by Vic Robbie
‘A good job, Arnaud, a good job,’ Bernay called out.
Bernay smiled. ‘So, there you have it. Ingenious, don’t you think?’
His puzzled look was soon answered as Bernay walked over to a trestle table against a wall and foraged in one of the canvas bags extracting an object that appeared heavy.
‘There.’ He handed it over. ‘What do you think of this?’
It glinted silver in the light from the lamp and he almost dropped it as it was much heavier than he’d anticipated.
‘Platinum.’ Bernay’s voice rose. ‘In every bag, ingots of platinum.’
He said nothing and just stared at the metal.
‘You know about platinum?’ asked Bernay.
‘Of course, wealthy women’s jewellery.’
‘It’s much more than. It’s the world’s most precious metal because it has so many other uses, especially in armaments, and it is in short supply. ’
His mind whirled as he tried to make sense of what he was seeing. ‘I thought we got the gold out?’
‘This is different. The bank holds in its vaults here many treasures for wealthy French citizens. The platinum belongs to four of the most prestigious families in France. They all left the country when war broke out and they have instructed me to save their platinum from the Germans so it can be used in some way to fund France’s resistance. All they hope for is one day they will be able to return to a free France.’
Ben’s eyes opened wide. ‘How much is here?’
‘Many, many millions. Doesn’t look much, but because platinum is so dense you could fit around a tonne of the metal into a large suitcase. The value of this is much more than you could imagine. I won’t tell you how much because you might run off to Switzerland with it.’ Bernay coughed as if he feared he might do just that. ‘Enough to fund a war.’
What Bernay was proposing made his hands tremble. ‘Oh, no, just hang on...’
Bernay watched him carefully.
‘What do you expect me to do with it?’
‘In a minute.’ Bernay laid a hand on his arm. ‘Excuse us, Arnaud,’ he said to the manager.
Arnaud nodded in understanding.
They walked as far away as possible where they wouldn’t be overhead.
‘Melodramatic, I’m afraid, yet necessary. The less he knows, the better.’
He could barely mask his incredulity. ‘You want me to drive your car out of Paris with millions in bullion strapped to its chassis?’
The banker said nothing, just smiled.
‘For Christ’s sake, what will happen when the Nazis find out what you’ve done. They’ll come after it. We won’t be hard to find – a bloody Bentley driving through the French countryside. We’ll stick out like a sore thumb.’
Bernay shook his head. ‘There’s no reason why they should find out and by the time they did – if they did – you’d be long gone.’
‘What if they do, and they catch me?’
Bernay hesitated.
‘They’ll shoot me, or worse.’
Bernay nodded as if that wasn’t so bad, putting what was meant to be a reassuring hand on his shoulder. ‘All the more reason why you must go now. You must drive the Bentley out of the garage and out of Paris. Make haste and go south and you’ll keep ahead of the Nazis. Cross the border into Spain, which will be neutral for I don’t know how much longer. Head for Portugal and on to Estoril where you’ll rendezvous with a British agent. It’ll be his task to get you and the platinum to England. In the car are maps, directions, and food and drink for several days. I’ll also give you money to help smooth your path.’
‘And the gun?’ He hoped Bernay would change his mind and reclaim the weapon.
‘I’m sorry, Ben, rather large and unwieldy. It’s a Lebel eight millimetre, my old officer’s pistol from the last war. It’s the only gun I could get my hands on. It’s there in case you encounter problems.’ And he shrugged as if it were unlikely.
‘I don’t know if I can do it, Philippe, it’s crazy and you’ll just lose your platinum,’ he snapped and felt ashamed of what he’d said. ‘Anyway, the car probably wouldn’t make it carrying the extra weight.’
Bernay flashed him a reproachful look. ‘Don’t you think we’ve thought of that? Renard has already made certain modifications, including strengthening the chassis.’
