The Occupation Secret

by The Occupation Secret (retail) (epub)

  ‘We’ll never make it across the border. You know that.’

  ‘Most probably not.’

  ‘But you will come with us? You’ll help us, nonetheless?’

  ‘I said before that I owed the German a debt. And that I’d paid it. I owe you one, too.’

  Hervé climbed out of the car before Lucie could answer. He glanced automatically at the nearby farm, his eyes asquint, searching for movement in the yard. Watching for smoke.

  He hunched forwards and lit a cigarette, then selected a nearby bush to urinate behind, just as he’d done first thing in the morning ten thousand times before. Gradually, as his senses sharpened, he became aware of the last of the night air rising from the ground against his ankles, and of the familiar weight of the awakening landscape embracing his shoulders. He watched with a burgeoning ecstasy as the first rays of the sun invested the steam from his cascade with something approaching beauty.

  He turned back towards the car. He felt refreshed. Almost as if he had passed a test set by some elusive teacher, whose presence could only be inferred and never known.

  ‘Try to get some sleep now, Lucette, while I drive. We still have a long way to go.’

  The Farm

  6:40 am: Sunday 11th June 1944

  ‘I’m hungry. Can we buy some food?’

  They were an hour or so beyond the dawn now, the roads empty, the day slowly heating up.

  Hervé glanced around. ‘Very well, then. I’ll try this farm up ahead. But you’d better stay in the car. It would be safer if nobody saw you just yet.’ He bit down on his lip the moment he uttered the words, but it was already too late. The implications seemed almost treasonable in the silent intimacy which he and Lucie had contrived between them.

  Hervé trudged across the farmyard towards the smoke-wreathed house, comforting himself with the thought that it was breakfast time and that the farmer, his wife and their children would be sitting down, like farmers all over France, to their torril, and would not be suspicious. He knocked at the back door and waited.

  The farmer’s wife summed him up in one all-encompassing glance, from his calloused workingman’s hands to his scarred and battered face.

  ‘Eh bien, Fiston. Qu’est ce que tu attends? Entre.’

  Hervé stepped over the threshold. He thumbed his forelock to the farmer, who was sitting at the head of the table, his two sons at his side, his three daughters scattered around him like confetti, cooking, serving, carrying.

  ‘Come on, boy. Sit down then. You look famished.’

  Hervé found himself grinning with relief at the familiarity of it all. His mother would have acted in just the same way, were a stranger to have arrived, unannounced, at her door. Her first instinct would be to feed him, before it even occurred to her to ask him his name, or what his business was.

  He washed his hands at the évier and sat down at the table. One of the girls stepped forward and ladled him some soup, with bread and a thick lump of pork fat to smear it with.

  He ate the soup with pleasure, enjoying the ministrations of the women, admiring the stolid beauty of their movements, absent-mindedly answering the casual questions that the farmer put to him, without ever needing to stray overly far from the truth.

  Yes, he was travelling. The Germans, of course. Yes. He was walking to St Jean de Luz. He had relatives near there who might possibly be able to find him some work. He’d been on the road for some time now. Yes. He would be very grateful indeed for some provisions for his journey. He could pay. No? He was very grateful, but he insisted. He had money…

  The farmer’s wife shook her head firmly. She busied herself making him up some soup in a cracked glass jar, five thick cuts of bread, and more pork fat. A bottle of homemade wine. A small pat of goat’s cheese. Two hard-boiled goose eggs. Treasures beyond price.

  Hervé stood at the door and accepted the parcel with both hands. ‘Thank you, Mother.’

  ‘God bless you, boy. Be careful now. You’ve got a long way still to go.’ She watched him for a few moments as he trudged down the track, then she turned back inside to her husband. ‘Did you see his face, Louis? What do you think caused that?’

  The farmer slipped his feet inside his work clogs and shrugged on his jacket. ‘What do you think? The Boches, of course. Who else?’

  The Awakening

  7:20 am: Sunday 11th June 1944

  Hervé threw himself into the front seat of the Delage and started the engine. ‘We’ll stop further up the road. You can eat then. I don’t want the farmer seeing the car. To know that I lied to him and his wife about how I was travelling to St Jean by foot.’

