Hunting Ground

by J. Robert Janes

  ‘I can’t, Nini! I’m five-and-a-half months.’

  ‘Idiote!’

  A whistle shrilled, the first of several, but all too soon there was the sound of motorcycles and the squeal of brakes, the cries of ‘Raus! Raus!,’ the hammering of hobnailed boots and bashing of rifle butts.

  Dragging a small suitcase from under the bed, she flung a few things into it, and as we reached the head of the stairs and I looked down, that spiral came rushing up at me. ‘Go down,’ she said.

  ‘Nini, I can’t!’

  ‘Carry your coat and hide that hat. Act naturally. Bluff it!’

  Give her time to get away.

  Two German corporals were going from door to door, bashing them in and yelling for everyone to get out, but they were still on the first floor, and some of the tenants were leaning over the railing like I was, wondering what to do. But the child gave a lurch, a tear that caused me to grip my middle and wonder if the baby had dropped. ‘Nini … Nini, I love you. Bonne chance.’

  ‘The Jardin du Luxembourg, but watch your back,’ she said as we briefly embraced. ‘I’ll see you later.’

  I started down. For me, it was the most difficult thing I’d ever had to do. Schiller and Dupuis would be waiting for me, one at each end of the street. My coat was over an arm, my hat hidden. When I reached a woman with two small children hurrying out of a fourth-floor flat, I heard one of them asking where they were going, and I took that little girl’s hand in mine, smiled at the mother and said, ‘To see the puppets, n’est-ce pas?’ It was a last desperate gamble, a prayer.

  The street had been cordoned off, and there was a wall of German soldiers at either end of the sector they’d chosen for the house-to-house, and as we walked towards the nearest, we did so uphill, until a Feldwebel’s unfeeling eyes searched mine and I heard myself asking, as if of the weather, ‘What’s the trouble, Officer?’ and I couldn’t understand the person who had said that. I couldn’t! It was like I was two entirely different people.

  He shook his head, tore the papers from my hand, looked at the two children, at their mother, and thrust my papers back at me.

  I thought I was going to have the baby right there, but they were looking for someone else.

  It took me a good hour or more to shake those who were tailing me and get to the Jardin du Luxembourg. I remember that the ribbon of the Légion d’honneur was pinned to the old man’s blazer and that he rented toy sailing boats with a defiance that was admirable, for he refused all German requests. Instead, children vied with their parents for them as the statues of the queens of France looked down from their terraced heights.

  Among the plane trees around the Fontaine Médicis, lovers sat on stiff-backed benches holding hands and doing other things, though kissing in public was still illegal, as was dancing, and considered an offence to all our boys who were locked up as POWs in the Reich.

  Lots of people were about, even though the afternoon, now late, was grey and cold. The puppets fought, as they always did. Out on the rue de Médicis, a calliope played while roasted chestnuts were sold near that gate and the trade was brisk. Around me, there were German officers and other ranks, most of them with their Parisiennes. Strolling flics were about, Gestapo gumshoes also, French ones too, and collabos, maybe even a few black-market dealers, but I saw no sign of my sister. Perhaps she’d not been able to make it. This I couldn’t bear to think, and with hands in the pockets of my coat, I started for the palais, only to remember that the Luftwaffe had taken it over and that it was not permitted to go near it.

  But suddenly, I felt her slip an arm through mine, and she gave it a squeeze, was breathless, and said, ‘So you got through it, eh, but me … Ah, I didn’t think you would, but am sorry to have kept you waiting. Were you apprehensive about me?’

  ‘How long have you been living like this?’

  ‘Long enough. Look, it doesn’t matter. One lives the way one has to.’

  It was an old argument. ‘Is everything set for tonight?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, of course, but we have to talk, just you and me. With that thing inside you, it’s impossible. You do understand?’

  We were near the greenhouses and the school of mines at the back of the gardens. ‘What, exactly, is it that you want to say?’

  ‘Schiller and Dupuis will guess who the father is, so what’s the sense of your hanging on to it? You’ll only have the child in prison. It’ll die anyways.’

