Hunting Ground

by J. Robert Janes

  Finding a handkerchief, he offered it, but I used my own. ‘How can you do this?’

  At least we’d talk now, he thought, and tried to smile. ‘Göring’s really not so bad. He’s got an eye for what’s exceptional and is still fond of the Impressionists, though the others aren’t. You of all people should appreciate him for that.’

  A common bond. ‘What I understand, my husband, is that you’re engaged in a monstrous theft. You’re building yourself on the sorrows of others.’

  ‘No more than most. I’ve repaid the mortgages on the house. I’ve money in the bank.’

  ‘And the taxes?’

  I was still the same, would always be that way. ‘There’s no need. You know as well as I that the house has been declared a repository. It’s under the protection of the Wehrmacht and not subject to taxes.’

  ‘And is that glorious Army of the Occupation protecting the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg? Has the German Army legalized the looting of works of art?’

  ‘Of course not. The military governor of France has expressly forbidden it but …’ He gave a sheepish grin, a shrug. ‘But there are those who wish it to continue.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The Führer, for his museum in Linz; the Reichsmarschall, for Karinhall, the villa he has on his estate in East Prussia; the Nazis, Lily. Even Himmler buys.’

  ‘And you, my husband? What about you?’

  He turned away to sit down behind that desk of his. ‘I’ve made my choice. Now you must make yours, but remember, please, that one more outburst like that and I may not be able to protect you. A word, that’s all they’ll need. Why not be sensible? The house is far more comfortable than the internment camp at Besançon. Jean-Guy still needs his mother. You can keep an eye on things for me. Schiller …’

  I waited, but he left it unsaid and irritably asked, ‘Why have you come to Paris? How did you convince them and that mayor of ours to give you an Ausweis?’

  A laissez-passer. ‘When you had expressly asked them not to?’

  ‘Why, Lily?’

  ‘Because I must see André.’

  ‘What’s the matter with you?’

  He was worried now—alarmed. Ah, bon, he needed me to watch that house of his. ‘Ask André.’

  ‘Lily, wait.’

  Out on Place de la Concorde, Jules told me exactly how things stood. ‘Why do you think you’ve been allowed to stay in the house, you with your English passport, your friends, and that sister of yours? It’s only because I’m useful, Lily. If you want to thank somebody, thank Göring. He’s the one who gave the order allowing you to stay.’

  Göring … My wife, the sculptress of that little piece I presented to you. My sculpture of Nini, the one that Tommy had bought and that was stolen from him by the Action française thugs and Schiller.

  ‘Make the best of things. Buy some new clothes, some shoes, a lipstick—whatever you want. Here, let me give you some money.’

  There were one-hundred- and one-thousand-franc notes, several five-thousands, and all of them brand-new. If I had thrown them up in the air, they would have floated slowly to the ground and neither of us would have stooped to pick them up.

  Like a whore accepting her ‘little gift,’ I took the money. It was far too needed to refuse. We found a café. I let him order something, but what it was, or if I drank it, I have no memory.

  He asked about Janine. I said I hadn’t heard.

  ‘She’s still missing,’ he said. ‘Dupuis thinks she must have gone underground.’

  ‘Dupuis is an inspector with the Sûreté.’

  ‘The criminal investigation branch. They’re hand in glove with the Gestapo because they have to be. Someone’s been plastering Résistance notices up all over the place and also printing a newspaper.’

  Nini would do this—a start. ‘She must have gone south with all the others. She’ll still be in the zone libre. It’s crazy to think she’d be messed up in anything like that.’

  ‘Just don’t try to find her. They would only have you followed, Lily. You wouldn’t want to lead them to her, would you?’

  ‘And Michèle?’ I asked. ‘Have you managed to break into the safe and plunder her little capital? Was it exquisite, my husband? Another virgin?’

  ‘Your sister wasn’t.’

  ‘I wasn’t thinking of her. I was thinking of myself.’

  ‘Michèle is also missing, as are Dmitry Alexandrov and Henri-Philippe Beauclair.’

  My sister’s friends. But Dmitry …

  I know I asked Jules about the Vuittons, and was he still involved with them. ‘I can never forgive you for what they did to me.’

