The Collaborators (35 page)

2

And now at last Paris began to rouse herself. This was the best of times, the worst of times. The police occupied the Préfecture, the FFI fortified the Hôtel de Ville. It was tanks versus ancient hand-guns; the outcome for the Resistance was inevitable, but the outcome for the Germans was irrelevant, and they happily accepted a truce within the city the better to confront the danger without. But there were many like Christian Valois who wouldn’t accept any truce. They raged through the streets, throwing up puny barricades, firing at any enemy movement whether of men or armour, till it ceased to be clear if they were seeking, or simply offering themselves as, targets.

Other citizens took to the streets too. Fired by a pure vision of justice, or a cloudy lust for revenge, they hunted down, judged and sentenced their errant fellows. Some were beaten, stripped, humiliated; some were executed; some were thrown into gaol to await a formal judgement.

Meanwhile other gaols were being opened, other prisoners set free.

At Fresnes Prison on the southern approaches to the city, a pitched battle took place. It cost the Free French 2nd Armoured Division five tanks to overrun this strongpoint on their way to the Porte d’Orléans. Like the Bastille a century and a half earlier, it gave up very little. Most of the prisoners left behind after the last transports departed had been released when the Germans set about fortifying the strategically placed building.

But there were still a few inmates remaining, too ill to move or set free, or perhaps simply forgotten.

An American medical team took charge of these, transferring them to a nearby civilian hospital. The Americans looked aghast at the evidence of torture they observed on the bodies of some of their new patients, the French with no less revulsion but less shock. In some cases there seemed little hope. In others proper medication and nourishment plus above all the news of the imminent liberation of Paris brought rapid improvement.

And in one case, all these plus a night’s rest seemed to produce a really remarkable recovery.

‘Hey, doc,’ said one of the orderlies early the following morning. ‘We’ve lost a patient. One of those guys from the gaol.’

‘Well, they were pretty badly hurt, poor devils.’

‘No, I don’t mean he died. He’s just up and gone. The bed’s empty. He took some clothes too. Took? I mean stole!’

‘Perhaps the guy didn’t want to miss the celebrations! Which one was it?’

The orderly consulted his list.

‘Scheffer,’ he said. ‘Édouard Scheffer.’

Günter Mai made his way back into Paris in the wake of the 2nd Armoured Division. It was remarkably easy even for a man in his condition. As the liberators drove through the suburbs, the empty streets of early morning suddenly exploded with life far more overwhelming than any German ambush could have been. From every doorway, every window it seemed, poured shouting, singing, laughing, weeping people. Mai had never seen, never heard such joy. Under the cloudless summer sky, this turmoil of flags and banners and cheering and thrown blossoms and spurting wine looked like some great artist’s living realization of the spirit of joy. He recalled the stillness, the emptiness, the sense of cold eyes dully watching from shuttered houses, that had been the invading Germans’ greeting four years before. How delightful then it had been to savour even that pretence of welcome offered by people like Louise Crozier. But beneath it all had been fear, or greed, or hate - nothing of this pure, untainted upwelling of joy which was exploding all around him.

He was slightly delirious, he realized. Somehow he’d scrambled up on the back of a half-track where he clung, unremarkable in a convoy festooned with men, women and children, kissing the soldiers, waving their flags, singing the ‘Marseillaise’. He had to get back to reality, he told himself, to the here and now.

‘What’s the date?’ he asked a young woman who clung by his side, almost hysterical with joy.

‘It’s Christmas Day! All Saints’ Day! Easter Day! It’s everyone’s birthday!’ she cried.

‘But the date!’

‘August the twenty-fifth, of course! You’ll never forget it, none of us will!’

She was probably right. What it meant to him was he’d been in Fresnes for about three weeks. Fiebelkorn’s men had worked at him in a leisurely way, pushing him often to the edge of confession to complicity in the plot. That way surely peace and rest lay. But some stubbornness at his core refused to let these bastards make him lie.

‘I knew nothing. Nothing!’ he repeated through bloodily gaping lips.

And finally Fiebelkorn had believed him. Or got sick of him. Or simply forgotten him. He was transferred to Fresnes. ‘We’ll be back for you tomorrow,’ promised his SS escort. But they never came. And he lay on his prison bed, a cipher to his new guards, who were indifferent to his crime or nationality and indeed to everything except who’d placed him there. The conditions, the treatment, the food here, were not pleasant but they were Hôtel Meurice standards compared with what he’d suffered in the Avenue Foch. Slowly he’d started to explore his ferociously abused body. Cuts, bruises, missing teeth, a broken nose, even cigarette burns he catalogued as minor inconveniences. Cracked ribs and mangled fingertips were more lasting sources of pain, but these too would pass. What had worried him most because they felt most permanent were his left eye, which even when he forced the bruised and swollen flesh around it apart admitted no light, and his testicles, which were so puffed up and painful that walking was almost impossible.

