Paris Adrift

by EJ Swift

  It seemed like a simple enough plan, assuming I could survive the journey without discovery. I’ve barely made it two hundred paces down the boulevard when a young German calls out to me from a terrace.

  “Salut, mademoiselle.”

  At once my hackles rise. Keep it light, I remind myself. Friendly. And as few words as possible.

  “Salut, monsieur.”

  “Vous êtes belle...”

  “Merci, monsieur.”

  He holds his beer aloft, waves a newspaper enthusiastically. I’m struck by the youthfulness of that face. He must be my age or even younger. I try to imagine being conscripted to war, but the idea is impossible, implausible.

  “Möchten Sie etwas trinken?”

  I form an expression of regret.

  “Désolée monsieur, mais c’est tard...”

  He presses both hands to his chest, a gesture at once comical and alarmingly endearing.

  “Sie brechen mein Herz.”

  If this is to mark my procession all the way to Jean-Jaurès, I will never make it in time. I need a speedier mode of transport. I keep walking, a long but leisurely stride, the heat in my face feasibly due to the balmy night. There are no civilian cars on the street, although once a German patrol drives past, its occupants armed and upright, and the precariousness of my situation strikes me again with force. A horse and cart passes in the opposite direction. Another bicycle overtakes me, the cyclist’s feet pedalling steadily. I watch as, a couple of blocks ahead, the bicycle skids to a halt and the rider dismounts, a parcel under one arm. He props the bicycle in the nearest side-street and rings a bell smartly. I slow my pace. I’m a block away when he steps inside the building. I walk decisively now.

  I’m turning into the side-street and am about to step forward and seize the handlebars of the bicycle when the door to the apartment block opens. The boy steps out. He gives me a suspicious look. I’ll look guilty if I turn back now so I’m forced to keep walking up the cobbled street. The foolhardiness of my almost-action hits me in a fit of weakness. Stealing a bicycle when it’s still light? What a brilliant way to get myself captured. Idiot.

  I continue uphill and turn right at the first opportunity, making my way parallel to the boulevard. At least I’m off the main roads, though there are plenty of smaller venues tucked away in these backstreets, where a lone woman might stand out more.

  I glance upwards. As dusk begins to descend, lights briefly illuminate the windows of the six-storey buildings, and then the blackout curtains go up. Some windows remain still and empty, and I can’t help wondering if they are—were—Jewish homes.

  It seems inconceivable that Paris could continue, Paris could be cheerful, even frivolous, and yet less than a week ago Rachel’s parents were dragged into the street, herded together like cattle. A little voice at the back of my head mutters: And what would you have done? I push the thought away uneasily.

  I’m doing something now. I’m going to get this cello if it’s the last thing I do.

  Then the rhetoric of that thought stops me cold: this could well be the last thing I do, if I get caught. Worse, if I do get caught, I have no defences against interrogation, mental or physical. No papers, no false identity. Nothing. What I do have is a packet of Luckies—I’ve learned my lesson from last time—and my smartphone, a piece of technology far beyond anything they’re doing at Bletchley, which would not only condemn me to the status of a spy but hand the Germans the blueprint for a computer in one pocket-sized piece.

  And what if, after torture and the loss of my phone, I say something that inadvertently gives the Germans a tactical advantage? I’m no expert on the Second World War, but there are bound to be facts swilling around in my subconscious—dates, place names, the existence of the Enigma machine—that might damage the Allied campaign irrevocably. My only option would be to establish myself as insane, but people suffering mental illnesses didn’t fare so well under the Nazis either.

  The few people I pass on the streets are hurrying now—it must be nearing curfew. The lamps remain unlit, the streets empty out and the gloom of dusk deepens. I look skywards. Sporadic cloud cover, weak patches of starlight. No visible moon. I use the light from my phone to check a street sign, reorient myself. The display time on the screen has not altered since I came through. It’s still six-twenty pm. What does that mean? Does some part of me remain in the twenty-first century, suspended forever in that second of transportation?

