by J. R. Lonie
‘I would not go. The police will be there,’ he said and yawned. The cat meowed. It was hungry.
‘I don’t care,’ she said. ‘I need fresh clothes.’
‘What about getting away?’
‘I’ll make enquiries,’ she said.
‘How can we trust them?’
‘We can’t,’ she said. ‘What else are we going to do?’ Thrusting 20 dollars into his hand, she told him if she wasn’t back in an hour and a half, he would have the dubious pleasure of being right. There were enough cigarettes in her rucksack to bribe his way to Jerusalem, even past Rommel and his Afrika Korps.
She walked down the dark stairwell. Was it wise to leave him with such temptation? She fought her prejudices. He hadn’t tried to steal again. When push had come to shove that morning, he had chosen to follow her rather than the comrades. If her help was given with bad grace, which it had been so far, she admitted, what sort of Christian was she? She knew the answer to that, alas. She had to trust him. She would trust him.
GARE DE LYON-PERRACHE, LYON II
A little later, afternoon, Thursday, 11th December 1941
Out in the open, she could barely see the other side of the street. The sky seemed lower. The world had closed in around her. From not far away, she heard the soughing and chuffing of the locomotives that were clogging the air with coal dust. She found the quay and saw a tram labouring past full of passengers. She bet on its destination and followed, remembering to shuffle along at the same pace as the others rather than stride like some flashy, confident American. She certainly did not feel like one. For all that, as she came to the bridge across the river upstream from the railway bridge and tunnel, she was cool-headed and determined. Traffic was sparse: no cars, with only a couple of motor lorries among the horse-drawn carts, whose horses snuffled and nickered as they shook their heads against the bits and harnesses. Their droppings steamed on the cold roadway, adding a top note to the air’s already pungent aroma.
On the other side of the river, she came into the square that opened out before the railway station. More people were about, which was comforting. She had not seen any police or gendarmes, another comfort.
She stopped, caught by a wonderful sight.
Appearing like a mirage through the gritty gloom across the square was an El Dorado of golden lights and shining brass doors, an imposing beaux-arts hotel of many floors, under a grand mansard roof. It was beckoning her with open arms. A simple ‘Open sesame’ and she would be folded up anonymously into its comforts. Henk had her rucksack, the cigarettes, the money; he could make his own way. She had her passport and her bank accounts, and soon she would have her valise.
The struggle against Satan was not difficult. He had appeared only a few hours too soon. On her way here, she had seen cafés at each of which she would try on her way back to secure Henk’s passage to Spain. Why, possibly even this night, she would say the magic words, enter this hotel with a clear conscience and let the devil take the hindmost.
First, her valise.
She sensed them even before she’d entered the main concourse of the railway station: gendarmes or police, she couldn’t tell the difference. They were at the entrance to all the platforms, where passengers were being held up, where tempers were frayed and voices vented in frustration and annoyance. Eleanor was not innocent of the danger. If the passeur in La Croix Rousse had been willing to trade Henk, it was possible even the Germans might now know who he was. She, his accomplice in their escape from the café, could be implicated as well.
She skirted the concourse and found the consigne à bagages in a far corner. She slipped under the arch and in through the door. No other passengers were there; luck was with her. She saw no attendant either but was used to French ways and soon an ancient kepi’d gentleman appeared at a shuffle and greeted her. She returned his greeting and handed him her receipt. He put on the lorgnette he wore around his neck and peered at the scrap of paper in his hand. With neither word nor any change in his demeanour, he shuffled away. She glanced at her watch.
Another five long minutes, and the attendant returned with her valise.
‘Identification card, madame?’ he asked when eventually he came to the counter.
‘But you have the receipt,’ she said.
‘Rules, madame,’ he said, and waited.
She handed him her carte d’identité.
‘Madame is American?’ said the old man in some surprise. She had the comfort at least of knowing that her French had not betrayed her.
‘Resident in France for many years,’ she replied.
‘Ah,’ said the old man and handed over her valise but did not let go as she went to take it. He leant close.
