The Collaborators (36 page)
There was fighting yet to do; there was blood still to shed. While to the south of the river they were dancing in the streets and celebrating the victory, on the Rue de Rivoli and in the Tuileries Garden they were still fighting for it.
There were Parisians here too, many of them simply spectators, eager to see the final act of this epic drama. But there were others who weren’t content to watch, but who, unasked and sometimes unwanted, rushed forward to join the Allied soldiers in the last battle.
An American infantry section, pinned down by fire from a pill-box close to the Orangerie, settled to wait for the arrival of a tank to remove the obstacle.
A young man with an automatic pistol joined them. They’d observed him earlier blazing away at the Germans with apparent unconcern for his own safety.
Now he put down his empty pistol and reached out to the grenades which the section leader had dangling from his belt.
‘You permit?’ he said.
‘It’s your party, friend,’ said the American.
Taking two grenades, the Frenchman stood up and walked towards the pill-box. Perhaps his casual mien baffled the German gunners, or perhaps they thought he came bearing a message of truce.
When he got close enough to throw the grenades, they opened fire. But it was too late, for them and the Frenchman alike. The pill-box rocked, cracked, fell silent. And the Frenchman slid to the ground.
When the Americans reached him, they thought at first he was dead. So did he.
It was with a profound sense of disappointment that Christian Valois opened his eyes to see the anxious faces peering down at him.
‘He looks bad, sarge.’
‘Yeah. Call up the medics,’ said the sergeant. ‘This one ought to be kept alive for the shrinks to play with!’
General Choltitz, the German commander, surrendered in the Meurice early in the afternoon. General de Gaulle entered the city at four-thirty. On his way in, he may have passed Michel Boucher and Günter Mai on their way out. When Louise Crozier released them from the oven, Mai had asked to see Janine again. Her mother refused and threatened to call for help. Boucher seized Mai’s arm and said, ‘Come on, Günter. If they get hold of you today, they’ll lynch you! Look what the bastards tried to do to me!’
‘Where are we going?’ demanded the German as he was dragged, weak and bewildered into the street.
‘We’ll get a few things together, pick up some transport. You leave it to me. Then we’ll head off to my house at Moret. Hélène will be worried about me. We’ll hole up there till things quieten down. Just do what I tell you, OK?’
So they left, the
Abwehr
officer and the collaborator, while Janine lay, her eyes open, staring sightlessly at the cracked, uneven ceiling.
They came for her again in the first month of the Liberation, not a mob of them this time but two gendarmes in neat clean uniforms. They brought an official warrant.
‘What the hell is this?’ demanded Crozier. ‘Can’t you leave her alone? Look at her! You can see what they’ve done already.’
‘Sorry,’ said the policemen. ‘But she’s got to come. She’ll be safer with us anyway when the news of the charge gets out.’
‘What charge? That she was friendly with a German officer? Who wasn’t? You lot did more arse-licking than anyone, everyone knows that. Just because you decided to do a bit of fighting in the last few days doesn’t mean we’ve forgotten the years before!’
He spoke bitterly and the gendarme had difficulty in keeping his temper.
‘There’s no need for that, monsieur,’ he said sharply. ‘They’ve been going through files the Boche left behind. It’s not just having a bit on the side that your girl’s accused of. They’re saying she was a paid agent of the
Abwehr.
They’re saying it was her who gave away the meeting when her husband got shot!’
Janine hardly seemed to notice her arrest. In a state close to catatonia, only once did she show any sign of emotion. When the enclosed police van into which she was put came to a halt and she was urged out, she stood blinking in the sunshine for a moment. Then it registered where they had brought her and something like a smile floated across her thin, bruised face, but not a smile of hope or of humour. It was more an acknowledgement of what she had known instinctively for a long time. This world her husband had fought and died for, this world she had lost her children and her liberty for, was not too different from the world it replaced. Oppression and blood, revenge and hate; the basic materials were much the same. Even the locations clearly weren’t to be very different.
She fell to her knees and prayed to God, any god, to keep her children safe. Once before she had prayed the same prayer in much the same vicinity. Only that time she’d been outside and they’d been in. Now it was the other way round.
They’d thrown her, with the other thousands arrested since the Liberation, into the prison camp at Drancy.