  ‘Max has woken up.’

  Hervé refused to respond to Lucie’s statement until he had driven the car far enough away from the oustal for comfort. He would remember where the farm was. Return there some day to thank its people. The place had a harmony about it that pleased him – the sort of harmony he would have expected to inhabit with Lucie, had she consented to become his wife. People like him and Lucie were born to stay put, he told himself angrily, not to zigzag endlessly from one place to the other like gypsies.

  ‘Didn’t you hear what I said? He’s awake.’ Lucie touched Hervé’s arm, tentatively, as a cat might stretch out its paw to claim its master’s attention.

  ‘Look. Look at all this I got.’ Ignoring the feather-light pressure of Lucie’s hand, Hervé showed her each separate article the farmer’s wife had given him. He was self-consciously ascribing a value to each individual object, as if he wished in this way to highlight his detachment from her and from Max. ‘She gave me soup. And wine. Goose eggs. Even some goat’s cheese. Perhaps you can get the German to eat something now that he’s conscious? Some good French food.’

  ‘I’d like a little soup, if that’s possible.’

  The sudden emergence of Max’s voice surprised them both.

  Max made a feeble attempt at sitting up, but he was still too weak to hold the position for long. He inched one hand towards his cheek and began to massage the side of his face.

  ‘You can hear me all right, then?’

  Max shook his head. ‘Not very well. This side…’ He indicated his left ear. ‘It’s hissing. And sort of numb at the same time. The other one is fine, though.’ Lucie tilted the jar of soup for Max to drink. Max managed a few sips, then allowed his head to sink onto his chest. ‘My jaw feels as if someone just slammed it between a pair of doors.’

  ‘Ha. Now you know what it feels like. Welcome to the brotherhood of the infirm.’

  Hervé lowered his eyes in response to Lucie’s loaded glance. He puffed out his cheeks, sat heavily back onto his seat, and glared angrily through the windscreen in front of him.

  ‘Najac?’

  ‘Yes? What do you want?’ Hervé refused to turn his head in response to Max’s question.

  ‘Lucie has told me what you did for me back there in St Gervais. I know how much it must have cost you. What a risk you took. I want to thank you. For sparing me. For not blowing my brains out when you had the chance.’

  Hervé gave an impatient shrug. ‘Il n’y a pas de quoi.’

  Max eased himself forward. ‘No. Really. It took a lot of courage to make such a decision, at such a time. More courage than it would have taken for you to snipe at me from the church tower, as you intended before.’

  ‘That’s as it may be.’ Hervé hitched up his chin. ‘It doesn’t feel good killing a man in cold blood. I found that out to my cost. The thought of him haunts you. The thought of his family. His wife. His mother. His children. I’m sorry I killed that man on the road.’

  ‘Corporal Nordeck.’

  ‘Was that his name?’ Hervé twisted around in his seat, his eyes flaring. ‘Did you know him?’

  ‘Personally? No. He was a recent transfer.’

  Hervé sucked in his cheeks. ‘Nordeck.’ He sat there, considering. ‘Still. I wish you hadn’t told me his name.’

  Max shook his head slowly, as if he were clearing his ears of
water. ‘You’re a fortunate man, Najac. I know no names. Only faces. Sometimes just body parts. A hand with a ring on it. A gold tooth in a blackened face.’ They watched each other silently. Weighing each other up.

  ‘And you…’ Hervé said at last, his eyes fugitive. ‘I suppose I ought to thank you for getting your sergeant-major to spare my life. Though I imagine you regret it now.’ He reached forward to start the engine in a clumsy attempt to cover his embarrassment. ‘What’s become of him, by the way?’

  ‘He’s dead. His own people shot him.’

  Lucie gave a quick intake of breath.

  ‘Because of sparing me?’ Hervé was looking squarely at Max now, his eyes narrowed, all thoughts of starting the car forgotten.

