by Pirate Irwin
Vandamme, though, played second fiddle when it came to the negotiations, either he also had good manners, in allowing the older man to conduct them, or because he was less experienced in these matters.
Fayette, who didn’t seem long for this world as he wheezed and coughed almost in alternate breaths, proved a tougher negotiator than Lafarge had bargained for. The bottles were eagerly accepted as were the four cartons of cigarettes, American Lucky Strikes which even if the recipient didn’t smoke could be sold on for a nice amount, and the eggs, cheese and butter. However, the money proved to be, as they had feared, the problem once the guards were apprised of why they were being showered with gifts.
“I know a life hasn’t had much value these past few years Chief Inspector but these days with some form of rule of law having been re-introduced the price for protecting a high value personality has regained its worth,” said Fayette his voice gravelly in tone.
“You are asking us to ensure the safety of your father, who may be under threat of being knocked off by some of his fellow inmates, people who until last year partly ruled the country and who still no doubt have powerful friends.
“What you are offering in terms of cash is just not enough for us to endanger our own lives. Also you realize that we are on the same shift so therefore you leave yourselves at risk for when the others replace us? If you double the amount then that is a start, otherwise I am afraid it is no deal,” he added.
They had hit a dead end given the old man being so adamant and Lafarge glanced at Rochedebois. His step-brother nodded, and Lafarge withdrew the back-up sum he had wisely brought with him, again procured from Darval, though, not without some physical persuasion and threats of having him visited by his colleagues.
Fayette’s eyes light up and gleefully nudged Vandamme, who smiled. Lafarge, though, held back the other 5000 just as Fayette went to take it from him.
“You only get this if you can arrange for one of you to get on the other shift. As you perspicaciously observed it would be useless to have you both on the same roster, it would serve no purpose. Ordinarily we would try and procure two on the other shift but we neither have the time nor the money to do that,” said Lafarge.
“So I have to place this condition on our arrangement. I accept it makes it more challenging, you may be one against five or you may not have any of the other guards taking money from the inmates to do my father harm, but that is a risk you will have to take.
“So do we have a deal?” he asked staring firstly into Fayette’s eyes and then quick as a flash into those of Vandamme.
To his relief they blinked first, Fayette putting out his hand to shake Lafarge’s and then grabbing the money and splitting it with his younger partner. Vandamme pointedly didn’t shake hands either with the Chief Inspector nor Rochedebois, who had remained to the side of the quartet and not uttered a word which was unlike him but something that Lafarge welcomed.
Vandamme made to go but Fayette prevented him from doing so by taking hold of his arm.
“Chief Inspector I want to make clear that we will not cheat you but at the same time we cannot be expected to sacrifice ours own lives,” Fayette said.
“That is quite likely to happen. The others think I’m just a washed up alcoholic, but that has perhaps been a blessing for some of them have been indiscreet. I have over heard them saying there is indeed a plot to kill one of the prisoners, though, the name has not been mentioned.
“I am not sure how many of the guards might be involved but I know of a couple. When I go on the other shift I will do the same and inform you if there is enough time. However, I repeat, actually stepping in to prevent something taking place will depend on the circumstances.”
Lafarge wasn’t best pleased by the qualification added by Fayette but he admitted they had more or less got what they wanted. Whilst he didn’t think the older man would be able to put up much of a fight, Vandamme had a look about him that would frighten off many an assailant.
He gave both of them his number at work and at home, to be used only in emergencies he emphasized, and having bid them both farewell turned on his heel to leave. However, to his horror he turned straight into the man he least wanted to see. Bousquet.
His implacable enemy had seemingly not aged at all even with the stress of the defeat, arrest and possible execution awaiting him. He was also as he had always been dapperly dressed. He was in a dark blue blazer, gold buttons beautifully polished, and neatly-pressed grey flannel trousers with polished black lace up leather shoes. All he was missing was a boater thought Lafarge and he could be mistaken for Maurice Chevalier.