  I push the phone back into my pocket, keep going. I pass along rue d’Orsel, beneath the hill of the Moulin Vert, down to Barbès where I first stayed after my arrival in Paris. The quickest route from here is back onto boulevard de la Chapelle, following the route of the Line 2 métro. I’m walking in near-darkness but I can hear pockets of life from the various cabarets and nightclubs continuing behind the blackout. I listen for footsteps, for the rap of military boots, impossible to disguise, the softer fall of the civilian shoes of people, like me, who don’t want to be noticed. A gaggle of voices, male, slurred and drunk, forces me into a side street. Once I hear the approaching rumble of an engine and retreat to the edge of the street, crouching against the wall, my heart pounding as the patrol car draws closer. I catch the flash of torchlight, a glimpse of figures. There have been attacks, Rachel told me. Reprisals. They’re more careful now. At first they couldn’t imagine it, that anyone might resist. Why would they, with Petain whispering in their ears?

  The car passes. In darkness, the noise of the engine is audible for a long time before fading. I keep walking. Past another métro, a station that in a few years time will be renamed Stalingrad. Swing right, down to avenue Jean-Jaurès, over the canal which gleams blackly under the starlight—I hurry, alarmed that I’ll be caught in its reflection. From here, it’s straight up the road.

  TWENTY MINUTES LATER, with some furtive help from the light of my phone (battery: sixty per cent, time: eternally six-twenty pm) I’m climbing through an open window into the bathrooms of the conservatoire, feeling less Indiana Jones and more petty criminal. As I exit the bathroom I encounter a partially lit corridor, a shock to my retinas after the darkness of the streets. Rachel was right: there are people in the building. I can hear strains of music—brass and reed, the high-pitched singing of a violin—from both directions. There’s something ghostly about it, dislocated from any source. I take out Rachel’s scribbled map and check her directions. The practice rooms are to my left.

  I tiptoe the length of the corridor, peering inside windows until I see the unmistakable shape of a double bass on a stand and someone who matches the description of Rachel’s friend Jules. He’s picking out notes on the piano, peering at a score, and from the sighing and the emphatic hand gestures, it’s not progressing very well.

  I tap on the door.

  “I’m looking for Jules,” I say. “The double bass?”

  He speaks without turning, apparently oblivious to any concept of threat. “Who’s asking?”

  “Rachel sent me,” I say. “My name’s Gabriela.”

  This gets a reaction. He leaps up from the piano stool, crosses the room in two strides.

  “Rachel? Where is she?”

  “I can only speak to Jules.”

  “I am Jules, for god’s sake.”

  “How do I know that?”

  He points to the double bass.

  “That’s mine.”

  I check the corridor, glancing up and down to ensure we’re alone, before I speak again.

  “What was the duet you played with Rachel in autumn ’thirty-nine?”

  “I wasn’t here in ’thirty-nine.”

  “And in nineteen-forty?”

  “The Rossini. First movement. Are we done with the interrogation? Where is Rachel?”

  “What went wrong?”

  “What?”

  “In the Rossini, what went wrong?”

  “The D-string was flat. It was horrendous. Is she safe?”

  “All right.” My heart slowly recovers. What would I have do
ne if Jules had forgotten? I push him gently back into the practice room and shut the door behind us. “You pass. Yes, she’s safe, for now. I need her cello. She’s sent me to collect it.”

  “Wait a minute. I can’t give her cello to just anyone.”

  “She won’t leave Paris without it,” I say. “And she has a chance to leave tonight.”

  Jules slumps on the piano stool.

  “I heard her parents—”

  “She has to get out tonight,” I repeat.

  “I should leave too.” He looks despairingly at his surroundings. I can imagine what’s going through his head, and I don’t envy him the dilemma. “I should.”

  “It’s been arranged,” I say. “It might screw things up if you’re there too.”

