The Prisoner

by Robert Muchamore

  ‘Go that way, it’s faster. But don’t interfere with the Jews again.’

  Marc nodded and turned back on himself. When he re-passed the woman who’d handed him the note she looked upset, but gave him a nod of thanks for trying. He was almost at the door as he heard a wail. The French-speaking guard had dragged the elderly woman over the edge of the pen and punched her in the side of the head.

  ‘Stay back from the edge,’ he roared, as the old woman collapsed in sobs.

  Marc felt disgusted as he jumped off the ledge where the trucks backed in and started walking up a ramp. Pretty girls raped, Jews beaten and herded like cattle, bastards like Fischer. It was like the devil himself had been put in charge.

  *

  While horrors unfolded behind brick walls and barbed wire, Frankfurt didn’t seem such a bad place on this sunny Saturday afternoon. Marc strolled past kids playing football in a park, hanging flower baskets and smart trams rattling down cobbled streets.

  The city had only been pricked by minor bombing raids and you’d hardly have known there was a war on, but for the shades over car headlamps and the noticeable lack of young men.

  Central Station was a twenty-minute walk if you went direct, but Marc’s paperwork said he was a French civilian worker heading home on compassionate grounds, so he needed to ditch his prisoner jacket.

  He’d eyed a dilapidated riverside residential district when he was up on Großmarkthalle’s roof. The reality of it was grim, with six-storey apartment blocks built along alleyways narrow enough for a man’s fingertips to touch the buildings on both sides. Washing zig-zagged overhead. Not much light reached ground level and the smell of drains stood up to any prison camp.

  These brick apartments were built to house dock labourers. Walls wore layers of graffiti, where faded communist slogans outnumbered swastikas by at least five to one. Marc stopped in an alleyway filled with stinking pig bins6 and glanced about furtively before pulling off his jacket and ditching it in an empty metal can.

  He immediately saw a problem: his gun had been invisible below the jacket, but it bulged obviously when tucked in his trousers and wasn’t much better when he put it in the cloth food bag. He’d gone less than thirty metres when he spotted the solution – a man’s jacket hung tantalisingly out of reach.

  Marc slowed down and checked the next couple of alleyways, eventually finding a stick. He then doubled back and gave the jacket a good whack, expecting it to drop down. Instead, he sent the entire line swinging across the street.

  A shout of thief came from high up as he ripped pegs off the jacket and a spare shirt for good measure. Marc raced off expecting hot pursuit, but there was nothing behind when he looked over his shoulder. After a couple of turns he dropped his pace and put on the grey jacket.

  A bunch of alley kids eyed him crossly as he stepped through their football game, but moments later Marc was back on the main drag, sweaty but unscathed.

  The rest of the walk to Central Station was uneventful, but while the prisoner jacket had given Marc a clear identity he felt less confident in civilian clothes. His near-shaven head didn’t suit a civilian and he decided to steal a cap first chance he got.

  The route Marc had chosen involved starting at Frankfurt’s colossal Central Station, which was the busiest in Germany. This was riskier than boarding a train at a smaller station, but Marc planned to buy a ticket to Leipzig, which was in the wrong direction for someone wanting to get back to France.

  All being well, Marc would arrive in Leipzig late that evening, kill a few hours in the station and board the overnight Berlin–Paris express, arriving into Paris just before noon on Sunday.

  But all wasn’t well when Marc arrived at the station. First off, his train was due to leave in less than an hour and there were big notices up saying, Due to increased security measures, please ensure you arrive a minimum of two hours before your train departs.

  Queues stretched from the station’s triple-arched entrance, down a flight of thirty steps, then snaked several times across the courtyard. They were clearly hunting for Marc because the passengers were being sorted when they reached the station entrance.

  Women, young children and older men passed through with nothing but basic document checks, but younger men and boys older than about ten were fed on to a separate section of the concourse, where Gestapo officers sat at tables, searching bags and asking detailed questions.