Three weeks’ rest had worked no miracles, but at least the swelling round his crotch had gone down enough for mobility, though what the American doctor had hidden beneath the dressing on his eye he did not yet know. Perhaps he should have waited to find out. In fact why hadn’t he? What was he doing in his condition clinging precariously to this enemy vehicle? Was he trying to escape?

The thought made him smile. It felt unfamiliar, painful even. It was the oddest escape route imaginable! No, it was some basic instinct that was taking him back into Paris, the sense that the changes exploding through Europe now were so great, so cataclysmic, they might blow him anywhere; the fear that this was the closest to Janine he might ever be again. If there was a last chance to see her, he had to grasp it. And if there was a last chance to protect her, he had to take it. He prayed that all his files at the Lutétia had been burnt or removed or that he could get to them in time to destroy all references to Janine.

And then? Surrender? Escape to continue the fight? The fight for what? He looked down at his mangled finger ends and felt the throb and jag of all his other hurts. These had been inflicted on him in the name and by the authority of the State he served.

‘Here, don’t fall off,’ said the girl next to him, grabbing his arm.

He hadn’t realized he’d been slipping.

‘Thanks,’ he said.

She looked closely at him and said, ‘My God, you’ve been through the mangle, haven’t you? Did the Boche do this?’

‘Yes,’ he nodded. ‘Yes. The Boche.’

‘Oh, the bastards. But this is the day they get their comeuppance! Think of that! Death to the Boche! Death to the Boche!’

Others took up the chant. And after a while, for the sake of verisimilitude he told himself wryly, he joined in.

And so, on the back of a liberator’s half-track, with tricolours flying around him and flower-petals in his hair, Günter Mai returned to Paris.

3

They’d come for Janine Simonian the previous night. There were about twenty of them, the men slightly drunk, some of them inclined to merriment. But the women weren’t drunk, and they certainly weren’t merry.

She put up no resistance. Her father wasn’t in the house and her mother had screamed and run and locked herself in the bakehouse when she saw the mob, thinking they were after her.

But once she realized it was Janine they wanted, she reappeared and flung herself into her daughter’s defence, both verbally and physically, till two of the men had to restrain her.

‘Let’s do the old cow too,’ suggested one of the intruders. ‘She’s been arselicking the Boche for years and playing favourites with her miserable lumpy bread.’

‘My Crozier’s bread’s never lumpy!’ screamed Louise. ‘What would you know about lumpy bread, anyway, you with no teeth!’

The woman thus addressed flew at Madame Crozier and had to be restrained in her turn. Several of the other women urged that Louise should be brought to ‘justice’ with Janine but their leader said, ‘No, leave the old bird. She’s not for us.’

‘Why not?’

‘Never you mind. But her, she’s ours whatever anyone says.’

And they dragged Janine out into the street. By the time they reached their destination, a café a couple of streets away, their number had doubled. The café was already packed. In better times, they would have a singer or a musician here and there was a small stage at the back.

Tonight it was the focus of attention as if Chevalier himself had been appearing. Huddled together on it were half a dozen women. Their heads had been shaved and their bare feet trod on their own tresses. Their clothes had been ripped from shoulder to waist and on their naked breasts swastikas had been daubed in red and black paint. At least two of them clutched small babies in their arms, presumably the result of their so-called horizontal collaboration. At the front of the stage a fat man in a blue apron stood over a woman seated on a wooden stool. He was cutting her hair with a large pair of scissors, flourishing each tress triumphantly before throwing it over his shoulder, and occasionally taking a long draught from a wine bottle. The audience clapped and cheered, but fell silent when he put the scissors aside and took a cut-throat razor to perform the final shaving.

‘Hold still,
liebchen,’
he said. ‘I’ve not cut anyone yet, but if I do, I might go all the way and take off your ears!’

He shaved her swiftly and efficiently and twisted her bald head to display the evidence of his expertise to the wildly applauding audience before stepping aside to let a trio of women get to work with their paint pots.

Janine closed her eyes wearily. This too she could bear.

Now she was up on the stage. She heard her name called to the audience: ‘… Janine Simonian who fornicated with a Boche officer while her husband was being murdered -’ the crowd howled their hate - ‘… and who stayed in Paris to indulge her lusts while her children were sent out into the country to be picked up and deported by the Boche…’

‘No!’ she screamed.

