Hunting Ground (15 page)

Vuitton waited at the edge of the clearing with my children. That wife of his looked back. My husband said, ‘Lily, I’ll ask you once again.’

Then he, too, walked away, and I felt myself come up against the sleigh.

* * *

Frost ringed the glass of the big French windows of my kitchen. Beyond the courtyard shadows, moonlight bathed the orchard. It made the snow crystalline, and as I touched the glass, I stood there in my robe and pajamas. There were no slippers on my feet. The tiles were freezing, but I didn’t care.

The deer had come again to forage. Timidly, they moved among the trees, and I knew I should scare them off. Each nibble was at least a pear or two or more in season, an apple, or a plum, but I couldn’t do that because for me it was a ritual of healing. The robe fell open, the cold washed in, but I couldn’t move.

There were five does and a buck whose winter could be his last. The tip of my nose touched the glass, fogging it with my breath. I took a chance and carefully rubbed the fog away. The deer were so graceful. One even stood on its hind legs. February 1940 had been bitter—harsh in the forest. Cruel!

My love went out to them and they, in turn, sent theirs back to me. No hurting of another, not with them. No ganging up to beat and punch and kick and rape. Just life and living and getting by from day to day. No sleep at night, of course. How could there be? Tears were of no use. They were all gone anyway. There were the children to care for, and nothing could be said of it. Perhaps that was what hurt the most. That and what they did to me while my children were taken for a little walk in the forest, and had to have heard me.

The deer stopped. Suddenly, they froze all motion. In an instant, they were gone, bounding effortlessly through the orchard and into the nearby woods.

I watched. I held my breath, and out into the moonlight came a man. He paused among the trees to survey the house, but the cold drove him on. He was dog-tired, had come a long way on foot, and when he reached my courtyard, he passed into shadow only to find me looking through the glass at him. He was startled—stunned to find me there. ‘Go away, damn you,’ I told him.

‘Lily, let me in. The police are looking for me.’

He rattled the flimsy lock. I weakened. ‘The police … ? What is this, please?’

I opened the door, and he shoved past me to drag off his shoes and things.

‘Why did you do that to me?’ I asked.

‘Because I had to. Because it was stolen, and your husband had no right to have it.’

‘You could have told me the truth.’

He asked for some light so that we can see each other better. I refused. He opened the door of the firebox, and I moved away to stand behind the table, then to back up against the wall, which became the sleigh, so that I gripped my head and dug my fingers into my scalp and wanted to scream!

The children would hear me. The children …

‘Lily, what happened?’

How often was I to see men stand like that? Broken, stricken, cursing God and the enemy and themselves. A father with his son still bound to the execution post, a husband huddled over a bloodstained figure that lay sprawled in the street.

‘Lily, what did they do to you?’

My face was crushed into the snow. Their hands were on me. One pinned my arms and had a knee against my head. Others held my legs. I tried to move, tried to crawl forward, to scream, to get away, but they were laughing at me, and my trousers were down around my ankles, my seat was up. I had told them the little I really knew, yet they still did that to me, and their laughter broke in waves that drowned as another of them rutted at me to the hoots of the others.

Again, Tommy asked what happened, but my head was bowed, and I couldn’t find the words to tell him that most of all there was rage against him and rage against them.

That to tell is to fear. That I mustn’t say a thing because I’d been warned not to.

Putting his fingers under my chin, he gently lifted it, gasped, drew in a breath, and held it, then stepped aside to let the light shine better on me.

Flickering shadows couldn’t hide the angry scabs of a scraped cheek where the ice and snow had torn the skin, nor the blackened eye whose purplish bruise had turned to yellow.

My lips were still split and painful.

‘
Ah, bon
, monsieur, now you see what my husband had them do to me. Are you pleased? That tiara we took to England was never a fake. You knew it was the real one, Tommy, but you let me think otherwise because my husband had told me it was. I should have guessed. I should have had more sense. I was just too stupid.’

‘Only an expert could have seen the difference.’

‘Vuitton was such a one.’

‘We didn’t know how closely your husband was involved. We had to find out.’

‘So, having recovered the real one from me, you substituted the fake, and let me hang out the bait for the wolves.’

‘Can you ever forgive me?’

