by Mike Ripley
Her face set and her eyes unblinking, she grabbed my left wrist and held on to it for dear life as she asked me to swear that my reason for visiting the Mission would not endanger the Mission or those who worked there. As such a thing was the furthest from my mind, I assured her of my pure and noble intentions, which only caused her to grab both my wrists and stare deeply and fiercely into my eyes.
‘Swear it! Swear that nothing you will do will place Pasteur Nevin in danger!’
‘I have no idea who this Pasteur Nevin is,’ I said, hoping that – as we were within the cathedral precincts – all my lies would be regarded as white ones, ‘but my objective is to avoid danger wherever and whenever I can.’
‘That is not always possible,’ said the girl, with wisdom that belied her years.
Then she released her grip on one arm and led me by the other into her secret world.
Given that it had ‘English’ in its title, I could understand why the Seamen’s Mission would not advertise its location; it was one of those places which you could only find once you had already been there. Corinne led me down the Boulevard Maritime, parallel to the Joliette Station, almost to the apex of where it met the Boulevard de Paris. To our left, a grid of railway lines and sidings, littered with wooden sleepers and strangely twisted pieces of abandoned metal, separated us from the Bassin d’Arenc, another of the port’s near-empty docks which even the seagulls seemed to have abandoned. A single narrow street cut through to the dock which, at first sight, was a street of soot-stained warehouses or garages rather than houses, most with broken windows, shutters hanging at half-mast and tiles missing from the roof, where several of the mansard windows appeared in danger of collapsing and sliding into the guttering.
From the way she was chewing her bottom lip, Corinne clearly felt herself something of a Judas when she raised a slender arm and pointed to the third doorway along, where a square of yellow cloth was nailed to the frame of a sun-and salt-bleached door. Except that it wasn’t a cloth, it was far cleverer. It was a naval flag, probably a yachtsman’s version of the maritime flag for the letter Q, but flown alone was the signal indicating that a ship was free from disease and asking for a Pratique – a licence or permission to enter a safe harbour. It was a clever way to advertise, to anyone with a smattering of seamanship, that this house would welcome the lost and weary as long as they came free from contagion.
As we stood before the door with its flaking blue paint, I wondered if I would be welcomed as a lost soul or as a carrier of plague. Corinne raised a dainty fist and rapped a tattoo of blows, but whether it was code or not I could not tell.
We heard a bolt being withdrawn with a slow, metallic screech, and then a second bolt was pulled and the door seemed to sag with relief as it was pulled slowly inwards.
‘My dear Corinne,’ said a voice before the door was fully open; a voice with a worse French accent than even mine.
Its owner was a short, balding man, over fifty but not yet sixty, who had almost certainly at one time been described as ‘chubby’ and, inevitably, ‘jolly’, but whose clothes now hung on his slender frame as if they had been made by a short-sighted tailor who had transposed measurements in centimetres into inches. The jacket of his dark blue pinstripe suit hung off his shoulders like the wings of a bat, and the trousers were secured around his waist with what looked suspiciously like a length of skipping rope. His ensemble was completed by a black woollen sweater so thin and stretched that a white singlet or vest was visible through it, and a grubby dog collar which rose and fell with his Adam’s apple as he spoke.
‘What have you brought me today?’
‘A lost soul, Pasteur,’ said the girl, which I thought was taking a bit of a liberty.
The pastor put his head on one side and looked at me quizzically but without suspicion. ‘Is that so?’
From the cobweb of an overcrowded memory, I salvaged a phrase which I hoped would prove my bona fides, and translated it into French on the wing.
‘Bless us thy servants and the fleet in which we serve that we may be a safeguard to such as pass upon the sea upon their lawful occasion.’
The pastor smiled and opened the door wide.
‘Naval man, are we?’ he said in English. ‘You’d better come in. Welcome aboard.’
