No, she wasn’t asleep. In fact, she sounded more awake than Gabriela had ever heard.
“And Roger put his face on it,” Gabriela said. “When the Gestapo came and arrested the zazous, Roger sat and watched.”
“That’s me, too,” Christine said. Her voice was softer now, rippled with a current of anguish. “Do you think that’s how my face looks? When the boches come to me, when I lie on my back and do nothing. Is that what I look like?” Her voice rose in pitch. “That dead look, is that me? Please, tell me.”
“Christine, no. Don’t do this to yourself.”
“I can’t help it. My god, I’m a collaborator.”
“Christine,” Helmut said. “Listen to me. In war, everybody is a collaborator.”
Chapter Twenty-nine:
The human smuggler led them along a hedgerow just after dusk, then into a thick copse of trees and up to the edge of another farm. He stopped Helmut and Gabriela and waited. They could see a ramshackle stone cottage with a single lit window. Ten minutes passed.
The smuggler was a nervous young man, wiry with a thin mustache. Maybe eighteen, twenty years old. Gabriela couldn’t understand what alarmed him about the farmhouse. At last, he whispered, “All right, it is safe. Go.”
Helmut had paid him five hundred reichsmarks, agreed to pay five hundred more for every crossing, of which there would be several. Five hundred more when he brought the truck across the border, loaded with bags of flour. It was an exorbitant fee, but it was a complicated undertaking.
Gabriela carried a heavy bag as did Helmut and the smuggler. Her arms ached.
They stopped again some distance on, this time in a wide ditch. Trees on either side, but clear pasture in front. The stars glittered overhead. A chill breeze blew down from the Massif Central just to their south. In the distance, a dog barked. Then it was silent again. Still they waited.
Gabriela could sense Helmut’s impatience as he stirred by her side. “What is this about?”
“They come through this wood,” the smuggler whispered. “They’re dangerous to both sides.”
“You mean the Resistance?” Gabriela asked. “The maquis? Why would they care what we’re doing?”
“They’re always on the lookout for collaborators.” Again, that whispered urgency. “Some are no more than common criminals. They don’t care, they’ll rob anyone.”
But then later, when they set off again, the man said, “Stay back from the road. They come down this way in their trucks, even in the middle of the night. Always looking for contraband.”
“You mean the boches?” Gabriela asked. “German military, is that who we’re looking out for?”
He didn’t answer. A few minutes later, however, he warned, “These farms are dangerous. If they see you passing, know you have a little money, they won’t hesitate to rob you.”
“Who will rob you?” Helmut asked. “You mean the farmers?”
But again, he refused to clarify. It was never more specific than “they” or “them.” It occurred to Gabriela that the smuggler classified everyone as either us or they. And they were always a risk to us, no matter who they were.
At last, they reached the safe house, a small inn at the edge of the village of Gaudet. And just in time; Gabriela’s aching arms couldn’t take any more.
“Be careful, they can’t entirely be trusted,” the smuggler warned. “Sometimes they’ll take advantage of travelers.”
But when they arrived, the innkeeper took their money and gave them a key. He was an ancien combattant from the last war, with a crooked nose and a thick neck marked with mustard gas scars. One eye was cloudy gray and blind. He fixed Helmut with a hard look with his remaining eye, but said nothing, just pointed them toward the room. He disappeared into a back room and didn’t reappear. Helmut carried the bags upstairs one at a time while she stayed with the smuggler.
The whole setup, dividing trusted people to stay with the bags of gold coins, reminded her of the old logic puzzle from the colégio in Barcelona.
You have a wolf, a goat, and a cabbage and you have to get them across the river.
Helmut looked tired when he came back downstairs. He leaned forward to speak in her ear. “You’ve got the Mauser? Good. Lock the door. If someone tries to enter, shoot them. I don’t care who they are or what they say.”
“And have you figured out yet who they are?”
He laughed. “I have no idea.”
“Helmut, be careful. I don’t trust that guy, either.”
