Gingerly she climbed down the ladder and went along the corridor until she came to number seven. It was all too risky; she’d have to choose another place, another time, but would Châlus not tell them the truth about her?
She would have to kill him. She had no other choice.
Up on the roof, the rain struck her and when she reached the first chimney to hug it tightly, the Beretta slipped away and she heard it clatter on the copper sheathing before it dropped into emptiness.
‘Martin … ? Ah, chéri, don’t take it so hard. Something must have come up. These things, they’re never certain.’
She’s been arrested, he cried. Now they are yanking out her fingernails!
‘Petit, please. She’ll come when it’s safe. We have to believe this, otherwise everything is lost.’
He buried his face against her chest and wept as she tried to comfort him. Salauds, he cried at the Boches. Cochons! Killers!
‘Courage, Martin. Courage. Your father would have wanted you to be brave.’ But would he really have? she wondered. Anthony had been the gentlest of souls. He had detested the very thought of war and had lost his own father in the previous conflict. This Résistance leader Herr Dirksen thought had lived in her flat would have had to become the exact opposite of Anthony. Hard, shrewd, a ruthless killer who was always one step ahead of the Germans and their friends.
Try as she did, Angélique couldn’t reconcile herself to such a change. Martin’s father had escaped and was in England where he had been for the past three years. Doing design work for the Royal Navy, yes, of course, but not killing people, not directly.
‘Come on, Martin, let’s lie down for a bit. So what if there are bedbugs, let’s make hotels of ourselves. We’re both exhausted. We’ll leave this place well before the curfew ends. We’ll return to the Hôtel Trianon Palace. Those who are watching for us will be far too sleepy to notice.’
He had found his thumb, poor thing, and when she kissed his cheek, it was still hot but a little cooler. ‘Sleep, that’s it, mon petit parachute. Sleep.’
She dozed, fought to stay awake, mustn’t drift off. Martin depended on her. ‘Martin,’ she murmured.
The rain was constant, but here belowdecks in the cabin of the Alcyone, she felt it warm and dry, and they lay naked, Anthony kissing her hair, her eyelids, cheeks and throat, she feeling the soft brush of his lips until their bodies were as one.
Boots sounded, racing up the stairs from floor to floor. A shriek was given. A door flew open, splintering. Another and another. Someone tripped and fell headlong down the stairs. ‘SALAUDS, YOU HAVE DECEIVED US!’ cried out someone in French.
‘UNE RAFLE!’* cried another.
But then the Deutsch came: ‘DUMMKÖPFE, GET BACK TO YOUR SOLDATENHEIMS AT ONCE!’
‘ALL RIGHT, ALL RIGHT! HEY, WE’RE GOING AREN’T WE?’
Clubs swung, couples were being torn from their beds and flung into the corridors, some to yell as they fell down the stairs. There was more pounding, more cursing, more shrieking. A gun went off. A man cried out. A burst from a machine pistol tore plaster apart. Suddenly everyone was shrieking, crying, screaming.
Pound, pound, crash, crash! ‘OUT! OUT!’ Smash, smash. Boots racing up those stairs, chasing someone. ‘ARRÊTEZ!’ Another burst of firing, the return of pistol fire, the pop, pop of it heard against the terrible racket of machine pistols.
‘LES TOITS, MES AMIS. LE SALAUD, HE IS GOING OVER THE ROOFS!’
The door flew in. A machine pistol opened up. Angélique shrieked and tried to shield her head. Martin screamed, ‘FATHER! FATHER!’
Over and over again he screamed for that father of his, but hands were now on her shoulders, her arms, face and hair as she cried out, ‘MARTIN! MARTIN!’
Slammed against a wall, she lost consciousness momentarily, was dragged up, hit twice across the face, punched, kicked, she trying to speak, trying to defend herself.
A hand grabbed her by the throat. She couldn’t breathe … Must breathe … Martin … Martin …
‘FATHER! FATHER!’ he shrieked. ‘FATHER, PLEASE SPEAK TO ME. IT’S MARTIN. MARTIN!’
