The Paris Collaborator

by A. W. Hammond

  He had no doubt this was intended for him to see.

  Stahl moved him on, and the next door was opened. The Oberführer was sitting at his dining-table desk, authorising papers.

  Sitting where he was placed, Duchene waited while the lean man worked his way through the stack. With a glance at the ticking mantel clock on the corner of the dining table, Duchene saw it was 8.13 a.m.

  After five minutes of silence, the Oberführer placed his Montblanc on the table and looked up at Duchene, his body barely filling the width of his chair. ‘Stahl tells me you’ve been busy. Getting around. Talking.’

  ‘I have,’ Duchene replied.

  ‘And yet we’ve heard nothing from you.’

  ‘That would seem to be a common complaint.’

  ‘Pardon?’ The Oberführer managed to find an even greater stillness.

  ‘My daughter. She says the same thing.’

  ‘Stahl picked you up last night outside the Ritz, chasing a man on the cusp of curfew. I do wonder, Herr Duchene, do you have a death wish?’

  Duchene said nothing.

  ‘This man, Lucien Martin – he was a colleague of yours?’

  ‘He was. I was hoping he might have information that would help lead me to Kloke.’

  ‘And that was?’

  ‘The whereabouts of Kloke’s lover.’

  ‘And did he?’

  ‘I don’t know. You shot him before I could find out.’

  ‘He was an insurgent.’

  Despite the danger, Duchene felt his anger well. ‘He wasn’t.’

  ‘We don’t justify our actions. We are the SS,’ the Oberführer said without expression.

  ‘Lucien was harmless. You should have held him, at least, so I could talk to him.’

  ‘Stahl has advised that’s what he was trying to do. Until your friend ran.’

  ‘I thought you didn’t justify your actions.’

  ‘We don’t.’

  ‘You’re not making it any easier to find Kloke. There’s also the woman you arrested the other day, Eliane Payet. She was helping me to find him.’

  ‘Another insurgent.’

  ‘Can I talk to her?’

  ‘No. She was put on a train to Ravensbrück.’

  The answer came too quickly. Duchene didn’t dare challenge the lie. ‘Your men need to stop following me.’

  ‘That won’t happen.’

  ‘Then they need to do a better job of keeping hidden. The whole purpose of my looking for Kloke is that I can ask questions more easily than a German. When your men are seen arresting the people I talk to, that makes it very hard for me to do my work.’

  ‘And your behaviour makes it hard for us to do ours.’ The Oberführer raised a finger and pointed it at Duchene. ‘You were found outside the Ritz. You’d spent some time in there. So had Faber. The two of you didn’t happen to talk, did you?’

  Here was a man practised in the art of discerning truth from lies. And here Duchene was, a poor liar who’d had no sleep. To spend too much time thinking of an answer would betray him, to reply too quickly would do the same. A partial truth was necessary to hide the lie.

  ‘Of course we did. I couldn’t avoid him. But I’d gone to meet Lucien.’

  The Oberführer nodded to Stahl, who removed a notebook from his pocket. With the same care that his colleagues had observed loading the artwork in the lobby downstairs, he lifted out a scrap of paper.

  Duchene recognised it immediately. It had been crumpled once; now it was spread flat from being pressed in the notebook. The handwriting was a tight cursive with extravagant flourishes.

  He said to meet at the Ritz at seven. Would not give a name. Sounded Swiss.

  – M. Junet

  How had he been so foolish? All the elaborate manoeuvring to throw the Gestapo from his trail had come to nothing. They’d never followed him, just gone into his apartment building and read the notes pinned to his door – the meeting last night with Faber, the meeting yesterday morning with Eliane. They’d probably only retrieved this scrap to demonstrate the point.

  ‘Then tell me,’ the Oberführer said, ‘why your French friend, Lucien, would run from you if he had invited you to visit him. Why would your elderly neighbour tell you he had a Swiss accent? I’m afraid what little trust we had in you has evaporated.’

