Hunting Ground

by J. Robert Janes

  ‘You must excuse me then because I’m rather full.’

  Ten seconds—is that how long it takes for the burning sensation in the mouth? I know it’s a most painful death—I’ve read of this in detective stories. Who hasn’t? The victim lies on the floor, cramped with stomach pains and vomiting hard, then the violent purging starts. But nothing happened. There was no poison. Just a sip of wine and then another. ‘Salut!’ she said and grinned. ‘Are you satisfied?’

  The table erupted with laughter. The scar tightened. Schiller got to his feet and bowed as he handed the pâté in its napkin back and it was passed from hand to hand. ‘For your cat, mademoiselle.’

  As the handbag and its contents were returned, Dupuis didn’t join in the fun, nor did Jules or the Vuittons. For them, as for Nini and myself, the agony had been too much.

  ‘Seven hundred thousand francs.’

  Göring sat like a potentate among the treasures in the library. He never bid himself. That was always left to Hofer. He only smoked his cigar and watched.

  The Gobelin tapestry went for something like a million; the Hellenistic terra-cotta sculptures, three beautifully done heads, and a small statue of a woman whose arms had been lost centuries ago, fetch a miserable one hundred fifty thousand francs.

  The icon brought only five hundred thousand; the Giordano canvas one-and-a-half million. So many things. Göring had his pick. A set of Roman coins, some Etruscan glass, two of the Renoirs from the house—Jules hated to see them go, but they were the price he had to pay.

  A Limoges enamel triptych, by Pierre Reymond, sixteenth century, was someone’s loss. A Dürer Madonna and Child, in watercolours, caused the Reichsmarschall to hesitate, but he couldn’t let it go and gave a nod before filling his mouth with champagne. As the treasures were carried out to a waiting lorry by men in Luftwaffe uniform, the rest were left to be fingered and exclaimed over, for the auction had been a bit of a sham since there was only the one bidder.

  ‘From Avon, the train will make its way to Munich,’ confided my little sister, ‘and from there to Karinhall, his estate some ninety kilometres to the north of Berlin.’

  She didn’t tell me any more, simply because it would be safest, but I knew that some of Nicki’s treasures must have been among those purchased, and that Katyana had apparently slipped away.

  7

  It’s getting dark. Soon Jules and the others will be cold in that house of my husband’s. Perhaps they’ll light a fire and say, ‘It will draw her in,’ but I’m used to not having any heat. Have they forgotten this?

  The Cherche-Midi was once a convent. Built in the reign of the Sun King, it had thick stone walls, airless corridors, iron-bound wooden doors, and moisture that ran down the walls to freeze. Each cell had a window—just a rectangle behind iron bars and of pearl-grey glass into which God had pressed chicken wire as if one might try to escape through such a thing.

  Converted to a prison during the Revolution, it held us for a while, and maybe still my name is there, scratched on the wall among all the others. Lily, taken 22 November 1943.

  From the Cherche-Midi, we were sent to Drancy in late January 1944, in the Black Marias the French called the ‘iron salad shakers’. From there, in the dead of that winter we went by rail in cattle trucks to Birkenau and in the dead of the next winter to Bergen-Belsen, so me, I know a lot about cold. I know how the bones can ache, how the eyes glaze over and there are no thoughts because even that takes too much energy.

  I know how Michèle Chevalier clung to life throughout all that cold because she believed in me and I had repeatedly told her she would survive. I know how they took us from our block at dawn and told us we were to die. Cher Jésus, the war was finished for them. They could have used a little humanity. Cold, I felt so cold. I tried to hold Michèle’s hand. Her fingers were like ice. I said good-bye, said, ‘I’m sorry I failed you.’ And they made me watch! Pour l’amour de Dieu, those bastards, Schiller and Dupuis! Schiller had ordered the executions. Dupuis was still in Paris, I guess; Schiller, I don’t know where. Just a voice on the telephone: ‘Kill them.’ Nothing else except, ‘Yes, you are to use the axe.’

  The axe!

