by Manda Scott
There are no women in attendance. Sophie sends the men for their wives, sisters, mothers; anyone who will come and be useful. While she’s waiting, she washes her hands and brings a wrung-damp flannel to the wife of the captain of the Milice. The girl turns her head away.
Palm to cheek, Sophie turns her back. ‘Let me wash your face. You will feel better.’
Madame Andreu submits to the cleansing with the soundless, wordless incomprehension of a foreigner. Sophie lays down the flannel and drags a chair to the bedside. ‘Do you speak French?’
‘Of course!’
There. See? That wasn’t hard. Amazing what a little pride can do. Sophie says, ‘I am a nurse. The doctor is on his way, but he may be delayed. It may be that I can help in the meantime. Will you permit me to examine you?’
‘Do I have a choice?’
She is the wife of the Milice chief. She probably has almost as much power in this place as anyone but Kramme. Red points of anger tinge the sharp angles of her cheeks and angry women are dangerous.
Sophie chews her lower lip. ‘Not if you want to be sure you and your children will live through what is happening.’
Nature has its own comment to make; at that moment, Madame Andreu’s contractions recommence with a single, violent heave. The girl’s scream is long and hoarse, like the distant braking of a train. There is no need to ask for permission a second time.
Time becomes bloody, cramped and slippery with birthing fluid. Sophie forgets, always, the way her forearm aches, and her fingers become numb, how the first feel of a limb is a mystery, how she has to let go of the part that knows things, and let instinct tell her whether what she has found is an elbow, a heel, a foot. Here, there are not two elbows, but four, four heels, four feet, two heads, or rather one head, almost crowned, but she thinks the foot near it belongs to its twin.
She says things, useful things, perhaps: I am going to have to push him back in, please, if you can, don’t push against me for a moment. Never mind. You can’t help it, and we made some progress. Again, try again. Good. So now the first one is ready. Send him to me.
It is a girl. She comes out puce, shimmering, cone-headed … and whole. Another little Milice. Still, Sophie loves her. Towels are here, and hot water, and all the things she asked for and did not notice when they arrived. A taller, more striking version of the woman on the bed steps forward to take the child. ‘I am her aunt. I will hold her now. Until this is done.’ Madame Andreu does not demur. She is lost in a world of pain and stretched flesh. She is tired now, and the contractions are weaker.
‘She needs calcium. Where is the doc—? Oh.’ How long has he been there? He does not have the fresh-skinned look he has when he has been outside. His hair is flat from his hat. He regards her for a long-held breath and then turns to René Vivier, who is standing by the door.
‘Get my calcium gluconate bottles, a needle and some rubber tubing.’
He is a good phlebotomist; there is no pain as he slips the needle into Madame Andreu’s vein. Everyone watches as the fluid drips in, hypnotically slow. They look from bottle to bed and back again, waiting for the miracle of the calcium to expel the second child.
‘Your hands are smaller than mine. Deliver the second one, if you please.’
And so she finds herself once again kneeling, blood stained, reaching, not thinking, hoping.
The second child is delivered whole and alive: a boy. Now that the screaming has stopped, more people are here to observe the outcome, and several of the assembled cross themselves and mutter. With calves, if twins are of opposite sex, they are sterile. They will not believe that this is not the case when a woman has twins.
Sophie does not care. She sits back on her heels, drained, dizzy, hungry beyond anything she can remember. Even waiting for the boat across the Channel, two days without food (or was it three?), she was not this ravenous.
The Patron catches her eye. In the angle of his brow, or perhaps the flat, undemonstrative smile, is a warning. His voice says, ‘Monsieur Andreu is outside. You will wash and present yourself to him and then we must go. We have to pay a visit to Madame Labrèche. Already we are late.’
She is too tired to be afraid, whoever is here. Monsieur Andreu is smaller than her imagination had cast him, but then in her mind, he was bigger than JJ Crotteau, which would be impossible. He is of mid-height, with middling to balding hair that shines with brilliantine. In a world without war, you would think him a bank clerk.
