The Maids of Chateau Vernet

by Steven Landry

  Deborah nodded.

  “Go on. Eat,” he said. Though Hiram detested the protein bars, the women seemed to savor each tiny bite. He caught a glimpse of a few pleased smiles with brown flecks of food stuck between their teeth.

  The remaining journey downstream was quiet. Hiram supposed the joy of a full belly paired with the prospect of freedom contented the former prisoners. If nothing else, they paddled hard and took direction well. The little flotilla covered another twenty kilometers downstream before the sky began to darken. Hiram directed the exhausted women toward a rocky slope at the water’s edge. Each boat came to stop amid a hurried mix of splashing and whimpering as the women jumped out into the frigid water and began pulling the boats to shore.

  After grounding his kayak, he jumped out and pulled his gear out of the storage compartment. He laid his pack on the rocky shore, away from the women, and spread it open. Reaching into the kayak, he removed the ribs that gave the kayak its shape, so it collapsed into an eight-foot long pile of canvas and plastic stays. After another two folds, the kayak was portable.

  “We need to do the same with your boats,” he said. Hiram showed them how to remove and fold the ribs and deflate the boats. Each boat compacted down to the size of a briefcase. The five boats sat lined up on the rocky shore. Thirty women walked about the low-lying area working out the stiffness of sitting for so long.

  He opened his pack and activated the portal, exposing the white surface inside. One by one, he picked up each of the compacted boats and began to send them through the portal. His pack did not grow fuller. He pushed two of the boats through without question, but the third drew attention. Deborah spoke up first. “How can-What is-?” She stepped back from him. “Magic?”

  “No, not magic. I mean it looks like magic.” He paused for a moment, uncertain if the truth would hurt the situation. “In basic terms, it’s a portal, like a door to someplace else.”

  “To where?”

  Some of the other women ventured closer, watching. He picked up another boat and pushed it through the portal.

  “It’s a storage area. A place I can keep things.” He reached in and felt around for something detachable and pulled out a spare spotter scope mounted near the portal’s location in the pod. “Until I need them.”

  Deborah reached toward the milky white surface. “Can I try?”

  “No!” He stepped between Deborah and the open portal.

  She jumped back. “I didn’t mean to-”

  All of the women watched now, curious and uncertain.

  “The portal only works for me. I don’t know what would happen if you tried.” He lied. After the incident with the dog…

  Deborah picked up the last compacted boat in line and held it out to Hiram. “I can help then.”

  Hiram relaxed and knelt back down on the ground beside the pack. “Yes, of course.” He accepted Deborah’s offering and slid it through the portal.

  She then handed him the smaller kayak.

  “Let them know,” he closed his pack. “No one touches my pack.”

  Deborah nodded and said a few words in French to the women.

  One of the others, a short woman with a dark brown braid that swept across her lower back, asked a question. Hiram looked at Deborah, hoping she’d translate for him.

  Instead, Deborah looked to the short woman and as she spoke, the woman shook her head and seemed to slump at the retort. Then Deborah looked at Hiram, waiting for the next direction.

  “Let’s get moving,” he said.

  None of the women questioned the order. They nodded, looked away from the water, and began climbing the small, rocky incline.

  He led the group into the woods, following a deer trail cut into the overgrown vegetation, urging the women to duck under the low-lying branches. Once the group entered the thick cover of the trees, he returned to erase any sign of their passage. He dragged a heavy branch along the shoreline, spreading loose pebbles and erasing footprints. He covered the marks left by the climb up the embankment by moving around a few leafy vines and a fallen tree branch. Not perfect, but good enough. He made his way back to the maids, covering his tracks along the trail.

  “We’ll spend the night here,” he announced once he rejoined the women. Deborah translated. No one argued.

  “I’ll need to go through the portal for supplies,” he said to Deborah.

  She signaled for Danette to join them. “We’ll watch your pack,” Deborah said.

  After Deborah translated, Danette nodded and aligned herself on the opposite side of Hiram’s pack, which he had placed on the ground.

  Hiram looked around at all of the women who stared at him. Each one weary from the long journey.

  “Go on,” Deborah said. “It’s your turn to trust us.”

  * * *

  When Hiram returned from setting the motion detectors up around the camp, he found all thirty women huddled in a circle around the dull glow of the heat unit he had procured from the pod. Some held blankets over their shoulders, others reached out to touch the phantom fire before them. They talked amongst themselves. Deborah and Danette sat side by side, Hiram’s pack on the ground between them, just as he’d left it.

  He took up a place on the ground beside them, thanked them for protecting his gear. A woman brought Hiram a serving of pot pie in a metallic bag, then returned to her spot in the circle.

  The short woman, shortest among them, he had observed, said something to him in French.

  Deborah looked at him. “She wants to know who you are. They all do.”

  He hesitated. “You can call me Hiram.”

  Deborah translated for the others.

  Danette spoke and Deborah translated her words for Hiram. “He knows my family. The ones in America.”

  “You are an American?” Deborah said.

  “Not exactly. I grew up in the Sinai but immigrated with my family to America in 1936 when the Society of Muslim Brothers began harassing Jews living on the peninsula. Right after the Arab Revolt started in Palestine.”