  My SS knife is really very sharp. I’ve taken the remaining bullets out of the Luger and its clip and have laid them on a stone while there’s still light. Since there are only six of them, I’m cutting notches into each to make up the difference. They’ll open up on impact. If caught with them, my death will be horrible as it was for others I knew who had done this, but I have to be sure of things. You see, Schiller and Dupuis used to interrogate me at the Cherche-Midi. The one would start, then the other would take over. They kept it up for nearly forty-eight hours, and when they were done, I laid on the floor of my cell for three days. I had so many secrets by then, one in particular that they wanted very badly, but I told them nothing.

  Schiller … Is he still alive? Did he manage to get away, to hide some place? This I really don’t know and wish I did.

  Dupuis is still an inspector. Isn’t that something. But since all of us had been killed, he could claim he’d only been doing his duty and that, in the final days, he had joined the uprising in Paris just like everyone else, a résistant!

  He has a wife, a son, and two daughters, all grown by now, of course, and I won’t hold it against them, only the father, and the others who were with him, but wait, please. To understand the Occupation, you have to consider that those times were often like a kind of ether. People drifted into and out of your consciousness. They came and went, and you wondered where they were.

  By 1941, people had started coming out to the countryside from Paris to scrounge at the farms for eggs, meat and vegetables, or milk, and in the forest for mushrooms, acorns, even twigs for the stove. One still needed an Ausweis, the laissez-passer, and the sauf-conduit to do such a thing, and always there were the random searches on return and the danger of having everything confiscated and being accused of planning to sell it on the black market.

  I think it was towards the end of April or perhaps into the first weeks of May when Dmitry Alexandrov finally showed up. It wasn’t that long after Göring’s visit. The war with Russia still hadn’t started, but the Germans had gone into Yugoslavia and Greece. Malta was being pounded; Tobruk defended against Rommel.

  I was working in wax. I’d blocked out the three figures and was beginning to concentrate on Katyana because I wanted to get her just right and I had this horrible feeling I’d forget what she looked like.

  I’d decided to make the piece a little larger than the one I’d done of Nini. I worked in the kitchen and, as the days grew longer, threw myself into the sculpting and my vegetable gardens and the farm. My mother had returned, so that was good. Tommy would have a place to stay—at least a warning if things weren’t right. We had worked out a system for this, but still there had been no word from them. It was as if they had disappeared forever.

  Then Dmitry showed up. I remember that it was Jean-Guy who came to tell me he was in the forest and wished to speak with me. I set the pallet knife aside. Marie was working in wax, too, and had got it all over herself. As I cleaned her off, I said to my son, ‘Take Marie and go and talk to Rudi. Keep him busy. Ask him to help you make a kite.’

  ‘But we made one last autumn? It was lost in the trees.’

  ‘Then get him to help you make another.’

  Rudi … I was beginning to really worry about him. In his idle moments, our German guard would stray to the side door of the cellar and wonder about Collin. I knew that what I’d done plagued his conscience as it did mine. I didn’t want him to suffer, nor did I want him to give things away. Please, you must understand the predicament I was in. Rudi was my friend, but at the same time he was of the enemy.

  I think Oberst Neumann was in the library, for it was a Sunday. I know his car was in front of the house. Schiller had been recalled to Berlin on urgent business.

  The fresh newness of the leaves gave to the woods that smell of things gr
owing. There was the sound of the bees, that of distant birds. All these things came to me, then on looking back, the sight of my courtyard and kitchen door down through the long tunnel of blossoming fruit trees. That delicate pink-and-white gossamer of the apple was like no other, that pure, strong white of the pear, just as distinctive. Pastoral, the way life ought to have been.

  Dmitry was sitting on a boulder behind some others. There were two suitcases, one a little larger than the other, both of brown leather, not new, not old, but scuffed. ‘So you’re back,’ I said. ‘Where have you been all this time?’

  The clothes were old and rough, an open blue denim jacket, a black turtleneck sweater, brown corduroys, and boots that had seen much walking. ‘Here, there, everywhere,’ he said. ‘Marseille, madame. I’ve brought you a little something you’re to take over to your mother’s for us.’

  Why me? I wanted to ask, to say, Didn’t they tell you the Germans are here nearly all the time?

  ‘Your sister has asked this of me, madame. I’m only the courier.’

  He indicated the suitcases. ‘It’s a British Mark II wireless transceiver, so you had better not let the Boche find you with it.’