The change from corpse-like indifference to a vital, struggling indignation was so electrifying that for a second it reduced the mob to silence. Then they began to urge the barber on, but his was no easy task. She had to be held down while he used the scissors. Twice she overturned the chair, twice was forced back upright with increasing violence. And when the blue-aproned man came to take the razor, he looked with great unease at the wildly jerking head.

‘For Christ’s sake, be still!’ he hissed. ‘It’s only hair, woman!’

She spat in his face.

‘Cut! Cut! Cut!’ screamed the audience.

‘Right, you bitch,’ he said, pulling at his wine bottle.

He put the razor to her skull. She flung her head from side to side. Next moment there was blood streaming from a long cut on her brow. Now the barber seemed bent on proving that far from being an accident, this drawing of blood had been deliberate. Ferociously he hacked at the stubble and when the razor pierced the skin he did not draw back but removed skin and hair simultaneously. Soon her head was crowned with a bright red helmet of blood.

Then it was the women’s turn. Janine kicked one of them in the stomach, bit another’s hand to the bone. They retaliated with equal ferocity, tearing her clothes not just to the waist but to the knees and wielding their brushes as if they were chisels. Still Janine resisted and one of her assailants grabbed the barber’s scissors and screamed, ‘Let’s make yours permanent!’ Before she could be stopped, she had thrust the point and scored a huge, jagged-edged swastika beneath Janine’s breasts across her belly. The barber, already a little ashamed of the havoc he’d created with her head, jumped forward, swearing, to grab at the scissors. But the damage was done.

‘For fuck’s sake, get her out of here!’ he said, looking down at Janine’s bloody figure which had suddenly gone quite slack again. ‘The sight of her will spoil all the fun.’

They dragged her back through the streets and put her in the boulangerie doorway and left her there after banging at the door.

No one came. Louise Crozier was too terrified, not knowing what madmen might be roaming the streets to avenge imagined wrongs, and Claude Crozier was not yet home. She might have stayed there all night, if Michel Boucher hadn’t turned up an hour later.

He too was not in the best of conditions. There was blood on his face and his clothing was torn and dusty. But his bruised and swollen knuckles showed that he’d inflicted as well as taken damage.

‘Janine, what are you doing out here? Oh Jesus Christ!’ He had become aware of her injuries. ‘You too! The bastards got you too. Let’s get you inside. Come on, open up! Auntie Louise! Uncle Claude! It’s Miche!’

He thumped so hard on the door that the glass which had survived all the threats of the Occupation cracked right across. A light appeared somewhere within the house.

‘Hurry it up! Oh, Janine, Janine, you poor kid. They’ve gone mad. What have we done, eh? Me, I’ve tried to earn an honest living, nothing more. For that they tried to hang me! Would you believe it? They were throwing a rope over a lamp-post! There’s a couple of them will feel like hanging themselves when they wake up, I tell you. And that Pajou! He’ll wish someone had hanged him when I get hold of him. I should’ve been long gone, but when I went for my car, it wasn’t there. Pajou! The car, and everything else he could lay his hands on! The little shit, I’ll tear his head off. Come on, Auntie Lou! Can’t you see it’s me! Open this sodding door!’

And at last, Louise Crozier, trembling and terrified, unlocked the door and let them in.

Günter Mai found Paris, always a city of contrasts, now displaying to him the greatest contrast of all. Struggling through the joyous celebrating crowds where the most martial sound was the popping of champagne corks, he finally found space and peace. But before he could relax and enjoy it, he suddenly found himself back on the edge of the war.

He’d come in through the Porte d’Orléans. Taking his bearings now for the first time, he realized that the Observatory was behind him and ahead were the Luxembourg Gardens, source of the noise of combat.

That made sense, if anything in this madness could be called sense. He didn’t know who was in charge of defending Paris now; Fiebelkorn had told him that the old military commander and his close aides had gone back to Berlin to be dealt with for their part in the July plot; but whoever it was would probably concentrate his forces in strongpoints like the Luxembourg.

He certainly didn’t want to be there. He struck off left. He was tempted to make straight for the boulangerie but once seen there and recognized, he would almost certainly find his scope for action limited, possibly permanently. So first it was essential to get to the Lutétia and check what had happened there.

He didn’t need to get within more than a hundred yards to see he was too late. That his colleagues would have gone was obvious. Probably the non-fighting element in the Occupation Force had been withdrawn a good week before. But the hotel wasn’t deserted. There seemed to be a constant stream of men going in and out. Some of them had rifles. The Resistance had got there before him.

So; the boulangerie. For what purpose? To see Janine once more before he met whatever fate was awaiting him? What he was hoping for from the encounter he couldn’t say. Something to dilute the bitterness of their last meeting, that was the most his mind could imagine, and that took an effort.

