The Collaborators

by Reginald Hill

  He said, ‘Who sent you, Pajou?’

  ‘Well, Colonel Fiebelkorn, sort of. I’ll explain in private, shall I?’

  Uninvited he came running up the stairs. Mai led him into his bedroom and quickly got dressed, the annoyance of being watched by those lizard eyes being preferable to the disadvantage of holding a conversation in his nightshirt.

  ‘Civilian clothes, eh? Very good. And no doubt you’ve got Monsieur Édouard Scheffer’s identification somewhere about you? That could be useful.’

  Did this little bastard know everything? Mai recalled he’d once dismissed him as being not very bright. Something else he’d been wrong about.

  ‘All right, Pajou. Spit it out,’ he said brusquely.

  The man had no intention of saying anything directly, but by hints and obliquities, he soon made his purpose clear. There’d been several hours during which it was believed Hitler was dead. The Militärbefehlshaber had ordered the arrest of senior SS and SD officers to prepare the way for the expected assumption by the Army of all powers, political and military. But news of the Führer’s survival, confirmed later that night by his voice, hysterical with fury, on the radio, had changed everything. Released, the SD were bent on revenge. The principal high-ranking officers involved would be returned to Berlin to be dealt with there. But smaller fry would be disposed of locally.

  ‘I just happened to be around while all this was going on,’ said Pajou. ‘I was at the Avenue Foch when some Wehrmacht chaps were invited in for a chat. That’s when I realized Colonel Fiebelkorn was keen to see you too, captain, and as I happened to know where you were…’

  But he was here under his own steam, that was clear. And his reasons were soon clear too.

  For a ‘consideration’, he would give Mai a running start to disappear into the countryside. For a larger consideration, he would even help him across the border into Switzerland.

  When Mai packed his bag and announced his intention of returning to Paris, Pajou only laughed, assuming this was part of the haggling process.

  ‘Come on, captain,’ he said. ‘You must be loaded! I mean, you’ve been here from the start.’

  The man really believed it! He could not envisage that a man with Mai’s opportunities wouldn’t have laden himself with plunder during the past four years.

  But when it became clear that Mai meant what he said, his ingratiating manner ceased.

  ‘You’re a fucking idiot,’ he said. ‘But you can’t help that. All right, in the car! Sooner we get you back the better.’

  ‘Pajou,’ said Mai softly. ‘You forget yourself. To talk to a Wehrmacht officer in that insubordinate tone is a criminal offence. Men have been shot for less.’

  This was the real test. For a moment Pajou looked uneasy and Mai felt triumphant. But when he turned to Boucher and said, ‘Right, Miche. Let’s go,’ Pajou said, ‘Oh no, captain. With me, not him.’

  ‘I prefer to choose my own transport.’

  ‘There may be less choice than you think. Eh, Miche?’

  Boucher was sitting on a sofa with Hélène, whose face was heavy with apprehension. She had hold of his right arm and now her grip visibly tightened. The red-head’s gaze met Mai’s then slipped away.

  ‘I’m sorry, captain,’ he said miserably. ‘But mebbe it’s best…’

  ‘Never mind, Miche,’ said Mai, smiling. ‘I understand.’

  He did. Pajou’s keen sharp nose must have sniffed out Boucher’s special arrangement with the Abwehr as well as his country hideaway, so poor Miche was in no position to make empty gestures on behalf of a German officer in trouble.

  As they approached Paris, Pajou renewed his offer. Mai didn’t respond. There hadn’t even been a moment when he felt tempted. He couldn’t envisage a worse fate for a man than to become a fugitive from his own country. In any case, why should he? Whatever he had guessed, he had known nothing.

  Of course there would be a witch-hunt, there would be unpleasant moments ahead; but ultimately even the fury of the SD must wane and acknowledge that some of those under suspicion were telling the truth. At worst he might find himself under officer’s arrest in the Lutétia for a couple of days. He could use them to weed out his files before the withdrawal from Paris - a withdrawal he now accepted as certain. An intelligence officer had loyalties to his agents. Some, like Boucher, were too prominent in their activities to be protected. But others, more clandestine in their work, did not deserve betrayal by their employers.

