The Collaborators

by Reginald Hill

  They’d thrown her, with the other thousands arrested since the Liberation, into the prison camp at Drancy.

  PART EIGHT

  March 1945

  … en effet, la résistance, qui a fini par triompher, montre que le rôle de l’homme est de savoir dire non aux faits même lorsqu’il semble qu’on doive s’y soumettre.

  Jean-Paul Sartre,

  Qu’est-ce qu’un collaborateur?

  1

  On the face of it, the Simonian trial had everything, even in these days when the courts of justice had been resounding to tales of death, deceit and betrayal for several months. But somehow after the first day, it never took off.

  The trouble was the prisoner herself. She stood there like a pillar of salt, absorbing all emotion like moisture from the atmosphere. She never raised her voice, never contradicted. She denied nothing, admitted everything. Yes, she had been on the Abwehr officer’s list of agents; yes, she had accepted favours from him; yes, she had slept with him; yes, she had signed the letter found in his files in which she betrayed her husband’s last meeting.

  The only time the proceedings came to life was when the prisoner pleaded for news of her children. The judge had felt enough pity for her distress to have their fate checked, but nothing was known except that they had been put on a train carrying several hundred Jewish prisoners from Lyon to Germany.

  The judge was finding the woman’s dead presence increasingly uncomfortable. The number of spectators had diminished by half, and the newspapers had given the whole thing up as a bad job. Not that the purge did not still have a vast amount of momentum, but the main focus of the public lust for expiation was directed to the promised trials of the Vichy leaders before the new High Court of Justice. Meanwhile the papers tried to direct the country’s interest outwards to the re-establishment of France among the great powers and invited readers to rejoice in the news that the Allied Forces, including the Free French, were crossing the Rhine.

  The judge shortened matters by refusing to let the prosecutor strut centre stage with his star witness, Christian Valois, the Resistance hero.

  ‘Proof,’ he said, ‘where there is no denial, merely consumes the court’s precious time.’

  The verdict was, of course, inevitable. All that was still debatable was the sentence. The prosecutor would certainly demand death. It would be impossible to deprive him of that dramatic moment. Death, of course, was pointless even if the prisoner deserved it, which the judge doubted. So far de Gaulle had commuted every death sentence passed on a woman. So it was gaol. But for how long?

  For the woman’s defence, there was only her father, also it seemed a Resistance hero. Was there anyone who wasn’t? wondered the judge. He had little that was material to say, but the judge let him maunder on, disposing of the prosecutor’s objections by saying, ‘Character testimonial is still acceptable in law, I’m sure you haven’t forgotten that!’

  From the biographical stuff the father gave, it didn’t seem likely, even allowing for parental bias, that the woman would deliberately set out to get her husband killed. And the larger part of her association with this German seemed to spring from her concern for her family. Perhaps twelve years would be enough?

  He encouraged the father to go on. The woman had been given a defence lawyer, of course, but he seemed totally inadequate. Where were they digging these people up from for God’s sake?

  So the trial drew to its close. This final morning should see it over well before lunch. The defence lawyer was talking with or rather listening to the father. Now, with evident reluctance, he approached the bench.

  Another defence witness! To character? No, to fact!

  The judge was doubtful. The prosecutor was scornfully, almost imperiously dismissive.

  ‘By all means, let us hear him,’ said the judge.

  The man was brought in. He looked rather down-at-heel, with clothes that were manifestly too large for him. But he had an honest, open kind of face.

  The judge himself took over the questioning. If there was anything useful to be got out of this fellow, it was silly to leave it to that idiot defender.

  ‘Your name, monsieur,’ he said.

  ‘Scheffer. I’m known as Édouard Scheffer.’

  For the first time, at the sound of this strong Alsatian accent, the woman’s head rose and she turned her eyes to the witness stand.

  ‘You say you’re known as Édouard Scheffer?’ said the judge. ‘That implies a sobriquet.’

  ‘Yes sir,’ said the witness. ‘My real name is Mai. Günter Mai. Hauptmann Günter Mai, late of the Abwehr counter-intelligence unit stationed at the Hôtel Lutétia in the Boulevard Raspail.’

