The Collaborators

by Reginald Hill

  ‘That’s right, darling,’ said the sergeant. ‘Home’s best today. I wish I was coming with you!’

  And the soldiers’ mocking laughter followed them down the stairs.

  Half a mile away, a German corporal was growing very irritated. He’d been up since before midnight, first of all lying in wait to quell an assault on the Embassy which never happened. Then, when at last he was stood down, he’d just had time to have some breakfast and stretch himself out on his bunk before he was ordered out again to deal with some real demonstrations. All was quiet now, and he could be thinking of getting back to that bunk if this funny little twerp would stop babbling at him in broken German.

  Maurice Melchior had woken up to a terrifying silence. No one was talking about midnight marches and torchlight processions and assaults on the Embassy. He was supposed to meet Zeller early to collect Émile’s pay-off, but he had the sense not to keep that appointment. He did go to the Orangerie, however, and hung around in growing despair till news of the disturbances at l’Étoile had brought him hurrying here, hoping against hope that somehow his disturbances had moved on in space and time.

  The corporal grew angry. The little fairy was apparently taking the piss about last night’s abortive ambush! Only his eagerness to get to bed stopped him from arresting him. He turned away. The Frenchie grasped his shoulder! That did it. He turned and hit him in the gut. Melchior sank to the ground. The corporal swung back his foot.

  ‘No,’ said a voice from a staff-car which had drawn up alongside.

  Through tear-clouded eyes, Melchior recognized a face. No. Two faces. One, looking at him through the window, was Colonel Fiebelkorn’s. The other, less frightening but more incredible, belonged to a man getting out of the car. He looked at Melchior and smiled as he walked past. It was Émile.

  ‘Monsieur Melchior,’ said Fiebelkorn opening the door. ‘Won’t you join me?’

  For days there were rumours of pitched battles, hundreds killed, thousands arrested. The truth was less dramatic. No deaths, a few injuries, and only one arrest on a serious charge.

  ‘Some poor devil miles away from the demos got jostled by a drunken Boche and jostled back. Now he’s facing the death penalty for violence against the German Army! At least it’ll show people what kind of monsters we’re up against.’

  ‘Isn’t that a big price to pay for an illustration?’ wondered Janine.

  ‘Don’t give me that bourgeois sentimental crap,’ retorted Valois.

  ‘All I mean is a man’s life seems more important to me than anything else.’

  ‘Oh yes? And to get Jean-Paul home safe and sound, how many death-warrants would you be prepared to sign? One? Two? Three? A hundred?’

  ‘I don’t know. That’s different. It would depend…I don’t know!’

  ‘It’s a question of objectives and priorities, isn’t it?’ said Valois bleakly.

  ‘Christian, are you a communist?’ asked Janine.

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ he replied, suddenly gay. ‘Didn’t you know, the communists are Herr Hitler’s friends, bound to him by formal agreement? They’re finding it even harder to be consistent than you are!’

  It was true. This seemed a time of inconsistencies. On December 15th the Marshal had his vice-president, Laval, arrested. Abetz, the German ambassador, immediately went to Vichy to have him released. Meanwhile, at midnight on December 16th, a gun carriage rumbled through the curfew-emptied snow-feathered streets flanked by a mixed escort of French and German soldiers. On the carriage was a coffin containing the body of the Duke of Reichstadt, Napoleon’s only son, exhumed from the imperial vault in Vienna, and returned at Hitler’s own behest to be set at his father’s side in Les Invalides. For a short while Bayreuth came to Paris and under the flaming torches of this Wagnerian stage-setting, all the civic dignitaries, French and German alike, shivered through their walk-on parts. This conciliatory gesture was followed a week later by the execution of the man arrested during the November demonstrations.

  Then it was Christmas.

  ‘You must go to your parents, for the children’s sake, especially, but for your own sake too,’ said Sophie firmly.

  ‘But what about you?’ said Janine. ‘Why should you be left alone at Christmas?’

  Sophie laughed merrily.

  ‘What are you saying? An old Jewess alone at Christmas? What’s Christmas to me, liebchen?’

  ‘All right, I’ll go,’ said Janine. Then she added, guiltily aware that despite her objection she had really made up her mind before Sophie spoke, ‘I was going to anyway.’