  And there was one more, whose name must be expunged completely. He’d kept Janine’s file on record so that her alleged Abwehr status could protect her from the SD. Now suddenly he wished he’d anticipated matters and destroyed it before his trip to Moret.

  He wished it even more a little later. The streets of Paris were full of soldiers in full battledress. The car was stopped several times, but Pajou’s papers obviously carried a weighty authority. Mai, deep in gloomy thought, paid little attention till he realized they were crossing the river.

  ‘Hold on! Where are we going? I want to go to the Lutétia!’

  But Pajou only smiled at him, and fingered his gun. A few minutes later, the car came to a halt before SD HQ in the Avenue Foch.

  ‘Wishing you’d made a deal now, eh, captain?’ said Pajou, opening the door. ‘Sorry, but it’s too late.’

  They went in. Pajou talked urgently to an SS major who went away, and returned a few minutes later. Mai tried to address him, but the man ignored him. For the first time, Mai wished he’d been wearing his uniform.

  Now he felt his arm seized by Pajou in a grip which was close to the point where friendly directive pressure became arresting force. They went out into the avenue again and entered another building a little further along. Here they were expected. An NCO led them down a flight of stairs and opened a door into a brightly lit though sparsely furnished room in which Colonel Fiebelkorn was talking to a Gestapo man.

  ‘Captain Mai! So here you are,’ said Fiebelkorn, little black eyes glistening behind his glasses. ‘Sorry that your leave has been interrupted. Thank you, Monsieur Pajou, for your assistance. Though if you’d told us you knew where to find the captain, we could have saved you the trouble.’

  There was a threat vibrating unmistakably behind the words and Pajou retreated before it, smiling ingratiatingly.

  ‘I’m glad to see you do not authorize foreigners to summon Wehrmacht officers, colonel,’ said Mai boldly.

  ‘Of course not. You can rest assured that I value the honour of the Wehrmacht 2too highly for that,’ said Fiebelkorn. ‘More highly, it seems, than some of your own superiors.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘You must know what has happened?’

  ‘Yes, sir. I learnt of the assassination attempt for the first time from Pajou. It was a terrible shock.’

  ‘It must have been,’ said the colonel.

  ‘I was of course delighted to hear the attempt had failed. What I don’t understand is why I have been brought here.’

  ‘There are certain necessary investigations. I hope we can rely on your aid.’

  ‘Of course, sir.’

  ‘Good. Now for a start, you can perhaps point out the code phrases in this and tell us what they mean.’

  He tossed a sheet of paper on to the desk.

  Mai examined it briefly and said in surprise, ‘But that’s a letter I got recently from Colonel Zeller.’

  ‘Yes, yes, we know it is. What we want to know is its significance.’

  ‘It’s just a letter. He was badly hurt, he’s been convalescing…but you know all that.’

  ‘It’s a very friendly letter for someone of Zeller’s background to be writing to a subordinate like yourself, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘Perhaps. But as I didn’t write it, I don’t see why I should need -’

  Fiebelkorn cut across him brutally. ‘Are you saying it was just coincidence that you decided to bury yourself out of sight in the countryside on the day of this monstrous assassination attempt?’ />
  ‘Of course. What other reason -’

  ‘A prudent man might think it best to keep his head down till he saw which way things were going.’

  ‘A prudent man who knew what was going to happen, yes! But I didn’t. Colonel, I demand to see someone from the Wehrmacht’s legal department. If I’m going to be cross-questioned, I want it to be at a properly constituted Board of Enquiry.’

  ‘Someone from the Wehrmacht . . .’ mused Fiebelkorn. ‘Have a look through there, see if there’s anyone you fancy.’

  He pointed to a door behind him. Günter Mai approached it, then hesitated. Something in him resisted going through that door. The Gestapo man reached past him with a muttered ‘excuse me’ and turned the handle.

  The room beyond was not so brightly lit but bright enough. Two shirt-sleeved men sat on wooden chairs, smoking cigarettes whose vapour coiled around the bare light bulb which hung from the centre of the ceiling. A couple of feet behind it something else hung. Three meat hooks had been screwed into a beam. From them stretched wires so fine that the men hanging from them seemed to be supporting themselves like performers in some grotesque ballet on the very tips of their toes.