  Now the pall of dullness cast by the prisoner lifted from the courtroom like a morning mist, and the judge sat upright, eyes bright, and he thought, At last! A trial I can tell my dinner guests about without my wife shutting me up for being boring!

  Günter Mai had spent the past months at Boucher’s house near Moret. That it should prove such a safe place of refuge so close to Paris had seemed unlikely, but the care which Boucher, so careless in most other respects, had taken in establishing this retreat for his family was soon revealed. To the few locals he had any contact with, he was merely a businessman whose work kept him in Paris a good deal. He had complete sets of papers for himself and his wife under her maiden name of Campaux. He shaved off his beard, trimmed his hair and set about giving the appearance of a man taking a rest till the turmoil had settled enough for him to resume his work.

  ‘I thought you didn’t think anyone could wish you harm,’ said Mai ironically.

  ‘There’s always some mad bugger,’ said Boucher. ‘For myself, I reckon I can take care of anything. But there’s Hélène and the kiddies to think of. That’s why I set up here in the first place.’

  ‘And very well you’ve done it.’

  ‘Yes. Foolproof, I’d say.’

  ‘But not Pajou-proof,’ reminded Mai.

  Boucher’s expression darkened.

  ‘That little bastard. I’d love to get my hands on him!’

  Summer browned into autumn, blackened to winter. So certain was Mai that each day must be the one on which they came looking for Boucher, or his own thin pretence was pierced, that he felt no sense of time passing or of time stretching ahead. When Hélène started talking of Christmas, he was truly amazed.

  ‘I should try to get away,’ he said to Boucher one night.

  ‘Where to?’

  A good question. Most of France was now liberated. German resistance was strong and would be strongest of all along the border; but the end, inevitable in Mai’s eyes since 1942, was complete defeat, without condition, without honour. He felt no impulse to try to get to Germany and die in arms. What did that make him? A traitor? A collaborator?

  ‘Switzerland,’ he said without conviction. ‘Or Spain.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Boucher eagerly. ‘Switzerland, that’s what I thought. But it’s too dangerous on your own, Günter. Wait till Hélène’s time comes and she gets her strength back. Then we’ll all go.’

  Hélène was heavily pregnant, her baby due at the year’s end. Boucher was more worried now than he’d ever been. His naïve self-confidence had suffered a blow in the autumn when, growing tired of these self-imposed restrictions, he’d announced he was going to take a trip to Paris. Despite his wife’s protests, he’d gone, but he’d soon come back.

  ‘They’ve arrested thousands!’ he said in amazement. ‘They say the Vél d’Hiv and Drancy are packed. Places your lot used, now we’re using them! They’re going to put ‘em on trial, Günter!’

  From now on, Boucher kept close to the house. Mai suggested that if they did come to arrest him it wouldn’t help his case if he was found to be harbouring a German.

  ‘Don’t be daft,’ said Boucher with an unusual flash of lucidity on this point. ‘If they arrest me, one German more or less isn’t going to help or harm my case, is it? Besides, I need you here, Günter. I’d go mad b
eing stuck here alone; no other man, I mean. I’d start sneaking off for a chat and a drink and God knows what that would lead to!’

  So he stayed, needing no persuading. Germany; Switzerland; Spain; the only place he really wanted to be was Paris to find out what had happened to Janine. There was no way of getting news. Claude Crozier had made it clear that hiding in his oven was his last act of kindness; to contact him would be to run a deadly risk.

  ‘She’ll be all right,’ assured Boucher. ‘Like me, tough as old rope.’

  ‘But the children. If she hasn’t heard anything about the children…’

  Boucher gathered his little daughter to him and pressed her close, but did not reply.

  The new baby came early in January, a boy. Boucher wanted one of his names to be Günter but Mai advised against it.

  ‘Édouard, then,’ said Boucher. ‘He shall have your French name at least.’

  So the child became Michel Édouard Boucher.

  At the end of January there was a second arrival.