  Duchene’s mind turned to the room next door and the bodies, still warm, on the floor. ‘I did talk to Faber. He wanted an update.’

  ‘Did you give him one?’

  ‘Partially.’

  ‘That was not what we discussed.’

  ‘I know. But I needed to give him something. He’s threatening the life of my daughter.’

  ‘Marienne.’

  Duchene nodded. ‘I told him some of what I knew, but not all of it. Not the important parts.’

  ‘For example?’

  ‘I told him Kloke was working with another man – whom I now know to have been Lucien – to steal guns from the Resistance.’

  ‘That’s a court-martial offence.’

  ‘So I’d assumed. What I didn’t tell him was why Kloke stole the guns.’

  ‘Why not?’

  Duchene paused. Faber was dangerous, but the Gestapo were here with him now. If they could see his value, feel that he was making headway, then he might still regain his freedom.

  ‘Because at that time I suspected Faber was involved in the theft. I still do. I’m not sure. I feel he’s hiding something, from you Germans too.’

  ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘He distances himself from the role of an occupier, behaves as if he’s morally and intellectually superior. He doesn’t see himself as part of the Wehrmacht. Why else would he come to me to find Kloke? Why not the military police? He’s taking steps unofficially, and I don’t believe, as he claims, it’s to help one of his troops.’

  ‘Really?’ asked the Oberführer. ‘It’s not possible for a German to show concern over someone in his command?’

  ‘A major to a lieutenant? Perhaps. But the most damning evidence is you, the Gestapo. You wouldn’t be investigating him if you didn’t feel he was hiding something big.’

  ‘But we’re after Kloke.’

  ‘But we both know you don’t give a damn about him. It’s Faber you’re after, and something Kloke knows will help you catch him.’

  The Oberführer narrowed his eyes. Duchene stopped breathing. Perhaps he had overstepped. ‘There are other things you don’t know about Kloke.’

  As though he were standing before a cobra, he would need to retreat with caution. Too suddenly and he would arouse suspicion.

  ‘Undoubtedly,’ Duchene said.

  ‘When you find him, he will have papers on him.’

  When. A future.

  Relief washed over Duchene. ‘They’re not in his hotel room?’

  ‘He wouldn’t risk leaving them anywhere but on his person. You’re to bring them to me. You do this, and we’ll take care of Faber.’

  ‘And if I don’t?’

  ‘That should be obvious. We need to interview Kloke. You have until midday to find him.’

  ‘I would do a better job of it if you weren’t traipsing around behind me.’

  ‘Very well, only Stahl will stay with you. With orders to shoot if you try to run.’

  ‘That will make it harder for me to interview people.’

  ‘I’m sure you’ll adapt.’

  Duchene shook his head. ‘What about Lucien’s possessions? Can I look at everything he had on him when you brought him in? Or is that too much?’

  The Oberführer nodded to Stahl, who gestured towards the door. Duchene got up and started to walk out.

  ‘One other thing,’ the Oberführer said.

  Duchene stopped walking and turned back to him.

 
‘To whom were Kloke and Lucien selling the guns?’

  ‘Like any good war profiteers, they were going to sell them to the people most desperate for them, the ones who’d pay the most. The Resistance.’

  TWENTY

  ‘How would they not know they were buying the weapons that had been stolen from them? Are you French stupid?’

  ‘We are. But no more or less than you Germans.’

  Stahl blinked at Duchene, his eyes vanishing for a second, only to resume looking at him with the same ice-blue intensity. It wasn’t affectation or a practised art – it was biology. With his pale golden hair and square jaw, Stahl would have been the perfect poster image for his regime’s propaganda. He stood out in a room, held the gaze of men and women alike when he entered. It made no sense that he was working for the secret police. Perhaps this was why he’d been relegated to the role of driver.

  ‘The Resistance isn’t ignorant because it’s stupid,’ Duchene told him. ‘It’s by design, in case they’re caught.’

  ‘Obviously.’

