The Collaborators

by Reginald Hill

  ‘Hold on,’ said Boucher.

  An image from his mad flight from the road had returned to him.

  He retraced his steps to the roadside. Lying in the ditch just as he had remembered was the warder. There was no sign of a bullet wound, but his head was split open. Despite the freedom of his arms, he must have fallen even more awkwardly than Boucher.

  The bloody head moved, the eyes opened and registered Boucher, who raised his booted foot threateningly. With a groan, Chauvet closed his eyes and his head fell back.

  Squatting down with his back to the body, Boucher undid the man’s belt, then fumbled along it till he came to the chain which held his ring of keys. It slid off easily.

  Standing up, he found that Pajou had joined him.

  Looking down at the unconscious warder, he said admiringly, ‘Did you do that? Christ, you can handle yourself, can’t you, Miche?’

  ‘Let’s go,’ said Boucher shortly.

  They set off once more into the green-gold sea, sinking into it like lovers after a couple of hundred metres.

  It took ten minutes working back to back to unlock the cuffs from Pajou’s wrists, two seconds then to release Boucher.

  Released, Pajou was a different man, confident of purpose.

  ‘Come on,’ he said, massaging his wrists.

  ‘Where, for Christ’s sake?’

  ‘Back to Paris, of course,’ said Pajou in surprise. ‘With the Germans in Paris, the war’s over.’

  ‘Tell that to them back there,’ said Boucher curtly gesturing towards the road.

  ‘They should’ve stayed at home,’ said Pajou. ‘There’ll be no fighting in Paris, you’ll see. It’ll be an open city. Once the peace starts, it’ll be a German city.’

  Boucher considered the idea. He didn’t much like it.

  ‘All the more reason to be somewhere else,’ he growled.

  ‘You think so?’ said Pajou. ‘Me, I think there’ll be work to do, money to be made. Stick with me, Miche. The Abwehr will be recruiting likely lads with the right qualities, and they’re bloody generous, believe me!’

  ‘So you did work for them,’ said Boucher in disgust. ‘All that crap about being framed! I should’ve known.’

  ‘It didn’t harm anybody,’ said Pajou. ‘If anything, it probably saved a few lives. The Krauts were coming anyway. Whatever helped them get things over with quickest was best for us, I say. It’s them silly military bastards who went on about the Maginot Line that should’ve been locked up. We must’ve been mad to pay any heed to a pathetic old fart like Pétain . . . Jesus Christ!’

  Boucher had seized him by his shirt front and lifted him up till they were eye to eye.

  ‘Careful what you say about the Marshal, friend,’ he growled. ‘He’s the greatest man in France, mebbe the greatest since Napoleon, and I’ll pull the tongue out of anyone who says different.’

  ‘All right, all right,’ said Pajou. ‘He’s the greatest. Come on, Miche, let’s not quarrel. Like I say, stick with me, and we’ll be all right. What’s the difference between robbing the Boche and robbing our own lot? What do you say?’

  For answer Boucher flung the smaller man to the ground and glowered down at him.

  ‘I say, sod off, you nasty little traitor. Go and work for the Boche if you must, and a lot of joy I hope you both get from it. Me, I’ll stick to honest thieving. I may be a crook, but at least I’m a French bloody crook! Go on, get out of my sight, before I do something I probably won’t be sorry for!’

  ‘Like kicking my head in like you did that warder’s?’ mocked Pajou, scrambling out of harm’s way. ‘Well, please yourself, friend. If you change your mind any time, you know how to find me! See you, Miche.’

  He got to his feet and next moment was gone.

  Michel Boucher sat alone in the middle of a field of waving cereal. It was peaceful here, but it was lonely. And when the bright sun slid out of the blue sky, he guessed it would also be frightening.

  This was no place for him. He was a creature of the city, and that city was Paris. Pajou had been right in that at least. There was nowhere else to go.

  The difference was of course that he would return as a Frenchman, ready to resist in every way possible the depredations of the hated occupiers.

  Feeling almost noble, he rose to his feet and, ignoring the path trampled by Pajou, began to forge his own way northward through the ripening corn.

