‘If you don’t vanish from my sight in thirty seconds, I’ll have to ring Delaplanche,’ he said not unkindly. ‘Grow up, eh, kid?’
Valois had felt angry and ashamed. The following week he had visited his parents for a few days. Vichy was now a dead and dispirited place. Since the occupation of the Free Zone its function was manifestly an empty pretence. He found his father silent and depressed, his mother drinking too much, and even Marie-Rose seemed off-hand and self-absorbed. He pressed her to tell him what was the matter but all that she replied was, ‘I’ve just got to get away from here.’
‘Come and see me in Paris,’ he said. ‘At least that should be OK now there’s no Free Zone.’
To his surprise she shook her head.
‘I can’t,’ she said. ‘Not yet. Soon perhaps.’
‘Why? Is there something the matter?’ he asked.
She shook her head and laughed but as he sat on the train home the sense that Marie-Rose was no longer completely open with him was a further cause for depression.
Coming out from the platform in Paris, a man collided with him and forced him into an involuntary embrace.
As he tried to pull loose, Jean-Paul’s voice hissed in his ear, ‘It’s me, idiot. Head for the old bistro by the Cluny.’
Then he was gone.
There was no doubting where he meant. The bistro near the Cluny Museum had been a haunt of their student days. But what he meant was something else. By the time he reached the bistro, his mind had invented a hundred reasons, all bad.
Jean-Paul was there already with two drinks in front of him.
‘What’s happened?’ asked Valois, sitting down and trying to conceal his anxiety. ‘All this cloak and dagger, it must be important.’
‘It is. They’ve taken Laffay.’
‘Oh shit! What happened?’
‘There was a meeting. It was blown. One guy didn’t appear. Presumably they got him and kicked his balls till he talked. They shot another. With a bit of luck, he’s dead. But Theo got taken, alive and well.’
‘Theo won’t talk,’ said Valois certainly. ‘He’d die first.’
‘Don’t talk shit,’ said Simonian contemptuously. ‘Everyone talks. Twenty-four hours is what we usually expect to be given. Hold out for twenty-four hours, then spill your guts out. Trouble is, the Gestapo know this as well, so they do everything possible to start the talking earlier. In this case I reckon they’ve got Theo’s family. I rang to warn them. There was no reply. He’s a very uxorious man, this Laffay. His wife screaming in the next room may loosen his tongue ahead of schedule.’
‘Good God. I’d better warn Delaplanche!’
Valois began to rise. Simonian grabbed his arm and pulled him down.
‘Sod Delaplanche,’ he said wearily. ‘He can look after himself. He’s a big man, too big to go under easily. Some day, they’ll send the Géstapistes in to blow him up, maybe. Meanwhile, he’ll get by. No, it’s you I’m here to warn. Theo knows about you, right?’
‘He’s met me,’ said Valois, suddenly cautious.
‘Don’t go coy! He knows about your Boche, doesn’t he? He was there! Don’t look surprised. I’ll tell you something about me, Christian. Nine months ago I was taking risks that make me shudder when I think about them now. But I’ve learned a lot. And one of the things I learned is to reconnoitre your allies as thoroughly as your enemies. So I know about Theo. And he knows about you!’
‘But we only met briefly. In his eyes, I’m not important at all,’ protested Valois.
‘Perhaps not. But he’ll be grabbing for scraps to feed those bastards by the time they finish with him. And once he mentions that you killed one of them…!’
Valois picked up his empty glass and attempted to suck the last few drops out of it.
‘What shall I do?’ he asked desperately.
‘Lie low. Ring your office, tell them you’ve had to stay in Vichy - sick relative, anything. Come and stay at my place for a couple of days. We’ll watch and wait. Perhaps it will blow over. Cheer up, old friend, there’s always a silver lining.’
‘You say so? Well, show it to me.’
Simonian grinned. He looked young, carefree, like the student who had so often sat in this very bistro those few, short, life-long years ago. Valois felt a small surge of hope. Perhaps his friend had some genuine consolation to offer.