“I’ll be careful.” He lowered his voice further. “Only four hundred more kilos to go.”
She retreated to the room and locked the door. She lit the lamp, then lay down on the bed with the gun in her hand. It wasn’t her intention to fall asleep, but she was exhausted and long past the ability to maintain the constant tension she’d felt since the previous night at the Egyptienne. She woke to Helmut pounding on the door. She let him in and helped him with the bags of gold.
He woke her about once an hour with two more bags. Sometime after midnight, he brought Christine and they paid off the smuggler. The man slipped the wad of bills into his pocket. “The truck will be parked around back first thing in the morning.”
“And the guns?” Helmut asked.
He reached into his coat and pulled out a pair of handguns and then a box of shells. Helmut turned them over in his hands. “Lugers. German sidearms. Where did you get these? Wait, never mind, I don’t want to know.”
“Probably not,” the smuggler said.
“Well, thanks.” The two men shook hands.
“If you come back, need to get north again, ask for Yves in the village. Bonne chance et bon courage, I hope they don’t catch you.”
Helmut turned to Christine once they were alone. “Your man came through, I’ll give you that. I half expected to be robbed by armed men. Or worse.”
“I’ve used him before. He’s expensive, but he’s good and he can be trusted.”
“You girls can have the big room. I’ll take this one. Lock your doors, keep the guns at hand.”
“Nah, I’ll take the smaller room,” Christine said. “And I’ll be fine by myself. I think you two have some unfinished business.”
“It’s okay,” Gabriela said. “I mean, we’re not, we haven’t. . .”
“No need to explain it to me,” Christine said. “Go ahead, I’ll be fine. I’m only too happy to have a few hours alone, by myself, in a comfortable bed.”
She took the key to the second room and left them alone, staring awkwardly at each other. The sound of the door in the adjacent room closing, the lock turning.
“I’ll sleep on the floor if you’d like,” Helmut said.
“No, don’t do that. Go ahead, sit down. You look exhausted.” She helped him out of his shoes, took off his jacket, then sat down beside him on the bed.
“Thank you.” He rubbed at his temples, then gave her a direct look. His eyes were piercing and startlingly blue. “I’m so sorry for everything.”
She put her hand on his. “Shh, I know. I think I understand.”
“You do?”
“It’s the war, it makes everything wrong and it justifies everything.”
“Not everything, there has to be a line.”
“But you didn’t cross it,” she said. “You could have and I’d have never known. But you didn’t, you stopped, you told me.”
He reached a hand and rested it against her cheek. She leaned forward until their noses touched and they looked into each other’s eyes. His gaze was so intense it was hard not to look away.
Slowly he leaned forward. His lips brushed hers. She responded. It was a gentle kiss. The second kiss was more passionate. They put their arms around each other and kissed longer, harder. She was burning with desire and she could tell if she pushed, they would be undressing each other within moments.
There was nothing said aloud. Gabriela didn’t pull away, and she sensed no reservation from Helmut. Nevertheless, there came a point whe
re an unspoken agreement passed between them. They disengaged, first pulling back just a few inches, crossed again by a brief kiss, then further. At last they separated.
“Oh,” he said. “That was nice.”
“Yes.”
And then Gabriela was helping him under the covers. She crawled in next to him, still clothed in what she’d worn the previous night—they had picked up fresh clothes earlier in the day, but were saving them for the next day—and put her arm around him. She lay her head against his chest. He pressed his face into her hair, kissed her head. Then leaned back against the pillow.
She could feel his heart beating furiously. But gradually, minute by minute, it calmed. Helmut sighed. His breathing turned regular. He was asleep, she could feel exhaustion pulling at her as well.
Gabriela put her hand to his face and stroked his cheek.
It didn’t seem fair, none of this seemed fair. A different time, a different place. Things would have been different.
#
They unloaded the bags of gold coins into the safe house in Marseille. It was already spring in the south and Christine went upstairs and threw open the shutters.