March 1945
… en effet, la résistance, qui a fini par triompher, montre que le rôle de l’homme est de savoir dire non aux faits même lorsqu’il semble qu’on doive s’y soumettre.
Jean-Paul Sartre,
Qu’est-ce qu’un collaborateur?
On the face of it, the Simonian trial had everything, even in these days when the courts of justice had been resounding to tales of death, deceit and betrayal for several months. But somehow after the first day, it never took off.
The trouble was the prisoner herself. She stood there like a pillar of salt, absorbing all emotion like moisture from the atmosphere. She never raised her voice, never contradicted. She denied nothing, admitted everything. Yes, she had been on the
Abwehr
officer’s list of agents; yes, she had accepted favours from him; yes, she had slept with him; yes, she had signed the letter found in his files in which she betrayed her husband’s last meeting.
The only time the proceedings came to life was when the prisoner pleaded for news of her children. The judge had felt enough pity for her distress to have their fate checked, but nothing was known except that they had been put on a train carrying several hundred Jewish prisoners from Lyon to Germany.
The judge was finding the woman’s dead presence increasingly uncomfortable. The number of spectators had diminished by half, and the newspapers had given the whole thing up as a bad job. Not that the purge did not still have a vast amount of momentum, but the main focus of the public lust for expiation was directed to the promised trials of the Vichy leaders before the new High Court of Justice. Meanwhile the papers tried to direct the country’s interest outwards to the re-establishment of France among the great powers and invited readers to rejoice in the news that the Allied Forces, including the Free French, were crossing the Rhine.
The judge shortened matters by refusing to let the prosecutor strut centre stage with his star witness, Christian Valois, the Resistance hero.
‘Proof,’ he said, ‘where there is no denial, merely consumes the court’s precious time.’
The verdict was, of course, inevitable. All that was still debatable was the sentence. The prosecutor would certainly demand death. It would be impossible to deprive him of
that
dramatic moment. Death, of course, was pointless even if the prisoner deserved it, which the judge doubted. So far de Gaulle had commuted every death sentence passed on a woman. So it was gaol. But for how long?
For the woman’s defence, there was only her father, also it seemed a Resistance hero. Was there anyone who wasn’t? wondered the judge. He had little that was material to say, but the judge let him maunder on, disposing of the prosecutor’s objections by saying, ‘Character testimonial is still acceptable in law, I’m sure you haven’t forgotten
that!’
From the biographical stuff the father gave, it didn’t seem likely, even allowing for parental bias, that the woman would deliberately set out to get her husband killed. And the larger part of her association with this German seemed to spring from her concern for her family. Perhaps twelve years would be enough?
He encouraged the father to go on. The woman had been given a defence lawyer, of course, but he seemed totally inadequate. Where were they digging these people up from for God’s sake?
So the trial drew to its close. This final morning should see it over well before lunch. The defence lawyer was talking with or rather listening to the father. Now, with evident reluctance, he approached the bench.
Another defence witness! To character? No, to fact!
The judge was doubtful. The prosecutor was scornfully, almost imperiously dismissive.
‘By all means, let us hear him,’ said the judge.
The man was brought in. He looked rather down-at-heel, with clothes that were manifestly too large for him. But he had an honest, open kind of face.
The judge himself took over the questioning. If there was anything useful to be got out of this fellow, it was silly to leave it to that idiot defender.
‘Your name, monsieur,’ he said.
‘Scheffer. I’m known as Édouard Scheffer.’
For the first time, at the sound of this strong Alsatian accent, the woman’s head rose and she turned her eyes to the witness stand.
‘You say you’re
known
as Édouard Scheffer?’ said the judge. ‘That implies a sobriquet.’
‘Yes sir,’ said the witness. ‘My real name is Mai. Günter Mai.
Hauptmann
Günter Mai, late of the
Abwehr
counter-intelligence unit stationed at the Hôtel Lutétia in the Boulevard Raspail.’
Now the pall of dullness cast by the prisoner lifted from the courtroom like a morning mist, and the judge sat upright, eyes bright, and he thought, At last! A trial I can tell my dinner guests about without my wife shutting me up for being boring!
