A Treachery of Spies

by Manda Scott

  ‘You didn’t, maybe. What about him?’ Her chin jerks over her shoulder at Laurence. She really doesn’t care about his gun. ‘Or his fucking uncle?’

  What?

  And then: What?!

  It’s Paul he reads, the disgust written raw across his features, and it’s not directed at Sophie, but at him, Laurence, and through him, to—

  Oh, Christ. He looks at the departing car, at the man in the back seat, who is waving. He never knew what Kramme looked like. He does now: middle height, sandy blond hair, on the lean side; fit as a flea.

  Hell. Bloody hell. Three years of bluff and counter-bluff, of ciphers and cryptic half-tells and the long, slow dance of deception. Icarus is Kramme. Kramme is Icarus. There is a terrible symmetry to it and he is not at all sure that the Brigadier does not know.

  Laurence turns to look at the church, where men are dying in a blaze of gunfire, and slowly, he turns back to Paul Rey and Sophie.

  To Paul: ‘You’ve never seen Kramme. How did you know it was him?’

  ‘I didn’t.’ He jerks a thumb down towards Sophie. ‘She did. And I trust her.’

  There speaks love. But love is not always blind.

  To both of them, Laurence says, ‘I didn’t know. I swear to you on Toni Gaspari’s life, I had no idea.’

  ‘And the Brigadier?’ Sophie asks, flatly.

  He remembers a conversation at Montagu Square: a hint of other wars being fought behind the scenes, of priorities beyond the obvious. He says, ‘We are family. He wouldn’t lie to me.’

  ‘Tell that to Toni Gaspari. And whoever court martials me. Paul, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean …’

  ‘I know.’ Standing, Sophie lets drop her gun. All the fight has gone out of her, but she is gazing over Laurence’s shoulder towards the church, where the firing has stopped. To him, she says, ‘You need to tend to your cousin. The Boche have just killed her Patron.’

  ‘Stop. Theo, stop. It’s over. It’s over. It’s … over.’

  The Boche are dead. They are beyond dead. His cousin Theodora has emptied six magazines into the bodies and is still firing. Approaching, Laurence coughs on cordite and his ears sing.

  ‘Theo …’

  ‘Céline. I am Céline.’ She is a doll, a marionette. She is not weeping any more than Sophie is. He wonders when women stopped weeping and why he didn’t notice. The barrel of her gun is giving off a radiant heat, like a furnace. Empty magazines lie at her side. She runs out of rounds, and so has to stop.

  He turns her, shoulder and arm. ‘Céline, then. Come away.’

  ‘Fabien?’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  Alain Devereaux, known as Fabien, is not dead, but he is not likely to survive the day. Three rounds have hit him: leg, shoulder and gut, and he is losing blood, fast. His life is measured in hours.

  ‘Patrick will save him.’ Céline stands, looking round the men, counting casualties, and deaths: two others, dead. And Toni Gaspari. How can he tell her this? That he, Laurence, has just helped Sturmbannführer Maximilian Kramme escape. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I didn’t know. He says it over and over in his head. I did not know. How could I know? Each word, each syllable, sounds hollow. The Brigadier knew: as time passes, he is coming to believe that. He is not sure he can ever forgive him.

  Aloud, he says nothing. Sophie says nothing. Paul Rey is carrying Toni’s body back to the trucks. Céline does not ask how he died, or whether Icarus made a clean escape. Certainly, she does not know who Icarus is.

  Her priorities are elsewhere. ‘Patrick’s a doctor. He’ll make it all right.’ Her battle shirt is black with blood. As far as Laurence can tell, when she saw Fabien fall, she ran out into the open and stood there, firing in arcs until every Boche soldier in front of her was dead.

  Laurence finds the body with many medals. ‘Kramme’, who was not Kramme, is a pulped mass of brain and bone. He could be Hitler and nobody would be any the wiser.

  So the world will think that Kramme died this day. Christ, it keeps on getting worse.

  His bride … she knew. She was trying to warn them. ‘Luce?’ Laurence asks. ‘Where’s Luce Moreau?’

  Nobody will tell him. By looking where they will not glance, he finds that Luce, too, is dead. He is afraid that Céline killed her in a red-mist rage, but when he looks at her body, she has a single shot through the centre of her forehead, fired at close range: the scorch marks are clear. When he asks, nobody will admit to doing it. Nobody particularly seems to care, except Daniel, whose fiancée is her sister.