He is not ungrateful, but it is clear he holds with the majority view that his children are freemartins, that his son will be sterile. And so she finds she must talk to him.
‘You have names for your children, Monsieur?’
‘My son will be Arnaud, after my father. The daughter …’ His gaze slides past her to someone of more interest in the antechamber. ‘My wife will name her. Excuse me.’
It feels like being dropped from a height, this sudden transfer of attention. In one moment, Sophie is the focus of their thoughts; the next, she is stranded, alone in a half-empty room, and everyone is very still, as if a gun has been pulled and the first to move will be shot. She doesn’t have to turn to find out why – she is a tuning fork, finding its note.
Kramme is here.
Kramme.
He the stoat and she the rabbit. She cannot look away. He is no bigger or more imposing than Captain Andreu of the Milice. He is a slim man of unassuming proportions. Set somewhere in the decade between thirty-five and forty-five, his remaining hair is a mousy blond, cut to military neatness. He has an open, boyish face, unlined by age or the weight of responsibility. If you didn’t know him, you would think he had a keen sense of humour.
He reeks of Boche: that faint almost-ozone of power and expensive unguents, of red wine and good food and the knowledge of superiority. She has seen the way men shrink around him, but she is surprised to see the Patron shrinking with the rest.
He catches her eye. He must not be seen to know her, or she him, but he smiles, nods, takes off his hat as if they were old friends. His eyes flicker to the Patron, to the others in the room. Her heart is a cascade of terror. She wants to look down. It would be proper to look down. She cannot. The Patron. You must preserve him at all cost. And she wants to. Really, she does. Whatever she may have thought on the night of the drop, here, now, today, she wants to prove to the red-headed Englishman that she is better than any man they could have sent. This is her truth and it is not the right one.
I don’t know who this man is. He’s the doctor. He’s not the Patron. I have not yet met the Patron.
You’ll have to do better than that.
I am a nurse. My name is …
The Patron catches her elbow, ushers her forward. ‘Sophie, let me introduce you to Sturmbannführer Kramme. He keeps the peace in Saint-Cybard.’ She is set in front of the monster. ‘Herr Kramme, this is Mademoiselle Destivelle, my new nurse, come lately from Paris to fill the gap left when our beloved Madame Florant retired. Sophie will transform the medical capacity of our town.’
‘Transform it? That I doubt after all that you have done, but certainly, she will make it more beautiful. She is not only competent beyond her years, she also has eyes in which a man could drown and die happy. Mademoiselle, enchanté.’
His French is slightly archaic. Halfway through speaking, he sweeps off his glasses. His eyes are blue-grey and suddenly, startlingly vast. Smiling, bowing, he kisses her hand. His lips are dry. His grip firm. In a world without war, perhaps he, too, would be a bank clerk. He gives her fingers a slight squeeze. She smiles at him. I am your agent, pretending to be in the Maquis, pretending to be Sophie Destivelle, a nurse.
Sophie, who hates you, but will not show it.
Sophie, who will smile and try to make it look real, although she is afraid of you.
She has no idea whether anything she does looks real. ‘A delight, Sturmbannführer Kramme. Are you a patient of Monsieur Duval’s?’
‘Everyone in this town who cares to kee
p his health is a patient of the good doctor. And today, we have seen why we shall also be overjoyed to be ministered to by you. But you are fainting with hunger, I can see it. François, take her to Monsieur Jacquot’s and tell him that I will settle the bill. I will send an officer to Madame Labrèche to explain why you will call on her tomorrow, instead. Her fluttering heart, I am sure, will continue to beat strongly enough for another twenty-four hours, even lacking your ministrations. And sometime in the near future, you must bring Mademoiselle Destivelle hunting. You can handle a gun, Mademoiselle? No? Not even a small one? But then we shall teach you. A lady should always be able to shoot to defend her virtue. Go!’ He claps his hands. ‘Allez! Vite! We shall speak again presently. For now, I must congratulate the new father in proper style.’
