He left her then, left her feeling so alone and leaning back against a ruined wall wondering what the hell to do to stop it all from happening, and when he returned, he had the rucksack he had taken into the mountains as a boy.
‘There’s a stripped-down Schmeisser in an oilcloth, two hundred rounds, and a Luger with fifty. See that this mayor of yours receives the Schmeisser, then single Kraus out and lead him into a trap. Make certain he’s killed.’
He was serious. ‘Why don’t you do it yourself? A lonely road—there are lots of those. A walk through the ruins—ah! there are plenty of those too.’ Why her?
‘Because I can’t. Because if I did, my death wouldn’t be so pleasant and you know it.’
Ah yes, an SS man must never kill one of his fellows. They used piano wire to garrotte them but first would castrate and then torture. ‘The mayor won’t want any killing that can’t be hidden or attributed to natural causes. There’d be reprisals. Hostages.’
He tossed a hand. ‘For every omelette there are casualties. Tell him that.’
How French Hans had become. ‘And Châlus?’ she asked, still watching him so closely it made him feel uncomfortable.
‘I don’t know! I wish I did, but we’ll get him this time because we have to. Use his son against him. Ach, verdammt, let the boy lead both Kraus and him into a trap. Do something! You have no other choice.’
An order, was it, or else? ‘Me, I’ve risked my life for you many times. Already I’ve told the sous-préfet Allard that this “priest” and “novice” might try to infiltrate. At the very most this can only delay Châlus a day or two, no more, I assure you, and in the end, if he’s not stopped, he’ll confirm that I’m that very infiltrator, but I’ll never know how things are until the end.’
Pinching out the cigarette, he crumbled it to dust. ‘Look, I wish I could be here to help but I’m not even supposed to have left Paris. If Berlin find out I disobeyed, they’ll …’
He glanced at the rucksack and, swearing at himself for having used it, said, ‘Destroy it. Don’t let Kraus find it. He would only trace it back to me.’
And what of us? she wanted so much to ask, but softly said, ‘You leave me many things to do but nothing for myself.’
‘You have the Luger. Use it.’
‘Hans, how can you say this to me? To me?’
‘Everything is waiting for you at your flat in Paris. Your new carte d’identité, new passport, travel permits, sauf-conduit for the zone interdite along the Spanish border—everything to get you across the frontier and into Spain without question. Also one hundred thousand Reichskassenschein and a letter of introduction to our consular general in Madrid.’
Two million of the Occupation francs. It was little enough when all was considered. ‘So, it’s good-bye, is it?’ she asked and saw him shake his head.
‘Not at all and you know it. As soon as Kraus is out of the way, I’ll take over again. Do this for me and you can have anything you want. Anything, Marie-Hélène. We’ll destroy London and win the war. We’ll turn back the Allies. Even the Russians will be afraid of what we have.’
Bois Carré was but one of many such sites and yes, the destruction of that city alone could well cause the Allies to rethink their position but didn’t such a prospect of mass destruction also seduce the minds of those who would use it?
Wanting so much to say, I pity you, she shrugged and said, ‘For me, I only hope you’re right.’
Noyelles-sur-Mer was at the head of the Somme Estuary and from this little seaside village, the rippled sands and channelled muds at low tide formed a huge and glistening apron. The wind was from the west, and it would bring much rain. Allard could smell it, but would it cause problems? he wondered, thinking of what had to be done.
Seagulls and terns fought for scraps among the floating refuse—German scraps, he told himself—but the sound made him think of the Marquenterre. There were thousands of such birds in that place but also migrating ducks and geese and sandpipers and they offered perfect shooting now only for Germans. Grey-blue herons too, and swans and spoonbills.
He could taste them. Not the herons—ah, not one of those from the spit of an open fire, but merely for the sport and to say one had shot one on the wing. Slow … mon Dieu but those things had been so slow. Like Dorniers, Blenheims or Wellingtons.
‘Do you remember the dunes, Nicolas?’ he asked. The two of them had come the fourteen kilometres from Abbeville, north down the Somme Valley in the tiny Peugeot the Germans had allowed him.