  And so for Daniel’s sake, and for his own sanity, Laurence asks everyone, man after man, and thus, by a process of elimination, comes to the conclusion that Ancil Roche shot Luce Moreau for the crime of sleeping with the enemy. The fact that she sent the message with Véronique that brought them here seems not to have mitigated any actions on her part.

  Laurence tells Céline, who is now, by default and by popular acclaim, the Patron of the Maquis de Morez, and it is not his place to usurp her authority.

  She steps back from organizing Fabien’s transport back to the camp. ‘Sophie, go with him. Keep him alive until Patrick can heal him.’ To Laurence: ‘Where is Roche now?’

  ‘I don’t know. Nobody can find him.’

  Under Céline’s questioning, the men are more forthcoming. Ancil Roche, it transpires, has stolen one of the trucks and gone to ‘liberate’ Saint-Cybard.

  Which is, when they think about it, not such a terribly bad idea.

  The battle for Saint-Cybard is short and brutal. Two things are clear: first, that they are expected, and second, that without Kramme (God, how did we not know?), there is no real defensive organization.

  Very few Boche are here, none of commissioned rank, and those that remain have poor morale: they die easily. With fresh ammunition, and fresh guns where they need them, the fighters of the Maquis storm in the wake of Ancil Roche. Laurence finds himself at one edge of the main square, a place he has never seen except on maps, and in his head, listening to the stories of Sophie and Patrick.

  Thus he knows as if by sight the Hôtel Cinqfeuilles to his left; to his right the town hall steps where so many broken bodies lie. A desultory fountain dribbles water ahead. Outside the hotel, a burned-out staff car spews oily smoke to the sky. Inside it, men shout in French. A woman screams, a high knife of sound that ends for lack of air, not an end to the pain.

  ‘That’s not right.’ Paul Rey is with him. He is quiet, and seems uniquely uninterested in killing Boche.

  The scream comes again. Laurence sets his jaw. ‘I never liked Ancil Roche.’ He shoves a new magazine into his Sten and sets off towards the Hôtel Cinqfeuilles.

  ‘Wait.’ Rey catches his arm. ‘It’s not our place to stop it.’

  ‘Then whose?’

  Paul nods to where Céline sprints across the square. ‘Look.’

  ‘She’ll kill them,’ Laurence says, and he, too, begins to run. He shoulders in through the door of the hotel. He won’t be in time to cut her off, but he may be in time to—

  ‘Dear God.’

  Amidst the debris of ruined opulence, two children – infants, really – lie dead, their throats opened to the backbone, their bodies sheathed in blood. And between them, a young woman, straggled-blonde, thin, dressed in pale-green linen with lilies embroidered on the hem, sprawls against the back wall, unconscious, or nearly so: she might be dead, Laurence can’t tell.

  Her face is red raw and swollen. Her dress is dragged obscenely high. Dark blood pools beneath it. Off to one side Daniel is being held in a bear hug of iron by JJ. The big man has bruises on his cheeks where Daniel’s head has battered him, but he is not letting go.

  So this is Lisette Moreau, Daniel’s fiancée, sister to the dead girl at the church. Laurence thinks she may still be alive.

  Céline, evidently, thinks the same. ‘Larry, see to her.’ There is a world – the military world – in which Laurence Vaughan-Thomas outranks his cousin, but it exists on another planet. Here,
he follows her orders, and Paul Rey with him. They muscle through the ring of a dozen men, one of whom is Ancil Roche. Inside the ring, a raw-faced bank clerk is held at gunpoint.

  Laurence reaches the fallen woman, seeks the pulse at her neck with one hand, while with the other he draws down her dress to cover her modesty. A pulse jumps and threads beneath his fingers. She is alive, but mercifully unconscious.

  He lifts her. She has bird-bones that weigh nothing. Her head flops against his shoulder. He carries her out of the circle, lays her on the remains of a chaise, sends René for water and whatever else he can find to clean her up.

  ‘Who did this?’ Céline’s voice is a knife blade. Anarchy stalks here: already, it pushes at the walls of this shattered, echoing space.

  ‘We did,’ Ancil Roche answers. He is bearded, broad with a drinker’s belly and a backside like a rhinoceros, even now, after all the deprivations of the war. His teeth are foul.

