by Scott, Manda
He lifts the ends of her scarf and slides them between his fingers, makes them flow, silk made water. ‘And still no Patron?’
She gives a little huff of frustration. ‘They don’t tell me these things. I still don’t know who the Patron is. I don’t even know if it is a man. It could be Luce Moreau and I wouldn’t know it.’
He laughs, softly. His gaze drifts to Luce and back. ‘Do you think she could be the Patron?’
‘I want you to think so.’
His laugh this time is loud enough to make everyone turn. Luce Moreau, in all her careful lipsticked glory, glares at Sophie as if at any moment she might walk across the room and stab her in the eye with a hatpin.
Calming a little, Kramme says, quietly, ‘If she is, you are in terrible trouble. I should give you a car of your own, so you can escape.’
‘You’d have to teach me to drive.’
‘JJ will do that with great pleasure, I’m sure.’ JJ has recently become the administration’s driver, a position that is intended to demonstrate the amity between Germany and France, and is already proving useful to the Maquis.
Kramme takes her hands in his and leans forward. ‘What about the raid? Will the Patron be there, whoever he – or she – may be?’
‘I don’t think so. If he comes, it will be the first time, and I think he would not take such a risk this close to the invasion. He will want to save himself for bigger things. So no, I think no Patron.’
‘No. Of course. He will not take risks when he thinks the end is in sight.’ Kramme’s gaze loses focus. By this time, she can tell whether he’s thinking of her or something else, and just now he is planning. He says, ‘I have to go to Lyon tomorrow: the mayors of the local towns have convened a conference on the future of the Jura and I must regale them with all the potential of Saint-Cybard for the Reich in the years to come. It will be good to be out of the way. I will, perhaps, have to reprimand someone when I return, but that is no bad thing. There are one or two who will benefit from strong discipline.’
Sophie has a moment’s pity for JJ who, as Kramme’s driver, will miss the jaunt, but then there is no room for thought because Kramme shakes his head and brings all his focus back to her, his gaze on her face. Surprisingly, he strips off his glasses. His eyes look naked.
And then he kisses her. She has no time to prepare, no defence – not even any proper response, except that of her body, which has wanted this for longer than perhaps she has known.
Wine and warmth and the press of him, close, and he is a man who knows women, but he is not hard, as Schäfer would be, or scared, as Alexandre was during their first kiss. He is more tentative than she had imagined, though; more vulnerable. She is given space to be herself, to respond, to lift to the fierce ache of—
‘… dans les culottes. Joker, joue le sept de pique. Joker, joue le sept—’
The seven of spades. Seven. Seven. Wild Card, play the seven. Jesus, Mary and Joseph, on the BBC: Seven!
‘Ma coeur?’
She has barely moved, yet her body is ice now, not fire.
You have to make it true. Whatever you are doing, whoever you are being, every part of you must believe it.
She lets out the breath she was holding. ‘Max …’ She picks up his hand. Five days. Five. No more. No less. She traces a finger along the lines of his palm. She is shaking, only a little, but enough to be seen. It is not feigned. Hoarsely, she says, ‘I will not be your mistress. I have more dignity than that.’ How does she say this? Her voice has a script of its own, uncoupled from her mind.
‘My dear …’ His finger down the side of her cheek and she can feel the burn of Luce Moreau’s hate, and the extra weight of the Patron’s disapproval. He doesn’t trust her. He thinks she is too close to Kramme. He is not wrong.
And Max? He is struggling. ‘I do not want a mistress and even if I did, I would never ask that of you. How could you think I would do such a thing?’
‘Then what?’
‘Is it not obvious?’ He is hurried now. He leans forward, lays his hands on her shoulders. ‘I want you to be my wife. Please, Sophie. Please. I know it’s war. I know we’re the occupying force. I know there is horror all around, but in spite of these facts, perhaps because of them … Will you marry me?’
‘Oh, Max …’
‘Is that a yes?’ He is a boy, shy, eager, trying to be suave.