The meal is astonishing; she hasn’t eaten like this ever, not before the war, not in England, not anywhere. She had no idea that it was possible. Which isn’t to say the meat doesn’t taste like sawdust in her mouth, but she can at least appreciate the work that has gone into making it. Two new men have come with them – two who know the Patron very well, but were not part of the pick-up last night. They are introduced to her as Latimer Bressard and Thibaud Navarre, businessmen of Saint-Cybard.
Bressard is a civic lawyer of some sort; his exact profession is not made clear, but he talks in legal language for the entirety of the meal. Navarre runs the Peugeot factory at the east side of the town, which is no longer making civilian vehicles, but has been retooled to furnish tank tracks for the Wehrmacht.
Sophie stitches these facts together from fragments of conversation, all of them innocuous. What is less innocuous is the tap of Navarre’s finger on the tabletop. Twice, he spells ‘equinox’ in Morse. The Patron is talking to Bressard at the time. He nods, says yes, nods again, but it might be entirely unconnected.
The men eat as if it were their first meal, or their last. Sophie picks at her steak flambé and the caramelized peaches that follow it until the Patron stands and makes his goodbyes and leads her out.
Not once in the entire meal has he spoken to her. Still not speaking, he drives out of town, heading east, with the setting sun blazing on the mirrors from behind. Sophie dozes in the passenger seat, lulled by the rocking of the car. It is older than she had thought, and one of the cylinders is not quite firing cleanly. Her father would have had the engine out and stripped it down.
She talks to him in her head, her father, muzzily, as if he were still alive. Did you see me deliver the son of a Milice? I am sorry, but the child is not responsible for the actions of the father. And I shall do things that will balance it out. There will be an assault on the tank factory tonight, I am sure of it. I will make the Patron take me along. He will see what I can—
‘Get out.’
Her head is slumped on the window. Her mouth is open, her tongue dry and rough. The Patron is standing at the window on her side, his fists jammed in his pockets, glaring at her.
She is awake, sharply. ‘Why?’
One brow flashes up. ‘Because I tell you to do so.’
She gets out, keeping the car between them. He does not appear to be armed. If she has to kill him, she’ll have to go back to Kramme and give him everything. JJ, Daniel, Madame Fayette, René, Raymond … all will be dead.
Nothing happens. He draws no gun, but nods forwards and she has time to look around. They are in the country, in the mountains, in fact, so soon after the town. A forested slope rises steeply to the south and east, big enough to blot out the horizon and the blue-distant peaks that bite so savagely into the sky. Here, where the car is parked, is a small lane with tall hedges on either side and a river running to the south. To the north are two brick-built barns, their vast doors shuttered. They are lacking, as far as she can tell, any farmhouse.
‘Inside.’ He jabs his elbow toward the left-hand barn, the one with the tiled roof intact and fewer rat holes along the ground line. ‘Quickly.’
He is in a hurry now. He runs ahead of her, in through a small door in the nearest barn’s end. She follows him into darkness, dust and streaks of lacerated sunlight struggling through the gaps in the doors. Hay fills one end, dry as spun gold. The Patron throws himself to his knees, where the stack meets the wall.
‘In here.’
In here is a space beneath a plank which itself is hidden beneath the hay and then some sacking. It is so well fitted into place that it would not have occurred to her to lift it. Nevertheless, in the space revealed as the Patron tilts it back is a wireless set of the kind she was trained to use: bulky, heavy, difficult to move around and hell to set up the aerial and get a signal. It is also an invitation to arrest and interrogation if she is found anywhere near it by the man she has so recently met.
‘We have a send time in three quarters of an hour. The plain text is here.’ The Patron pulls a sheet from his pocket. ‘You have your own poem, I imagine? And true check? On the assumption that you can encipher, I will return one hour and ten minutes from now. You will open the left-hand door to the other barn just before that as a signal that you are safe. If I don’t see the door open, I won’t even turn into the lane. Is that clear?’
