by Simon Mawer
V
Morning seems different. The threats of the day before have receded like a tide. They’ll return just as surely but for the moment there is calm and quiet, with the rough sea a long way away. Outside, the grey drab of the previous day has been replaced by a sky of peerless blue, as soft as angora.
She gathers her things and creeps down the corridor to the bathroom to wash. Back in the sanctuary of her room she is half dressed and finishing her hair when there’s a knock on the door.
‘Come in.’
He wears an expression that she remembers, part contrition, part amusement. ‘I’ve come to apologise,’ he says. ‘You were right.’
‘Right?’
‘About conversations that we’ll regret in the morning.’
‘We’d drunk too much.’
‘Or maybe, not enough.’
She shrugs, continuing with the task in hand, conscious of his eyes on her, feeling the thrill of nakedness without the fact of it. ‘I’m in a hurry and you’re putting me off.’
‘I’m only watching.’
‘That’s the trouble.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘To see this friend. I told you.’
‘But you’ll be back this afternoon, won’t you? You’re not going to run away again?’
‘Again?’
‘You ran off to school in England.’
‘I wasn’t running. I was sent.’
‘You were sent here as well, weren’t you?’
‘I could have refused. It was my decision to come.’
‘And you won’t leave without telling me?’
‘No.’ The hair is fixed. She turns back to him. ‘I’m an adult now, Clément, not your little girl.’
‘I never thought of you as a little girl. You always seemed absurdly grown-up to me.’ He comes into the room and kisses her chastely on the cheek. ‘I’ll see you when I get back from the lab. We’ll do something. We can’t stay cooped up in here. How about the theatre? I can get tickets.’
‘The theatre?’
‘What could be more Parisian than going to the theatre?’
The theatre seems dangerous, calling attention to oneself. ‘Perhaps …’
But she doesn’t finish what she is saying, and he doesn’t wait to hear it. ‘That’s all right then. I’ve got to go now but I’ll try not to be late this afternoon.’ He glances back before closing the door. ‘Be careful, won’t you? Paris is a dangerous place.’
She listens for the front door to slam. In the dining room Marie is in attendance, hovering over the table and the poor apology for breakfast – some grey bread and a yellow slime that isn’t butter. But there is coffee, real coffee from the packet Alice has handed over. It isn’t clear whether this gift has warmed Marie towards her. The woman watches her carefully, as though she expects her to steal the silver. ‘Will Mademoiselle be in for dinner? Monsieur Clément gave me to understand …’
‘I’ll be here for dinner, yes. I’ll be here for a few days.’
‘And you have no ration card?’
Alice looks helpless and makes her apologies, that she left it at home, that it was stupid of her. The woman sniffs. ‘That makes my job all the more difficult.’
‘I know it does. But I had to leave in a hurry. This girlfriend of mine I’ve got to see …’ She leaves the rest unsaid but implied: nameless female troubles – a lover, perhaps, or maybe even an errant husband; or pregnancy, unwanted and unexpected. ‘I know Monsieur Clément would never accept it, but if some money would help …’
The maid doesn’t flinch. ‘That wouldn’t be right, would it? You’re our guest.’
‘But you might be able to get some things on the black market. Some real butter, maybe. Monsieur Clément need never know.’
‘I expect you get butter in the country, don’t you?’
‘Some, yes we do. The farmers keep some back, and if you know the right people …’
The woman nods. ‘My cousin farms in Normandy. We get stuff from him but it’s more and more difficult these days.’
The nod seals the matter. The handing over of money takes place with all the discretion of an illegal street-corner transaction, as though even here the police may be watching.