‘Of course. I think … Yes. But must we rush? Even in war? Please. Let me write to my uncle. Let me get his permission. It’s proper. A week, maybe ten days, and then yes. Oh, my dear, yes!’
Driving back, the Patron won’t speak to her, which is no bad thing, because she would have trouble answering him.
He drives too fast from the Hôtel Cinqfeuilles and she can taste the layers of his rage.
Outside her lodgings, he parks, stone-faced. Someone has to speak and so she says, ‘I’m not going to marry him,’ and watches the lines of his mouth grow tighter.
‘You will have to. You cannot avoid it now.’
‘It’s a war. Anything could happen.’
‘Not here. Not this far back from the lines. The invasion won’t touch us for months.’
‘We have the raid tomorrow night. He might die. I might die.’
‘He won’t be there, and you can’t come now. You have to—’
‘No! I’m coming! You can’t stop me.’
He can, obviously. What she means is, Please let me do something to restore my honour amongst my countrymen because otherwise they will think I’m a worse collaborator than Luce Moreau and her sister who married the Milice, and I am afraid of what they will do to me if the Boche do not win.
She says this, maybe, with her eyes, with the tightening of her own lips, with the air that grows fragile between them. She takes a breath.
He says, ‘If you accuse me of jealousy, I shall send you back to Paris and deal with Kramme’s wrath on my own.’
They are beyond such trivia as jealousy; she had no intention of mentioning it. What she was going to do, what she does, is to lean across the frigid space between them and kiss him full on the lips. All the savagery of her burning heart is here, right at the surface, searing them both.
It doesn’t take long. She lets go before he can jerk back. Bright-eyed, she says, ‘See? A kiss means nothing.’ If she says so, they may both believe it. ‘I killed my last lover. I cut his throat and took out his tongue. On the seventh of this month, five days from now – four if we are already after midnight – I am to do the same to Kramme.’
‘What?’
His eyes are wide and dark, like an owl’s. She could get used to the giddiness of this, the sense of pushing him off balance, except for the sharp, insistent ache in her loins at the feel of him, close. First Kramme, and now the Patron: both. But then again, neither. She is stronger than the treacherous fires of her body.
She leans back against the door, out of his reach. ‘I told you this was their promise to me: if I wait for the signal, I can kill him. Tonight, there was a message on the radio. Joker, joue le sept de pique. That was for me. I heard it and he felt the change in me and if I hadn’t done something, he’d have pushed until he got the truth. You are a man. You, obviously, would have stolen his dress pistol and shot your way to safety. As a mere woman, I must use the skills at my disposal. Do not read into it anything more than that.’
With what dignity she can find, she steps out of the car. ‘Kramme is going to Lyon tomorrow. He won’t be around when the raid takes place. I will meet you at midnight, at the place appointed. If you give me a good partner, I can plant the explosives.’
~
~
3 June 1944
Four days to go. Four.
Kramme’s time has come. His death will change the course of the war. Sophie does not know how, or by what means this decision has been reached, but she knows that on the seventh of June, she can kill Max Kramme. All she has to do between now and then is stay alive, and not give anything away.
The day goes very much too slowly. She is slow in the dispensary, slow in applying dressings. She has a headache. The Patron sends her home early and a boy she doesn’t know spits on her as she walks down the street.
Back at the house, the Aillardes are solicitous. This is their way now: she is favoured. Beatrice makes pea soup with real milk in it and sends her to bed. She sleeps, which is surprising, but not for long.
The night is clear and still. At the point of midnight, she rises, dresses in her dark clothes, and slides out of the window and down to where Daniel is waiting to bring her to the raid. She would rather it was JJ. She misses his bulk, and his trust in her, but Daniel is the next best thing: in the two months since she landed they have become a partnership, adept at the placing of explosives, the insertion of timers, the quiet, safe retreat.
He has his own bicycle, too, an oversized brute made of cast iron that weighs almost as much as Sophie herself but is, so he says, much less attractive. He is charming as he holds the handlebars for her to mount. She smiles and blows him a kiss. He, too, is her friend.