  ‘I knew you were,’ said the old lady laughing. ‘You’re a good daughter.’

  ‘You think so?’ said Janine doubtfully. ‘I don’t always feel it. I don’t feel grown-up yet. Adults should be prepared to suffer the consequences of their own decisions, shouldn’t they? In any case, it’s me who has the rows with maman, but it’s papa and the children who suffer the consequences.’

  Sophie shook her head.

  ‘Yes, when I first knew you, that was very much how you were. But you’ve grown a lot since then, child. And you’re still growing.’

  ‘Am I? Have I far to go, Bubbah?’ she asked, half-mocking, half-serious.

  ‘Further than I care to see, it sometimes feels,’ said the old lady, for a moment very frail and distant. But before Janine could express her concern, Sophie laughed and said with her usual energy, ‘And when I said you were a good daughter, I meant to me as well as to Madame Crozier.’

  The welcome they received on Christmas Eve made Janine ashamed that she could even have dreamt of staying away. Louise burst into tears of joy at seeing them and later, while she was out of the room putting the children to bed, Claude said confidentially to his daughter, ‘If you’d not come here, we were going to come round to see you tomorrow.’

  ‘Maman too? But she said she’d never visit Sophie’s flat again.’

  Never set foot in that heathen temple had been the precise phrase.

  ‘I told her it was Christmas and she’d have to swallow her pride,’ said Claude. ‘She shouted at me a bit, but deep down she wanted to be told.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Janine ruefully. ‘I know how she feels.’

  The truce lasted all that evening and even survived Janine’s amazement the next morning at the way in which rationing and growing food shortages did not seem to have affected her mother’s preparations for Christmas dinner. Probably all over Paris, housewives were performing similar miracles, she assured herself. But she had a feeling this miracle had started with a bit more than a few loaves and fishes.

  Just on midday with the house rich with the smell of baking and boiling and roasting, the door burst open to admit a tall, broad-shouldered, red-bearded man, resplendent in a beautifully cut suit, pale grey almost to whiteness, a virginal silk shirt and a flowered necktie fastened with a diamond-studded gold pin. He had the look of a pirate king dressed up for his bosun’s wedding. On his arm was an elegantly furred woman with tight black curls, a great deal of make-up, bright-red nail varnish and a good figure, slightly thickening with rather heavy thighs.

  ‘My God, Miche, is that you?’ said Janine.

  ‘Cousin Janine, how are you, girl?’ Boucher cried, stooping to give her a kiss which went a little way beyond the cousinly. His beard was soft and fragrant with attar of roses.

  ‘I hoped you’d be here. I’ve brought a few things for the kids. Hey, this is Hélène Campaux, by the way. La Belle Hélène, eh? She dances at the Folies. Some mover! Now where are those kids? And where’s the old folks?’

  ‘I think they’re in the bakehouse,’ said Janine. ‘I’ll go and tell them…’

  Warn them, she meant. But it was too late.

  The door opened.

  Madame Crozier stopped dead in her tracks when she saw the newcomers.

  Then spreading her arms, she cried, ‘Michel, my dear. You’ve come!’

  And with an expression of amazement which matched anything her father ever
produced, Janine saw these old antagonists embrace with all the fervour of dear friends, long parted.

  It soon became clear that the reconciliation had taken place some time before and obviously had much to do with Cousin Miche’s new affluence. He presided over the feast like a red-bearded Father Christmas, commandeering Pauli’s help to fetch in from a rakish Hispano-Suiza bottles of champagne, a smoked ham, a tub of pâté de foie gras and a whole wheel of Camembert. In addition there were the promised presents, a huge fairy doll for Céci and a football and a penknife for Pauli.

  Janine demurred at the knife.

  ‘He’s far too young. He’ll cut himself.’

  ‘Nonsense!’ said her cousin. ‘Me, I was carrying daggers and knuckle-dusters at his age!’

  This reference to his criminal past, far from offending Louise, provoked her into peals of laughter. But she went on to say, ‘Janine’s right. He’s too young for a knife.’

  Pauli said, ‘Maman, it’s not all a knife. It’s got all kinds of things.’