‘I told you I know all about my allies,’ said Simonian. ‘Well, Theo has a heart condition. With a bit of luck, you’re so unimportant that his ticker will give out before he dredges you up!’
4
It was strange to be living under the same roof as Janine again. Last time it had been his roof, and she had always been on the defensive. Also the children had been there, and her mind had been preoccupied with doubts and fears about her newly returned husband.
The doubts and fears had not diminished but Valois could tell they had changed. Jean-Paul was a different man, full of life and energy, constantly on the move. He had found a role and was living it to the full. But he was not the same man Valois had known in the old days; there was a new hardness and to make room, something gentle and loving and sensitive had had to give way.
He spent a whole week closeted in the Simonians’ apartment, much of it alone with Janine.
‘Should I be here?’ he asked anxiously. ‘Wouldn’t it be better to put me in a safe-house somewhere? I don’t want to bring you danger.’
Simonian had laughed.
‘If they come looking for you here, we’re all in danger anyway,’ he said. ‘And this way, I don’t waste a good safe-house. You know where I live already!’
‘He’s enjoying all this,’ he said to Janine as they sat together one night.
‘Yes.’
She’d gone very quiet, very introspective, as if her husband’s vitality had been derived, vampirishly, from her own veins.
‘But you’re not?’
‘I live in fear,’ she said very simply. ‘Night and day, waking and sleeping. I have nightmares full of terror and when I wake up, the terror wakes with me. I didn’t think you could grow used to terror, but I have.’
He wanted to reach across and take her in his arms but he knew that this would be useless. All her passion was reserved for Jean-Paul.
He suddenly came close to hating his friend.
‘What are you afraid of?’ he asked. ‘That he’ll be caught?’
‘Yes, but not just that,’ she said. ‘I’m not so saintly that I don’t fear for my own sake. In fact, I sometimes think that Jean-Paul would quite like to be caught so that he could tell the Boche just how many of them he has killed. But what I really fear is what they may do to me to make me tell what I know.’
‘What do you know?’ Valois asked gently.
‘About Jean-Paul? Next to nothing!’ she answered. ‘I’ve stopped myself from knowing, stopped myself from hearing, though I can’t stop from guessing.’
‘But if you don’t know anything, why be so afraid?’
‘Because the only way to stop the pain is to tell them what you do know,’ she said patiently as if to an idiot. ‘If you’ve nothing to tell, the pain goes on for ever. So I fear I would tell them something. Anything. Everything!
‘What?’ he asked, smiling despite himself at her earnestness.
‘I don’t know. About you perhaps. Or about my parents. But what I fear most of all is that I’d tell them about the children.’
‘What’s to tell about the children?’ he said in surprise.
‘Their father is a Jew and a Resistant. Their grandmother has been deported. They left Paris on an illegal Ausweis. Their mother is…’
‘What?’
‘What’s it matter what their mother is?’ she asked sharply. ‘She’ll be the one who’ll be doing the telling.’
He reached over and took her hands in his.
‘Janine, don’t upset yourself like this,’ he urged. ‘They’re not interested in the kids, honestly. Why should they be? They’ve other thin
gs to worry about.’
‘They arrested them and put them in Drancy, didn’t they?’ she demanded.
It was unanswerable. He said, ‘Janine, you went to see the kids last month. OK, I know you don’t like to talk about it, but tell me one thing. How could you bear to come back?’
She stared at him resentfully. It was true. She could hardly bear to think let alone talk about her short visit. The way Céci’s face had crumpled as she got on the train…and Pauli’s eyes…
‘Why don’t you go back now and stay on there?’ Valois pressed.
‘Because! Because I might take danger with me where there is none now. Because I don’t know what might happen here if I left!’
She jerked her hands up to cover her face. He didn’t release them instantly but let his own hands be drawn up with them, so that when he did loosen his grip it seemed natural to run his fingers through her hair.
