The Collaborators (26 page)

6

‘Where the hell did you hear that?’ demanded Jean-Paul Simonian.

She’d been full of her news. It might not be good but she’d got it herself despite their attempts to freeze her out. Now all her elation drained away.

‘Miche found out,’ she said. It was a believable lie. She hadn’t been able to think of one to cover her close escape from the Gestapo.

‘That treacherous bastard! I’ve told you to keep away from him.’

‘At least he can find things out which none of your patriotic friends can manage,’ she retorted.

‘You think not,’ he said. He looked pleased with himself. ‘Well, at least we can confirm that for once your Géstapiste cousin is telling the truth.’

‘Jean-Paul! You’ve found out something too?’

He sat beside her, his outburst of temper forgotten as he spoke of his friend.

‘Yes, he’s in Fresnes. There’s a warder there who wants to keep on the right side of the Resistance against the day he’s called to account. He says Christian’s in the German section of the prison. He looks a bit bruised about the face but otherwise all right. The word is that Vichy father of his got on to it quick enough to pull strings before the Gestapo really got to work.’

‘So he’s safe? Will his father be able to get him out?’

‘Don’t be stupid. Once Theo talked, and he must have said something, Christian was a dead man. Old Valois can hold things up for a bit, but the Geste will be given a free hand eventually and once that happens there’s no way that Christian won’t tell everything he knows.’

‘Is that all you’re worried about?’ she cried. ‘That Christian may break and tell them something about your precious group?’

He rushed forward and grabbed her arm, pulling her towards him. His grip was so tight she cried out in pain. His face only a few inches from hers was no longer emotionless.

‘Who the hell do you think you are?’ he said in a voice low with the effort of restraint. ‘What do you know about what I feel for Christian? He’s been my friend, my dearest friend, for years. I know the risks he took to get me back home after the canal raid. I know that if I were in Fresnes, he wouldn’t rest till he got me out. Don’t tell
me
what my reasons are for wanting to rescue him.’

‘Oh I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ she said, trying to turn their closeness into an embrace. ‘Rescue him, you say? But how? From Fresnes? Surely it’s impossible!’

He let her go and turned away to light a cigarette.

‘That’s a word the Boche like to use,’ he said. ‘They haven’t realized yet it doesn’t mean the same here as in Berlin.’

‘And what does it mean here, Jean-Paul?’ asked Janine.

He let out a joyful laugh.

‘It means Christian will be back safe with us tomorrow!’

The Department of Sanitation truck coughed its way under the arch of the main entrance to Fresnes Prison. It slowed almost to a halt so that the guard could scan the driver’s familiar face. They exchanged greetings, the man next to the driver joining in, then the truck accelerated laboriously across the courtyard, following the familiar route to the kitchen block where the greatest concentration of refuse was stacked.

The passenger got out, stretched, beat his mittened hands against his chest against the winter chill, then wandered round to the back of the truck. After glancing casually around, he rapped on the tailboard. A moment later, a man slipped down from the truck. He was dressed in the uniform of a warder. He made no effort to move away but stood chatting casually to the garbage man, as if he’d just come out to supervise the loading.

‘How do I look?’ said Jean-Paul Simonian.

‘Not bad,’ said Henri, eyeing him critically. ‘Except maybe for that cabbage leaf on your hat.’

‘What?’ Simonian raised his hand, found nothing, realized his lieutenant was joking. A great respect had grown between these two since the débâcle at the canal. ‘He’s a mad bugger and he may get us all killed yet,’ Henri would declare to others of Les Pêcheurs. ‘But not without getting himself killed first, trying to save us.’

Now the two men smiled at each other.

‘I’ll be on my way.’

‘Don’t forget your parcel.’

‘I’ve got it.’

He reached into the truck and extracted a neatly wrapped box with the name of a well-known
pâtisserie
on it.

‘Back in twenty minutes,’ said Simonian.

‘Make it fifteen,’ said Henri. ‘This is one place we don’t hang around on the job. Good luck.’

He watched the Fisherman stride boldly away.

‘Good luck,’ he repeated to himself. They were going to need it. In fact, they were going to need a whole year’s supply of it for this crazy scheme to succeed.