From the moment she steps out of the house she assumes she is being followed. Always assume the worst, one of the instructors warned them: a pessimist makes the best agent. Around the Sorbonne she mingles with students going to lectures, walking into one of the great courts and out by a different exit to see if she can tease a follower out of the crowd. In the rue Saint-Jacques she gazes into shop windows and scans the reflection of the other side of the street, looking for loiterers, looking for anyone who might be looking for her. At the métro station on the boulevard Saint-Germain she descends the stairs on one side of the street and emerges on the other, watching for anyone doing the same. No one follows. She is clear and clean, a bright, free woman alone in this anxious city. She makes her way back to the métro and pushes among the crowd on the platform to get onto a westbound train. At Odéon she changes to the line that goes under the Seine, going north beneath the city, away from Clément, away from Marian Sutro.
Yvette’s address is a block of flats near the cemetery in the twentieth, a grimy, four-storey building with a mansard roof and decaying mouldings on the façade, the kind of place that has come down in the world ever since the plans of Haussmann first put it there. Alice walks straight past the building, looking. There is a clochard going through bins; a couple sitting in the window of the café directly across the street; young lovers who stand there debating some issue with typical Parisian intensity; a woman walking her dog; a newspaper seller with copies of Le Matin and Les Nouveaux Temps. Further down is a street market with a few threadbare stalls selling old clothes and bits of hardware – sewing-machine parts, sections of plumbing, pots and pans, anything that might be of use in a world where everything is reused and nothing is new. People are rummaging through the junk. She turns over a few old sweaters and glances back at the building.
‘You’d look lovely in that one, dearie,’ the stallholder says.
Alice smiles and considers the possibility of purchase before putting the thing down and walking on up the hill towards the cemetery. People are coming and going through the gates, some with misery etched into their faces. At a stall nearby she stops to buy flowers, a meagre clutch of anemones, to give herself some kind of alibi before going in through the gates. She walks purposefully down one of the lanes between ornate epitaphs and pious weeping angels and finds a bare sepulchre on which to deposit her flowers. The inscription says Jules Auvergne, poète. She has never heard of him. Do flowers to the unknown dead from the unknown living have any significance in the afterlife? She returns the way she has come, back past the street market to the opposite side of Yvette’s building, watching the people in the street, trying to make an assessment, trying to answer the one question that has to be answered: is Yvette’s apartment under surveillance?
At a window seat in the café across the street she sips coffee and reads her book. Time passes. At the next table two girls are discussing a boy in low and urgent voices. He’s a bastard, apparently, un salaud who is going with two different girls at the same time. Should they tell the victims? The debate goes on without ever reaching a conclusion. Beyond the window the scene shifts in that casual, contingent way of the street: women meeting and talking, complaining; people coming and going at the market stalls. In an impasse on the opposite side of the street children are playing tag, three girls and a younger boy, quite oblivious to the world around them. Chat! they call and scatter across the pavé away from whoever is ‘it’. Whenever the door to Yvette’s apartment block opens whoever comes out has to manoeuvre through the game. It isn’t until half past ten that the figure stepping through the door is Yvette herself. Suddenly she is there, scurrying out into the daylight, wearing a drab brown dress with a fawn gilet thrown over her shoulders. She hurries past the children an
d disappears up the impasse.
Alice calls for the bill. There’s no need to rush, she tells herself. The mouse will return to its nest. And sure enough, a few minutes later, clutching a brown paper bag to her chest, Yvette reappears.
Leaving change on the table, Alice grabs her bag and goes out. Across the street Yvette is searching in her bag, then fiddling a key into the lock. Trying not to hurry, Alice reaches the entrance to the building just in time to block the door and push her way inside. Counterweighted by some kind of pulley system, the door slams shut behind her. The hallway is gloomy, illuminated by a dusty fanlight. There are two bicycles propped under the stairs and a battered pram. Yvette is already climbing the stairs, barely glancing at the stranger who has followed her in.
‘Hey!’ Alice says. ‘It’s me.’
Yvette grabs the banister and looks round. Even in the shadows Alice can see fear in her wide eyes. ‘Who’s that?’
‘Can we talk?’ Alice asks.
Recognition dawns. ‘What are you doing here? Go away. I don’t want to see you.’
