by Manda Scott
The Firm gave them a half-day of training in propaganda: its uses and effects. They advised the use of a megaphone. She puts her hands around her mouth.
‘Men of Saint-Cybard.’ The echo slams in off the high, close walls. Cybard. Cybaaaaard. ‘We are the Maquis de Saint-Cybard. We are here for France. If you stand against us, you will die. Go back now. Go back!’ Back. Back. Baaaaccck.
The hoses wilt. The men retreat, step by slow step, until one breaks and runs, and the rest follow. Behind them they leave a knot of men by the open door: collaborators who will not run. The fire lights them in silhouette. The echo has confused them. They don’t know where she is, where the danger is coming from. Like sheep in a pen, they mill and gather.
Sophie lifts her arm again. ‘Get them!’
This is like shooting crows on a church roof: impossible to miss. Twenty-four men and two women fire a single short burst each.
The noise! It chatters down from the walls and in its stutter, the eight men at the doorway are reaped as summer corn.
‘Come on!’ No going back now. Her heart is a piston, driving. She leaps over the bodies and in through the door.
What now? Smoke. Fire. In the lobby, the chandelier is a scatter of needled light. To the right, the reception desk has been abandoned. To the left is the chaise longue on which she has lately sat with Kramme, a low table, turned on its side, the fire still vast in the grate, blazing. Ahead is the big curving sweep of stairs leading ever upward.
A second look: Cinqfeuilles was expensive, once: the wallpaper in the hallway is thickly textured with silver embossed over a once-pure white; the reception desk is gilded mahogany; the chaise is stuffed with horse hair and covered in a heavy burgundy velvet.
All is ruin now: the chaise, the desk, the walls, the floor are coated in a melange of dust and smoke and the air is dense with the scent of boiling blood and burned hair.
‘Look out!’ Beyond the chaise, a doorway, and in it, a shape that sees them through the smoke and recoils. She huddles down behind the desk, fires a short four-shot burst, hears someone die and someone else scream a warning. Céline is somewhere close behind, firing up the stairs. Someone dies there, too. Not Kramme. She would know the sound of his voice.
The Maquisards press in from the street. Some of them she knows. ‘JJ!’ He’s big, easy to see. ‘The cellars are on the right past the desk. The door will be locked.’
‘Not for long.’ He is a bull. This is his china shop. He carries a crowbar, long as a rifle, and thicker. He elbows past her and kicks open a door on the far side of the reception desk. Silver-grey smoke billows out. Sophie can smell burning Bakelite. She fires back into the corridor opposite and follows him. ‘Daniel! This way!’
The hotel has a telephone exchange. It’s only a small one, but she rakes a burst of bullets across it in passing. It isn’t on fire; the smoke is coming from somewhere further in and deeper down. JJ kicks through another door and beyond, stairs spiral down. He fires down the first curve, just in case. They are coughing now, choking into their sleeves.
‘Cover your faces with your scarves.’ Céline, calling from behind. They all have scarves; she insisted on it. They don’t make the breathing any easier, just less hot. Going down, though, they pass through gradients until, at the foot of the stairs, the air is cool, almost cold, and free of smoke.
The cellars are a well of black: no light is here, but men are shouting in French, beating on solid wood. ‘Here! Here, for the love of God! Open the doors!’
The beam of her torch is a knife, paring slivers of dark. ‘Left!’ This voice is heavier, more authoritative. ‘Come to me. Left at the foot of the stairs and ten paces along. The first cell is on your left there. The boy is in the second.’
She reaches the door, presses her hand to it, as if he might feel her. ‘The boy? You mean René?’
‘Vivier’s son. Yes. If there are more of you, turn right, take the cells there. Hurry, there is water coming in and some are on the floor, unable to stand.’
On the stairs, their feet were dry. On the floor, frigid water sloshes thickly around their ankles. Things bump and swirl, and are caught underfoot, softly. The stench of raw sewage rises in gagging waves, smothering the aftertaste of smoke.
‘JJ!’ He is there, at her side. ‘Let me hold your torch. You need both hands on the crowbar.’ Now she wishes for proper light. The torch barely illuminates the splintering wood, the buckle of steel. ‘Look out!’