‘How could I after what we’ve shared?’

‘I still love you.’

‘Ah, no, monsieur, you love only your job. You’re a hunter, just like Marie has said.’

He left me then. As I watched, Tommy put on his shoes and coat, closed the firebox door, and turned to face me one last time. ‘We honestly didn’t think your husband would hurt you like that, Lily, but then I found that his friends tried to kill me in Paris. Two nights ago, I came back to my hotel room, and they were waiting. I don’t carry a gun. That’s not my sort of thing. I ran down the corridor and made it to the stairs and the street, heard three or four shots well behind me, but now the Sûreté are claiming I shot and killed a man. It may have been an accident; it might have been intentional. I’ve never trusted some of the Sûreté’s rank and file. But they’ve got a body—some poor bastard who was staying two rooms down from mine. The newspapers are full of it. My mug’s been plastered all over the place, and that can only mean they don’t want me finding out who stole Nicki’s things and where they ended up.’

‘Where will you go?’

‘Antwerp, if I can, and over to London as quickly as possible. If not, Lyons, Marseille, North Africa, and London. I don’t relish spending time in a French jail where they can get at me. Not with the connections those friends of that husband of yours must have.’

The Action française. ‘The frontiers will be watched. The Nazis will help them find you—the one called Schiller, the lieutenant who’s in the SS. Jules had them to the house while we were in England. Marcel thinks they must have slipped into France from Switzerland after first having been in Poland.’

He was in the orchard when I called out, ‘Tommy, wait! I’m sorry I had to tell them your last name and who you worked for and what you did. I tried not to, but they …’

The bricks of the courtyard were like ice against my bare feet. ‘Please come back. Let me hide you for a little, and we’ll work something out. I’ll drive you south. I don’t know but …’

I fed him as I was to feed so many in the years to come. Full of soup, bread, and cheese, he sat there with his feet ankle deep in a basin of hot water, he to tell me that two of Nicki’s paintings had turned up at an auction house in Brussels, me to tell him what I knew of the Vuittons, the things from the Louvre, and the Comité Secret d’Action Révolutionnaire. ‘Their “Action” gangs. They’ll destroy the Third Republic if they can.’

The Royalists and the Action française didn’t agree on everything, but Tommy knew France had a fairly strong fifth column that was just itching for the Germans to invade, the old order being replaced by the new, which was really somewhat older: kings and queens and all that rubbish, or dictators who could tell everyone what to do.

Reaching out to me, he said, ‘Somehow we’ve got to get you and the children out of France. The States would be best, Lily, a visit that’s at least long enough for the worst here to have happened. No one would send you back, not then. You’d like Montana. Jean-Guy and Marie certainly would. Promise me you’ll come if I can find a way.’

For me, the healing had begun, but it was much more than this—though I wasn’t to have known it at the time—it was a change in our relationship from that of lovers to comrades-in-arms.

* * *

‘Madame de St-Germain, je m’appelle l’Inspecteur Gaétan Dupuis, Paris Sûreté. Vous permettez?’

May I. ‘What?’ I asked as if I didn’t already know.

‘Come in.’

Wet snowflakes had settled on the olive brown fedora and shabby overcoat whose top button had come undone and was hanging by a thread.

‘Please, madame, much valuable heat is being lost through this open door of your husband’s.’ Digging a hand into a pocket, he hunched his shoulders forward as if to butt me out of the way. ‘My card and badge will confirm what I’ve stated. One can, of course, appreciate your nervousness, since the house it is quite isolated.’

Patently ignoring the obvious threat, I stood my ground. ‘A policeman … but why?’

His was the shrug of a
flic
. ‘Merely a few questions. You have a friend, an American.’

There was a black Citroën parked out front, but he had chosen to come to the kitchen door, hoping perhaps that I had not seen that he hadn’t come alone. Short, rotund, seemingly looking diffident but far from it, the warm brown eyes flicked over everything, noted the children still behind me, grinned and ducked his head, the happy father figure in an instant.

About forty-five, he had bags under the eyes, warts on the left side of the rather fleshy nose that had been broken at least twice, I felt, and a small brown mole to the left of a chin, which had caused him trouble shaving that morning.