‘Do not try to board a train now,’ he whispered. ‘They’ – his eyes shot in the direction of the concourse with its police and gendarmes – ‘they are looking for an American woman and a young man.’
‘Really?’ she said, as blithely as she could. ‘For what reason, do you know?’
He did not know, he said with a weary shrug. They were always looking for someone or other these days.
She thanked him and offered a generous tip.
‘Oh no, madame,’ he said. ‘You will need it more than I.’ They exchanged generous smiles and she left as casually as her panic allowed.
Outside, her El Dorado hotel beckoned her, but it was a fool’s gold. She was shaking so much, she had to stop. Instead of tempting her, Satan was bent on making a meal of her. She set down her valise and went to light a cigarette. She remembered she had left them with Henk. It crossed her mind to liberate one of the packs she’d stowed in her suitcase, but she could hardly do that in the middle of the square. She tried to gather her wits, missing a flurry of excitement whose epicentre was the news kiosk, where a lone van had just delivered a swathe of those thin sheets that gave out the news approved by the regime in Vichy. Normally, these newspapers were useful only for rolling cigarettes. Now they drew a crowd actually wanting to read its tidings.
Eleanor heard the voices across the gritty air. ‘Hitler’s declared war on the Americans,’ they were saying. ‘The Yanks are in at last!’
Her blood quickened. Gone her fear, gone the shakes. Her vanity allowed her a brief moment of vainglory at suddenly finding herself on the front line of this new war, a representative of the United States of America, even if no one else had the faintest idea who she was. Energised and excited, she picked up her valise and headed away into the fading light. Sylvia came to mind and the vainglory that had briefly shone a halo above her vanished into the gritty air.
HOTEL GRANDE, GARE DE LYON-PERRACHE, LYON II
Meanwhile, same time, mid-afternoon, Thursday, 11th December
At this same moment, at a table inside Eleanor’s El Dorado, under warm, golden wooden panels bordered by gentle Nouveau curves, with friezes that could have been painted by Degas himself, sat Kommissar Bauer. The day’s searches had produced plenty of Jews on the run but no young man with an American woman, with or without a cat. Nor had Girard’s informants given him anything that was useful. Hadn’t Bauer known in his gut since that morning that the birds were flown? He was frustrated, he was tired and he was cold. He sipped a cognac. Kopitcke, who had spent the day poring over police and gendarme reports since the murder, entered the room. Meticulous fellow, he did have something to report.
Gendarmes had arrested an illegal Polish Jew in the village of Saint Pourçain at lunchtime yesterday. They’d encountered a whole party of people who’d come illegally across the line the night before, the night of the killings, but once they had the Jew, they ignored the rest because they were French. Kopitcke had spoken to the two gendarmes who had arrested the Polish Jew. And yes, they reported, a young man had been in that party. They remembered him and his mother because she was an American, married to a Frenchman. The son wouldn’t talk to them; he wouldn’t talk to anyone, because he and Mama had been in an argument.
‘Hah, he can’t speak French!’ Bauer sai
d with triumphant glee.
‘That’s what I said. The idiots!’ exclaimed Kopitcke, in German. He saw the pain on Bauer’s face. ‘Sorry, boss,’ he said in French. ‘Sorry.’
‘That’s all right,’ said Bauer. ‘You get a good description from them?’
That was further cause for complaint from Kopitcke. The answer was no, nothing beyond the generic, nothing distinctive. Her hair was brown, his hair was short; he looked about eighteen, she about fifty. Up to Kopitcke, these two gendarmes would have been cashiered.
‘No point in gnashing one’s teeth about that,’ said his boss.
‘Oh,’ Kopitcke suddenly remembered, ‘they said the young man had a little cat.’
Bauer smiled. Eureka. This was the best description he could have. And it was the young man, not the woman. Proven – amazing, but proven.
‘If you’d been in charge, Kopitcke,’ he asked, ‘how would you have known the boy was the murderer?’
