The Paris Collaborator

by A. W. Hammond

  TWENTY-NINE

  The security chain swayed as the door was opened. Guillaume peered through the crack. Duchene watched the subtle transition of his face from curiosity to recognition to realisation. ‘I have a gun on the other side of this door.’

  ‘I’m here to talk.’

  ‘Talk?’

  ‘We don’t have to do it here. We could walk, in the streets.’

  Guillaume drew a slow breath. Duchene waited.

  ‘We can do that. I’ll meet you downstairs.’

  Duchene walked down the two flights of stairs from Guillaume’s apartment back onto the street. Around him, Parisians were enjoying the night, strolling beside the Seine, listening to the buskers who’d returned to fill the air with music.

  He stepped around the corner of a boarded-up brasserie and adjusted the cut-down belt on his left forearm. It needed to be tight enough to hold his trench knife in place, but also loose enough that the blade would draw freely from its sheath. Grabbing the handle, he practised pulling the blade from the sleeve of his jacket. He hoped he wouldn’t have to use it but had no doubt Guillaume was making similar preparations.

  Eventually the charcutier arrived downstairs, wearing a heavy coat despite the warm night. Duchene could feel the weight of the knife on his arm. He tried to compensate for it in his movements, limit how quickly Guillaume might notice something was there.

  ‘You said we’d walk the streets,’ said the charcutier. ‘Where?’

  ‘Up here, along the boulevard, with the crowds.’

  ‘In case I try to harm you?’

  ‘Safer for both of us.’

  ‘After everything this city has been through, you think decorum has remained?’

  Two young American GIs walked past, loose limbed and swaggering, their rifles slung to their backs.

  ‘Who knows? Perhaps one of them will intervene,’ Duchene said. ‘They see themselves as heroes.’

  ‘Our cowboy liberators? Perhaps.’

  They paused at a marionette theatre. Children, out after ten for a special occasion, were seated on the cobblestones, watching as a knight on horseback fought an ogre. The knight’s shield had recently been repainted with the Cross of Lorraine, the ogre with a swastika on its sizeable gut. The parents smiled and laughed as their children squealed and shouted while the battle raged on.

  ‘You’ve been killing people, selling them as food,’ Duchene said quietly. He didn’t recognise his own voice. It was tight, wavering. Was it fear or anger?

  ‘Not people,’ said Guillaume. ‘Nazis.’ He turned his back to the marionette theatre. ‘It was the ring, wasn’t it? I was too bold in wearing it so soon.’

  ‘It was.’

  ‘Sinners will have their trinkets.’

  ‘So you admit they’re crimes.’

  ‘Before God, of course. But I’d think the law, during war – well, that’s another matter.’

  ‘You were selling their meat to people.’

  ‘As I said, not people. Nazis. I sold swine to the swine. Every slice and every terrine. They ate their own and they loved it. They should never have come to Paris.’ Guillaume said and rubbed the back of his hand against his cheek.

  ‘If you were only feeding them to the Germans, why do you still have a human arm your cellar?’

  ‘You won’t be satisfied with that answer,’ Guillaume said, reaching into his coat pocket.

  Duchene moved his right hand towards the cuff of his left sleeve, touching the handle of the knife. ‘Why?’

  ‘Because collaborators still walk our streets. The same reason you didn’t turn up on my door with the gendarmes.’ Guillaume took out a packet of cigarettes. ‘You’re a collaborator,’ he continued as he lit one. ‘I’d confused you for Resistance – I thought you were hunting that soldier. But after you turned up on my doorstep, I realised you must have been working for the Germans.’

  He held out the cigarettes to Duchene, who brought his hand away from the knife to take one. Guillaume offered him his lighter. Duchene remained still.

  ‘Really, in front of these children? You think I’m a monster.’ Guillaume flicked the flame into life and held it out.

  Duchene lit the cigarette, drew deep and exhaled. ‘You are a monster.’

  ‘I did what I needed to survive. I couldn’t have them in my city, eating my food without a way of defying them.’

  ‘You could have joined the Resistance.’

  ‘I wanted to live. You were the same. You made that same choice.’ Guillaume turned back to face the play and to look out over the river, black under the night sky with golden eddies from reflected street lamps. ‘So what are we going to do? You can’t go to the police, as we’ve discussed. And you’re not going to kill me. You’re not that kind of man.’

  Duchene sighed. Smoked some more. Looked for answers on the faces of the parents and their children. ‘Things will never be simple again,’ he said.

  ‘Were they ever?’

  ‘It has to stop. That arm – burn it. In front of me.’

  ‘And then you’ll be satisfied?’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘And if I don’t?’

