The Little Parachute

by J. Robert Janes

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  The Little Parachute

  J. Robert Janes

  MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM

  This is for the librarians of the central branch of the St. Catharines Public Library who over the past forty-five years have stick-handled oft-curious, and at times demanding, requests. Had they not done so, where would folks like me be?

  Acknowledgements

  As with the St-Cyr and Kohler mystery series, there are a few words and brief passages in French or German. Jim Reynolds, of Niagara-on-the-Lake, very kindly assisted with both; the artist Pierrette Laroche, on occasion with the French. Should there be any errors, they are my own, and for these an apology is extended.

  Author’s Note

  The Little Parachute is a work of fiction in which actual places and times are used but altered as appropriate. Occasionally the names of real persons appear for historical authenticity, though all are deceased and the story makes of them what it demands.

  Parachute: umbrella-like device of cloth and harness used to retard the fall of a person or package from an aircraft; during wartime used to drop secret agents and clandestine wireless sets into enemy-held territory where things are seldom what they seem

  1

  It was hot in the room and Angélique didn’t know what to do. The Sturmbannführer Kraus-SS, ramrod stiff and very sure of himself, sat across the table from her, studying hers and the boy’s papers. Tormented flies buzzed against the curtainless windows through which the late August heat of Paris streamed. Sweat beaded her underarms. Dark stains grew next to her belt where the flowered cotton print was pinched. There were stains down her back, stains under her breasts and around her neck.

  The boy watched the flies. Now one, now another. Silently she asked, Are they Spitfires, Martin? Heinkels, Stukas or Messerschmitts? In the late summer of 1943 one still had to ask such questions.

  ‘He’s your son?’

  They spoke in French. ‘Yes, of course he is.’

  ‘He doesn’t look a bit like you.’

  She shrugged. ‘It’s his father. Men like that always put their stamp on things.’

  ‘But you’re not married?’

  ‘Since when did that mean anything to reproductive organs?’

  Herr Kraus acknowledged this. He wasn’t handsome, not blond, blue-eyed and all the rest. He was brown-haired, brown-eyed, thin-faced, thin-lipped, sharp-nosed and, without the uniform, could well have been taken for a junior accountant in a shoe factory. Age about forty and passed over but now successful in his new line of work.

  The chair, a sturdy wooden thing, much scraped and banged, had leather belts and buckles to tightly fasten the arms and legs, though hers were not yet fastened. Sweat stains marred the leather, which was really quite new, in spite of the shortages. There was blood. Old, dried and caked, the claw marks of fingernails. She could smell the excrement and vomit. Suddenly the room, bare but for the table, the two chairs, the lamp on its stand, and a copper bathtub—Ah non, why did they have one here?—gave up its stench.

  Numbers 72, 76 and 84, the avenue Foch, were the headquarters of the SS in France, this the top floor of number 72, and why had they picked her and the boy up? Why had they been detained so long? For taking the train from Abbeville? For carrying sixty eggs, four kilos of butter, eight of ham, six of bacon and three freshly roasted geese all in two shabby brown leather suitcases?

  The marché noir* … Did they suspect her of planning to sell the stuff? If so, they were somewhat mistaken. Oh for sure, she had thought of it, who wouldn’t? A little something for oneself, a little cash, but …

  ‘Your name?’

  How cold he was. ‘It’s on my papers.’

  ‘Just give it to me.’

  ‘Angélique Bellecour.’

  ‘Age?’

  ‘Thirty-six. Look, why don’t you tell me what you want? The boy has to go to the specialist. For months we’ve waited for permission to leave the zone interdite.* He can’t talk. He hasn’t since the Blitzkrieg. The Messerschmitts, they … they machine-gunned the road and killed a lot of people. Me, I … I found him wandering in a field.’

  ‘Then he’s not your son.’

  ‘Ah, nom de Dieu, monsieur, why such suspicion? Of course he is. We all ran. What were we supposed to have done? Died like the others?’

