The Occupation Secret

by The Occupation Secret (retail) (epub)

  ‘Get up. Get up you damned fool!’

  Hervé twisted his head skywards. The sun was shining blindingly into his face. The black uniformed sergeant-major was hovering over him like the shadow of death. As Hervé watched, the man fired a further single shot into the ground.

  ‘Now run, man. And don’t return to St Gervais. Not until after we’re gone. This is for the girl’s sake. A gift to her from the Major. Do you understand me?’

  Hervé clambered shakily out of the grave. His face and body were drenched in sweat. His ears were hissing with the tinnitus from the shots. His mouth hung open uncomprehendingly.

  ‘Do you understand what I am saying?’

  Hervé nodded. Without thinking, he began a halting, weaving run in the direction of the clearing. At any moment he expected the sergeant-major to change his mind and bring him down. ‘Escaping prisoner. I was forced to shoot him.’ But nothing happened.

  Hervé stopped at the storm-damaged oak tree and risked a single backwards glance. The man was shovelling earth back into the grave, his head turned purposefully away from the direction of Hervé’s flight.

  Hervé corkscrewed around the tree and continued running. He had the intense conviction that he was going to run forever. That he would go on running like this until all sense left him, and he became a tree, or leaves, or a zephyr of wind.

  ‘Well. Did you see anything? Hear anything?’ Meyer threw the spade into the back of the Kubelwagen.

  ‘Absolutely nothing, Herr Sturmscharführer. You just went into the woods to take a leak.’

  ‘Good. Remember that.’

  St Gervais

  1 pm: Monday 5th June 1944

  Fewer people than usual came to Jeanne Léré’s restaurant that Monday lunchtime. She ignored the tell-tale signs at first, but by twelve thirty it had become obvious that her lunch trade would consist in its entirety of two visiting German officers, an itinerant salesman, and the alcoholic seed merchant from Figeac.

  She walked to the front door and peered outside. There was nothing noticeably different about the day. No wind to speak of. The sun shone thinly across the schoolyard. A faint smell of animal urine lingered in the air from the farmer’s market. What were all her regular clients doing? Attending a funeral?

  Madame Mercier emerged from her perennial lunchtime gossip with the patronne of Au Chic Parisien next door, her empty shopping bag flapping in her hand.

  Jeanne Léré forced a smile onto her face. ‘Window-shopping again, Mathilde?’

  La Mercier cut her dead.

  Well. It had been a catty remark. And there’d been little love lost between the two women since Jeanne Léré had allowed old man Mercier to give her a fumble once at a long-forgotten village dance. To tell the truth, she’d always suspected he’d gone straight home and bragged about it to his wife – as much to show her that he was still desirable, if she knew men, as to grease up his seat in heaven. Because he’d certainly never come back for seconds.

  Still. Mathilde Mercier had never quite dared cut her before. They’d always maintained frosty but polite relations. At this rate of attrition, half the married women in town would be giving her the cold-shoulder: she knew one or two errant husbands, though, who could be counted on to keep their traps shut and continue plying her with their attentions.

  As if in echo of her thoughts, Mayor Hourthier inched past on the opposite side of the street, his head bowed, his concentration seemingly fixed on the cobblestones beneath his feet.

  ‘André?’

  The mayor waved an imperious hand and continued on his way. ‘Busy. Very busy. An emergency council meeting. I’ll talk to you later, Jeanne.’

  Jeanne Léré drew herself up. ‘You’ll talk to me now. This instant.’

  Mayor Hourthier stopped as if he had just come face to face with an impenetrable stone wall. ‘I’ve already told you it’s simply not possible. I’m far too busy.’ For some obscure reason the mayor was refusing to look across at her. Instead, he was fiddling with his pocket watch, tapping and prodding at it as if he had neglected to wind it up, that morning, before breakfast.

  ‘Good. I shall speak to your wife, then. We two women have so much in common.’

  The mayor flashed a loaded glance up and down the street. He took in the retreating Madame Mercier’s back, decided that she was safely out of earshot, then hurried mournfully across the road. ‘Quickly. Get inside.’