A light breeze blew in off the Mediterranean. It smelled of salt water with an occasional whiff of fish from the docks.
They’d come down from the hills on winding roads choked with cars, bicycles, motorcycles, and trucks. Goats sometimes crossed the road en masse, blocking traffic. Germans built concrete casements along the hillsides, mounted with machine guns. More Germans were bulldozing a pasture for an airstrip, others dug tank traps. One entire stone village, clinging to the side of a cliff, had been emptied and turned into a fortified camp. They were never stopped or challenged.
The Marseille safe house itself sat back on a narrow lane, with a hillside view down toward the aquamarine blue of the bay. Scrubby trees stretched up the hill behind them. The hill sloped sharply down from the house to a small alley cut through the scrub and along the edge of the hill. It twisted down to some houses fifty or sixty meters below them. But no immediate neighbors. A rooster crowed in the distance.
“I’m not turning over the gold until I meet with the Americans,” Helmut explained as he double-checked the Mauser, then handed it back to Gabriela.
She didn’t like it. “And you want us to stay here, while you go off alone? How can you be sure it’s not a trap?”
“If Philipe Brun were setting me up, he could have turned me over to the Gestapo a long time ago.”
“Unless he’s just a bandit, then he’d want you to come down and bring the gold before finishing you off.”
“Maybe. I’ll take that risk.”
“Then why not take the gold with you?” she asked.
“I don’t know the man, so I’d be a fool to blindly trust him. Just in case they really are trying to rob me, I don’t want to make it too easy. Besides, a thousand things could go wrong. It could be nothing more than running into a gendarme who wants to inspect the truck. A thousand kilometers across France and we could lose the gold in the last kilometer.”
He pulled out his own pistol, unloaded it, reloaded, then aimed at a spot on the wall. He put the gun away, then pulled it out again and aimed a second time.
“Tell me where you’ll be, at least.”
Helmut tucked the gun in his jacket pocket. “I'm going to the vieux-port, near the fish market in Quai des Belges. One of the shops has a wooden sign painted with a blue dolphin. That’s where I’ll be. But don’t come, it’s not safe.”
“And when you’re done, then what?”
“Then I’ll take you to Switzerland.”
Christine came down the stairs. “What about me? Just go home?”
“You’ve done so much,” Helmut said. “We’d never have got out of Paris without you. There are seventy thousand roosters in those bags, more or less. Nobody would notice if there were a few missing, do you know what I mean? A girl wouldn’t have to go back to working nights if she had ten or twenty gold roosters.”
Christine blinked, nodded. Ten or twenty gold coins would be more than she’d ever seen in her life, but she had to have been thinking about those heavy bags already. You didn’t stand next to bags of gold coins without being aware of it at all times.
“But you’ll be caught as quickly as anyone else if you try to spend them, you understand. You have to wait until the Americans are here, or. . .” He hesitated. “Or bury them until the war ends, whenever that is.”
“I understand.”
“Just one more thing and you’re done,” he said. “Stay with Gaby until I get back. You’ll be safer together. Then go home, get your family away from the coast. Inland, at least—I don’t know—forty kilometers, maybe. This will be the most dangerous real estate in France if everything goes according to plan.”
“And if it doesn’t go according to plan?” Gabriela asked.
“If I’m not back by nightfall, you’ll know I failed. Christine, take Gaby if that happens. Your family can protect her. Don’t either of you go back to Paris, for god’s sake.”
“But what about my father?”
Helmut chewed on his lip. “I don’t know. Find David Mayer. Maybe he can help. Just. . .I don’t know.” He looked at his wristwatch. “I have to go.”
The next few minutes proved to be a bitter parting. She wanted to tell him that she’d forgiven him and to thank him for finding her father. She wanted to tell him she loved him. But there was no time, and the moment was too awkward, so instead they exchanged chaste kisses to each cheek and best wishes and then he was gone. She heard the crunch of his tires as he backed the truck out of the lane.