Lafarge thought it prudent given his father’s delicate situation not to provoke Bousquet with such a remark or to start singing a Maurice Chevalier song, but acknowledged him with a polite nod of his head and then tried to step round him.
Bousquet, though, exhaled the smoke from his cigarette straight into Lafarge’s face causing the detective’s eyes to water and induce a bout of coughing.
“Now you know what your Jew friends sounded like when they met their end,” he whispered in the Chief Inspector’s ear and then quick as a flash sauntered off whistling leaving Lafarge in no doubt that Bousquet remained as vicious and dangerous an opponent inside prison as he had been outside it.
The problem was in prison Lafarge had no control or anything to hold over him and as a result it left his father horribly exposed even with the two guards in his pocket.
Chapter Six
Lafarge scanned the rooftops surrounding the Palais de Justice and was reassured his men were in place. They had been placed on full alert because Darnand was due in court to hear his verdict delivered.
The settling of accounts post Liberation had decreased dramatically as the year wore on, the call for bloodletting and tarring and feathering of women, whose only error of judgment largely had been to sleep with a German, had been sated. However, Darnand’s followers had been so fanatical and violent during the Occupation the Paris authorities were taking no risks when it came to security.
Darnand with his bull neck and closely-cropped grey hair – he could have passed for being the archetypal Prussian Junker general – looked many years older than his actual age of 48.
Lafarge put it down to his fighting in both world wars – indeed he was a rare bird in that he had actually succeeded in firing his gun on the Maginot Line and been decorated for heroism something which many of his comrades could not attest to as they had fled,
However, despite Lafarge’s contempt for Darnand’s far right views and swearing an oath of loyalty to Hitler he gave him a grudging respect for not trying like many others to weasel his way out of responsibility for his actions at his trial. Going quietly into the night was not Darnand’s style but nevertheless he was fighting a hopeless cause and a death sentence was widely anticipated.
Darnand’s fiery anti-Semitic rhetoric had always drawn a crowd, who had eagerly lapped up his Jew-baiting. Now, though, a large body of people, no doubt some who had shared his ideology but shed it as quickly as the tanks rolled into Paris, had gathered on a chilly October morning and awaited word of his fate, ready to applaud and cheer as loudly as they had done his speeches.
People don’t change that quickly thought Lafarge, just their instinct for survival weighs on them heavier than hanging onto their real feelings. He hoped such a sudden welcome fervor for justice would last till Bousquet went on trial. For if ever he wished someone to end up in front of a firing squad, he’d have preferred the guillotine but this form of execution had been set aside for the Vichy ‘statesmen’, it was he.
The worrying thing was that no date had yet been set for Bousquet’s trial. That was strange as with two of the other most notorious collaborators Jacques Doriot and Philippe Henriot dead, the former another to adopt the German uniform had been killed when his car was strafed by a British fighter, the latter assassinated provoking murderous reprisals by Darnand’s men, he was one of the most senior figures in captivity.
He snapped out of his obsessive thoughts on Bousquet’s future as he noticed the crowd was pressing forward towards the gates of the Palais de Justice. He approached the senior gendarme officer, a major who he didn’t recognize and assumed he and his men had been brought in from outside Paris, and suggested he get the line of gendarmes to step forward so as to make a point to the crowd that they had gone far enough.
***
The gendarme, who introduced himself as Major Prudhomme, saluted smartly and yelled instructions at his men. They stepped forward smartly, their rifles slung across their shoulders but only to be used in the most threatening of circumstances.
The crowd, largely and predictably made up of men, women getting the vote must have been anaethma to people like Darnand and they wouldn’t have been his greatest fans, didn’t give an inch and some of them began taunting and yelling insults at the gendarmes. This worried Lafarge as it boded ill for what was to come after the verdict was announced. The prefect Charles Luizet, his boss of bosses, had tried vainly to have the sentence posted on billboards round the city instead of announced publicly but it had been rejected by de Gaulle, who saw it as a test of popular opinion.
