In the Balance (21 page)

“Maybe so, but I don’t much care to count blighters like that as part of humanity,” Whyte said. “If it was Lizards in Paris, he’d be sucking up to them instead of the Germans.”

The navigator didn’t bother keeping his voice down. The Frenchman jerked as if stung by a bee and walked even faster. Now his footfalls sounded like those of a mere mortal, not of one who was lord of all he surveyed.

Ken Embry clicked his tongue between his teeth. “We should count our blessings. We haven’t had to live under Jerry’s thumb the last two years. I daresay if Hitler had invaded and won, he’d have found his share of English collaborators, and plenty more who’d, do what they had to to stay alive.”

“I don’t mind the second sort,” Bagnall said. “You have to live and that means you have to get on about your job and all. But I’m damned if I can see any of us sporting a silver jackboot or whatever the Mosley maniacs use. There’s a difference between getting along and sucking up. Nobody
makes
you wear the
francisque
you do it because you want to.”

The rest of the aircrew nodded. They walked deeper into Paris. The nearly empty streets were not all that made it feel strange to Bagnall. When he’d been here before, the Depression still held sway; one of the things he’d never forgotten was the spectacle of men, many of them well dressed, suddenly stooping to pluck a cigarette butt out of the gutter. But welldressed men in London were doing the same thing then. Somehow the Frenchmen managed to invest even scrounging with panache.

“That’s what’s gone,” Bagnall exclaimed, as pleased at his discovery as if he were a physicist playing with radium. His comrades turned to look at him. He went on, “What did we always used to think of when we thought of Paris?”

“The Folies-Bergère,” Embry answered at once. “What’s her name, the Negro wench—Josephine Baker—prancing about wearing a few bananas and damn all else. All the girls behind her wearing even less. The orchestra sawing away down in the pit and no one paying it any mind.”

“Sounds good to me,” Joe Simpkin said. “How do we get there from here?”

Not without effort, Bagnall ignored the gunner’s interruption. “Not quite what I meant, Ken, but close enough. Paris stood for good times—Gay Paree and all that. You always had the feeling everybody who lived here knew how to enjoy himself better than you did. Lord knows whether it was really true, but you always thought so. You don’t, now.”

“Hard to be gay when you’re hungry and occupied,” Alf Whyte said.

“Occupied, yes,” Ken Embry said softly. “Straighten up, lads, here comes Jerry himself. Let’s look like soldiers for him, shall we?”

The German infantry of propaganda photographs looked more machined than born of man and woman: all lines and angles; all motions completely identical; hard, expressionless faces under coalscuttle helmets that added a final intimidating touch. The squad ambling up the street toward the aircrew fell a good ways short of Herr Goebbels’ ideal. A couple of them were fat; one wore a mustache that had more gray than brown in it. Several had the top, buttons of their tunics undone, something a Goebbels soldier would sooner have been shot than imagine. Some were missing buttons altogether; most had boots that wanted polishing.

Third-line troops
, Bagnall realized,
maybe fourth-
. The real German army, the past year, was locked in battle with the Russians or grinding now forward, now back across the Sahara. Beaten France got the dregs of
German manpower. Bagnall wondered how happy these Occupation warriors were at the prospect of holding back the Lizards, a worse enemy than the Red Army ever dreamed of being.

He also wondered, rather more to the point, if the tacit Anglo-German truce held on the ground as well as in the air. The Germans up ahead might be overage and overweight, but they all carried Mauser rifles, which made the aircrew’s pistols seem like toys by comparison.

The
Feldwebel
in charge of the German squad owned a belly that made him look as if he were in a family way. He held up a hand to rein in his men, then approached the British fliers alone. He had three chins and his eyes were pouchy, but they were also very shrewd; Bagnall would not have wanted to sit down at a card table with him.

“Sprechen Sie deutsch?”
the sergeant asked.

The Englishmen looked at one another. They all shook their heads. Ken Embry asked, “Do any of your men speak English? Or
parlez-vous français?”

The
Felwebel
shook his head; his flabby flesh wobbled. But, as Bagnall had suspected, he was a resourceful fellow. He went back to his squad, growled at his men. They hurried into shops on the boulevard. In less than a minute, one of the soldiers emerged with a thin, frightened-looking Frenchman whose enormous ears looked ready to sail him away on the slightest breeze.