  He demonstrated, pulling out one after another a corkscrew, a bottle-opener, a screw-driver, a gimlet.

  ‘I can’t cut myself with these,’ he said earnestly. ‘If I promise not to open the blade till I’m old enough, can I keep it? Please, maman?’

  He fixed his unblinking wide-eyed gaze upon her, not beseeching, but inviting her to retreat before the logic of his argument.

  As usual, there seemed nothing else to do.

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘Only, Pauli, I’ll decide when you’re old enough, you understand?’

  ‘Yes, maman.’

  ‘Then promise.’

  ‘I promise,’ he said solemnly.

  ‘Janine, are you sure? He’s only a child,’ protested Louise. ‘You’re far too soft, I always said.’

  ‘Except when you said I was too hard,’ retorted Janine.

  This small crack in good will was smoothly papered over by Hélène, who said, ‘Isn’t it lovely to see them opening their presents? I just long to have children of my own, Janine. You’re so lucky to have this beautiful pair.’

  She sounded as if she meant it and Janine found herself warming to her. Soon they were deep in domestic conversation, while Madame Crozier busied herself being the perfect hostess, and Boucher and Monsieur Crozier talked nostalgically about the great cyclists of the thirties. One thing that no one mentioned was the immediate past or the foreseeable future. The Paris - indeed the France - that lay outside the door might not have existed. Christmas, always a game, was being played with extra fervour this year.

  Only a child to whom all play is reality could not grasp the rules of this game. Pauli ate his dinner silently, and drank his wine and water, and looked after his little sister who still found it hard to discriminate between nose and mouth. And all the time he hardly ever took his eyes off Michel Boucher. But Janine knew, and the knowledge wrenched her heart, that it was his father he was seeing.

  And now her own father, as if catching the thought, broke the rules too and said quietly when Pauli had taken his sister to the lavatory, ‘Any news of Jean-Paul?’

  Janine shook her head. Boucher said, ‘That man of yours not turned up yet? That’s lousy. Have you tried the Red Cross?’

  ‘I’ve tried everything,’ said Janine dully. She listed all her channels of enquiry. Hélène put her hand over hers and squeezed sympathetically, while Boucher snorted his opinion of civil servants and bureaucracy.

  Then Louise came in with brandy and chocolates and the subject was shelved.

  When the time came for the visitors to go, Janine showed them out. After he had put Hélène in the car, Miche came back to the shop doorway and kissed her in a fairly cousinly manner.

  ‘It’s been great today,’ he said.

  ‘That’s good, Miche. And it was lovely having you and Hélène here.’

  ‘Yeah. Surprising too, eh?’ He laughed. ‘I saw your face! Thing is I’ve always liked your dad. He’s been good to me over the years, more than the rest of you know. All the family I’ve got, you Croziers. It was meeting Hélène that made me realize a man needed a family. So when I started doing well enough to get round Auntie Lou, I thought, what the hell. I can put up with her funny little ways.’

  ‘I’m glad, Miche. You and Hélène are really serious then?’

  ‘Do me a favour!’ he said. ‘I’m too young to be really serious. But serious enough. Look, Jan, none of my business, but about Jean-Paul, if you like I’ll have a word with my new boss, see if he can help.’

  ‘Your new boss. Who’s that, Miche?’ asked Janine suspiciously.

  ‘Doesn’t matter, if he can help, does it?’ laughed Boucher. ‘And if he can’t, then it doesn’t matter either. I’ll be in touch. Hey, what are you doing on New Year’s Eve? Fancy going to a party?’

  ‘I don’t think so, Miche,’ said Janine. ‘I’m not really in the party mood at the moment.’

  ‘No? On second thoughts, you probably wouldn’t enjoy this one anyway,’ he said with a grin. ‘Cheers, kids. Pauli, you look after your mother now. Wiedersehen!’

  And as Janine frowned her displeasure, he smiled, shrugged and said, ‘When in Rome, sweetie, do like they do in Berlin. Leb’wohl!

  8

  So the year drew to its close. Winter like the Germans came swiftly, hit hard, felt as if it was here to stay.

  ‘I’ll tell you something, Günter,’ said Major Zeller. ‘I never thought it would be so easy.’

