Hitching his knapsack over his shoulder, he walked out of the fringes of the wood on to a road full of morning sun. He had become an evader.
He reached the railway station of Fontainebleau-Avon shortly after nine, unchallenged. It was Sunday, little traffic about. But he was proud of himself because he’d walked right past a couple on their way to church, and called out, ‘Bonjour.’
‘Bonjour’ was the limit of his French, and he wouldn’t get to the next stage without help. After standing for some minutes on the station concourse, eyeing up potential assistance, he approached a man leaning against a wall. Dirty, with jet-black hair poking beneath a beret, the dog-end of a cigarette glued to his bottom lip, he cut an unsavoury figure. Getting closer, Irish saw that one of his hands was bound up in a dirty rag. A vagrant? No use. He needed someone capable of buying him a ticket and getting him on to a train. He was about to slink away when he noticed the man’s shoes. They were tan leather with hand-stitched welts, such as professional men wore. Unless they’d been stolen, of course. But by the time he’d thought of that the man had seen him and growled something. Probably, ‘What are you looking at?’
Warrant Officer Donal Flynn held out his hand and said, ‘I’m a British aviator and I need help.’
*
Hiltrud von Elbing spent the journey to Paris removing cherry stones with a fingernail. A fiddly job, made no easier by the lurching of the train. The messy results she ate, but after a few attempts she had successfully replaced one stone with the cyanide capsule.
A guard shouted something at her. She thrust out her ticket, but he shouted, ‘Identité!’ She produced the card belonging to the nurse whose bag she had taken. The man looked it over, then looked her over. She held her breath.
He was asking her something when a rumpus broke out in the carriage one along. Rudely throwing the card into her lap, he strode away.
A moment later, Hiltrud saw a young man jump from the slowing train. Shots were fired, and everyone in her carriage dropped their heads to their knees. She didn’t. It was far more interesting to watch the police leap on to the tracks. Not so much fun being at a standstill for half an hour afterwards. When you have difficult tasks ahead of you, you do not want delays.
At the barrier, a German policeman looked over her papers and called her ‘Schwester’. She puzzled over it until it struck her that her black, hooded cloak and the hem of the cotton nightdress beneath suggested a nursing nun. Where were the taxis? All she could see were bicycles with funny little cubicles attached behind. Yet people were getting into them.
She approached a driver and said, ‘La Passerinette.’
The driver returned a mystified look. She pointed to her head, and shouted in German, ‘Modistin!’
‘Modiste?’ he queried, and shouted something down the line of drivers. Somebody seemed to understand and a moment later he was asking her, ‘Boulevard de la Madeleine?’
She had absolutely no idea, but nodded nevertheless.
After the bumpiest ride of her life, she found herself in a broad street, as fine as any in Berlin. She dropped coins into the driver’s hand, and watched him count them with his eyes before he pedalled quickly away. Within seconds, she had forgotten about him because there was ‘La Passerinette’ etched on to glass. The shop’s blinds were up but there were no hats on show. Nothing to prove that these were the premises of her husband’s mistress. Considering what she was planning to do, she must be sure.
The door was ajar, and she stepped inside. A man wearing her father’s stiff kind of collar was talking animatedly to a tall, blonde and very lovely girl in a pink dress. They were surrounded by pink and grey hatboxes and Hiltrud had the impression they were arguing over them.
‘Fräulein de Lirac?’
They broke off and gave Hiltrud a curious stare.
The girl said something in French through sensual, painted lips. Assuming she was being asked who she was, Hiltrud pulled herself up to a dignified height and said, ‘I am your lover’s wife.’
The blonde girl took in a shocked breath and colour swept through her cheeks. So. Condemned by her own shame. Hiltrud held out two red cherries hanging from a single stalk. One had a stone, the other . . . Well, she had no actual proof it was a cyanide capsule.
‘Non, merci.’ The girl indicated the door and Hiltrud understood that the shop wasn’t open. But, of course, it was Sunday. She’d heard bells as she came through the barrier at the station. She continued offering the cherries and finally, with an impatient noise, the girl took them.