The girl and I stepped over the threshold and into a gloomy corridor, which ended in a wooden staircase suggesting an even gloomier upper floor and to a small kitchen area with a single tap sink, a small spirit stove and a kettle. On the draining board were half a dozen oil or kerosene lamps waiting for dusk.
‘Be it ever so humble,’ said our host, closing and bolting the door. ‘You are English, aren’t you?’
‘Canadian,’ I said, on the basis that the less he knew, the safer it would be for him. ‘My name is Jean-Baptiste Hamelin.’
‘French Canadian, eh? You don’t strike me as a Canuck, but then we get all sorts here. I’m Sandy Nevin, how can I help?’
‘It would settle the butterflies in my stomach, Padre, if you were a little more circumspect when offering hospitality to strangers. Perhaps more suspicion is called for. Not that I am refusing your offer of help, for I genuinely do need that.’
Pastor Nevin smiled. ‘I am flattered by your concern, m’sieur, but here we follow conscience, not common sense. Any piece of human flotsam is welcome to drift to our door, where they will not be turned away.’
‘I could have been anyone.’
‘Indeed you could, but as you came with Corinne and could quote the Naval Prayer, I was sure you could be trusted.’
‘How did you know I was with the girl?’
‘There is a window in the attic which looks down the street to the station. Our residents take it in turns to keep an eye out. We are not quite as trusting as you may think. Visits from the police are not infrequent I’m afraid, and when they happen, they tend to be rather disruptive, so we appreciate advance warning.’
‘What are you saying?’ complained Corinne.
In my enthusiasm to speak English, I had quite forgotten that the girl might not, and the realization that I had so easily and swiftly slipped into my native tongue produced a sickening wrench in my stomach and a memo-to-self to be a damn sight more careful in the future, if I was to be allowed one.
‘Forgive us, little one,’ said Nevin, reverting to French, ‘we are being impolite. Tell me, why have you brought Monsieur Hamelin to our humble refuge?’
The girl’s eyes widened at the name ‘Hamelin’, but thankfully she only said, ‘He asked to be brought here. My orders are to help him if I could. We were not followed.’
‘Orders from our friend in Toulouse?’ asked the pastor, and the girl nodded silently. ‘Then I am obliged to help if I can, and my first action is to ask the most important question: would you like a cup of tea, my dear chap?’
‘What a good idea,’ I said with too much enthusiasm, and Nevin beetled away into the corner to busy himself with kettle and tap. ‘Do you have any problems getting tea? I hear that the tea ration in England is regarded as more of a threat than the Luftwaffe in certain quarters.’
Pastor Nevin’s small frame shook as he chuckled, but it was a pleasant if hesitant chuckle; a chuckle he did not get much chance to use these days. He waved the kettle in the air, vaguely in the direction of outside.
‘My dear sir, we are in a port, a rather large one. Most things can be obtained here – for a price – from the most exotic of locations. It would not surprise me if the tea I am about to brew was liberated from English prisoners taken by the Afrika Korps before it found its way on to the black market. Fortunately we do not pay for it; we gratefully receive gifts from those who avail themselves of our humble hospitality.’
‘Then let me make a contribution to your upkeep,’ I said, offering him the parcel Robert had given me at our meeting.
Pastor Nevin accepted the offering gratefully, carefully removing the two-day-old copy of Marseille-Matin wrapping paper, smoothing it out ‘to read later
’.
‘American cigarettes!’ he exclaimed with a huge grin. ‘Thank you, they will come in very useful. Can I ask where you got them?’
‘Diplomatic channels,’ I said, tapping a finger against my nose and silently breathing a sigh of relief that Robert really had given me cigarettes, as I carelessly had not checked the parcel.
The pastor busied himself with the tea ceremony and then paused as his face contorted in dismay. ‘But we have no milk!’ he wailed, in an act of despair which would not have passed muster in even the most amateur of amateur dramatic societies. He frantically patted the pockets of his flapping jacket then plunged both hands into his trouser pockets. ‘Corinne, my angel, run and buy some milk for us.’