The lock breaks with a retort like a gunshot. Along the corridor, men flinch and duck. Sophie stabs the dark with her torch. ‘Are you there?’
‘Here.’ He is medium height, dark-haired, unshaven, the man in the cell. He has been beaten, but not recently. She doesn’t know this man but JJ rushes past her to embrace him. ‘Verne Bedard! We thought you were dead!’
‘I should be, but Kramme caught your Patron and decided he had better things to do than hang me from the ceiling.’
Her guts coil and clench. ‘Where is he? The Patron, where is he?’
‘I don’t know.’ Verne unpeels her fingers from his shirtfront. ‘He was here. I spoke to him two, maybe three days ago, when he first came in. In the dark, one cannot tell the passage of time and they bring food only once every three days. I haven’t seen him since the last meal. Before you look for him, you need to release the child. He has been badly used.’
Gunshots ring out behind her. She spins, trigger finger already flexing. ‘Don’t shoot! Sophie, it’s us!’ Céline flashes her torch at the ceiling to show where she is. ‘Fabien is shooting the locks. The stairs are safe, but we have to get everyone out fast. Get the boy and the others in the adjacent cells. We’ll do the rest.’
JJ is already muscling René’s door but this is too slow. To Verne, she says, ‘Where are the keys?’
‘Upstairs in Kramme’s office. He never leaves them down here. Look, the boy …’
The door has broken open. JJ is in, and crouching in the filth. ‘René. René. René. Oh! Your father would be proud of you …’ The big man comes out, carrying his new burden. René looks small, frail, fragile, so young, so broken; feverish. His head lolls on JJ’s elbow. One arm is a mess of blood. His hand is bandaged, badly. His fingers … it may be he has lost some of his fingers, perhaps the whole hand.
JJ is going to extract blood price for this; his face says so. Sophie asks, ‘What have they done to you?’
Verne is still at her side. ‘They crushed his joints with a hammer, one each day, and sent him back here. If the wounds are infected now, he’ll die.’
‘I didn’t tell him anything.’ René’s voice has been shredded, all the life dragged from it. His smile is flat. His eyes will not focus on her face. Doggedly: ‘I told him nothing.’
What was there left to tell? She wants to be sick, only her body will not let her. First, she has to get everyone else out. She says, ‘Give René to Verne. We need to keep opening doors. JJ, listen to me. There are men in there who have had worse than this. We need to free them.’
And so it is done. René is passed to Verne and JJ becomes a door-breaking automaton. Wedge-lean-snap. Wedge-lean-snap. Wedge-lean—
At the end of the row, one last door resists JJ’s weight: lean again.
Lean some more.
He gives up and shoots out the lock, and finds that even then, the door won’t open.
‘Is there anyone in there?’ she shouts, banging on the wood. She has never been down here; she doesn’t know where the door leads. She calls out, ‘Where does this go?’ and, from along the corridor, a voice says, ‘That’s the way out. There are stairs from there up to the kitchens and outside. The Boche went that way and barred it behind them.’
‘Stand back.’ She has some plastique in her haversack and she knows how to shape a charge. ‘Back! Right back!’
The door splinters. An iron bar has been slid into iron hasps. She hauls it out, kicks open the wood, and yes, her torch finds another door, half open, and beyond a flight of wooden s
tairs, coiling up. Kramme has been here – she can feel his nearness as a prickle on the skin of her forearms, but it is old, by an hour or more.
‘Don’t.’ She catches JJ’s arm before he can charge on up the stairs. ‘They might have laid charges. Besides, it matters more to get everyone out of here.’
‘What do we do?’
‘Blow the kitchen stairs so they can’t come down at us.’ Another shaped charge. Another retreat around the corner. Another satisfying explosion and the stairs are splintered matchwood, burning.
The men of the Maquis are carrying those from the cellars who cannot walk, which is perhaps half of them. Some are too thin, some too badly injured. Nobody, as far as she can see, has lost a limb. They head back up the stairs.
On the ground floor, Fabien is maintaining order: the fire burns less fiercely, the smoke drifts in patched clouds and there is clear air between. The Boche are not much in evidence, except on the floor, dead.
