The Collaborators (11 page)

She left the room still smiling. It was good when Pauli behaved like the child he was!

Behind her, Pauli lay in the dark. His eyelids were pressed tight in pretence of sleep, but his ears were straining and it wasn’t until the clock in the living-room struck eleven and his mother tiptoed into the shared room that he really fell asleep, persuaded at last that there was no chance now of opening his eyes to find Christian Valois leaning over him, offering him a red-skinned apple with the same outstretched hand he had last seen in the métro, stained with the blood of the German soldier he and his accomplice had just shot down.

7

There was a poster on the wall of the bakery. Günter Mai recognized it from some distance away. Everybody was now familiar with the black-and-red edged notices printed in parallel columns of French and German on a dull biscuit background. They were notifications that more executions had taken place.

This one, he saw as he got nearer, had been defaced. Someone had scrawled across it in thick blue letters, GERMAN

business.

Clever,
he thought. An accusation against the authorities and also a parody of the notices Jewish-owned shops had to display.

He found Madame Crozier in a state of mixed indignation and apprehension.

‘I really don’t know what to say, lieutenant,’ she protested. ‘I know your boys have to put their notices up somewhere, but I hardly feel my shop is the proper place. Then when it was defaced, well, of course my natural instinct was to take it down, but that would make me to blame, wouldn’t it?’

She was right. Removing or defacing official posters was a serious crime.

He said, ‘I’ll have a word about it.’

‘Thank you, I knew I could rely on you.’

He accepted the usual invitation to step into the living-room and take a cup of coffee with Madame while Crozier put together his order.

‘I went to the exhibition at the Berlitz the other day, have you been, lieutenant? You must go, it’s really fascinating.’

The exhibition was called
Le Juif et la France.
Mai had seen the advertising poster as he walked down the Boulevard des Italiens a few days earlier. It showed a caricature Jew, bearded, hook-nosed, evil, digging claw-like fingers into a huge globe of the world.

‘I was telling Madame Pascal about it, her whose son came back from the army
before
the armistice, he was a taxi-driver, so God knows what he’s doing now, keeping very odd company from what I hear, and she said that she couldn’t see the point of it, the exhibition, we were all French together, and wasn’t Jesus a Jew. Well, I ask you! Jesus a Jew! Excuse me, that sounds like the shop door.’

She went out. Mai produced his Hitler
Jugend Tagebuch
from the pocket it had stretched to bursting point and made an entry in his illegible shorthand. He was a collector of trivia, a sower of tiny seeds. From the shop he heard a voice whose words he could not catch but which he recognized. Then Madame Crozier spoke, in a low tone just audible to the sensitive ear.

‘Lieutenant Mai is here.’

He listened for the sound of the street door opening and shutting. It didn’t come. He smiled and put away his book. Sometimes the tiny seeds took root.

The living-room door opened and Madame Crozier re-entered.

‘Here’s my daughter, lieutenant. I think you’ve met.’

He stood up and bowed.

‘Good day, Madame Simonian,’ he said.

‘Good day, lieutenant,’ murmured Janine in a low voice.

She wants to talk to me, he thought. He’d guessed it when she didn’t immediately walk out of the shop. He knew it now he saw her.

It hadn’t been difficult to confirm that the patient ‘Simon’ and Iakov Moseich Jean-Paul Simonian were one and the same person. He’d arranged with the hospital for any correspondence for ‘Simon’ to be intercepted and copies of both letters now lay in his files. He’d checked Pivert’s alleged return address and discovered it was Valois’s. So far he had found nothing against the young man, but he had one of his feelings…

He felt no guilt about keeping all this to himself. He could see no advantage in letting the warped bastards who organized farces like the Berlitz exhibition know that one of their POWs was a Jew; on the other hand, the knowledge might be useful in recruiting another pair of ears and eyes to help his job here in Paris. But there’d been no rush. It was always better to get your victim to volunteer if you could.

He finished his coffee and said, ‘Now I must go. Thank you for the coffee. Good day, Madame Simonian.’

