Peach (13 page)

“Grand-mère?” pleaded Lais.

“I am here to take my granddaughter home,” said Leonie, casting a contemptuous glance towards the salon. “This is no place for a de Courmont, nor for any Frenchwoman.”

“I don’t hear your granddaughter complaining,” replied Karl angrily. “Well, Lais? Do you have any complaints?”

“No. Of course not,” Lais shrugged, avoiding Leonie’s eyes.

“Quite the opposite in fact,” said Karl. “Lais is very content here. She is a clever woman, Madame Leonie. She has chosen her side well.” With a bow, he walked back towards the salon. “Lais, you are being neglectful of our guests.” His voice held a warning and Lais shot an apprehensive glance at his retreating back.

“Grand-mère,” she whispered, “it’s not the way it seems.
Please believe me
.”

“I came here once before to rescue you,” Leonie took Lais’s hand in hers, “when you were involved with that terrible Russian and didn’t know how to get out of it. You said you felt trapped. Is that the way it is now, Lais?”

“In a way,” Lais nodded. “A little like that, Grand-mère. It’s more complicated,” she added despairingly. “I can’t come with you tonight, Grand-mère. I just can’t.”

Leonie’s eyes searched her face. “I won’t ask why,” she said, “because there’s no time for explanations. But I’m here
to help you, Lais. I feel you are in terrible danger here.” She felt Lais’s hands trembling. “I’m at Caro’s,” she said quickly. “I’ll wait there for you tomorrow. And then I’m taking you home, Lais.”

“Yes. Oh yes, Grand-mère, please.” Lais blinked back the tears as Leonie walked across the hall to the doors. An attendant flung them open and Leonie looked back with an anxious half-smile before she walked slowly down the broad steps into the night.

Karl von Bruhel awoke feeling calm and refreshed. He sat up in the big Louis XIV bed whose headboard was decorated with a charming painting of lords and ladies disporting themselves by a lake, and pushed the bell to signal that he was ready for his coffee. Running his hands through his crisp steel-grey hair, he glanced first at the clock and then at the empty place beside him. So, Lais was up already. A memory of last night came to mind and he smiled. Throwing back the sheets he padded naked across to the bathroom. Legs arrogantly apart he urinated into the bowl, remembering last night. Lais trembling and beautiful, begging him to stop, goading him on. He remembered that the party had gone well, too, apart from the visit by Lais’s grandmother. No ordinary grandmother! Leonie was as firm-fleshed and beautiful and as coolly arrogant as she had always been on stage. She was his kind of woman.

Laughing, he stepped under the shower, turning the dial to cold, gasping as the freezing water hit his warm flesh. His thoughts switched to the meeting he was to have today at the Château Villelme, a very high-level conference in which he was to play a principal role. He had marshalled his plans for the deployment of French labour, and his notes and the agenda for the meeting, together with the comments of Goebbels and Himmler, were waiting in his briefcase in the library. It would be an easy day in which he would consolidate a pleasant victory, one that would place him more prominently before the Führer’s eye, and maybe even put him in line for promotion to Reichsmarschall. That would upset Himmler! Karl towelled himself briskly. He despised Himmler, and as for Goebbels—just look at the man’s behaviour towards his wife last night, flaunting that actress in front of her. They said he’d even brought the woman to live with them at one point. A man should not treat his wife that way.

There was a tap on the door and he looked up. Lais was dressed beautifully in simple blue-green linen that breathed Paris couture. Her shoulder-length blonde hair was brushed into a smooth curve framing her face and she wore dark glasses. “Up so early?” he commented, narrowing his eyes as he scraped the long-bladed razor across the stubble on his cheek.

“I thought I’d visit my grandmother this morning,” murmured Lais.

Her voice sounded very small and he shot a glance at her in the mirror. “Take off the glasses,” he commanded. Obediently she removed them. Her eyes were red and swollen. Karl sighed as he continued his shaving. “Crying? Again!”

Lais put back the dark glasses. “I thought as you were going to be away today and as Grand-mère is here …”

“Going to cry to your grandmother, eh? You’re wasting
your time. She’s only here to tell you what a bad girl you are. And you are a bad girl, aren’t you, Lais?” Gripping her wrist he pulled her roughly towards him. “You were
so bad
last night,
so very bad
.” He forced back her head as his tongue explored her mouth. When he let go of her, Lais backed away towards the door. Her lipstick was smudged, and her hair in disarray. “Be home by six,” commanded Karl, returning to the mirror. “We are going to the theatre and I want you to look your best. Wear the white dress with the rubies. I like you in that combination.” He didn’t say goodbye as she walked away.

Enrique García, dressed in blue mechanic’s overalls, tinkered with the innards of an ancient Citroën in the forecourt of the wayside petrol station on the route between Rambouillet and Chartres. The old
patron
, in overalls and blue beret, sat in his office, sipping the brandy that Enrique had brought him, and dreaming of the days when his little garage had serviced a constant stream of vehicles, the tractors and farm machinery and the smart automobiles of the
maisons bourgeoises
and the
châteaux
that dotted the surrounding countryside. With petrol rationed and in short supply, and a scarcity of spare parts, most cars were off the road for the duration, and all he had left were his dreams. This was the old man’s second war and Enrique had thought the brandy would help ease the pain of his losing everything he had worked for,
twice
in a lifetime. There were many men like this now, who had nothing left to lose, who would gladly do what they could to help the Resistance.

