Hunting Ground (24 page)

We both knew this, but I told him to hang on. ‘Once Michèle and Henri-Philippe get to Paris, André de Verville will come. He’s a very good doctor.’

‘Can’t you trust anyone local?’

‘They give me no reason. Fontainebleau is replete with collaborators and
Boche.
Now eat, please. At least a little more.’

His Bristol Beaufort had been on coastal patrol out of West Malling in Kent when the weather had socked in. They’d drifted off course and had been shot down over Rouen. Collin had crash-landed in a field. Of the others in the crew, he remembers only the flames and the screams, which are with him all the time. His hands had been welded to the stick, but somehow he’d been thrown clear or had gotten free of the wreckage, though with no knowledge of this.

Luck played such a part in things. Luck found him with a farmer who passed him on to another and another so that he made a wide detour around Paris only to find himself alone at our railway station in Avon.

Luck caused Henri-Philippe and Michèle to get off the Paris-bound train and pause to stand beside him. He’d been trying to make sense of the timetable, had thought he might head for Spain. Henri-Philippe noticed that his hands were leaking through the shabby woollen mittens he’d been given; Michèle asked if he might, perhaps, need a little help in reading the timetable.

I’m the one who cut the mittens off. ‘Now try to sleep.’ I left the soup—I could get that later. I closed and locked the door, wiped my hands on my apron, and tried to tidy my hair.

That house … How it all comes back to me. The corridor was long and filled with such lovely things, but it passed by the open door to the library. Their voices were muted, for they were sitting at the far end of the room, facing each other across the small oval of a Louis XV gilt-wood table. The Louis XIV chairs were really very uncomfortable, and Schiller had chosen the setting, even the furniture they’d use.

Henri-Philippe would be able to look out the French window to see Rudi standing guard at the gate, and if Schiller wanted it, knees would touch ‘accidentally’ to generate increased fear, and we would’t know what he’d asked Henri-Philippe or what answers had been given.

Pale and afraid, Michèle was waiting for me in the kitchen. She’d brushed her lovely light brown hair and tied it behind with a dark brown ribbon. The blouse and heavy cardigan suited her, but she couldn’t panic, couldn’t weaken. ‘Just answer readily,’ I told her. ‘Repeat if necessary, but don’t offer information. Let him do the digging.’

Henri-Philippe was not allowed to talk to her or to me. That bastard sent him outside so that he could watch the house and wonder what was going on. Michèle was in there a long, long time, and when he’d finished with her, she went straight to her room in tears.

Then he sat by the window, at that table with his answers, and finally in the uniform of the SS at last. ‘Is your daughter glad to be home?’ he asked me.

‘Of course.’

‘Perhaps now you’ll be a little more friendly, Frau de St-Germain. Perhaps you’ll find us Germans not so bad.’

I stood and waited but didn’t look out the window, for I knew Rudi would be blowing on his fingers and that Henri-Philippe would have tried to share a cigarette with him. Rudi would have had to refuse such a kindness simply because Obersturmführer Schiller was with us and Oberst Neumann had warned Rudi to behave as one of the Occupation’s troops should.

‘Tell me about Michèle,’ said the lieutenant.

‘There’s nothing to tell. They’re just a couple of young people who ran away like everyone else when the blitzkrieg came. Now they’ve finally obtained permission to return home to Paris.’

‘Yet they don’t do so immediately. They stop off to see you.’

‘Is there something the matter with that? They were worried about my sister and anxious for news.’

‘Your sister, yes.’ He turned the pencil in the fingertips of both hands as if it was the shaft of a millwheel and he the miller of us. The flaxen hair was precisely parted, the jackboots gleamed. ‘The girl’s a violinist, I gather. Is she good?’

‘Certainly.’

He smiled that tight little smile that buckled the scar as he said, as if doubting me, ‘Friends of your sister. Associates?’

I shoved my hands into the pockets of my apron. ‘Associates in what, please?’ Marie, where is she? I wondered. Jean-Guy, he was at school.

The pencil was set aside. The fingers tidied the papers before a smoothing hand passed over the back of his head. ‘Let’s leave that matter for the moment. Please … please have a seat. You must be tired, cooking all those meals, doing all that laundry. A woman’s work is never done, is it? Georges …’

I waited. I tried not to show any alarm. ‘Georges?’ I asked.