  He nods slowly. I can’t tell if he’s relieved or disappointed. Both, probably.

  “I can’t get in the way of her chances,” he says. “Who the hell are you, anyway?”

  “I’m nobody.”

  “Some kind of agent?” he guesses.

  “We shouldn’t talk about that.”

  “Don’t worry,” he says. “Nobody here would dream of reporting. They’d be kicked out.”

  He falls silent and I have to prompt him. “The cello?”

  “It’s in room four. Come on.”

  He takes me a few doors down the corridor, and we enter a practice room identical to the first: a table, a piano, a music stand, a cello case resting in one corner. I notice a Rachmaninov score open on the piano. Concerto No. 3. Jules sees me looking.

  “There was a German officer in here two, maybe three months ago,” he says. “He wanted a tour. He stood right there where you are, one arm resting on the piano top, listening to me play. Afterwards, he said he’d been a musician at home himself, and hoped to return to it, after the war. He said he liked Russian music best, though he couldn’t say that outside of this building. Not any more. Tchaikovsky as well, which surprised me, it doesn’t seem to fit with the uniforms. My tutor asked him to play a couple of bars—as a courtesy, I suppose—and he did, and it was... exquisite.” Jules comes to stand next to me by the piano. He plays an arpeggio, soft, tentative. “And then he asked how were we liking their concerts outside the Opera House? Smiling. All in this conspiratorial manner, you understand, like he wanted to get us on side.”

  “Did it work?”

  Jules turns a page of the score. “I just want to make music.”

  He shuts the piano lid abruptly, and goes to fetch the cello, lifting the case and laying it flat on the table.

  “Wait—”

  He looks about, picks up a loose sheaf of papers from a music stand.

  “She was working on this. Her tutor’s notes are on it.”

  He opens the case and puts the papers inside.

  “You’ll let me know she’s got out?”

  “I’ll ask her to get in touch. When she can.”

  “Where will she go?”

  “South, I suppose. The Resistance—” I hesitate. “They’ll have places.”

  “She wanted to play the Dvorák. At the Opera House.”

  There’s a tag tied to the handle of the cello case, Rachel’s name and address written in neat block letters. I untie it and give the tag to Jules.

  “She will,” I say firmly.

  Jules doesn’t reply. He is staring at the address tag in his hands. I remember Rachel’s face as she said, Paris makes me sick, and I think that there are some things music can’t transcend.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  THE STREETS SURROUNDING the Moulin Vert feel cold and deserted, as though an invisible wall occludes this section of Paris from the rest of the city. The Germans don’t go up that far, Rachel told me. The Moulin’s not included in their guide aryen—too ugly for the master race. The eight arms of the windmill loom over the hill, heavy and menacing in their stillness, the way they creak in a breeze not strong enough to move them. The impression makes me shiver, and then I realise why: it reminds me of the hooked arms of the swastika. I wonder if what Rachel said could possibly be true, that the Resistance are tunnelling into the hill, creating emergency escape routes from their Montmartre base. Aide Lefort claimed it was a hub for their activities. Are they there now, laying plots in the basements, patiently fiddling with the radio to find the BBC’s illicit Radio Londres?

  Making my way around to the back of the mill, I understand why this makes a good site for conspiracy, but the thought is far from reassuring. I check my phone covertly, using its dimming light to navigate the cobbled streets. By the time I reach the vineyard, the battery has dropped to forty per cent, and already I’m wondering how I’m going to find my way back to Clichy. The vineyard itself presents a new problem—it’s surrounded by a wire fence, topped with barbs. But Rachel told me to wait inside, so there must be a way in.

  I walk its circumference, barely thirty metres on each side, running my hand lightly over the meshing until I find a place where the wire has been cut. I push the flap aside, wincing at the echoing, metallic rasp. I push the cello case through first, which only just fits, and I scramble through after. The wire snags on Tournier’s clothes and I hear something rip before I tug myself clear.