‘It’ll be all right,’ he said. ‘I know it will. This can’t go on for ever. You and the children will be together again soon, I’m sure of it. How are they anyway? You’ve got to talk about them. Honestly it does no good bottling things up.’
With a great effort she said, ‘Yes, you’re right. You usually are. It’s me. I’m so weak. You know I didn’t go out to the farm? I stayed in Lyon and Mireille brought the children in to be with me. I said it was to give us more time together. Liar! It was because I didn’t trust myself to…but next time, Christmas, perhaps things will be better…Mireille gave me a photo. Would you like to see it?’
She rose, breaking the contact. He looked at his hands as though he’d just let a precious fragile vase slip out of his grip.
‘See. Those are Mireille’s three boys, they’re older than my two, of course. And there’s Pauli and Céci. Look at her smiling, she’s always smiling and laughing. Not Pauli though. He’s like his father…’
Valois looked at the frowning intensity of the boy’s expression. He seemed to be looking beyond the camera as if disdaining to acknowledge its existence.
So he would probably look at a firing squad.
The thought was so macabre he felt for a moment he’d said it out loud. It must be these crazy times that brought such thoughts into his head. But surely the very craziness of the times meant that ordinary patterns of behaviour no longer applied? In a world where boys might face firing squads, grown men were foolish not to speak their hearts while they still had the chance.
He reached forward to take her hand once more and looked deep into her eyes.
‘Janine,’ he said.
A door opened and banged shut.
Valois let her go and sat back in his chair. She remained where he left her, pulled slightly forward, regarding him with bewilderment.
The room door opened.
‘Here you are then. Very comfortable you look!’ proclaimed Jean-Paul. ‘Very cosy. Pity you can’t stay longer, Christian.’
‘Can’t…?’
‘No need to. It’s been confirmed. Poor old Theo’s heart gave out three days ago. There’s been no sign of the Geste round at your place. So it looks as if everything’s clear. You can go home and resume the even tenor of your ways!’
’Now, you mean? Tonight?’
He must have sounded querulous, like an old man frightened of being pushed out on to some long and perilous journey rather than a young man being invited to take a short métro trip home. The Simonians glanced at each other and shared their amusement, an event rare enough to surprise them both and to fill Valois with resentful jealousy.
All the way back to his apartment the picture remained with him. Jean-Paul with his arm draped loosely over Janine’s shoulders, she smiling with pleasure at the contact, he with that expression of mocking bewilderment he used to wear when he was puncturing his friend’s student pomposity.
If the Gestapo had been waiting for him he’d have walked straight into their hands. He found himself putting the key into the lock with no recollection of how he’d got there.
Well, it was too late to worry now. If the Boche got him, maybe that would wipe the smile off their faces!
He went inside. The place felt cold, unused. He closed the blinds and put the lights on. It was just as he’d left it. A half-full coffee cup stood on the telephone table reminding him that as usual he’d left in a rush, fearful of missing his train.
He poured himself a drink and walked around. It was good to be back, he decided. Good to get out of that poky little flat in the Quartier Mouffetard. A man got silly ideas cooped up like that. Obsessions rubbed off and by Christ, the Simonians were certainly an obsessive pair! There was Jean-Paul, reduced by rage and mental damage to playing at gangsters. And Janine, the little shop-girl, who only lived through her connection with this madman…
He paused in front of a mirror and regarded his reflection for almost a minute. He looked pale and unkempt but it was deeper than this that his gaze was trying to penetrate.
‘You mealy-mouthed shit,’ he said finally. ‘Tell the truth to yourself at least. You are sick with envy of his courage, his role, and you’re even sicker with desire to bed his wife. But you won’t do anything about it. You won’t do anything about anything!’
He felt an impulse to hurl the glass at the mirror, but it would have been artifice, a contrived gesture, not in his nature.
The telephone rang, startling him out of his little self-dramatization.
He picked it up but did not speak. His mouth was dry.
A voice said, ‘You all right?’
It was Jean-Paul. ‘Yes, I’m fine. Look I really didn’t say how grateful I was…’
‘That’s OK. Go to bed.’ The phone went dead.