  2

  Janine Simonian had dived into the ditch on the other side of the road as the Stukas made their first pass. Like her cousin, she had no arm free to cushion her fall. The left clutched her two-year-old daughter, Cécile, to her breast; the right was bound tight around her five-year-old son, Pauli. They lay quite still, hardly daring to breathe, for more than a minute. Finally the little girl began to cry. The boy tried to pull himself free, eager to view the vanishing planes.

  ‘Pauli! Lie still! They may come back!’ urged his mother.

  ‘I doubt it, madame,’ said a middle-aged man a little further down the ditch. ‘Limited armaments, these Boche planes. They’ll blaze away for a few minutes, then it’s back to base to reload. No, we won’t see those boys for a while now.’

  Janine regarded this self-proclaimed expert doubtfully. As if provoked by her gaze, he rose and began dusting down his dark business suit.

  ‘Maman, why do we have to go to Lyon?’ asked Pauli in the clear precise tone which made old ladies smile and proclaim him ‘old-fashioned’.

  ‘Because we’ll be safe down there,’ said Janine. ‘We’ll stay with your Aunt Mireille and Uncle Lucien. They don’t live in the city. They’ve got a farm way out in the country. We’ll be safe there.’

  ‘We won’t be safe in Paris?’ asked the boy.

  ‘Because the Boche are in Paris,’ answered his mother.

  ‘But Gramma and Granpa stayed, didn’t they? And Bubbah Sophie too.’

  ‘Yes, but Granpa and Gramma have to look after their shop…’

  ‘More fool them,’ interrupted the middle-aged expert. ‘I fought in the last lot, you know. I know what your Boche is like. Butchering and looting, that’s what’s going on back there. Butchering and looting.’

  With these reassuring words, he returned to his long limousine, which was standing immediately behind Janine’s tiny Renault. He was travelling alone. She guessed he’d sent his family ahead in plenty of time and been caught by his own greed in staying behind to cram the packed limo with everything of value he could lay his hands on.

  Janine reprimanded herself for the unkind thought. Wasn’t her own little car packed to, and above, the roof with all her earthly possessions?

  Others were following the businessman’s example and beginning to return to the road. There didn’t seem to have been any casualties in this section of the long procession, though from behind and ahead drifted cries of grief and pain.

  ‘Come on, madame! Hurry up!’ called the man, as if she were holding up the whole convoy.

  ‘In a minute!’ snapped Janine, who was busy comforting her baby and brushing the dust out of her short blonde fuzz of childish hair.

  Pauli rose and took a couple of steps back on to the road where he stood shading his eyes against the sun which was high in the southern sky.

  ‘They are coming back,’ he said in his quiet, serious voice.

  It took a couple of seconds for Janine to realize what he meant.

  ‘Pauli!’ she screamed, but her voice was already lost in the explosion of a stick of bombs only a couple of hundred metres ahead. And the blast from the next bowled her over back into the protecting ditch.

  Then the screaming engines were fading once more.

  ‘Pauli! Pauli!’ she cried, eyes trying to pierce the brume of smoke and dust which enveloped the road, heart fearful of what she would see when she did.

  ‘Yes, maman,’ said the boy’s voice from behind her.

  She turned. Her son, looking slightly surprised, was sitting in the corn field.

  ‘It fl
ew me through the air, maman,’ he said in wonderment. ‘Like the man at the circus. Didn’t you see me?’

  ‘Oh Pauli, are you all right?’

  For answer he rose and came to her. He appeared unscathed. The baby was crying again and the boy said gravely, ‘Let me hold her, maman.’

  Janine passed the young girl over. Céci often reacted better to the soothing noises made by her brother than to her mother’s ministrations.

  Turning once more to the road, Janine rose and took a couple of steps towards the car. And now the smoke cleared a little.

  ‘Oh Holy Jesus!’ she prayed or swore.

  The bomb must have landed on the far side of the road. There was a small crater in the corn field and a couple of poplars were badly scarred and showed their bright green core, almost as obscene as torn flesh and pulsating blood.

  Almost.