‘Allow me,’ I said, taking my cue and producing a note from my wallet.
Corinne wrinkled her nose in disgust, but I thought it more an expression of the inbred French disapproval of putting milk in tea, rather than being asked to undertake a menial errand designed solely to get her out of the way so the grown-ups could talk.
She tugged the money from my hand, glared at me and left with a flounce. As soon as Sandy Nevin had closed and bolted the door behind her, he began to speak in English and, for the first time, I picked up a slight burr of a Highland Scots accent.
‘We can speak English again, m’sieur. You are English, are you not? No Canadian face would light up at the mention of a pot of tea; they would demand coffee.’
‘I must insist that you accept my Canadian persona, even if you do not believe it.’ He nodded in agreement. ‘But English would be the more efficient language for our dealings.’
‘We are going to have dealings?’ he asked with an impish grin.
‘I certainly hope so, Pastor Nevin. Can I ask what you actually do here at the Mission?’
‘We are a hostel for lost souls, both physically and spiritually, but in truth, mostly the physical. We can offer a roof and a bed and the prospect of a night’s sleep without being torpedoed, dive-bombed or sunk to all the human flotsam which washes up in this great port.’
He held my gaze as he spoke, but it was a no more threatening look than would be dispensed by a rural vicar saying farewell to his flock after Sunday service. I decided to probe the country parson as much as I dared.
‘Do you ever turn away a lost soul?’
‘Someone in genuine distress? Never, though of course we do not shelter known criminals or enemy aliens who are, as the Americans would say, on the run.’
‘By which you mean escaping prisoners-of-war or shot-down airmen?’
Somewhere deep in his oversized jacket he shrugged his shoulders.
‘It would be against the law to shelter someone being sought by the authorities, and the police would be interested in anyone who might suggest such a thing. Especially a stranger who arrives unannounced and who may not be quite what he seems … Yes, they would be most interested.’
‘I quite understand,’ I said. ‘You don’t know me from Adam. I have given you cause to suspect my identity and absolutely no reason why you should trust me. All I can say is that I am bound to a higher authority to make sure that anything I do while in Marseilles does not endanger, embarrass or compromise the work of your Mission.’
Nevin graced me with a thin smile. ‘I think I report to a much higher authority than you, my Canadian friend.’ He let his eyes flick upwards, just in case I had not got the message. ‘One who might judge that, by simply coming here, you have compromised our safety.’
‘If He does, He will know that it was not my intention and allow me to prove it to you.’
‘And how would you do that?’
‘By asking one simple question of you, and if you cannot provide the answer I seek, then I will leave this refuge and forget I was ever here.’
The pastor narrowed his eyes, boring into my face. ‘Do I have your word on that?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘As a Canadian?’
I accepted defeat; gracefully, I hoped.
‘As an Englishman pretending to be a Canadian for the purest of reasons, and one who trusts you enough to admit that.’
‘As a Scot who was brought up never to trust the purity of English motives, I am prepared to give you the benefit of the doubt. What is your question?’
‘Would you happen to be sheltering a man with a bullet wound in his shoulder?’
The little man’s emaciated face froze, his eyes, unblinking, still locked on mine, and for a full minute of thick silence I felt sure he would not answer me; possibly never speak again. But he did, though his voice was strained, as if invisible hands were strangling him.
‘I cannot answer that.’
‘Cannot or will not?’
‘We offer a safe harbour here; not just a roof, but sanctuary. I cannot violate that. Sometimes I have to when the police force me. But you are not the police. In fact, I do not know who you are.’
‘I have told you my name. To tell you more would not enlighten you and may endanger you and the Mission.’
‘And why would that be?’
Who the Devil was that? And where had he sprung from?