  Jeanne Léré’s mouth fell open in shock. Until now, she had always been the dominant force in their relationship – not the mayor. He could be as forceful as he wanted to be in public, but in private she demanded a little formal courtesy and consideration. ‘Why should I get inside? And why should I do it quickly?’

  But the mayor had already squeezed past her and was moving, as swiftly as his considerable bulk allowed him, towards the kitchen.

  Jeanne Léré made a face. She signalled across the dining-room with her hand. ‘You take over, Lise.’

  ‘Oui, Madame.’

  Jeanne followed the mayor into the kitchen area. She was already hard at work on her plan of attack. Something was in the wind, something that might affect her business, and she wanted advance warning.

  Mayor Hourthier was weaving around the kitchen like a drunken man. Peering out of the windows. Checking the catch on the back door. His face was covered in a thin film of sweat and his lips had turned an unhealthy blue.

  ‘André? What on earth’s got into you? You look like a ghost.’

  ‘What’s got into me? What’s got into me?’ The mayor was endeavouring to whisper: to keep his voice sufficiently low so that the German officers wouldn’t hear him next door, but sufficiently high to suggest his sense of moral outrage. ‘Surely you’ve heard about Najac?’

  Jeanne Léré shrugged. ‘The Boches have taken him to Montauban for further questioning. It’s a tragedy, of course. But what did the fool expect, trying to assassinate a major in the SS?’

  The mayor shook his head so vehemently that his dewlaps flapped against his starched collar. ‘No. No. No. That’s not what happened. Not what happened at all.’

  ‘What on earth are you talking about? What didn’t happen?’

  ‘Where’s Lucie?’

  Jeanne Léré contrived a long-suffering but still vaguely seductive moue. ‘She’s over at the Bastide. Where she usually is at lunchtimes. You know that very well.’

  ‘I doubt it, somehow. I doubt it very much. But if she is… well, you’d better send for her as fast as you can and tell her to stay put.’

  Jeanne put her hand to her throat. It was finally dawning on her that something somewhere was seriously wrong. ‘André, have you gone quite mad?’

  Hourthier grabbed at the nearest available open bottle, poured himself a tumbler of red wine, and downed it in one. ‘The Boches have shot him.’

  ‘Shot who?’ Jeanne Léré hurried forward and grabbed Hourthier’s arm. ‘Hervé? No. You’re mistaken.’

  ‘I’m not mistaken. They took him out to somewhere near Flairac and they shot him. Like a dog.’ Hourthier poured himself a second glass of wine and slugged it back.

  ‘Nonsense. How do you know all this?’

  The mayor pressed the back of his hand against his stomach, as if he feared the onset of yet another bout of indigestion on top of all his other worries. ‘The whole town knows about it. That German corporal. The one who’s been pestering the Lanclos girl. He blabbed it to her as soon as he got back this morning. Thought it would make him look big, I suppose, sharing in the liquidation of a suspected terrorist. He and that sergeant-major took Hervé out first thing, made him dig himself a hole, then shot him. They’re only pretending he was sent to Montauban to keep the town quiet.’

  Jeanne Léré turned away. The movement was more by way of hiding her shock at the mayor’s revelations, than through any sudden advent of grief for Hervé. ‘I’ve never heard such rot. The Germans don’t shoot people furtively. They make a song and a dance about it.’

  ‘N
evertheless. The people here believe him. Hervé was badly beaten up, it appears. The Stols probably wanted to cover up the evidence.’

  ‘The evidence of what?’ Despite her bluster, Jeanne Léré could feel fate’s outstretched finger prodding at her upper spine.

  ‘Look. I can’t stay here any longer. Someone might see me.’

  Jeanne lunged for Hourthier’s arm. ‘What do you mean “someone might see me”? This is a restaurant. A public place.’

  Mayor Hourthier disentangled himself as delicately as circumstances allowed. ‘Jeanne. Listen to me. You’ve got to get out of town. You and Lucie are only safe while the Germans are still here. And perhaps not even then. Hervé was deep in with the Maquis. Those boys will be coming down from the hills to avenge him. And they won’t be fastidious.’

  ‘But his death had nothing whatsoever to do with me or Lucie.’

