The Collaborators (25 page)

4

It was strange to be living under the same roof as Janine again. Last time it had been his roof, and she had always been on the defensive. Also the children had been there, and her mind had been preoccupied with doubts and fears about her newly returned husband.

The doubts and fears had not diminished but Valois could tell they had changed. Jean-Paul was a different man, full of life and energy, constantly on the move. He had found a role and was living it to the full. But he was not the same man Valois had known in the old days; there was a new hardness and to make room, something gentle and loving and sensitive had had to give way.

He spent a whole week closeted in the Simonians’ apartment, much of it alone with Janine.

‘Should I be here?’ he asked anxiously. ‘Wouldn’t it be better to put me in a safe-house somewhere? I don’t want to bring you danger.’

Simonian had laughed.

‘If they come looking for you here, we’re all in danger anyway,’ he said. ‘And this way, I don’t waste a good safe-house. You know where I live already!’

‘He’s enjoying all this,’ he said to Janine as they sat together one night.

‘Yes.’

She’d gone very quiet, very introspective, as if her husband’s vitality had been derived, vampirishly, from her own veins.

‘But you’re not?’

‘I live in fear,’ she said very simply. ‘Night and day, waking and sleeping. I have nightmares full of terror and when I wake up, the terror wakes with me. I didn’t think you could grow used to terror, but I have.’

He wanted to reach across and take her in his arms but he knew that this would be useless. All her passion was reserved for Jean-Paul.

He suddenly came close to hating his friend.

‘What are you afraid of?’ he asked. ‘That he’ll be caught?’

‘Yes, but not just that,’ she said. ‘I’m not so saintly that I don’t fear for my own sake. In fact, I sometimes think that Jean-Paul would quite like to be caught so that he could tell the Boche just how many of them he has killed. But what I really fear is what they may do to me to make me tell what I know.’

‘What
do
you know?’ Valois asked gently.

‘About Jean-Paul? Next to nothing!’ she answered. ‘I’ve stopped myself from knowing, stopped myself from hearing, though I can’t stop from guessing.’

‘But if you don’t know anything, why be so afraid?’

‘Because the only way to stop the pain is to tell them what you do know,’ she said patiently as if to an idiot. ‘If you’ve nothing to tell, the pain goes on for ever. So I fear I would tell them something. Anything.
Everything!

‘What?’ he asked, smiling despite himself at her earnestness.

‘I don’t know. About you perhaps. Or about my parents. But what I fear most of all is that I’d tell them about the children.’

‘What’s to tell about the children?’ he said in surprise.

‘Their father is a Jew and a Resistant. Their grandmother has been deported. They left Paris on an illegal
Ausweis.
Their mother is…’

‘What?’

‘What’s it matter what their mother is?’ she asked sharply. ‘She’ll be the one who’ll be doing the telling.’

He reached over and took her hands in his.

‘Janine, don’t upset yourself like this,’ he urged. ‘They’re not interested in the kids, honestly. Why should they be? They’ve other things to worry about.’

‘They arrested them and put them in Drancy, didn’t they?’ she demanded.

It was unanswerable. He said, ‘Janine, you went to see the kids last month. OK, I know you don’t like to talk about it, but tell me one thing. How could you bear to come back?’

She stared at him resentfully. It was true. She could hardly bear to think let alone talk about her short visit. The way Céci’s face had crumpled as she got on the train…and Pauli’s eyes…

‘Why don’t you go back now and stay on there?’ Valois pressed.

‘Because! Because I might take danger with me where there is none now. Because I don’t know what might happen here if I left!’

She jerked her hands up to cover her face. He didn’t release them instantly but let his own hands be drawn up with them, so that when he did loosen his grip it seemed natural to run his fingers through her hair.

‘It’ll be all right,’ he said. ‘I know it will. This can’t go on for ever. You and the children will be together again soon, I’m sure of it. How are they anyway? You’ve got to talk about them. Honestly it does no good bottling things up.’

With a great effort she said, ‘Yes, you’re right. You usually are. It’s me. I’m so weak. You know I didn’t go out to the farm? I stayed in Lyon and Mireille brought the children in to be with me. I said it was to give us more time together. Liar! It was because I didn’t trust myself to…but next time, Christmas, perhaps things will be better…Mireille gave me a photo. Would you like to see it?’

