The Little Parachute

by J. Robert Janes

  Kraus had been after her. ‘You’ve never had cold feet before. Why suddenly now?’

  ‘Because, in listening to the river, I was reminding myself of how I was at the same age. My father was holding me by the hand. We’d had a terrible loss, one that he couldn’t forget, neither could I.’

  ‘Bien sûr, chérie, but now we don’t even know where Martin’s father is. We only know there was a parachutist who came down in a field of wheat not far from Bois Carré. As leader of this Sonderkommando, I have to quickly find out what the Wehrmacht have been missing, and you should know and understand the urgency. Verdammt, mein Schatz, I need you.’

  My treasure, but he had never told her anything about those sites, not even what they were for, nor why such secrecy was imperative. Instead he had always avoided it.

  ‘Try to sleep. There’s a pillow in the back. Curl up and I’ll get it for you.’

  ‘I couldn’t. None of it’s right, but I’ll do what you want because I have to.’

  ‘If Kraus has been threatening you and trying to get you to give him information before myself, I’ll have to know of it.’

  ‘He hasn’t. Now just let me sit here. I … I need to be by myself.’

  ‘Then I’ll check again if the boy is still asleep.’

  At 5.00 a.m. in pitch-darkness, the curfew ended and the city began to drag itself out of bed, and yes, thought Marie-Hélène, the sound of her wooden heels on the damp paving stones of the rue des Grands-Augustins was overly loud.

  ‘Bijou … Bijou, ma chère,’ she sang out, ‘where are you, petite? Come to Isabelle. Ah! you naughty thing. You know you’re being absolutely repulsive. Staying out all night; defying the curfew. Now listen, you, I really mean it this time. It’ll be into the soup pot for you if someone should grab you before I get there …

  ‘Ah, mon Dieu, mon pauvre,’ she said to the boy, to this Martin. ‘You’ve been hurt. Your hands, your knees … Are they still very painful? Oh for sure, they must be. It’s lucky the Boches didn’t come along to find you out here all night in a doorway. Here, let me help you up. Let’s see if you can stand okay.’

  Martin rubbed sleep from his eyes and tried to moisten his throat as the woman set her torch, with its tiny pinpoint of blue light, down on the stones and felt in her purse for a handkerchief. ‘It’s clean,’ she said, ‘so don’t worry about picking up any of these strange diseases we’ve been having due to the lack of vitamins and minerals. And don’t mind the perfume. It’s as good an antiseptic as anything. Even the hospitals are using it to bathe the wounds, if they’re not too big and deep. Saves money too, I guess, so be brave. Steel yourself while I touch you up where it must hurt the most.’

  Her light shone on his hands. Gently the woman dabbed at the cuts. Delicate, the scents of bergamot, sweet orange and lavender were there, with touches of cloves and cinnamon. Sandalwood too, probably—all of the very special ingredients Angélique had told him to search for when assessing a woman’s taste.

  ‘There,’ this one said and smiled so beautifully he felt his heart skip. ‘The scrapes aren’t as bad as I feared at first. Painful, yes, of course—ah, mon Dieu, why wouldn’t they be? After all, isn’t that the way the body tells us that we’ve been injured and are in need of help?’

  Playfully she touched his shoulder, making him wish with all his heart that he could say, Merci beaucoup, mademoiselle. He did try. He really, really did, but it wasn’t of any use.

  She didn’t seem to mind. ‘You haven’t seen or heard a little dog, have you?’ she asked, and he liked the sound of her voice. It had a certain music to it. Gentle and kind but with muted suggestions of laughter at herself for having thought the cuts and scrapes far worse than they were.

  ‘Bijou’s a poodle, of course, and very tasty, or so I’ve been warned. Temperamental, too. Me, I should have known better than to have chosen such, but …’ She shrugged. ‘What is one to do when one is looked at with such sorrowful eyes? I adopted her, but how was I to have known she could be such a wretch? Out all night and causing me to worry and not sleep.’

  Again Martin tried desperately to find his voice and felt a fool. Ashamed, he shook his head rapidly, she to nod and say, ‘Well, thanks anyway. Bonne chance, eh? One needs it these days. Take care of yourself.’