‘I wouldn’t but I would have made him talk and we’d have known immediately that he didn’t speak French,’ Kopitcke replied. ‘That would have been enough to arrest him and we’d have him in the clink on our side, like we’ve got the Polish yid. Then we’d make him confess.’
‘Exactly,’ said Bauer. Kopitcke glowed. ‘The French are still too soft,’ he added. ‘Now what?’ If their quarry wasn’t French, what was he?
His enquiries among his Wehrmacht contacts hadn’t yet produced any results. ‘Who does the evidence point to so far, Kopitcke?’
Kopitcke knew by the tone of Bauer’s voice to answer the question with his own question. ‘What do you think, Herr Kommissar?’
‘Unable to speak French, a military combat knife, the ability and willingness to use it against two trained Wehrmacht soldiers,’ said Bauer. ‘We’re looking at one tough customer who has no love for us.’
‘He has a cat,’ Kopitcke protested.
Bauer smiled. ‘I like cats, young man,’ he said. ‘I’d do the same in his shoes.’
‘But you’re not a killer, sir,’ Kopitcke rejoined. Liking cats proved it and thus his doubts that the young man in question could possibly be a murderer.
‘Keep the cat in,’ Bauer said. ‘I’ve killed in my time, young man, don’t forget. Legally, but plenty.’
‘He’s an American?’ Kopitcke replied. ‘The gendarmes said the woman really was an American; they could tell by her accent.’
‘Possibly,’ Bauer allowed. The papers were forged to cover the kid’s lack of French.
Kopitcke had it. ‘Mother and son,’ he said, convinced. ‘Getting away together to Spain and back to America, taking their cat with them. Our boy bails them up, the kid knifes our boy in the back, lies in wait for the second, knifes him after a struggle. Look at their gangsters. Everyone carries knives and guns. It’s a wild west.’
‘Not bad,’ Bauer offered and nodded approvingly. ‘If he’d gotten a combat knife. I’ve asked for tests to be done using our own and the French combat knife. If it’s definitely French, you might be on to something. If, as the doctor surmises, it turns out to be German, that takes us in quite another direction.’
Still, all speculation. Where were their quarries now?
‘Ah,’ said Bauer. It was obvious. ‘On a freight train or trying to find one.’ Why would you go on a passenger train with a cat? You couldn’t keep it hidden.
Sub-Inspector Girard arrived to see that Bauer was settled and to report that the gendarmes were at last covering the marshalling yards.
‘Better late than never,’ Bauer said agreeably. ‘Kopitcke has discovered our killer is travelling posing as a French son with an American-born mother and that they’re carting a cat along with them.’
‘If so, that makes them both enemies of the Reich,’ said Girard.
‘The cat as well?’ Bauer posed lightly.
Girard saw that Bauer hadn’t picked up on the import of what he’d just said. ‘Haven’t you heard? Your leader’s declared war on the United States,’ he said, slipping the news in like a stiletto between the ribs.
Bauer felt the blade strike his heart.
‘Kommissar?’ Girard said, genuinely concerned.
‘It’s nothing,’ Bauer responded. This was untrue. He felt dreadful. He had a pain in his chest, his stomach ached, his head ached. He hurriedly drank some cognac.
Girard said he was going to call a doctor.
‘No, thank you, inspector,’ Bauer said. He saw Kopitcke staring mutely at him aghast or astonished, as if he, Bauer, might have had a stroke. But Bauer’s mind was working its way through this most terrible news. He took another more generous draught of his cognac and ignored the pains in his body.
‘Your news, inspector, I admit it has taken me by surprise,’ he said.
‘It’s wonderful, sir, isn’t it?’ Kopitcke exclaimed with his Hitler Youth enthusiasm.
Wonderful? Bauer couldn’t begin to respond to such idiocy. His thoughts were consumed by his boys. The odds of them surviving this war had just worsened considerably. All along, he’d had his doubts about Hitler, though who could argue against success after success? But he knew first-hand what it was like after he and his men had been transferred to France following the Russian withdrawal from the war in 1918. They were exhausted and there in front of them were a million fresh American troops with the promise of more. Now the Soviets, supposedly on their last legs, were counterattacking outside Moscow. He was convinced that Germany was led by a fool and they were done for.