  ‘British? How did you come by it?’

  Those washed-out, grey-blue eyes took me in. ‘Felucca from Gibraltar to Marseille, the boyhood home of your artist friend Marcel.’

  ‘Is he also involved?’

  Dmitry couldn’t help but see the worry I felt. ‘He and others. We have to use whomever we can, it seems.’

  ‘Just what do you mean by that?’

  ‘Only that Marcel Clairmont finds himself in the unique position of being able to help us. He has friends, as you know, and they … Why they have other friends.’

  Smugglers. ‘Nini asked if you’d been in contact with me but she didn’t say why.’

  Dmitry dug a hand down through the neck of his sweater and fished out his cigarettes. ‘Have we time?’ he asked, indicating the packet. He was tired and probably hungry.

  ‘A little,’ I said, and quickly filled him in on my situation. ‘I’ll leave something for you to eat in the potting shed, but come after dark. About ten. If I can be there, I will.’

  ‘The guns, madame. Janine has told me you uncovered my little cache. I need that Luger.’

  For some reason, I shook my head—even now, after having thought about it so many times, I still can’t think why I refused. ‘They watch me all the time,’ I said. ‘I have to be so careful.’

  He lit up, took a drag, passed the cigarette to me, and we shared that thing. I think I knew I had to, that it wasn’t just an act of friendship but one of trust. Though I didn’t inhale, it was the start of my using cigarettes, and very soon I found that they calmed my nerves and often gave me the opportunity to think things over.

  ‘Janine says you burned the papers I stole.’

  ‘It was for the best. Look, I couldn’t take the chance.’

  ‘Yet you kept the guns—still keep the Luger?’ Our fingers touched as he took the cigarette from me. ‘The transceiver is for the Polish one, madame. I gather among his other attributes, he insisted that he be trained in wireless work before the war.’

  ‘I really wouldn’t know. No one tells me anything.’

  Dmitry set the cigarette aside on the edge of a boulder and stooped to spring the catches on one of the suitcases. ‘There isn’t room to hide these with clothing. This larger one is the transmitter, the smaller, the receiver.’

  There was a varnished box of laminated wood in each suitcase. The larger one had a brown Bakelite panel with dials for coarse and fine-tuning, plug-ins for the earphones, and the Morse key, also switches and a six-volt battery.

  ‘Remember that if you’re caught with it, the Boche will know right away what it is, so you mustn’t tell them anything.’

  This last seemed so obvious and yet how many times was I to hear it? Our little prayer for silence.

  ‘Get it over to the farmhouse as soon as you can. Be sure to let them know they mustn’t be on the air for more than a couple of minutes and that they must use different times of transmission—preferably early in the morning. Between two and four hundred hours. That way, there’s less chance of causing static in some villager’s radio. There’s also less chance of the Germans pinpointing the set.’

  Dmitry closed the suitcases and handed them to me. I felt the weight—the larger was by far the heavier. ‘A little more than twenty kilos in total,’ he said of both, about forty-five pounds. ‘They’re too heavy to run with, so keep that in mind if you meet a patrol or have to go through a checkpoint. Don’t panic. Just bluff it out.’

  He scraped the leaves away and, with a stick, drew a circle in the earth. ‘Paris,’ he said with a stab of the stick. ‘Nuremberg, Augsburg, and Brest. Wide scanners, madame. Cathode-ray tubes that sweep the air twenty-four hours a day to pick up clandestine transmissions. They get the larger fix on the set by a simple triangulation and notify the closer centres so that those can narrow down the location. Tell Alexis Nikolai Ivanovich that this thing is both friend and enemy. One can get lulled into thinking there’s safety once a link with the home base has been established. Tell him that it would be safest to move the set about rather than to transmit from the farmhouse. For your mother’s sake and for your own, as well as for the rest of us.’

  ‘You seem to know a lot about it. How is that, please?’

  The Russian remembered the forgotten cigarette and blew the ashes away from the stone before carefully wiping out all trace of his little sketch and replacing the leaves. ‘I only know what I’ve been told.’