  All too soon he was left alone, the pinpoint of her torch growing fainter and fainter, the sound of her heels as well until they stopped suddenly in the darkness, and he heard her coming back, heard the worry in her voice. ‘Hey, mon ami, are you really okay now? Was the concierge mean? Did she tell you to sit outside and learn a damn good lesson or else, eh? Is that why you weren’t allowed in?’

  Again he tried to find his voice, as she said, ‘Look, why don’t you pull the bell and let me give her the tongue lashing of her life? It’s not right for her to have done a thing like that. One of the swallows* might have come along and you’d have spent the rest of the night scrubbing the toilets in the district gendarmerie.’

  Shaking his head, Martin started out, and when she caught up with him, she said, ‘So it’s not your house. What difference does it make? Don’t cry. I’m a friend, aren’t I? Look, why not help me find that wretched dog? If you do, you can share my breakfast. Fair’s fair, eh? If not, why you can share it anyway and you can then console me.’

  Still he didn’t say a thing, and she must really be wondering at such a silence as they went along the street through the darkness, she calling out for Bijou and flicking her light here and there while trying also, she said, to save the damned batteries. ‘They’re so hard to get now. Two hundred francs apiece on the marché noir if you can find one. If.’

  A vélo-taxi hurried past, the wheels squeaking from the lack of grease, for in Paris they wouldn’t even have the pig fat they had on the farm and he’d had to taste since it had been shoved into his mouth on a brush, he lying in the pig shit, having lost the fight.

  ‘Ah! to hell with Bijou. She’ll come home when she wants if she’s not been slaughtered, gutted, stuffed and ready for the roasting, her hide then to be tanned and made into shoes. Me, I’ve warned her many times, but she fails to listen.’

  Again he tried and tried to speak, she saying, ‘I’ll bet you’re as hungry as I am. Too bad it’ll only be the ersatz coffee of crushed and roasted acorns with a touch of chicory, no milk of course, for our friends stopped that the day they entered Paris and they still haven’t managed to get those trains running even though they’re using them for lots and lots of other things. Sending them east, of course. But, I’ve bread, the national, that grey stuff with the floor sweepings and all the rest like weevils, but you can drown those little buggers in your coffee and chew them up. If you’re like me, you’ll find them rather tasty and nourishing too. Even the Maréchal* eats them, but he’s so dotty now, he wouldn’t even notice. He’d just suck on them, having forgotten to put his teeth in. Laval* would have forgotten to tell him that too, since that one does everything for him.’

  The boy had been huddled on the doorstep of number 37 and Hans would already have obtained a list of all in that house and on the street too, just in case.

  ‘Is that where your father lives?’ she asked and saw Martin desperately shake his head and dart his eyes away from the light. And when the café patron let them in, she found a pencil and a scrap of paper in her purse. ‘Now tell me who you are, since you must have lost your voice. A cold perhaps, who knows? Write down where you’re staying and let me see if I can’t help you a little more. My name is Moncontre. Still a mademoiselle, for the man I was to have married is, of course, locked up in the Reich, in a prisoner-of-war camp. But since we’ve become friends of a sort, why you can call me Isabelle just like he would, and it’ll be music to my ears when you recover your voice.’

  * A vehicle whose engine uses a gas-producer fired by charcoal or wood, or bottled producer gas

  * A medieval square, and the former name of t
he place de Hôtel-de-Ville

  * Resupplying

  * The Special Commando for the Retaliatory Weapon Ones, the V-1 flying bombs

  * Policemen on bicycles

  * Pétain

  * Pierre Laval, the premier

  3

  The shade was deep, the early morning cool. Water trickled softly over the stone steps of the Médicis Fountain where Acis, the shepherd, made love in white marble to Galatea, and the jealous Cyclops, Polyphemus, knelt in bronze above, peering over the edge of the boulder he would soon push to crush them.

  Martin had come back. Angélique knew about the night spent on the doorstep of number 37. It was only a matter of time until things closed right in and they, too, were crushed. She felt so helpless. Utterly frustrated and angry, as if the whole world had suddenly gone mad and all she could do was to stand here and wait for it to happen.

