by Andrew Wood
She went through into the bedroom and he heard the sound of doors and drawers opening and closing. Feeling at liberty to circulate in the room now that she was present, he made a closer inspection of the photos, though he was unable to discern any clues or facial resemblances that might indicate the subjects’ link to Lemele. The few books on the shelves in the recess beside the fireplace were a random mix of medical texts, some classic novels and poetry.
On a table by the single worn armchair were some mimeographed sheets from the police files, work that she brought home with her. As he flipped idly through them he was shocked to find a copy of Femmes Françaises buried amongst them. He set the official documents back on the table and held this new find gingerly in front of him as though it were an explosive device. This underground publication was very familiar to him in his work; was certainly explosive in its own right. It had been appearing in Paris since the beginning of 1944, inspired by similar publications from other areas of France. The Resistance, that is to say the true people’s movement that left out the political idealists, communists and others, had sprung largely from the French women. Philippe Petain’s vision of ‘Femme au Foyer’ – women at home, which aped Hitler’s ‘three K’s’ doctrine of Kinder, Kuchen, Kirche for women, had been central in the Vichy regime’s range of anti-feminist propaganda and discrimination in education and employment. Disgusted and opposed to this, a significant proportion of French women had united in defiance, first against Petain’s puppet government and then against the German occupiers. But whilst previous feminist publications had mostly restricted their topics to criticism of the Vichy collaborationist policies, Femmes Françaises openly advocated resistance against the Germans.
He flicked through the few pages printed on poor quality grey paper, finding an article aimed at those who worked in the factories producing materiel for the German war effort. It suggested several forms of subversion, even going so far as to give details of methods to sabotage the equipment and how to create in the workplace an atmosphere hostile to the managers. The article ended with the motto: ‘Be ingenious, so that you return home at night with a tranquil conscience because you have done your daily sabotage.’
Marner was still reading when he became aware that Lemele was watching him, standing in the doorway of the bathroom with her bag in hand. Snapping up straight, he shut the document and thrust it down to his side, out of sight. Then he relaxed; why was he acting like the one caught with a banned paper, for goodness sake? His confusion evolved into anger and he strode to the open apartment door and slammed it shut so that the trooper out in the corridor would not overhear. “Do you realise that I should arrest you for possessing this?” he shouted, waving the offending item in the air. “How could you be so, so . . . stupid as to keep a copy of this in your home?”
If Marner considered that she was supposed to be contrite, Lemele was not going to play the role assigned to her. “So where do you suggest that I keep it – at my office?”
“No,” he continued more calmly, talking as if to a child. “My point is, what are you doing with it? Keeping it here! This is a dangerous document to possess. At least read it and then get rid of it. Burn it for goodness sake!” he exclaimed, pointing at the cold, empty fire grate. “After all, this is hardly high quality literature that you are going to enjoy reading over and over again,” he finished, trying for a note of levity in an effort to backtrack from his clumsy outrage and talk of arrest.
She let her bag drop to the ground and slowly crossed the room to stand in front of him. As she stood under the light hanging from the centre of the ceiling he saw the bruises and raw cuts in her face come into focus and full colour. Standing just centimetres away from him, she tilted her face up to his to enunciate softly but clearly, “Whatever we may be working on together, I remain first and foremost a French woman and a French patriot. If you want to arrest me for that,” she continued, raising her hands up, wrists pressed together to hover between them, he could see a red welt on one wrist, “then go ahead.”
They stood like that for a few moments, Marner entirely distracted by the soft sound of her breathing, inhaling the scent of the soap that she had just washed with, the mint of her toothpaste and a trace of something else, maybe perfume? Then he shook his head and stamped to the door, hurling it open to be confronted by the confused and embarrassed face of the guard, who now moved a couple of paces away down the corridor. He spoke gently, “Come on, we need to go and find a hotel and get some sleep if we are going to catch the first train tomorrow.”
----
They met with Boris in a quiet street on the other side of Montparnasse from Lemele’s apartment block. It was now past eleven o’clock and a soft mist of rain was falling in the darkness, creating halos around the shrouded headlights of the car. Marner, ever cautious, dismissed their guards and the car, telling Boris and Lemele that they would take a taxi to a hotel in another sector to make a clean break in their trail.
“You sure are skittish and paranoid,” observed Boris, winking at Lemele as was now his custom whenever he made a joke at Marner’s expense. As of yet, he had not received any smile in response to these.
Marner knew that this respite was only temporary; the order to go to Toulouse and their method of transport would be common knowledge around Foch, but at least they could sleep peacefully tonight. He had taken the precaution of relieving one of the guards of his machine gun. The guard had been patently unhappy about this break with protocol, had stuttered and stammered, trying to recall some rule that prevented him from having to do so, alternating between fear of this officer in front him and his terror at having to explain the loss of his weapon to the quartermaster. His fellow guard could not or was not going to come to his rescue with an applicable regulation. The awareness of the bulk of Boris and Boris’s eyes boring into the side of his skull finally swayed him and he had reluctantly handed the weapon over to Marner, Boris also relieving him of the two spare magazines of bullets in his belt as well as the two that his colleague had.
