The French detective was in a high good humour. He had heard three days before from Lacroix that the little Colonel had succeeded in getting safely away and that he was now back in Vichy. Gregory too had escaped, but parted from Lacroix on the night that the home was raided to make his own way back to England; and as Kuporovitch had enormous faith in Gregory’s ability to look after himself this was great good news.
They laughed a lot over the way in which the Quisling Mayor of Batignolles had been pressed against his will into the service of the Free French cause, and Ribaud was pleased to hear that Pierre Ponsardin had also managed to evade capture and could be found when wanted at his old address. As they spoke of their friends who had been caught in the home their laughter left them, as both of them knew that nothing could be done to help these poor people. They must be written off just like soldiers who had fallen on the battlefield, only to be remembered with honour; but their number was not large and, according to Ribaud, their loss would have no very serious effect upon the ever-growing movement to sabotage the German war effort and eventually restore freedom to France.
On the nights that followed Kuporovitch went out on other missions. He was an old soldier and a scrounger of the first water, who, considering himself at war again, had no scruples whatever about looting, now that he was living in enemy territory. His first exploit was to break into Lavinsky’s office in the early hours of one morning, and he came away with a sackful of samples of black market goods that he had seen there. They used some of them later that week in another celebration dinner when the splendid news leaked through that the British Fleet Air Arm had scored a magnificent victory by torpedoing a number of Italy’s most powerful warships in Taranto harbour. But in Paris that week this good news was more than offset by the knowledge that the Germans had, contrary to the armistice agreement, incorporated the French province of Lorraine into the Greater Reich and had begun forcibly to deport all French citizens from it.
Now that one-half of France was occupied, and the other in a state of uneasy non-belligerence with Germany, there were no steps at all which the French could take by way of retaliation, and the Nazis’ cynical disregard for the terms of the armistice spread a gloom over all Paris. Madeleine became subject to the general helpless anger and depression, but Kuporovitch sought to console her by saying that, apart from the unfortunate folk who were actually being deported, the measure would do their own cause good in the long run, as it would show the French people more clearly than ever that no faith could ever be put in the word of the Nazis and that collaboration with them could only end in France being devoured piecemeal.
Kuporovitch’s night forays mostly took him out to the nearer suburbs, as he did not like to rob the smaller shops. During the autumn nearly everyone who had a garden had dug it up to grow vegetables against the winter, and selecting the larger ones in a different neighbourhood each night he pilfered potatoes from one, greens from a second, fruit from a third, and so on. Occasionally, also, he secured a chicken or a tame rabbit; all of which good fresh food made a better contribution to the Mayor’s table than two extra rations would have done, and helped them to sustain themselves against the rigours of the cold, which continued to prove their greatest inconvenience.
Ferrière’s wireless was only a small one upon which they could not listen to foreign broadcasts, but there had now sprung up in Paris such a thirst for outside news that, in spite of the heavy penalties announced by the Germans for listening to the B.B.C., or passing on statements made in its bulletins, practically every shopkeeper had become a channel for forbidden information, so Madame Chautemps was able to furnish them with the latest news after her daily shopping expeditions and long waits in queues.
The German aerial assault on Britain seemed to have petered out, but on November the 15th they again launched one of the biggest blitzes that they had ever attempted against London; yet the following day the underground grapevine news service showed the writing on the wall. The Nazis had lost seventeen planes destroyed against one British.
With the passing days, Madeleine began to get increasingly anxious about her mother. It was now over a fortnight since she had been to see her. The old lady knew nothing of her daughter’s secret activities, but by this time would be wondering why Madeleine had neglected her for so long. In consequence, they got in touch with Pierre, and he came to dine with them.
He reported that Madame Lavallière was much as usual, except that she suffered most severely from the cold and whenever he went in to see her she was always complaining of her daughter’s neglect. As Kuporovitch absolutely forbade Madeleine to go to see her, it was agreed that Pierre should tell Madame Lavallière, without giving her any details, that Madeleine had made herself liable to prosecution by the police through repeating news given out by the B.B.C., so she had had to change her address and disappear for the time being, and she might be caught if she visited her old home, although she would do so as soon as the affair had blown over.
Pierre said that Ribaud had been to see him only the previous day and told him that fresh arrangements had now been made for continuing underground work against the enemy, and that he was to go to a certain house where he would be given a number of pamphlets, which he was to distribute at night by pushing them through letter-boxes; so he would be on the job again very shortly.
On November the 20th it was announced with a great blare of trumpets that Hungary had joined the Axis, but nobody took very much notice of that, as for a long time past it had been clear that the wretched Hungarians had very little option in resisting German pressure, once it was brought to bear upon them. As against that the Greeks were standing up magnificently to the Italian invasion, and a few days later the news trickled through that they were now advancing on all fronts.
This good news gave Kuporovitch another opportunity to indulge his love of celebrations, and in order to produce something special for the feast he put into execution a plan which he had been considering for some days. For the first time since he had been living in Ferrière’s house he took the risk of going out in daylight, and late in the afternoon paid a visit to the Paris Zoo, to inform himself where the cages and compounds of various animals were situated. That night he went back again, and, having got in under cover of the darkness, he captured and killed a small roebuck, which he brought home in triumph, thus providing the household for some days with most excellent venison.