  Immediately, he withdrew, was almost brutal about it. ‘We had to know. Too much was at stake. Besides, those guys were only to have threatened you. It … it got out of hand.’

  ‘Did it? On your orders or those of the Vuittons?’

  I started to get up but heard him saying, ‘Just keep the house in readiness. When the time comes, we’ll be there with Göring. Then you’ll see how things really are.’

  ‘And Schiller?’ I demanded.

  ‘Do everything you can to keep him happy since he probably won’t be staying with you much longer. There’s far too much else for him to do.’

  What can I say? It’s to my everlasting shame that later I didn’t have the courage to have Jules killed when I could so easily have done so. The others had left the matter entirely to me, yet I always hesitated. There would be no little black pasteboard coffin for him then, only recently, and from Zurich.

  Bedrooms are such intimate places. One makes love to one’s husband while dreaming of another. One dwells on the fantasies afterwards, asking of their necessity. One tries to understand, to forgive, but the doubts crowd in, the hopes, the aspirations, and the secrets.

  Could I kill him today or tomorrow? This I really don’t know, even after all I’ve been through.

  The plaster’s been ripped from the ceiling above me. The flowered linen of the walls is spattered with bloodstains. Heaps of rags become heaps of my clothes, a negligee, a torn stocking—I pull it out and hold it up. I remember saving it, can you imagine that? One silk stocking, the last of them. Such vanity. Ruined at the knee when I fell in the rue Mouffetard as I ran to warn my sister. What was I going to do with it? One never threw anything out in those days.

  The wind stirs and I let go of it, ask myself, Why did I fall in love with Jules? Why? Over and over again, I must tell myself, as Tommy insisted once, Jules couldn’t have been that bad or I wouldn’t have married him.

  Perhaps that’s so. Perhaps it’s just that in this life some of us are lucky and others aren’t, but like Georges and Tante Marie, like all the local people, I’m inclined to blame the weather and the times. Of course, at that particular time I was also pregnant with Jean-Guy, though not desperate, not destitute, you understand. I could have gone to live with my father in England. Me, I thought I was really in love, and for a time I was.

  The gate squeaks. I flatten my back to the wall. An avalanche of broken plaster pours over my shoulder. My heart’s racing. Have they finally come?

  A man of about forty is out there—it’s too hard to tell from up here, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen him before.

  Shade from the broken louvres of a shutter falls on my fingers. He wears a grey fedora and grey tweed overcoat, grey scarf, and black leather gloves. There’s no sign of a car on the road. He must have left it some distance away so as not to let me hear it. Then why make that noise at the gate? To let me know, eh?

  He’s read the no trespassing notice. In spite of this, he starts up the drive. From time to time he looks up here but can’t possibly have seen me.

  He’s not heavy, not overly tall—medium in many ways. Nondescript—that’s what counts. Plainclothes Gestapo? I wonder, even though I know they’ve all gone from here.

  His cheeks are fair and closely shaven, the face a smooth oval that is neither too narrow nor too wide, and betrays few if any of
the war’s ravages. Is he British? I wonder, but discard the notion as he comes closer and closer before finally passing out of sight below me.

  The front door is nudged open. Slowly, cautiously, he steps inside, and I thumb the safety off the Luger. It would be just like Dupuis to send someone from Paris.

  Stealthily, he picks his way over the rubbish, is selective, and doesn’t seem to mind the papers. It’s the glass that bothers him, and he avoids it, sending a signal to me. Now only the wind is heard as it slips under the eaves or finds the shattered windows, and I know he’s been sent to kill me.

  A cigarette butt has been left to smoulder in the safety of the fireplace of the main dining room, but it’s a classic Gestapo ploy, that gesture. He doesn’t cry out, hardly ever makes a sound. Each step he takes is calculated to bring him closer.

  A fleeting shadow leaves me wondering where the hell he is, but now he’s even closer and steps quickly into the kitchen, my kitchen, but there’s more glass, and I hear his shoes scrunch on it as he gives a muted ‘Sacré nom de nom,’ and I know he’s really from Paris, a former gestapiste français.