  Had he used it himself? I remember thinking this at the time. If one could contact London with that thing, then Moscow was also possible. This thought worried me so much I reached for the cases. ‘I’ll leave something in the potting shed for you to eat. I won’t forget.’

  ‘There isn’t time. If you could have got the Luger for me, I’d have stayed.’

  ‘Then it’s good-bye until the next time.’

  His grip was strong. He had such powerful hands. ‘When I get to Paris, I’ll tell your sister you’re okay.’

  I think he was afraid I’d get caught with that thing. I’m almost certain he had thought it over and had decided to put as much distance between us as possible. I know he watched as I walked away, and when I’d hidden the suitcases in the shed, he was still there among the trees. I didn’t wave. I just stood with hands in the pockets of my skirt. For perhaps a few more seconds, we looked at each other, then he was gone, and I had turned to head back through the orchard.

  A transceiver. Ah, merde! How on earth was I to get it to the farm?

  André de Verville is the last to arrive. As the others must, I see his car turn in. Getting out to stand before the gates, he’s like an old, old man but someone shouts to bring the car up to the house. Was it Jules? I wonder.

  No, not Jules, and not Dupuis, either. That voice … ‘Have you had a chance to talk to her?’ André shouts back.

  Someone else says, ‘No.’ Dupuis, I think.

  ‘We mustn’t hurt her. I’m insisting. If you refuse, I’ll turn around and take what’s coming to me.’

  Dupuis walks out to meet him halfway along the drive, but André nervously drops the cigarette that has been offered and stoops to pick it up and clean it off. They both look down the drive towards the gates, the road, and the forest beyond. ‘Out there, my friend …’ I can hear Dupuis saying. ‘A note … She wants to speak to you first. Yes, you. Ah, don’t worry so much. Just talk to her.’

  All lies, of course, except for the note, but poor André who doesn’t want to hurt me anymore is to be the negotiator, not Jules, and not the Vuittons, either.

  He’s much older, greyer, thinner, but is there really someone else, that voice I heard? Dupuis, Louis and Dominique Vuitton, Jules, André, and … Is it Schiller?

  The back road to Barbizon was below me, down through the barren trees. In that spring of 1941, I was thinking of so man
y things as I rode my bicycle along it. Of Tommy and Nicki, of the robbery, the wireless set that was then behind me—everything, it seems. Marie was five, so she was in school all day, as was Jean-Guy, but would I ever see them again?

  The big front carrier basket was full of things, old clothes, two bottles of wine, some cheese, bread, and eggs, for I’d good laying hens—cash for when I needed it—and the day was so beautiful I’d even undone the top buttons of my dress and was glad it had crept up to my knees. A gentle rise soon took me to another hill. I stood up to slug it until forced to hop off, only to hear what I simply didn’t want: a Wehrmacht lorry.

  As it passed, men leaned out to whistle and wave, so I smiled and waved back, but the thing stopped, and I didn’t hesitate because if I did, it would be suicide. ‘Schnell!’ one of them yelled. Two others hopped down. Hands pressed against my seat and touched my legs; others encircled my waist as I was lifted into that thing. There were perhaps twenty of them, sitting on benches that were on either side of the back: young men in their grey-green uniforms. I grinned, I smiled, I said, ‘Merci, mes amis,’ and tried to act the silly young country girl, though of course I was not so young anymore.

  One offered a cigarette, others looked at my bare legs, the sabots I’d been wearing lately, the undone buttons and heaving breasts. ‘So, where are you off to today?’ I asked.

  In broken French, I learned that they were to do un ratissage, a raking of the forest. ‘We can only take you to the edge of the woods.’

  ‘A search for poachers?’ I asked and raised my eyes in mock alarm.

  The heavy one, a Gefreiter, let his gaze travel up my legs to linger on my chest. ‘Poachers?’ he asked. ‘Are there such things?’

  They all grinned and looked at me. It was illegal to hunt, trap rabbits or birds, yet lots did and I was just itching to buy myself a ferret. Three months in jail for a woman, if caught, forced labour in Germany for a man. This also applied to the illegal taking of firewood.

  I shrugged and tried to look as if I’d been smoking cigarettes forever. ‘So, if it’s not poachers, what then?’ I asked, flicking ash aside. I was really pretty good at it. Very saucy.