  Mai looked at the naked bodies in shocked disbelief. Their torsos were livid with bruises and their sexual organs were a scarcely recognizable mass of crushed and bleeding flesh. The thin filaments of wire were digging so deep into their necks that they couldn’t be seen, but the pulled and swollen flesh, the gaping lips and protruding tongues, showed that they were there.

  ‘You bastards!’ he yelled, turning, his hand going to where his pistol would have been had he been in uniform.

  The Gestapo man punched him in the stomach. One of the seated men hooked his legs from under him, and as he hit the floor the other lashed his booted foot against the side of his head. He rolled over and over and came to a halt semi-conscious, with his head resting against a pair of the balletically poised feet.

  What could it mean? he wondered dully. When men could do this to other men, any men, let alone their fellow soldiers, what could anything mean?

  Another pair of feet came into view, boots highly polished, toes slightly splayed.

  ‘And now, Captain Mai,’ said Fiebelkorn’s distant, echoing voice, ‘let the Board of Enquiry begin.’

  8

  Four or it may have been five days after their escape from the train Maurice Melchior and the two children woke high on a forested slope and found themselves looking down on a broad river gleaming in the midday sun.

  ‘Is it the Rhine?’ asked Pauli incredulously.

  ‘Of course, my child. What else?’ replied Melchior casually.

  He thought he concealed his own delight and amazement very well. They had travelled only at night. Mercifully the weather had held fine. They had drunk spring water and eaten whatever of the midsummer vegetation Pauli’s recently acquired country lore pronounced safe. They’d made one large diversion to avoid an encampment of soldiers but that apart, they had seen no one. Each morning as the moon faded and the east grew grey, they had chosen a hiding place and snuggled up together to get what sleep they could.

  In Melchior’s mind they had been completely and irretrievably lost. Thus to wake up this morning and find that by some miracle he had performed what he promised and brought them to this mighty river gave him a greater joy than he could recall and seemed a guarantee of their future safety.

  ‘What do we do now, Monsieur Maurice?’ asked Pauli. ‘Swim across the river?’

  ‘We’ll see,’ said Melchior. It was not the time to admit he could not swim a stroke. God would surely provide!

  ‘Don’t move!’ came a harsh command from behind him. ‘Hands up!’

  He couldn’t believe it, not here, not now, with the Rhine in sight. A man moved slowly by him keeping a safe distance away. He was dressed in a grey-green tunic which for a moment Melchior thought despairingly was Wehrmacht uniform. Then he realized that soldiers didn’t wear old feathered hats, neither did they carry shotguns, nor were many of them, except perhaps generals, in their seventies.

  But for all the man’s age, the gun was aimed without a tremor.

  ‘Good day,’ Melchior said in his best German. ‘The children and I were having a little picnic. I do hope we’re not…’

  The word for ‘trespassing’ failed him.

  ‘Foreigner?’ said the man accusingly.

  ‘Yes, but a friend,’ said Melchior disarmingly. ‘Italian. An ally.’

  It occurred to him as he spoke that most Italians were no longer the Germans’ allies. The man was certainly not disarmed.

  ‘Move,’ he commanded. And when Melchior stood still, he raised his shotgun menacingly.

  Apart from the man’s age and his weapon, there was something else about him which tugged at Melchior’s attention and kept his mind off their destination as they marched uphill through the forest. The children walked ahead. Pauli held his sister’s hand and she chatted quite happily as she trotted along.

  Melchior guessed they would end up in a village where they would be gawked at by rough peasants till the army - or worse, the Gestapo - had been summoned to deal with them. Instead after about twenty minutes they stepped out of the trees on to a rising stretch of mown grass and there ahead of them was a castle.

  It wasn’t a big castle as Rhine castles go, but it had all the usual absurdly romantic turrets and towers. On another occasion, Melchior might have viewed its exuberance with some pleasure.

