by Thomas Wood
“Shut up, shut up,” I hissed, forcing the pistol further down his throat the more that he resisted.
“Be quiet, keep still.”
Eventually, he got the message, his eyes widening as his night-vision began to form facial features into a face that he vaguely recognised. I helped him out regardless.
“It’s Alfie Lewis. You remember me don’t you. I got reassigned. You know me.”
My arm began jolting up and down as he tried his best to nod fervently, his eyes filling with tears as he struggled to breathe. He looked utterly terrified and I was certain that he was just as surprised to see me alive as he was to see me standing in his bedroom brandishing a pistol.
“Okay, stay quiet. I just want a chat.”
I slowly withdrew the pistol from his mouth, wiping my hand on his bedsheets as they were doused in a gloopy saliva. I let him have a few moments to gasp for air before he began to calm himself down, as his oxygen levels returned to something resembling normal.
“Why are you here?”
“I need some help.”
He began fumbling around on his bedside table, before he eventually found the switch for his bedside lamp, which blinded the both of us for a few seconds while we readjusted to the sudden burst of light.
“What kind of help?”
I decided that I had scared him enough, so began to lower the pistol out of his face, but still keeping it pointing in his direction. This time more at a hip height, still threatening enough that I would be able to use it at a moment’s notice, but submissive enough to allow him to talk relatively freely.
“I need a place to stay. Somewhere nearby. Have you got anywhere?”
“Yes. Yes. Of course, there are many places near here,” he said as he finally began to come across as awake and not still half asleep. “But why are you here?”
“You know why. There’s a traitor in the line. I’m here to find him.” I hoped that by telling him my intentions I would pressurise him into making some sort of mistake over the next few days, allowing a much easier ride in my tasking.
“The safehouse. It needs to be where other people are living. I can’t be in a building alone.” I needed somewhere that was habitable, so that people weren’t suspicious when they suddenly saw a stranger begin to duck in and out of a house that had stood empty for years. If I was with people, then it would look like I was a family member who had come to visit, or a lodger kipping in one of their spare bedrooms. “Have you got anywhere like that?”
“Yes. You know the Blume butchers?” I knew it quite well, it was where Louis had often left me standing outside when he ducked in to stock up on whatever meat they had to offer that week. It was a little further on down the main street, on the other side of the small village green.
I nodded.
“They have an apartment upstairs. You can stay there. Tell them I sent you. They will let you in immediately. Go there right away.”
I sighed as I stared at him, nodding gently as I mulled everything over. I thought about the possibility of confronting him there and then but stood nothing to gain from a standoff in the middle of the night like this, especially as I still had no solid evidence to charge him with.
“Okay. Thank you, Joseph.” I felt like I was going to be sick all over his bedroom floor as I uttered the words, the hatred that I held for this man manifesting itself as nothing more than a pile of bile and stomach acid, that for a moment thought might be a fitting departing gift for him.
I managed to hold it in, instead opting to make for the front door to make my escape.
“Don’t come looking for me. I’ll come to you if I need you. Understood?”
I wanted to make it out as if I was looking for someone else, like he was in the clear for the moment, especially as he could have had a pistol sitting in that bedside cabinet of his, ready to pump me full of rounds as I left his room.
My feet thumped down the stairs as I practically ran away from the man, not making any attempts to try and hide my whereabouts this time. Throwing the bolts back on the door, I let the door swing open, the fresh, cool air smashing me in the face like a cricket ball to the nose, but it felt refreshing all the same.
I quickly checked my watch, it was four twenty-five in the morning, only an hour or two to wait before Monsieur Blume began working in his shop downstairs. I would simply have to wait until then till I made my next move.
Slowly, I began dawdling down the street towards the green, making sure that any soldiers out to enforce the curfew were a safe distance away from me.
As my watch face slowly ticked round, I began to prepare myself for the next phase of my operation.
9
The night time curfew ended at five o’clock in the morning and so I did not have to wait too long before I was able to roam around the streets freely. Although, owing to the oddness of someone strolling about so early, I tried to keep a low profile, to avoid the over eager Germans who would want to see my papers.
At around six in the morning, I visited the bakery, at the other end of the village, walking past the butchers in the process just to make sure Monsieur Blume hadn’t started early that morning. I bought a couple of pastry type things suitable for breakfast, more by pointing at them than trying to work out what they were called, and I began to throw them down my neck as I walked back in the direction of the village green.
The green was quite a large one, considering the size of the rest of the village, which allowed me to pop myself down on a cast-iron bench, situated on the far side of the green, from where I got a decent enough view of the butchers and a large chunk of the main road in either direction.
As I sat on the bench I stared, at nothing in particular, as there wasn’t anything especially noteworthy in this portion of the village, apart from the parade of three or four shops either side of the butchers, and a few, quiet houses on either side of the village green.