  ‘Then where is his father?’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s been three years now, hasn’t it, since the Blitzkrieg? Maybe he’s been … well, you know. Maybe that’s why my son won’t talk.’

  Kraus passed smoothing fingers over their papers only to hesitate at the laissez-passer that had allowed them to travel from the Forbidden Zone. She was lying, of course. After a while one got to sense such things. Perhaps it was the way she studied the leather straps rather than look at him, perhaps it was her anxiety over the boy whom she could only see by turning, since her back was to the windows. What really is he up to—is this what you’re wondering, Angélique Bellecour? Are you afraid this “son” of yours will betray you?

  The sand-coloured hair that was thick and secured with the double twist of a strong elastic band was not stylish, but elastics like that were impossible to get these days. Still, she’s from the countryside, he reminded himself, and they might have had a few, though he doubted it. The grey eyes were widely set and earnest in alarm and uncertainty, the lips resolute, full and soft, not defiant yet. No lipstick too. Small, enamel earrings—flowers of some sort and cheap—were worn perhaps to please the boy. The bare arms were softly tanned from being out in the fields in her off-hours. There was a small scar, a cut that had been stitched long ago, on the left side of the wide, smooth brow. The nose was freckled and robust—solid peasant stock there. The cheeks were not thin, the face a broad oval. A small brown mole marred the left of a deeply cleaved chin. She had good breasts; good, strong shoulders—the peasant ancestry again, he reminded himself. A passable figure. Taller than most—yes, yes. Her head was still held high. The eyebrows, wide and full, added further to the worried gaze.

  At once, a pleasant-looking woman, now well past her prime.

  ‘It says here that you’re a secretary.’

  ‘At the hôtel de ville, which is also the Kommandantur. There are three of us secretaries, but the boy and I don’t live in town like the others. We live at the farm of my uncle.’

  ‘To the northeast of Abbeville?’

  Angélique warned herself never to volunteer information, but said resignedly, ‘Yes. It’s about twenty kilometres from town. It’s near Bois Carré but not too close. Some distance from the woods.’

  She was making certain he knew it too. ‘Do you gather mushrooms there?’ he asked of the woods.

  ‘Mushrooms? Ah! It’s forbidden. All such things are, General. The trapping of rabbits, the fishing in our ponds and rivers, the taking of wild birds. All things, so we do not ever go to that woods even for the firewood we must not gather so as to heat our stoves to cook or keep warm in winter.’

  One of the many rules of the Occupation that were far too often broken but which she obviously still hated. ‘Boy, come here.’

  ‘Martin, the major wishes to speak to you.’

  First it had been “general”, now “major”. From flattery to the reality of working in the Kommandantur? wondered Kraus. And how was it, even then, that a French secretary could identify the collar bars and epaulets of an SS uniform? ‘Boy, give me your name.’

  ‘He can’t.’

  ‘Let him.’

 
‘But …’

  ‘YOUR NAME!’ shrieked Kraus, causing them both to jump, the boy to open his mouth in panic, to try to say, Martin … My name is Martin.

  ‘There, now are you satisfied?’ she demanded, and reaching out, pulled the boy to her. ‘It’s all right, mon petit. The major didn’t mean to startle you. He’s just doing his job.’

  The boy was thin and growing tall, thought Kraus. The sea-green eyes that were brimming with tears went with the dark reddish lights in the hair and the big ears. The angelic bone structure of the face—indeed, that of the arms and hands, too—didn’t have the coarseness of the woman. There was sunburn—the skin was peeling. There were more freckles on the nose, the cheeks and narrow brow than on her. Had he been circumcised?

  ‘Wait here.’

  ‘But … But, please, we have an appointment at 4.00 p.m. The specialist.’

  ‘You’re among them.’

  It was now nearly 3.00 and they had been kept waiting downstairs for hours. Just hours.

  Pocketing their papers, Kraus left the room, left the door open into the corridor. They didn’t hear him take the stairs or the lift, nor did they hear him go into one of the other rooms.

