Early One Morning (27 page)

Eve emerged from the house swinging the keys to the Renault van. ‘I’ll see you later,’ she said, and they both raised a hand as she drove off.

‘I’ll miss her,’ said Williams.

‘Me, too,’ said Robert. ‘But she’ll end up getting us both killed.’

Williams finished the protective coating and peered in at Robert. ‘One last blast?’

‘We shouldn’t. But … you want to do the honours?’

Robert started the engine and moved across to the passenger side. Williams jumped in beside him, the tarpaulin crackling beneath him. For the last rime for a long rime he let the rear wheels spin on the gravel, splattering the entrance like buckshot, let in the clutch and took the car out on to the road, watching the speedometer swing up until they were going at more than a hundred and twenty kilometres. The countryside flashed by in a blur. Williams judged the turn perfectly, letting the back end drift as he took them on to the forest track, correcting the oversteer and accelerating again, until the trees became a solid wooden wall of trunks.

‘We’ll have to move as well,’ shouted Robert.

‘What?’

The noise was frightening, the whoosh off the vegetation mixed with the raucous scream of the engine.

‘We’ll have to move house. Been there too long.’

‘Any idea where?’

‘Uh?’

‘Where?’

‘Tahiti.’

‘Sounds good to me.’

Realising that meaningful conversation was impossible, they both fell silent while Williams took them on a circuitous route through the forest, only stopping once to take a nasty dip in the road very slowly, rather than risk tearing off the exhaust as the suspension bottomed.

As Williams eased off the pedal on the final leg, they began to see figures in the trees, barely glimpsed flashes of sheepskin and sten guns. Mostly local farmers, the ranks had been swollen recently by the little team Robert had cautiously assembled from the waifs and strays from the forests around Auffargis. Eventually they arrived at the clearing.

Eve was stomping up and down, occasionally glancing at her watch, furious at what she saw as reckless tardiness. She stabbed a finger at her wrist in silent admonition. Around her were four of the farmers and six of their big, muscular shirehorses, harnesses attached to long ropes disappearing into a long, shallow pit which had been crudely excavated by the tractor-dozer at the edge of the clearing.

Williams guided the burbling car down the long slope, feeling the chill of the freshly uncovered earth as they reached the bottom. It was a little too like a grave for comfort, he mused, and one that could hold an awful lot of people. The top of the trench was about a metre above the precious car’s roofline. He wondered how much a metre of earth weighed. Not too much he hoped.

The two drivers loped quickly back up the ramp and Eve got to work. She signalled the horses to be driven forward, and the sagging ropes tightened and hummed as the heavy tarpaulin was dragged over the car, wrapping it in a green cocoon.

‘When do we move?’ asked Williams.

The dozer started up, a raucous rasping sound, and it chugged forward, pushing the mound of excavated earth back into the hole, the soil forming the rough shape of the car, like an unfinished clay model.

Williams looked across the hole at Eve on the far side who shrugged in sympathy. Williams passed the key on its silver chain to Robert who looked at it thoughtfully and kissed it before tossing it over to Eve. She caught it and carefully looped it round her neck.

Robert looked at Williams. ‘My mother has been moved to hospital in Paris. I must see her. But I’ll take us to our new home after that.’ He put an arm around Williams and steered him away from the burial. ‘Tomorrow. We move tomorrow.’

J
ULY
–
A
UGUST
1943

E
VE SLUMPED DOWN
next to Maurice on the terrace of the café near Etoile, breathless and sweaty, and ordered a coffee. When it arrived he offered her a flask ‘Armagnac. Complements the taste of acorns perfectly.’ She helped herself to a generous dose.

The day was cooling now. As if to mock the deteriorating fabric of daily life in the city, the summer of 1943 was turning out to be glorious. She shouldn’t complain—the airless heat was preferable to the icy winter it had suffered. At least living was cheaper than in the cold months.

A charcoal-powered car chugged by, belching its filthy fumes, a billboard strapped to the top advertising that evening’s performance by Maurice Chevalier at Odeon.

‘Is it true?’ she asked.