Alice climbs the stairs towards the woman. Outside there are the cries of the children playing, silly, quotidian sounds. Inside, this sudden, unexpected meeting of shadows. ‘I’ve come to see how things are going.’
‘You can’t come here.’
‘Are you on your own?’
‘I’m going.’
She turns to climb the stairs. Alice grabs her arm, her fingers locking round the fragile elbow. ‘Let’s talk. There’s no one around. Let’s talk here. Like old friends. Who are you these days? I’m Anne-Marie Laroche. Who are you?’
‘Yvette,’ the woman answers dully. ‘Just Yvette.’
‘Can we go upstairs? Are you on your own?’
Yvette shrugs. ‘Of course I’m on my own. That’s it, isn’t it? We’re all of us on our own.’
‘You’re not on your own now.’
The woman stands there. It isn’t even clear if she is pondering the matter. Then, as though surrendering to the inevitable, she shrugs and goes on up, with Alice following.
Yvette has done well in the choice of flat: it is a typical pianist’s apartment right at the top of the building, with sloping ceilings and mansard windows giving out onto a parapet where you can deploy an aerial. Outside the windows, pigeons scratch and scrape on the tiles. The sound of their beating wings is like hands being clapped. In the distance Alice can see the domes of the Sacré-Coeur. Once she loved the building, but Clément had told her it was hideous so now it seems exactly that: hideous, a whited sepulchre.
‘I knew they’d come to get me,’ Yvette says. ‘I just didn’t guess it’d be you.’ She’s making coffee at a paraffin cooker in one corner of the room, the precious coffee that Alice brought. All the time she looks round, not specifically at Alice but over her shoulder, like an animal on the watch for predators. The scent of coffee mingles with the stench of paraffin.
‘I haven’t come to get you, Yvette. I’ve come to help.’
‘I don’t need help.’
‘You went off the air. They thought your set might have a fault. I’ve brought crystals for you—’
‘I don’t need fucking crystals. I don’t need anything.’
‘What’s happened, Yvette? What’s happened to your circuit? CINÉASTE, isn’t it?’
‘How do you know that?’
‘It was in the signal from London.’
‘They sent you specially?’
‘I was already in the country. They didn’t know what had happened when you went off the air. Tell me what happened, Yvette. To CINÉASTE.’
‘They were blown. They were all meeting in a café—’
‘We were told not to do that.’
‘But that’s what happens, isn’t it? That’s what people actually do, whatever they said in training. What the hell do they know? Anyway, I was late. The métro broke down or something. So I got there just in time—’
‘In time for what?’
‘Not to get caught. To see it happen. They knew. The Frisés, I mean. They knew about the meeting. Someone must have betrayed us. I watched from down the street. There were dozens of them. Soldiers and police. They surrounded the place and grabbed them all and took them away.’
‘What did you do?’
Yvette brings the coffee over. ‘I laid low. What else could I do?’
‘And no one came for you?’
‘Nobody. They didn’t know this address, see. I’d only just found it. You know, moving around, what you’re meant to do.’
‘So how did London know?’
She shrugs, as though such matters are of no consequence. ‘My final sked, I suppose. I thought they might help me, so I told them about the circuit, and gave this address and then I realised they couldn’t do anything for me at all, that I was on my own, that as far as they were concerned I could go and fuck myself. So I cut the transmission. The city is crawling with detector vans. If you’re on for more than a minute or two they can get a fix on you and then you’re in the shit.’
‘Don’t you have other places to transmit from?’
‘They’ve all been blown, haven’t they? They got Emile, you know that?’
‘Emile?’
‘He’d only arrived a week earlier. A Lysander …’
‘But when I last saw him he was waiting for a drop.’
‘He refused to jump. At the last minute, he refused to leave the aircraft—’
‘He refused?’
‘They had to take him all the way back, and the next time they had to get him in by Lysander.’
‘He told you this? Surely he wouldn’t have admitted it.’