  ‘But …’

  ‘Look, I’m sorry, but you’ll just have to live with the lie of your illness. A tumour, Lily. Cancer of the womb. André has agreed, under duress of course, since he’s holier than the holy, but has finally seen the sense of what I’ve told him at that office of his.’

  Me, I couldn’t believe what was happening and finally blurted, ‘But what am I to do about the children, the house, my rabbits, the chickens, and the potatoes I still have to lift?’

  Anything but what I really wanted to say, but it was Nini who insists. ‘Go and see Jules at the Jeu de Paume. Tell him you haven’t been feeling well and that you’re afraid it might be bad news.’

  ‘He won’t care, why should he? Besides, the children already know I’m expecting and that it’s Tommy’s child.’

  ‘Must you confide everything in them?’

  ‘One has to trust if one is to gain their loyalty.’

  ‘Schiller must see you talking to Jules. He must be made to think …’

  I pulled her round to face me. ‘What?’ I demanded.

  Nini never backed off when cornered. ‘Why do you think Schiller and Dupuis have left you at the house? They hope you’ll lead them to us. We were just lucky that the rafle in my street happened at the same time and that they didn’t know about it.’

  ‘But they know where you live. They can pick you up at any time. And Michèle and Henri-Philippe.’

  Again, there was a look in her dark eyes that I’d never seen before, and I wondered if that was what the Occupation had done to her.

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘I’ll tell you because I must. There’s to be another big auction next Wednesday. Göring’s flying in for it. Schiller must think we’re going to try to knock it off, so we keep him thinking that. You go to see Jules, and Schiller sees you with him, and it all makes sense—you’re sizing things up for us, and he thinks he can use that stuff to bait the trap while we go off to blow up some other trains. It’s neat, Lily. Only, you absolutely have to have that tumour removed. You’ll be away from it all. He can’t connect you with any of it, and we’re safe as well.’

  Bien sûr, I had thought of the dilemma. A child without a father is one thing, but a lot of women had those now, and I didn’t want to lose this one. Suddenly, it meant more to me than anything, and I said, ‘I want to talk to Tommy first. It’s as much his as mine.’

  Gripping my hands, she told me that he mustn’t know, that we could always make another, that the war wouldn’t last forever, that the Russians had surrounded the Sixth Army on the outskirts of Stalingrad. ‘It’s happening, Lily. The end’s in sight.’

  ‘Dmitry …’

  She turned away from me. ‘Yes, I know. Tommy’s told me. He was very useful, and I don’t honestly know what we’re going to do without him. I really don’t. Organize something, I guess. Always it’s me who has to cover things up and organize something to replace them.’

  Turning back, she kissed me on both cheeks and said, ‘Now cheer up and I’ll take you to see that husband of yours who’s in bed with the Occupier. Perhaps if we’re seen together with him it will help the cause. Two sisters, yes. The nearness of the death of one of them, the anxiety, and a few tears, of course.’

  There are only fragments of memory, glimpses of that business. Simone was so upset. For her, to lose a child like that was to commit murder. André and she argued, but I said so little. In the end, I think it was done at about two thirty a.m. I hadn’t even made out a will, had so little of my own, but what I did have, I wanted to see properly disposed
of. When I came out of the anaesthetic, who should be sitting there but Dupuis, holding a large glass bottle in which a tumour was submerged in formalin.

  Promptly, I threw up and passed out, but he was still there when I came round. ‘You’re full of surprises,’ he said.

  I could hardly speak. ‘Have I been out for long?’

  ‘In and out for three days. It’s Wednesday.’

  I shut my eyes and tried to slip back into unconsciousness, but his words, when they came, were of no help. ‘It’s not the length of time, madame. That’s only understandable. It’s the things you inadvertently said.’

  ‘What things?’

  ‘Rudi Swartz, madame? Orders for the Russian front?’

  Me, I had to turn away, couldn’t bring myself to face him, though I had to say, ‘Poor Rudi, he was so terrified of being sent there.’

  ‘But there were no such orders.’

  I had to face him, I needed to. ‘Weren’t there? Rudi thought so. Please don’t tell me he was mistaken.’

  ‘A cave, madame? “The cave,” you said and repeated it several times. Also, “the farm.” By that, I presume you meant your mother’s.’