Bed. It was good advice. Suddenly he realized he was exhausted.
He awoke to darkness and the sound of rain lashing the window-panes and a wind rattling a badly closed door. He glanced at the luminous dial of his watch. It was five a.m. Gestapo time.
He pushed the unpleasant thought from his mind and rolled over.
In a corner of the room a torch flashed on.
He sat up, holding his hand against the jet of light.
‘Mr Valois, so you’ve come home,’ said a soft, friendly voice. ‘I said you would. Don’t go crashing into his flat, I said, smashing up his nice things, tearing up the floorboards. What would a nice young man, son of a deputy, be hiding there, anyway?’
‘Who are you? What do you want?’ demanded Christian fearfully.
‘Come now. You can answer both those questions yourself. Just as I was able to say, watch and wait, watch and wait. When all seems safe, he’ll come wandering home. And here you are, as I forecast.’
Valois struggled out of bed. The torch was his enemy. He plunged towards the disc of light. A forearm caught him round the throat. A knee drove into his crutch. His mouth gaped wide, gasping to take in air, to let screams out. A gloved hand fastened on it and squeezed so tight he thought his cheeks would tear. His nostrils sucked in air, but not enough. He saw the torch disc dwindle to a pin-point as a new darkness invaded his sight.
‘Now let us go quietly,’ said the soft voice. ‘No need to disturb the neighbours, is there?’
5
Mai sat under the great cedar in the Jardin des Plantes and filled his pipe for the third time. A bitter damp wind was rasping through the bare branches making it hard to light the pipe which in any case tasted sour from oversmoking. The few people who had passed him in the last hour had glanced at him with amusement, clearly thinking he was a lover who’d been stood up. Good cover, except that that was just what he felt like.
Since his return to Paris he had only seen Janine distantly but he had been kept up-to-date on her by her cousin, Miche, with whom he’d resumed the old relationship.
Then Miche had passed on a problem.
‘That stuck-up mate of hers, Valois, he’s gone missing it seems. She seems to think he might have got himself arrested, God knows why. I’ve checked as best I can. No trace, but there’s a lot of people doin
g a lot of arresting these days.’
‘And she asked you to ask me?’
‘No. That was my idea. Would you mind asking around?’
‘You’ve got a cheek!’ said Mai. Inside, he was suddenly hit by a powerful desire to see Janine again.
He said, ‘All right. I’ll see what I can do. But she’ll have to come herself. Tell her tomorrow afternoon, three o’clock, the usual place.’
‘The usual place?’ Boucher raised his eyebrows and grinned. ‘We’ll make a Frenchman out of you yet!’
A fool was all that had been made out of him, thought Mai gloomily looking at his watch. It was four.
He got up stiffly and set off down the steep path. As he turned the corner at the bottom of the slope, there she was, standing by the railings.
‘You’re late,’ he said shortly.
‘This wasn’t my idea. I didn’t have to come.’
‘Why did you?’
She thought seriously of the answers she wasn’t going to give. She was worried sick about Christian, but Jean-Paul seemed to regard her concern as a kind of self-indulgence, reserving all real feeling to himself. Her attempts to win a role in the hunt for information had been dismissed and she found herself expected to be available in the kitchen at all hours to provide Les Pêcheurs with coffee and food. They’d moved out of the Quartier Mouffetard as soon as they realized Christian had vanished and were now living in a dilapidated flat in Clichy. It had seemed clever to try to steal a march on the men by asking Miche for help, but her reaction when he told her about Mai had been anger. She didn’t want to get involved there again.
But today, furious at being left alone after an urgent message had taken Jean-Paul from the flat without explanation and scarcely a farewell, she had gone out herself. In direct contravention of her husband’s instructions, she had headed back to the old apartment. By the time she got there, discretion had returned and she had resisted the temptation to go in and pick up some more of her things. Then, though she’d resolved not to keep the appointment with Mai, finding herself so near the Jardin, she’d come here anyway.
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