With a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach, I took the fedora from him and waited for the overcoat, which was heavier in one pocket than in the other, an observation of mine he quickly noted, for he said, ‘Put it over a chair. That one will do well enough.’

Kicking off his rubbers, he ran a hand over his thinning hair before patting the pockets of a suit jacket that must have been with him for years, taking out his pipe and tobacco pouch. He smelled of wet, coarse wool, garlic, onions, and peppermint-flavoured anise bonbons, which, I assumed, he took for his ulcers—he had that look about him.

An upper front tooth, to the left, was capped with gold, the crowns of the others stained with nicotine and too much coffee.

No tribunal would ever doubt my word. He wasn’t as tall as myself, so when he looked at me, he had a way of slowly lifting his eyes as if they, too, were heavy and he perpetually tired.

Packing the tobacco down and lighting the pipe, he looked at me and said, ‘
Ah, bon,
madame. This friend of yours … Apparently, your neighbours …’

‘Georges and Tante Marie.’

Dupuis nodded. I turned to tell the children to go up to their rooms, but he stopped me. ‘Children are often overlooked in matters such as this. Please allow them to remain.’

I remember that he liked my kitchen, its spaciousness and warmth. He made a great thing of the view out over the vegetable gardens and into the orchard. He even asked for coffee, when I’d offered wine.

There were biscuits for the children, and I remember that Marie lifted an extra one for her dolls and that Dupuis noticed this as he did everything else. ‘You’ve seen the newspapers?’ he asked me.

In the wood box there were several ready for lighting the fire. One, however, was much thinner than the others, and I knew I shouldn’t have saved that scrap.

Unraveling it, he said, ‘All but two pages from yesterday’s
Le Matin
. Children, have a look at what remains of this torn photograph.’

‘It’s Monsieur Tommy,’ said my son.

‘Wanted for murder,’ whispered Marie, before asking if she might be excused.

‘She wants to play with her dolls,’ I blurted.

‘Yes, yes, of course. So, Jean-Guy, is Monsieur Carrington here in the house?’

There wasn’t a waver. ‘No, monsieur. Bad people hurt my mother, but it wasn’t him, and he isn’t here. We haven’t seen him since our visit to England.’

I was shocked. I hadn’t known my son could lie with such a straight face. Dupuis tussled the boy’s hair and laughed as he gestured with his pipe. ‘Of course. Now go and keep an eye on your sister so that your mother won’t be worried about her.’

He listened as Jean-Guy fled. Mapping out the very room, he retrieved his gun from that overcoat pocket and said, ‘Madame, where is he?’

Though I couldn’t have told you then, that weapon was a Lebel Modèle d’ordonnance, one of the old 1873s with the 11-mm black-powder cartridges that would often misfire due to dampness after having been stored for so long. Since the French never throw anything out, the police, the military and Sûreté were accustomed to saying ‘two shots are always better than one.’

‘There’s no need for that revolver,’ I heard myself saying. ‘He’s not here.’

‘Then where?’

I shrugged. Even then I waited for the blow, but it did not come, only later in Paris, in the Prison du Cherche-Midi, where I hit the wall and felt blood rushing from my nose. ‘Look, how should I know where he is? He wouldn’t risk coming here, knowing he was wanted for murder. He’s not like that. He’d have been far too worried about us.’

‘And a repeat of your accident in the woods—is that what you’re implying? Ah, yes, an unpleasantness, madame. I was sorry to hear that such a thing had happened.’

‘Then you’ll do something about it?’

‘But, of course.’

Like Vuitton, there was only that unfeelingness in his gaze. I took the coffeepot from the stove and refilled his cup. ‘He’s not a murderer, Inspector. Those people tried to frame him so as to stop him from getting too close.’

‘Perhaps you’d tell me, then, exactly what he was involved in but first, madame, how is it that he even knew of your accident in the woods?’

‘I never said he did, Inspector. You assumed I had told him.’

I added milk to his coffee, then one, two, and three little spoons of sugar, he shaking his head at a fourth.

He took a biscuit and dunked it. I sat down and told him what little I could, but he had the habit of always wanting more and of fleshing out the details for himself so much so that in the end, I realized that he knew far more about it than myself.