After the guards had departed in the car, Boris swiped the gun out of Marner’s grip and took charge of it. “You’ll just shoot yourself in the foot. Or maybe even her again,” he joked, although Marner was relieved; he had not handled anything larger than a pistol since his military training three years previously. “Nice!” cooed Boris admiring it. “Sturmgewehr 44, better accuracy than the old Schmeisser MP40, five hundred rounds per minute...” and he wandered off, fondling his new toy affectionately.
Chapter Fifteen
They arrived at Montparnasse station very early the next morning. Marner felt refreshed. They had only had six hours sleep due to their late arrival at the hotel and early departure. Nevertheless, a warm bath prior to going to bed had soothed his nerves and aching muscles and he had slept from the moment that his head had touched the pillow to when Boris had shaken him awake. The ever resourceful Boris had managed to bully coffee and bread and butter out of the kitchen staff, even at that early hour.
Josef had informed them that they had places on a train that was returning south to pick up more troops and armoured vehicles stationed there. At the entrance to the platform they were required to show their travel passes at a security check. Whilst Boris joked with the armed guards at the checkpoint, comparing technical specifications of weapons, Marner questioned the need for German military personnel to show travel permits as well as identity papers. He was told curtly that it had always been standard policy anyway, it was simply now being correctly and universally applied. Marner shrugged, seeing no point in arguing over it and they passed on through to search for their train, which turned out to be a mix of passenger carriages, bulk liquid tanks and flatbed trucks.
They installed themselves in the only carriage with first class compartments, all of them being filthy and rank with the smell of tobacco and sweat from whoever, or ‘whatever’ as Boris had joked, had been in it previously. At least by arriving early they had the opportunity to choose the most acce
ptable of the compartments in the carriage. The few civilian passengers who arrived at their compartment door took one look at their uniforms and then moved on to find another, meaning that they had it to themselves.
When the guard came along just before the train pulled out he was displeased that they did not have formal tickets, but Marner held out his identification and their travel permits and cited ‘urgent Gestapo business’. The looming bulk of Boris bearing the machine gun quelled any remaining obstinacy from the guard.
Boris squeezed past them to take a prowl along the train and Marner led the guard outside the compartment, slipping him a generous amount of francs with instructions that he should alert Marner if any of the passengers appeared suspicious or showed the least interest in their group. In spite of the fact that he had always had little penchant for tipping and bribing, he was discovering a new found largesse with the wad of cash that he had relieved from the bodies over the last couple of days.
Boris returned only after the train had been underway for fifteen minutes. He explained that he had worked his way to one end of the passenger carriages, waited for the train to start rolling and had then made a sweep fully to the other end, thereby ensuring that he missed no one who jumped aboard at the last moment. There were few others on board, a few military but mostly civilian. Marner nodded his approval.
The journey out of central Paris went smoothly, there having been very few attacks on the rail network within the city. Once free of the suburbs they were subject to several stoppages, on one occasion for more than an hour, which the guard speculated was simply a queue of traffic waiting to use one of the few open bridges across the Loire. The incessant jerking of the stopping and starting was hugely irritating and Marner’s refreshed feeling from the night before quickly evaporated. Despite the padding of the seats in this first class carriage, he was unable to find a comfortable position to ease his body, which was starting to ache again.
It was also becoming hot in the carriage and as the temperature soared the various odours ingrained in the frayed seat fabric became stronger. The breeze through the open window helped, but only whilst they were rolling. Lemele stared out the window, expressionless and wordless. Boris fiddled with the StG44, as he had affectionately explained its military acronym, apparently enjoying the return of his old trained habits of stripping and reassembling and working the mechanism.
To pass the time they shared notes on their cases and what the potential links were. Boris and Lemele were both astonished to learn the true background to Schull’s visit to Paris. They agreed that Schull’s murder was not a simple opportunist killing by extremists; quite simply, too much effort had been put into the staging of it, trying to make it look like an open and shut case. What still puzzled Marner was how Schull and then in turn he himself had been picked up on so quickly. Even if Schull had gone around shouting his business loudly, Marner had not.
“If you have Carlingue involved, then it points heavily to one of the organisations on Foch, since there is so much interaction between the two groups,” concluded Boris, having deliberately chosen the word ‘interaction’ whilst they were speaking openly in front of Lemele. “Not forgetting that you have the Gestapo involvement in the transportation of the gold. I am beginning to understand why you are so paranoid, Dieter.”
----
Marner had not realised that he had dozed off but was suddenly jerked awake as he was launched violently across the carriage into the seats on the opposite side, fortunately not those occupied by Boris or Lemele. The train was slewing to a halt, a cacophony of noises from the carriages clanking together, wheels screeching.
Immediately that they had ground to a stop and silence had descended, they heard the roar of the aeroplane engines as they thundered low overhead, the propeller wash causing the entire carriage to shake and vibrate. Boris leapt to the window. “Oh shit, Typhoons! Move, get out, now,” he roared, pulling the confused Lemele out of her seat and thrusting her towards the door. “Move, move, out!”
