(2013) Collateral Damage (14 page)

'You mean cut-outs like you,' said Koller, making one of his
rare interruptions.

'What?'

Koller had used the English word. He couldn't think of the French
equivalent.

'A person who passes messages between his agent
and his bosses.
Like you do to me.'

'Yes, that's right,' beamed Le Poidevin. The Calvados had dispelled
all fear. 'My controlling officer, the man the messages went to, was Fouche-Larimand.
He was a major then.'

'What sort of messages did you give him?'

'Well, you must understand, I wasn't a very political person,'
said Le Poidevin, a note of caution creeping into his voice. 'I didn't want to do
this job did I? I was blackmailed into it. I tried to tell them nothing that was
very useful, nothing that would do any harm. Let the others get on with the war.
That was my motto.'

'But obviously you had to tell them something or they would have
been suspicious?'

'Yes.'

'What did you tell them?'

'Well, I'd tell them that so-and-so had been seen talking to
so-and-so. Sometimes I'd say that I had overheard somebody had bought a duplicator
for an underground newspaper. But I always pretended that I didn't know the fellow's
name or that he had been sitting in a dark corner and I wouldn't recognize him again.'

'Always?'

Le Poidevin looked uncomfortable, refilled his glass, lit another
Gitane, plucked the medallion out of the jungle on his chest and examined it as
if he had never seen it before.

'Always?' repeated Koller.

Still the waiter chose not to answer the question directly. 'It
was a strange situation,' he said. 'Even after they had formed their National Council
the Resistance people weren't all that united. Some of the Gaullists were very suspicious
of the Communists. They really thought that they were going to take over after the
Germans had gone, that there would be a revolution. They used to spy on each other,
get into one another's organisations.

'The Milice had a man in one of the Communist cells who never
knew he was working for them. He thought he was working for the Gaullists. He used
to tell me things and then I'd pass them on.'

'He thought you were passing them on to London?'

'I suppose.'

'Why did he think that? Why did he think you were a Gaullist?'

'Because the Milice had given me the right passwords, code-signs
and what have you. I think they had arrested somebody the RAF had parachuted in
and he had told them what they wanted to know.'

'They tortured him?'

'I don't know.
Perhaps.
I heard some
people talked right away. They knew they would sooner or later, anyway, so what
was the use?'

'That must have been very funny. This silly bastard meeting you
in the bar, telling you things about the Commies, thinking he was working for de
Gaulle and all the time he was working for Petain and the Nazis.'

Le Poidevin shuddered. 'I didn't think it was all that funny.
I didn't think it was funny at all. I was very scared. I felt I could be shot at
any time by either side, but it was impossible to get out.' He paused. 'It still
is.'

'Why did you think you were in danger from the Milice?'

'Because I knew they didn't trust me. As far as they were concerned
I was some sort of Englishman. Sometimes I considered confessing who I was to the
Resistance, but I was too scared. They would probably have killed me without thinking
about it. Some of those heroes were real thugs, you know.'

'So what did you do to prove to Fouche-Larimand that you could
really be trusted?'

'What do you mean?'

'You had to do something, didn't you, to show you were one hundred
per cent on their side. You had to do something to save your own skin?' Koller had
been there himself; he knew the sort of questions to ask.

'Why do you want to know these things?'

'Because you fascinate me, Monsieur Le Poidevin.
I want to know everything about you.'

The German stroked the pistol on his lap with his left hand,
almost as if it were a wild animal that had to be calmed.

'You are young,' sighed Le Poidevin. 'I don't know what you are
up to with Fouche-Larimand. I don't want to know. Perhaps it's dangerous for you,
but I doubt whether it is as dangerous as things were then. Many people did things
they were to regret.'

'So what did you do to convince the Milice you were their man?'

'I betrayed a Jewish family who had befriended me.' Le Poidevin's
voice was drained of emotion. He might have been the speaking clock.

'They were sent to Germany?'

'Yes. They were Hungarians. They had been in Paris since 1938.
They went into hiding in 1942 when the French rounded up their own Jews. The Parisian
police were so enthusiastic they included four thousand children. Even the Germans
had told them they didn't want anyone under sixteen. I had an affair with their
son, a wonderful boy. Then he ... left me. I was cross.'