  Oh for sure they were being followed all the time and watched. She was certain of it, yet the city went on about its business as usual. The traffic on the rue de Médicis could be seen through the trunks of the plane trees and the tall, black iron fence that surrounded the Jardin du Luxembourg. It was thin. An old priest with a briefcase was passed by two arm-in-arm girls, then a German soldier who was smoking a cigarette, then a bicycle taxi, a lorry with a gas-producer that smoked terribly. Wet and rotten wood probably. Hay too, maybe. But no one would care a damn about what was happening to them. People kept to themselves only all the more so in this Occupation.

  Everything in her wanted to cry out, Martin, you knew the concierge of that house could identify me! But … ah, one couldn’t blame him. He was too little, had been far too upset. Had lost monsieur le maire’s pencil again and for good, perhaps. One would, of course, have to see. Yes, one would. A little test of her own, for if it did come back, she would know right away what Herr Dirksen and Herr Kraus would want of her. Betrayal of everyone. Monsieur le maire and all the others in Abbeville and anyone else she could bring.

  ‘Chéri, your father can’t have gone back to that house. Petit, listen to me. Don’t switch me off like that! I’m not a wireless whose music you hate. I’m your Angélique, the only friend you have, and you’re mine, so friends like that have to stick together, eh, especially when the whole world is against us.’

  Had it done any good at all? she wondered. ‘Look, I know how much you want to believe he might well have done such a thing, but it’s not in the cards. You wouldn’t want him to be shot in the street, would you, he trying to escape when they come to tear that house apart and arrest everyone? They will, Martin. They’ll rip the floors up and tear the walls apart searching for the clandestine wireless set on which a very different kind of music is played. Secret answers, Martin, to questions asked by the British. They’ll look for guns as well, and explosives and you know this. You must. Your father simply won’t have been there. He knew exactly how valuable he was to the Boches if captured. A designer of racing yachts can design other things. Even in 1938 he was doing classified work for the British Royal Navy. He went home, Martin, during the Blitzkrieg. Home, do you hear me? He’s alive, yes, yes, but in England. He knew he had a duty far beyond just you and myself, and in the end he had to make a choice that was far greater than the two of us.’

  She was the one who wouldn’t listen. She never had, thought Martin. His father would really have gone back to that house. He’d have made himself a good set of false papers and taken another identity, would have lived right in that same flat, right in the very heart of this city.

  The Boches wouldn’t know who he was. He’d look just like all the other men of his age, even with his dark red hair because … why, because he would dye it black. Yes, black! And he could speak Deutsch too, he really could, and the Germans liked and trusted those who could. It was one of the ways of getting right in among them, they not even knowing.

  Angélique smiled softly at him and tried to comfort him but he pulled away as he heard her saying, ‘Someone else will have taken over my flat. Right after the Defeat, the Germans issued an ordinance that stated that if a person didn’t return to their home or place of business, it would be confiscated. Someone else will be using my desk and sleeping in my bed. They’ll be eating off that china my aunt Victoria left me in her will even though the dishes were cracked and chipped and would have suffered if auctioned off. She had always hated me as much as she had my father, her own brother, for God’s sake. Ah! she knew I wouldn’t throw the wretched things out because she had read my character through and through. Whoever has the flat will have found and burned all those photographs and letters I’d been saving and couldn’t manage to take on the exodus. They’ll have my collection of antique scent bottles too, the ones I used to find in Saint-Ouen.* All such things, Martin. Things that really don’t matter anymore, do they, until …’

  Bursting into tears at the thought of opened trunks and suitcases, of the boxes of things scattered about in the cellars of that house, the mould and mildew on everything now, even on the endless snapshots of her and her lover: Anthony James Thomas, yes! Thomas, Martin, she silently wept, for Kraus would find them and then he’d make her tell him everything.

  ‘Chéri, if your father did stay, they will only get him, so please let’s pray that all of my things were destroyed or sold off, and that there’s no longer any evidence of him or of myself.’