‘WHERE IS HE, DAMN YOU?’ shrieked a voice in French.
She tried to answer. There was more firing, more sounds of running, more shrieks. Lights found her. Lights blinded her. There were men but they weren’t in uniform. They were gestapistes français who pushed her repeatedly against the wall and shrieked, ‘WHERE IS HE?’
The sound of fabric ripping came. Now a seam, now another until at last she realized it was her dress.
The strap of her brassiere broke. Naked, cowering before them, Angélique tried to cover herself. ‘I DON’T KNOW WHO YOU MEAN! I DON’T!’
They shone their lights over her. They didn’t believe her and grabbed her by the arms, yanking her from the wall.
But someone must have said something to them, for they left as suddenly as they had come. Now they were up on the roof.
Left in semidarkness, aching all over and with only the light from the corridor, she couldn’t find the will to move. Martin must be somewhere. Martin? she asked herself. I must find him.
And then, uncertainly exploring each breast, each shoulder and gripping the stomach they had punched and kicked, she realized that Martin had cried out for his father, that in the midst of the gunfire he had found his voice but had used English.
‘Martin … ?’ she said hesitantly. ‘Martin, are you all right? Speak to me, please. I know you can, my darling. I heard you calling out.’
The road was littered with wreckage. A baby’s brains were all mixed up with its blood and skin and those of its mother. A man sat slumped against the car that was turned onto its side. A dog whimpered. Flames rose from the windows of the car. A front wheel kept turning and turning.
‘Please, sir, can you tell me where my father is?’
Grey and slippery with blood, the red-netted, stringy, blue-lined tubes kept bulging out of the man’s stomach to glisten in the midday sun. Both hands tried to stop them. The man couldn’t understand what had happened. Bewildered, he looked up.
Bulge, bulge, they kept on slipping through the blood-soaked, clasping fingers. ‘Mon papa, monsieur? Have you seen him?’ Seen … What was that word in French? wondered Martin. ‘Un Anglais, oui? Un homme? Tall … with reddish-brown hair like mine and sea-green eyes. His ears stick out too.’
The man didn’t understand English. He just stared up at him with that same stupid, uncomprehending expression. Then he toppled over, just like that, and the rest of his guts rushed out in snaking coils until they, too, lay still and the blowflies began to swarm in.
Farther along the road, a seven-year-old girl lay sprawled on her back beside a wicker pram. Blood trickled from her nose and lips. She had wet herself and emptied the rest.
This baby in the pram had been smashed to pieces too, just like the other one, but then the Messerschmitts came back and it began to rain, and the rain of cannon shells and bullets changed into a rain of water, which would wash the blood away, he supposed.
Martin blinked to clear his eyes. Down from him, two roofs over and beyond other chimneys, men with torches and guns had finally captured the one they’d been chasing. A boy of maybe eighteen had been badly wounded, his shirt drenched; he was trying to say something. Perhaps it was, Why did you have to shoot me? Perhaps it was, We’ll get you in the end. But then it came clearly in French, ‘Why was the other skylight locked?’
They paid no attention. Helped to his feet, the boy thought they were going to take him back into that house, and for a moment it looked like this would happen as they negotiated a narrow ridge.
They’d question him. They’d torture him, thought Martin. But what if he were to call out to them in English from here—yes, yes. No one would expect him to do that. Distracted, the boy, a résistant, might have a chance.
He began
to step forward but a hand on his shoulder stopped him. ‘Don’t. You mustn’t, Martin. They’ll kill me if you do.’
It was the Mademoiselle Isabelle and she had been hiding behind one of the chimneys on this other and higher roof.
‘Martin, I have to get away. Everything depends on it.’
The rain came steadily. The torch beams of those guys, those gestapistes français, were searching the roof down there for a better place to stand.
Gripped tightly, Martin felt her cheek against his. Some of her hair now clung to his brow. Beneath the damp smell of the rain, there was the faint smell of her and of a fear that made him tremble. ‘Shut your eyes,’ she said, and there was a hardness to her voice he couldn’t understand. ‘You must,’ she grated. ‘This won’t be pleasant.’