'You were cross,' said Koller in a low voice.

'No, not cross.
Heartbroken.
I didn't
know what I was doing. You must believe
me,
I didn't know
anything about the camps, not the concentration camps. I just thought they would
be interned somewhere in Germany.
Perhaps made to do a bit of
work.
Of course, they didn't come back.'

 
'Of course,' said Koller.

Le Poidevin went silent. A presentiment, something that had started
to evolve minutes before in the soggy chemistry of his brain, suddenly took horrid
form. 'You're an Israeli agent, aren't you?' he said in his frozen voice. 'You've
come to kill me.' There was even a little genuine humour in the sound of Koller's
laughter.
Him, with his big fat file in Jerusalem, a Zionist gunman?
It was really quite funny. 'No,' he said, 'not an Israeli. Just go on with your
story. Tell the truth and you've nothing to worry about. How did you meet Fouche-Larimand
again?'

They lost contact a month or so after the Allies had landed in
Normandy, Le Poidevin explained, about the time of the July bomb plot against Hitler.
For a few weeks some of them had thought that the fighting might stay up there,
that there would be trench warfare like in the First War and Paris would remain
well behind the lines. But Fouche-Larimand obviously saw the writing on the wall,
he said, because he wangled himself a transfer to the Charlemagne Division, the
French contingent of the Waffen SS. There were a few thousand West Europeans in
the SS by then. Dutchmen and Scandinavians in the Viking Division had been crusading
against Bolshevism on the Eastern Front for over two years. The Charlemagne Division
was one of the last foreign units to be formed.

Before he left Fouche-Larimand had handed Le Poidevin the Milice's
file on him, which he had promptly destroyed. He had also tried to persuade him
to go with him, but Le Poidevin refused. He was still in the capital at the end
of August 1944 when de Gaulle arrived, and a few crazed miliciens sniped at the
Free French soldiers from the roof-tops around the Place de la Concorde.

The Gestapo's original cover story to explain his presence in
Paris had been that he was working by St Malo when the islands were occupied and
was unable to get back home. It had been out of the question to give him a French
identity because his accent was too strong.

The months after the liberation of Paris had been a particularly
nerve-wracking time for Le Poidevin. He could not, even if he dared, return to Guernsey
because the Allies had bypassed the islands and they were still occupied. Before
proper courts were set up collaborators were being shot out of hand. People who
had never said as much as boo to a German were running around with sten-guns denouncing
everybody else. Poor little whores who had made their living under the Wehrmacht
were paraded naked through the streets by the mob, their heads shaved until their
scalps bled and swastikas painted on their chests.

He had been given his file, but he didn't know how many others
were in existence that might, at any moment, fall into the wrong hands. The Gestapo,
for instance, must have had one on him and he had no idea how many of their records
they had managed to destroy before they fled Paris. As far as he knew the Comte
was the only member of the Milice aware of his existence, but he could not be certain
that somebody else had not seen his file or that the Comte had not spoken about
him among his colleagues. Some of the miliciens who had survived summary execution
were still being interrogated and others were being flushed out of their hiding-places.
There were new arrests every day. He lived in terror that, even if all the documentary
evidence had been destroyed, he might be betrayed by some wretched milicien trying
to save his own skin.

As soon as he decently could he left his job in the bar and found
work in a French officers' mess, where his status as a refugee from one of the few
bits of Europe still under German occupation won him
a certain
sympathy. It also gave him the idea to bury himself even deeper into the Allied
cause by enlisting in the reconstituted French Army as an artilleryman.

During a skirmish against the Nazi rear-guard in the Black Forest
a mortar splinter wounded him in the leg. When he had recovered the European war
was over and, after a few months' occupation duty in Berlin, his regiment was re-fitted
and sent to Indo-China. It was here, in 1947, that he met the Comte again in a
bar in Saigon. He was in the uniform of a sergeant in the Legion and drinking with
a bunch of German-speaking Legionnaires. Artillerymen and Legionnaires were not
normally on speaking terms. Especially, added Le Poidevin, who had now decided that
his best chance with Koller lay in self-denigration, an overweight gunner who had
secured himself a cushy number serving drinks in a rear-echelon mess.