  His back is to me. The toe of a brown Oxford nudges the rusty crowbar I used to break in, and he can’t understand why anyone would do such a thing when entry has been so easy for him.

  Puzzled, he fingers the broken sash of the door as he looks out through the orchard, only to then pick his way over the glass. Soon, he’s looking at the remains of the potting shed where I used to meet Tommy and other members of our réseau. Is he putting it all together? Has he been told to look for this shed?

  He must have some familiarity with the orchard, for he makes a careful circuit of my vegetable plots that are now so overgrown they almost look as if they’ve never been used. Is he looking for unmarked graves or my recent footprints?

  Waiting, I hear the guns, the cries of my friends and comrades, the bursts of a Schmeisser, the single shots from a Walther P38 as I see them kneeling on that very ground, those that are left. They have dug their own graves, and as Schiller, tall and arrogant in his SS uniform, stands behind each, he raises his pistol for the Genickschuss.

  Only that’s all gone now, and soon this man stands beneath one of my apple trees looking up curiously at the frayed end of the rope that hangs from a sturdy branch.

  He’s tall enough to touch the end of it and does. Hunching his shoulders against the cold and damp, he again heads for the house only to walk round the side and out to the road. Me, I could so easily have killed him.

  * Curfew times were often changed at will, though generally settled down to the above.

  6

  They’ll come for me now. Probably, like him, they’ll leave their car some distance, will split up, for he’ll have told them I’m here. One will nudge that front door open, another the back with one in reserve. I had better do the unexpected.

  In the kitchen, there’s a German ordnance map. I fish it out, tear off a strip, search for the stub of a pencil and in big, black letters print: ATTENDEZ! JE VAIS REVENIR. (Wait! I’ll return.)

  This I nail to the front door with the tines of a carving fork. Then I sign it, Lily Hollis, and disappear back into the house to wait for them.

  Always there’s that night in my thoughts, and I’m walking the streets of Paris knowing there’s no price like that of my innocence. Jules had warned me not to try to contact my sister. Me, I was so green I had let them follow me.

  Like fireflies in the darkness, the bicycles passed by. Occasionally, at the corners of the streets, there were faint blue-washed lights. Otherwise, there was only the night above and the shapes, the silhouettes, the sounds of hesitant steps.

  Hurrying across the boulevard Edgar Quinet, I frantically tried the main gate to the Cimetière du Montparnasse. It was the best of places to disappear into during the day, the final home of so many, of statues, angels, griffins, and hobgoblins, too. A city in itself, its crowded stones rose constantly upon one another in a jumble of darkened crosses to the length of the wall that would shut me off from the avenue de l’Ouest if I could but get over it, but it was impossible of course! At six p.m., they locked up the dead, and that was it. I barked my shins but made no more noise as he lit a cigarette. It was Dupuis and he was standing nearby, but did he want me to see him? Each time he took a drag, the cigarette glowed, and all I had of him was this and the dumpy silhouette.

  Something fluttered past, terrifying me—a bat, who knows—and Dupuis moved calmly away to search elsewhere, leaving that cigarette for me to find burning on the edge of the kerb.

  Dupuis … He was so clever, that one.

  Later … but a few moments later, I was at Marcel’s. The woman was naked and clutching the bedclothes to hide herself, the boy asleep on the floor beside the bed, curled up like a little dog. There were black, curly hairs on the barrel of Marcel’s chest, and it was easy for me to see that he had the hanging fruit of the well endowed as he rasped, ‘Jésus, merde alors, Lily, what is this?’

  I switched off my torch. ‘I have to talk to you about Janine and the others.’

  ‘Idiote, it’s well after curfew! In any case, what are you doing in Paris?’

  The woman sank down and pulled the covers up over her head. ‘Don’t wake the boy.’ That’s all she said. Marcel reached for his shirt and trousers, and together we moved away to look out at the night, down the length of that courtyard towards the rue de l’Ouest. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I don’t know where your sister and the others are. I think Dmitry stole a van and picked them up just before the invasion, but I’ve told no one of it until now.’

  That only made me suspicious of him. The flat reeked of oil paints, turpentine, and other things, like a vase de nuit that needed emptying. ‘Jules could give you lots of money now. Why don’t you go to him?’