There was a determination in Bernay’s eyes he hadn’t seen before. ‘There are no problems with the car. I wouldn’t be asking you to do this, Ben, if it weren’t important.’
He turned away. He just wanted to get out of there and keep on walking.
But the director pulled him back. ‘The British have promised to give us all the help they can. If we get the platinum to England, it’ll be sold to raise funds for France’s freedom fighters. Better we have it than the Nazis. It’s imperative you make it. You’ve an advantage being an American. No one will suspect you... you must go now. I don’t know how much more time we have.’ And he glanced over his shoulder.
He wavered.
‘If you succeed you’ll be a hero.’ Bernay smiled.
‘If I don’t?’
‘You’ll still be a hero.’
‘Maybe... a dead one.’
It was crazy. Bernay was a very careful man, measured in every thought and action. He’d obviously taken leave of his senses. He shook his head several times in an attempt to erase the images flooding through his brain, and they were all of him lying with a bullet wound between the eyes. It was crazy yet there was something appealing about it in a perverse kind of way. He’d been looking for some action, something that would make his mark on this war. Perhaps this was it.
‘You’ll do it?’ Bernay was almost pleading and he felt sorry for him. Sticking his hands in his pockets because he couldn’t be sure what he might do with them, Ben found he was nodding in agreement.
Almost overcome, the banker paused before embracing him and kissing him on the cheek. ‘Mon brave, you’re the only man I could trust with this task.’
Now he realised why Bernay had given him the revolver.
* * *
ACROSS the river on the Left Bank in the corner of a nondescript café, a man in overalls was on a public telephone and sipped his café noir as he waited for his call to be picked up.
‘Yes?’ a man’s guttural voice answered eventually.
‘I have something of interest for you.’
13
A SHARP pain in the prisoner’s side and a smell of burning jolted him back to reality every time he drifted into unconsciousness. Stripped to the waist, he sat in a straight-backed wooden chair with his wrists fastened to the armrests by a coarse rope cutting deep into the skin and his bare feet were also tied to the chair legs.
How long had he been in this room? He didn’t know whether it was hours or days and every time he slipped away they brought him round. They were in a long, narrow room with a stone-flagged floor and limestone walls. A heavy wooden door with iron studs was at one end; at the other, sandbags, stained red in places, lined the wall. Above the sandbags diffused light crept through a grille and he heard the occasional muffled thud, footsteps running and screams although he wasn’t sure whether they were outside or his own.
A single bulb flickered the room with light. And he could just make out the two men who’d stripped off their black jackets and rolled up the sleeves of their khaki shirts before they started beating him with their hands and rubber truncheons. They chain-smoked vile smelling cigarettes and when not interrogating him spoke to each other in German laughing at their own jokes. Each time he drifted into sleep they jabbed a lighted cigarette into his side just below the rib cage to revive him.
They asked the same thing over and over again, but he didn’t understand the questions because he didn’t know the answers. He wasn’t a brave man. He would tell them anything and everything except what he told them didn’t seem to satisfy them. At first the pain ripped through him as they switched from one area of torture to the next, all the
time laughing. Now the pain was constant. After they had beaten him so his face became a congealed mass of blood and flesh, the tearing out of his toenails turning them into bloodied stumps made little difference. Occasionally they offered water to lubricate his answers, but his lips were so swollen he couldn’t force his tongue through them to get at it.
‘Heil Hitler.’
He was conscious of the two men straightening up and raising their arms in the Nazi salute as the door creaked open.
The newcomer looked with disdain at the troopers and didn’t return the salute. Hitler was certainly not his Führer. Tall, at least several inches over six feet, he was stooped as if embarrassed by his height and his thinning grey hair and grey stubble made him appear older. In a different situation, he might have been a university professor although the look in his grey eyes and unsmiling face brooked no familiarity and for the first time the prisoner felt real fear.