  The businessman lay across the bonnet of his ruined car. His head was twisted round so that it stared backward over his shoulders, a feat of contortion made possible by the removal of a great wedge of flesh from his neck out of which blood fountained like water from a garden hose.

  As she watched, the pressure diminished, the fountain faded, and the empty husk slid slowly to the ground.

  ‘Is he dead, maman?’ enquired Pauli.

  ‘Quickly, bring Céci. Get into the car!’ she shouted.

  ‘I think it’s broken,’ said the boy.

  He was right. A fragment of metal had been driven straight through the engine. There was a strong smell of petrol. It was amazing the whole thing hadn’t gone up in flames.

  ‘Pauli, take the baby into the field!’

  Opening the car door she began pulling cases and boxes on to the road. She doubted if the long procession of refugees would ever get moving again. If it did, it was clear her car was going to take no part in it.

  She carried two suitcases into the corn field. As she returned a third time, there was a soft breathy noise like a baby’s wind and next moment the car was wrapped in flames.

  Pauli said, ‘Are we going back home, maman?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said wearily. ‘Yes. I think so.’

  ‘Will papa be there?’

  ‘I don’t think so, Pauli. Not yet.’

  If there’d been the faintest gleam of hope that Jean-Paul would return before the Germans, she could never have left. But the children’s safety had seemed imperative.

  She looked at the burning car, the bomb craters, the dead businessman. So this was safety!

  ‘Maman, will the Germans have stopped butchering and looting now?’ asked the boy.

  ‘Pauli, save your breath for walking.’

  And in common with many others who had found there is a despair beyond terror, she set off with her family back the way they had come.

  3

  Under the Arc de Triomphe, a cat warmed herself at the Eternal Flame. Then, deciding that the air on this fine June morning was now balmy enough to be enjoyed by a sensitive lady, she set off down the Champs-Élysées. She looked neither to left nor right. There was no need to. Sometimes she sat in the middle of the road and washed herself. Sometimes she wandered from one pavement to the other, hoping to find tasty scraps fallen beneath the café tables. But no one had eaten here for at least two days and the pavements were well scavenged. Finally, when she reached the Rond Point, she decided like a lady of breeding whose servants have deserted her that she’d better start fending for herself and bounded away among the chestnut trees where the beat of a bird’s wing was the first sign of life she’d seen since sunrise.

  Christian Valois too was reduced to getting his own breakfast, in his family’s spacious apartment in Passy. Four days earlier the Government had packed its bags, personal and diplomatic, and made off to Bordeaux. With them had gone Valois’s parents, his young sister, and the maid-of-all work. Léon Valois was a member of the Chamber of Deputies and a fervent supporter of Pétain. By training a lawyer, he reckoned there weren’t many things, including wars, which couldn’t be negotiated to a satisfactory compromise. His son, though a civil servant in the Ministry of Finance, was a romantic. To him the move to Bordeaux was a cowardly flight. He refused to leave Paris. Neither his father’s arguments nor his mother’s hysterics could move him. Only his sister, Marie-Rose’s tears touched his heart, but couldn’t melt his resolve.

  At work he got less attention. His superior, Marc du Prat, smiled wearily and said, ‘Try not to spill too much blood on my office carpet.’ Then, pausing only to remove the Corot sketch which was his badge of culture, he left.

  For three days Christian Valois had conscientiously gone to work, even though he had nothing to do and no one for company. The Ministry occupied part of the great Palace of the Louvre. What was happening in the museum he did not know, but in his section overlooking the Rue de Rivoli, it was eerily quiet, both inside and out.

  This morning, because he found himself very reluctant to go in at all, he had forced himself out of bed even earlier than usual. But when he arrived at the Louvre almost an hour before he was officially due, the thought of that silent dusty room revolted him and his feet took him with little resistance down towards the river.

  He saw few signs of life. A car crossed an intersection some distance away. Two pedestrians on the other side of the street hugged the wall and looked down as they passed. A priest slipped furtively into St Germain-l’Auxerrois as though he had a secret assignation with God.