She nods. She wants to say, ‘I am not a wireless operator. Tap out your own codes,’ but he’s gone, striding, and in any case, she is not certain she has the guts to say that, yet; not to his face. She turns and begins to thread out the aerial. By the time it is done, he has gone.
He collects her seventy minutes from the moment he left her. They do not speak in the car, until he draws up outside a row of cottages on the margins of Saint-Cybard.
‘You will stay with the Aillardes. They are collaborators. If, at any point, you make them suspicious, they will denounce you. You will not listen to the radio. You will not tap Morse on the breakfast table to keep it fresh in your mind. You will not endeavour to make contact with Raymond, or JJ, or any of the other men. Are these things clear?’
‘What about Madame Fayette? She was making dinner for us.’
‘That was by way of her humour. She knows you cannot go back there.’
‘In case I endanger her?’
‘Or her sons. Her family has lost enough to this network already.’
‘What am I doing here?’ Am I the turnip? In which case do I operate or do I run? She asks this in her head and he ignores her.
‘You are my assistant, who is a nurse. You will accompany me by day and you will assist with my work. If there are other things you can do, I will tell you. In the meantime, I expect you will hear more from Sturmbannführer Kramme. He likes you.’
Two days later, a package arrives, c/o François Duval, for his cousin, the nurse, from Sturmbannführer Maximilian Kramme. In it is a dress of flowing burgundy silk, the exact colour of her scarf, cut in a fashion she has never seen and would never dare wear. The note says, ‘A gem should have the best of settings.’ Shoes and stockings follow a day later, and the day after that, a summer coat with a mink collar.
She opens each in the Patron’s presence, increasingly aghast. ‘I can’t wear these.’
‘Unless you want both of us to lose our eyeballs, you will wear whatever he sends you, whenever he asks you to do so.’ He turns to walk out of the room. She thinks he is not going to speak to her ever again.
At the door, tight-lipped, he says in English, ‘If the bloody idiots had to send a woman you’d have thought they’d have had the basic common sense to send an ugly one.’
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
ORLÉANS
Sunday, 18 March 2018
13.00
AT THE RADICAL mind studio, Clinton McKinney fields phone calls, most of them from the other side of the Atlantic.
Picaut catches him between dial tones and lays her phone on the table with the Maquisard image on the screen. ‘The original of this came from ciné footage shot in 1944. I need to see it.’
‘Captain, if we had it, I would show you. Paul Rey had the only copy and Elodie went to collect it. When she arrives, you can add
this to the list of your questions.’ His fingers hover over the speed dial. ‘Did you find anything that might help your investigation?’
‘Sophie Destivelle was an assassin in the war, did you know?’
‘A member of the équipes de tueurs. We had heard rumours to that effect, yes.’
‘Did she talk of it on the record to Elodie?’
‘If she did, today’s events would make it worth its own weight in platinum. Sadly, she didn’t. At least—’ He pauses to think. ‘Not that I know of. Elodie shot four hours of interviews and I’ve only seen the rough cuts. It’s not impossible. I refer you to Martha, who may be able to tell you more.’
Martha Lakoff is there, as if she has never been away. ‘I really can’t, but I can—’
Picaut’s phone buzzes, an angry-hornet noise that means Rollo is using his spare phone, which means it’s urgent, so she answers. ‘Yes?’
‘How was Pierre Fayette when you left him?’
‘Stooped. Quiet. Not as clueless as he wanted me to think. Why?’
‘He had a gun, right? You got Petit-Evard to check the registration. Did you take it?’
‘His father’s M1911 was locked in a box in his shed and no, I didn’t take it. There was no reason to. Rollo, why?’
‘A neighbour rang in. She heard a gunshot and went round to look. She found him in the kitchen. He’d put an old wartime gun to his head and pulled the trigger.’
Oh, dear God. Picaut hits the stairs, running. ‘Get someone there, whoever’s closest.’
‘I’m already here. I was crossing the river when it was called in to the station. I’m in the kitchen, looking at the body.’
‘Pierre Fayette shot himself in the kitchen?’
‘That’s what I’m saying.’