Simonian had no such doubts. It was at moments like this that he felt most truly in control, most passionately alive. He could do anything, be anything. For the moment he felt that he actually was a prison warder who’d just taken delivery of a cake addressed to the guard commander of the German prison block at Fresnes and who was rather irritated at having to waste his time carrying the thing around.

He burst through the door with a suddenness which had the corporal at the desk leaping to attention before he spotted the inconsequential uniform.

‘A cake,’ he announced, banging the box on to the desk.

‘A cake?’ said the corporal. ‘Oh yes. It’s his birthday.’

‘Is it?’ said Simonian, who’d obtained this and much more information about lay-out, procedure and timing, not to mention his uniform, from the warder who’d first revealed that Christian Valois was here.

‘He must have rich friends,’ he continued. ‘Ask me when I last had a decent slice of cake. Shortages, they say. This doesn’t look very short to me.’

He shook the box.

‘Careful,’ said the corporal, alarmed. ‘He’ll play hell if you muck it up.’

‘No. It’s all right, I’m sure. Let’s take a look.’

He undid the elegant bow, lifted a corner of the box, smiled his approval, then, to the corporal’s round-eyed shock, he inserted his hand into the box as though to scrape at the icing.

‘Here, none of that!’ said the corporal. ‘None of…’

He stopped speaking as a second and more powerful wave of shock stifled his voice. Simonian’s hand had come out of the box with a revolver in it.

‘Open up,’ ordered Jean-Paul. ‘Take me to the prisoner Valois. Shout, resist, even delay, and I’ll put a bullet right at the base of your spine. It won’t kill you. It will just paralyse you from the neck down for the rest of your life. Move.’

He spoke quietly but with the same utter conviction as he’d brought to his previous role.

The corporal was pale and trembling slightly. For a second Simonian feared he might have got himself a true Teutonic hero. Then the man rose, took his keys and, with the swiftness of one who wants to get an unpleasant duty over, he began unlocking the inner door.

Using the cake box to conceal the gun, Simonian followed close behind. They passed a couple of German guards coming the other way but the men paid no heed to the common sight of a French warder’s uniform. Fresnes was a big enough prison for the Occupation Force to have its own section, but overall administrative control still lay with the local authorities.

The corporal stopped and opened a cell.

He stood aside as if to usher Simonian courteously before him.

‘Get in,’ snarled Simonian.

The man entered. Simonian followed close behind. As the corporal’s leading foot touched the floor of the cell, the gun barrel came down on the nape of his neck. He slumped to the floor and Christian Valois, squatting on the end of his trestle bed, had to leap upright out of his way.

‘Jesus Christ!’ he exclaimed in alarm. ‘What the hell…Jean-Paul!’

‘That’s right. You OK?’

‘Yes. Fine. Just a few punches…Jean-Paul!’

The two men embraced. When they drew apart, there were tears in Valois’s eyes.

‘Jean-Paul,’ he began, but Simonian shook his head testily.

‘No time. Put this on.’

He opened the box fully and took out of it another warder’s tunic.

Stooping he lifted the corporal, dropped him face down on the bed, gagged him with a length of cloth, then pulled his dangling arms together under the bed and joined them with a pair of handcuffs taken from his pocket.

‘That should keep him quiet,’ he said, throwing a blanket over the body. ‘Now let’s go. Just look as if you owned the place!’

In fact Christian Valois’s powers of acting were very little tested. They left the block without encountering a soul, and though they saw one or two other guards and officials on their way towards the kitchens, no one spared them a second glance.

Henri was just emptying the last bin.

‘In you get,’ he said.

With a glance around to make sure they were unobserved, Valois slipped over the tailboard.

‘Now you,’ said Henri.

Before Simonian could obey, the kitchen door opened. The driver emerged, took in Simonian’s presence with relief, and called out to someone inside, ‘Thanks for the coffee!’

As he made for his cab, the kitchen door opened once more and a man in a cook’s apron appeared, yawning in the cold sunlight. Simonian was just clambering over the tailboard. He paused and stared at the cook, who grinned back.

‘Think they’re escaping in the rubbish, do we?’ he called mockingly.

Simonian dropped to the ground.