She rose, breaking the contact. He looked at his hands as though he’d just let a precious fragile vase slip out of his grip.

‘See. Those are Mireille’s three boys, they’re older than my two, of course. And there’s Pauli and Céci. Look at her smiling, she’s always smiling and laughing. Not Pauli though. He’s like his father…’

Valois looked at the frowning intensity of the boy’s expression. He seemed to be looking beyond the camera as if disdaining to acknowledge its existence.

So he would probably look at a firing squad.

The thought was so macabre he felt for a moment he’d said it out loud. It must be these crazy times that brought such thoughts into his head. But surely the very craziness of the times meant that ordinary patterns of behaviour no longer applied? In a world where boys might face firing squads, grown men were foolish not to speak their hearts while they still had the chance.

He reached forward to take her hand once more and looked deep into her eyes.

‘Janine,’ he said.

A door opened and banged shut.

Valois let her go and sat back in his chair. She remained where he left her, pulled slightly forward, regarding him with bewilderment.

The room door opened.

‘Here you are then. Very comfortable you look!’ proclaimed Jean-Paul. ‘Very cosy. Pity you can’t stay longer, Christian.’

‘Can’t…?’

‘No need to. It’s been confirmed. Poor old Theo’s heart gave out three days ago. There’s been no sign of the Geste round at your place. So it looks as if everything’s clear. You can go home and resume the even tenor of your ways!’

’Now,
you mean?
Tonight?’

He must have sounded querulous, like an old man frightened of being pushed out on to some long and perilous journey rather than a young man being invited to take a short métro trip home. The Simonians glanced at each other and shared their amusement, an event rare enough to surprise them both and to fill Valois with resentful jealousy.

All the way back to his apartment the picture remained with him. Jean-Paul with his arm draped loosely over Janine’s shoulders, she smiling with pleasure at the contact, he with that expression of mocking bewilderment he used to wear when he was puncturing his friend’s student pomposity.

If the Gestapo had been waiting for him he’d have walked straight into their hands. He found himself putting the key into the lock with no recollection of how he’d got there.

Well, it was too late to worry now. If the Boche got him, maybe that would wipe the smile off their faces!

He went inside. The place felt cold, unused. He closed the blinds and put the lights on. It was just as he’d left it. A half-full coffee cup stood on the telephone table reminding him that as usual he’d left in a rush, fearful of missing his train.

He poured himself a drink and walked around. It was good to be back, he decided. Good to get out of that poky little flat in the Quartier Mouffetard. A man got silly ideas cooped up like that. Obsessions rubbed off and by Christ, the Simonians were certainly an obsessive pair! There was Jean-Paul, reduced by rage and mental damage to playing at gangsters. And Janine, the little shop-girl, who only lived through her connection with this madman…

He paused in front of a mirror and regarded his reflection for almost a minute. He looked pale and unkempt but it was deeper than this that his gaze was trying to penetrate.

‘You mealy-mouthed shit,’ he said finally. ‘Tell the truth to yourself at least. You are sick with envy of his courage, his role, and you’re even sicker with desire to bed his wife. But you won’t do anything about it. You won’t do anything about
anything!’

He felt an impulse to hurl the glass at the mirror, but it would have been artifice, a contrived gesture, not in his nature.

The telephone rang, startling him out of his little self-dramatization.

He picked it up but did not speak. His mouth was dry.

A voice said, ‘You all right?’

It was Jean-Paul. ‘Yes, I’m fine. Look I really didn’t say how grateful I was…’

‘That’s OK. Go to bed.’ The phone went dead.

Bed. It was good advice. Suddenly he realized he was exhausted.

He awoke to darkness and the sound of rain lashing the window-panes and a wind rattling a badly closed door. He glanced at the luminous dial of his watch. It was five a.m. Gestapo time.

He pushed the unpleasant thought from his mind and rolled over.

In a corner of the room a torch flashed on.

He sat up, holding his hand against the jet of light.