Again she shrugs, looking suddenly embarrassed. ‘He told me. He’s not like we used to think.’ She sips her coffee, holding the cup in both hands for comfort, looking up at Alice with fear and confusion.
‘We need to get you out of here,’ Alice tells her. ‘We need to get you home, back to safety, back to little Violette.’
It’s the mention of her daughter that does it. For a moment Yvette’s face hesitates, as though it can’t make up its mind what expression to adopt. And then suddenly it breaks up like a paper mask dissolving in the rain, the features crumpling, the whole losing its coherence and becoming something else, a mere assembly of ruined features. She sits with her head bowed, convulsed with sobs and apologising for not being up to it. That’s what she has always done: apologise for her failures. ‘I’m frightened,’ she says through the mess of tears. ‘I never thought I would be, but I’m frightened. I’m frightened of what they might do to me and frightened of what I might tell them. I’m frightened. And I’m frightened of what might happen to Violette if I don’t survive.’
Alice puts her arm round her shoulders. ‘Violette’s safe, you don’t have to worry about that. And we’ll sort you out. We’ll get a pick-up. How can I get a message to you without coming here?’
‘What’s wrong with here?’
‘You know it’s better to have a cut-out. What about the café across the street? Can I leave a message there?’
‘I suppose so. I go in occasionally. The owner’s a fat guy called Boger. You can leave something with him.’
‘Go in regularly to check. Have you still got your wireless?’
Yvette nods. ‘It’s under my bed. I wanted to get rid of it but I didn’t know how.’ Her eyes widen. ‘You’re not going to use it … for the love of God, I’ve told you, it’s not safe!’
‘I’ll get rid of it for you. I’ll take it.’
‘That’s dangerous, going out on the street with that thing.’
‘It’ll be all right. Everyone in Paris is carrying a suitcase these days.’
Yvette attempts a laugh. ‘They haven’t all got a B2 transceiver in it.’ It isn’t a bad effort, considering the tears. Alice encourages her. ‘You know I brought spare crystals for you? Stuffed up my fanny.’
‘Your fanny?’
The idea seems hilarious. They shriek with laughte
r, a laughter that borders on hysteria. And then the mood veers dangerously, like a vehicle out of control. ‘And there’s this,’ Yvette says, opening a drawer in the table and taking out a bundle of cloth. It’s like a conjuring trick: one moment a bundle of grimy cloth, the next moment there is a pistol lying in her narrow hand – a Browning nine millimetre semi-automatic.
‘Jesus Christ, Yvette. What are you doing with that?’
‘It’s standard for a pianist. You can’t pretend you’re doing anything innocent, can you? So you may as well be armed.’
Alice takes the weapon from her. She is immediately familiar with it, that is the disturbing thing. All those hours spent at Meoble Lodge on weapons training. The different types. More models than a soldier would see in a lifetime. She points the pistol at the floor, flips out the magazine, works the slide back and forth a few times, pulls the trigger and listens for the empty snap of the firing mechanism. ‘Ammunition?’
Yvette produces a loaded clip and a box with a dozen rounds in it. ‘Take it.’ She pushes everything across the table. ‘Take the shitty thing away.’
VI
Alice crosses the city, humping the suitcase. It’s a battered, leather-bound thing with a few old hotel labels stuck on it and a handle repaired with tightly whipped twine. She hates it for being dull and ugly and as dangerous as a bomb. It sits on the floor of the métro car by her feet where any policeman or soldier might ask her to open it, and that would be enough to detonate the thing.
At Réaumur-Sébastopol she has to change trains, lugging the hateful object through the tunnels where her footsteps echo against the tiled walls. There are others going the same way and she tries not to catch their eyes, tries not to be noticed. ‘Let me help you,’ a fellow passenger suggests, drawing alongside her and putting his hand down to take the handle. She pulls the case away from him and attempts not to look. But even out of the corner of her eye she can recognise that grey-green uniform, those black and silver flashes plainly enough. A major in the Wehrmacht. ‘I’m quite all right, thank you.’