  Deborah shortened his response for the benefit of the group. The women’s eyes moved from Hiram to Deborah to Danette, curious and uncertain.

  “I spent some time in America when I was young. My father taught biology at Brandeis University,” Deborah said.

  “I –” Hiram started.

  The short woman spoke again, Deborah translated. “Barbara wants to know why you came for us.”

  Hiram looked at Danette and back to the short woman Barbara, her eyes dark, almost black.

  “I was sent by a man named David Wiseman,” he said. “A journalist in Washington.”

  “His family is taking care of my son,” Danette confirmed. “He’s my cousin.”

  “Wiseman’s got a source in Army Intelligence with the American War Department. The Americans intercepted communication about a Nazi plot to exterminate all the Jews in Europe, not to mention a few other supposed undesirable groups. From what they’ve gathered, Hitler’s calling it the Final Solution.” A few understood his words, Deborah translated for the rest. Heated conversation broke out among them. Disbelief. Fear. Anger. A few began sobbing.

  “The camp you were headed back to – Camp Joffre, is caught up in this mess. The prisoners in F and J Blocks are to be shipped out in August. The plan is to move the group to an SS run camp near Paris and then to an extermination camp in Poland.” He stuck as close as possible to the truth. When Deborah completed her translation, Barbara stood with fists clenched and rattled off a few fiery accusations.

  Danette talked back to her this time, almost spitting her retort. For two minutes, the two women barked at each other.

  Finally, Hiram stood up, put a hand on his great-great-grandmother’s arm. “I am here to help you, and to help your families. I need you to trust me.” It sounded wrong. He was already hiding so much.

  Deborah took a moment to translate.

  “I need your help. Together, we are going to rescue them all.”

&nbs
p; “We have no weapons,” someone said.

  Yet another woman addressed her. She said something about a “porter.”

  “Portal,” someone corrected.

  “He has to have more guns?”

  “We don’t know how to fight,” said another.

  “He’ll teach us,” Danette said.

  For a time, the women continued the discussion. They talked, they argued, and, more than once, they even laughed. Deborah continued translating the statements of importance and Hiram offered words of agreement.

  He had formulated a plan, the start of one at least.

  Despite the energy the women around him mustered, Hiram felt the day’s activity wearing him down. He settled back down to the ground and leaned against the tree behind him. On his wrist, the C2ID2 monitored the motion sensors. As he drifted off, his great-great-grandmother laid a blanket over him.

  5

  2130 hours, Monday, July 6, 1942, Pyrénées-Orientales Department, Vichy France

  Sarah Mandelson, former professor of physics at the University of Paris, watched from the other side of the campfire as Danette laid a blanket over their would-be savior. Everything Sarah understood about the physical universe contradicted Hiram’s technology. His portal seems impossible, yet it exists.

  She had to accept what she had witnessed. She had touched the ground where Hiram laid his pack, thinking – no, hoping – for evidence of a magician’s trick. Whatever kind of science explained his magic was well beyond anything published before the damn war. Necessity is the mother of invention. The Nazis have certainly provided the impetus.

  So here she sat, in the middle of the forest, with twenty-nine women and a strange man, being hunted by the police. And, if they believed Hiram’s story, all marked for death. She was relieved that her brother had taken a position in a bank in Switzerland a month before the roundup began. His wife and young son had relocated with him. Sarah had been offered a place in their new apartment, but she refused to abandon the family home. A ridiculous choice now that she thought about it. She believed Hitler and his Gestapo wanted to destroy the Jews, but she doubted Vichy cooperation in the mass murder of millions of men, women, and children. They all found it hard to believe. Still, they rounded us all up and stuck us in that camp. To what possible end? And if I hadn’t returned to my family home in Narbonne after being dismissed from the University, I’d probably already be dead. She would never forget the day the department head stepped into her lab and told her the Jewish were no longer allowed to hold academic titles. She missed teaching.

  “We cannot trust him!” Barbara’s hiss pulled Sarah’s attention back to the discussion around the heater.

  “We have no choice,” Deborah said. “He has the weapons and knowledge we need to save our families.”

  “What if he’s lying?” Ellen asked. “We could go back on our own. The Vichy said they would only hold us until the war ended so we didn’t hamper the war effort.”

  “What if he’s telling the truth? Then we all die like dogs,” Danette said. “Better to go down fighting.”

  “Easy for you to say,” Frieda said. “You don’t have family back there.”

  “Neither do I,” said Rosette. “You can do what you want; they’re going to have to drag me back to that camp. I’m not even Jewish! I was born and raised Catholic. I was no threat to anybody. They arrested me anyway. The police said I was a Jew because one of my great-grandparents was Jewish. They just wanted to get rid of me.”

  “What about his portal or pod, or whatever it is?” Ellen asked, nodding towards the pack lying between Deborah and Danette.

  “I never would have believed it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes,” Sarah answered. “I have no idea how it works, but it does. It lends credence to his story. That level of technology almost certainly came from the Americans. I heard they entered the war a few months ago. If the Axis Powers had that capability the war would be over by now. Same with the British and Russians.”