  There was another old man, who seemed to be pruning some bushes. Their captor shouted at him. He came and peered in amazement at the prisoners then turned and lumbered off towards the house. He too was wearing a sort of uniform tunic. It was this that Melchior now identified as being at the centre of his mental irritation. He tried to divert his mind back to the terrible peril he and the children now stood in, and, as the eye in moving away will often glimpse the object it’s been looking for, so now he remembered.

  He stopped and turned. The gun came up, the hammer was cocked.

  ‘No, no,’ said Melchior soothingly. ‘I just want to look at your buttons.’

  He looked. They bore a device he had last seen on a ring worn on a hand which was gently caressing his naked thigh. Or had it been clenched in rage?

  ‘And what have we here?’

  The voice sounded familiar, but when he turned he saw he had been wrong. The ancient gardener had merely brought another old man to view the scene. This one perhaps had some authority, standing as he did on the steps leading up to the open main door. He looked as if something rather terrible had happened to him. He was leaning heavily on a stick, his right sleeve was empty and pinned to his breast, and as for his face…it was heavily muffled, but what Melchior could see had the burnished purpureal look left by severe burning…

  And then he saw the eyes and recognized their recognition of him. He took a step forward.

  ‘Bruno? Is it you? Oh God. Bruno, my dear…’

  He felt tears damp on his cheeks.

  ‘Well, well. All things come to those who wait,’ came the familiar voice from that dreadful strangeness.

  And Melchior looked into those hard blue eyes again and began to think that perhaps he should have saved his tears for himself.

  PART SEVEN

  August 1944

  Il y avait loin de ces mœurs efféminées aux émotions profondes que donna l’arrivée imprévue de l’armée française. Bientôt surgirent des mœurs nouvelles et passionées. Un peuple tout entier s’aperçut…que tout ce qu’il avait respecté j usque-là était souverainement ridicule et quelquefois odieux. Le départ du dernier régiment de l’Autriche marqua la chute des idées anciennes: exposer sa vie devint à la mode; on vit que pour être heureux…il fallait aimer la patrie d’un amour réel et chercher les actions héroiques.

  Stendhal, La chartreuse de Parme

  1

  Janine Simonian looked in her bedroom mirror and wondered why she hadn’t gone mad.

  It wa
s the same gilt-framed, silver-flaked glass which had faithfully recorded her image since she’d first had to climb on the bed to look into it. Now it showed what could easily have been the picture of a madwoman. Thin by nature, emaciated by malnutrition, her face was now positively cadaverous through grief, and her neglected hair hung in knots and tangles over her sparrow-boned shoulders.

  But she knew she was sane. As long as the children were alive she would shun the tempting path down into madness. And the children were alive. She knew it with the same certainty she had felt about Jean-Paul during those long months of silence.

  But even the firmest faith requires a sign.

  During the past weeks she had gone everywhere, confronted everyone, in search of this sign. Curiously the Germans had received her more courteously than the French. Christian Valois must have told Les Pêcheurs of disturbing her in bed with Mai, and it was evident that her other meetings with the man, or at least a man, hadn’t gone unobserved, and had only gone unreported because Jean-Paul wasn’t the kind of man you called a cuckold to his face.

  So any sympathy felt at the loss of her children was compounded by the feeling that she’d brought it on herself.

  Even Henri, good-natured, solid Henri, couldn’t keep the coldness out of his voice as he regretted that none of his Resistance contacts had been able to find any trace of the kids and suggested that for her own good, in the present temper of the city, she’d do well to take a long vacation.

  She had in fact travelled to Lyon, not for a holiday or a refuge, but in search of that faith-bolstering sign. All she learned there was that Lucien Laurentin had been shot and Mireille was still imprisoned. Yes, there had been a pair of Yid kids at Montluc some weeks back, but they’d been transported long since. Where? Where the hell did she think!

  She returned to Paris and resumed her rounds, meeting everywhere with the same unhelpful courtesy. The fact that the Germans did not seem interested in arresting or even harassing her, the widow of a notorious Jewish Resistant, was not going unnoticed, except by herself. She had no time for any diversion of thought from her search for information, for hope. She went everywhere, the Majestic, the Avenue Foch, even the Lutétia where she demanded to see Günter Mai once more. They held her at the entrance for more than an hour, then told her that Captain Mai had been transferred.