  Hourthier flapped his hands up and down like a distressed child. ‘You can’t be serious. Of course it had something to do with you. People think you set Lucie up with the German commandant to feather your own nest. That you acted as his procureuse. Look at all the extra trade you’ve taken during the past six weeks. Do I need to paint you a picture?’ He glanced mournfully at Jeanne’s well-stocked kitchen. ‘And now – or at the very least since Mass yesterday morning – the situation has deteriorated even further. The gossips know for a fact that old Marie has driven Lucie from her house. That she’s been branded little better than a whore, in public and by her own family.’ He lowered his voice to a dramatic murmur. ‘Collaboration horizontale. Najac simply wanted to protect her from your schemes – or so it will seem to them in retrospect. And now, all of a sudden, he’s dead thanks to a secret order from your daughter’s lover, who just happens to be the German commander.’ The mayor hitched his shoulders disingenuously. ‘Well, they can’t very well do anything about him, can they? So, in their eyes, the responsibility is entirely yours.’

  Jeanne Léré’s face was stark beneath her powder. ‘They say that I’m a procureuse?’

  ‘What they say is the least of your worries, Jeanne. It’s what they do that counts.’

  ‘But André, you can’t be serious? You must do something. Immediately. Talk to them. Explain the situation. You’re the mayor. They will listen to you.’

  ‘It’s far too late for all that. You must get out of town as soon as possible. Do you have relatives? People you could stay with?’

  ‘But what about my restaurant? I’ll be ruined.’

  ‘Jeanne, for pity’s sake. Do you see any customers out there? It’s finished. You’re finished. Lucie too. Your only chance is to get out before the Maquis come for you. And while the people are still scared witless of the Germans.’

  Jeanne Léré sat down on a chair and put her head in her hands. ‘Oh, André. You must help me. Speak to them. It’s all a misunderstanding. They’ll bring Hervé back and…’

  ‘He’s dead, Jeanne. I can do nothing about it anymore. The moment has passed.’

  She looked up, her face instantly transforming itself from supplicant to malcontent. ‘André, if you abandon me to this – if you leave me – I’ll tell everyone what you’ve been doing to me, two days a week, for the past three years, between five and seven o’clock in the afternoon.’

  Hourthier poured the dregs out of the wine bottle and tossed them down. ‘Go ahead and tell them, Jeanne. Tell them everything. It will make no earthly difference to me. My wife will nag me for a few months, it’s true. Make my life a living hell. But she’ll eventually forgive me. Najac’s death, on the other hand, the town will never forgive. He was a war hero, for pity’s sake. Wounded in the cause of France.’ Hourthier’s sweat-drenched face took on a melancholic tinge, as if he realised that in sending his mistress away he was also discarding the final tattered remnants of his long-forgotten youth. ‘Please, Jeanne. Take my word for it. Go and talk to the German. Persuade him to provide transport for you and Lucie. He’s a reasonable man. He’ll understand your position. But I can’t be seen with either of you anymore. I’m the mayor.’

  ‘The what?’ For the first and only time in her life, Jeanne Léré found herself almost incapable of rational speech.

  Hourthier placed the glass carefully back onto the sideboard and drew himself up. It was as though an imaginary sash of office had miraculously materialized across the front of his jacket. ‘Yes, Jeanne, I am the mayor. And, what’s more, I fully intend to remain the mayor when the Germans are finally gone and – if at all possible – to die in office and at an advanced age. What I certainly do not want to do is to die by the hand of my own people, in a war not of my choosing and for a reason that escapes me. No.’ He made a sideways slash with his hand, just as he imagined Robespierre might have done whilst hectoring the Convention. ‘I draw the line at that. Even your charms are not enough to drive me towards certain suicide.’

  He eased himself towards the back door, opened it and glanced outside.

  ‘So. Listen. I’m doing you a big favour here.’ He felt furtively around in his inside pocket and took out his wallet. ‘Here. Here is some cash. I owe you that much at least. Take it. Grab everything small that you can sell. Then go.’

  Flairac Woods

  4 pm: Monday 5th June 1944

  Hervé sank to his knees by the edge of the expiring stream. He bent down and lapped at the brackish water, gagging and moaning in equal measure. He had alternately jogged and stumbled his way along the isolated valley road for the past seven hours, and he was perilously close to exhaustion.