  ‘I really wouldn’t know, Inspector. I’ve always wanted a farm of my own. It’s been a lifelong dream.’

  ‘And an emerald-and-diamond tiara? That of the Empress Eugénie? Has that also been a lifelong dream of yours?’

  To this I could say nothing. Hunched in that chair of his, sucking on a cigarette, he took a moment before adding, ‘“Flames,” Madame? “Screams in the night. Must get away. Mustn’t let them find me here.”’

  ‘I was delirious, in shock, and in a great deal of pain.’

  ‘Bien sûr, but you kept asking God to forgive you for something. God and Thomas Carrington. “Tommy,” I believe it was.’ He consulted his little black notebook. ‘Yes, here it is,’ and he showed it to me. Tommy … Tommy, forgive me.

  I think it was on the 18th or 19th of January 1943 that they took me to the farm. The Russians, I know, had lifted the nine-hundred-day siege of Leningrad. The German Sixth Army at Stalingrad had all but been destroyed. No one in the car said much. I think they were all wondering what it must mean for them.

  I remember that there had been the usually insufferable cold and damp, even a thin layer of newfallen snow, but that the ashes of my mother’s farmhouse still smouldered and there was the stench of burning cloth and rubber.

  Blood matted the jet-black hair where the bullet had entered. Schiller stood looking at her. The wind tugged at the collar of his greatcoat and made the tops of his ears red beneath the cap with its death’s-head.

  ‘There was a wireless set and you knew of it,’ he finally said.

  ‘I didn’t! How could I have?’

  He hit me then. Still weak and dizzy, I fell to the ground, where he kicked me. Doubled up in pain, I tried to think what was best to do. They’d use Jean-Guy and Marie to make me talk. They wouldn’t hesitate.

  A shot rang out, and I saw the gun in his hand leap. Another spurted up the earth beside me, and as I lay waiting for the final one, Dupuis stepped between us. ‘Of course, she’ll talk, Herr Obersturmführer, but only if her mother receives a decent burial.’

  ‘I’ve nothing to say. I don’t know anything.’

  In anger, Schiller fired at me again, Dupuis losing all colour. ‘Obersturmführer …’ he began.

  ‘Answers! I will have answers!’ shrilled that SS. Four others of those stood around with machine pistols. Dupuis let go of me and stepped back as Schiller pressed the muzzle of that gun of his to my forehead and said, ‘The cowards smashed their wireless and left her to face the consequences. You will tell me where they are and the names of all of their contacts, and you will tell me the locations of the artwork.’

  Me, I didn’t know how long mother had been lying here, a day or two at most. Tommy and the others could be anywhere, but I’d have to tell him something, otherwise he’d have the children brought before me. ‘There’s a hut in the forest, at a place we call the Three Gables. I’ll show it to you.’

  They stopped off at the barracks in Fontainebleau to get more men. I think then that the feeling of being very much the hunted now, rather than the hunters, had begun to come over them. I do know that they moved through the forest stealthily and that I was forced to wait under guard in one of the cars. Dupuis even lit a cigarette and passed it to me but said, ‘You know that wasn’t a tumour de Verville removed. It was a child.’

  Two of the others had been left to guard us. There were some cars behind, and then a couple of lorries. ‘You can think what you will, Inspector, but I know what it was and so does the German doctor who examined me before the operation.’

  That one had been perfunctory, a taking of my pulse, a signing of the necessary papers. Me, I think he must have been on his way to Maxim’s when André caught up with him in the corridors.

  ‘The lieutenant will pry everything out of you, madame.’

  Me, I kept listening for the sound of gunfire and hoping Tommy and Nicki and the others were nowhere near. The shackles hurt, and every time I lifted the cigarette to my lips, that length of chain made a rattle. ‘Listen, you, I have to pee and would prefer not to in the car.’

  He unlocked the handcuffs and the door. ‘Try to make a run for it, and you won’t get far.’

  The cigarette pauses and I blink. I know it’s Dupuis and that he’s finally caught up with me, the past having become the present, for he has just said exactly the same thing, though now he adds, ‘Lift your hands slowly.’

  ‘Where’s Schiller?’

  ‘In the house.’

  ‘Is Jules with him?’