As a precaution Lafarge stepped inside the gates and collected several of his own plain clothes men. He ordered them to tell all those people, who were not policemen, gathered on the steps leading into the courts to go inside in case the crowd started throwing projectiles or broke through the line of gendarmes and breached the gates.
He accompanied them up the steps so he could gain a better vantage point of the crowd and see if there were perhaps agents provocateurs not only at the front, for that was what he assumed their role was, and at the back which would make the situation even more delicate and harder to manage.
He grabbed a pair of binoculars from one of his men and swept across the panorama of the crowd, and noticed there was a group of men emerging from the metro station and arriving at the back of the crowd in orderly fashion. These looked very much like former milice men, in the manner that they were disciplined and acting as a unit.
Trouble was Lafarge had no way of traversing the crowd and accessing the rooftops to alert the men up there to the new arrivals. He would just have to trust that they were as aware of the changing situation as he and his men on the court steps were. If they were not then the consequences could be dire.
He stepped inside the grand building and made for reception where there was a telephone and flashing his ID at the stern looking middle-aged lady behind the desk, it was clearly her empire and woe betide the person who dared crossing the line of over-familiarity, he made a call to the Quai which was just round the corner.
A sleepy and disinterested voice greeted him on the other end. Lord almighty he intoned, the level of detective may not be high in comparison to before 1940 but whoever this was was surely expendable.
Lafarge kept his thoughts to himself and told the elderly detective called Barbier, who had to be fair to him been recalled to the service because of a lack of manpower and no-one had the nerve to tell him he should go back into retirement now that there were younger bodies turning up looking for a career, to either go himself or send someone to the men on the roofs. They were to inform them to train their rifles on the back of the crowd and to fire a volley into the air when they saw him give the signal. He would wave his arms five times, from the steps of the court.
Satisfied that Barbier had absorbed this instruction he replaced the receiver, smiled as sweetly as he could at the receptionist stroke empress, and returned quickly to join his men at the top of the steps.
He saw to his alarm that some of the gendarmes had also retreated behind the gates. It created a problem for the remainder because they weren’t sufficient in numbers to plug the holes left by their colleagues. He ran down the steps and sought out Prudhomme, and was furious to find he was one of those who had sought safety.
“What the hell do you think you are doing major?” hissed Lafarge.
The major wiped sweat from his brow, despite the chilly temperature clearly the pressure was getting to him and Lafarge guessed wherever he had been sprung from he had never faced such a crowd, and shrugged his shoulders.
“Jesus Christ Prudhomme, you were meant to hold the line! You’re no use to your men behind this! Get back out there and stabilise the situation immediately,” ordered Lafarge.
Prudhomme stared back at him and shook his head.
“We are better off here Chief Inspector, a second line of defence, and besides I would be amazed if the mob will be able to scale the fence,” said Prudhomme summoning up some defiance, which Lafarge thought would have been better used being directed at the crowd.
Lafarge sneered at him and turned on his heel, gesturing for four of his men to come down and join him. They were on the point of having the gates opened when they were stopped in their tracks as from behind a voice cried out ‘Darnand guilty, death sentence handed down. Long Live the Republic!’
The news had the effect on the crowd like someone throwing a pebble into the sea and provoking a ripple effect as line upon line turned to tell the one behind what the sentence was. Initially it produced a hush as the news sank in, then large parts of the crowd applauded and broke into a rendition of the Marseillaise.
While Lafarge appreciated enormously the stirring strains of the national anthem this was not the best time for it, understandable even though their reaction was. The men at the front of the crowd didn’t turn away they just pushed forward increasing the pressure on the line of the gendarmes, who vainly tried to push them back with the butts of their rifles.
Lafarge, though, could hear shouts and cries from further back in one of the areas from whence the anthem had been sung, but he had to run back to the steps to see what was going on.