My vision blurred over for a few minutes, as I began to think about how desperately tired I had become. During this war, I had realised that there were two significant types of tiredness that a man could experience, both of them having loomed over me at some point during the last eighteen months especially.
There was a tiredness that simply needs a good, decent twelve-hour sleep to remedy, the kind that would be most welcome on account of the two or so hours that I had managed to steal on that graveyard bench. The other kind was a mental one, an exhaustion that became so ingrained on the psyche of a man, that he wanted nothing more than to simply give up what he was doing and live a simpler life in the middle of a forest somewhere, or on barren farmland.
I was experiencing both as I sat on that bench. I was tired of my relentless journeys to and from France, never knowing if I would ever make it or if I would end up at the bottom of the channel. The exhaustion that is inflicted upon a man who thinks every day will be his last, only to be granted a reprieve is so heavy, that it is impossible to describe unless you have been through it yourself.
I was so tired that I could not even muster the energy to stagger over to the water pump on the other side of the green, even though I knew that it would do me the world of good just to take a few sips from it. My legs were so heavy and aching that I couldn’t see the benefits for the pain that I would inflict upon myself.
After a while, I noticed that there were a few other, mostly elderly residents, who had ventured outside to perch themselves on the other benches that adorned the perimeter of the green, which gave me some comfort, as if it added some credibility for my being there.
A few of them nodded in my direction as I caught their eye, which I could only just about return, my head threatening to simply loll into my chest and stay there while I snored away.
On one such occasion I was awoken, not by my chin stabbing into my chest, but a rumbling that was sent shivering through my legs and for a moment I thought that the exhaustion was beginning to get to me physically, as I lost all control of my lower limbs.
Looking aro
und sharply, to see if anyone had clocked onto my quaking legs, I noticed that they too were all suffering the same issues, each one of them practically staring at their own limbs in utter disbelief.
The quaking limbs soon became a low rumble, which itself soon turned into the roar of a motorbike engine, sidecar equipped with a menacing looking MG34, manned by an even more devilish looking German soldier behind it.
As if the motorbike was the first drop of water to burst a riverbank, streams of vehicles trundled in behind it, completely clogging up the visible bits of the road that I could see from where I was sitting.
At the noise of the vehicles and the sight of the armed soldiers all hopping out the back of the trucks, most of the residents perched on the green’s benches heaved themselves up, as quickly as they could, before tottering their way back into the relative safety of their homes.
I, on the other hand, had nowhere to go but, even if I did, this was the reason that I was sitting there, to watch what was about to happen.
Shouts, German ones, began to erupt from the parade of shops that had become obscured by the multitude of trucks and motorcycles that had roared into this quiet little French village, the one that seemed to house so many secrets.
Everything that went on was played out through my ability to pick out individual sounds, trying to piece together what was happening. There was a thudding, a loud rhythmic thump every two seconds or so, presumably as a door was smashed in by a bucking jackboot. Then, a glass pane was smashed, followed by more shouts and thumping noises.
After, a silence, only for a second or two, but then soldiers began to trickle back out to their vehicles, chatting to their friends and pulling out cigarettes to share with one another. Officers holstered their pistols and they seemed like they had done what they had come here to do.
A few of the motorcycles roared into life and trucks began backing up as around half the policing force scarpered from the scene as quickly as they had arrived. I noticed that curtains had started to twitch on all three remaining sides of the green, every occupant trying their best to work out who was being picked on this time by the Germans.
It didn’t take long for them to receive an answer. Monsieur Blume was dragged, kicking and screaming towards one of the trucks sat at the front of the column. He was followed by his wife who was surprisingly calm, although sobbing, followed finally by their small daughter, carried over the shoulder of a soldier balling her eyes out as if she’d lost her favourite teddy bear.
“Non! Non!” Monsieur Blume began to scream as he was lifted towards the back end of the truck. His wife and daughter were powerless to the strength of the German soldiers and were simply plonked in the back like ragdolls, clutching hold of one another as soon as they were able to scrabble over to each other.
Monsieur Blume continued to resist violently, kicking out at every man who tried to grab at one of his bare feet.
Somehow, the soldiers managed to bundle him to the ground, with one soldier sat on the back of his legs, the other across his back. Slowly, he began to calm down, muttering something that I couldn’t quite make out from where I was sitting. The Germans retreated slowly, and he began to get up passively, as if he had been persuaded to give up the resistance he was offering.
As he clambered to his knees slowly, brushing himself of the dirt that he had acquired all over the front of his shirt, an officer walked up behind him, pistol drawn.
Before he even knew what was going on, the officer had put a bullet into the back of his skull, sending him straight to the ground with a sobering thud that seemed to reverberate around the village green, far louder than the gunshot did.
There was a momentary silence as everyone watching seemed to gasp in disbelief, before Madame Blume and their daughter erupted into a hysterical scream, which drowned out the noises of the convoy’s engines growling back into life.
They screamed and howled for the whole time the truck rolled down the road before it eventually curtailed into nothing more than a shocked silence.