Hiltrud left, but went no further than the opposite side of the road. After a short wait, she saw the girl leaving the shop, carrying one of the pink and grey hatboxes. Hiltrud followed her to the end of the street, and saw a great building flanked by columns. The girl did not cross the junction, but turned left into another street. At the kerb, she paused and that was when Hiltrud saw her raise her lips to the cherries and bite off first one fruit, then the other.
The girl was halfway across the road when she gave an unearthly cry and doubled over. The hatbox rolled like a drum. Baying like a hound, the girl gripped her throat and fell to her knees. A second later, a black car bearing the flag of the German Reich on its radiator grille ploughed into her.
*
Hiltrud walked on, ignoring the cries of horror, the running feet. One task complete. She crossed a great square that she recognised. She’d sat here on her first day in Paris, watching eddies of snow falling from a gunmetal sky. She kept walking, remembering the car journey to Dietrich’s flat. They had crossed a river and the driver had said, ‘The Seine, gnädige Dame. A fine river.’
A good enough river, anyway. Shortly after midday, Hiltrud von Elbing stepped off the wharf into cold brown water, completing her second task of the day.
Chapter Thirty-seven
Coralie knew she’d overslept even before she opened the curtains. Georges and Lorienne could have stripped La Passerinette to the floorboards by now, but if they had, they had. She wasn’t going to scramble over to boulevard de la Madeleine in yesterday’s clothes.
It was after midday and Dietrich was still asleep. She’d nip home to rue de Seine, she decided, change, then return and massage his back until he woke. The way to a man’s heart.
In her own flat she washed, put her hair up in a bun and changed her pewter-grey choker for one of pale pink. While the kettle boiled, she opened her wardrobe and surveyed her dresses. Was it mischief that made her reach for the pink dress printed with twin cherries in navy-blue?
The last time she’d worn this . . . Well, she’d see if Dietrich remembered. She put on the tasselled pillbox hat that went so well with it, and reluctantly tied a dark headscarf over it because she intended to cycle to La Passerinette. It was such a gorgeous day.
She cycled as far as the river, then wheeled her bicycle across the pont des Arts and again across place de la Concorde. At the top of rue Royale, she was held up by a police block. People were gathered in the road, watching an ambulance slowly drawing up. She heard somebody say that a young woman had been knocked down and killed by a German driver.
Coralie averted her eyes.
Turning right in front of the imposing Madeleine, she wheeled her bicycle into boulevard de la Madeleine, straining her eyes for the first sight of La Passerinette. The salon door was open! ‘No!’ she raged. ‘No!’
When she stormed in, Georges Blanchard, surrounded by hatboxes, looked momentarily relieved. Then, as he recognised Coralie, his fists went up.
Little did he know how many times she’d seen a big man in that stance. ‘Put them down, Georges. You don’t frighten me. Just know this. If I catch you anywhere near this place again, I will go to the head of the Paris police, the head of the Abwehr, the head of the army and the head of the Gestapo, one after the other, until one of them kicks your backside into jail, and kicks Lorienne’s in after it. Look at
my face.’ She tapped a cheek. ‘This is the anger of a betrayed woman. Why did you do it?’
‘She promised to make me her premier if I brought you down. She was meant to come straight back, with a vélo taxi.’
‘Better go and find her then, hadn’t you? How many of my hats are missing?’
‘None.’ Georges hesitated, then admitted, ‘Lorienne took one with her.’
‘I suggest you ask her to drop it back. Now get out.’
Coralie watched him till he’d gone round the corner. Sighing, she closed the door, then opened it again because the shop suddenly felt constrictive. After returning the hatboxes to the workroom, she unpinned her closing-down notice and tore it up.
Seeing her shop threatened again, she’d remembered how passionately she loved her work. Dietrich had advised her well.
Lunch. Why not telephone Dietrich and invite him to meet her here? She was just reaching for the handset when a man’s cough from the salon told her that Dietrich had anticipated her.
Walking through, she began a laughing comment that ended in a gasp. It wasn’t Dietrich. Two rough-looking men filled the doorway.
