by Cara Black
“What if I give you a lift, show you something en route?”
A few tipples of vin rouge and keen to get her in a car?
As if sensing her hesitation, he pointed to his chest. “Asthma sufferer. Side effect of my new medication gives me the hiccups.”
No whiff of vin rouge and he seemed steady on his feet.
She pulled out the newspaper clipping. “I’ve got a story to write,” she said, lying her heart out. “A story my editor won’t accept without facts. These theories you’re quoted saying—every little thing requires backup evidence.” At least that’s what Martine, who was studying journalism at the Sorbonne, complained about.
“Driving to Vierzon takes thirty minutes, give or take.” He pulled out an old rail map with X’s marked in red. “I can show you everything I’ve researched. The German truck recovery site, the river’s course then and now, logistical problems.”
She snapped her bag shut and stepped out of the ticket line. “Lead the way.” An odd tour guide, but it worked for her. “Any basis to support your allegation that the sixty villagers executed in 1942 were related to a German truck bound for Portugal?”
“I thought you’d never ask,” said Ducray, lifting the glasses hanging from a string around his neck onto his face. They got into his old Peugeot. He handed her the map, ground the car into first, and shot out of the parking lot. “Hold on, Mademoiselle Leduc.”
•••
After crossing the bridge to Givaray, Ducray turned onto a muddy road and let the engine idle on a small bluff. Across the river lay Chambly-sur-Cher, and a stone’s throw away, a crumbling water mill. Aimée caught a whiff of damp manure drifting from over the river.
“Let me set the scene, that’s how you say it, non?”
She winced. A crackpot? “In the movies maybe, Monsieur Ducray. Unless you’ve got facts, I haven’t got a story.”
Or a suspect who’d murder old men with shady links to Nazi gold.
Shouldn’t she feel like an imposter, playing two roles, neither one very well? But she enjoyed playing reporter, giving herself a script and getting this train obsessive to cough up real details. Better than in the movies.
“Why are you so interested in this?” she said. “What’s driving you?”
“I was a baby when my father was executed with the others,” he said in a flat voice, emotionless.
The car engine idled. Ducks in a V formation rippled the river’s gunmetal-grey surface. Georges Ducray had the perfect motive for revenge.
“When the war ended, I was two or three, but I still remember the German’s black boots. We didn’t go hungry, because this was farmland, and my mother ran a cheese shop. But I was never full.”
She understood the difference. Nodded.
Ducray pulled over, reached in the back seat for a folder. He showed her photos; one titled La ligne de démarcation à douaniers with a sentry booth at the bridge crossing, the French border guards wearing képis, a pregnant woman, a beret-wearing man with her pushing a bicycle.
“Our only family portrait,” Ducray said, a sliver of emotion.
He continued, matter-of-fact. “My uncle was a cheminot at Vierzon station. I’ve loved trains since I was a kid, gobbled up everything to do with them.”
She nodded again, praying this went somewhere. That she could make Ducray’s story come out.
“He always said the rail lines were bombed the night before my father and the villagers were shot.”
She hadn’t heard that before. Maybe it was in the damn diary Elise burned. “Go on.”
“The Germans routed trains to Spain and Portugal via Vierzon—it’s still a hub between north and south,” said Ducray. “Because of the bomb damage on the tracks, the Germans deployed troop trucks to recover stock from stranded rail cars. The commandant requisitioned the trucks from the garage where my uncle worked.” He paused. “There was a flash flood that night of the bombing. The river overflowed the banks there—in Chambly-sur-Cher. Where the missing truck was found, in the deepest part of the river, by the mill.”
She looked around. “Wasn’t this the demarcation? Are you saying the truck was in the unoccupied zone—illegally?”
“You’re quick.” Hiccup. “There’s no access from our side. See?” He pulled out another map from his pocket. “Here’s the river now. I marked in yellow the old course of the river in the late thirties from an agricultural map, and the barge routes. See, it’s changed course—that was after the flash flood in 1942. The only way the truck could have ended up in the river by the mill was from the Chambly-sur-Cher side. There’s no other way. Not even the mill has access.”