‘Maybe,’ he said.

Henri coughed. He was standing by the cab and could see round the side of the building. Simonian stepped forward and followed his gaze. On the far side of the courtyard, a prison officer and a German soldier had come out of a building and were talking together. He willed the cook to go back inside. Perhaps he was OK. He looked at the driver, who was looking very unhappy. If he didn’t trust the fellow, then certainly Simonian wasn’t going to.

The officer and the soldier split up. The soldier was heading to the German detention area. The officer was walking towards the kitchen block. There was little time left.

He went up to the still smiling cook, pulled out a long-bladed knife from its sheath in his belt and drove it into the man’s rib-cage.

The driver hissed involuntarily, ‘Oh Christ! He was my mate!’

’You should’ve trusted him then,’ gasped Simonian. ‘Henri, help me.
You,
start up!’

They tipped the dead man into the rubbish. Simonian plunged in after him and covered up the body, then himself. Valois stirred. Simonian whispered, ‘Lie still.’

The truck set off towards the main gates, which opened as they approached, and they were waved through without an inspection.

As they drove under the arch, Henri glanced back. The German soldier had turned towards the barrack block well short of the detention area. The prison officer too had turned back well before the kitchen.

As they left the prison behind, he should have felt elated. But somehow elation didn’t come very easy these days.

7

As soon as he’d got back to the Lutétia from the Jardin Mai had composed a formal complaint to the office of the
Höherer SS und Polizeiführer
in the Avenue Foch. It was not a conventional channel of communication between the
Abwehr
and the SD but he worked out that if a fuss was going to be made, he’d better do the lion’s share as the alleged injured party.

When news of the daring rescue of Christian Valois reached him the next day, he was stricken with guilt and fear.

The guilt was soon disposed of. His reason told him that merely telling Janine where Valois was imprisoned couldn’t have anything to do with his escape a mere twenty-four hours later.

But the fear remained. If the Gestapo decided to make an issue of his interference in Janine’s arrest - as, enraged by the humiliation of losing Valois, they might - then anything could happen, to him and to the woman.

There was nothing to do but wait.

A few days later as he sat in his office, the door opened and he rose swiftly to his feet as Major Nebe, the Head of Records, appeared, ushering in Colonel Fiebelkorn who wore a smile like a hangman’s, with more in it of relish than reassurance.

‘Heil Hitler!’ said Mai smartly.

‘Heil,’ replied the colonel. ‘How are you, Captain Mai? And poor Major Zeller, how is he?’

‘I’m well. The major is improving, thank you, sir. He has been taken back to Berlin for specialized treatment.’

‘Excellent. We can ill afford to lose such a man, though from what I hear, his work has passed into the very best of hands.’

Gold teeth glinted in another smile. You could almost hear the mouth muscles creak in protest at this unusual activity. But not even gold could glitter bright enough to touch the dark dead eyes.

Suddenly he became businesslike.

‘I was here on a small matter of shared interest, exchanging information. We should do more of this, don’t you think?’

‘Yes, colonel.’

‘Yes. Then perhaps if we did, embarrassments like trying to arrest each other’s agents would be avoided!’

‘Yes. I’m sorry, colonel…’

‘No, no,’ said Fiebelkorn holding up a pale pudgy hand in remonstrance. ‘There is nothing for you to be sorry about. I can understand your anger. I have been glancing at the woman Simonian’s record, with Major Nebe’s permission of course, and I can see how much you must value her. Informants are plentiful enough. You can’t spit out of your window without hitting half a dozen! But reliable ones, trustworthy ones - only the best intelligence officers can recruit those.’

‘Thank you, colonel,’ said Mai bewildered. He’d worked all night after the incident outside the Jardin to give Janine real substance as an agent, expecting the row to explode almost immediately. Instead of which, he could have taken his time; and in any case, far from a row, he was getting what amounted to an apology!

‘So let’s say no more about it,’ said Fiebelkorn. ‘The idiots who caused you this embarrassment are now relearning their basic skills in the Ukraine. And let us try to be more sharing and co-operative in the future. We need to unite our strength against all the enemies of the Fatherland. Agreed?’

‘Agreed, colonel,’ said Mai.