  Late one wet and windswept night as the two men followed their usual custom of drinking a nightcap of brandy and hot water, they heard a noise outside. They exchanged looks but no words. Rising, Boucher signalled Mai to go out of the back while he took the front. Arming himself with a broad kitchen knife, Mai slipped out into the squally rain and made his way down the side of the house. As he turned the corner to the front, the main door opened, spilling light over the threshold, then Boucher stepped out.

  ‘Who’s there?’ he called.

  ‘Miche, is that you? Thank God, old friend.’

  A figure emerged from a patch of shrubbery and began to move forward. In a second Mai was behind him, his arm locked about the intruder’s neck and his knife pressed across the bridge of his nose.

  ‘Don’t move or I’ll cut your eyes out,’ he said. ‘Miche!’

  Boucher came running, a torch in his hand. He flashed it into the newcomer’s face.

  ‘Fuck me,’ he said. ‘It’s a Christmas present come late. Step inside, Pajou, while I unwrap you!’

  The little Géstapiste was in a pretty run-down condition. Unkempt, unshaven, he was soaked to the skin though the rainwater hadn’t helped clean him.

  ‘God, you smell vile,’ said Boucher in disgust when they’d got him into the house.

  ‘You’d smell too if you’d been through what I’ve been through,’ snarled Pajou. The left lens of his spectacles was cracked and there was a suppurating scar down his cheek. Boucher postponed his threatened vengeance while they got the little man cleaned up, but he made it clear it was merely a postponement.

  ‘Now,’ he said finally. ‘Talk. Why’ve you come here, you little shit? To apologize? Where’s my bloody car?’

  ‘Miche, I’m sorry. Sorry for everything, sorry to disturb you now. But God, you’ve no idea how relieved I was to find you still here. My last hope! If anyone will help an old mate, it’s Miche. I mean, look at the way you’re helping the captain here. This is a real surprise, captain, but I’m so glad to see you looking so well…’

  Boucher took the knife from Mai’s hands.

  ‘Talk,’ he said.

  Pajou talked. Making allowances for embellishments and omissions, it seemed he’d decided that Spain was the best place for him and had headed south in the stolen car with as much loot as he could carry. After narrowly evading the American and Free French forces who’d landed on the Mediterranean coast and were rapidly driving their way north, he’d reached the Spanish border, paid a large sum to a guide to take him over the Pyrenees, spent an exhausting and bewildering couple of nights on the mountain paths, woke on the second morning to find himself abandoned and all his baggage missing, and descended to the valley below to find himself not in the Basque country that he’d been promised but back in Gascogny where he’d started. He’d returned to Paris by fits and starts and with many narrow squeaks because here he’d left hidden the bulkier items of his war loot. But when he went to the warehouse he’d hidden it in, he found he was too late, it had gone. Worse, his presence was reported and for the last week he’d been on the run, in and around Paris, living rough and with his description in the hands of all gendarmerie units.

  ‘They’re saying dreadful things about us, Miche,’ he concluded indignantly. ‘But we’re innocent, aren’t we? We never did anything to be ashamed of!’

  He stressed the we, making his meaning unambiguous. He wasn’t asking for help and sanctuary. He was stating quite bluntly that if he didn’t get it, Miche might as well give himself up too.

  If Boucher had decided to slit Pajou’s throat there and then, Mai would not have intervened. But despite his threats of violence, the big red-head had no stomach for murder, and so the house at Moret got another guest, but one who had to remain completely hidden for there was no explanation to cover his presence.

  He was not good company. He drank everything he could lay his hands on and in his cups he gave up his pretence at innocence and boasted of the disgusting things he’d done with nostalgic glee.

  ‘They’ll have your head, you bastard,’ said Boucher. ‘They’ll stretch you out and kill you slow and you deserve it.’

  ‘Don’t come the innocent with me, Miche! You may have been a bit more delicate-stomached when it came to the dirty work, but you were always around when it came to the pickings! They all were! Oh yes, the day they try to put me on trial, they’ll hear some things about their precious heroes they’d rather not hear! No, they’ll send me to Switzerland with a pension rather than risk putting me up in open court!’

  ‘They won’t bother with the expense of a trial,’ said Boucher. ‘They’ll kill you in the streets.’