She saw that. Her gaze caught on water grass under the surface, waving hypnotically like a woman’s long hair.
“But that could have happened any time during the war. How could you match it to the requisitioned trucks?”
“All the records exist in the train station cellar,” he said. “I know it like the lines in my hand. The logs, the garage requisitions.” He handed her a stapled bunch of photocopied pages. “The recovered truck engine number matches one of the trucks that was requisitioned that night,” said Ducray.
It made her think. “But given your scenario, okay, the passing truck would have been seen by the border guards.”
“Just ask the retired butcher,” said Ducray. “All hands were busy sandbagging the banks. Still, the wheat fields flooded. Guards were busy in the storm and with the RAF bombing.”
An answer for everything, this Ducray. She wondered about him—his thoroughness raised red flags for her. His eagerness to set the record straight bordered on obsession. Besides, he had a potential motive for murder—revenge for his father, if he’d linked the German reprisals to the men who’d seemed to profit from the missing gold.
But he was a trove of information. She might as well see what else she could get out of him.
“The four German soldiers who were murdered—were they ever identified?”
“We know the serial numbers had been taken off their uniforms,” said Ducray. “Presumably the Germans have identified them in their records.”
“Have you checked that out, too?”
He hiccuped. “Non, that’s all in Paris. I don’t go to Paris.”
“Why’s that?”
“One time on a school trip, I got lost for hours in the Louvre.” He gave another shrug. “Call me provincial, but it frightened the hair off me. Never want to go back.”
True or not, she stashed that thought for later. Didn’t want to burst that suspect theory yet. She nodded and smiled. “You’re not the only one. I’ve gotten lost in the Louvre, too. And I’m Parisienne.”
He started back toward town. “We need to get moving for you to make the train.”
In the back of her mind something niggled. Ducray braked to avoid a mud-spattered spaniel. She wondered how Miles Davis was doing.
As he flashed his signal to pass a tractor, her eyes scanned the Chambly-sur-Cher riverbank, the bridge, the old mill. She remembered Bertrand’s words. “Is that the mayor’s barn over there? It’s for sale?”
“It’s abandoned. The sale sign’s been there for years.”
But it was so close, literally a stone’s throw from the river. She used her kohl eye pencil to sketch the scene before her.
“I’ll take you through Givaray,” Ducray said, “past my shop.”
It was an old-fashioned cheese shop, train set in the window.
“Does the window in back overlook the river?” she asked.
“Like to see?”
She nodded.
Inside, the young woman behind the counter smiled at her as Ducray spread the beaded curtain to lead Aimée through to the living quarters. Bare-bones, clean; worn, functional furniture—so unlike the Peltiers’ luxurious house, or Madame Jagametti’s quarters with its tins of foie gras and truffles
.
“May I?” she opened the window to the damp but fresh air. The warble of a bird carried over the gurgle of the river. She heard the tractor engine turn off, the farmer in conversation with his neighbor.
Amazing. But whatever Georges Ducray’s mother or father had heard from over the water had died with them.
Back in the car, they passed a limestone wall with a memorial plaque to the sixty villagers who had been executed. “Shot right there?”
Ducray nodded. “They only put the memorial up a few years ago. I don’t know why. Gone is gone, my mother said. After it was finished, people didn’t talk about the war—it wasn’t something they wanted to relive.”
But Thérèse Jagametti’s words—how Alain and the others were afraid of Givaray—sounded in her head. “People would want revenge, I’d think, after a massacre of innocents.”
“Move on with life or the past haunts you, the priest would say.”
“But look at Chambly-sur-Cher. It’s almost deserted, lifeless. Were those people broken by the war, when Givaray has somehow moved on, despite the tragedy?”
Ducray expelled air, shook his head.
“Any theories about who killed the German soldiers? Rumors?”
“If so, I didn’t listen.”