  It seemed completely hopeless. Marc considered a few wacky schemes: sneaking into the station somehow, or dressing up as a woman. But even if he could pull something like that off, there was no way he’d do it in time to catch a train that left in an hour.

  As well as the Gestapo officers on desks, Marc was sure there would be plain-clothes officers nearby, whose job was to keep an eye out for people like him who backed off when they saw the heavy security. He used his espionage training, being careful not to stop or to make it too obvious when he looked around.

  ‘Support the front?’ someone asked.

  Marc found himself face to face with an old granny draped in swastikas. She had a wooden tray strung around her neck, which was filled with cheap-looking tin swastika badges.

  The old girl broke unenthusiastically into a prepared script. ‘All good Germans must contribute. Our men fight heroically, but everyone must pull together for ultimate victory. This badge is a symbol of solidarity of German people …’

  Marc had to make a rapid decision. Although his German was good, he spoke it with a distinct French accent. The more words he spoke the more his accent became clear, so he raised a finger and said, ‘One,’ as he rummaged in his pocket for coins.

  This was the problem with being out on the street. You could sit up on a roof, poring over maps and timetables, planning every detail, but out in the real world things got unpredictable. You faced rapid decisions, when one wrong answer could earn you a bullet through the head.

  Marc felt jittery as he moved away from the station, pinning the tin swastika to his freshly stolen jacket. He looked back for any sign of a tail and took a couple of side streets, before doubling back to be completely sure.

  He had to decide between returning to Großmarkthalle or trying to see if the security situation was any better at one of Frankfurt’s smaller stations.

  Without a map and afraid to stop and ask for directions with his French accent, Marc walked for almost thirty minutes. He’d started at Großmarkthalle in the east, passed through the city centre and was now travelling west.

  Shops and cafes closed at lunchtime on a Saturday and it was a lonely walk through a prosperous part of town.

  Although Marc felt stronger than he’d been when he first escaped, months of prison rations followed by his recent stomach bug meant he was a shadow of the boy that had passed espionage training a year earlier. His big worry was that if he kept walking for much longer, he’d crash before making it back to Großmarkthalle.

  It felt like fate when a bus approached, with Höchst Station on the destination board and a bus stop less than a hundred metres ahead. Marc only knew three things about Höchst: it was roughly 10 km further west on the city’s outskirts, he’d seen it mentioned as the stopping point for many trains going west when he’d studied timetables, and lastly it had several large chemical plants which were dreaded by prisoners.

  Marc wasn’t familiar with German buses, and felt like everyone was staring as he found a seat near the back next to a pregnant woman, then fumbled to pay the conductor.

  The bus swept through quiet streets, then beyond the edge of the city proper into the industrial belt. The route was timed to coincide with a shift change at a big factory and the bus filled to bursting with matching brown overalls and the smell of men needing a wash.

  Marc was intrigued by two workers standing a few rows ahead. They asked the conductress why the bus was late and whether they were likely to make up enough time to connect with the last train to Mainz.

  Marc’s German geography was far from perfect, but he’d
picked up some knowledge while working for Commandant Vogel. Höchst was ten kilometres west of Frankfurt; Mainz was another fifty kilometres in the direction of the French border.

  It took twenty minutes for the bus to reach Höchst. As Marc only knew it for chemical plants, he was surprised to find his bus driving through narrow streets, with picturesque medieval buildings like something out of a Nazi propaganda film.

  Höchst station felt oversized for a modest town and the atmosphere couldn’t have been more different to Frankfurt Central. Half the platforms were overgrown and there were more people queuing to use the telephones than waiting to board trains. Most importantly, there were no Gestapo blocking the main entrance.

  The two men who were anxious about connecting with their train rushed to be first out of the door when the bus pulled up.

  ‘Sorry,’ the lead man said, doffing his cap as he squeezed past another passenger. ‘If we don’t get that one, it’s another two hours.’

  Marc liked the idea of putting another fifty kilometres between himself and Frankfurt and decided to make a run for the train himself. He raced into the station close behind the men, then up on to a footbridge to get to the platform.