  Céline is taller than he is. She looks down at him, a thoroughbred amongst carthorses. ‘We?’

  ‘We, the men of the Maquis de Morez.’

  ‘You slaughtered two children and raped Lisette Moreau because you are of the Maquis? Fabien’s Maquis?’

  ‘She is Lisette Andreu,’ the clerk says, ‘my wife. And they do this because you ordered it.’

  ‘I did not.’

  ‘And yet, you did not control them.’

  ‘I am controlling them now.’ There is a tone in his family that Laurence has not heard in many years and this is it. Beside him, Paul Rey sucks in a breath. All around, men stand more upright.

  Céline’s gaze rakes the circle and comes back to Ancil Roche. ‘Come here.’ She crooks a finger. Roche steps forward. Laurence cannot see his face, but Paul, who has a better angle, murmurs, ‘The bastard still thinks it’s funny.’

  Laurence shakes his head. ‘She’s got his back to the stairs. Wooden panels all the way up and nobody behind.’ He feels faintly ill.

  Roche hooks his fingers in his belt, and sets his feet apart. ‘I am here.’

  ‘I gave very clear orders that the women were not to be violated. I am anxious to hear why you felt you had the right to ignore me.’

  ‘She was a whore. She married the Milice. That filth’ – he spits at the clerk – ‘filled the cellars for the Boche. We who suffered there knew him.’ Roche was held for questioning earlier in the war. He was released unharmed, but he wears his three days of captivity as a badge of honour. ‘It is what she deserved.’

  He talks past her, expecting support, but the men who were with him before are not any longer. They stare at the floor and those with stains at their groins stare hardest.

  Céline allows the silence to grow. At length, she says, ‘The Moreau sisters were the bravest women in Saint-Cybard. Luce kept herself close to Kramme, at enormous personal risk. Lisette slept with a man she despised’ – her gaze rests on the clerk, who is not a clerk – ‘for four years so she could bring us information directly from the heart of the beast. She bore his children, for God’s sake. She has saved your life more often than you will ever know. And now, by your actions, you have thrown it away.’

  Roche’s smile fades. His eyes shift, left to right and back again. ‘You can’t seriously—’

  Céline doesn’t move except to alter the angle of her Sten by a few degrees and slightly flex her index finger. The single shot takes Roche on the brow, centrally, a neat, black hole; exactly the shot that killed Luce Moreau. Roche stumbles backwards onto the stairs where the girl lay. His body spasms in the aftershocks of life.

  Céline turns a full circle, taking up the gaze of each man, and dropping it again. ‘I will not enquire further as to who took part in this, when Roche so clearly led. But if any one of you touches another woman against her will, I will not take the time to ask you why, I will simply kill you. Anyone who thinks this is unreasonable may make his case now.’

  Nobody speaks against her. Nobody is ever again likely to speak against Céline. She nods at the shattered bank clerk. Laurence has heard of Gaston Andreu, prison governor, chief of the Milice, the man whose children Sophie delivered at the start of her tenure as the nurse of Saint-Cybard. The man whose wife was Daniel’s fiancée, whose children are dead. To him, Céline says, ‘Lisette Moreau will live her life a hero. Your marriage was never real. Everyone will know she made a fool of you.’

  The shot that kills him is a mercy. Céline steps back, away from the growing leak of his blood. ‘Take these two outside and burn the bodies. I want nobody made into a martyr for later. JJ, take Daniel back to camp. Laurence, Paul, take Lisette. The rest of you, come with me. We have a town to clean up.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  THE MOUNTAINS OF MOREZ

  4 September 1944

  FABIEN, FORMER PATRON of the Maquis de Morez, holds Sophie’s hand as he dies.

  He takes a long time of it: longer than her first, urgent triage had suggested. She gives him morphine, although he tries to order her not to; but Céline is Patron now, and Céline has ordered him to be given whatever Sophie has. So he survives the ruts and potholes of the road, and then the ruts and ridges of the track and the stretcher up to the infirmary, where Patrick, alerted by their shouts, has lit a fire and put water on to boil.

  Arriving, Sophie says, ‘Céline says he’s to have everything.’

  In English, Fabien countermands the order, ‘I’m still the Patron and I say you are not to waste drugs on a dying man. Patrick, you are my friend. Listen to me.’ It takes him a long time to say this, but Patrick is his friend, and listens to him: he doesn’t waste the drugs.