Through the dark night, they ride towards the railway bridge. In preparation for the Allied landings, London has asked specifically that the vast, complex, sprawling rail yard at Saint-Cybard be disabled and the Patron, a conscientious man, has dedicated his entire group to the mission. He has not excluded Sophie.
Together, Sophie and Daniel join the rest of the Patron’s inner circle half an hour after midnight at the southern edge of town, three hundred metres from the railway station. Léon is here, and Raymond, Vincent and René, who has been allowed to accompany his father for the first time and has gone about all day with a grin on his face that would alert Kramme to everything were he not in Lyon.
René has a Sten with half a magazine; the Patron has been giving him personal tuition. He knows how to kneel and shoot in single fire, as well as how to lie flat on the ground and rake a line between two trees. He is a boy transported. They sneak forward, keeping to the edges of the road, until they come to a dip just beyond the northern railway bridge.
It’s three weeks to midsummer; the night is warm enough that they have abandoned their coats – all they need are their dark trousers, shirts and caps. Each has a haversack and this time, along with the plastique and the detonators, the Patron has taken delivery of a special device that can be laid on the track in a certain way, and will judge the number of trains that go over it before it explodes.
The Patron is already in place, lying in his shirtsleeves in the grass.
Sophie drops down beside him. ‘I have red pencils,’ she says. ‘Set for half an hour.’
‘Good. Thank you.’ There is something light about him, too, a fierce aliveness that lights his eyes. Sophie has never seen him like this, but then, he has never been on any of the jaunts she has taken part in. In this, she did not lie to Kramme.
They are too close to Saint-Cybard to risk using their torches properly; tonight they are slid into socks with tiny holes clipped in the toes, to keep the beam as narrow as possible. There was a time in Paris when Sophie believed she could see like a cat. Now, she really can. Her ears are sharper as well. From the rail yard, she can hear the quiet clank of an engine uncoupling, and the voices – German, not French – of the men working on it. And far, far away, so far that she can only imagine them, the heavy bombers of the RAF.
‘Sophie? Are you coming?’
The Patron is ready to leave and she has been listening to the song of the stars. She hitches her haversack on one shoulder, her weapon on the other, and runs after his shadow. The Patron has made maps of the whole yard, nearly a hectare in all – of the lines coming in and going out, the sidings, the parked engines and goods carriages, the points that must be jammed; everyone knows where to go and what to do. They are quiet now, when they have to be, all the noise of the dropping zone gone. The Patron was right about this, as about so much else.
Sophie and Daniel have their pouch of explosives and the timing pencils. They crouch almost to crawling and slide down a bank onto the railway track where the sleepers are smooth, slippery with the day’s rain. Step by step, pace by slow pace with their Stens on single shot and their fingers on the guards, they pass to the left of a signalling box, to the right of the stationary engine of the Lyon train, and left, down to the turntable that is their target.
Working by touch, Sophie places the charges as she was taught: five at seventy-degree angles, each to the other, wedged down deep into the mechanism. Daniel keeps close to her shoulder, his hand on her hand, feeling the charge, stamping on the ends of the detonator pencils and passing them over. They go faster in the heat of the night. A clock ticks in her head, counting down the bare thirty minutes they have to get clear; all of them, including the Patron, who has to set his magical device that will (if it works) count five trains over in the morning, all of them full of French citizens coming in to or going out of Saint-Cybard, and then will destroy the sixth, which is coming from Italy with munitions destined for the imminent war front on the Atlantic coast. Thirty minutes. Or less, because really, the timers have never yet been reliable. Move!
‘Wait!’ Daniel’s hand is on her arm, his voice almost soundless in her ear. And on the far side of the turntable, a tin-headed Boche with his Mauser a black stick in the starlight and his cigarette a single red dot. She could aim for that. It’s so very tempting.
‘Wie spät ist es?’