After all the training I had received, my lords and masters in London would have been appalled at my performance in that moment. The fact that the voice had spoken in English – and had clearly been eavesdropping on Pastor Nevin and myself – had thrown a huge spanner into the creaking, slow-moving cogs of my brain. Otherwise, I was sure I would have followed the lessons drilled in to me by Corporal Colgan, my small-arms instructor at Commando school in Scotland, and dropped into a crouch, pulled out my pistol, turned and fired in one swift and fluid movement. My shot, naturally, would have scored a bullseye, were it not for the fact that I was not carrying a firearm and that the mystery voice did not come from behind, but above me.
The voice belonged to a man who had appeared with an impressive measure of stealth on the staircase. How he had got there was a trick that The Great Lafayette or Harry Houdini would have been proud of, as both Sandy Nevin and myself stood between the foot of the staircase and the firmly bolted front door of the Mission. Having successfully materialized as if from thin air, he had made himself comfortable by sitting on the top step, which gave him the equivalent of a front-row balcony seat from which to watch – and hear – the unwitting performance being put on by Pastor Nevin and myself and, judging by the arrogant smirk on fleshy lips framed by a dark, pencil moustache, he seemed to be enjoying the show.
‘I don’t believe we’ve been introduced,’ I said, which was an idiotic thing to say but it broke the silence. ‘My name is Jean-Baptiste Hamelin.’
‘If you say so.’
He wrinkled his nose so that the hair on his upper lip wriggled like a caterpillar, as if an unpleasant scent had wafted up the staircase. He wore a three-piece suit which had been tailored for someone, though not him, and brown leather Oxfords, the sort issued to the British army (officers only). His feet were planted on the second step down from the first-floor landing and his elbows rested on his knees, allowing the fingers of both hands to meet in a triangle. His suit jacket hung open just enough to make sure I could see the shoulder holster tucked into his left armpit.
Pastor Nevin stepped up and exerted his authority as guardian of the Mission.
‘I have asked you not to use the attic route before, Magnus. That’s our escape route, not our front door. How long have you been there?’
‘Long enough to hear the King’s English spoken and the promise of a brew-up now the kettle’s on. By the way, your little errand girl is sashaying down the street with a jug of milk even as we speak.’
Perfectly on cue, there was a rapid knocking on the street door.
‘There she is,’ said the man called Magnus with something of a leer. I imagined that he was the sort of chap who leered a lot, especially when young girls were involved.
I was perhaps being hasty – or perhaps I was merely saving time – by disliking Magnus Asher on first sight, for the arme
d man who had appeared without warning on the stairs only a few feet from me was certainly the British army deserter I had been briefed about in London.
The realization of that fact prompted my brain into first gear after it had been idling in neutral for too long. I deduced that our surprise visitor had not appeared on the staircase by some illusionist’s trick. If he had spotted Corinne in the street, then he must have been looking out of one of the mansard windows which Nevin had said provided an early warning system. That, and the pastor’s comment about the ‘attic route’ suggested that there was a way in, and out, of the Mission, at roof-top level from the adjoining buildings.
Sandy Nevin undid the bolts and opened the door to allow Corinne to enter. She carried a white porcelain jug with a starched white napkin covering it in one hand and the Franc note I had given her crumpled in the other. As she handed the jug to Nevin and thrust the note towards me, she burst into rapid French to tell us that a Madame Joubert, whoever she was, had refused to take payment for the milk as it was for the Mission, but whether there was any more to the story, we never knew, as her voice switched off the moment she saw the figure on the staircase. The look on her face was not one of starstruck admiration.
‘What is he doing here?’
‘The adults are having a private conversation, little one. Why don’t you run along and play with the other street rats,’ Asher answered her in French.
Before the girl could make a sound, though her mouth was open wide enough to accommodate a scream, Pastor Nevin gently took the milk jug from her with both hands and said quietly: ‘It would be for the best, my dear.’
For me she reserved an icy glare, then turned and flounced out, her grip on the Franc note tightening so that it disappeared completely into her fist.