  ‘Indirectly.’ Max laid his head back against the seat and shut his eyes. ‘But yes. There was a connection.’ He returned Lucie’s squeeze and rested his other hand across hers. ‘Perhaps this will mean something to you, though. Meyer told me, just before he died, that he did not regret letting you go. That it was the right thing to do in the circumstances.’

  ‘Meyer? That was his name?’

  ‘Paul Meyer. Yes. He was my good friend. A real countryman. Like you.’

  Lucie brought Max’s hand to her lips and kissed it.

  Hervé looked away. He could feel his bitterness – the unyielding and as yet unassuaged weight of his debt to the dead German – eating into his throat like cancer.

  St Jean

  11:15 am: Sunday 11th June 1944

  ‘Quick. Give me back my pistol.’

  Hervé hesitated. He glanced at the checkpoint, one hundred and fifty metres in front of them, and then back at Lucie.

  Max was already straightening his tie and fastening the concealed buttons of his uniform. ‘Decide fast. If I get this wrong, we’re all dead.’

  Hervé reached across and handed Max the Luger. Max dropped the pistol into his holster without securing the flap.

  ‘How are you going to play this?’ Hervé changed down a gear, readying himself to pull up.

  ‘I haven’t the remotest idea.’

  Max sat up higher in the front seat. He smoothed down the sleeves of his panzer-jacket and readjusted his medals, self-consciously transforming himself once more into the image of an SS officer.

  ‘Now pass me my hat.’

  ‘We don’t have it with us. It must have fallen off back in St Gervais.’

  ‘Damn.’

  The Kettenhünde was already holding up an admonitory hand. Hervé eased the Delage to a stop in front of him. It was obvious that the man had already noticed the car’s lack of a gazogène boiler, for he ducked his head and squinted through the windshield at Hervé, raising one puzzled eyebrow. Then he noticed Max.

  Straightening up, he strolled across in front of the car, taking in Lucie’s presence with another quizzical flick of his head. Half a dozen guards stood either side of the barrier, their hands resting on their Schmeissers, watching the car.

  Max felt inside his jacket and withdrew his papers. He held them up in full view of the soldiers.

  ‘Sergeant. You must direct me to Milice headquarters immediately. This girl and this man work for us. The Maquis have discovered their names. I have promised them our protection. It is of the utmost urgency.’

  The Kettenhünde couldn’t take his eyes off Lucie. ‘What did the bastards do to her?’ His gaze travelled over her breasts and down across her flanks.

  ‘It’s obvious, isn’t it? If we had arrived a moment later, they would have killed her. As it is, my men and I had to shoot our way clear. The rest of my unit are ten minutes behind us. Please be so good as to indicate to my sergeant-major the direction in which you have sent me.’

  Max could feel an impassable gulf opening up in front of him. There was no earthly way that the Kettenhünde would let them through – he would simply detain them there until Max’s non-existent men failed to turn up. Then, one glance at the papers would seal their fate. They’d be lucky not to be shot on the spot.

  The sergeant stepped back, saluting. ‘Of course, Herr Sturmbannführer.’

  Max almost laughed. How absurd war was. The sudden glimpse of his Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves had worked its customary magic on the Feldengendarme’s attitude. It was as if the medal accorded its holder an invisible, almost mystical, aura that no German soldier dared sunder.

  ‘The terrorists have injured you, Herr Sturmbannführer.’

  ‘It’s nothing. I can add it to my Wound Badge. This fellow here saved my life.’ He indicated Hervé with a toss of the head.

  The Feldengendarme managed a grim smile, as though, a fair man, he was prepared to give even a Frenchman the benefit of the doubt.

  ‘Follow this road to the centre of town. When you find the Hôtel de Ville, enquire there. They will soon tell you the way.’ He waved away Max’s papers, stepped sideways, and saluted once again. ‘It has been an honour to meet you, Herr Sturmbannführer.’

  Max returned the salute. He turned and raised his eyebrows to Hervé, speaking out of the corner of his mouth. ‘Better get going. Fast. I’m counting on the possibility that when the soldiers I told him are accompanying me do not appear, he may assume that they entered town by a different route. If not, we may find ourselves in something of a fix.’

  Max buttoned the papers back inside his top pocket and gave the Kettenhünde a distant smile.

