The Tin Snail

by Cameron McAllister

  “Sorry I took so long. I thought Christian would tell you to go to bed.”

  “He did. But I wanted to see you. Is it done?” I asked breathlessly.

  He nodded gravely. “Nothing’s left.”

  “You’re sure they won’t be able to find it?”

  “Trust me. Even if they find one part of it, they’ll never find all the others.”

  I wasn’t sure whether to feel relieved or defeated. Both, I supposed. It felt like the end of an era. The end, in a funny sort of way, of my childhood.

  The next couple of days were spent double-checking all the hiding places around the village. I was terrified someone had been slapdash—that a hiding place was too obvious, a well too shallow or a vegetable patch not replanted with turnips.

  I needn’t have worried. The villagers turned out to be incredibly resourceful. Maybe, like Benoît, they’d had years of hiding illicit liquor stills from local officials.

  By the end, no one would have known that for the last eight months or more, two famous car designers and a thirteen-year-old boy had been assembling a string of prototypes in a makeshift workshop.

  Finally the time came for my father and me to follow Christian back to Paris.

  Victor came out of his bar to see us off personally. Dominique joined him and presented us with a large cake tin. Inside was a selection of her finest confections, topped off by two frosted almond macaroons.

  “In case your little pâtisserie in Paris is closed,” she told me warmly. “Enjoy them while you can. They’re saying chocolate could be rationed soon.”

  I saw my father shudder at the thought. I accepted the cake tin gratefully while, for the second time that week, Papa found himself shaking Victor’s hand.

  “Thank you for everything,” he said. “We could never have done it without you.”

  “It was my honor,” Victor said proudly, meaning every word. “And I haven’t forgotten that I owe you those winnings from our bet. I always pay my debts.”

  “You have more than repaid any debts,” my father told him. “Anyway, save them for when we come back to visit.”

  “So you’ll definitely return?” Victor asked.

  “Someone has to dig up all the car parts after the war,” he quipped. “You don’t think we were just going to leave them here?”

  Victor gave a snort of laughter and the two men shook hands again, all trace of their former animosity finally buried—along with the Tin Snail.

  When we got back to Paris, I was able to speak to my mother again. For days it had proved impossible to put a call through to her remote Italian village, but eventually the phone rang in the little concierge’s apartment in the lobby of our block. When I was handed the receiver, I heard Maman’s anxious voice over the crackling line.

  “Angelo, my darling, is that you?”

  I felt a surge of joy and longing at hearing her after so long. I could tell that she was desperately trying not to cry. Suddenly the war seemed more real than ever. But what was worse, it almost felt like my mother was on the other side. She wasn’t, of course—France was her adopted country now—but she was marooned in Italy. For how long was anyone’s guess.

  “How are you, my love?” she asked, frantic for all my news. “Are you going to school at all?” I darted a look at my father, struggling to remember what lie I was supposed to be telling about my education.

  “Don’t worry,” she went on quickly. Her voice became hushed, more serious now. “Listen to me, Angelo. Your father is going to try and see if he can get you on a train to Italy. I’m not sure if it will be possible, my darling, but we have to try.”

  I threw a panicked glance at Papa. I missed my mother desperately—more than I ever thought I would—but leaving for Italy? The thought was unimaginable. I had to stay in France to protect the Tin Snail from the Germans at all costs.

  My mother wasn’t able to talk much more before she was cut off; just long enough to convey frantic information to my father. To my dismay, I overheard him giving her repeated assurances that he would do everything he could to arrange my train. No sooner had he hung up the receiver than I launched into an impassioned plea to stay. But before I could get more than two words in, he held up his hand to silence me.

  “It’s OK. I’m not going to send you to Italy.”

  “You—you’re not?” I stuttered, taken aback.

  “Perhaps if I could come with you…” He faltered. I could feel panic rising in my chest again. “But I can’t,” he continued, more defiant now. “France is our home. It took us in and gave us refuge, and I’m blasted if I’m going to desert it now.”

  I closed my eyes with relief. I desperately wanted to be reunited with my mother—for all three of us to be reunited—but saving the Tin Snail and France was simply more important.

  Every morning, over the coming weeks and months, I took the métro with my father to the factory on the quayside. Paris was becoming almost unrecognizable now. With sandbags and barbed wire on every corner, it looked more like a fortress than a city.

  Yet the strangest thing happened. At first, people panicked about the Germans sweeping over the border. Memories of the last war were still fresh in their minds. An entire generation of young men had been killed or maimed, and the prime minister and his cabinet were locked in furious disagreement over how best to prevent it happening again. Some felt that we were more than ready to repel the enemy, while others insisted we were woefully unprepared.

  But as the months passed, and with them my fourteenth birthday, no invasion came. So much so that people began to wonder if there really was a war at all.

  Not Bertrand. He was convinced the Germans would come—and when they did, it would be fast and ruthless. After all, hadn’t Ferdinand Porsche himself designed their tanks…the much-feared Panzers?

  In the meantime, people carried on with their work much as they had before. Any issue about my father’s job was completely forgotten as Bertrand put him to work designing the artillery trailers that the factory was now churning out.

