all be in the files,’ came the reply. Mai doubted it.

  ‘And our friends in the Rue des Saussaies and Avenue Foch, how are they?’

  ‘Cock-a-hoop that they caught Moulin,’ said the chief gloomily.

  Jean Moulin had been de Gaulle’s emissary, given the task which he’d almost accomplished of co-ordinating the various conflicting arms of the Resistance. He’d been caught in Lyon and had died under interrogation.

  ‘Caught and killed,’ said Mai. ‘Before he told anything, I gather.’

  ‘It still comes out as a triumph. We’ll have to be alert, Ma
i, or they’ll steal all our thunder.’

  Was the man a fool, or just ultra-cautious? wondered Mai as he returned to his room. The battle with the SD was long lost. All they could do now was fight the rearguard action with enough spirit to gain an honourable settlement, preferably somewhere not on the Eastern Front.

  His conclusions about the way things were going were confirmed as he slipped back into his old work. Perhaps his short absence had wrought large change or perhaps simply sharpened his perception. But Paris was now definitely the capital of a conquered country and the techniques of persuasion had been abandoned almost entirely in favour of the threat of terror. The pretence of partnership had gone; the hope of neutralization was dead; they had lost France just as certainly as they were losing Italy. News of these external defeats had had its inevitable effect upon the great passive majority of the people. Content to make the best of the Occupation, or even a profit out of it, when it seemed a permanency, now the good burghers of Paris were cautiously shifting some of their eggs into the Resistance basket.

  Others felt the shift in the wind too. It wasn’t that hope was greater. If anything the German grip was tighter than ever before. But none but the out-and-out fascists could still pretend that the stranglehold was a loving embrace, and when hope lay in only one direction, that’s where you had to look.

  This gentle shift made Christian Valois even more unhappy with his role. In obedience to Delaplanche’s command, he had almost broken off contact with the Simonians, but he knew that Jean-Paul had cobbled together his own group out of what was left of André’s after the canal fiasco, and every reference to Les Pêcheurs filled him with envy. The memory of his one piece of action, the shooting in the métro, now seemed like an adolescent’s daydream. He sought out Theo Laffay who’d been his group leader then, pretending the encounter was accidental. The man looked weary and ill but his mind was still sharp enough to see through Valois’s pretence.