‘It’s not a day for boyhood memories, Théodore. It’s a day for us to find this infiltrator priest and his novice.’
‘I was only asking so as to remind myself of the things I value most.’
‘The camping trips.’
Life! but there was little sense in saying this. ‘Those girls we used to meet, Father, and the things they urged us to do with them while under moonlight among the dunes.’
‘If I remember it, we played cards and sang songs. They wore bathing suits, towels and kerchiefs and there were far more of them than there were of us.’
‘You have no imagination. Constant prayer must kill it!’
The Marquenterre was just to the east of the estuary, where the tidal flat was at its broadest. Reclaimed after the Middle Ages, the land had been found so wanting, the area had been left as a wasteland that had quickly been taken over by sand dunes, salt flats, scrubby patches of woods and isolated, marshy ponds.
‘One could hide there, perhaps,’ offered Father Nicolas with the shrug Allard knew so well he didn’t need to look at his friend to see it.
‘They would use the dogs and spotter aircraft to find us,’ he grumbled. ‘Besides, there are coastal batteries, pillboxes and minefields.’
‘We may not have to hide. Not yet,’ said Nicolas.
‘At Mers-les-Bains there might be a lugger or a trawler. It’s just a thought.’
‘You would never leave your wife and family to face things alone, myself my parish.’
‘Then let’s get this over with.’
The Auberge of the Annoyingly Fertile Cat wasn’t much. Norman-looking in its entire, with half-timbered walls, low ceilings, shutters and leaded windows, it had somehow avoided the ravages of 1940, but the staircases were hell and begged for a damned good shelling. Far too steep, too narrow for the cautious approach and too noisy. Impossible to do anything but look up and into a pistol perhaps.
When shown the room, they saw right away that the priestly cassock and novice robes had been left behind but were neatly folded on the bed. From the room, the roofs stepped down to freedom.
‘One night, that is all they have spent,’ lamented the patron. ‘I have wondered at them sharing such a small bed, Monsieur le Sous-préfet, but,’ he shrugged, ‘with God there are always mysteries and to each such life, the secrets.’
Where had he come from, this idiot? wondered Allard, snorting inwardly but grunting dispassionately, ‘The sister? The older one?’
The head was tossed. ‘Ah! she didn’t share this room. She’s among the graves, searching as she does each year for the stone of her long-dead brother. Though she has seen it many times, the memory is, alas, in other places, the mind also.’
Allard sucked on a tooth. Father Nicolas fingered the cassock. ‘And the others—these two?’ he asked, indicating the cloth.
The patron, a man of sixty who must have spent his life digging for clams and mussels and eating them, shrugged and threw out the hands of desperation. ‘Gone to heaven perhaps, as angels.’
‘Idiot! this is serious,’ swore Allard.
He had meant it too. ‘Gone east, well beyond the war graves here. On foot. Me, I have seen the two of them as they waved good-bye to the elderly sister.’
‘Who will, no doubt,’ offered Father Nicolas, ‘return these garments to whom they rightfully belong.’<
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‘Is the church mixed up in something?’ asked the patron dodgedly.
Allard drew himself up and frowned as a police administrator should.
When they found the elderly sister, she was indeed lost among the graves and of absolutely no use to them. A note was securely pinned to her habit: I am Sister Juliette from the Carmelites of the rue d’Assas in Paris. As you think of God, please return me to them and so direct my path.
It was Father Nicolas who wished her well. Allard simply looked to the east along the empty road, which here found its lonely way across the plain of Ponthieu towards the Forêt de Crécy.
‘They must be heading for Bois Carré or to one of the other sites,’ he said. ‘But if infiltrators, as I’ve been told by the Mademoiselle Moncontre, then why would they begin their task at the source of our interest?’
‘Because only by searching for what we desire to know better can they prove to us they are genuine.’
‘Was it one of them who killed Véronique?’
‘You know that’s impossible. The distance, the train times …’
‘Yes, yes. I’m only asking because I already have the answer, Nicolas. If not the priest and his novice, then who?’