  ‘Chéri, you mustn’t worry. Hey, it’s all right. You’ll see. As soon as we can, we’ll go to the clinic. A few tests, that’s all. Your ears, your voice box—the doctor will look down your throat with a light. He’ll tell us if there’s any medical problem, but me, I don’t think there is.’

  Martin pulled away. He went back to the windows to watch the flies.

  ‘We’ll pay the doctor with the butter, chéri, and maybe the geese or the ham. He won’t insist on everything. Doctors aren’t like that. There’ll be something left for the room. Some little hotel. Then tomorrow we’ll go to the Louvre and I’ll show you paintings and sculptures like you’ve never seen before. I think the Occupier must have put some of those back after it was emptied early in 1940 and lots had been stored away. It’ll be our little holiday.’

  He wasn’t listening. He had “taken down his wireless aerial” and was concentrating on the flies. Several were gathered in a corner of the windowpane. They buzzed. They fought with one another and only as she drew closer to the tall French windows with their narrow balcony so high above the street did she see the handprint and realize the fingernails must have been pulled.

  Bois Carré … The woman hadn’t said verboten signs had been posted all around that woods or that there were sentries, felt Kraus. She hadn’t let on that the local villagers and peasants were terrified of what was going on there and tried to ignore it. Guilt-ridden perhaps, some of them.

  The “son” wasn’t hers—the boy couldn’t be. He didn’t look at all like her, but they could check for stretch marks. Had she any, this Angélique Bellecour?

  Born 8 May 1907 in Tours, a long way from what she now called home. Not stylish. Not fashion-conscious. Not married. No curls, no waves. Not interested in men, or did she simply no longer care about her appearance? Three years into the Occupation, defeat and despair of its never ending had so disillusioned the French, many of their women had given up even worrying about what they looked like.

  Not Jewish, not one of those, though a few of the non-French Jews were still left, still trying to hide out—he was certain of it, and those others would also be taken care of. Again he wondered if the boy had been circumcised. They’d have to check, but did she spend time in that uncle’s potager when not needed in the fields, or was she working for the Banditen, the so-called Résistance, the terrorists?

  Probably. Vegetable gardens were a means of survival.

  What lay before him in the crowded suitcases was not survival but riches beyond most Parisians. Illegal, too, of course. Though many did, it was still forbidden to forage the country­side farms and return with food. There were ration tickets, alcohol-free and meatless days for that purpose, and every one of the French were supposed to obey the system even if it wasn’t working properly and was being constantly abused by themselves.

  Survival—yes, yes, but the food in these suitcases could be survival of a far different sort. ‘These things could simply have been brought for her to admit, if stopped, to the lesser charge of dealing on the black market,’ he said aloud and to the others. ‘That would have landed her a few weeks in the Petite Roquette.* We’d have sent the boy home to that “uncle” of hers. She would know this, too, and that the boy is also good cover. Always travel à deux, n’est pas? Always look as if you’re simply going about your normal routine.’

  He held up one of the geese, but the prisoner, Henri-Paul Doumier, land surveyor, didn’t understand. Battered nearly senseless, his eyes swollen shut and blackening like overripe plums about to burst, Doumier sat in a stupor. His nose was broken, a tooth still clung to a lower lip that had been split. The rounded shoulders had collapsed so that the neck craned forward, begging for the blessed release of the floor.

  Blood dripped from his nose to lose itself among the greying black pubic hairs and spatter the limp penis with its foreskin. A father of four grown children, two boys, two girls, the boys “lost” in the war—this had been claimed. There was evidence of it, but were they really in England and just waiting to come back?