‘Is what true?’ He looked at her admiringly. She looked good in the simple summer dress with the high neckline, a new silver chain round her neck disappearing into her hidden cleavage. Maurice had always been indifferent to Eve’s charms, or at least more immune than his brother. He liked his women to be beautiful—Eve certainly fulfilled that criterion, even twelve years after he first met her—but she remained something of an innocent. Not stupid, not naive, but she exuded a more wholesome view of humanity than Maurice could possibly countenance. He liked his women somewhat more earthy, soiled, compromised. Like himself.

‘Sicily,’ she said quietly.

Maurice shrugged. Rumours were rife that resistance to the landings in Sicily had collapsed, that Mussolini was finished. Even the word armistice was being bandied about. ‘Ask them.’ Maurice pointed to a group of two couples at a far table, laughing a little too loudly.

‘Who are they?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Maurice. ‘But if I were the Gestapo I’d have them in the cells of rue des Saussaies in a flash. Every day they meet here. Sometimes one brings a case which the other leaves with. Stupid.’

Maurice fit a cigarette and offered Eve one. She refused. They were normally so adulterated—the smugglers like to boast ‘as long as there is grass in Belgium, the French shall have tobacco’—that she had decided to give up.

‘I asked you to meet me because perhaps you could convince my pig-headed brother it is time to give up his … pursuits. And your husband.’

‘Why?’

‘It is getting far, far too dangerous. Those people at Foch have stopped beating about the bush. The honeymoon is very, very over. Yet those two race around in that car as if they can whistle their way past the graveyard.’

‘Not any longer.’

Maurice raised an eyebrow. ‘Really? They got rid of the Atlantic?’

‘They’re in mourning for it.’ She took a hit of the coffee and shuddered. She’d been over-generous with the Armagnac, and it wasn’t the subtlest example of the liquor. She waited for the searing trail down her gullet to subside before she asked: ‘Why the sudden concern, Maurice?’

‘I saw a DF map in Keppler’s office.’ He caught the look of distaste that was clearly more than the effect of the brandy. She found it hard to accept that dealing with the enemy wasn’t the same as supporting them. To him it was all a matter of checks and balances, and as long as the correct column came out in profit, then compromises were tolerable. ‘I saw the areas they are concentrating on, where they have transmissions they cannot pinpoint exactly, but know someone is operating. A lot in Paris. One in Pontoise. Isn’t that where Robert put the Englishman? And a few on the edge of the Rambouillet forest.’

Eve nodded. Robert always left the house to transmit, always drove into the forest, but clearly had a few favourite spots. Repetition, the radio man’s worst enemy.

‘Eve, you would be shocked if you knew how much they know.’ He looked up as a car pulled into the kerbside. A powder-blue Opel. He felt a bolt of white-hot pain shoot down his bad leg. He quickly whispered: ‘Go inside. Now.’

Without asking for an explanation, Eve turned her face away from the car, stood, grabbed her bag and headed inside.

The window rolled down and there was Keppler, smiling. ‘Maurice. We have a date.’

‘We do?’

‘Who was that with you?’

‘My wife. She’s just gone to …’

‘Your wife? I didn’t know you were married.’ Neither did Maurice till that answer popped out of his mouth. ‘I am afraid I only have one ticket.’

‘For what?’

‘Your namesake. Chevalier. Come along.’

Maurice stood and limped slowly over to the car, his leg more painful than ever. The door opened and he slid in beside Keppler. Framing the SD man on the far side was Neumann, expressionless. In the front, next to the driver, Arthur Lock, busy rolling a cigarette, turned and gave him a smile that made him wince. Arthur Lock was not the kind of man who you wanted smiling at you. At Keppler’s signal the driver pulled away.

‘We don’t have a date, do we?’

‘Only with destiny, Maurice,’ Keppler replied sardonically with a little high laugh. ‘And how is Mrs Williams?’

Maurice’s mind raced. He sped it forward to the worst possible scenario. Why didn’t they pull in Eve if they were after the Chestnut circuit? Because picking up Eve might forewarn Robert and Williams. This way, all Maurice had done was accept an invitation from his old chum Keppler. Nothing suspicious about that. Maurice felt his forehead prickle hot and cold, as if he was about to vomit.

‘So where are we going?’ asked Maurice. Because he knew if it had been straight to Foch or Saussaies, there would have been none of these niceties.