‘Our Mademoiselle Moncontre?’
‘There’s something about her that still tugs at me. Why, please, did she wait to warn of the infiltrators until she was alone with me?’
‘She wasn’t sure. She only thought they might be.’
‘And now, is it that we find they are, or is it that like the good sister, we must be told by another which path to follow?’
It was quiet along the Transit Canal amid the ruins on the outskirts of Abbeville and when she thought it safe, Marie-Hélène took the rucksack from her carrier basket and gently lowered it into the water. The stones would weight it down.
As it sank from sight, bubbles of marsh gas rose until, at last, there were no more.
Hans had asked her to kill for him but when the réseau de soie bleue ceased to exist, she had the feeling there would be nothing left between them. Her usefulness would be finished. She would be, and now was, too well known.
The Schmeisser and its two hundred rounds were hidden in the hut near the Monts de Caubert—she had found a good place for them along with thirty rounds for the Luger. All else was in the woven straw handbag.
Kraus wouldn’t cooperate any more than would the mayor. Both would have to be forced into meeting face to face and alone, but to that, Kraus would never agree. At best, he would come with a few others. There would be an exchange of fire—he could die in that, but far too much depended on pure luck.
Pushing the bike, with her bag in the front carrier basket and half open for easy access to the Luger, she started out again. She would ride to the northeast to have a look at Bois Carré from a distance. Only then would she decide what to do.
Between the villages of Caours and Neufmoulin, two camouflaged lorries full of Waffen-SS roared past, the wind taking their dust and chasing them. No smiles. No whistles. Just the brutal stares of the impassive.
Then a Wehrmacht one came along with a few laughing boys in the back who, on seeing her, eagerly signalled to their sergeant to stop and give her a lift. This was often done for pretty girls, but they had the SS’s German shepherds with them and these constantly took interest, so much so, that when they got to Saint-Riquier, she said that she had to get out, that she was home.
Grinning, they left her in the village, left her with a final sight of those dogs, all five of them with heads out over the tailgate, watching her.
‘Dogs … ? Ah, mon Dieu,’ she managed. ‘The search for the parachutist.’
Suddenly the telex had stopped and the phone lines were silent. In the stillness of the Kommandantur, Angélique heard Frau Hössler roll the lozenge around so that it clacked against the back of the woman’s teeth.
When excited, when nervous, she constantly popped these ersatz things into her mouth. Papers were being brusquely stacked, pencils tidied. Dogs … Were they to use dogs? Martin was in those fields next to Bois Carré. Martin wouldn’t know about the dogs until it was too late.
The Kommandantur and hôtel de ville had been a madhouse. Furious with Sturmbannführer Kraus for having called in a detachment of Waffen-SS without proper authority, Oberst Lautenachläger had brought down the mailed fist of a Prussian general. All hotels, inns and pensions were to be searched, all farms, villages and towns within a radius of fifty kilometres. Train schedules, bus schedules—even flights into and out of the nearby Lutfwaffe bases—were to be checked. All wireless traffic for the past ten days was to be thoroughly scanned for clandestine signals that might have been missed. Banditen from Paris were in on this Doumier affair. They were to get those people—GET THEM!
A priest, a novice and an aging nun … Would the dogs tear them apart? Would Anthony escape? Could he? And what of Martin?
Frau Hössler pried open the tin and offered a lozenge. ‘They are gut, ja? Menthol, eucalyptus und der Pfefferminze. Very suitable for the throat.’
Angélique shook her head and gave a whispered, ‘Merci, you’re very kind. Later perhaps.’
The woman was adamant the dogs would soon root out the parachutist while keeping at bay those who had hidden him. ‘You will see,’ she said and sucked on that thing. ‘Nothing will get past the Waffen-SS. Those boys, they know their duty.’
Dieu mon Père, please! begged Angélique silently.
‘Those dogs have been specially trained. They’re very vicious. Myself, I have seen such things. Ach, but I have. One caught the escapee by the throat, another rushed for the genitals—it is the same with wolves. They tore him to pieces in less than a minute and had to be dragged away lest they feed and get a taste for its sweetness.’