That, however, was not why the soldier had grabbed him. He proved to speak not only French but also fluent German. The
Feldwebel
spoke through him: “There is a
Soldatenheim
, a military canteen, at the Café Wepler, Place Clichy. That is where English fliers are being dealt with. You will please come with us.”

“Are we prisoners?” Bagnall asked.

The Frenchman relayed the question to the German sergeant. He was more at ease now that he saw he was to serve as interpreter rather than, say, hostage. The sergeant answered, “No, you are not prisoners. You are guests. But this is not your country, and you will come with us.”

It did not sound like a request. In English, Embry said, “Shall I point out it’s not his bloody country, either?” With the rest of the aircrew, Bagnall considered that The Germans had his comrades outnumbered and outgunned. No one said anything. The pilot sighed and returned to French: “Tell the sergeant we will go with him.”

“Gut, gut,”
the
Feldwebel
said expansively, cradling that vast belly of his as if it were indeed a child. He also ordered the Frenchman to come along so he could keep on interpreting. The fellow cast a longing glance back at his little luggage store, but had no choice save to obey.

It was a long walk the
Soldatenheim
lay on the right bank of the Seine, north and east of the Arc de Triomphe. The Germans and the English had
both respected the monuments of Paris. The Lizards knew no such compunctions; a chunk had been torn out of the Arc, like a cavity in a rotting tooth. The Eiffel Tower still stood, but Bagnall wondered how many days more it would dominate the Paris skyline.

In the end, though, what lay longest in the flight engineer’s memory about the journey to the canteen was a small thing: an old man with a bushy white mustache walking slowly along the street. At first glance, he looked like Marshal Pétain, or anyone’s favorite grandfather. He carried a stick, and wore a homburg and an elegant, double-breasted pinstripe suit with knife-sharp creases. On the left breast pocket of that suit was sewn a yellow six-pointed star with one word:
Juif.

Bagnall looked from the old Jew with his badge of shame to the fat
Feldwebel
to the French interpreter. He opened his mouth, then closed it again. What could he possibly say that would not make matters worse both for himself and, all too likely, for the Jew as well? He found nothing, but silence was bitter as wormwood to him.

German military signs, white wooden arrows with angular black letters, had sprouted like mushrooms on every Paris streetcorner. The British aircrew probably could have found the military canteen through them without an escort, but Bagnall supposed he could not blame the sergeant for taking charge of them. If not exactly enemies, they were not exactly friends, either.

The canteen had a big sign, again white on black, that announced what it was:
Soldatenheim Kommandantur Gross-Paris
. On another panel of the sign was a black cross in a circle. Men in field gray came in and out below. Those who recognized the fliers’ RAF uniforms stopped to stare. No one did anything more than stare, for which Bagnall was duly grateful.

The
Feldwebel
turned the interpreter loose just outside the doorway without even a tip. The fellow hadn’t translated more than half a dozen sentences, most of them banal, in the hour and a half it had taken to get here. Now he faced an equally long walk back. But he left without a backward glance or a word of complaint, as if escaping without trouble was payment enough. For a man in his shoes, perhaps it was.

Not far inside the entrance, a table with a sign lettered in both German and English had been set up. The English section read,
FOR BRITISH MILITARY SEEKING REPATRIATION FROM FRANCE
. Behind the table sat an officer with steel-rimmed spectacles; the single gold pip on his embroidered shoulder straps proclaimed him a lieutenant colonel.

The German sergeant saluted, spoke for a couple of minutes in his own language. The officer nodded, asked a few questions, nodded again, dismissed the
Feldwebel
with a few offhand words. Then he turned to the Englishmen. “Tell me how you came to Paris, gentlemen.” His English was
precise and almost accent-free. “I am Lieutenant Colonel Maximilian Höcker, if knowing my name puts you more at ease.”

As pilot, Ken Embry spoke for the aircrew. He told the tale of the attack on the Lizard installation in considerable detail, though Bagnall noted that he did not name the base from which the Lancaster had set out. If Höcker also noted that—and he probably did; he looked sharp as all get-out—he let it pass.

His gray eyes widened slightly when Embry described the forced landing on the French road. “You were very fortunate, Flight Lieutenant, and no doubt very skillful as well.”