‘Mr Valois, so you’ve come home,’ said a soft, friendly voice. ‘I said you would. Don’t go crashing into his flat, I said, smashing up his nice things, tearing up the floorboards. What would a nice young man, son of a deputy, be hiding there, anyway?’

‘Who are you? What do you want?’ demanded Christian fearfully.

‘Come now. You can answer both those questions yourself. Just as I was able to say, watch and wait, watch and wait. When all seems safe, he’ll come wandering home. And here you are, as I forecast.’

Valois struggled out of bed. The torch was his enemy. He plunged towards the disc of light. A forearm caught him round the throat. A knee drove into his crutch. His mouth gaped wide, gasping to take in air, to let screams out. A gloved hand fastened on it and squeezed so tight he thought his cheeks would tear. His nostrils sucked in air, but not enough. He saw the torch disc dwindle to a pin-point as a new darkness invaded his sight.

‘Now let us go quietly,’ said the soft voice. ‘No need to disturb the neighbours, is there?’

5

Mai sat under the great cedar in the Jardin des Plantes and filled his pipe for the third time. A bitter damp wind was rasping through the bare branches making it hard to light the pipe which in any case tasted sour from oversmoking. The few people who had passed him in the last hour had glanced at him with amusement, clearly thinking he was a lover who’d been stood up. Good cover, except that that was just what he felt like.

Since his return to Paris he had only seen Janine distantly but he had been kept up-to-date on her by her cousin, Miche, with whom he’d resumed the old relationship.

Then Miche had passed on a problem.

‘That stuck-up mate of hers, Valois, he’s gone missing it seems. She seems to think he might have got himself arrested, God knows why. I’ve checked as best I can. No trace, but there’s a lot of people doing a lot of arresting these days.’

‘And she asked you to ask me?’

‘No. That was my idea. Would you mind asking around?’

‘You’ve got a cheek!’ said Mai. Inside, he was suddenly hit by a powerful desire to see Janine again.

He said, ‘All right. I’ll see what I can do. But she’ll have to come herself. Tell her tomorrow afternoon, three o’clock, the usual place.’

‘The usual place?’ Boucher raised his eyebrows and grinned. ‘We’ll make a Frenchman out of you yet!’

A fool was all that had been made out of him, thought Mai gloomily looking at his watch. It was four.

He got up stiffly and set off down the steep path. As he turned the corner at the bottom of the slope, there she was, standing by the railings.

‘You’re late,’ he said shortly.

‘This wasn’t my idea. I didn’t have to come.’

‘Why did you?’

She thought seriously of the answers she wasn’t going to give. She was worried sick about Christian, but Jean-Paul seemed to regard her concern as a kind of self-indulgence, reserving all real feeling to himself. Her attempts to win a role in the hunt for information had been dismissed and she found herself expected to be available in the kitchen at all hours to provide Les Pêcheurs with coffee and food. They’d moved out of the Quartier Mouffetard as soon as they realized Christian had vanished and were now living in a dilapidated flat in Clichy. It had seemed clever to try to steal a march on the men by asking Miche for help, but her reaction when he told her about Mai had been anger. She didn’t want to get involved there again.

But today, furious at being left alone after an urgent message had taken Jean-Paul from the flat without explanation and scarcely a farewell, she had gone out herself. In direct contravention of her husband’s instructions, she had headed back to the old apartment. By the time she got there, discretion had returned and she had resisted the temptation to go in and pick up some more of her things. Then, though she’d resolved not to keep the appointment with Mai, finding herself so near the Jardin, she’d come here anyway.

She said, ‘Curiosity. And Miche said you offered to find out about Christian.’

‘Offered?’

‘Look, I’m not buying, not this time,’ she said.

‘And I’m not selling. Your friend was arrested by the Gestapo. He is presently in Fresnes Prison, unharmed as far as I can ascertain.’

Taken aback by the ease with which she’d got the information, she stammered a thank you.

‘What for? It’s not good news. And please don’t tell me he’s innocent. Even more, don’t tell me he’s guilty. I know that already and I don’t want any details.’

‘If you’re so sure, why are you helping me?’

‘Why do you think?’