Günter Mai had spent the past months at Boucher’s house near Moret. That it should prove such a safe place of refuge so close to Paris had seemed unlikely, but the care which Boucher, so careless in most other respects, had taken in establishing this retreat for his family was soon revealed. To the few locals he had any contact with, he was merely a businessman whose work kept him in Paris a good deal. He had complete sets of papers for himself and his wife under her maiden name of Campaux. He shaved off his beard, trimmed his hair and set about giving the appearance of a man taking a rest till the turmoil had settled enough for him to resume his work.
‘I thought you didn’t think anyone could wish you harm,’ said Mai ironically.
‘There’s always some mad bugger,’ said Boucher. ‘For myself, I reckon I can take care of anything. But there’s Hélène and the kiddies to think of. That’s why I set up here in the first place.’
‘And very well you’ve done it.’
‘Yes. Foolproof, I’d say.’
‘But not Pajou-proof,’ reminded Mai.
Boucher’s expression darkened.
‘That little bastard. I’d love to get my hands on him!’
Summer browned into autumn, blackened to winter. So certain was Mai that each day must be the one on which they came looking for Boucher, or his own thin pretence was pierced, that he felt no sense of time passing or of time stretching ahead. When Hélène started talking of Christmas, he was truly amazed.
‘I should try to get away,’ he said to Boucher one night.
‘Where to?’
A good question. Most of France was now liberated. German resistance was strong and would be strongest of all along the border; but the end, inevitable in Mai’s eyes since 1942, was complete defeat, without condition, without honour. He felt no impulse to try to get to Germany and die in arms. What did that make him? A traitor? A collaborator?
‘Switzerland,’ he said without conviction. ‘Or Spain.’
‘Yes,’ said Boucher eagerly. ‘Switzerland, that’s what I thought. But it’s too dangerous on your own, Günter. Wait till Hélène’s time comes and she gets her strength back. Then we’ll all go.’
Hélène was heavily pregnant, her baby due at the year’s end. Boucher was more worried now than he’d ever been. His naïve self-confidence had suffered a blow in the autumn when, growing tired of these self-imposed restrictions, he’d announced he was going to take a trip to Paris. Despite his wife’s protests, he’d gone, but he’d soon come back.
‘They’ve arrested thousands!’ he said in amazement. ‘They say the Vél d’Hiv and Drancy are packed. Places your lot used, now we’re using them! They’re going to put ‘em on trial, Günter!’
From now on, Boucher kept close to the house. Mai suggested that if they did come to arrest him it wouldn’t help his case if he was found to be harbouring a German.
‘Don’t be daft,’ said Boucher with an unusual flash of lucidity on this point. ‘If they arrest me, one German more or less isn’t going to help or harm my case, is it? Besides, I need you here, Günter. I’d go mad being stuck here alone; no other man, I mean. I’d start sneaking off for a chat and a drink and God knows what that would lead to!’
So he stayed, needing no persuading. Germany; Switzerland; Spain; the only place he really wanted to be was Paris to find out what had happened to Janine. There was no way of getting news. Claude Crozier had made it clear that hiding in his oven was his last act of kindness; to contact him would be to run a deadly risk.
‘She’ll be all right,’ assured Boucher. ‘Like me, tough as old rope.’
‘But the children. If she hasn’t heard anything about the children…’
Boucher gathered his little daughter to him and pressed her close, but did not reply.
The new baby came early in January, a boy. Boucher wanted one of his names to be Günter but Mai advised against it.
‘Édouard, then,’ said Boucher. ‘He shall have your French name at least.’
So the child became Michel Édouard Boucher.
At the end of January there was a second arrival.
Late one wet and windswept night as the two men followed their usual custom of drinking a nightcap of brandy and hot water, they heard a noise outside. They exchanged looks but no words. Rising, Boucher signalled Mai to go out of the back while he took the front. Arming himself with a broad kitchen knife, Mai slipped out into the squally rain and made his way down the side of the house. As he turned the corner to the front, the main door opened, spilling light over the threshold, then Boucher stepped out.
‘Who’s there?’ he called.
‘Miche, is that you? Thank God, old friend.’
A figure emerged from a patch of shrubbery and began to move forward. In a second Mai was behind him, his arm locked about the intruder’s neck and his knife pressed across the bridge of his nose.
‘Don’t move or I’ll cut your eyes out,’ he said. ‘Miche!’
Boucher came running, a torch in his hand. He flashed it into the newcomer’s face.