  At first there was a real sense of everyone pulling together for the war effort—even if there didn’t seem to be an actual war. But slowly a new mood crept into the factory. I couldn’t put my finger on it at first, but soon I knew exactly what it was.

  Suspicion. Throughout France, foreigners were being rounded up, especially those from countries like Italy that were allied to the enemy. War was making everyone paranoid and jumpy. How long would it be before someone tipped off the authorities about my father?

  During this time, nothing was said within the walls of the factory about the buried prototypes. It was far too risky. Any conversations were kept strictly between the four of us—me, Christian, my father and Bertrand—at Bertrand’s home. But even there Bertrand would go through an elaborate sweep of the apartment to satisfy himself that we weren’t being spied on.

  Usually the conversation was brief. Occasionally a report surfaced of a dog unearthing one of the concealed parts in the village. My father seemed even more on edge than the rest of us. But after a number of lapses in security, all breaches had been sealed. The village was effectively in lockdown. It had quietly withdrawn itself from the outside world, hunkering down like a hedgehog going into hibernation, hoping that the rest of the world would quietly pass it by without noticing.

  Christmas came and went, and then spring, yet still the Germans didn’t come. Then, one crisp, sunny day, my father and I were emerging from the métro station on our way back from lunch when I felt a sudden crushing thump in my chest. A fraction of a second later there was a hissing suck of air and I was blasted clean off my feet.

  Sprawling on the pavement, I looked up: ahead of us, a vast cloud of dust was mushrooming into the sky, raining debris and brickwork down onto the cars parked in the street. My ears were ringing and I could taste something acrid like sulfur in my mouth. As I tried to blink away the dust that was plastered over my face and eyes, I became aware of my father gently lifting me to my
feet.

  “Angelo! Are you all right?” His voice sounded eerie, like he was underwater, as I nodded, bewildered.

  “What happened?”

  “I think it was a bomb,” he said. “Can you walk?”

  I nodded again and he grabbed my hand. The next second we were running up the street. By now we had been joined by scores of others, all rushing in the same direction, their faces caked in white dust. As we approached the corner I felt a terrible dread rising in my chest; I already knew what lay round it.

  But nothing could have prepared me for the sight that met my eyes as I finally rounded the bend. Where the factory should have been, there was now scarcely half a building left. A vast smoldering crater had taken its place.

  I stopped dead in my tracks, unable to process what my eyes were telling me. All I could think of was Bertrand: when we had left for the station he had been in his office. Now it was completely gone. My father too stood paralyzed with shock and fear. A scalding wave of panic rose up inside me and my eyes were stinging with tears. But as I was about to take a step forward, I suddenly became aware of a figure standing beside me.

  His glasses were cracked and covered in dust and his face was like a ghost’s. But there was no mistaking who it was: Bertrand. He was even wearing his trusty trilby, though that was looking even more battered than usual.

  “I thought you were…” I trailed off, unable to say the words.

  “Dead? I’m afraid not.” He smiled ruefully. “It was such a beautiful day, I went down to the river for a picnic.”

  As my father sighed with relief, I threw my arms around Bertrand and buried my face in the wool of his trench coat.

  But there was no time for celebration. Others were still trapped in the rubble. Quick as a flash, we began sifting through it, frantically looking for survivors.

  It was 1:46 in the afternoon when the German bomb struck the factory. But as luck would have it, it wasn’t just Bertrand who’d gone out for a picnic. Thanks to a sudden break in the cold weather, almost all the workers were taking their lunch outside. Miraculously, the number of casualties was small.

  The bomb had managed to miss the production line by about ten meters. Instead, it had destroyed the entire design department and offices.

  But more alarmingly, it signaled imminent invasion by the German army—an invasion that would be so fast and ruthless it took the entire country by surprise.

  A few days later my father and I were called into the makeshift office Bertrand had set up in the storeroom behind the canteen.

  As he peered over his spectacles, his face looked even more woebegone than usual. “The time has come for you to leave,” he told us darkly.

  My father started to protest, but Bertrand held up a hand, adamant.

  “We have had a very lucky escape, but we may not get another. The Germans are on our doorstep, and in their wake, Ferdinand Porsche will come, or at least his envoys.”

  “What will you do?” I asked anxiously.

  “Stay here, of course,” he replied bullishly. “Someone has to keep things running.”

  “But what’s left to run?” my father protested. “The Germans will take over everything.”

  “Yes,” Bertrand conceded. “But there is more than one way to fight this war. I’m too old to go to the front line, but I fully intend to fight…just from the inside.”

  “I don’t understand.” I frowned. “You’re going to work for the Germans?”

  “The Germans will almost certainly make us produce vehicles for their own war effort. Scout cars, trucks, that sort of thing.”

  I wasn’t sure I was hearing this right. “You’d help them do that?”

  “Absolutely,” Bertrand declared, before adding slyly: “But I will make sure that they are the most unreliable, faulty vehicles ever produced by a car plant.”

  “It won’t work,” my father warned. “They’ll figure you straightaway.”