His immediate reaction had been to beat a hasty retreat, but
Fouche-Larimand recognized him at once, called him over, and introduced him as 'an
old comrade'. The Comte said that it was good to see they were still fighting 'the
real enemy'. By this he meant International Communism, currently in the uniform
of the Viet Minh, and from his brief conversation with the other gentlemen seated
around the bar Le Poidevin gathered that most of them had been engaged in this worthy
struggle since Guernica. After a couple of beers Le Poidevin had pleaded that he
had to return to the mess. He was sent back to France shortly afterwards and his
army discharge papers made his French citizenship automatic.

His past did not catch up with him again for almost thirty years,
although on a couple of occasions he had noticed the Comte's name in the newspapers.
The first time, he said, was in 1959 when he was one of several Legion officers
court-martialled for their role in the mutiny over de Gaulle's Algerian policy.
Subsequent press stories indicated he had somehow escaped prison, become involved
with the OAS and gone underground. Then in 1967the waiter had noticed his name among
a list of people, including de Gaulle's old Resistance chief Georges Bidault, who
had been amnestied.

For the next decade he had heard nothing of him and indeed had
almost forgotten his existence until, about a year ago, he had been taking an order
at the cafe when he had found himself staring down at a familiar face. At least,
said Le Poidevin, it was what was left of a familiar face.

He wore a black leather patch over his left eye and on the same
side the skin from cheekbone to jaw was a shiny, beardless yellow. They had greeted
each other like old friends - although the waiter said that inside he felt as if
he had just come across a walking corpse. A couple of nights later the Comte had
taken him out to dinner at a Vietnamese restaurant. At the time it had seemed to
Le Poidevin that their conversation was almost exclusively about 'the old days'.
Later he realised that the aristocrat had soon established that he lived alone and
was without close friends.

After that he called at the cafe at least once a week, usually
in the tired hours of the afternoon before the evening rush started. But it was
another nine months before he asked the waiter if he would mind doing him a favour,
a small job of work. He would not discuss the matter in the cafe. Another dinner
was arranged at the Vietnamese restaurant. Le Poidevin remembered that, throughout
the meal, Fouche-Larimand was very excited. He spoke of a group of old comrades
getting together and 'trying to do something for this damn Continent of ours'. To
Le Poidevin's amazement he even sang a verse from a sentimental German song popular
towards the end of the war.

'Es geht
alles voriiber, Es geht alles vorbei.'
(Everything passes, One day it'll
be over.)

Koller finished it:
'Nach
jedem Dezember,'
he sang softly.
'Gibts wieder ein Mai.'
(After every December, There's always
a May.)

'My father used to sing it,' the terrorist said.

'Go on.'

Fouche-Larimand had outlined the details of his organisation.
Their Grand Jules, he said, was called Roland-Grand Jules, explained Le Poidevin,
was the Milice's nickname for Hitler - and Roland had asked Fouche-Larimand if he
would find out if their old comrade from Guernsey would be willing to act as Mercury
- 'that was the expression he used' - between the inner circle and certain field
agents.

'But how does he know about me?' the waiter had asked. 'Oh, he
knows everything,' said the Comte casually. He made it sound as if a request from
this Roland was a great honour and it would be churlish to refuse. Frankly, said
Le Poidevin, the whole idea made him quite sick. He had assumed all this sort of
thing was a long way behind him. And the Comte frightened him. It was true there
had been no overt attempt at blackmail, but he detected menace in that 'he knows
everything'.
Everything?
Had there been more than one file
on him? Had that
Major
in the Milice about to embark for
a Waffen SS training camp thirty years ago had the foresight to squirrel away other
copies of his agents' files somewhere? He was too afraid to ask these questions.
Afraid to provoke Fouche-Larimand's wrath with doubts that would suggest his fidelity
sprang from fear and not from the respectful admiration he seemed to take for granted.
So he had agreed. 'And it seems,' said Le Poidevin, 'that I made a bad mistake.'