He is young, the Boche, and nearly he dies, just for calling out to a friend. Daniel’s knife is in his hand. The enemy is four long paces away. He’d be hosing blood across the gravel before he knew what was happening. Sophie clamps her hand on the boy’s shoulder, her fingers digging into his collarbone. Not yet. Not yet. Not yet. He quivers under her touch.
An older, deeper voice in the guard hut near the signal box answers the Boche’s question. ‘Fünf vor zwei.’
Really? Time moves too swiftly. The planes are due between half past two and three o’clock.
The Boche moves on past. Working slowly, as if through liquid gelatine, Sophie and Daniel place the remaining two charges. They finish at nineteen minutes past two and she has put red-banded pencils in the last. The guard has walked by half a dozen times. He is on the long reach to their left when a telephone rings in the guard hut to the right and is answered. The older guard comes out, calls over to the younger. They confer, looking up at the sky. Somewhere to the north, a searchlight blinks on and pokes at the lacewing cloud. Sophie fancies she can hear the pulse-thunder of heavy bombers, but it’s a sound she hears in her dreams now and it may be her imagination.
She catches Daniel’s arm, puts her mouth to his ear. ‘We must leave.’
Moving is even harder now, because telephones have rung in other guard boxes and a klaxon sounds and there are men, running; many, many men. With torches. And searchlights: bright, bright beams that do not turn up at the sky to tease out the incoming planes, but turn in and down, to rake across the rails, the engines, the turntable.
And behind them, a wall of grey-clad men.
Merde!
No point in silence now. As loud as she can, she shouts, ‘Daniel, run!’
Her Sten is an extension of her forearm. Running, she spins and fires. Her hands judder. Such a good feeling. She has wanted to do this for so long and has never been allowed to. Rifle fire whistles back, but the lights have not found her yet. She wrestles the spare magazine from her haversack, tucks it in her belt and throws the sack away: there is nothing in it to incriminate Sophie Destivelle, collaborator nurse.
The others? Where are the others? She cups one hand to her mouth, yells, ‘Troubadour!’
‘Here!’ The Patron is two hundred metres to the south, at the far end of the yard, where the line from Lyon joins it. Between them are three sets of tracks.
‘Troubadour to me! All of you. This way!’ The Patron, too, turns as he runs, Sten at hip level. So many hours of training, and here they prove their worth. She sees the muzzle flash a moment b
efore she hears the rip of rounds, the scream of falling men. Eight shots in that burst. You have twenty-eight rounds and only one spare magazine. Be careful.
The rumble in her bones is not from heavy bombers; it’s from trucks coming down the road from the town.
Sophie changes direction and angles down towards him, shouting, ‘South! There are truckloads of Boche in the north! We have to go south!’ South, where the fields are, and the possibility of reaching the woods where Kramme has three times taken her hunting. She shot nothing, but she learned the layout of the woods – the ways in, the places nobody goes – she can hide all of them in there if she has to, and worry about escape in the morning. ‘Go for the woods. Go!’
Run. Run. Run. And hear footsteps behind, to the right and running, turn and running, fire a long, sweeping burst. Ten rounds? Twelve? At most half her magazine gone. Keep running. There are so many Boche. Why so many? Kramme did not say he was going to do this, and he would have told her, surely? The British should be here. Where are the planes? If they’d come over now, they could— ‘Daniel! Don’t stop!’
He hasn’t had their training; he can’t fire while he’s running, and his need to kill the Boche is greater than his need to get away. He’s kneeling, firing at them as they come.
Sophie catches his shoulder, pulls him towards her. Rounds spray off the ground, chattering. She knocks the gun’s barrel down with the stock of her own. ‘Daniel. You’ll kill one of us and none of them. We have to leave!’
He can run as fast as she can, because two months here has slowed her, when all the training had left her fast. Over tracks, under a carriage, slide in, slither. This is what the obstacle courses in Scotland were for. Go over the ones marked A, under B, to the left of C … and then we’ll change them as you approach and you can curse all you like but you’ll be glad when you’re heading for something and there’s a Boche machine gunner on the other side that you didn’t see and you have to change direction, and—