  ‘Then we’ll both be exposed. I’ll go to the police and risk being branded a collaborator.’

  ‘Why would they care if I fed our enemies back to them?’

  ‘They probably wouldn’t. But I can’t see your business surviving if word gets out about the cannibal charcutier.’

  Saturday, 26 August 1944

  THIRTY

  A column of tanks rattled into the city. The smell of diesel was thick in the air, pushed around on a breeze that brought with it the chill of autumn. The ground shook as the tanks rolled over cobblestones and down the Champs-Élysées, their heavy armour burnt and punctured by bullets and shrapnel. They showed signs of makeshift repairs, ablative plates replaced by scrap metal from enemy tanks. But among the patchwork and battle damage, one thing was consistent: three stripes painted clear and polished every day. Three stripes were worn with pride on the shoulders of the drivers and the smiling wounded infantrymen who sat on the hulls. Three stripes flew on flags in the swarming crowds along the roadside. The tricolour. Vive la France.

  Last night Duchene had stayed at the charcuterie just long enough to see the arm go into the flames of Guillaume’s smoke oven. As brief as that moment had been, Duchene could still remember the smell of burning flesh. Even though it had been spiced and preserved, there was something about the meat, perhaps the understanding it was human, that made his stomach roil. He’d spent a night plagued by bad dreams with no alcohol in the apartment to abate them.

  A woman smiled at him. ‘You’re not happy?’ she asked, her voice hard to hear amid the cheering. There was a young boy at her side.

  ‘I am. Just cost a lot to get here.’

  ‘So it did.’ She remained smiling, but there was distance in her eyes now.

  ‘I can’t believe those soldiers are really ours!’ said the boy.

  ‘Yes,’ said Duchene. ‘The Free French, who’ve been fighting for de Gaulle.’

  ‘They’re not dressed like they’re French.’

  ‘I don’t care how they’re dressed,’ said the woman. ‘As long as they fly the flag, I’ll cheer.’

  Despite running on little sleep, Duchene had been determined to come and see General Leclerc’s Second Armoured Division. These were men who had risked court-martial to defy the Americans. Men who had rushed deep into enemy territory to support the liberation of the city. Men who had fought the Germans until they had, like a struck wasp nest, burst into anger and fought a battle on these very streets.

  The tanks drove on, and soon the cheering grew again as a random collection of trucks, tanks and cars flowed in unranked procession behind the Armoured Division. Now came the French Forces of the Interior led by Colonel Ro
l in his handmade uniform. He stood in the hatch of a German tank, FFI painted crudely along its side, his wide mouth beaming under a hawkish nose.

  Around and behind him, men of all ages marched out of formation, dressed in civilian clothes and unified only by their black FFI armbands and seized German weapons. A group of young FFI fighters waved from the back of a truck. A few women were among their number, dressed in trousers and shorts.

  Duchene pushed forward as they came nearer, his instincts taking control of him as he recognised a smile within the group and called out, ‘Marienne!’

  The woman’s eyes held his for more than a second.

  It was her. Marienne. On the back of a truck, a German submachine gun at her side. She leaned out over the street. ‘Papa!’ The truck was still moving. ‘Papa!’

  Duchene ran over, gripped the trailer with one hand and reached up with his free hand.

  ‘Help me,’ Marienne called, waving for two young insurgents to work with her to pull him up.

  Duchene struggled onto the truck, already short of breath. He let his legs dangle over the road beside hers.

  She held him, and he hugged her back.

  ‘You’re safe,’ she said.

  ‘I am. And you too.’

  ‘I am.’

  He nodded to the FFI fighters on the truck. ‘You’re with them now?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Fighting?’

  She nodded.

  ‘So not entirely safe, then?’

  ‘Safer than if I’d done nothing. I could have still been called a collaborator. You’ve seen what they’ve been doing?’

  Duchene nodded. Already today, he’d witnessed two firing squads in an alleyway, and three women, one holding a baby, having their heads brutally shaved on the street. Even with the smell of burning human flesh that wouldn’t leave him, he was relieved Guillaume hadn’t pushed him to go to the police.

  ‘Smart girl,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t be sad. It’s over now.’

  ‘They’re saying Rol will keep fighting the Germans, all the way to Berlin.’

  She nodded. ‘He will.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’ She frowned. ‘Sometimes people look at me who knew me during the occupation. In the shops where I used to go with Max – the shopkeepers, the regulars. My neighbours. Sometimes I think this armband is all that’s keeping me safe.’

  Duchene looked at his daughter. She looked back at him without moving. A calm seemed to have found a place within her.