‘To see how your poor old mother is.’

Sitting in the small café opposite the St Stephanie Clinic in the Republique district, to the north of the city, where his mother was being treated, Robert sipped at his third bitter coffee of the morning, trying to lift his energy levels. Despite a large quantity of red wine he’d been unable to sleep, his mind spinning about what he suspected. And about the dangerous game Maurice had embarked on. Three years previously the Germans had arrived behaving with an almost serene
noblesse oblige.
Now that the
noblesse
looked distinctly shaky, the rules had changed. He just hoped that Maurice had noticed.

Robert tried to stop the gnawing in his stomach, as if the acid was corroding the fleshy walls. Like everybody else, he didn’t eat anything like as well as he had pre-war—although he did well in comparison to most—but it wasn’t hunger causing his dyspepsia. It had been writhing away ever since he got back with his orders. Blow this, damage that. Meet the radio operator Madeleine—a woman so beautiful as to draw the attention of the dumbest of Germans. And once they got over that face, they were bound to wonder about that big case she was lugging around. Link up with this group there, bury more arms here. Something was very wrong. He just didn’t know what it was.

Down the street the last of the housewives departed with a precious slice of bloody flesh. One of Paris’s many overworked horses had collapsed between the shafts, and while the owner had gone off to seek help, a swarm of two-legged vultures had descended, brandishing their sharpest knives and largest enamel bowls. Great steaks of the stringy flesh were quickly sliced off, leaving the carcass glistening sickeningly. As the women scurried away, so a cloud of crazed flies descended. When the owner returned he would find his horse reduced to an undulating mass of black, interspersed with islands of darkening crimson.

The girl made him start. It was Beatrice, no longer the child who had once cycled up his path, but a young woman, albeit one with a lined, hollow face and eyes that darted jerkily from side to side. This time she was keeping an eye on her bicycle, her most precious possession. He hoped that the damage caused by fear and subterfuge and privation to this young lady was reversible and that once this was over she could go back to being frivolous and carefree. Somehow, though, he doubted it.

‘I have a message from Jester.’

Robert nodded. Jester was in charge of the dead letter drops, and someone Robert trusted. Mainly because he had never met him, didn’t know where he lived and had never met anyone who did. That was his kind of agent.

‘Maurice is ill.’

Robert tried to keep his face impassive. The phrase meant Maurice was taken. It was known that a few brave Frenchwomen who worked in Foch and Laurent and Lutetia, the other Gestapo strongholds, kept their eyes and ears open and reported to Resistance contacts. But Maurice was a familiar figure around Foch at least; something must have changed to make them assume he was there under duress.

‘Is it serious?’

‘It could be terminal. You should go now.’

With that she mounted her bike and pedalled off, not looking back. One day, when all this was over, he must find that Beatrice and do something for her. Maurice taken. Go now. He scanned the street for suspect cars, men with hats pulled low, as the V-men did whenever they thought they needed to look inconspicuous. Nothing. Robert looked at the hospital opposite. Still nothing untoward.

He decided to take a chance, grabbed the precious chocolates he had found at a stupendous price—his mother had an astonishingly sweet tooth, and had suffered these last few years—and hurried across the road, bounding up the steps to the entrance.

Madame Benoist was on the third floor, but rather than encase himself in the claustrophobic lift he took the stairs, two at a time, occasionally glancing behind him. It may be early, but the hospital had been up for hours, and he could smell fresh carbolic almost masking the fading aromas of an untempting breakfast.

Robert stopped at the entrance of the room. A group of nurses were round his mother’s bed, fluttering and twittering like sparrows. ‘What’s going on?’ he boomed inadvertently.

‘Ssshhh,’ said the Sister. The group parted and when he saw her face he gasped. A livid bruise ran left to right, the ancient skin glowing hideously purple. One eye was closed, red and swollen, the lid marbled with veins.

‘Robert,’ she said thinly.

He walked over and held her and he was aware of the sister shooing the junior nurses away. Robert could feel the bones through his mother’s nightdress and the wild beat of her heart. He fought hard to stop crying, to keep his voice steady as he held her at arm’s lengths and forced himself to examine the poor, defiled face. ‘Who did this?’ he demanded.

‘It was the Germans,’ said the sister.