The Prisoner (11 page)

He glanced at a couple of the papers. One was a Frankfurt evening paper and had the bottom third of the front page dedicated to his escape. The headline:
Hunt for boy prisoner. Heir to Von Osterhagen fortune among dead
.

Osterhagen was a decent guard and his death saddened Marc, but he was pleased to find no picture of himself, just a vague description: young, 170 cm, fair hair, speaks good German.

The counter was shuttered from the inside, but the door alongside it had the same simple lock as the ones he’d already picked to get into the offices. He listened at the door for a few seconds to make sure no one was behind it, then used the pistol spring and a good bang with his palm to open up.

The lights were off inside. There were big ovens and gas hobs, and it was sweltering where they’d been running for most of the day.

Marc was drawn to the larder at the back of the room. It would have been safest to grab as much as he could and leave quickly, but he was so hungry that he couldn’t resist grabbing a cook’s knife and slicing a chunk from a hanging bierschinken sausage.

Marc’s taste buds erupted as his mouth filled with the mixture of pistachio nuts, ham and garlic. Next he went for a chunk of rich white sausage, made from veal, cream and eggs. The food he’d picked up here for Commandant Vogel had always been plentiful but basic, so Marc guessed this luxury fare was reserved for senior Nazi officials.

After a few indulgent mouthfuls, Marc realised he needed to be sensible. He’d only eaten one small meal since his bout of illness and it was better to eat plain food than to gorge on rich stuff and end up spewing.

He’d only have been able to get a couple of meals if the canteen had been open, so the closure was a bonus. Marc found a small cloth sack with a few grains of barley in the bottom and began stuffing it.

He wanted high-energy foods that would stay edible for a few days, so he went for cheese, sausage, canned pork, a large tin of condensed milk, sugar, biscuits, tinned fruit and a jar of chopped nuts. Finally he went back into the kitchen and grabbed a spoon, a tin opener and a couple of cook’s knives which he thought would be good for throwing.

‘Anybody home?’ a German shouted.

Marc jolted, spun around and ducked behind a metal preparation surface. He could have sworn he’d shut the kitchen door on the way in, but apparently he’d not fully pushed it up. It had drifted open and the bald head of a German supervisor now poked through it.

Marc was furious with himself and scared by how easy it is to make mistakes when you’re weak with hunger. As the German stepped in, he crept backwards into a tight space between a bunch of flour sacks.

‘Hello, hello?’ the supervisor said, sounding more guilty than suspicious. ‘Somebody left the door unlocked.’

Marc pulled his legs tight to his chest and moved one of the sacks so that you’d have to walk right up to the back of the kitchen to spot him. But the supervisor just assumed the door had been left unlocked by mistake, and only seemed interested in the contents of the larder.

Marc heard but didn’t see as the supervisor picked up the knife he’d himself used to cut sausage. This was followed by chewing sounds and a big,
mmm
.

With the cloth sack in one hand and the knife in the other, Marc crawled out of his hiding spot as he heard the supervisor moving deeper into the larder. As the delighted supervisor pocketed a can of pear halves, Marc peeked around the kitchen door to make sure it was all clear before dashing out and heading along the hallway towards the stairs.

Note

  
⁵
 
Ersatz coffee – the Germans had no access to coffee-growing areas and made this bitter-tasting fake coffee from acorns.

Food and drink brought Marc’s strength up and enabled his brain to focus on something other than a growling stomach. Better still, after months of powerlessness, being master of his own destiny felt good.

He didn’t want to risk spending any longer in the offices than he had to, so he went straight back out to the roof with his booty. He ate and drank slowly and was greatly releived that the food seemed to be staying down. Then he got a feel for the two cook’s knives by repeatedly throwing them into the side of the wooden shelter.

A maintenance crew cleaning skylights in the market hall roof took the wind out of his sails, but they disappeared after an hour and Marc watched the sunset, lying on his back while scoffing tinned peaches.

He slept well – perhaps too well for someone in so much danger. When he woke it was light. There were already staff working in the offices below, though it was a Saturday so they’d only work until lunchtime.

Marc suffered fewer aches and pains than the day before, though his ribs were badly bruised. Breathing deep was excruciating from where Fischer had punched him in the kidney, but the damage was healing, at least judging by the clear urine when he peed in the empty peach tin.

He decided to make his move today: half-day in the office gave him an opportunity to leave while the streets were busy and catch an afternoon train, and as very few passenger trains ran on a Sunday he’d have to risk two more nights hiding out on the roof if he didn’t.

When the staff left, Marc picked up everything from the roof and headed inside. He dumped his litter behind one of the file cabinets, where it wouldn’t be discovered until he was either home safe or dead. After a quick wash in the bathroom, he stole another of the commandant’s clean towels and headed down to the fifth.

Commandant Eiffel had worked an extra hour and was just locking the door. Mercifully she didn’t look up as she waited for the lift. Once she was out of the way, Marc picked the lock then completed his final tasks: sticking the photos to the travel warrant, adding today’s date and stealing a larger sum from the petty cash tin.

As he headed out, Marc remembered that the guard on Großmarkthalle’s exit occasionally asked why he was leaving, so he grabbed a couple of Deutsche Post’s yellow telegram forms, folded them in three and kept them in his hand.

It was heart-in-mouth time on the stairs as three Gestapo officers came by, but their minds were focused on a stunningly beautiful teenager being dragged up by her hair. She had a Star of David on her dress and when Marc neared the ground floor he saw that the big wooden pen was crammed to bursting with more than two hundred Jewish women.

To reach the exit Marc had to walk alongside the pen under the gaze of half a dozen SS men guarding the Jews. A frail palm with a folded note inside shot into Marc’s path.

‘Post this for me,’ the woman begged.

Her voice was weak. Marc made an instant decision and snatched the letter. At the same moment, he could hear women arguing on the other side of the pen. Their German was faster than he could follow easily, but the gist of it was that they believed that the pretty girl had been dragged upstairs to be raped rather than interrogated.

‘Do you like the Jews?’ a guard asked, stepping in front of Marc with a big Alsatian at his side. He had a few days’ growth of beard and his uniform was dirtier than any German Marc had seen until now.

Marc acted dumb. ‘No speak German.’

‘Give,’ the guard said, before snatching the letter. ‘You wait. My colleague speaks French.’

As the guard beckoned a colleague with his gloved hand, Marc frantically waggled the yellow telegram papers and made running motions with his arms.

‘Standartenfuhrer, urgent!’ he said.

Marc’s experience with Germans had taught him that their harsh regime made everyone afraid of upsetting their bosses.

‘Urgent,’ he repeated. ‘Telegrams for the Standartenfuhrer.’

This did the trick. When the French-speaking officer arrived, he glanced at the folded blank telegram forms and pointed Marc towards the open doors where the trucks delivered cargo.

‘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 bins
⁶
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.