  ‘For what? For doing a job?’ said Pajou, suddenly fearful. ‘There’s no justice. No, there isn’t. All right, you think there is? What are you doing hiding here, then? I tell you, Miche, they’re trying everyone in Paris. Everyone! They’ve even got that skinny cousin of yours under arrest, the one you used to meet in the Balzac, captain, and in the Jardin des Plantes.’

  He leered and winked at Mai, delighted to show off his intimate knowledge of everything that had gone on.

  Mai couldn’t speak. Boucher said, ‘Janine? She’s arrested? What for?’

  ‘She’s been under arrest for months,’ said Pajou dismis-sively. ‘I went sniffing around that shop her parents run, looking for news of you, Miche. I’d heard nothing, you see, and I was beginning to wonder if mebbe you’d got yourself holed away, safe and sound, down here. I talked with the mother, gabby woman, a bit thick. I buttered her up! All I wanted was to know if she’d heard from you, but I got the whole fucking family history!’

  ‘What did she tell you?’ demanded Mai, his eyes blazing.

  ‘All right. Keep your head on! They’ve accused her of getting her husband killed, of betraying all his Resistance plans to the Boche, mainly you, captain. Funny files those you kept, it seemed!’

  ‘They have the files?’

  ‘Oh yeah. You should’ve burnt them, captain. Better still, you shouldn’t have written them in the first place. What made you go in for fiction anyway? Strange payment for getting your end away!’

  Suddenly Pajou found himself on his back with Mai’s fingers round his throat.

  ‘What do you mean, fiction?’ he said, squeezing. ‘How do you know it’s fiction?’

  ‘I think maybe he’ll speak more clearly if he’s not quite dead,’ said Boucher mildly.

  Mai relaxed his grip.

  ‘All right, all right,’ gasped Pajou. ‘I’ll tell you. No need for this. We’re all friends here, aren’t we? For God’s sake, it’s one down, all down, isn’t it? So just let me up and I’ll tell you a bedtime story that wouldn’t put some buggers in Paris to sleep, believe me!’

  Later, alone with Boucher, Mai sat in deep silence drinking more than his usual share of brandy.

  ‘Give us a week,’ said Boucher suddenly.

  ‘A week?’

  ‘A week’s start before you
go back to Paris.’

  Mai made no effort to deny or even debate his intention.

  ‘I’d not say anything about you, Miche, you know that.’

  ‘Of course. But Pajou will, and you’ll be taking him with you, I think. So. A week. And we’d better sort him out now. Once he gets wind that we’re moving on, he’ll be like a rat in a trap.’

  They went for Pajou at Gestapo hour the next morning. He sat up in bed, blinking shortsightedly at the sudden light.

  ‘What’s up?’ he asked fearfully. ‘Are we being raided?’

  ‘You are, Paj,’ said Boucher. ‘On your feet. No need to bother getting dressed. You’re not going anywhere.’

  The little Géstapiste obviously thought they were going to kill him. His face turned grey and his legs could hardly support him. Mai felt little sympathy. Pajou must have roused hundreds of his own countrymen at this hour. And Mai hadn’t forgotten that it was Pajou who had delivered him into Fiebelkorn’s hands.

  When he realized they were only going to tie him up, his first reaction was relief. But once he grasped Mai’s purpose he went wild.

  ‘You mad bastard,’ he screamed. ‘They’ll lynch me. They’ll lynch us both. We’ll never see a court. And if we did, do you think I’m going to say anything?’

  They bound and gagged him.

  Downstairs Boucher said, ‘He may be right. And even if you do get him to stand up in court, you can’t make him talk.’

  ‘He’ll talk,’ said Mai. ‘Not for any good reason, but out of sheer malice he won’t be able to keep his mouth shut.’

  ‘Let’s hope you’re right,’ said Boucher. ‘But you’re going to have your work cut out getting him back to Paris by yourself.’

  ‘I’ll manage,’ said Mai. ‘Even if I have to beat the little toad unconscious and carry him over my shoulder.’

  A few hours later the house was in a turmoil as the Bouchers prepared to leave. ‘We may have to dump a lot of stuff later, but nothing looks more suspicious than travelling light,’ said Miche.