It was the morning after this exploit that the people of Paris were once more driven to fresh anger and hatred against their oppressors. Fifteen French newspapers had published accounts of the havoc caused by British air attacks on Le Havre, and all fifteen were suppressed, thus robbing the Parisians of one of their main sources of material for the eternal discussions which they loved to hold in their cafés.
On the 28th Ribaud telephoned and asked Kuporovitch to meet him in the Café du Rhône that evening. When he arrived, instead of asking him to sit down, the detective took him straight out to the car, which he was still allowed to run on account of his official duties. Once they were in it he said: ‘The big Chief’s in Paris again and asked me to bring you to see him at his new headquarters.’
As they drove through the almost deserted streets the detective told his companion with grim satisfaction about the death of M. Chiappe, which had occurred the day before. Chiappe had been a cunning and ambitious Corsican who had climbed to power with Laval and at one time had been Chief of the Paris Police. Lacroix, who had had to work with him, had loathed him, as had Ribaud and most of his other subordinates.
Apparently the Vichy Government had grounds for distrusting the Governor of Syria and feared that he might go over to de Gaulle; so the Quisling Chiappe had been sent to supersede him. But the aircraft in which he had set off the day before had got mixed up in an air-battle between British and Italian planes, which was raging over a sea-battle off the coast of Sardinia that had resulted in the British Navy inflicting severe damage on an Italian battleship and three cruisers.
The plane in which Chiappe was travelling had been shot down by an Italian pilot who mistook it for one of the enemy, and Ribaud was immensely tickled to think that this ace-Quisling whom he had had reason to hate personally had come to such an unexpected and sticky end.
They drove right across Paris and on past the Luxembourg to the Observatoire, near which Ribaud left his car in a garage; then they walked for a little distance across the Place Denfert-Rochereau to the Avenue d’Orléans and entered the courtyard of a large private house on the right side of the road.
At the doorway under the big porte-cochère Ribaud rang the bell, knocked twice and then rang the bell again, upon which it was opened by a man who was dressed as a servant but did not look or behave like one. He and Ribaud just nodded to each other, and the detective walked in with Kuporovitch behind him. Crossing the tiled hall, he led the Russian into a big salon at the back of the house, where eight or ten people were already assembled. Lacroix was among them, and he immediately came forward to greet the new arrivals.
Evidently the business of the meeting had not yet begun, and while they waited for another half-dozen people to arrive, either singly or in couples, Lacroix told Kuporovitch of his escape after the nursing-home was raided and that he hoped that by this time Gregory was back in England; but he had had no news of him. As the clock struck ten Lacroix seated himself at the head of a long table, and on the others taking seats round it he addressed them.
At first the proceedings did not mean very much to Kuporovitch, as the only person present whom he knew, other than Lacroix and Ribaud, was Madame Idlefonse, and the first part of the Colonel’s dissertation mainly concerned the excellent progress of the movement in the provinces of both Occupied and Unoccupied France. This was the result of a strong campaign, by means of the secret distribution of handbills and the pasting up at night on walls of subversive posters for strengthening anti-Nazi feeling; but Lacroix gave it as his opinion that they were now in a position to take more ambitious measures and to indulge in actual sabotage. He then asked for suggestions.
Various ideas were put forward, and Kuporovitch contributed as his quota the proposal that explosives should be smuggled into the cellars of the Hôtel Crillon and the German Headquarters blown up. Such an apparently impossible plan caused a certain amount of mild laughter until he related how he had actually got into the cellars himself, and, having done it once, saw no reason why he should not do it again; only this time, instead of delivering sacks of coal, it would be sacks of dynamite.
A big redheaded bull of a man, who proved to be an ex-Communist Deputy named Léon Baras, was all in favour of the idea, as were several of the others; but Lacroix vetoed it on the grounds that such an act would be certain to bring about the most ghastly reprisals. He pointed out that one of the great strangleholds which the Germans possessed over the French people was the fact that they still held over a million French soldiers who had been captured in the Battle for France, as prisoners in concentration camps. The Nazis were perfectly capable of butchering hundreds—if not thousands—of these unfortunate men. In his view, although lives should not be given undue value where the freedom of France was concerned, any such massacre, while causing the most bitter anger among the French people, would also antagonise them against the anti-Nazi movement, from fear that still more of their men might die as reprisals from the further activities of the freedom fighters.
He went on to say that he hoped, and had little doubt, that the time would come when the whole nation would rise to exterminate its enemies, but at present there was no sense in killing one German if ten, twenty, or even more Frenchmen were to lose their lives as a result. Therefore, as yet they must confine their activities to the sabotage of German war materials and avoid killing, except in self-defence.
The majority of the meeting expressed itself in agreement with his views and proceeded to go into details with regard to the destruction of bridges, the derailing of trains and the firing of German supply dumps. Then, after a two-hours’ session, it closed, and the members departed, singly or in couples, at intervals of about five minutes.