He left swiftly. Janine wouldn’t talk to him in front of her mother, he knew that. She would need an excuse, so he’d provided her with one. And he smiled to himself a few seconds later as he heard her voice calling, ‘Lieutenant! You forgot your cakes.’

He stopped and turned. Faintly flushed, she ran up to him, carrying a small white box.

‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘That was kind. Though it might have been kinder to my waist to let me forget.’

She smiled. It was an effort, but she managed it. He said, ‘Are you walking my way by any chance?’

‘Yes. I think I am,’ she said.

They walked in silence a little way.

‘How are your children?’ he asked, seeking a means of prompting her request for help.

‘They’re very well, thank you.’

‘They must miss their father,’ he said sympathetically.

‘Yes. They do. We all do.’ A pause, then it came out with a rush. ‘I was wondering if perhaps your enquiries, you were kind enough to help, if anything else…’

The rush declined to a stumble.

‘I have learnt nothing more than I knew last time we talked,’ he said carefully. ‘Nothing has changed.’

He could feel her scrutinizing his words, desperate for significance. She was hooked but he would need to play her very carefully. Other intelligence officers might have wondered if she was worth the effort, but Mai had a feeling that in the struggle ahead, every collabo they could lay their hands on was going to be invaluable. He had to be careful not to frighten her off. He recalled her own suspicion that it might be her body, not her loyalty he was after. It might be useful to re-activate that idea. Which would a woman find it easier to contemplate - betraying her husband or betraying her country? He’d no idea but he knew it was psychologically sound in matters of corruption to give the impression of choice, even between two evils.

He said, ‘He has my sympathy, your husband, wherever he is.’

‘What do you mean?’ she demanded.

‘It is a lonely business, being far from home, in a strange country, whatever the reason,’ he said with a sigh. ‘I know this from experience. You long for a little sympathy, a little kindness.’

He stopped and turned to face her. He reached out and took her cold, unresponsive hand in his.

‘I hope,’ he said softly, ‘wherever he is, your man is finding a little kindness.’

For a moment he thought he’d overdone it and that she was going to laugh in his face or slap it hard. Then visibly she relaxed, her expression softened, her hand squeezed his and she said, ‘I hope so too.’

He raised her hand slowly to his lips and kissed it. She lowered her head so that her hair fell in a fringe over her face, he guessed to hide her look of revulsion.

She said in an almost inaudible voice, ‘The poor man you were telling me about, the one in hospital whose name did not appear on any official unit list…’

‘Yes. I remember him.’

‘He must be very lonely, if no one knows where he is, perhaps even who he is.’

‘Yes,’ said Mai. ‘He’s often been in my mind.’

‘I could sense you were sympathetic,’ said Janine with a flash of savage sarcasm. ‘Perhaps it would be a kindness to find out how he is, what is planned for him when his treatment is finished.’

‘You would be interested in that, madame?’ he said. ‘Then I’m sure I can find it out for you. Perhaps you would do me the honour of dining with me one night. Then I could report what I’ve managed to discover.’

‘Yes, I would like that,’ she said trying for brightness.

‘On Friday then? Seven o’clock at the Balzac, shall we say? I look forward to that very much,’ said Mai letting his face break into a smile.

She nodded and turned and almost ran away in her haste to put distance between them before he recognized her loathing and self-disgust.

He watched her go. She moved well, almost boyishly. Poor child, he thought. All upset because she thinks the big, bad Boche wants to bed her! She’ll chatter like a chipmunk in her efforts to postpone the awful moment. And by the time she realizes it’s the chatter not the chuff I’m after, she’ll be so relieved, and so used to the idea of co-operating with the enemy, that the rest will be easy.

He resumed his walking, trying to whistle a few bars of Schubert’s
’Sah ein Knab’ ein Röslein stehn’,
but it wouldn’t come out right. He ought to be feeling happy that yet another of his little schemes was working out so well, but somehow he didn’t.

8

‘Christian,’ said Maître Delaplanche, ‘you are an imbecile. May I come in?’

Valois stood aside and let the lawyer pass by him into the flat. He’d been expecting the visit. Delaplanche had been away on another trip to the Free Zone at the time of the shooting in the métro.