Everyone, curtain twitchers included, simply stared at the lifeless body of Monsieur Blume, the well-loved local figure who was now lying prone on the cobbled high street. I wondered if it was out of a genuine horror that everyone stared, or out of a concern over where they would get their meat from now, as there wasn’t another butcher until the next town, about ten miles away.
After a few more minutes of staring, two brave souls ventured out into the street, tugging away at the man’s body, dragging him back into his own shopfront to give him at least some dignity in his death.
For me, I couldn’t move. I had expected it, but it still came as a harrowing revelation to me. There was only one man who would have known where I was supposed to be staying. He had given me the location not three hours before, not really enough time for anyone else to have got hold of the information and pass it on to the Germans. There was also no way that the Germans had followed me and, even if they had, how would they have known that the Blume butchers would be where I was headed?
That swift, ruthless action by the German army and secret police told me everything that I needed to know; Joseph Baudouin was the traitor in the line, he was working with the Germans.
My mind worked on overtime as I tried to figure out what to do next as, for some reason, I hadn’t really wanted any of it to be true or I at least thought that Joseph might have let me get a night or two’s sleep before he sent his attack dogs in to pick me up. As it happened though, doing it sooner rather than later was probably better for me. It meant that everything might be over with far more gusto than I had anticipated. Which meant that I might get to go home soon.
Before I let myself get carried away with thoughts of success and going home, I realised that I had a far more urgent and pressing issue that I would have to deal with before too long.
Joseph would soon learn from his pals in the secret police that there had only been three people in the building when they had stormed it; one man, one woman and a child, and that the man present had been executed. Joseph would soon know that I hadn’t been in the building and, if he was sensible, he would deduce that I was now onto him, as he had practically given himself away.
Knowing that, he would be forced into doing one of two things. First, he could pack his things and do a runner to some other corner of France. Or, more likely, he would be out on the prowl for me, seeking me out with the only purpose of seeing me strung up, or face down like Monsieur Blume.
Joseph had far too much going for him in this part of France; the local resistance at his beck and call to do whatever he asked of them, which in turn, presumably he used to bribe the Germans into giving him special privileges. Above all of this, I assumed that the Germans were paying him handsomely to hand over the British runaways or the troublesome undercover soldier trying to smoke him out. There was no way that he would be running away right now, he was far too cocky and self-important for that.
But, I was all alone, against the man who had what amounted to two private armies to do his bidding. I was severely outmanned, outgunned and most of all exhausted. There was no way around it. I was going to need some help, and fast.
10
During the day, the river had been a centre piece of French day to day life, with many pacing up and down its banks as they made it to and from work, or spent the walk in the company of a friend, nattering about the goings on of the war or what they had for breakfast.
I had felt quite comfortable, watching the German soldiers pass me by, quite disinterested as I took in the day’s news from the latest newspaper. A young boy had been selling them, a face that had stuck itself in my mind because of his likeness to Bill.
When Bill had been younger his cheeks had always been stained red, like he was constantly puffed out or embarrassed. As he had grown up the pigment had changed somewhat, which meant my teasing had to be redirected towards some other odd feature of his, on account of the fact that he now looked normal.
His skin colou
r would be as pale as anything now, the blood having ceased to pump its way around his body to give him that healthy looking glow, that is so often associated with someone who was actually alive.
The boy must have thought I was some sort of madman, as I stood there staring at him for a while, letting him repeat his request for the assortment of coins that I had in my pocket, that would pay him for his time stood on the lonely river banks.
I couldn’t shake his image, it was as if I had stepped back in time, and that I was nothing more than a young, innocent twelve-year-old boy, who knew nothing of the perils of war or the destructive nature of the human heart. I found myself looking up at my older brother Bill, who had just returned from another adventure with the Boy Scouts.
I admired him, as any younger brother should, for his bravery and strength in doing such tasks, but envied him that I was not yet in amongst the ranks of the association.
It was only when the young lad had tried to take the paper back from my grasp, that I suddenly snapped out of the trance that I was in, immediately seeing Bill as he now was, six feet under the sand in Egypt, with no prospects of ever becoming the scout leader that he so craved.
Handing the boy the money that he required, plus a little extra for the strange stare that I had given him, I went to plonk myself down on one of the benches that sat loyally looking out over the water.
As with the church bench, I knew that I would be there a long time, so put off thinking about the inevitable until later, choosing to try and enjoy the paper that I was now flicking through to the very best of my ability.
It took me hours to read it, cover to cover, slowly translating every word that I read for myself, before trying to systematically work out all the words that I found it impossible to translate.
Before too long though, I ran out of reading to do and my mind dallied onto the thought of what I had seen earlier on in the day. I wondered what was going to happen to the wife and child of Monsieur Blume and whether they would be released without charge, the death of their husband and father the only punishment that they needed, or if they would be incarcerated indefinitely.