‘I don’t know. Because you still hope you can turn me into a collabo like Miche?’

He laughed to hide his absurd hurt.

‘That would require surgery,’ he said. ‘So, you’re convinced Germans aren’t capable of altruism?’

‘I’m not sure what Germans are capable of,’ she said in a low voice.

‘Just Germans? It was
your
gendarmes who rounded up your kids and put them in Drancy.’

‘There are always idiots who will follow orders,’ she said dismissively. ‘But you’ve got to be sick or evil to give those orders.’

‘And which am I?’ he asked. ‘Sick or evil?’

‘Not evil,’ she replied at once. ‘But to be part of it, even just to be on the very edge of it, you must be just a little bit sick, I think.’

‘You do, do you?’ said Mai feeling himself driven into a corner by the simple intensity of her reasoning. ‘And what does Nurse Simonian prescribe as the cure for this sickness?’

He saw a smile touch her lips at his effort to escape into ponderous sarcasm.

‘Simple,’ she said. ‘I would prescribe a long, long rest. At home.’

He opened his mouth to destroy her with some fine German metaphysic but instead he let out a huge roar of laughter. And after a moment, seeing that it was her joke he was laughing at and not her, she joined in.

‘Thank you for coming to give me this consultation,’ he said, still chuckling. ‘I’ll pass your recommendations on to my superiors.’

She took his amusement as the cue for release.

‘Now I must go,’ she said. ‘Goodbye.’

She turned away but he was alongside her in a couple of paces.

‘Not so quick,’ he said, taking her elbow. ‘Where’re you rushing off to?’

‘Home,’ she said.

‘You kept me waiting for an hour,’ he said. ‘I’m very cold and rather damp. What I need is hot coffee laced with brandy and in addition I claim at least ten minutes of the hour of your company you’ve cheated me out of.’

She said, ‘Really, I can’t.’

‘Think about it as we walk through the Jardin,’ he said. ‘How are the children? Miche tells me you went to see them.’

‘Yes. It wasn’t easy arranging it but Miche helped. Mireille brought them to Lyon and we stayed a few days in a boarding house. They were fine, really fine.’

He could tell it was painful for her to talk about them.

‘Why not go to the farm?’ he asked.

‘It seemed better. This way I could have them to myself…’

And also he guessed she’d wanted to avoid the additional pressure likely to be on her at the farm to make her stay permanent.

Could this fellow Simonian have any idea of the demands he was making on her love and loyalty? Obviously not. From what Boucher reported, he seemed as keen as anyone for his wife to join the children.

‘I’ll stay at the farm next time,’ she went on. ‘I’d like to go at Christmas.’

‘Let me know,’ he said. ‘I’ll fix the travel papers. And before you ask, no conditions. Except perhaps that coffee.’

As they passed through the exit from the Jardin, she said, ‘All right. Ten minutes. No more.’

‘No more,’ said Mai, delighted.

A car was parked at the kerb. Two men got out. His attention was focused on Janine and he scarcely registered them until one of them stepped in front of the woman and said, ‘Madame Simonian!’

‘Yes.’

‘Come with me.’

The man seized Janine’s other arm. She turned on Mai an expression uncertain whether to be an appeal for help or a Medusa-stare of accusation.

‘Hold on!’ cried Mai.

But before he could take more than half a step forward, his left arm was seized from behind, twisted round and forced up between his shoulder-blades till he doubled forward, screaming with pain.

The man holding him didn’t relax his grip, but relaxed his attention to look towards the car for instruction.

‘Bring him too,’ came the order.

But the relaxation was enough for Mai, who drove his heel hard beneath his captor’s right knee, then stamped viciously on his left toe as he hopped in pain. The man crashed to the ground needing both hands to break his fall. Mai straightened up. Janine, inspired by his example, had flung herself at the man holding her and her nails had drawn blood from his face. Mai’s impulse was to go to her aid, but a third man was emerging from the car and in his hand was a pistol.

‘You idiots!’ screamed Mai in his best parade ground voice. ‘You blockheads! You stupid, half-witted botchers! I’ll have you on the Russian Front for this. I’ll see that you’re still up to your arseholes in snow when your mates back here are ankle-deep in daffodils!’