“Mais soldiers murdered, reprisals taken out on your village—bien sûr, people must have talked. Any gossip? Anyone ever find out?”
“I thought journalists couldn’t use hearsay. Facts and evidence, you said.” He grinned, throwing the words back in her face.
“You got me, Georges. Eh, but just between us?”
He shifted into second. Checked the rearview mirror. “There’s been a German here asking questions.”
The Boche Madame Peltier saw—just before she had a stroke.
“We’ve got twenty minutes or so, non?” She pulled out her anatomy notebook. “And I won’t quote you—I’ll just say an anonymous source. And along the way, I need to buy some tape.”
She jumped on the train, threw her bag up in the rack, and settled in with her new roll of tape to repair her smashed pager. Once she’d reinserted the battery, voilà, the thing worked. Wonder of wonders.
She kicked her boots off and started reading Ducray’s file of information. Immersed, she barely noticed the glow of a November sun laying a russet orange over the rolling green fields, or the lulling schwa schwa of the wheels over the tracks. Two impressions stayed with her: Givaray, a bustling village, and Chambly-sur-Cher, lifeless—as if poisoned. Poisoned by the past. Shouldn’t it be the other way round?
She reached in her pocket for the photo she’d pocketed from Elise’s collection. Youthful Dufard and Peltier with the mayor, Gaubert, and the little boy.
Her pager showed a number. She didn’t know it.
When the train stopped in Lyon, she jumped off onto the platform, ran to the pay phone and dialed.
“Oui? Who’s this?”
“It’s René . . .” The rest of his answer got muddled amid the loud speakers. Passengers rushed to the train, dragging children and suitcases.
“René, can you meet me at Gare d’Austerlitz in half an hour?”
“Make it forty-five minutes, upstairs at le Train Bleu in Gare de Lyon.”
The train conductor blew a whistle.
“René, but that’s not—”
“Le Train Bleu. Upstairs. I want breakfast.”
Breakfast this late? But he’d hung up. The train to Paris was pulling out of the station with her notes, the damn file. She took off, jumped over an old woman’s suitcase, pumped her legs. Leapt onto the train car’s steps as the train gathered speed.
“Let me get this straight.” René’s short legs dangled as he leaned forward. He looked around, sipped his fresh-squeezed orange juice. “Sabotage?”
She whispered, “Non. I just need info on a company called Foundry, Inc. I thought you could use your computer skills to help me find what I’m looking for. You know, use your computer to get into their computer—people can do that kind of thing, right?”
Pause. His folded Le Monde sat beside his late breakfast: croissant, orange marmalade, yaourt de nature, and a stiff double espresso. The front page was hoopla about the opening of I. M. Pei’s pyramid at the Louvre. “You mean hacking? That’s illegal.” René pulled a laptop out of his briefcase. “Shame on you, trying to lead me into a life of crime. Why don’t you do it yourself?”
She would if she could. And if she had a computer. “Why, when I can ask an expert like you?”
“Who said I’m an expert?” He sipped his orange juice.
“Your card does, in case you hadn’t noticed.” She pulled out his card. “Says you can rebuild a computer, rehab motherboards. So you should be able to weasel into them too, non? How about deciphering a floppy disk?”
René set down his glass. Shrugged. “I’m expensive.”
Playing hard to get? “So you keep saying. And worth every franc, I’m sure.” She pulled out the floppy disk she’d taken from the bookstore. Checked the time. Merde, she had a biology study group! She signaled the waiter with the long white apron for the check.
“What’s that?” René was peering at Ducray’s thick stapled file.
“Railway manifests. I need to figure out what stock the Germans were bringing in from Portugal in 1942.” She pulled out her worn Vuitton wallet. “Talk about a headache.”
“Wolfram.”
She blinked. “Eh, c’est quoi ça?”
“Wolfram ore, also called tungsten. The German army plated tanks with it.”
Did he know everything, this man of short stature with the liquid green eyes?
“A history buff, too? I’m impressed.” She leaned back in thought. “Did they pay Portugal in gold?”