  Then he was on the quay, looking at the endless, indifferent Seine.

  Was he merely a posing fool? he asked himself moodily as he strolled along. Perhaps his father was right. With the army in flight or simply outflanked, the time for heroics was past. It was time for the negotiators to save what they could from the débâcle. Perhaps the Germans wouldn’t even bother to send their army into Paris. Perhaps in the ultimate act of scorn they would occupy the city with a busload of clerks!

  At least I should feel at home then, he told himself bitterly.

  He had crossed to the Île de la Cité. When he reached the Pont du Change, he headed for the Right Bank once more, half-resolved that he would waste no more time on this foolishness. If he truly wanted to be a hero he should have fled, not to Bordeaux, but to England or North Africa, and looked for a chance to fight instead of merely making gestures.

  So rapt was he that his feet were walking in time with the noise before his mind acknowledged it. Once acknowledged, though, he recognized it at once, for he had heard it often, echoing in his dreams like thunder in a dark sky ever since the war had passed from threat to reality, and his imagination had not deceived him. It was the crash of marching feet, powerful and assured, striking sparks off the paving stones as if they made an electrical connection between the conquerors and the conquered. He stopped and leaned against the low parapet of the bridge, overcome by his own mental image.

  Then suddenly he could see as well as hear them, and the reality was even more devastating. In columns of three they were striding into the Place du Châtelet, passing beneath the Colonne du Palmier whose gilded Victory seemed to spread her angelic wings wider and hold her triumphal wreaths higher in greeting to these new and mightier victors.

  Now they were on the bridge and coming towards him, trio after trio of strong young men, their faces beneath their heavy helmets grave with victory. Past him they strode with never a sideways look. He turned to follow their progress, saw the leaders halt before the Palace of Justice, saw them turn to face it, saw the great gates swing open and the gendarme on duty stand aside as the first Germans entered.

  Now once more it was essential he should be at his desk.

  He walked as fast as he could without breaking into an undignified trot which might be mistaken for fear. By the time he reached the Louvre the Rue de Rivoli had come to life once more, but what a life! No colourful drift of oppers and tourists, but a rumbling, roaring procession of trucks and tanks and cars and motor-cycles; and above all, of marching men, an endless stream of g
rey, like ash-flaked lava flowing inexorably, all-consumingly, through the streets of Pompeii.

  Seated at last at his desk, he realized his calf-muscles were shaking. He experienced the phenomenon distantly as though the trembling were external and did not have its source in his own physical core.

  Minutes passed, perhaps an hour.

  Suddenly, without hearing anything, he knew they were in the building. He’d grown used to its emptiness, its sense of sleeping space.

  Now…

  Noise confirmed his intuition. Footsteps; steel on marble; regular, swift; certain.

  The trembling in his legs grew wilder and wilder. It was beginning to spread through the whole of his body, must surely be evident now in his arms, his shoulders, his face. He tried to control it but couldn’t, and prayed, not out of fear but shame, that they would not after all find him.

  But now the steps were close. Doors opening and shutting. And at last, his.

  In that self-same moment the trembling stopped.

  It was the young soldier who looked in who showed the shock of his discovery, clearly taken aback to find anyone here.

  ‘Yes?’ said Valois testily.

  The young man levelled his rifle, turned his head and called, ‘Sir! Here’s someone!’

  More footsteps, then a middle-aged warrant officer came into the room, pushing the soldier’s rifle up with irritation.

  ‘Who the hell are you?’ he said in execrable French.

  ‘Valois. Junior Secretary, Ministry of Finance.’

  ‘You what? I thought this was a museum. Where’s all the pictures?’

  ‘That’s another part of the Palace. This wing holds the Ministry of Finance.’

  ‘Does it, now? Don’t suppose you keep any money here, though!’ the man laughed.

  Valois did not reply.

  ‘No. Thought not. All right. Don’t go away. Someone may want to talk to you.’

  Turning to the soldier, the man commanded, ‘Stay on guard outside!’

  The soldier left. The warrant officer gave the mockery of a salute. ‘Carry on with your work, Monsieur Valois,’ he said smiling.