It began to rain very hard and the sound of it drowned out anything more the young man might have said as he struggled weakly to get free from those who held him. They laughed. They had pistols and machine pistols and they hunted for résistants and evaders of the forced labour, the STO—the Service du Travail Obligatoire—but he hadn’t been guilty of any of those. He couldn’t have been, for he had asked why that skylight had been locked.
Laughing, they threw the young man from the roof. He didn’t even scream. Then one of them said, ‘That’s it, eh, mes amis. He flies to meet the angels.’
‘Salauds,’ breathed Isabelle Moncontre, pressing her cheek so hard against Martin’s the salt of her tears was mingled with the rain. ‘They’ll pay for this, won’t they, my little parachute? Your father will help us kill them all.’
Hidden on the rue de Vaugirard, the cars started up and soon there was only the sound of the rain.
The flat on the rue de Beauséjour was in darkness and Hans left it that way because she wanted him to, Marie-Hélène following him through to the salon to open the French windows to the balcony and listen to the rain.
‘I can’t go on with this,’ she said. ‘I’m finished.’
‘You’re going to have to. We have no choice.’
He was refusing to understand. ‘Those two terrorists were waiting for me, Hans. They knew I would be using that maison de passe.’
She was really worried and would have to be calmed. ‘Look, you know that can’t be true. The wire across the corridor was simply a safety precaution for themselves.’
Ah, damn him! ‘And their door being ajar? Yes, I suppose that, too, could have been a precaution, but what about the one who waited on the floor above, eh? Who the hell was he waiting for, if not myself?’
A third man? ‘Thiessen, Châlus, or whatever Anthony James Thomas is now calling himself, couldn’t have known you would be meeting the Bellecour woman and the boy there. In any case, Kraus covered your back. Without the men he sent, where would you now be?’
Dead, was this what he really believed? ‘So am I to be indebted to your second-in-command? That’s perfect, isn’t it, and exactly what he wants you to believe. Myself also, no doubt.’
She would have to be warned. ‘Berlin have been after me again. Kraus is essential. They’re telling me to listen to him or else.’
‘Then ask yourself, please, if he knew enough to cover my back and to bolt and wire those skylights, why did he not warn me? He knew about those two who were killed, Hans. He must have. He’s out to get us and you know it!’
She wouldn’t understand how serious things were nor why he had to take Kraus’s part. ‘He felt the Bellecour woman might need convincing, so he organized things. Now the woman will accept you totally.’
So that was it, that was why the raid? Was this what he was saying? She couldn’t believe it of him. ‘I could easily have fallen from the roof, then where would you be?’
‘You were supposed to have been in the room with the woman and the boy. Everything depended on their acceptance of you.’
‘And were my clothes to be torn from me too, Hans? Was I also to have been smashed up against a wall?’
He didn’t answer but was he still so blind, he wouldn’t question what had happened? ‘Then why, please, did those gestapistes français of his not take that wounded boy from the roof and into custody? Why didn’t Kraus think it necessary to have questioned him, especially since he could well have led us to Châlus?’
His back was still to her. ‘The idiots got carried away, that’s all. They were to have taken them to the avenue Foch. Those were their orders.’
‘Ah, mon Dieu, I’m not hearing this.’
Furious with him, for he wasn’t listening, she went out onto the balcony to lift her face to the rain and shut her eyes. Martin would be no problem, but what of Angélique Bellecour? That would have to be seen. And Abbeville? she asked, dreading the thought of what was to come. ‘He’s out there, Hans. Raymond Châlus, that unfinished business from Lyon and the réseau Parrache. Theissen—James Anthony Thomas—are they really one and the same? Please don’t tell me you’re still working on it.’
‘Thiessen’s wife and children are alive and well and at the address in the suburb of Marienburg. Apparently the couple separated just before the Blitzkrieg in the east and the fall of Poland. Certainly divorce is not currently allowed in the Reich, not without very special permission and she continues to try to get this, just as he continues to write to her and the children as if nothing had happened between them.’