*
Had she fainted? Because she was on the floor, looking up at the octopus-arms of her ceiling light. Fingers were tapping her cheek. A man muttered, ‘Wake up.’
She thought, They’re looters. They think there’s money here. One of them was breathing harshly.
Fingers tapped her again. ‘Come on, sweetheart, wake up.’
Sweetheart? English? Not possible. The faces staring down at her simply could not exist together, not on the mortal plane.
‘Ramon?’
‘Oui, chérie.’
‘Donal?’
‘Hello, Cora.’
‘I’m Coralie. What the hell?’
‘We met at a station.’ Hard breaths made spaces between Ramon’s words. It wasn’t her hazy vision that made his face seem grey. It was grey. He’d painted his cheeks with some kind of dirt, and dragged it through his hair. Disguise, she supposed. After all, the Gestapo were after him.
Donal finished the story in English, ‘He got me on the train at Fontainebleau and stayed with me till I had to jump. We met up at the Madeleine. Lovely church. Whoever built it must have seen the Brompton Oratory because—’
Coralie interrupted. ‘Ramon, are you all right?’ To Donal, she said, ‘He’s not well.’
‘Caught a bullet in the finger. It smashed bone and it’s infected. He needs a doctor and we both need a safe house. I think Ramon said there were flats above this shop.’
‘Too dangerous, but I know somewhere else.’ It would have to be impasse de Cordoba.
She let Donal haul her up, then led them into the workroom. Donal looked around, at the boxes, at the designs pinned on the walls, the marotte heads sporting unfinished models. ‘Who makes all this?’
‘I do.’
‘They’d fall off their chairs at Pettrew’s. I’m proud of you, Cora.’
‘Call me Cora one more time, I’ll punch you. I’m Mademoiselle de Lirac.’
He grinned. ‘And I’m Air Vice Marshal Flynn.’
‘You both need a change of clothes. I have to get you out of here.’ Dietrich might come looking for her at any time. He would see Donal as an enemy captive, to be treated according to the rules of the Geneva Convention. Ramon might as well have a firing-squad target pinned over his heart. She sniffed him. ‘Been sleeping rough?’
‘Running, chérie, not sleeping. Help me get back to my comrades. I have no money. My new English friend paid for my ticket.’
She took Ramon’s filthy beret, replacing it with a trilby that Georges had left behind. It changed his appearance immediately. Ramon’s jacket was stiff with dried blood. That was why he stank. She made him take it off and helped him into a trench coat she’d left there when the weather turned warm. Tight on him, but masculine enough not to draw attention. Coralie wished she’d had the foresight to keep a man’s suit here as well because Donal’s blue-grey trousers, blouson jacket and white sweater screamed ‘British airman’.
In the end, she had Donal and Ramon exchange jumpers, and discovered that both men carried pistols in side holsters. She made no comment. For Ramon, she fashioned a cravat from an offcut of cloth while Donal dulled his light brown flying boots with black ink and blue tailor’s chalk. After she’d added a slick of glycerin to his hair, he looked more like a local, particularly as he now had a morning’s growth of beard. Her finest touch was a black eye, conjured out of the makeup in her bag. Solange had left a bottle of red nail varnish behind and Coralie stippled tiny dots under Donal’s eye to resemble burst blood vessels. His face was already hatched with scratches and bumps from his rough landing. ‘We might as well make a virtue of it,’ she said.
Ramon considered her handiwork. ‘You’ve overdone the yellow.’
‘Listen, I’ve seen a few black eyes in my time.’ She said it again in English to Donal, adding, ‘I’ve seen them in the mirror.’
Donal shook his head, and she supposed there were things he didn’t like to be reminded of. ‘Right,’ she told him, ‘the story is, I’m taking you home because you were beaten by thugs outside a drinking den. If anybody stops us, say nothing and look dazed.’
It was agreed that Ramon would go ahead and they would meet at the corner of rue de Leningrad and rue du Berne, close to impasse de Cordoba. When it was their turn to leave, Coralie knotted her scarf over her hat and assembled a few useful items, including her left-handed scissors, wads of absorbent cloth, salt and ersatz coffee. Putting them in her bicycle basket, she thought of Dietrich. He would never track her to impasse de Cordoba – it would seem as though she’d abandoned him again.