  Picking up the cello case, I stand completely still for a moment, listening. I can hear the faint whisper of the vines and the trees overhanging one side of the vineyard. A rich tang of earth and grape rises from the ground. I wonder if this place is tended in wartime, or if the vines are growing freely. Glancing once behind me, seeing nothing, I move deeper into their cover.

  I’ve only progressed a few metres when my foot catches and I trip. I fall clumsily, suppressing a cry, releasing the cello. The case drops to the ground and I can hear the strings reverberating inside with the impact.

  Next thing I know, something cold and hard is slipped against my throat.

  “Don’t move.”

  French. I attempt to speak, to explain myself, and the knife pushes harder. Are these Rachel’s rescuers? What if it’s a trap?

  An arm grips around my torso and hauls me to a sitting position, but the knife doesn’t move. I can feel the vines on either side of us. The intense, sweet smell of the fruit fills my nose.

  “Who are you?” demands my captor. It’s a male voice, low and strained.

  I assess the possible answers. If this is the Resistance, they need to know I’m an ally, not a threat. If it isn’t, I’m fucked anyway.

  “Rachel,” I manage. “I’m helping Rachel.”

  The knife relaxes slightly but it remains at my throat.

  “My name’s Gabriela. I brought the cello.”

  “That’s not the password.”

  This time, I catch the edge of an accent.

  “You’re American,” I hiss, and I feel him tense. I switch to English. “I brought the bloody cello. Rachel’s cello. It’s in that case.”

  The rustle of vines moving. Someone else is behind us.

  “Who knows you’re here?”

  The American continues to speak in French.

  “No one. Only Rachel!” The knife pushes again. “Wait. Wait!” What the hell was it Lefort said? I dredge my memory. “Eight arms! Against your four arms, we raise eight.” I tip my head as best I can. “The Moulin Vert.”

  “Don’t say its name!”

  The second person steps around us and crouches slowly. I hear hands running over the cello case. Then the newcomer steps aside.

  “You open it.” This voice is female, and a native accent. The knife slides away from my throat and moves to the small of my back.

  “Fine,” I whisper. I feel for the case, find the clasps and click them open. The woman steps closer, and a tiny flashlight skims over its contents, illuminating the rich wood of the cello, the loosened strings. I hear muttering behind us.

  “What if there’s something inside it—”

  “You can’t break it!” I hiss. “I brought it all the way from the conservatoire. Her parents gave it to her.”

  That give
s them pause, but moments later they’re scanning the cello again, shielding the torchlight with their coats, peering into the f-holes, lifting the neck to give the instrument a tentative shake. I have visions of the doomed cello being hacked to pieces by agents of the Resistance, but fortunately we are interrupted by the arrival of Madame Tournier and Rachel herself. This time the protocols are observed; I hear the mutter of voices but I can’t make out what they’re saying, probably something about eight arms. Apparently Rachel has certified my presence, because I’m now left to my own devices. After a couple of minutes of intense discussion, I hear her move away from the group.

  “Hello again,” I murmur.

  “Figment,” she says tiredly.

  “Figment with a cello.”

  Rachel stops. Then she drops to the ground, her body collapsed over the open case. I can hear the slight squeak of her running her fingers up and down the strings, over the wood. I can hear her breathing shakily.

  “We can’t take that with us,” says the Frenchwoman, returning.

  “Hang on a minute—”

  “We don’t even know who you are—”

  “She’s my figment,” says Rachel. “And the cello is coming.”

  “Has Tournier not explained this to you? Our success depends upon secrecy. Secrecy depends upon invisibility. That is not going to make us invisible.”

  I hear the click of the case shutting.

  “If it doesn’t come, I don’t come,” Rachel says. “There’s no point. Anyway, you can’t leave it here.”

  “The Englishwoman can take it back.”

  “No way—”

  “I have to go,” says Madame Tournier.

  “Yes, there’s more than enough of us already...”