After he was gone Christine sat in a chair in the salon, tapping her foot. “The problem is,” she said at last, “I don’t know anything else. My parents think I’m working as a seamstress in Paris. I send them money and ration coupons. Imagine a seamstress doing that. But they don’t want to think about it.”
Gabriela wondered about that. Probably they helped Christine maintain her fiction, but they’d have to be blind as well as stupid not to guess what she was doing in Paris.
“You’re not seriously considering going back to the city,” Gabriela said. “Not after all that about being a collaborator.”
“Do you think I’m a collaborator?” Christine asked.
“No, but you do, that’s what matters. And why would you go back anyway? Especially after what Helmut said about the gold.”
“It’s not about the money. I told you, I don’t know anything else, what would I do? Move home to Toulon and marry the son of the boulanger, like my father says?”
“Those are your only two choices? Surely not.”
Gabriela felt like she was going insane waiting. She cracked the front window, then opened the front shutters a fraction, looked down at the street at the bottom of the hill. An old man on a bicycle, a dog trotting by with something nasty in its mouth.
“What are you looking for?”
“This is crazy,” Gabriela said. “Sitting here, doing nothing.”
“We’re guarding the gold.”
“We’re not guarding the gold. If someone wants to steal 70,000 gold coins, will a couple of girls deter them? I don’t think so. We’d be an added bonus. The only thing keeping this gold safe is nobody knows it’s here. That’s it.”
“We’ve got guns.”
“Yeah, and we’re sitting on them, doing nothing. We could be out there helping Helmut.”
“Helping him do what?” Christine asked.
“I don’t know, but you saw what he looked like when he left. He’s expecting trouble. What if Colonel Hoekman gets there first, he’ll be dead.”
“Helmut told us not to go.”
“And he also told us how to find the fish market with the blue dolphin sign,” Gabriela said. “He wants us to come or he wouldn’t have told us.”
“You’re just rationalizing. You don’t want to wait is all.”
“No, I don’t want to wait. Do you?”
“I think we should stay here. We’ve done all we can.”
“No, we haven’t. Listen, Helmut’s in trouble, so what I want to know is are you coming, or staying? I won’t make you. I understand either way.”
Christine sighed. “Oh, come on, are you sure?” Finally, when Gabriela didn’t answer, she gave a firm nod. “Fine, then, I’m coming.”
“You know how to find the Quai des Belges?”
“Of course. We can walk, it’s not far.”
“And the market with the blue dolphin sign, would that be hard to find?”
“I wouldn’t think so.”
Gabriela nodded. She looked down at the bags of gold. “How much did Helmut say? Four hundred kilos?”
“Oaui, something like that.”
“We can’t just leave it in the open.”
“What then?”
“If we’re going to hide this stuff before we leave, we’d better get busy.”
#
Helmut walked along the Marseille waterfront.
Fishermen tossed their catch from boats and into baskets. Other men waddled away with the heavy baskets balanced on shoulders. A babble of language; French, Italian, Catalan, Spanish, Arabic. Gulls wheeled overhead, screamed and squabbled. The sun was bright, the air cool and saturated with the smell of fish and seaweed.
He removed the cyanide capsule from his pocket and tucked it into his cheek. The glass felt smooth and cool. How easy to crush it between his teeth. He imagined the sharp glass, the bitter taste.
And it was surreal, because apart from the glass capsule, Helmut felt like he’d stepped out of the real world and into the pages of a book. A book where there was no war, where a German tourist with a battered copy of the Michelin Guide might stroll the docks of Marseille, taking in the crisp spring air, the sights and smells of the old port. Where he might stop for lunch and eat oysters with mignotte sauce and a bottle of chenin blanc.
That had been his life at one time. School in England, business in Germany, holidays in France. He’d met a pretty French girl, held her hand, whispered sweet French things in her ear. Marie-Élise was like a dream now, like a story he told himself.
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