‘Fuck me,’ he said. ‘It’s a Christmas present come late. Step inside, Pajou, while I unwrap you!’
The little Géstapiste was in a pretty run-down condition. Unkempt, unshaven, he was soaked to the skin though the rainwater hadn’t helped clean him.
‘God, you smell vile,’ said Boucher in disgust when they’d got him into the house.
‘You’d smell too if you’d been through what I’ve been through,’ snarled Pajou. The left lens of his spectacles was cracked and there was a suppurating scar down his cheek. Boucher postponed his threatened vengeance while they got the little man cleaned up, but he made it clear it was merely a postponement.
‘Now,’ he said finally. ‘Talk. Why’ve you come here, you little shit? To apologize? Where’s my bloody car?’
‘Miche, I’m sorry. Sorry for everything, sorry to disturb you now. But God, you’ve no idea how relieved I was to find you still here. My last hope! If anyone will help an old mate, it’s Miche. I mean, look at the way you’re helping the captain here. This is a real surprise, captain, but I’m so glad to see you looking so well…’
Boucher took the knife from Mai’s hands.
‘Talk,’ he said.
Pajou talked. Making allowances for embellishments and omissions, it seemed he’d decided that Spain was the best place for him and had headed south in the stolen car with as much loot as he could carry. After narrowly evading the American and Free French forces who’d landed on the Mediterranean coast and were rapidly driving their way north, he’d reached the Spanish border, paid a large sum to a guide to take him over the Pyrenees, spent an exhausting and bewildering couple of nights on the mountain paths, woke on the second morning to find himself abandoned and all his baggage missing, and descended to the valley below to find himself not in the Basque country that he’d been promised but back in Gascogny where he’d started. He’d returned to Paris by fits and starts and with many narrow squeaks because here he’d left hidden the bulkier items of his war loot. But when he went to the warehouse he’d hidden it in, he found he was too late, it had gone. Worse, his presence was reported and for the last week he’d been on the run, in and around Paris, living rough and with his description in the hands of all gendarmerie units.
‘They’re saying dreadful things about us, Miche,’ he concluded indignantly. ‘But we’re innocent, aren’t we? We never did anything to be ashamed of!’
He stressed the
we,
making his meaning unambiguous. He wasn’t asking for help and sanctuary. He was stating quite bluntly that if he didn’t get it, Miche might as well give himself up too.
If Boucher had decided to slit Pajou’s throat there and then, Mai would not have intervened. But despite his threats of violence, the big red-head had no stomach for murder, and so the house at Moret got another guest, but one who had to remain completely hidden for there was no explanation to cover his presence.
He was not good company. He drank everything he could lay his hands on and in his cups he gave up his pretence at innocence and boasted of the disgusting things he’d done with nostalgic glee.
‘They’ll have your head, you bastard,’ said Boucher. ‘They’ll stretch you out and kill you slow and you deserve it.’
‘Don’t come the innocent with me, Miche! You may have been a bit more delicate-stomached when it came to the dirty work, but you were always around when it came to the pickings! They all were! Oh yes, the day they try to put me on trial, they’ll hear some things about their precious heroes they’d rather not hear! No, they’ll send me to Switzerland with a pension rather than risk putting me up in open court!’
‘They won’t bother with the expense of a trial,’ said Boucher. ‘They’ll kill you in the streets.’
‘For what? For doing a job?’ said Pajou, suddenly fearful. ‘There’s no justice. No, there isn’t. All right, you think there is? What are you doing hiding here, then? I tell you, Miche, they’re trying everyone in Paris. Everyone! They’ve even got that skinny cousin of yours under arrest, the one you used to meet in the Balzac, captain, and in the Jardin des Plantes.’
He leered and winked at Mai, delighted to show off his intimate knowledge of everything that had gone on.
Mai couldn’t speak. Boucher said, ‘Janine? She’s arrested? What for?’
‘She’s been under arrest for months,’ said Pajou dismis-sively. ‘I went sniffing around that shop her parents run, looking for news of you, Miche. I’d heard nothing, you see, and I was beginning to wonder if mebbe you’d got yourself holed away, safe and sound, down here. I talked with the mother, gabby woman, a bit thick. I buttered her up! All I wanted was to know if she’d heard from you, but I got the whole fucking family history!’