Valois had been ill for a week afterwards. His colleagues at the Ministry had been most concerned. The prospect of seeing Delaplanche on his return had not made him get better any quicker.

Delaplanche held up a paper-wrapped parcel.

‘A gift,’ he said. ‘From your mother. I met her in Vichy. We knew each other when your father and I were young lawyers. She asked if I could deliver it to you. I was only too pleased. It’s such an excellent justification of my presence here.’

‘Thank you,’ said Valois, taking the parcel. ‘Probably pâté.’

Delaplanche sat down and raised his eyebrows invitingly.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Valois wretchedly. ‘It was a mistake, I see that now. They’ve taken hostages, they’re threatening to shoot them. I never thought the bastards would react like this.’

‘Didn’t you? I did!’ said the lawyer. ‘At least, I hoped they would. It’s the best thing that could happen for us.’

‘That innocent Frenchmen should be shot down?’

‘That not the most innocent of Frenchmen, or women, or even children should be able to feel safe!’

Valois sat down opposite the lawyer.

‘Why burst in here calling me imbecile then?’

‘Well, for a start, you don’t seem to have been very good at it, do you? Oh, don’t look so affronted! I understand you were all cut up about the killing. Now you seem to be ready to take offence at not being complimented on a nice job! I’ll give you the same compliment I gave Theo, shall I?’

Theo was the cell leader. He was also the man who’d had to steady Valois’s hand so he could pull the trigger.

‘Don’t blame Theo! It was my choice! My responsibility!’

Delaplanche said softly, ‘I told Theo he was stupid, unfit for our work. And I tell you the same. Choice? Responsibility? What have they got to do with you any more? Listen, Christian. I didn’t recruit you to run around the métro killing Krauts. All right, so you succumbed to some childish need to prove yourself - don’t interrupt! -well, I take the blame for that. I’d forgotten what it is to be young and untried while the old men are boasting. I shouldn’t have put you anywhere near Theo.’

‘He’s not being punished on my behalf, is he?’ said Valois.

‘Jesus! Such self-importance!’ said Delaplanche. ‘On the contrary, he’s a great success, first-class organizer and he kills a lot of the enemy. No, he’s going onward and upward, don’t worry about Theo. It’s just that you’re going in different directions. This is going to be a long war. By the time it’s finished you could be well up the ladder, in just the kind of position we need to help us rebuild the country. In the meantime, you’ll be a pair of eyes and ears for us in the Finance Ministry, and probably other ministries too. Make yourself popular. No need to collaborate actively with the Boche, I don’t want you tainted with
that
brush or some other ambitious young killer may rub you out! But be nice to people. Make up your differences with your father, for instance. Visit him more often. There’s all kinds of useful little things to be picked up in Vichy!’

‘You want me to spy on my father? For God’s sake, that’s a Nazi trick, isn’t it?’

Delaplanche said quietly, ‘I hope no one ever has to die for your sentimentality, Christian.’

The doorbell rang and Valois jumped to his feet in such alarm that the lawyer laughed.

‘You might have been followed here!’

‘Really. Why? And if I were, why shouldn’t I be here? I’ve brought pâté from your mother! Also, you seem to forget, I’m not a member of any subversive group, am I? My name appears on no party lists. Now hadn’t you better answer that bell?’

Reluctantly Valois went to the door and opened it. He was still half-expecting to see men in uniform there. Instead…

‘Janine!’ he cried.

The woman pushed by him, slamming the door behind her.

‘Christian, can I talk to you?’ she said.

Without waiting for an answer, she crossed the narrow vestibule and went into the lounge. Delaplanche looked up from the newspaper he was reading and smiled. Janine stopped dead.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Christian, I didn’t know you had company…’

‘Yes,’ said Valois shortly. ‘Can we talk later? In an hour perhaps?’

He glanced at Delaplanche, who nodded almost imperceptibly.

Janine glanced at her watch.

‘Yes…no…it doesn’t matter. Next time you come round…You haven’t been to see us for a while…’

‘I’ll come soon, I promise.’

He ushered her back to the door and, lowering his voice, asked, ‘Is it important? Have you had any news?’