  The two men passed an inspector waving tickets, but Marc didn’t have one and came to a halt. He couldn’t double back because the ticket inspector had already seen him and it would have looked suspicious.

  ‘Can I buy a ticket on the train?’ Marc asked, doing his best German accent. ‘I’ve got to get home to Mainz or my mum will murder me.’

  There was a second railway worker on the ticket barrier. He had eyes that bored straight through you, and Marc was in enough of a state even without freaky eyes staring at him.

  ‘Mainz, one way?’ the guard asked, as he opened a leather waist pouch filled with ticket rolls.

  ‘Yes,’ Marc said, eying the train anxiously as he pulled out a ten Reichsmark note.

  ‘Payday, eh?’ the guard laughed. As he tore off a pink ticket, the guard pointed to the whistle hanging around the freak-eye’s neck. ‘Don’t worry, son. No one’s going anywhere until my friend here plays a tune. You enjoy your weekend.’

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ Marc said.

  A couple more passengers belted past the inspector waving tickets as Marc pocketed his change and dashed across the platform. The third-class carriage was jammed with bodies and Marc shuffled inside, reaching anxiously for a grab-handle as the train pulled out.

  Note

  6 Pig bins – large metal bins into which people tipped waste food such as potato peel. The resulting slop was collected and fed to pigs.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The Mainz train was a stopping service that took two hours to go fifty kilometres. Marc studied the timetables in the ticket hall when he arrived and got a shock when he found a station attendant staring over his shoulder offering to help.

  While Marc was wary, she identified his accent and seemed pleased by an opportunity to try out her French.

  Marc explained that he was heading home, but had boarded the wrong train. The woman said he could pick up a Paris-bound train at the border town of Saarbrücken, but the last train to Saarbrücken had left for the day and the next wouldn’t run until Monday. If he didn’t want to wait, he could either get a train back to Frankfurt, or a bus to Saarbrücken.

  Marc found the bus station. Buying the ticket to Saarbrücken was no problem, but the bus didn’t leave until six the next morning. There didn’t seem to be much security around, but Marc doubted he’d get through a whole night without a bored policeman or railway official sticking his nose into his business.

  It was starting to get dark as he wandered through the area around the station. He had food, but needed a place to spend the night. The weather was mild, so a field or shed would do, but the area around the station was built up and without a map he was worried about straying too far and getting lost.

  Marc finally caught a break when he turned into a street of modest houses. An elderly couple were stepping out of their front door, arms linked and dressed to impress, with dancing shoes on their feet. What hooked him was the way the man walked around the side of his house to check that all the windows had been closed, making Marc sure there was nobody else home.

  Breaking in was a risk, but Marc was still weak from the stomach bug. Two hours standing on a hot train followed by a long walk had left him with painful feet, banging head and a desperate thirst. A few hours in an unoccupied house would enable him to sit down, use the bathroom, take a long drink and possibly even heat some food.

  He gave the old couple time to clear off before doubling back. All the houses in the street were identical: front gardens had well-trimmed hedges and the main doors were all at the side of the houses, giving a degree of privacy to anyone breaking in.

  The front door had a deadlock, making it impossible to pick without locksmith’s tools. Frustrated, Marc crept around to the back garden, keeping low so that his head wasn’t seen over the dividing wall.

  The door opening on to a large back garden had no keyhole, just a knob that turned from inside. Marc shoved one of his cook’s knives into the gap between door and frame, then used it to push back the spring-loaded latch bolt holding the door shut.

  Marc had lived in institutions his whole life and always felt envious when he entered a proper home. It was a cosy little place, with a rocking chair, framed pictures and a collection of pipes hung from the wall.

  As Marc grabbed the door handle to explore the rest of the house he heard a scratching sound. He glanced back, making sure his exit was clear, before clutching the cook’s knife and opening the door into a hallway.