Enrique glanced up at the threatening sky. Even as he looked the first drops of rain began to fall, whipped into a flurry by a chill little wind. He pulled on a beret and stared down the empty road, then he checked his watch, frowning.
He knew the car had left Paris exactly on time. It should be passing here within the next five minutes.

The Mercedes coughed suddenly and the chauffeur glanced at the dashboard in surprise. The car had been sluggish all morning. He listened, but all seemed well. No. There it was again. A sudden hiss came from the radiator and simultaneously the overheating signal on the dash flashed a warning red. Alarmed, he glanced through the glass partition that separated him from his distinguished passenger, but General Karl von Bruhel was immersed in his papers. The chauffeur wondered what to do. The boss was supposed to be at an important conference in thirty-five minutes’ time and they still had twenty kilometres to cover through winding country roads. The Mercedes slowed to a crawl, steam hissing from its radiator just as the little garage came into view, twenty-five metres ahead.

“What is it?” demanded von Bruhel through the glass partition. “Why have we stopped?”

“Sorry General, but the car is overheating. I’m stopping at this garage to see if I can get some help.”

Karl groaned, glancing at his watch. He’d left the time a bit tight deliberately, not wanting to arrive too early and therefore look too eager. It was a tactic he used often—but he hadn’t planned on this sort of delay.

The chauffeur pulled the car into the forecourt in a cloud of steam and got out. Thank God there was a mechanic!

Enrique sauntered over, hands in pockets, a low whistle on his lips. “Monsieur,” he said in a slow, country accent, “you are in
trouble!
”

“I know that,” snapped the chauffeur. “What can you do to help?”

Enrique peered through the window at the passenger in the back and Karl glared at him. These damned French
peasants were so slow! Enrique grinned cheerily at von Bruhel and Karl turned away impatiently, concentrating on his papers.

Enrique released the bonnet, standing back as the scalding cloud of steam escaped. Peering inside, he poked around expertly with a spanner.

“It’s the water pump,” he said finally. “Broken.
Kaput
.” He laughed happily at his own little German joke. “You need a new one, Monsieur.”

The chauffeur paled. Now he really was in trouble. Without the pump there was no way the car could run. “Then you must get me another,” he commanded harshly. “General von Bruhel has important business at the Château Villelme. We must get there immediately.”

Enrique shrugged indifferently. “Well, Monsieur,” he said in slow country French, “I don’t know if I can help you. We’re not used to such cars as this nowadays and, as you are aware,” he added with a shrug, “there are no spare parts for us French. But if you wait a minute, Monsier, I’ll see what I can find in the back.”

He shuffled towards the jumble of rusting tools and parts at the rear of the workshop while the chauffeur paced the forecourt anxiously. He was dying for a cigarette.

Enrique emerged clutching a rubber pump. “Wait one moment, Monsieur, just one moment. I think we might be able to help you after all.” He delved into the engine with his spanner, cursing loudly as he burned his hand. But in moments he had the defective water pump removed and was inserting the new one. “It’s not
new
, Monsieur,” he explained, “it must have been here for years. We used to service good cars in the old days. But it’ll get you to your final destination.”

Relieved, the chauffeur paid him a few francs and climbed back into the car. “Well?” asked Karl.

“We were lucky, Herr General,” he replied. “The mechanic was able to fix it, but I’ll have to drive fast, sir, to get there on time.”

Karl sighed. “Very well then. Get on with it.”

Enrique shook a Gauloise from the packet, placed it between his lips and lit it, watching the Mercedes retreating into the distance. Smiling, he returned to the cabin and removed his beret and his blue overalls, emerging in the pants and shirt of an agricultural worker. “
Au revoir
, Clémence,” he grinned, clapping the old man on the shoulder. “Enjoy the brandy.”

“I am already, M’sieur, I am already.” The old man toasted him with his brimming glass.

Enrique headed through the field at the back of the garage making for the woods to the north. A delivery truck waited at a farm five miles away loaded with fresh vegetables that he would drive to the market at Les Halles. His papers were in perfect order. There would be no problems.

He jogged rapidly keeping close to the hedgerows and avoiding the open fields. Lais had kept her promise though at what cost to herself he would never know. They had the information and that was all that mattered. As he came to the woods, he paused to check his watch. Leaning against a tree, his listened. The explosion came exactly on time. It would have happened exactly where he had calculated. On the bridge. The car, with its passenger, or what was left of him, would be twenty feet beneath the river by now. Enrique cut through the woods towards the farm. He had kept his promise to Lais.

Lais sat next to her grandmother in the back of the Hispano as it ate up the kilometres between Paris and Reims. Goebbels himself had signed her travel papers under pressure from his sympathetic wife Magda, who had mistaken Lais’s hysterical sobs for sorrow at Karl’s death. But if Enrique hadn’t killed Karl then Lais knew she would have done so. Her body still bore the bruises and welts of their final night together and she felt tainted with the mark of Karl’s depravity.

And if it weren’t for Grand-mère and Caro she didn’t know how she would have got through the past few days, especially the questioning by the Gestapo. They had pounded on Caro’s door where she’d fled for safety and a frightening young man in a black uniform with cold angry eyes that bored into her, had forced her to go over her movements on the day Karl died—over and over again. She could tell he didn’t believe her when she said she had been here all day, with her grandmother, but thank God her story was true and there was no way he could associate her with Karl’s murder.