  Hervé slipped the car into gear, his eyes fastened on the inexorable movement of the barrier. ‘Soldiers? Why the hell did you have to mention you had soldiers with you? Why couldn’t we have come in alone?’

  ‘It might have escaped your attention, Najac, but I’m a major in the SS. With an obvious wound to my face. The sergeant will automatically assume that I am in charge of an active unit. Otherwise I would have to show transfer orders, or a movement pass. If he’d asked for either of those, I would have had to shoot him. By now we would have been dead meat.’

  ‘Putain.’ Hervé flapped his hand as if he’d just burnt it on the gear stick. He glanced superstitiously into the dashboard mirror, as though he expected the guards to change their minds at the very last moment, and open up fire on the retreating car. ‘You know something, German? I urgently need a piss and a cigarette.’

  PART NINE

  St Jean De Luz.

  Friday 16th June to Saturday 17th June 1944

  The Cannery

  Banks of warehouses fanned out from the cobbled axis of the cannery’s freight yard like the quarters of an Aztec stone calendar the young Max had once come upon in one of his father’s anthropology books. Max found the image oddly comforting. It reminded him of a better place in a better time, in which men like his father were valued for their culture and gentility, not excoriated for their principles.

  In the past five days he had used the design of the calendar as a mnemonic tool to help him memorize every cobble of the St Jean de Luz dockyard, every factory window, the position of each bollard, the location of every crane and hoist, the mooring of each boat.

  From the very first day of his incarceration in the dilapidated slope-floored sardinery that he now shared with Lucie, he had taken to watching, more often than not in silence – but always with a notebook propped up on the windowsill in front of him – as the cod and tuna boats endlessly paraded through the harbour entrance on their way to the fishing grounds, only to be replaced by other sea-scarred boats returning after many days away to unload their catch.

  The scar on Max’s cheek had begun to heal, thanks to Lucie’s ministrations, and his leg was fast losing its stiffness. His hearing, however, was still impaired. It was as if a piece of wax had lodged itself inside the shell of his ear and he had only to syringe it out in order to hear clearly again – but this procedure was, for the time being at least, impractical. He had caught himself praying, on more than one occasion, that the deafness he was experiencing would not last forever and destroy his capacity to play and to enjoy music. That would be the final irony, he told himself, in
a life replete with ironies.

  Hervé’s cousin, Sebastien Lartegui, understood Max to be a car mechanic, originally from the Alsace, and now on the run from the Germans following a botched attack on an armoured unit by his and his cousin’s Maquis cell. It was a lame story thought up in haste. But at least the Alsatian background went some way towards explaining the occasional small lapse in Max’s French pronunciation.

  Explaining Lucie away had been a tougher proposition altogether. They had finally settled on the story that Lucie had been imprisoned by the Gestapo on suspicion of aiding the Maquis, and had only been released on the liberation of her prison by the heroic intervention of the FTP. This ludicrous concoction, much to Max’s surprise, appeared to explain away to everybody’s satisfaction – including that of Lartegui’s quite spectacularly unforthcoming wife – Lucie’s adamant refusal to be seen out in the streets even under the protection of a headscarf, in case her prison shearing caused her to be mistaken for a victim of a collaboration horizontale purge.

  Max and Hervé had reluctantly agreed that a halfway believable fabrication such as this would be necessary to lull Lartegui’s suspicions and convince him to help them, and so, before dumping the Delage in a back street on the outskirts of town, Hervé had visited a fisherman’s store and bought Max some second-hand woollen trousers, a seaman’s shirt, a blue canvas jacket and some rope espadrilles. Then they had weighted his boots and uniform down with a brick, and tossed them off the end of the jetty.

  All that Max had kept of his former life – in a moth-eaten tobacco pouch that Hervé had lent him, in extremis – were his decorations and his Soldbuch. He knew that it was an unwise thing to do that could be fatally misconstrued if he were ever stopped and searched, but there was some restraining element in him that was not yet ready to jettison every last vestige of his past. He had won those decorations in honest warfare and at the risk of his life. Such things were not lightly set aside.