‘Will you join us for dinner, inspector?’ he asked Girard in the fervent hope he would decline.
Girard, relieved his well-aimed blow had struck but not killed his German colleague, declined with gracious thanks and left.
Bauer was floundering. He’d kept defeatist thoughts and fears at bay. Now they were eating him up. Worse, wouldn’t they help condemn his sons to certain death?
Then, the oddest thing happened, especially for a man who was so methodical and evidence-based in his thinking. In a flash of quite profound comprehension, he saw a clear and strong link of causality: that by pursuing and catching this bastard who’d killed those two Landsers, he’d be keeping his sons alive. It wasn’t rational and couldn’t be explained, but he knew it was true. Then a dread realisation: this is what happens when you’ve had a stroke. But he saw himself in one of the mirrors, lifted his eyebrows and scratched his head. He was sound of mind and, now he noticed the pains gone, sound of body. Indeed, he felt reinvigorated.
This morning, he had come tantalisingly close to catching the killer, but so what? The bird and his companion were hiding or flown and the trail cold. He had no high hope that Girard or his police would catch them; they were more interested in cornering communists.
‘We head south to the frontier and lay an ambush,’ he told Kopitcke. ‘We’ll eat and then we’ll go. Immediately.’
‘Here?’ Kopitcke asked, quailing at the thought.
‘Here,’ Bauer confirmed. ‘Truly, Kopitcke, there’s more to eating than filling yourself with pig’s stomach and beets.’
OLD TOWN, LYON V
After 4.30pm, Thursday, 11th December
Eleanor checked her watch as she came in off the street. She was late. She had her suitcase and its precious cargo of cigarettes and her cosmetics but no passage for Henk. The waiters in each of the cafés she’d tried on her way back from the railway station had either been unable or unwilling to help. One was simply a crook; she had seen it in his eyes the instant she produced cash as her credentials. She got herself out of there in a hurry. With reasonable fear she might be followed, she doubled back to the quay, where she felt safe, then found her way back to their lodgings. She would ask their protector where she might go. She should have asked him before.
The building was back to life as she climbed the stairs, with children playing in the courtyard and up the stairs and along the balconies. The corridors stank of paraffin from the lamps. She arrived on their floor and pushed open the door.
‘Damnation!’ she erupted with anger, and she paced back and forth for a few moments before a torrent of words in French and English poured out to describe what she thought of him: cheat, liar, thief, but really, ingrate fitted the bill. Rank ingrate. She’d said an hour and a half. She hadn’t been all that much longer. Mere minutes. Then she realised: the silver lining. She was absolved of any further responsibility for him. She relit the lamp to get some light in the room.
There on the floor was her rucksack with its stash of cigarettes and dollars, right where she had left it.
This did little to lighten her mood. She hoisted her rucksack. Now she herself was probably on a wanted list, she would find another café well away from here, up in La Croix Rousse. She would buy herself a passage out of Lyon, past the police, and into Spain, past the Germans. If she met the little shit on the way south, she could ignore him with a clear conscience. She picked up her valise and went towards the door, when it opened and there he was.
‘Where are you going?’ he demanded, pushing past her to get inside.
‘Where have you been?’ she countered. He was freshly shaved. He must have been in the washroom. She couldn’t back down now.
‘You were leaving,’ he replied.
‘You left.’
‘You have no trust.’
‘Not of you, no,’ she said. ‘I said I’d be back.’
‘You said if you weren’t back in an hour and a half,’ he corrected her.
He produced a loaf of bread, a sausage and some milk from his cloth knapsack. ‘Good worker’s food,’ he said, tearing off a piece of bread and sausage for himself. ‘I have enough for the journey too.’
‘How did you get it?’ she demanded. The milk was particularly galling.
‘Hah, you think I steal it,’ he said. ‘I pay. My money.’