‘No. Nothing. It’s just that, not seeing you for so long, I wondered if you’d heard anything…about your parcel, I mean…’

‘You don’t think I’d have heard something and not come round to tell you?’ he said. ‘But I will call soon, I promise. My love to the children. And to Madame Sophie.’

He kissed her cheek and closed the door behind her.

Back in the lounge, Delaplanche said, ‘That’s a striking young woman. What’s particularly striking is the way she always seems to call on you whenever I’m here.’

‘She’s married to a close friend of mine. He’s a prisoner-of-war. Also he’s a Jew, but trying to keep it quiet.’

‘Very wise,’ observed Delaplanche. ‘You will naturally do what you can. Only, try to keep your distance.’

‘From my friends?’

‘From the Jewish question. I’ve got a contact on the CGQJ. This exhibition is a major step forward in the Nazis’ strategy for France. I suppose you might say we’re lucky here. They still feel it necessary to propagandize. Elsewhere in Europe, they’ve been less particular. Have you been to the exhibition, by the way?’

‘Certainly not!’

‘Go and see it!’ commanded Delaplanche. ‘And let yourself be noticed seeing it. And if you find its crudeness shocks you, remember, as far as our German friends are concerned, this is anti-Semitism at its most subtle! Now, let’s eat some pâté and get down to some real work in case your pretty little friend returns to interrupt us yet again!’

There was no chance of that. Janine had been on her way to her dinner date with Günter Mai when an overwhelming impulse to tell everything to Christian had diverted her. Now her sole concern was that she might arrive so late at the Café Balzac that Mai would not have waited.

But he was there, drinking a beer.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said breathlessly, tumbling into her chair. ‘I was held up, the métro, some trouble…’

‘It’s all right,’ he said, amused. ‘You’re only a quarter of an hour late. That’s punctual in French terms, surely? Now, I thought we would just eat here, if that’s all right?’

‘That’s fine,’ she said.

He had expected her to be too impatient for news of her husband to wait more than a few moments, but she seemed content to exchange small talk and to tuck into the meal without questioning him. She was, he guessed, delaying the moment which would put her in his debt.

His guess was partly right. The other part was that Janine was determined to eat her fill. The more she ate here, the less hungry she would be when it came to sharing out the rations at home. But at last she was finished.

‘All right, lieutenant,’ she began, but paused as Mai put his finger to his lips.

‘Not lieutenant. Not here,’ he smiled.

‘What then?’

‘Édouard. Let us act like friends.’

‘As long as we remember it is an act,’ she said. ‘What have you to tell me about my husband?’

He sipped his beer slowly. So, she was determined to start by throwing aside all pretence. It was a good move. When it came to pretending, she was no match for him.

‘He is well, almost well enough to be discharged,’ he said, accepting her change of rules.

‘Discharged? Will they send him home?’ she asked with sudden hope.

‘I doubt it. If it had been a permanently crippling wound probably yes. But when there is a complete physical recovery…’

He stressed
physical
but she did not take him up. Instead she said gloomily, ‘But to keep him in hospital such a long time, it must have been a terrible wound.’

‘There was a great deal of bodily damage, as well as the head wound,’ admitted Mai. ‘But the rest has healed completely, with a few scars. The head wound was the most serious, however. There was a fragment of metal lodged inside the skull. They did not dare try to remove it till the other wounds had healed and the body was strong enough to risk the operation. This is why it all took so very long.’

‘You’ve gone into this pretty deeply,’ she said.

He had in fact received a copy of ‘Simon’s’ full medical record. What he’d said about the soldier’s physical health was true, but there’d been more. The patient suffered from bouts of severe withdrawal, almost catatonic on occasions. Sometimes he had blackouts, and though there was a question mark against his claim to total amnesia, the doctor was certain that what recollection of the past he did have was disturbed and fragmentary.

He emptied the last of the wine into her glass. There was a limit of a bottle per table, but he had stuck to beer and Janine had consumed the wine greedily. Perhaps she was trying to anaesthetize herself against whatever payment she was expecting him to exact? He studied her flushed face over his glass. She met his gaze squarely. How did she see him? As the ruthless spymaster or a lecherous Hun? How did he see himself? He pushed his chair back a little way and crossed his legs.