  ‘The strength of a resistance is that one cell doesn’t know what another one is doing. That way they can’t reveal each other. Outside of their own cell, their membership is secret. Selling their own guns back to them is actually quite clever. They’d have almost no way of knowing.’

  Duchene had lost track of which apartment he was in, and on which floor of the Gestapo building. Stahl’s room contained little embellishment and few personal effects, just a photo of a young girl sitting on his shoulders in an alpine field. They were dressed in hiking clothes and had edelweiss flowers pinned to their shirts.

  A clerk arrived with a box folder and placed it on the table before Duchene. Stahl nodded and sat on the edge of the table. He flipped open the box folder and announced each of its contents as he dropped them in front of Duchene. ‘Wallet. Keys. Lighter. Cigarettes. Brown paper bag with …’ he opened it and counted the contents ‘… six bags of methamphetamines. And a handkerchief? What is this?’ Stahl held out a small square of gingham, roughly cut. It was from the old apple box they’d used to carry the Vernier baby back to Paris.

  Duchene shrugged.

  ‘You know I had to shoot him. Your friend.’ Stahl must have caught his expression. ‘We have orders. If someone runs –’

  ‘I ran the other day.’

  ‘That was different. We were ordered specifically not to shoot you. You understand, yes? You were a soldier once.’

  ‘Well, I’m not now.’

  ‘I agree with what you said. You need to find Kloke, you need space. So, you work with me, and we can find a way to keep you and the Oberführer happy.’

  ‘Germans are in my city, killing my friends. How can I be happy?’

  ‘It’s just talk. I don’t really care if you’re happy or not.’ He lit one of Lucien’s cigarettes and emptied the wallet onto the table: Métro stubs, business cards, twenty-two francs, a library card. ‘Is that all of it?’

  ‘He had a pen too. A nice one. The Oberführer kept that.’

  ‘The thing I need, it’s not here. We have to get going. Time is running out.’ Duchene grabbed the keys and cigarettes from the table, and his trench coat from the back of the chair.

  ***

  It took almost no time for them to cross the city in the black Citroën. There were very few cars and buses on the streets. The Champs-Élysées was almost empty, only bicycles and pedicabs at its edges. But what they made up for in time, they lost to conspicuousness. To keep German soldiers from challenging them, Stahl had placed two swastika flags on the front of the car.

  It was 9.30 a.m. as Duchene unlocked Lucien’s front door. He’d only been outside the building before, never inside, and had discovered the apartment number by testing the letterbox key on all the available options.

  As the door opened, it pushed a pile of notes across the floor into the small living room. Stahl closed the door as Duchene hunched down to flick through them. Without electricity, the apartment was dark. Stahl crossed the room to open the curtains, while Duchene pumped his torch to get a better view of the pages.

  They were notes from the landlady, hastily scrawled. They contained initials, times and meeting places, all of them for that day. Nothing resembled a CK for Christian Kloke.

  Duchene handed them to Stahl, who started to leaf through them. ‘How did he keep track of all these initials?’

  ‘That’s why we’re here,’ Duchene replied as he unlocked the large double doors on a black armoire. It was filled with unopened boxes of stockings, bottles of wine and cognac, candles, inner tubes for bicycles, two cigarette cartons, three American first-aid kits, bags of flour, tins of tea, and a large sack of sugar ready for the decanting.

  He opened the nearest door. It was to Lucien’s bedroom. An unmade double bed with a brass frame had two tables beside it. Duchene pulled the drawer from one of them and emptied it onto the mattress: broken cigarettes, spare lighters, a rosary, condoms, mismatched cufflinks. He did the same with the other drawer and found more trinkets, photos of male and female nudes, an old dog-eared copy of Das Kapital.

  ‘Communist?’ asked Stahl.

  ‘Once. From everything you’ve seen so far, you can tell it didn’t stick. Lucien might have dabbled in philosophy, but he was a committed capitalist.’

  Beneath the photos was a dark-green block, crudely formed. Duchene picked it up and turned it over. It was made from hard wax, and in its centre was the impression of a large iron key. Six right studs protruded from the block. Duchene pushed around the trinkets until he found another block, almost identical in size and shape. It had the other half of the impression from the key along with six holes. A narrow channel ran across the top of the two blocks.