  A floppy-eared spaniel scrambled to the door as it came open. When it got a sniff of stranger, the little dog yelped, skidded on the polished floor, then backed up to the bottom of the stairs and started growling.

  ‘I’m not gonna hurt you, boy,’ Marc said softly as he stepped into the hall.

  He needed to be sure nobody else was home, so he quickly confirmed that the kitchen and dining room were empty, before heading upstairs and checking three more rooms – the couple’s bedroom, a tiny study and a neat space that looked like it belonged to a boy who’d grown up and left home.

  The dog thought exploring the house was a great game. He chased Marc, and when they reached the bottom of the stairs again the spaniel started jumping on to Marc’s leg and slobbering over his wrist.

  The rough tongue tickled and Marc couldn’t help laughing, but the dog’s attention made Marc emotional. He realised it had been months since he’d felt any kind of affection, human or otherwise.

  Marc didn’t want the break-in reported to the police before he left town, so he made a mental note of where everything was in the kitchen before striking a match and putting a kettle on the gas stove. It was nearly dark, but the kitchen overlooked the street, so he left the light out as the water boiled.

  Finding nothing but revolting ersatz coffee, Marc settled for hot water. He sat in the rocking chair in the back room, pulling off his sweaty rubber boots and letting steam from the mug rise up to his face. He munched some of his biscuits, then unwrapped a big piece of sausage and shared it with the dog at his feet.

  Marc reckoned the old couple would be dancing for at least a couple of hours. He was tempted to just relax in the chair, but he’d been intrigued by his glimpse of the grown-up-and-left-home bedroom upstairs.

  The dog stayed back, licking biscuit crumbs off the floor as Marc headed upstairs. The bedroom was tiny, with one wall steeply angled by the roof. There was a mirrored dressing table and a poster of a Mercedes racing car on the wall above a single bed.

  Items were set out in a certain way, giving the impression of a museum exhibit. Marc realised that the room’s owner wouldn’t be coming home when he noticed a small wreath of dried flowers resting on the neatly-folded soldier’s uniform at the foot of the bed.

  Everything had been preserved, including a pocket watch in the bedside drawer and polis
hed boots under the bed. As well as the dead man’s clothes, the wardrobe contained items from childhood, including a Hitler Youth uniform, shirts and trousers, plus pairs of good-quality shoes, going all the way back to a size that would fit a lad of eleven or twelve.

  After all Marc had been through, he’d have happily lobbed a live grenade into a truckload of Germans, but he could almost feel the dead soldier’s presence, and the idea of stealing his things unsettled him.

  However, Marc’s rubber boots, tattered clothes and shaved head made him look very different from a typical German fourteen-year-old. Regular shoes and German clothes would help him fit in and he guiltily tried on a couple of pairs of shoes, seeking the best fit, before grabbing a cap, trousers a spare shirt and a couple of sets of clean underwear.

  Marc would have to leave the house before the old couple got back from dancing, but a glance out of the window made him wonder about the possibilities of sleeping in the back garden, rather than setting off on another risky trek through town.

  Like most lawns in Germany, this one had been dug up to grow food. Tall rows of beans and crude glass frames shielding rows of tomatoes made plenty of hiding spots. As long as Marc hid his break-in well, he saw no reason why the middle-aged couple would come back late from dancing and start rummaging around in their garden. And even if they did, Marc felt he’d have a better chance in a confrontation with them than if he got picked up by cops wandering the streets, or sleeping on a bench near the bus station.

  *

  Marc had fun playing fetch with the dog, but he let it carry on too long and had to rush out of the back door when the couple got home at 10:30. If spaniels could talk Marc would have been in trouble, but the couple just seemed slightly baffled by the excitable state of their dog.

  ‘He’s panting,’ the woman said. ‘You mad thing, it’s after your bedtime!’

  Marc had already put his things outside and made a little den by spreading some cloth sacks he’d found over the damp earth between fruit bushes and the garden’s back wall. The ground was lumpy and he worried about rain, or sleeping late and missing the bus.