The troopers waited for him to talk. Members of the SS Einsatzgruppen, they followed the conquering soldiers and, with a relish for brutality, they cultivated the vanquished. Those who might cause the Nazis trouble were executed, those with information were tortured, and others who could smooth their paths were used.
In some villages, the inhabitants were denied food and to eat they were expected to serve their new masters in any way deemed fit. Others who were of no use to the Germans starved or had to scavenge for food often excavating fresh graves to boil the corpses before eating them.
The newcomer reached into the inside pocket of his long black leather coat and pulled out a gold cigarette case with the initials LW.
Ludwig Weber extracted a Russian cigarette and tapped it several times on the case all the while taking in everything in the room. He hated these apes. They gloried in this war and the violence. It was certainly not his war. He would have preferred to remain at home with his family.
The men said nothing, waiting for him to break the silence. Instead, he made a play of lighting his cigarette and inhaling so the warm, comforting smoke penetrated every corner of his lungs. It was important to keep them in their place like guard dogs. One slip, show one ounce of compassion and he’d end up in the chair.
He didn’t approve of their methods for extracting information yet his team had their work to do and he couldn’t interrogate every prisoner. His way, while more thorough and with the minimum spilling of blood, took longer.
‘Well, has he told you what we need to know?’
‘No, Herr Weber,’ one of the men answered and shook his head.
He said nothing, just stared at him until the trooper dropped his gaze. He turned and pulled a chair in front of the prisoner and sat down.
‘So, what have we here, m’sieu?’ He spoke in perfect French and smiled at him in an almost apologetic way as if sympathising with the prisoner’s misfortune at getting into such a predicament.
There was no response.
‘Just tell us what you know and you’ll be free.’
Again the prisoner said nothing.
‘Your silence is futile.’ His voice grew harsher. ‘No one can help you now. We can make it so you just disappear off the face of the earth.’
Still there was no reaction.
‘Very well.’
He pushed back his chair and got to his feet. He studied the prisoner, his eyes dwelling on his bloodied feet.
The prisoner watched him with his one remaining eye.
‘Tell us what we need to know.’
He moved closer to him.
‘No more pain, it’s quite straightforward.’
Still no response. He crossed his arms and waited.
‘Talk now and we’ll let you die without any more pain.’
This time he didn’t wait for an answer. With all his power, he stamped down on the man’s unprotected feet.
The man catapulted backward in the chair and attempted to shout, a bubble of red coming out of what had been his mouth.
The fools had gone too far this time.
He studied the prisoner not sure he wanted to do what he’d do next.
‘Very well,’ he said in resignation and signalled to another black-suited trooper to come forward through the doorway.
The soldier pulled behind him a small boy who stumbled, and the trooper continued to drag him until he regained his feet. He gestured to the soldier and took the whimpering boy’s hand and guided him until he stood in front of the man shackled to the chair. Although the prisoner tried to smile, it was that of a gargoyle and so horrific the boy pulled away.
He spoke in a hushed tone as if it were a secret between them. ‘I don’t wish to harm the child, but if you won’t tell me what I need to know I’ll have to hand him over to your two friends.’ He looked in the troopers’ direction.
Again the man struggled in his chair, which almost fell over, and the boy recoiled in fear not recognising his father, and a loud moaning noise came from deep in the prisoner’s chest. The pain inflamed the man’s mind and everything concentrated on the seat of his excruciating suffering. Weber moved in close and put his ear to the man’s mouth. Words tumbled out unedited, between sobs, and without meaning, and Weber nodded in understanding several times as a priest taking a confession.
He was trained to extricate the truth from pain-crazed ramblings and, with a sigh and a shake of his head, he straightened up and stared at the two soldiers until they shuffled nervously.
‘You’ve been wasting my time here,’ he accused them and turned on his heel, releasing the now hysterical boy’s hand.