Outside, groups of men guard the roads with mortars, but nobody has faced them down yet. A line of Maquisards moves wounded men from the stair-head out onto the street where Fabien has commandeered three petrol-driven trucks. ‘Sophie! We have Kramme’s car.’
‘Where’s Kramme?’
‘Gone. One of the Milice said a message came, warning him to leave before the planes arrived.’
She doesn’t want to see the Milice who gave this information. If he’s dead, he’s lucky, but it won’t have been clean. ‘Someone needs to show us how to get to Kramme’s office.’ She should know, but Kramme never mixed business with pleasure, so she doesn’t.
Beside Fabien is a big man with a beer paunch who smells of the cellars. He grins, showing a row of rotting teeth. ‘I can find another one to question,’ he says.
Ignoring him, Sophie says to Fabien, ‘Where’s the Patron?’
‘Not here.’
Verne is back. He has found a Luger and looks as if he knows how to use it. ‘Kramme’s office is on the second floor.’
Thank God someone knows. She asks, ‘Do you know the way?’
‘Follow me.’
They run up the long, shallow, spiral stairs, slipping on blood-slicked marble, past punctured bodies all clad in grey. JJ stoops to put a bullet through the skull of one that might not be dead.
Verne turns right at the top of the stairs and they all follow. ‘Third along.’
Third along looks like any other hotel suite: big double doors with much glass, curtained. Brass handles the length of an arm stand proud, stained now with smoke and fire-scorch. The carpets smoulder. The smoke here is thin and acrid. Sophie can smell burning flesh and will not think whose.
‘Céline. Verne.’ At her nod, they take up positions either side of the double doors. JJ kicks them open, ducks to the side and waits. When nobody shoots, they push through, all four together, weapons to the front.
Into an empty salon that smells of burned flesh and fear and death.
It’s a big room, well appointed. The stabbing lace of their torches lights a dress uniform on a hanger in an open wardrobe; a desk, neatly ordered; a bar, well stocked. But nobody is here: not Kramme, not the Patron. Nobody.
‘Patron?’ Sophie sets her voice above the general melee.
She is answered, after a fashion. A grunt, a swift scuffling, soon suppressed, and these from behind a door on the room’s far side.
Kicking it open, she enters what was once a bedroom, and now has been stripped of all amenities. The floor is solid wood, painted black. The walls are white. There are no curtains and the windows are barred. Yet another door leads off into a bathroom, and in that sits a full bath with old blood on the curved edge.
She sees these peripherally and only because she has been taught to observe all that is out of the ordinary, and everything in this room is extraordinary, from the raw stink of blood to the pile of telephone directories with the scuff marks of men’s shoes on them to … the thing she does not want to see: the man hanging from the ceiling.
‘Patron!’
His eyes are whole. They have not taken his eyes. This is what she sees first, ahead of all the rest: he is not blinded. That was her first fear.
But the rest is as grim as her nightmares. He is hanging by his wrists from a meat hook bolted onto the ceiling joist. A bloody cloth gags his mouth wide open. His teeth are bared in a white-lipped grimace of pain. Ligatured by the handcuffs, his fingers are red-blue swollen sausages, and below them his wrists are green-white dead. Dark, crusted blood tracks down his forearms. His chest is a burned and bloody mess. His bare feet are pulped and he has no toenails.
All this as she crosses the room. She is a nurse. Her mind is clean and clear. ‘Verne – there’ll be a doctor’s room somewhere nearby: next door, probably. Find it. We need morphine, penicillin and iodine. Get them. And mop handles to make a stretcher. Use Kramme’s greatcoat, it’s on the hanger in the outer room.’
She is in front of him. He’s still alive, breathing, however shallowly. She shifts across the pile of directories and stands on it, grasps his hips, takes his weight to release his arms, feels the gasp as the pain is lifted. ‘JJ!’
JJ is tall enough to stand on tiptoe and flip the chain of the handcuffs over the hook with the crowbar.
The Patron’s weight is all hers. She holds him, staggering. Céline helps her. Between them, they lay him down on the matt-black floor. Verne is somewhere, blundering. He has morphine, a syringe, a needle that may be clean. She cracks open a vial, draws in, taps out the bubbles, injects into his arm.