In the corridor Marner and Lemele turned on the spot, confused; out where, for goodness sake? Boris barged past them and raced away down the corridor to the left, shouting for them to follow. He threw open the door at the end of the carriage and jumped down, landing agilely for one so large. He turned to help Lemele descend and then dragged her away, heading to the left and away across the adjoining field.
Marner was left to fend for himself; the drop onto the gravel sloping away from the track looked long and daunting, so he got down onto his backside and then dropped to the ground on his feet and set off in pursuit of them. The thigh-high wheat or whatever the crop might be was dragging at his legs and it slowed his progress. As he reached the middle of the field, the others having already gained the shelter of a stand of trees that bordered it, he heard the planes coming back again. As he continued running, he glanced back over his shoulder and saw the two planes in staggered formation, one slightly behind and above the other, swooping in. When they were about five hundred metres out from the train there was a huge billow of white smoke from under the wings of the leading aircraft. The rockets leapt from their pylons and accelerated at an incredible velocity towards the train, the roar and whoosh only reaching his ears a second later. They impacted into the side of one of the flatbed trucks and the entire carriage was jolted a metre into the air by the explosion, despite its weight and despite being coupled to the carriages in front and behind. It slammed back down, but with two of its wheels destroyed, the top of the flat-bed above them buckled and torn. The percussion of the explosion was a blow that he felt in his back, a blast and rush of heat that made him stagger but he kept his feet and continued running the last few metres to crash to the ground beside Boris. He could not help but marvel at the incredible power of the high explosives, a thing of wonder, despite that the fact that they were being targeted at him.
They waited a full three or four minutes but the planes did not return again. Marner questioned whether they had run low on fuel or ammunition, but Boris was of the theory that they had achieved their intended effect – the disablement and disruption of the train – and so they had moved on in search of other targets of opportunity. “Maybe if those trucks were loaded with military vehicles or tanks, they would have given us a real pasting.”
Together with the other passengers who had also exited the train and were now emerging from the surrounding field and undergrowth, they walked back to the ripped carriage to examine the full extent of the damage. As well as the wreckage of the carriage, a two-metre section of the track underneath it was also destroyed. Even without the damage to the carriage, the train could now move neither forward nor back to traverse the damaged rail.
A piercing scream from the field on the other side of the carriage caused everyone to instinctively duck and look to the sky, fearing that it signalled the return of the planes for another attack run. After a long silence, the people rose again to their feet, somewhat sheepish and embarrassed and moved around to the other side of the train to see what the commotion was. In the field beyond the carriage a woman was unconscious on the ground in a flattened patch of wheat, being attended to. She had only fainted, but what had caused her to faint was the sight of the body of another woman, almost entirely ripped and torn in two at chest level. The gender was only recognisable by the blood splattered skirt, both shoes missing from stockinged feet, the upper body a mess of viscera. She had probably been trying to crouch down in the wheat directly beside the carriage that had been hit and had been struck by rocket shrapnel or flying debris from the carriage. “That’s why I ran out into the field toward the forward section of the train,” said Boris. “The planes would not likely attack carriages carrying civilians. Their objective was simply to disable the train. Maximum disruption, minimum risk of civilian casualties.”
Marner blessed his luck to have someone capable, intelligent and battle savvy like Boris watching his back.
After several more minutes of confusion the guard walked past
and Marner asked him how long it would take to get under way again.
“We have to wait here for a repair team to arrive, Herr Lieutenant. To achieve that, we first have to send someone to walk to the nearest town to find a telephone, to report the attack and the need for repairs. So I think that it could be some hours,” advised the guard, who turned and continued on his way towards the engine.
“Leave this with me,” growled Boris as he sauntered off in pursuit of the guard. A minute later Marner heard Boris arguing loudly with the guard, the driver and the engineer, the argument brought to an abrupt end by the metallic click-clack sound of Boris working the mechanism of the StG44. Moments later he came sauntering back, smiling. “I simply stressed to them that we are on urgent military business,” Boris supplied in response to Marner’s raised enquiring eyebrows.
Chapter Sixteen
The train was set underway after ten minutes of banging and cursing at the coupling by the engineer. The entire rear section of flatbed and tank trucks was uncoupled and abandoned; only the carriages forward of the damage were retained. Marner, reflecting on Boris’s theory about the Allies wanting to avoid civilian casualties, wondered if the civilian train engineers and drivers put the passenger carriages closest to the engine systematically and for their own safety. Any freight of potential military use and thus likely to be targeted would be on the carriages furthest from the engine.
After a further four slow hours of stop-start progress, including a one hour stop that must have been close to their destination, they finally pulled into the suburbs of Toulouse. Marner had visited it once before and loved the city, especially the avenues of red brick villas lined with leafy trees shading the wandering pedestrians from the southern sun. Toulouse was a city with an almost Mediterranean feel, despite its geographical distance from that sea.