  For some time now he had seemed to recognise landmarks – a particular tree here, an oddly shaped rock there – thrusting their way up through the undergrowth. But after two wrong turns, which had cost him more than an hour of wasted effort, he was learning to become wary of the evidence presented to his fluctuating vision.

  Instinct told him that once he had managed to cut up and over the hill facing him, he would find himself directly above the main Montauban road. If he made it safely across that, his parents’ farm would be a bare half an hour’s walk away. His rational mind, however, warned him that he was hallucinating, that he was probably a good ten kilometres short of where he thought he was, and that he would almost certainly die if he ventured off the beaten track.

  He awoke some hours later with his head half in half out the stream. A stone had been digging into his cheek, and his arm was twisted underneath him, the whole weight of his body concentrated on one elbow. Mumbling incoherently, Hervé forced himself to his feet. The pain from his shattered teeth had been building for more than three days now, and the right-hand side of his face felt swollen and infected, as though an abscess were forming inside it.

  It was dark and he was bitterly cold. He flapped his arms, as much to force the blood back into his frozen limbs as to generate a little heat. From somewhere nearby an owl shrieked. He sensed the presence of a bat fluttering at the blurred outer edges of his vision. He shook his head to clear it, then glanced up at the still nascent moon. Early then. He hadn’t slept for more than five or, at the very most, six hours. Still time to make it to the farm and get some much-needed food inside him before heading on up to the Causse.

  For Hervé knew exactly what he had to do and where his duty lay.

  During the seven dogged hours of his nightmare walk, one thought had resonated compulsively through his head, numbing the worst of his pain and taking the edge off his exhaustion. To maintain his honour, and his image of himself as a Frenchman and an agriculteur, Hervé knew that he had to persuade Jean-Baptiste and the boys that he hadn’t betrayed them to the Germans. That the Maquis would not have to move their camp. That their long-planned attack, when the allies eventually invaded, was not compromised. Then, and only then, would he be able to take his revenge on the likes of Eberle and his cronies.

  Sobbing with pain and frustration, Hervé abandoned the safety of the main track and began to feel his way up the contours of the unfamiliar hill.

  Sanctuary
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br />   9 pm: Monday 5th June 1944

  Max lit a cigarette, the flare of the match briefly outlining the hollow planes of his face. ‘I want you to come and stay here with me at the Bastide. To move out of your mother’s house for good.’ The library was in partial darkness, the curtains wide open to let in the last of the evening light. Max flicked the still blazing match out of the window and followed its burning trajectory all the way down to the ground with his eyes. ‘What do you say?’

  Lucie hesitated, more to placate Max than out of any serious consideration of his question. Finally, when the silence between them was no longer tenable, she shook her head. ‘I can’t. You must see that.’

  Max continued to stare out across the courtyard as if he hadn’t heard her. ‘An SS officer needs special permission to marry. And such a permission is only obtainable direct from the Reichsführer’s office. I would never get it, of course. Not in a million years. Not to marry a Frenchwoman.’ He tossed his cigarette after the match, still refusing to meet her eyes. ‘But I’ve thought of a solution to this. We could marry in secret. Meyer would be our witness. The Curé and I have an understanding of sorts. I’m sure, if I approached him in the correct spirit, that he would agree to conduct a private ceremony, according to the tenets of the Catholic Church, with only the three of us present. Then, later, we could have the civil side confidentially ratified by the mayor.’ Max rocked forward, both hands gripping the window sill. ‘It would offer you at least some security when I leave. The safeguard of Napoleonic Law, for instance, were I to be killed. You would at least not be destitute, whichever way the war goes.’

  Lucie raised her head, a bemused expression on her face. ‘You’d marry me? Someone like me? You’d go that far to protect me?’

  Max continued speaking into the darkness outside the window. ‘Further, if that were possible. It goes without saying.’

  Lucie let out a sigh. She could feel the uncertainty of the future gradually overwhelming the certainties of the past. She allowed her gaze to slide across Max’s back, down over his boots, to the floor. ‘Even then.’