‘Says that the war will turn you into a good housekeeper since nothing else could.’

‘Georges and Tante Marie have always been critical of my efforts. It’s only understandable.’ But had they told him about Collin or said anything about Tommy and Nicki?

Schiller lit a cigarette, sat back, and took his time to study me, and I had to wonder, was he really asleep that time I went into his room?

‘You’re a strange one, Frau de St-Germain. Why the visits to Barbizon and that farm of your mother’s?’

‘To arrange for a farmer to take care of the place and share the harvest. There are three hectares. One I wish to have planted in alfalfa for my rabbits and his cows, one in wheat, the other in potatoes if we can get the seed. Good cash crops, Herr Obersturmführer. Is there anything wrong with that?’

‘You must show me the place. Perhaps I can be of assistance. No … no, there’s nothing wrong. It’s just that the girl tells me she’s never been there, to the house of your mother, but the boy says that before the war they both went there with your sister.’

Such a simple thing. Who would have thought he’d even ask?

‘Well?’ he insisted. ‘What about it?’

Again, there could be no hesitation. ‘That I really wouldn’t know, Lieutenant. They’re friends of my sister’s as you’ve said. Neither of them have been there with me.’

‘So why would the girl deny she’d been there?’

Merde,
what the hell was I to say to this, since it was
me
who had really taken them there that first time to meet up with Nini? ‘To save me trouble, perhaps. Michèle knows I’ve recently been to the farm a couple of times. She probably thought I’d not been given the necessary permission. For myself, Herr Obersturmführer, I wouldn’t make too much of it. Oberst Neumann has asked her to give a little recital for him in Fontainebleau tonight. It would be a shame to make her so nervous she couldn’t perform.’

‘The
palais,
yes. The Feldkommandant and his staff will be there, but that doesn’t mean she should lie to me. The matter will have to be gone into.’

How many times was I to hear him say that? ‘And their “association” with my sister?’

Has he waited for me to ask it? ‘Associates in a robbery, Frau de St-Germain. Apparently, some very valuable things have been stolen from one of the auctions at the Jeu de Paume. Your sister was reportedly seen there on several occasions, attempting to speak to your husband.’

‘So why not ask her?’

‘We are, and that is why I am interested in these “friends” of hers.’

A robbery.

‘So now you will tell me about this violinist who calls herself Michèle Chevalier.’

As if it was a
nom de guerre
. He would have checked her identity card, would have gone through all her papers, even her handbag …

Marie came into the room to tug at my ear and whisper closely, ‘There are noises,
maman
.’

‘You must excuse me, Lieutenant. Marie has to go potty.’

‘
Maman
…’

‘
Ferme la, chérie!
’ I gathered her up and headed for the door, and when he found us standing outside Collin’s, he looked along the corridor past us but didn’t say a thing, simply went downstairs, but let me hear him doing so.

Michèle was waiting for me in her room. ‘Lily, I told him I
had
been there with you, that just before the defeat we went there to see Nini and your mother. Neither Henri-Philippe or myself would have
lied
to him about that. We had no reason to.’

But Schiller now knew it was me who had just lied to him!

Again, Marie tugged at me and whispered, ‘
Maman
,
monsieur le pilote
, he has cried for you.’

‘And the robbery?’ I asked Michèle.

‘Four paintings. A Raphael, a Rubens, a Leonardo da Vinci, and an icon from the twelfth or thirteenth century. Something Byzantine.’

Nicki’s treasures. For me, for us, Collin Parker was just a prelude to what was to come.

There’s no sign of Dupuis and the others. Pink stucco, bullet holes, and broken shutters mar the château, but the sight of these hardly disturbs my remembering the call I made.

‘André, it’s Lily. Please, I’m sorry to telephone on the colonel’s line, but my problem has come back and I’m bleeding quite badly. Could you come at once? I … I have also burned myself on the stove.’
Burns,
André. Please get the message.