Outside, she gruffly reminded Donal, ‘Traffic comes from the left over here. If we’re stopped, I do the talking. Anything goes wrong, run for it and we’ll meet at Gare de Lyon, where you arrived.’
‘You do the talking, I get to look dumb. Nothing changes, Coralie.’
‘At least you’re getting my name right.’
*
In the flat on impasse de Cordoba, she opened the window to air the place. Nobody had been inside since she’d last left it, and the smell of damp was unwelcoming. She made black coffee for them all. ‘I’ll go foraging in a moment, and contact a member of my circuit. You’ll both need money, and Donal needs false papers and a safe sanctuary beyond Paris.’
‘You trust your contact?’ Ramon demanded.
‘Sure I do – he wears Nazi uniform and shouts, “Sieg Heil!” every time we meet.’
‘Sarcasm is not only wasted, it is uncharitable to a man in my state.’
‘Then don’t ask daft questions.’ She make a strong salt solution with water from the kettle and held Ramon’s hand in it until the blood-caked bandage fell away from his finger. When he complained of shooting pains up his arm, she laid a hand to his brow. The bullet had got the middle joint of his wedding finger which was grotesquely inflamed, naked bone under a collar of ragged flesh. More ominously, black streaks radiated from the site. Damn right they needed a doctor.
Donal, meanwhile, was looking around the flat, a two-minute job. He flicked back the window curtain. ‘Reminds me of Barnham Street. Grey roofs and mean-eyed windows. I thought Paris was different.’
‘Most of it is.’
He turned, unsmiling. ‘Still, no worse than I’m used to in barracks. Cheers.’ He drank his coffee without making a face, so she guessed what they got at home was no better. Seeing Ramon slumped on the sofa, Donal said quietly, ‘What were the chances of running into him? I nearly fell down when I discovered he was your husband.’
‘He has the same effect on me.’ She took their cups away to wash. Something about Donal was making her nervous. It wasn’t just the physical changes in him she found hard to adjust to, it was his tone, his demeanour. The shy boy h
ad always been easy to brush off and tease. This man was essentially a stranger and he looked at her the same way – as if she were a stranger he intended to know more about.
‘Did you mean to come to Paris?’ she asked, as she belted on the cheap cotton coat she kept in the flat. ‘Wouldn’t you have been better heading straight west, making for Spain?’
‘I wanted to find you.’ Still no smile. ‘Ramon was nervous about coming to you – worried the Gestapo might have you under surveillance, but we didn’t dare hang about south of the river. Not after I jumped from the train and got chased half a mile.’
‘Ramon’s a wanted man, you know that?’
He answered instead, ‘That time we met at the club, the Rose Noire? You were belting out “The Lambeth Walk”. When you told me you were married – ’ his voice caught ‘– I hadn’t known until then how much I’d always thought of you as my girl.’
She shook her head.
‘No. And you’re not his, either.’ He meant Ramon. ‘There’s a German, right?’ Donal had inadvertently smeared his painted black eye across his face and he looked like a chimney sweep. A sweep with hard blue eyes, searching her face for clues. It wasn’t just Donal questioning either, it was everything he represented. Homeland, King, comrades.
‘There are no Germans in my life,’ she told him. Why complicate matters? ‘I’d better go. Don’t go outside, stay away from the window and wash your face.’ She was out of the door before he could ask her anything else.
The shops were closed, of course, but the patron of her regular café sold her a tin of ham, green beans and a knobbly swede. He also filled the bottle she carried permanently in her bicycle basket with red wine.
*
Moineau had told her that in an emergency she could go to the Café de Finisterre opposite the entrance to Gare Saint-Lazare. He went there most days for lunch, he said, and always on a Sunday. If she missed him, the proprietor would summon him by telephone if she gave the code phrase ‘Cousin Charles’.
The Girl Who Dreamed of Paris Page 44