“Thank you, sir.” Embry took up the tale again, omitting the names of the Frenchmen who had helped the aircrew along the way. They’d learned only a couple of those, and then just Christian names. Even so, Embry did not mention them. Again, Höcker declined to press him. The pilot finished, “Then your sergeant found us, sir, and brought us here. By the sign in front of you, you don’t intend to hold us prisoner, so I hope you’ll not take it amiss if I ask you how we go about getting home.”

“By no means.” The German officer’s smile did not quite reach his eyes—or maybe it was a trick of the light reflecting off his spectacle lenses. He sounded affable enough as he continued: “We can put you on a train for Calais this evening. God and the Lizards permitting, you will be on British soil tomorrow.”

“It can’t be as simple as that,” Bagnall blurted. After going on three years of war with the Nazis—and after seeing the old Jew wearing the yellow star—he was not inclined to take anything German on trust.

“Very nearly.” Höcker plucked seven copies of a form off the table in front of him, gave them to Embry to pass out to his crew. “You have but to sign this and we shall send you on your way.”

The form, hastily printed on the cheapest of paper, was headed PAROLE. It had parallel columns of text, one German, the other English, The English version was florid legalese made worse by some remaining Germanic word order, but what it boiled down to was a promise not to fight Germany so long as either London or—no, not Berlin, but the country of which it had been the capital—remained at war with the Lizards.

“What happens if we don’t sign it?” Bagnall asked.

If the smile had got to Lieutenant Colonel Höcker’s eyes, it vanished from them now. “Then you will also go on a train this evening, but not one bound for Calais.”

Embry said, “What happens if we do sign and then end up flying against you anyhow?”

“Under those circumstances, you would be well-advised to avoid capture.” Höcker’s face was too round and mild to make him fit the film cliché
of a German officer; he seemed more Bavarian peasant than Prussian aristocrat. But he packed enough menace into his voice for any three cinematic Huns.

“Have you received any communication from the RAF or His Majesty’s government permitting us to sign such a document?” Embry asked.

“I have not,” Höcker’s said. “Formally, we are still at war. I give you my word of honor, however, that I have learned of no punishment given to any who have so signed.”

“Please be so good as to put that assurance in writing, for us to present to our superiors. If it should prove false, we shall consider ourselves at liberty to deem our paroles null and void, nor should sanctions be applied against us in the event we are captured in arms against your country.”

“Jolly good, Ken,” Bagnall whispered admiringly.

Hacker inked a pen, wrote rapidly on the back of another parole form. He handed it to the pilot. “I trust this meets with your approval, Flight Lieutenant?” He pronounced it
leftenant
, as a native Englishman would have.

Embry read what he had written. Before he replied, he passed it to Bagnall. Höcker’s script, unlike his speech, was distinctly Germanic; the flight engineer had to puzzle it out word by word. But it seemed to set forth what Embry had demanded. Bagnall gave it to Alf Whyte.

The German lieutenant colonel waited patiently until the whole Lancaster crew had read it. “Well, gentlemen?” he asked when Embry had it back.

The pilot glanced from one flier to the next. No one said anything. Embry sighed, turned back to Höcker. “Give me the bloody pen.” He signed his parole with a few slashing strokes. “Here.”

Höcker raised an eyebrow. “You are not pleased with this arrangement?”

“No, I’m not pleased,” Embry said. “If it weren’t for the Lizards, we’d be fighting each other. But they’re here, so what can I do?”

“Believe me, Flight Lieutenant, my feelings are the same in every particular,” the German answered. “I had a sister in Berlin, however, and two nieces. So I shall adjourn my quarrel with you for the time being. Perhaps we shall take it up again at a more auspicious moment.”

“Coventry,” Embry said.

The lieutenant colonel answered, “Beside Berlin,
Englander
, Coventry is as a toddler’s scraped knee.” Höcker and Embry locked eyes with each other for most of a minute.

Bagnall took the pen, wrote his name on his parole form. “One enemy at a time,” he said. The rest of the aircrew also signed theirs. But even as Höcker called for an escort to take the Englishmen to the train station,
Bagnall wondered how many nieces the old Jew with the yellow star had, and how they were faring.