  They made a copy of the crypt key.

  ‘What’s that?’ asked Stahl.

  ‘An answer. But not the one we’re looking for.’

  The remaining furniture in the bedroom was another armoire, which matched the one in the living room and was filled with Lucien’s suits. Duchene started to remove them and dump them on the bed.

  ‘If you want to search fast, I can help,’ Stahl said. ‘I have more experience than you. What are we looking for?’

  ‘A small black journal. It’s how Lucien tracked his incomings and outgoings, his customers. Are you sure you didn’t find it on him?’

  ‘Yes. He had nothing else in his pockets.’

  Duchene stopped pulling out suits. ‘How thorough were you?’

  ‘There was nothing else.’

  ‘What about his seams, hidden pockets, the lining of his jacket?’ Duchene snatched up a jacket and felt around its edges until he found it. He held the garment up to the German to show him a small tuck pocket along the edge of a cuff.

  Stahl paused. Blinked. ‘Come on, then.’

  ***

  It was almost eleven, and the working day was well underway. But on the streets there was even less traffic than earlier, and very few bicycles and pedestrians. Aside from Stahl’s Citroën, the only other vehicles on the road were a Kübelwagen filled with German officers and the six motorcycles that flanked it. This group hurtled past them towards the Avenue des Portugais, and Stahl slowed to watch them disappear down the street under a bright blue sky.

  As the Citroën passed the Arc de Triomphe, Stahl slowed again. A few Parisians moved along the street. It was like a ghost town.

  ‘Something is going on,’ he said.

  Duchene joined him in peering out the window. ‘The police kiosk is empty.’

  ‘Not a single policeman all morning. Not anywhere along the Champs.’

  Stahl turned the car around and retraced their route until he found a telephone booth. He stopped right on the side of the Champs-Élysées. At any other time, this would have invoked the blaring of horns and the swift arrival of a policeman. Today it brought nothing.
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br />   ‘Get out of the car,’ he said. ‘And don’t go anywhere.’

  Duchene stepped out, lit a cigarette, and watched as Stahl lifted the earpiece from its cradle and leant towards the mouthpiece. He turned the rotary dial with swiftness and precision.

  Gestapo headquarters.

  It was the number the Oberführer had given Duchene.

  Stahl turned his head from the car window and spoke into the phone. Duchene kept his eyes on his watch. The German spoke for about five minutes, before replacing the phone. He put his hand to his forehead and stood for at least twenty seconds before glancing at Duchene, his face locked in a frown, a sneer tracing its way across his mouth.

  And then the expression was gone. He left the phone booth and got back into the Citroën.

  Duchene offered him a cigarette. He took it and felt around his pockets for a light. Duchene held his own cigarette upright, offering Stahl the tip. The German lit it, drew back on the smoke and exhaled. ‘It’s starting.’

  Duchene looked at him, frowning, to conceal his growing excitement. ‘What is?’

  ‘What we’ve been anticipating since the landings at Normandy. The insurrection has started.’

  Duchene remained very still. He thought of the executed prisoners on the floor of the Gestapo headquarters. They were panicking, fleeing, covering their tracks. He held his breath and watched Stahl closely.

  Finally, the German spoke.

  ‘My orders haven’t changed. Neither have your requirements.’

  Duchene used as neutral a tone as he was able. ‘How did it start?’

  Stahl paused. ‘Your police have occupied their headquarters on the Île de la Cité. They’ve seized the armoury. They’re barricading the doors. Snipers have been observed on the rooftops.’

  A thrill moved through Duchene – and left him just as quickly, when the logistical nightmare of a siege and street battles dawned on him. ‘And the Resistance?’

  ‘Nothing yet. But it’s still early. High command is expecting they’ll start emerging as the word gets out.’ He paused again, as if considering some other course of action, before turning his key in the ignition and accelerating into the empty street.