‘Good. Anything you learn from your good agents, like this Simonian woman, that would be very interesting to us. And should you ever wish to restructure your career, Captain Mai, give me a ring. There’s always room in the SD for any man with the skills to persuade a woman to stay with her terrorist husband so she can keep on betraying him!’

He laughed as he spoke and the two
Abwehr
men laughed too, like a trio of untuned cellos.

Mai, alone, sat down heavily and soon had the room foggy with tobacco smoke, but for once the outer fumes brought no compensating clarity to his thoughts. He realized now he’d made a mistake in not insisting that he had some means of contacting Janine. He wanted to see her, to make sure she was safe. No. He just wanted to see her.

He tried to will the phone to ring. It didn’t. He went back to work.

Two days later, the phone rang when he was out. A woman, the message simply
two o’clock.

He got there at ten to one. At two he was still sitting in the Café Balzac with the patron making sympathetic grunts every time he brought another drink.

At two forty-five, he gave up. This was absurd. He tried to feel annoyance, but all he could feel was terror.

He stood up, looked down the café for the patron. And there she was. Standing in the doorway. Like a slim, pale flame in the gloomy atmosphere of the shabby café.

She came to him and sat down.

‘Where’ve you been?’ he demanded.

She looked at him in surprise.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Mean? You’re so late!’

‘No I’m not!’ she replied indignantly. ‘Don’t you remember, you said I should give a time an hour before the real time? I’m early.’

He began to laugh, but the laughter didn’t sound right, like the cracked notes he’d produced from Fiebelkorn’s joke. So he stopped laughing and clasped his hands together in an effort to control their sudden trembling.

‘Are you ill?’ she asked with real concern.

‘No, not at all. Just relieved,’ he said. ‘I was so worried.’

‘About me?’ She looked at him closely.

She sounded surprised. But concerned too. And perhaps even, though this might have been his imagination, pleased.

‘Let’s walk, shall we?’ he said.

‘If you like.’

The patron opened the door for him, his congratulatory leer concealing his melancholy musings on the weakness of man. Monsieur Scheffer was obviously putty in the hands of this woman. She wasn’t even a beauty! A skinny, undernourished thing, like a frightened rabbit! But she must have something…He watched them stroll away in the wintry gloom and tried to warm himself up by imagining what it was.

As they walked along he asked, ‘What happened when you got back that day?’

‘I told him that I’d learned from Miche where Christian was.’

’Was
is the operative word.’

‘That had nothing to do with our conversation, believe me.’

‘I worked that out for myself.’

Relieved, she moved away from that delicate topic.

‘What about you? What happened about those Gestapo thugs?’

‘Is that why you rang? To find out?’

‘Yes. I got more and more worried.’

For the sake of that precious husband, no doubt, thought Mai. She felt guilty at hiding things from him and wanted at the very least to make sure that her silence wasn’t endangering him. He told her briefly of his visit from Fiebelkorn. Ahead lay the Tuileries Garden. Mist seemed to hang in the leafless trees like the ghost of some old decoration. There were few people about, stick-figures with little plumes of breath trailing behind them. Our breath too, thought Mai, suddenly melancholy. Our life. A little vapour. How many exhalations to go?

A bunch of soldiers passed them as they entered the gardens. They looked so young. It wasn’t just his own sense of ageing that was doing this. They really were young, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen. We’re spreading ourselves so thin, he thought. Italy, the Ukraine, the whole of France. The pot’s not bottomless.

One of the soldiers glanced at Janine as they passed, made a phallic gesture with his forearm, and the sound of his companions’ laughter drifted eerily back as the mist swallowed them up.

‘Don’t be annoyed,’ said Mai. ‘Boys, a long way from home, trying to pretend they’re so experienced, so sophisticated.’

‘I’m not annoyed,’ said Janine. ‘I’m not some provincial schoolmarm you know. But don’t ask me to feel sorry for them either. I know what your “boys” are capable of when the occasion demands.’

‘And yours?’ said Mai gently.