  “I wouldn’t be so sure,” said Bertrand, with a devious smile. “Believe me, there are ways and means of wrecking a car without it being detected. In the meantime you must at all costs return to the village,” he insisted. “Our German rivals aren’t stupid. Very far from it. They almost certainly know we have been designing our own people’s car. If they discover we’ve been using a secret test track near the house, it won’t be long before they come looking.”

  “Will you come?” I asked.

  “No,” Bertrand replied firmly. “It will only attract more attention. It could be dangerous for the villagers. You will have to be my eyes and ears. Now go, both of you, while you still can.”

  Papa walked round the desk and gave him a huge bear hug. Bertrand held him tightly, a rare show of emotion. Then he turned to me.

  “I’m relying on you,” he told me. “And take care of Camille. The villagers may not be so kind to the daughter of a German now that the tide is turning.”

  My father put his hand on my shoulder and steered me gently toward the door. Before I left I glanced back. Bertrand was looking out the window, lost in thought. For a moment he was quite still, his face suddenly older than I remembered. The lines around his eyes cast deep shadows where they were etched across his skin.

  Suddenly, without warning, the sun appeared from behind the clouds and rebounded off his glasses, making them flash like liquid silver. Like a pair of welder’s goggles, in fact. Then, as suddenly as it had come, the light was gone, almost as if someone had thrown a switch.

  If people hadn’t believed there was a real war before, they were no longer in any doubt now. German tanks were chewing up the French countryside at a furious pace.

  France was taken completely by storm. The air force tried to scramble its fighter planes into the sky, but the German Stukas—two-man dive-bombers—were far faster, and destroyed half of them before they had even left the ground.

  Before long the French army was in full-scale retreat. But the German Panzers were so fast, French soldiers were falling back to villages that had already been captured by the Germans.

  There were some truly astonishing acts of bravery—particularly by France’s elite cavalry, which confronted the Germans in battle despite facing overwhelming odds.

  But before long entire regiments were surrendering and being taken prisoner. In the space of weeks, nearly two million of France’s population had been captured, many of them shipped off to German prisoner-of-war camps. More would follow; both towns and countryside were decimated. Those soldiers who weren’t taken prisoner simply melted back into the local population and fled south as fast as they could.

  On June 14 the German army roared into the streets of Paris. By midday, the swastika had been run up the flagpole at the city hall and Germany was officially in control.

  Within days, panic had seized the country as rumors spread of the atrocities carried out by the Germans. According to some, the German secret police were even chopping off the hands of schoolboys to stop them becoming soldiers.

  Hundreds of thousands fled, grabbing their most prized possessions and ramming them into any form of transport they could find. The roads out of the city were soon clogged with columns of evacuees fleeing south, carrying everything from mattresses to birdcages. Thriving cities and villages were reduced to ghost towns, the streets full of pets roaming around, abandoned.

  It wasn’t just pets either. Children were being parted from their parents in the panicked crushes at train stations. Seats were so hard to come by, some parents were simply shoving their children onto any passing train in the hope of keeping them safe.

  But despite all this, after a few weeks a new rumor slowly began to drift in on the breeze. The invading army might not be the evil brutes we had been led to believe. Instead of plundering, they were being polite and paying for the goods they needed—sometimes well over the asking price. In some places they were even handing out free chocolate and ice cream!

  If this was the invading army, maybe occupation wasn’t so bad after all. At least, that
was what some were starting to say.

  Not Papa. He was resolute. It was all just a German publicity stunt to make people give up without a shot being fired. Besides, we’d already had more than a taste of what the enemy was capable of at the factory.

  Whatever my father thought, within days of the invasion there was already talk of a cease-fire. Germany had promised that France would be allowed to carry on much as usual—in exchange for paying its new occupiers a hefty slice of its income.

  To many it seemed like a good deal. Especially if it avoided any unnecessary bloodshed. But if the rest of the country was giving in, the little village of Regnac had no such intention.

  On the day we arrived back there, we interrupted a small ceremony in the main square. Victor was dressed up in his finest flannel suit, carrying out the ritual with as much pomp as he could muster. Many of the locals had also dressed up to observe. Even Benoît wore his Sunday suit and a freshly pressed shirt.

  As we stood watching, the flag above Victor’s bar, the tricolore, was carefully lowered. Then, rather than being folded up, it was ceremonially burned, right there in front of everyone.

  It was a shocking sight. Even Félix, who rarely showed any emotion, wiped a tear away from his eye as Benoît put a comforting arm round Marguerite, who sobbed quietly.

  I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.

  “How can you just stand here and let Victor do this?” I asked Félix, astonished.

  “Better the flag is burned,” he answered solemnly, “than that it should be disgraced by falling into enemy hands.”

  Suddenly I understood. This was no betrayal of France’s most precious symbol of freedom. This was open defiance. Nothing could be worse than the German invaders taking our prized flag, as they had done in Paris.

  But of course, Regnac had something else to protect—the knowledge that it, and it alone, was responsible for safeguarding the prototypes for the little Tin Snail. The Germans might have overthrown our country, but they—and, more to the point, Ferdinand Porsche—would never get their hands on them.