The man with the gun looked at him in bewilderment modulating to concern. Janine’s captor released her. Even the man on the floor showed signs through his pain of a suspicion that all was not as it should be.

Janine, bewildered by events and all this incomprehensible yelling, was leaning against the parked car, drawing in deep shock-absorbing breaths. Her first cogent thought had been that Mai had led her into a trap. His behaviour now seemed to disprove that. Or perhaps it was just that the trap had been sprung too soon, the men hadn’t waited for his command?

The man with the gun spoke. His voice was respectful but he still held the weapon loosely ready and it snapped up into the aim position as Mai reached inside his overcoat.

What he came out with was a leather wallet. He opened it, took something out, probably his card of identity, and handed it over. The gun man examined it, returned it, put the gun away and, stiffening momentarily to attention, spoke in a conciliatory voice. Mai replied in kind. The gun man gestured towards Janine and spoke again. Mai’s reply this time was emphatic and urgent. The gun man looked dubious. For a couple of phrases, Mai returned to his earlier, frighteningly authoritarian manner. This seemed to do the trick. A few more words and some rudimentary salutes were exchanged. The man Janine had scratched helped the man Mai had kicked into the car and it accelerated away.

Mai watched them go. As he stood there he felt Janine’s hand take hold of his arm.

‘Günter,’ she said. ‘Who were they? What’s going on?’

It occurred to him that never before had she addressed him so familiarly, so naturally. Nothing like a bit of fear for breaking down barriers, he thought cynically. Well, she was right to be afraid.

‘Gestapo,’ he said. ‘Who else? They were going to arrest you.’

He paused then went on, ‘No, not arrest you in the legal sense. If they’d had a formal warrant with the signature of a high-ranking officer on it, nothing I said would have stopped them. They were just going to take you in for a little unofficial questioning. People have been known to survive.’

‘But why? What have I done?’

He turned to her, looked into her eyes and said sadly, ‘Janine, stop playing the innocent. There’s no protection in it, not from us, not from your own people.’

‘My own people? Why should I need protection from them?’

‘You’re standing here talking to a German officer, for a start. Don’t you imagine there’ll be Frenchmen willing to believe what I hope those Gestapo hoodlums believe?’

‘And what’s that?’

‘How do you think I got rid of them? I told them who I was and said that you were one of my best agents. Janine, I’m afraid you’re back on my books again.’

She showed neither gratitude nor surprise. Her mind was still occupied with working out what had happened. Why her? Why here?

They must have been on watch near the flat in the Quartier Mouffetard.

She felt faint at the thought of what would have happened if she’d abandoned the rendezvous with Mai entirely and headed straight back to Jean-Paul. The Geste agents must have decided that while one was worth following, two were worth picking up. Thank God the other had been Mai.

Impulsively she leaned forward and kissed him on the cheek.

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Now I’ve got to go.’

Rushing off to warn her precious husband, thought Mai. And why should he need warning?

Alarm bells were sounding in his own mind. He’d been right in his suspicions about Christian Valois. And from the sound of him, Simonian was an even more likely member of the Resistance, and not in any passive, sleeping capacity either.

How deep was he willing to plunge in his increasingly ambiguous relationship with Janine? Mai asked himself.

When did he reach the point where protecting her meant also protecting men whose main aim was to kill German soldiers?

Meanwhile, talking of protection he’d better set about protecting himself. The Gestapo men were probably reporting in already.

Janine was turning to go.

He said, ‘Hold on. If you want to see me, ring the Lutétia and just leave a time. I’ll meet you an hour earlier at the Balzac the same day.’

‘An hour earlier?’ she said puzzled.

‘Just so you won’t keep me waiting,’ he joked. Then, because it was no joking matter, he spelt it out. ‘For security. You’re one of my best agents, remember?’

He watched her run away along the damp pavement towards the Jussieu métro. Slim-hipped, she ran with an athlete’s grace, like a winning runner.

‘One of my best agents,’ he repeated without irony.

Then he set off up the steep incline of the Rue Lacépède with the short aggressive steps of a man who may not go fast but knows that he can keep going for ever.