  ‘Never. It’s not pride, if that’s what you’re thinking.’

  ‘Then what is it?’

  ‘Look, it doesn’t matter, eh? Some things are best left alone.’

  ‘The Vuittons?’

  ‘They’ll be after you, too. They want Jules to be completely free of past associations.’

  ‘Could Nini have made it to the zone libre? She’d go to Provence, to mother’s. They could have holed up there. Damn it, Marcel, she’s not mixed up in anything is she?’

  ‘Résistance leaflets, newspapers? Me, I simply don’t know.’

  ‘If not the Free Zone, then where?’

  His shoulders lifted. ‘The farm perhaps, but they’ll be watching it. Jules will have told them to.’

  Tommy and Nicki would have made very careful circuits of it. ‘Can you get someone into Paris for me?’

  Assessing me through the darkness, he hazarded, ‘Peut-être. I still have a few contacts.’

  ‘In the black market?’

  ‘In that and other things. When would you want this person to be moved?’

  He now knew that someone could well be at the farmhouse so there was no sense in my hiding it. ‘Three days from now. He’ll be there, but well hidden.’

  ‘Is he a British airman? Janine could be in that business, Lily. For myself, I’ve thought it entirely possible but, again, I’ve said this to no one but yourself.’

  How kind of him! ‘So why not keep it from me, too?’

  ‘Because I choose not to in spite of the risk.’

  ‘How much will it cost me to have someone moved?’

  ‘Five thousand francs—half in advance, but make it some place deep in the forest. Near the buttes perhaps.’

  Why had he suggested such a place? ‘Must it be there?

  ‘Certainly, because Schiller and the others will think you would never go there again. Now push off before that concierge of mine calls in those neither of us want.’

  Again, the city awaited, and I didn’t really know if I’d ever make it because Simone and André de Verville lived in a posh block of flats on the boulevard de Beauséjour not a stone’s throw from the Bois de Boulogne and me, I arrived in the dead of ni
ght. They were frantic, of course.

  ‘You what?’ snapped André.

  ‘I’ve ridden here. I stole a bicycle. It’s outside, so you’d better bring it in and hide it. I’ll take it home with me tomorrow.’

  He tore his hair and gestured at the idiocy. ‘Lily, you can’t be doing things like this. You promised.’

  He had warned me earlier, at his consulting room. ‘But I didn’t realize they would have me followed. Dupuis and the others slowed me up.’

  ‘That Sûreté? Well now you know what it’s like. I just hope no one saw you coming here except for Laforge, our concierge, who will be lecturing me first thing in the morning!’

  Which was true, of course, but … ‘It’s pretty dark out there, eh?’ It was no mean feat to cross the city and the Seine after curfew. I had avoided two street patrols and managed to walk right by the control on the Pont d’Iéna, both of whom had been laughing and seeing how far they could piss into the river, but … I’d better not tell them this.

  Simone was sitting on the arm of a chair in her dressing gown and slippers. ‘He’s right, Lily. It’s no time to be fooling around. But Marcel, chérie? Why go to a man no one should trust?’

  André had pulled on his coat. ‘Yes, why? Just what are you involved in?’

  Me, I needed to quickly learn how to lie and wisely decided to use a half-truth. ‘A small investment. I’ve some potatoes and things. I was hoping to find a way to get them to you.’

  He glanced at Simone then said, ‘Potatoes,’ and lifted his eyebrows. André was typical of the French intelligentsia, thin, greying, sharp-featured, tidy always—even in pajamas and silk dressing gown—dark-eyed, fifty-two, and twenty years senior to his wife. A very good and successful doctor, but with a practice that I knew was falling to pieces: wealthy Jewesses mainly, so he wore a certain stripe the Nazis wouldn’t like, though neither he nor Simone were Jewish and I knew they would not have backed off, not then.

  ‘I’ll go and get the bicycle,’ he said, ‘and apologize to Monsieur Laforge, not that it will ever do any good. Some coffee, Simone. Maybe something stronger. Lily, really, you’ve scared the life out of us and put us in the soup as well!’