  Martin studied the reflections in the fountain’s rectangular pool. Big, empty stone urns stood on pedestals around the pond, just inside the walkway, and he could see their images in the water, that of the ivy too. English ivy.

  A matchstick was thrown by one of the men who were pretending not to watch them, and when it hit the water, it sent out its message rings just like one of those secret short-wave transmitters would. Da, dit, dit, dit … Da, dit. Ici Londres … Here is London calling. He often listened in on his crystal set that was illegal and would be confiscated if they found it. Sometimes there was too much static, sometimes the Boches were jamming the airwaves. He preferred to listen to the Free French broadcasts from London rather than the BBC’s English language program. He found that better, easier to understand. Both, however, would be sure to give the latest news.

  Had he forgotten how to say things in English? he wondered. Was he now so fluent in French, he couldn’t even speak his own language anymore?

  I can’t speak anything anyway, he said.

  Though her voice would grate, felt Angélique, it would have to be asked. ‘Martin, tell me about the Mademoiselle Moncontre, this Isabelle who sent you back to the hotel in a vélo-taxi. Tell me everything you can. You said she told you she worked for a big publishing house. Was it Les Presses Universitaires de France? That used to be on the boulevard Saint-Germain and is not far from here. Maybe she can help us.’

  It was only logical to thank her. Surely Dirksen and Kraus, since they must be working together on this business, would understand a mother’s desire to offer thanks?

  Impossible! They would simply arrest the woman and then ask their questions later. Clang, clang and into the panier à salade* with her. Straight to the Santé or maybe the cells of the Petite Roquette if they were feeling kindly, the Cherche Midi, if not.

  ‘I’d better telephone first. Others will, of course, be listening in, since the Gestapo and their French helpers do this constantly, but sometimes one must take chances.’

  Taking out his pencil and paper, Martin scribbled furiously, She’ll just hang up. She won’t say anything. She can’t. She’s one of us!

  At 8.30 a.m. there was sufficient traffic in the rue de Tournon for a Parisienne with a wounded bicycle to pass unnoticed. Marie-Hélène ruefully examined the front tyre and, at last, trying not to break a fingernail, pried the offending drawing pin out. ‘Maudit,’ she said to no one in particular, stamping a disgruntled foot. ‘Patching kits are impossible to find these days even though ninety-nine percent of the population either runs on two wheels,
four if they’ve a horse and wagon, or else nothing but the feet!’

  Just along the street, Dr. Émile Vergès paused to secure the gate, then to look back at the house of his forefathers. Was he wondering if he would ever see it again or merely if his aged mother would understand why he had agreed to become a part of this thing, or was he arguing with himself and saying he need not go through with it?

  She couldn’t tell at this stage. He searched the street for trouble, looked at her as she leaned over the front tyre—she could feel him studying her closely, said silently, I’m nothing, Doctor. Just a young woman with a little problem. Such minor catastrophes, they happen all the time, n’est-ce pas?

  At a news kiosk he purchased copies of Le Matin and the weekly Pariser Zeitung, Germany’s own paper in Paris. An eclectic reader, was that it, or were they ID marks to single him out for his contact?

  The Zeitung faced the world, the Matin was hidden. Sweeping her gaze around the square, she searched for others. When he reached the Jardin du Luxembourg, he made straight for the terrace and she hung back. Suddenly he stopped beside the pond and she saw him talking to the Bellecour woman and her son. The boy would recognize her. Others were strolling; others sailing their toy boats. For perhaps five seconds all motion ceased for her, the scene to be recorded starkly in memory. A Wehrmacht lieutenant was over by one of the statues. Nearby there was an elderly Frenchman with his dog, a maid pushing a pram, a solitary Frenchwoman of about thirty-five, in a suit and wearing a large felt sun hat.

  The Bellecour woman didn’t smile at Vergès but said something so intense the doctor tried vehemently to deny it and, with a dismissive lift of his newspapers, turned his back on them.

  Much distressed, Angélique Bellecour watched as he quickly retreated. Then the two went back to their little sailboat, the boy kneeling at the edge of the pond, his mother with hands dejectedly in the pockets of her flowered print dress.