He left the room slamming the door behind him. He was sick of battlefields and battle songs and broken people and misery. Tomorrow they would be in the City of Light. Civilisation. The French had declared Paris an open city whether out of cowardice or good sense he didn’t know and didn’t care. Instead of desolation, there would be restaurants and plenty of food and good wine. And he would be able to sleep in a comfortable bed with clean white sheets of linen and have a hot bath and a proper shave.
‘Herr Weber?’ The soldier stood by a small table on which there was a brown Bakelite box. ‘I have a telephone call for you.’
The soldier’s face was white and he appeared to be trembling. ‘Please.’ He proffered the handset of the Feldfernsprecher 33 field telephone as if he no longer wanted to be associated with it.
‘No, not now.’ He waved a dismissive hand at the soldier. ‘Not now.’
The soldier was insistent. ‘You must, Herr Weber, it’s very important.’
He detected fear in the soldier’s eyes. ‘Who is it?’ he asked.
The soldier croaked a nervous response.
‘Oh, very well.’ He snatched the handset from the soldier and barked down the phone. ‘Yes?’
The voice at the other end sounded as if it were underwater. ‘Herr Weber, please wait.’
After a series of clicks and intermittent crackling, a new voice came on the line, a high-pitched almost effeminate voice and Weber had known before he said his name to whom he was talking. And he felt like thousands of ants were crawling across his body.
The soldier exhaled and allowed his shoulders to relax relieved the call was no longer his responsibility.
Weber had pulled over a chair and sat down with his elbow on the table and his head resting on a hand and he listened deep in concentration. He’d heard it all before. First would come the compliments then the underlying threat that if he didn’t achieve the task he was being set there would be severe repercussions. With growing trepidation, he listened as he was told the Führer himself had asked for him to undertake this task. All means would be put at his disposal to track down an enemy who had the power to endanger the Fatherland’s war effort.
The soldier watched, convinced the longer the call lasted, the more Weber appeared to age.
After what seemed an eternity, although it was only a matter of minutes, he removed the phone from his ear and sat staring at the wall.
‘Herr Weber, is everything okay?�
��
He lurched to his feet and threw the handset onto the table and without a word left the room. Walking up the stairs, he made his way out into the daylight. Everywhere there was destruction, demolished buildings, fires burning, clouds of smoke and the smell of cordite yet the air was fresh compared to the stench of hopelessness in the cellar.
Even the landscape was depressing. Not just featureless, but also interminably flat as if nature had created it on an off day, too weary to be bothered to fashion an undulation far less a hillock or a ravine or river. Or perhaps it had passed over this barren land in a hurry to create a masterpiece elsewhere and it was forgotten as it had been by everyone who had trodden this sorry earth since.
He sat down on what was left of a wall. Across the way was a gutted building resembling a blackened skull with the empty upstairs windows like eye sockets and its mouth the hole that had been a door. As he lit a cigarette, the muffled crack of a pistol shot from within the building and the sound of a man shouting made him start.
Paris now seemed to be nothing more than a dream. ‘First, I have to find someone,’ he muttered knowing he had no time to finish his smoke and ground out the cigarette under his heel.
Crack! A second pistol shot rang out deep in the cellar.
Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler had been emphatic. ‘Find them,’ he’d warned, ‘or your family will be held to account.’
14
BERNAY thanked renard and even hugged him. ‘We’ll meet again in better times, mon ami.’ And Ben was sure he saw tears in Renard’s eyes.
‘Please have the car ready in 30 minutes.’ Bernay waved an imperious hand. ‘Time is pressing. The Nazis are close.’
Renard nodded and went back to his work with renewed vigour.
Bernay led the way to the stairs. ‘Come to my office, Ben, there’s one other thing we need to discuss.’
In the gloom of Bernay’s inner sanctum, he didn’t see anyone else at first. Then to his left a slight movement and a rustle caught his attention. He focused his eyes in the dim light and saw a woman sitting with her legs crossed on an upright chair against the wall. Her shoulder length blonde hair was cut close to her cheek and fell like a veil over her right eye so he couldn’t make out her features.