She said flatly, ‘How can you help me?’

Good girl! he thought. She was at least going to try to extract from him a promise of something more positive than his silence.

‘Alas,’ he said. ‘Only with advice.’

Unasked, the patron surreptitiously brought them two glasses of cognac.

‘To your health,’ he said.

She drank deep and said, ‘What advice?’

Her voice, now slightly blurred by the drink, had a note of desperation in it. It wasn’t just fear. This was the despairing voice of a woman alone, living with problems she did not care or dare to share with anyone.

He’d been intending to underline his power over her with a couple of gentle threats disguised as advice, and then to start leading her inexorably to the role of
Abwehr
informer. But now he found himself wanting to ease that pain he heard in her voice with some real advice.

He said, ‘You must be patient. If the man, Simon, is your husband but wants to keep his real name hidden, then the greatest danger of betrayal comes from your actions.’

’If?’
she said fearfully. ‘What do you mean,
if?

‘All right, it’s quite clear he is your husband,’ he said harshly. She wanted honesty. Let her have it. ‘He’s using another name presumably because he fears what might happen if it came out he was a Jew.’

‘And is he right?’ she asked with a calm dignity which took him by surprise. ‘Is he right to be fearful?’

He met her unwavering gaze, thought of all the reservations he could make, the assurances he could offer; then he thought of his opposite number in the SD and said quietly, ‘Yes, he is right to be fearful.’

She shook her head disbelievingly and said, ‘There must be something I can do. His father fought in the last war. Marshal Pétain himself decorated him. Perhaps if I wrote…’

‘Get it into your head,’ he snapped. ‘Any kind of fuss endangers your husband and perhaps even your family.’

‘My family?’ she said in alarm. ‘What danger can there be to us? Bubbah Sophie’s a Jew, yes, but she’s an old lady. The children and I are good Catholics. As for Jean-Paul, he hates all religion.’

In exasperation Mai snapped, ‘Being a little old lady is no protection, and saying you’ve been converted is no protection, and being brought up Catholic is no protection.’

His vehemence at last frightened her.

‘Protection against what?’ she demanded.

He sat back wearily and wondered how to answer.

He had seen plenty of anti-Semitic violence in Germany before the war. Here in France it was just starting. Recent terrorist acts were being blamed equally, sometimes simultaneously, on groups of fanatical Communists and Jews. The anti-Semitic press was growing ever more abusive. And, of course, the SD in its battle to take over effective control of the city from the Military Command would see pogrom both as a means and an end.

‘Listen, Janine,’ said Mai earnestly. ‘I don’t know what’s going to happen, but prepare for the worst. Get yourself as watertight as possible. Start by making sure all your papers are in order. For instance, your husband’s a French citizen, is he?’

‘Of course he’s a French citizen!’ Janine said. ‘Do you think he was fighting in the Foreign Legion?’

‘Yes, all right,’ said Mai. ‘But was he born here? His parents weren’t, were they? Presumably they were naturalized. Was that before or after your husband’s birth? Have you or your mother-in-law got all the papers? Where is the office of record? Here in France bits of paper can still protect you to some extent. Friends in high places are useful too. And it won’t harm to have a good lawyer in reserve.’

‘But why? What’s all this to do with me?’ she asked in bewilderment. ‘I don’t know anyone important.’

‘Monsieur Valois may be important one day,’ Mai suggested. ‘And already he must know important people. Isn’t his father a deputy?’

‘Yes, but they don’t get on,’ she said. ‘Though, come to think of it, Christian does know Maître Delaplanche, and
he’s
important, isn’t he?’

It was enough to make you believe in God, thought Mai, but a God of malicious irony rather than loving kindness. Here he was enjoying helping this girl, having put aside (for the moment, anyway) all thought of using her, and instantly those lovely pale lips cough up this pearl.
Delaplanche.
Almost certainly a communist, but too clever to have his name recorded on any list and too well connected (some said well informed) to be easily touchable. But he’d been on the
Abwehr’s
pink list of men to be watched even before Adolf decided to tear up the German-Soviet pact.