At the bakery, the noise of the fighting round the Luxembourg was very loud. He stood for a moment and looked at the shop. Soon perhaps it would be back to normal;

soon the old promise of ‘Pains Français et Viennois, Pains de Seigle, Chaussons aux Pommes et Gâteaux Secs’ would be fulfilled. Unless the Croziers were made to suffer for the welcome they had accorded him. That was very possible. This was a family he seemed destined to bring trouble to.

The glass on the door was cracked. Perhaps the trouble had started already. He pushed the door open and went in, passing through the bare and empty shop with the familiarity of use. Last time he had been here, it was to see Janine alone. Last time he was here, she had taken his hand and led him up these stairs…

He paused and looked up them. At the top of the stairs stood Madame Crozier.

‘You!’ she said. ‘You dare come here? You!’

‘Madame,’ he said. ‘Where’s Janine?’

‘You’ve come to see what they’ve done to her? Perhaps you should! It’s your fault!’

He ran up the stairs, all pain and weakness forgotten. Pushed open the door, looked at the bed where he and Janine had lain.

Now she lay there alone.

‘Oh God,’ said Mai. ‘What have they done to you?’

He advanced towards the bed but a voice behind him said, ‘She’s sleeping. Leave her.’

He turned. It was Claude Crozier speaking, his voice firmer, more commanding than Mai recalled. And in his hands with the hammer cocked was a large revolver.

‘Downstairs, please, lieutenant.’

He urged Mai ahead of him. Behind, Louise Crozier went back into the bedroom and shut the door.

‘What have they done to her?’ demanded Mai.

‘Punished her for associating with you, what do you think?’ said Crozier. ‘She resisted. They went further than they intended.’

‘You sound as if you almost sympathized with them!’

‘They’re Frenchmen. It’s a sense of their weakness not of their virtue that makes them act this way,’ said Crozier wearily. ‘You look as if you’ve had your own troubles, lieutenant. Sorry, it’s captain now, isn’t it?’

‘I’m not sure, not after my troubles,’ said Mai. ‘Tell me, Claude, how have you and your wife managed to escape? Why did these brave supporters of French justice pick only on Janine?’

‘Because of you. Because they couldn’t stomach her sleeping with you while Jean-Paul was being shot. If I’d been here, perhaps I could have intervened, kept them off her. Perhaps.’

‘Like you kept them off your wife? God, she’s fifty times more a collaborator than ever Janine was!’

‘Yes,’ agreed Crozier. ‘You’re right. But croissants aren’t embraces. And she is my wife.’

He glanced at his watch.

‘I have some friends arriving shortly. We’ll be going out on a matter of business. It’s probably best that they don’t see you. Come this way.’

He motioned Mai towards the bakehouse.

As they went through the door, Crozier said, ‘I don’t know why I should bother about you. Except that I came to think of you as honest.’

‘Because I praised your baking?’

‘That too perhaps,’ said Crozier. He gestured towards the left-hand oven, the bigger one, the one which shortage of flour and fuel had kept unused for more than three years.

‘Get in there,’ he said.

‘In the oven? What the hell for?’ demanded Mai.

‘Don’t worry. I’m not going to bake you. And you should be reasonably comfortable, at least by Resistance standards. I’ve had plenty of time to pad it out, haven’t I?’

‘Pad it out…?’ Mai’s professional mind was suddenly back at work. He knew what Crozier must be telling him but he couldn’t believe it. How many times had he been in this bakehouse? Leaned against this very oven door? Chatted to Crozier and his wife and thought of himself as the great manipulator! ‘Oh shit,’ he said.

‘That’s right,’ said Crozier allowing himself a brief smile of triumph. ‘I’ve had a lot of interesting people in there. Allied airmen, Resistants, escaped prisoners - and not a single search in all these years, for which I’ve got you to thank, I believe, Captain Mai.’

‘Madame Crozier too?’ said Mai disbelievingly. ‘Was she…?’

Crozier shook his head. ‘No, I’m afraid not. She provided such good cover, I could hardly take her into my confidence. But I made my friends promise she wouldn’t be touched afterwards. But Janine…’

He fell silent, then sighed and said, ‘All right. In you get. I’ll be going out when my friends arrive. We have business to attend to.’

‘Killing Germans, you mean?’

‘If necessary,’ said Crozier mildly. ‘But not you. Not for an hour, anyway. My wife will release you an hour after I’ve gone. What you do then, where you go, is your business. Both of you.’

‘Both?’ said Mai, puzzled.

‘Oh yes. You’ve got company.’

He swivelled the iron bar which held the oven door shut and swung it open.

‘Hello, Günter,’ said Michel Boucher. ‘That little shit, Pajou. You were right not to trust him. He stole my bloody car!’