  ‘If still alive.’

  Crouching, he teases the Schmeisser from me. ‘Now the Luger, eh? Easy … Yes, yes, that’s it.’

  Having committed the unpardonable of living in the past so intensely, I had forgotten the present. ‘There’s a knife in my left coat pocket.’

  With the gun pressing against the nape of my neck, he frisks me, and finds the wire cutters. ‘Where’s the knife?’ he asks.

  My hands are well above me and it’s so like it was back then, I have to say, ‘I don’t know. It must have fallen out.’

  Again, I’m frisked, but now his breath comes quickly, and I ask myself, How many times have I smelled those peppermint-flavoured anise bonbons on that breath of his, that face pressed close to mine?

  ‘So we’ll take a little detour,’ he says, ‘and you’ll tell me what we would like very much to know.’

  Snatching up the Schmeisser, he tells me to head for that old stone tower, but me, I haven’t told you how it came to be that I spent more than nine months with Tommy and the maquis of the Auvergne. We blew up a lot of things, caused trouble in widespread places, even infiltrated back into Paris to link up with Michèle and the others.

  As at my final capture in the late autumn of 1943, there’s still so much to say yet no time now to say it, for the Forest of Fontainebleau, that hunting ground of kings, opens out below us and I’m reminded of my daughter and son, of the fighter planes we once saw, of Jules and me, and then of Tommy and me.

  For me, the tower and the edge of this cliff are to be both the beginning and end, yet I’m not unhappy. To fail in life is nothing; to learn to live with it everything, and I’ve felt again the loves I once knew, have heard again the voices of my children and my friends.

  Dupuis mentions the clinic and asks how I managed to get there.

  ‘The British liberated Bergen-Belsen on the 15th of April. From there, I went first into a military hospital near Bremen, but there was trouble with my chest, so when I asked to be sent to Switzerland, to a clinic, they took it upon themselves to do all they could for me.’

  ‘The Médaille de la Résistance was awarded posthumously.’

  ‘Was it? Ah, bon, but you see, I had no wish to let people know I was alive. I wanted to be dead, Inspector.’

  ‘But they had the numbers that are tattooed o
n your arm? Surely, those would have given them your name?’

  ‘Quite obviously they couldn’t have had it on their lists. So many people died at Bergen-Belsen, sixteen thousand in one month. Me, I should have died, too, and probably that was all the Free French really knew. In any case, it was no gift to have been spared. On the contrary, it was and is to my everlasting shame. They killed my friends. Michèle … I saw them chop off her head.’

  ‘So, the cave, madame. Where is it?’

  ‘Not far, but you’ll need me to point it out.’

  Dupuis shakes his head but doesn’t smile. ‘I’ll give you a few minutes while the sun is still with us, then I’ll kill you simply because I must.’

  ‘And Schiller, what of him?’

  ‘After I’m done with you, I’ll kill him and the others.’

  What others, I wonder, except for my husband? ‘Could I have another cigarette?’

  He tosses me the packet, but it sails over the edge of the cliff as if by accident, so I feel for my blouse pockets and tell him, ‘Maybe I have some others.’

  That knife … it was in my sleeve, and when I raised my hands, it slid down under the blouse to end up next to the scar, trapped against skirt and belt. ‘Ah, bon, Inspector, there’s a packet in the left pocket of my blouse.’

  ‘Give me one.’

  ‘I must unbutton my coat first. Is that okay?’

  ‘Hurry then, the sun is almost gone.’

  As I slip my hand under the sweater, I pluck open the blouse. ‘The entrance to the cave, Inspector, it’s not easy to find. We tumbled a lot of rocks down in front of it. Sixty million francs worth of stuff are hidden there. Old francs, you understand. Probably a lot more. Dürer, Rubens, Rembrandt, and Cranach … lots of those. Some lovely paintings by Gauguin and Renoir, boxes and boxes of collectors’ gold coins. Other ones, too.’

  He reaches out with the match to light my cigarette, and I lean towards it, knowing that he’s forgotten what the sun on the horizon can do to the vision. Drawing in, I feint suddenly to the left, ramming that knife into him with a quick upthrust to the guts while seizing the gun in his hand.