Nothing. ‘That’s not what I asked you.’
‘Abwehr-Paris still refuse to answer my queries about him being one of their special agents, so I have made an urgent appeal to the Reichsführer Himmler. As soon as Berlin have something, they’ll telex it.’
But wasn’t the Abwehr on the downslope and Himmler about to absorb it into the Sicherhietsdienst, so much so that here in Paris each side had been forbidden to speak to or associate with the other? ‘Châlus could have taken up writing those letters, Hans. Châlus.’
Pulling off her things, she let the rain hammer her as it would the bodies of those two who had died. ‘Were those “résistants” Kraus’s men, Hans? Were they duped into doing what they did? Please, this I have to know because before they threw that boy from the roof, he demanded to know why the skylight he was supposed to have used had been locked?’
There was no answer, and when his car started up, she listened to it until, again, there was only the sound of the rain.
* First Berlin raid 4 March 1944
* A deliberate RAF raid to stir things up. Though several were killed or wounded, the races that day had continued.
* Also known as the Gare de Montparnasse
* A police roundup
6
The third-class carriage was old and of a style Angélique hadn’t seen in years. One of several, it had been pressed into use due to the removal of better rolling stock to the Reich. Each compartment was no more than a box that would seat four people. A small, square window had been placed too high for viewing the countryside when seated. Martin had to stand on his tiptoes until she, stiff and sore and sweating in this airless coffin, had taken down their suitcases and piled them on the floor for him.
Now the rhythm of the wheels, never fast, kept sounding until she thought she would go mad. Martin wasn’t “speaking” to her. She was certain he had seen one of the résistants die last night, but had yet to tell her anything.
He had cried out in English for his father. For one brief instant, he had found his voice but had he also remembered what had happened to Anthony on that road south from Paris? Had he?
Have I lied to him? she asked. Have I been wrong in believing that Anthony was safe in England? Did he die on that road and is that not why Martin lost his voice, and is this why he doesn’t want to have anything to do with me now?
Those gangsters of the gestapistes français hadn’t raped her but had left that feeling of total panic and terror. She was bruised and battered, her right breast badly discoloured and still hurting,
the left shoulder and other places too. Lots of them. If they could have beaten her to death, they would have. Chance alone had intervened.
Those guys must have found Isabelle Moncontre on the roofs but had taken her down through one of the skylights in the adjacent houses. She’s been arrested, hasn’t she, Martin? she said to herself, dreading the thought. Me, I’ve been a fool, haven’t I? And getting to her feet, went over to the window to wrap her arms around him.
He shook her off, would have smacked her if she had let him. ‘Your father’s in England, Martin. He can’t help us. He left us on that road because I made him leave. He knew too much and … and lacked the courage needed to … to have kept silent when arrested.’
There, she had said it at last. The proof positive, but was everything finished between her and Martin now? A coward … Was she calling his dear papa that? She knew he would be thinking this and that he would hate her for it.
‘Chéri, these times, they’re so very different. Who’s to say how any of us would react when faced with what those people would do?’
It was no use. Martin really had shut off his inner wireless set and had taken its aerial down, but as she watched him, he stretched, and in the top right corner of that little window, drew his signature parachute in the soot.
Below it he found room to put a dot and a dash, followed by a little gap, and then a dash-dot and another dash-dot, and, after a second gap, a single dash.
‘Martin, please erase all of that immediately. Ah, mon Dieu, what is it with you? You know what they’ll do to me if they find that.’
She was quivering with anger and he knew this as he drew a heart and then added the dot and a dash and then the dash followed by another and two dots.
A. J. T. loved A. B.—Anthony James Thomas loved Angélique Bellecour—but who will save us now? he asked and wrote two dots, followed by two dashes. I. M., Isabelle Moncontre.
‘You know I can’t read Morse. You know how dangerous it is for you to do that. Must you crucify the “mother” who loves you?’
The Little Parachute Page 16