  ‘I think so,’ said Kraus, not bothering to explain his thought trend to Doumier or the others, the musclemen, the gestapistes français. ‘That bitch down the hall is a part of it, isn’t she? The three of you took the same train. You left quite early in darkness. Straight up the Somme to Amiens and then the rapide to Paris, arriving at 9.05 a.m., a four-hour trip, a delay on arrival of only five minutes. That’s pretty good but we couldn’t let you slip away, could we? You were the only ones in from Abbeville today. She and that boy of hers travelled third class while you sat in comfort in the second-class coach. You were her lookout; she covered your back. You were afraid you’d be followed—of course I can see that. Either one or the other of you is the courier, or the both of you. I think you should tell us. We’ll get the names of your contacts here in Paris from her.’

  There were two others of the SS in the room, both specialists in this game of prying secrets. Fritz-haired giants. Blond, blue-eyed Aryans. Dead-cold about their jobs and ruthless, but with the help of those others, the French Gestapo.

  Kraus gave them a nod.

  The tooth was spat. ‘Non! Non, idiot! She has nothing to do with this. Nothing!’ shrieked Doumier.

  He coughed blood. Perhaps he panicked at the thought of what they would do to him, perhaps he revelled in the thought of getting that bitch out of harm’s way.

  ‘There … there was no one with me,’ came the broken cough. ‘Me, I was alone.’

  ‘That’s what they all say, but we knew you were coming,’ said Kraus. ‘We had word of it. Ah, please don’t look so dismayed. Betrayal is so typically French, it’s become the usual. I think the reward was four kilos of white sugar. I can’t be sure. Sufficient in any case.’

  The head was yanked up so that the plum-black eyes had to squint into the glare of the light and the blood ran down the back of the throat.

  ‘Crush his testicles. Let her hear him scream.’

  ‘They’re badly swollen, Sturmbannführer. The shock might kill him. The heart, you understand? He’s very weak. He’s old.’

  ‘DO IT!’

  Martin felt her take him by the shoulders, and when Angélique pulled him against her, the warmth and the sweat made their bodies cling and he thought he could hear her heart beating. Ever so slightly her hands shook just like they did when she washed his neck and back. She liked to feel the softness of his skin—he knew she did—but that it always made her tremble as if she never knew when he’d vanish and was afraid to hold on to him for fear it would be the last time.

  She spoke quietly, urgently. ‘Martin, listen to me. Don’t draw your little parachute for them. You mustn’t, chéri. They wouldn’t understand. They wo
n’t think of it as your way of telling people how you came to be with me in France. They’ll think of it as something else, something very bad. They’ll beat me, Martin. They’ll pull out my fingernails just like they did to the one who left this. They’ll never let me go if you do.’

  Shaking his head, he felt the soft, round firmness of her breasts beneath the thin cloth of her dress and that of her slip and brassiere.

  Satisfied that the warning had registered, she let him watch the flies as they buzzed and fought furiously with one another to get at the bloodied handprint. She touched his neck and ran a finger through the fine, damp hairs, smelled the gentle musk of him, said, ‘You’re so like your father. Every day you remind me of him.’

  Every day she “ached” for his father and prayed for him to come back when it was safe and the war was over, but why does a woman “ache” like that? he wondered, concentrating on the flies. There had been a lot of flies on the road that day in June of 1940. After the Messerschmitts had machine-gunned the road, squadrons and squadrons of bluebottles had come racing in from the nearby farms to feed on the dead and lay their eggs in the wounds, the eyes, the nostrils, the gaping mouths of children, the guts that had spilled out of one man’s stomach like coiled and bloodied snakes becoming sticky in the sun.

  There hadn’t been a sound except for that of the flies. All the cars, wagons and lorries that had been piled high with suitcases, mattresses, blankets, chests, chairs, birdcages even, the prams, carts and wheelbarrows too, had been strewn in a huge line of wreckage that had extended as far as the eye could see. Fires too, and dead horses, a mongrel with its tail between its legs. No one but himself had been standing. Even the wounded hadn’t cried out. Even they had waited a moment.

  Slowly the people had begun to pick themselves up in the fields, and slowly they had come back to the road as if they still couldn’t believe what had happened.