The burn was on my left wrist. I had done it with the poker, had needed to have some way of telling him what was really up. I’d made myself a little bag of blood and had kept it in my pocket, and when I went in to ask the colonel if I could use his telephone, I broke that thing and let the blood run down the inside of my leg. Neumann had a green stomach when it came to women’s things. He was your usual Prussian. Tall, big, blue-eyed, a little over sixty, grey and bristly haired, a monocle, the whole bit, but absolutely ‘correct’ with the locals because in those early days of the Occupation he’d been ordered to be ‘correct’ with the French and he considered me to be one of them.

André came with his little black bag and worried look. Because he was in the SP, the Service-Public, he had the use of his car and a small petrol ration. He appeared at dusk, and we went quickly upstairs. Michèle and Henri-Philippe were preparing supper. Schiller was in the library with Neumann, both taking their leisure with cognac before the fire, and we ducked in so that André could say hello to them. To her great credit, Michèle saw the need and immediately began to play her violin, for Neumann was particularly fond of Schubert and she’d been an outstanding success in Fontainebleau.

Letting André, still in hat and coat, into that room, I waited. He took one look at Collin, swore at me under his breath—a thing I’d never heard him do—called me stupid and selfish, and grimly said to Collin, ‘You need to sleep. Let me give you some morphia.’ Nothing else. Not, How have you stood the pain? Not, How have you hung on for so long?

We watched, the three of us, as the morphia went into that vein. I think Collin thanked him. I know he wished me well, but to see a young man die like that, to see his life simply slip away …

‘Now you’ve got a problem of disposing of him,’ said André. ‘What you do is no concern of mine, Lily, so long as you do it well.’

We went into my room, and he made out a certificate for me, which said that I might possibly have a cancer of the womb. ‘That ought to keep them from throwing you into the internment camp or getting too close.’

The Germans feared cancer, syphilis, and tuberculosis most of all. ‘We’ll just have to see,’ he went on. ‘They may, of course, simply shoot you.’

I longed to ask him about the robbery. He pulled two newspapers out of his bag and handed them to me. ‘It was stupid, Lily. Stupid! What do those friends of yours think they’re doing?’

‘Just getting back what’s rightfully theirs.’

No one had been shot in the robbery—nothing like that. The paintings had simply been carried out by two workmen wearing the usual
bleus de travail
. ‘Cool-minded thieves,’ the press said, not Bolsheviks, not yet—the war with Russia was still to come, so the Nazi-controlled press couldn’t blame the Communists. Göring was, however, particularly upset, since he’d had his eye on the Raphael. Me, I had to wonder about the Vuittons, the Action française, and most particularly my husband, for he might have been blamed for having let the robbery happen.

But what do you do with a body in winter when you’ve only a wheelbarrow or children’s wagon and the enemy are all around you?

‘Rudi, could you to do a little favour for me?’

The breath steamed from him. He unslung a frozen Mauser and leaned it against the gatepost. ‘Madame Lily, it would be the greatest of pleasures. Please, you have only to ask.’

All this was in broken French, interspersed with German, our lingua franca. His brown eyes were rimmed with red, the lashes half-frozen. Beneath the angular helmet, which all but hid his eyes and gave no possible warmth, there was the grey woollen cap I’d knitted.

This dumpling of a Gefreiter was my friend from the other side—
Ah, oui, oui
, I must confess it and pay homage to him. A figure out of Brueghel, a man who never wanted to go to war.

He saw how pale and shaken I was. The strain of everything had taken its toll, and he was troubled by this, for I was at once his benefactor and escape.

‘Some of the meat the colonel very kindly bought for the Reichsmarschall’s visit is bad, Rudi. He got taken, of course, but I don’t want to embarrass him, you understand.’

‘Bad in this weather?
Ach du liebe Zeit,
Madame Lily, how could this be?’

Remember, please, that he was a farmer, his family from generations ago. ‘With this burn of mine, I can’t do much.’

He looked at the bandage I showed him beneath the sleeve of my coat. There was the wariness of the peasant in his gaze. To burn oneself like that was questionable, other things as well.

‘Help me to bury the meat, Rudi. Dig the hole for me.’ I was firm with him. After all, he knew he was onto a good thing by being stationed with us, knew also that he had looked the other way often enough and that should I be forced to confess this to the Obersturmführer Schiller, I might.

‘Where, madame? With this weather, the ground must be frozen.’

‘In the cellars, beneath the stones.’

‘The stench, madame. The hole would have to be deep and out of the way. If I were you, I would use some other place.’