“Bien sûr. The only way Salazar would do business. Gold up front shipped in trains and the return-trip boxcars filled with tungsten.” He adjusted his tie.
She pulled out Ducray’s old rail map. Studied it.
“So according to the checkered history,” she said, “would-be Nazi gold, plundered from murdered Jews, would leave occupied France on trains bound for Portugal’s tungsten deposits via Spain?”
“More or less.” René nodded.
That meshed with Ducray’s findings.
“After the war,” said René, “rumor goes, Nazis escaped through Allied hands on these same tracks.”
“One problem solved,” she said.
“Any more?”
“What ever happened to the fifth German?”
“Now I could sink my teeth into something like that. Sounds like that thriller I read. A Ludlum.”
“So we agree on your price . . .”
“I said I’m expensive. That’s all. I won’t decide until you tell me what the hell it’s all about. Then I balance the risk.”
Cautious, smart, stubborn, a kick-ass machine. He pissed the hell out of her. She’d like to work with him.
“I can’t prove everything yet,” she said, “but in a nutshell, in 1942 during a flash flood, five German soldiers in a troop truck recovering gold from bombed-out train cars get lost. Some farmers from this village, Chambly-sur-Cher,” she pointed to the map, “plus maybe the village mayor, murder the five Germans, or so they think, empty the gold out, and dump their truck in the river. Four German soldiers wash up in the village on the opposite bank, Givaray. The Germans shoot sixty villagers in reprisal.”
She took a breath.
“That’s a nutshell?”
“There’s more. The Chambly-sur-Cher mayor is executed later, supposedly by the Resistance. But now, more than forty years later, two of the four remaining farmers who took the gold have been murdered. Copycat style—just like the mayor’s execution.”
René raised his pudgy hand. “Dites-moi, how does this involve the fifth German?”
&nb
sp; “Madame Peltier, the first victim’s widow and my distant relative, suffered a stroke. She said the fifth German has come back. Meanwhile, a man with a German accent has appeared, wanting to see this old truck.” Aimée gave him the rundown of her visit to Chambly-sur-Cher. “For years these men bribed the villagers to keep quiet. Meanwhile they left the village for residences in le triangle d’or. And now Elise, Madame Peltier’s daughter, is afraid the two other farmers are trying to prevent her from assuming control of Foundry, Inc. as all had agreed.”
René whistled. “They melted Nazi gold, laundering it through their company, Foundry, you’re saying? Reminds me of something Balzac wrote—behind every great fortune is a crime.” He inserted the floppy into his Compaq SLT-286 laptop, a model she’d lusted after. “And what do you want from me, exactly?”
Doubt hit her. Did she want the only extended family member she’d ever met slapped in the face with more of the ugly truth? How could she make Elise face the kind of person her father had been? The murders he’d been involved with, the lies. But wasn’t he also a victim?
Fragmented loudspeaker announcements called out train departures. “The 15:07 to Limoges . . .” Get back to the task, her father would say. Focus. Follow up. She’d need René’s help to learn more about Foundry.
But she was done, wasn’t she? Her paying job was over. And hadn’t Elise used her, trading on a distant family tie, suckering her in with talk about Aimée’s mother?
But Aimée’s gut said Elise was the one being used. It was only instinct, not something she could formulate into coherent thought, but Aimée couldn’t shake the idea that Elise wasn’t one of the perpetrators here—and that if Aimée didn’t help her, she might become one of the victims.
The mouse was out of the hole, as her grand-père would say, no stopping things now.
“Ground control to Aimée,” said René, waving his short-fingered hand in her face. “You back on the planet?”
Aimée pulled out the wad of francs Dufard had stuffed in her bag. Peeled off several five-hundred bills. “Hope you take blood money.”
“What?” René’s eager eyes clouded.
“Squeamish?” A heaviness filled her. “I guess I want Elise to know the truth. Where the fortune came from and what she’s signing on for. Once we show her, it’s her decision.”