Kuporovitch remained with Ribaud and Lacroix until nearly the last, and he spent some more time talking to a little pale-faced man, with a shock of white hair whom the others had addressed as ‘The Professor’. It transpired that the Professor was the owner of the house, a distinguished chemist, and now engaged on the secret manufacture of time-bombs, to be used for sabotage.
At a little before one Ribaud and Kuporovitch made their adieux and left the house. As they went out Ribaud told the Russian to memorise the place and the way to it well, as he might be asked to attend future meetings on his own, since people were summoned in accordance with whom Lacroix wished to see at any particular time. He also reminded the Russian of the signal to secure admission; one ring, two knocks, and another ring. They then collected the car and Ribaud dropped Kuporovitch at the corner of the Rue Cardinet, from which he had to walk only a few hundred yards to Ferrière’s house.
The first week in December was uneventful, except that on one night during it Kuporovitch participated in a plan arranged at the meeting by forming one of a squad of saboteurs who managed to get on board a row of barges in the Seine which contained valuable war material, and scuttle them. Pierre came to dinner again on Sunday, and Madeleine was upset to hear that her mother was suffering more acutely than ever from the cold, so that at times she even wept from it. But there seemed nothing that they could do to aid the invalid. All the fuel stores in Paris were now heavily guarded against night raids, and even Kuporovitch’s ingenuity was not sufficient to devise a way in which they might heat Madame Lavallière’s apartment. Gas and electricity for cooking were now cut to the barest minimum, and the only heat that anyone in Paris, except the Germans and a few officials, could get was from crowding round a stove to warm their hands when a meal was being prepared.
In vain Madeleine cursed the Nazis for the distress they were inflicting upon her bedridden mother, but none of the others could think of any way to alleviate her sufferings. Madeleine wanted to risk a midnight visit to comfort her, but Kuporovitch still would not hear of it and Pierre too said he thought it would be most unwise. He said he was convinced that in recent weeks the Bonards had gone over to the enemy, because their son had been killed in a British air raid on Calais; and it was next to impossible to get into the block without the concierge or his wife being aware of it.
On the night of December the 9th they heard of the British offensive in Libya, and it cheered them a lot to think that after the great peril through which she had passed Britain now felt herself strong enough to launch an attack in force against one, at least, of the Axis partners.
The following night Kuporovitch was summoned to another meeting at the house of the Professor. Fresh plans for further sabotage were entered into, and he learned from Lacroix that, although the Colonel had no news of Gregory himself, their friend must have succeeded in getting back to England, as a large sum of money had arrived during the previous week via the trusted man at the French Consulate in Lisbon. This had lifted a great weight off the little Colonel’s shoulders and enabled him to give all his plans a new impetus.
During the days that followed there was great excitement over the serious differences of opinion which had arisen in the Vichy Government. Marshal Pétain defied the Germans by dismissing Laval and appointing Flandin as Foreign Minister in his place. The French Senate and Chamber of Deputies were dissolved, and a Consultative Assembly substituted for them: then Laval was arrested. Otto Abetz, Hitler’s Gauleiter in Paris, went personally to Vichy and secured Laval’s release; but he was not reinstated, and Madeleine and her friends took this as a good indication that the first signs of resistance to the Nazis were now being forced upon the Vichy Government by the will of the French people.
They were cheered too by the news of the British successes in North Africa. In their first drive they had taken 26,000 Italian prisoners. By December the 15th they were f
ighting on Libyan soil, and by the 16th both Sollum and Fort Capuzzo, two great Italian strongholds, had been captured.
Kuporovitch was now out every night, either as one of the leaders of the gangs of Paris saboteurs or foraging for supplies. While attempting to fire a portion of the great Citroën motor works, which had been taken over by the Germans, he was very nearly captured, but he managed to get away by scattering the inflammable liquid that he was carrying over the two guards who attacked him, instead of on the roof of the shed, which had been his objective.
The Italians had now been driven far back into Albania, and two of their divisions, caught with brilliant generalship by the Greek Chief of Staff, General Papagos, had been entirely destroyed. On the 19th the British had surrounded Bardia, and the number of Italian prisoners taken to date had risen to over 31,000. It was on the night that this news came through that Madeleine was summoned to her first meeting at the Professor’s house, and as she might not have been able to find it on her own Kuporovitch was instructed to take her.
Lacroix was now making secret visits to Paris from Vichy nearly every week, and he told them that he had at last had news of Gregory, but he feared that it was not too good. Gregory had got safely home but had been caught in the heavy raid on London of November the 15th. He had been crushed under the blitzed building, and it had been thirty hours before they had been able to get him out. Fortunately his head had been protected by a fallen beam, but his left leg had been broken and he had sustained severe injuries to his body. For some weeks he had hung between life and death, but he had managed to pull through and recently had been transferred to the country, where he was convalescing; but the Colonel thought it would be several months before he was fit to take an active hand in the game again.
V for Vengeance Page 28