  ‘Victory, you mean?’

  ‘No. Not victory in the field, anyway. It was always possible that that would be easy. No, the remarkable thing is the degree to which we have got ourselves accepted. More than accepted. Welcomed! I actually feel at home in this city, a visitor rather than a conqueror.’

  He paused, then went on, ‘It would please me, Günter, if from time to time as I spoke to you, that you gave a little nod of agreement or let something other than lugubrious doubt light up that gamekeeper face of yours.’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Mai.

  ‘You don’t agree?’

  ‘It’s early days, sir,’ said Mai. ‘You knock a man down, he may be concussed and in shock for a long time afterwards. He may even believe that he didn’t really mind being knocked down. But you’d better wait till he’s fully himself again before deciding if you really want him holding the ladder while you’re cleaning windows.’

  Zeller regarded him curiously.

  ‘Cleaning windows? How quaint you sometimes are, Günter. I do hope you will not put your quaintness forward as official Abwehr thinking tonight. The SD are keen enough to undermine us without giving them ammunition in the Embassy.’

  ‘I’ll try to remember my manners, sir. I expect in any case I’ve only been invited to hand out drinks to the distinguished foreign guests. Is Monsieur Melchior attending on our ticket, by the way?’

  A glittering New Year reception was being held at the Embassy. All the main sections of the Occupying Authority had been asked to submit suggestions for the guest list. Mai knew very well that there was more chance of Zeller suggesting Winston Churchill than Melchior. The major was still being ribbed by officers in those units put on alert for the non-existent midnight disturbances. He was convinced that somehow the SD had been behind the fiasco to make the Abwehr look ridiculous. Mai didn’t discount the possibility but didn’t reckon Melchior would have had the nerve to fool Zeller knowingly.

  ‘I should prefer not to hear that revolting creature’s name mentioned, lieutenant,’ said Zeller dangerously. ‘I don’t know where he’s been hiding for the past weeks, but when he finally crawls out of his hole, he’s going to wish he’d burrowed down the centre of the earth.’

  Going to give him a spanking, are we? thought Mai. But the look on his superior’s face convinced him it would be unwise even to hint he found the matter more amusing than tragic.

  That night as he stood in the most obscure corner of the huge reception room in the Embassy, feeling itchy and uncomfortable in his dress u
niform, he wondered if perhaps Zeller hadn’t been right about one thing. Looking round the glittering assembly, it was easy to believe that all the richest, most influential members of the Parisian ruling classes were here. Women in elegant billows of silk and satin, necks and bosoms gleaming with gold or dazzling with diamonds; men in tail-suits that actually fitted, some with the medals of other campaigns in other wars pinned proudly on their chests; smiling, dancing, drinking, joking with their conquerors. Could it be that Zeller was right? Could they not only have won the war, but somehow managed to win the peace?

  As if summoned by his thoughts, the major appeared. He looked vital, assured, handsome, a true conqueror.

  ‘Enjoying yourself, Günter? The perfect end to a perfect year, wouldn’t you say? Triumph after triumph! There’s been nothing like it since Augustan Rome!’

  ‘Remember, you are mortal, major.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Didn’t the Romans use to set a slave close behind the conqueror in his triumph to whisper as he acknowledged the cheers of the crowd, Remember, you are mortal?’

  ‘Did they? And is that the role you think God’s allocated you?’ said Zeller sarcastically. ‘No, I shouldn’t think so. Basically you’re too arrogant a bastard to think of yourself as a slave.’

  Mai smiled. He wasn’t about to be provoked into a public row with his superior. That kind of fight was no-contest.

  In any case, he definitely hadn’t been picked to remind Zeller of his human frailty that night. God had chosen quite another champion. Mai knew this because, over the major’s shoulder, he could see him approaching. And soon they could both hear his voice, fluting its deflating message.

  ‘Bruno, dear boy! I thought it was you, so unmistakable from behind! I’m so glad you could make it!’

  Zeller swung round to confirm with his eyes what his ears found incredible.

  ‘What in the name of God are you doing here?’ he cried, bewilderment as yet stronger than rage.

  Maurice Melchior raised his eyebrows.