  “She’s right,” said Ester, who had only arrived at Camp Joffre a few weeks earlier.

  Sarah had listened to the officer’s conversations back at the Chateau, all the while serving tea or afternoon meals. She lingered during those times, searching for information that might give her fellow detainees hope. The officers spoke openly at the Chateau. Sometimes they talked about their wives, sometimes their children. On occasion, she heard them talk about defiling the maids, though none had made an effort to do so. They shared news from every corner of France, of resistance, and of unsatisfactory leadership. Once in a while she heard about defeat, a thing they all feared. They exchanged somber words about the lost lives of fellow countrymen. Not the Jewish ones though. Except there had been a man who talked about how he missed the Jewish woman who used to bake the sweetest bread. The way he said it, Sarah swore he missed the woman more. But news of American involvement, that had been scant, almost non-existent. “According to what I’ve heard, the Americans haven’t done much of anything. They fought in a big naval battle at Midway and defeated the Japanese. Little good that’s done for us.”

  “If we hide and wait, they’ll come and free France,” Ellen said.

  “If Hiram speaks the truth,” Sarah said, “they’ll be too late. Everyone in Drancy is scheduled to ship out in August, including our families. And I, for one, will do everything in my power to prevent that from happening. If that means trusting a Yiddish wizard with a magical Tinderbox, then that’s what I plan to do.”

  6

  1510 hours, Monday, July 6, 1942, Perpignan, Pyrénées-Orientales Department, Vichy France

  Captain Louis Petain, Chief of Police for the Pyrénées-Orientales Department, hiked down a mountain road that supported the passage of a full-sized cargo truck up until an hour ago. The climb over the fallen tree that blocked the road had left a sizeable hole in the side of his uniform pants. Thick, heavy cakes of mud stuck to his polished boots. If the current situation hadn’t demolished his pleasant mood, having to cancel this week’s date with his delicate young morsel of a mistress finished the job.

  “What in hell happened here?” he barked at the first man he saw at the site.

  “An ambush, sir,” the underling said.

  “I can see that, fool. Where are the prisoners?”

  “Thirty of them are gone, sir. We caught five, and one died of a gunshot wound.”

  “And my men?” Petain’s anger swelled. “What about my men?”

  “Seven of our men are dead, sir. As are both the hired drivers. Corporal Leveque is barely alive. He was blown out of the command car and wound up in a tree. We got him down and four of my men are carrying him to an ambulance at the roadblock west of here.”

  “What did he tell you?

  “Nothing sir, he was unconscious. But the remaining prisoners are willing to talk. Said something about a man dressed as a soldier.”

  “One man did all this?” the captain said.

  “That’s what the women said, sir. They said he spoke Hebrew, not French. He led the other prisoners east, around the bend in the road. We found tracks leading down to the water, but we haven’t found an exit point yet. I’ve sent for dogs.”

  “Keep searching.”

  “Yes, sir.” The underling stood in place.

  “Get on with it.”

  “Sir, one of the women said the man was somehow connected to a prisoner named Danette Halphen. He called out to her after the attack.”

  Petain rolled the name around for a minute. “Name mean anything to you?”

  “No sir.”

  He dismissed the younger man and the policeman sped off to execute his orders. Lieutenant Lebeau, his most trusted subordinate, arrived a few minutes later.

  “Lebeau, I want you to take charge of the five remaining prisoners. Question them closely; they may still have useful information.” Lebeau nodded his understanding and moved off without a word.

  Petain spent the next several hours prowling around the ambush site. He found
remnants of satchel charges and discovered the mysterious soldier’s foxhole. Inside he found only four shell casings. He expected more. Two odd sets of tracks, one from a small four-wheeled cart and another from some type of small tracked vehicle, added to the confusion. A nuisance ran loose in Petain’s jurisdiction. He intended to deal with him before he caused any more trouble.

  Before leaving the site, Petain found Lebeau with the five remaining maids, his stance more relaxed than acceptable considering the situation. Several of his comrades lost their lives because of these damned Jews. The maids leaned against the back of the truck with the least damage. They straightened up as Petain approached. Lebeau met Petain halfway.

  “Any new information?” Petain said.

  “No sir.”

  “Do you mind if I have a moment with them?”

  “Of course not, sir.”

  Petain approached the women, stepping around the dead one on the ground gathering a compliment of flies. Someone had covered her face with an apron, the ties sprawling away from her head. He stopped for a moment and looked at the body, reflecting for his audience’s benefit and not his own. “My condolences for your loss,” he said to the women. “We lost a few good men today as well. Such a tragedy.”

  He approached the woman to the left of the truck. Petain took her hand and guided her up in to the truck. “Have a seat.” He ushered the others in, helping them climb up into the back. “We’ll get you back to camp soon. I’m sure you wish to see your families.”

  Once they were all seated, he climbed up into the truck with them and sat near the back. “I know that Officer Lebeau has been kind enough to gather information from you all.” Lebeau waited outside the truck, watching. “If you don’t mind I’d like to ask you a couple of questions myself before we get you out of here.”

  A woman beside him spoke up. “What do you want to know?”

  “Where did this mysterious soldier come from?” Petain asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said.