What he saw convinced him it was time to send the signal to the rooftop, for the men who had arrived purposefully late to the assembly were the ones diving in and attacking the patriots in the crowd. To his horror, though, it wasn’t simply fists they were using but from what he could make out also large wooden clubs with what looked like nails embedded in them.
Hesitating not for a minute he waved his arms frantically and waited for the men to fire the warning shots. Barbier had clearly done his job, more likely he had sent a younger more enthusiastic pair of legs out to convey the message, for there followed three volleys of gunfire, thankfully not into the crowd but over their heads.
This had the impact he had wanted certainly at the back where the assailants were halted in their tracks long enough for those being attacked to flee. However, at the front it only seemed to energise the group baying at the gendarmes. Lafarge decided he would do Prudhomme’s job and ran down the steps taking seven of his tougher detectives with him, the ones you didn’t necessarily want conducting the enquiries but certainly to be present when it came to interrogations.
They brushed past Prudhomme and persuaded some of his uniforms to return to the line. First, though, Lafarge deployed a little trick which he hoped might have the same effect as the gunfire had had. He got a uniform to open the gate, but only so it was slightly ajar and this acted like a magnet for three of the more lithe Vichy thugs to make for it, easily thrusting aside the gendarmes who stood in their way.
However, having got through the gate, their faces gleeful and full of malice, they quickly were disabused that they had a friend on the inside as the gate was slammed shut and Lafarge and his men beat them to the ground, giving them a good kicking for a couple of minutes. Leaving them curled up in the foetal position he turned towards the others outside and shouted that if they wanted to avoid similar treatment they had five minutes to leave the area.
“After that the gloves are off and don’t blame me if some of you don’t see tomorrow,” he said.
“It’s pointless you persisting, your chief’s fate cannot be changed by anything you do here. Go home, change your ideas and be thankful you aren’t sharing the execution pole with him.”
He received a volley of foul-mouthed abuse back and a shower of spittle which landed well short, though, he felt sorry for the gendarmes who took the brunt of it. However, he could tell their energy was spent, he guessed the three who lay groaning on the ground had been the ringleaders, and now they were out of action the camp followers were seeking any excuse to cease the fight.
They didn’t even ask for the trio to be handed back to them. That was fine by Lafarge for there was no question of doing so, these three’s past would be looked into intensively and if, as he suspected, they were former members of the Milice they probably faced a long jail spell or perhaps the death penalty as the had spilt enough French blood themselves.
Lafarge re-enforced his point by opening the gate and coming out, accompanied by three of his men, and gloated as the line did indeed melt away, some of the thugs glowering at him as a final rather pathetic act of defiance.
As they filtered away he summoned Prudhomme and resisting the urge to give him a public dressing down, though his report would not spare him, told him to corral the group and funnel them towards the metro on the far side of the square. He was then to ensure he and enough of his colleagues escorted them on the metro till they were far enough away and then let them go.
Prudhomme looked as if he was about to protest, but Lafarge raised his hands to tell him enough was enough. The disconsolate major trudged off, barely in control of his own gendarmes, but the others did his job for him and within 10 minutes the group had disappeared down the stairs of the station.
Lafarge then felt free to signal with the thumbs-up sign to the men on the roof who gave one last sweep of the square to see that everyone had indeed left the vicinity before calling it a day. Lafarge said to the men with him to spread out and tend to the people who were lying injured on the ground as well as they could before the medics showed up from the nearby Notre Dame hospital.
Others he instructed to pick up any papers they thought might have been left or dropped so they could be returned to their owners. He went round and made sure that none of the wounded were in a critical condition, and saw that three sadly fell into that category. They had serious head wounds, inflicted by the studded clubs, which made it imperative the medical services hurried up. He sent one of his men, Georges Bernes a bright and young detective, running to the hospital to make it clear they were needed now and not after the valued cup of mid-morning coffee.