  She reached out and placed her hand on his shoulder. ‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘I understand now. She left because that was what she needed to do to survive this world. I can see that. I’ve lived it. I’m not angry anymore that you didn’t stop her from leaving. But I need you to do the same for me. I need to go and fight.’

  He touched her face. ‘I don’t think I could stop you if I wanted to. And I don’t think it would be good for us if I did.’

  Marienne smiled. ‘Sometimes there’s more strength, more courage, in letting go than in fighting to hold on. I can see that now.’

  Duchene pulled a small photo from his wallet. ‘Take this with you. Your mother.’

  Together they looked at the picture. There she stood, on a hillside in Spain. Rifle slung. She too was wearing trousers and an armband, but the resemblance was only in how they were dressed. She looked nothing like Marienne; neither did his daughter look much like him. What ancestral features she had were from some other place in their family. She was her own self.

  ‘You’ll write to me? You’ll try to call?’

  She nodded. ‘Yes. Of course.’

  ‘I know you’ll be busy. But just every now and then.’

  She nodded again. Duchene put his arms around her, and she hugged him back so hard it was as though she was trying to press a permanent imprint of him onto her, and fill up on enough of his love to last her when he was gone.

  He didn’t want to let go. To leave her. But he knew that she needed his strength right now, as her parent, as her father, to show her that he could hold the pain of her leaving for both of them.

  Sitting back from her, he smiled as the tears ran down her cheeks. He dabbed them with a handkerchief and passed it to her. ‘Good for something,’ he said, before he kissed her one last time on the cheek and slipped down from the back of the truck.

  She stood and called back to him. ‘Keep safe.’

  He tapped his hand to his hat. A moment later she was too far in the distance to see, and he moved off the road and back into the crowd.

  On the streets, Parisians walked arm in arm or in groups of revellers. Peals of laughter rang out from the banks of the Seine, while on the balconies above him people cheered as they looked out over the city.

  There was no question about it: Paris was finally free. What was uncertain was whether they could forget what they had done to survive.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Many thanks to my publisher, Tegan Morrison, whose passion and insight helped to bring shape to the roughly hewn. To Kate Goldsworthy for her diligent editorial advice and for finding a way to reattach the missing fingers. To Jo Hunt for her striking cover design. And to the entire team at Echo for their work to bring this book to publication. I am also grateful to my agent Fiona Inglis for her astute guidance and counsel.

  Thank you to Ben Chessell for early reading and feedback and also for collaborating with me on many hours of narrative speculation and practice alongside Miles Browne, Rani Kellock and Patrick O’Shea. Thank you too to Jason Badower for being a ready ally in the war of art.

  Numerous historical sources were used to research this book. I am indebted to two works in particular, Ronald Rosbottom’s When Paris Went Dark: The City of Light Under German Occupation, 1940–1944, (London: John Murray, 2015) and Douglas Boyd’s Voices from the Dark Years: The Truth About Occupied France 1940–1945, (London: The History Press, 2015). I also greatly benefited from the cultural and linguistic advice of Pierre Proske and from eleventh hour WW2 fact-checking by Mark Angeli – any mistakes are my own.

  My family have stood beside me throughout this writer’s journey, always with encouragement and optimism. Thank you to my sister Claire and my parents, Carol-Anne and Terence, to whom this book is dedicated.

  Finally, as always, I am humbled and amazed by my wife, Berni – thank you for your inspiration, advice and unfaltering support. And to my daughters, Francesca and Genevieve, who are a constant revelation.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  A.W. Hammond was born in South Africa and emigrated to Australia as a child. He currently works at RMIT University and lives in Melbourne with his wife and daughters.

  Echo Publishing

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  Copyright © A.W. Hammond, 2021

  All rights reserved. Echo Publishing thanks you for buying an authorised edition of this book. In doing so, you are supporting writers and enabling Echo to publish more books and foster new talent. Thank you for complying with copyright laws by not using any part of this book without our prior written permission, including reproducing, storing in a retrieval system, transmitting in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning or distributing.

  Echo Publishing acknowledges the traditional custodians of country throughout Australia. We recognise their continuing connection to land, sea and waters. We pay our respects to elders past and present.

  First published in 2021

  This ebook edition published 2021

  Cover design by Jo Hunt

  Cover images: Woman: Mark Owen/Arcangel; Eiffel Tower: maryolyna/Shutterstock; Street and buildings: Mari
oGuti/iStock; Planes: Keith Tarrier/Shutterstock

  Page design, typesetting and ebook creation by Shaun Jury

  A catalogue entry for this book is available from the National Library of Australia

  ISBN: 9781760686703 (paperback)

  ISBN: 9781760687021 (ebook)

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