‘You mean the Resistance? That’s different. That’s…’

‘… morally justified? Like the Crusades? We won’t argue that. But I met some of your other
boys
when I was down in Toulouse. The Milice. You’ve heard of them? They’re not in Paris yet, but don’t worry, they will be, next year at the latest. To start with, the SD trained them but the ones I saw were already outrunning their teachers!’

The grey tendrils of mist curled around them, weaving a curtain which shut them off not merely from sight and sound of the great city but from time and circumstance too. He took her hand as they walked, held it loosely and was not surprised when she did not pull it away. Why should she? They were in suspense. What was said and done now didn’t count.

Or rather it might count more than anything they had ever said or done before.

She said gently, like a grown-up reasoning with a child, ‘What can you tell me that justifies you, I mean the Germans, being here? That justifies the things you’ve done?’

Treated like a child, he found himself swinging her hand like a child as he wrestled with the problem.

He said, ‘Humiliation, perhaps. You humiliated us at Versailles back in 1919. That’s what made 1940 possible.’

‘That’s a cause not a justification,’ she corrected. ‘And I hope you’re wrong. Because you’re going to be humiliated again.’

She spoke with such certainty that he halted and peered into her face as if hoping to see there the source of such firm prophecy.

‘Why do you say that?’

‘Because you boast so proudly and behave so meanly,’ she declared. ‘Everybody knows what empty boasts they are! You were going to destroy England, weren’t you? Well, it’s still there. Half of Paris listens to its broadcasts every night and every night we hear British and American planes droning away overhead. It’s the sound of our victory, your defeat. And it won’t be a noble defeat either. That’s when the full story of your barbarity will come out. God knows how vile the whole truth will be! The little bit I know is enough to humiliate you all for a thousand years.’

He tried to meet the steady gaze of those wide eyes but he couldn’t. He’d never felt homesick before but suddenly he realized that like those boys who’d just passed them, he too was a long way from home.

He spoke, trying to keep his voice as even and controlled as hers had been.

‘I won’t argue with you. Perhaps I can’t. But one thing you should know is whatever we’ve done here in France, we’ve had our job made easy. We’ve had people queueing up for jobs, everything from political administrators to paid informers. And then there’s tens of thousands who didn’t want any pay. The letter writers, the telephoners, the anonymous tipsters. We’ve been snowed under. I sometimes think it must be a Resistance plot to break down the system! Perhaps that’s what they’ll claim later. They’ll have to claim something because when the world finds out that the Germans have got more than their fair share of madmen, they’ll also learn that France had more than its fair share of collaborators!’

He fell silent. It was a cheap point he had made even though he believed it to be true. But he wasn’t using it as an argument here, merely a diversion. He felt ashamed to see in her face that she was taking it so seriously.

She said, ‘Do you count me as a collaborator?’

‘No,’ he said, recognizing the truth as he said it. ‘Of course not.’

‘Then,’ she said never taking her eyes off him, ‘if I’m not, you must be.’

He was surprised only for a moment. He turned his head away and strove to force his sight through the mist back to the real world, back to the Rue de Rivoli where the crimson swastikas still flapped lazily in a triumph as empty as the shops beneath them. But it was no use. That part of his mind which, despite everything, could still pretend that he was leading her on simply would not function here.

He said slowly and with effort, ‘I’m not a collaborator. I’m in love with you.’

Immediately he felt a vast sense of relief.

He was still holding her hand. He raised it, played with her fingers, kissed them gently.

She said sadly, ‘Yes. That’s what I was afraid of.’

‘Afraid?’ He wanted to laugh out loud in his strange exultation. ‘You mean you’d rather I was the enemy manipulating you to betray your country?’

‘No. Of course not. Günter, what I meant was I’m afraid for you.’

Her voice was soft with sympathy as if he’d just revealed he’d got a fatal illness. But how clearly she saw things, he realized. For him that’s what it probably was. There was no place in her life for him other than as a source of help in the enemy camp. By his declaration of love, he had removed all threat from that help and transferred it to himself. She had been right after all. Being in love did make him a collaborator.

He drew her towards him. She did not resist but bowed her head away from his lips and he buried his face in her mist-damp hair.

‘I love you,’ he said taking pleasure from speaking the words again.

‘Poor Günter,’ she murmured almost to herself. ‘Poor Günter.’