  In the silence that follows as they wait for Fabien to die, Patrick says to Sophie, What can you tell me?

  For years afterwards, she wonders at that. Not ‘What happened?’ but ‘What can you tell me?’

  She thinks, Nothing, I can tell you nothing, not you, not anyone, but Fabien grips her hand and nods and so she opens her mouth and it all spills out: Kramme was Icarus.

  Icarus was Kramme.

  The whole wedding was a set-up and I killed Toni Gaspari.

  The fire sparks and spits. Flames sigh up by her head. She wants to swap places with Fabien. She looks past him to the pines and pleads with the dark and settled silence: only let him live, and I will die in his place.

  She does not die. Nor, yet, does Fabien.

  Patrick says, Sophie, help me.

  It’s an order and she doesn’t resist. Patrick has poured brandy. The harsh, sweet smell of it mingles with the smoke. He wants to give some to Fabien and so they hoist him, one on either side, and hold the mug to his lips and wait while he fails to swallow and has to spit it out and then tries again and gets some down.

  As they lay him back down, the dying man grips her arm. He has no strength. ‘It wasn’t your fault.’

  ‘I shot a lieutenant of the US army. They’ll hang me for it.’

  ‘They might not. But anyway, you don’t need to tell them.’

  ‘Someone will.’ Laurence. Céline. Paul Rey. Patrick. Laurence, definitely.

  Patrick says, You’d be surprised what will not be said.

  He sits on Fabien’s other side. He has taken it remarkably well, this tale of treachery. Kramme has run free when he was promised a death and he sits there, looking at her, and she can’t tell what he’s thinking. She meets his gaze. He holds it for long enough to show he can, then turns to Fabien. What can we do for you? Because it is obvious he is holding on for something.

  ‘Tell me Céline is alive, that Saint-Cybard is liberated. Then I can die at peace.’

  They can’t tell him that yet, and they can’t lie. There’s an uncomfortable gap. He grips Sophie’s arm again. ‘The notebook in my cabin. Can you get it?’ And she goes, even though she thinks she is being sent away so the men can talk in her absence. Certainly there is a change in the air between them when she comes back, although she has no time to test its textures because the ground shakes with the throaty thrum of the trucks and
all he has to do now is stay alive while they climb the hill.

  Something must show on her face because Fabien says, ‘They won’t hang you.’

  And Patrick: Trust us.

  Still, she tastes bile in her mouth as they come fast up the hill and yes, Céline is alive, and yes, Saint-Cybard is French again, although there are two small bodies carried up to lie beside Toni Gaspari.

  A bruised and weeping Daniel carries his fiancée up after them: Lisette Moreau, who was once Lisette Andreu, and whose so-courageous sister is dead. She is unconscious and will need a great deal of help, but she will have to wait a moment longer, because Céline has come to kneel at Fabien’s side and Sophie wonders that she did not see this love between them. Like everyone else, she was too busy looking at Véronique.

  Céline lifts his hand and kisses it. ‘Don’t go, Alain. Don’t go. Please, don’t go.’

  ‘I have to go. You have to stay.’ He pats her arm. He is beyond gripping. ‘My book?’ Sophie brings it. ‘Inside the front cover.’

  They read together the English lines he has written: for Céline, for Patrick perhaps, for Laurence. For all those who came to liberate the nation of France.

  AND THUS BY ACCIDENT WE BECAME AS GODS

  BLYTHE CHILDREN OF THE MOUNTAIN

  WARRIORS OF VENGEANCE

  UNFORGIVING, UNFORGIVEN

  UNFORGOTTEN

  Fabien kisses the back of Céline’s hand. ‘Never forget,’ he says, and lets go.

  Shovels are found enough for one in five people and Sophie joins the others to dig graves in the soft, black loam beneath the trees – for Fabien and Toni and the two small bodies, who are, it transpires, the twins of Lisette Moreau.

  The circumstances of their death are obscure to her, but Daniel has two broken ribs, one on either side, where JJ held him, so it can’t have been good. They give him morphine, and still he does not sleep, only sits by the fire, staring into the flames, not quite watching while Patrick and Sophie bathe Lisette Moreau, inject morphine and penicillin, wash her wounds with river water, well salted.