I’m going to vomit, said Angélique silently but somehow managed, ‘I’ll just take these papers into the mayor’s office. Then shall I make you a cup of coffee?’
‘Coffee, yes. You don’t look well. You have had a shock. Frau Dussart was your friend—this I have seen. But how is it that you French find it so easy to betray one another?’
‘Véronique was beside herself with despair. The Gestapo Munk must have forced her to …’ Ah, why had she said it? ‘I’m sorry, Frau Hössler. I am upset. Please forgive me.’
Was the Sturmbannführer Kraus using this one? wondered Beate Hössler. From the counter she could see the Bellecour woman standing with her back to her before the mayor’s desk, but of course Ledieu was not here. He was at one of his breweries. He wasn’t a paid mayor. Voted in before the war, he had simply been allowed to continue.
Calmed a little, the Bellecour woman went round the desk to place the papers beside some others, only to hesitate again.
The Oberst Lautenschläger’s telephone began to ring. Muttering under her breath, Frau Hössler went to answer it and found the Riechsführer Himmler shrieking and demanding reasons—yes, reasons!—why the colonel hadn’t answered the phone himself.
The list on monsieur le maire’s desk contained the names of all those who had gone through yesterday’s control at the entrance to the zone interdite. Angélique saw hers and Martin’s. Faint pencil marks encircled those of a Father Boulanger and a Sister Jacqueline Chevalier, the novice.
She reached for the eraser and began to remove the marks.
‘What are you doing, please?’
Frau Hössler filled the doorway. ‘I … You … you know how fussy the Gestapo Munk is. There were some accidental pencil marks. I …’ It was no use. ‘I erased them.’
‘Show me.’
‘Yes, of course.’ Angélique saw the mechanical pencil Martin had taken to Paris. Quickly she used it to encircle her own and Martin’s names. ‘The mayor was just glad to see we were home, that’s all. You know how concerned he’s been about my son.’
‘Please hand me the mayor’s
magnifying glass. It is in the top drawer, at the left.’
‘All right, you win. Give me back the list.’
The woman did so. Rapidly Angélique encircled every name she could, but faint lines were discovered and were matched with the names of Father Boulanger and Sister Jacqueline.
‘The Sturmbannführer Kraus will be notified of this, Mademoiselle Bellecour. For now I tell the Unteroffizier to mount a guard over you. Perhaps it is that the Sturmbannführer will accept your answer, perhaps he will wish to question you further.’
‘And monsieur le maire?’ she asked.
‘Will be questioned also. It is not right he should have encircled those names and you should then have tried to hide this from me.’
Being mayor was not easy; hunting for answers one hoped not to find, the most difficult task.
Ledieu pushed the bike out of sight behind the shed and hurried along the path. The Pension des trois soeurs was on the northern edge of Abbeville and just off the road down which Véronique Dussart had gone to her death. Théodore Allard had insisted he have a look while Father Nicolas and himself were searching for the “priest” and his “novice”. It was a modest house and had never been suspect, so it troubled him to have to ask to see the Mademoiselle Moncontre’s room, but he had no choice. The committee had voted: two to one.
Most of the guests were not German—indeed, at present there were none of those. The other guests were getting on and chose to live quietly: two widows from the previous conflict, and three veterans, all of whom had been badly wounded in that same conflict and were on meagre pensions, a national disgrace. And oh for sure, the widows would, no doubt, often join forces to accuse the pensioners of cowardice in the face of battle. So many had died in the Great War of 1914–18, it was only natural for others to blame those who had survived. Over a billion and a half artillery shells alone had been fired across the plains of northeastern France and Belgium. This legacy of old shells was constantly killing or maiming farmers, construction workers and the curious, especially boys. While the fighting had been to the south and east, at Amiens, Le Cateau, Verdun and so many other places, Ponthieu had experienced the British Expeditionary Force with its bivouacs and training grounds, and as a result, such buried surprises cropped up from time to time.
The Little Parachute Page 25