‘Patron. Patron. Patron.’ Her mind is not clear now; the word is the only one she can find while, of its own accord, her body goes through the mechanics of her trade. He has a pulse. It is hard and shocked and rigid under her fingers, but he has a pulse.
Céline leans over him, ragged. ‘Patrick. Oh God, Patrick.’
His eyes float open, green-grey with vast, black pupils.
He is alive.
He is not dead.
Sophie says, ‘We have you. You’re safe. Safe. I swear it.’
Weeping, Céline reaches for the gag.
They do not sleep: it is not that kind of night. In the early light of next morning’s dawn, Céline leans against the pine log wall of the infirmary, gripping a bottle of the local Calvados by the neck.
Sophie sits with her back to the closed door. Patrick is inside, with enough morphine to give him sleep. She has washed every part of him, sponged off the blood, catalogued the injuries. A part of her knows all that was done, can list the broken bones, the torn tissue, the joints wrenched out of alignment, the burns, the contusions, the lacerations. This knowledge is sealed in the growing part of her mind that hides what she does not want to see.
She takes the bottle, swallows, holds her breath against the burn. To Céline, she says, ‘Did the invasion succeed?’
‘Not yet. I radioed London. They said, “progress is smooth” which means, I think, we haven’t lost yet. It won’t be swift.’
Nobody thought it would be. Nobody who knew anything about war, anyway. ‘How’s René?’ Céline took him on: Sophie had no compassion to spare.
‘He’s eaten. He’s drunk a lot. Everyone is praising his courage. The pain will hit him later, in the night.’
‘We have enough morphine.’
‘He says he doesn’t want it.’
‘Still.’
‘Still.’
They drink, quietly, beyond speaking. Except that Céline keeps looking down through the trees to the fires and the camp. ‘Sophie?’
‘Mmm?’
‘Did you ever think you were betrayed? That Kramme knew more than he should?’
Merde. She sets the bottle down. ‘What have you found, Céline?’
‘This.’ She has them tucked into her shirt, warm from her skin: three slips of paper, thin, lined in pencil, with typed messages that look very like the Firm’s ciphers except they’re in German. The top one makes her eyes dance.
She says, ‘I c
an’t read German,’ which is not wholly true, but it buys her time to think. She has not brought a weapon here. She has the bottle, which is weapon enough, but she is not sure she has the heart to use it. The yammering in her head – I did not, I did not, I did not! – fell silent for the duration of the raid and there is a void where it was, a space, on the edge of which she sways. Now the voice of her guilt asks, Did I? and if the interrogative ever becomes a statement, she is finished.
She looks up and finds that Céline is watching her. Céline, of course, reads German without effort.
‘They were all sent to Berlin. This one –’ an elegant finger runs across the top – ‘says that Kramme has a new informant who goes by the name of Diem. The others detail information this Diem has provided about jaunts and so forth, and ask for permission from the highest authority not to act on it, for fear of endangering the life of his source.’
The highest authority. Christ. ‘Was he given that permission?’
‘Signed by the Führer himself. The corporal is most impressed with Sturmbahnführer Kramme.’
Something hard and ugly jabs at Sophie’s heart. ‘Where did you find these?’
‘In a drawer in Kramme’s desk, tucked under a diary.’
‘He’s a Boche,’ Sophie says. Her voice is holding up remarkably well under the circumstances. ‘He does nothing by accident. He wants us to destroy each other.’
‘Quite so. And Larry said he was proud of you, which, translated from family-speak, means you are to be kept safe, come what may. Some things may invalidate that, were he to find out about them.’ Her finger is under another line. ‘You can read this, I imagine?’
She cannot breathe. Did I? Did Kramme play me when I thought I was playing him? How? Aloud, because she might die here: ‘Céline, I swear I did not give Kramme the Patron. I would never do that.’
‘Did you give the date of the invasion? Because that might actually be worse.’
‘No!’ How can language be shaped to do what it must? She is on her knees. Her hands hold the neck of the Calvados bottle as if it were some holy book, or a Boche neck. ‘How could I? I was here when you found out and I didn’t leave until we went down into town tonight.’