The Prisoner (15 page)

Marc decided to use his last coins to buy a beer in a near-empty cafe. The staff were getting ready to close up. Instead of the risky snatch-and-grab he’d planned earlier, he decided on a sneak raid behind the counter as the staff mopped the floor and stacked chairs on tables.

He was about to enter the cafe when he noticed a German officer, sitting outside a restaurant with his coat draped over the back of a chair. He was leaning forward, with his attention fixed on the teenager he was groping, while his leather wallet poked from an inside pocket practically begging to be pinched.

It felt like fate. There were plenty of other people in the street, and Marc had to make sure nobody was looking, without it being obvious that he was making sure nobody was looking.

After a deep breath, he approached the back of the chair. At the last second the officer broke off from the teenager, but Marc was committed. The girl saw exactly what happened and looked around, clearly shocked.

‘You OK?’ the German asked.

Marc expected the teenager to start shouting, followed by the German standing and pulling a pistol on him. But the girl – who looked no older than sixteen – just gave an awkward smile and slapped the side of her neck.

‘I got bitten,’ she stuttered. ‘Insect, or something.’

Marc couldn’t believe his luck, but he was so scared that everything was going in slow motion and his limbs felt like wooden stumps.

The German laughed noisily. ‘If you’ve got fleas I hope you don’t give them to me.’

Marc pushed the wallet into his trouser pocket, walking as fast as he dared without it looking dodgy.

When he got into a side street and checked nobody was behind him, Marc backed up to the wall. He was shaking with pure terror and hated the fact that despite all the espionage training he’d been through, his survival was down to pure dumb luck.

The officer’s wallet was a good score. It left Marc with enough French Francs to get by for two or three days, and German Reichsmarks for a few more after that. He abandoned the wallet in a dark Metro carriage, while riding five stops back towards the dormitory he’d scouted earlier on.

A fifteen-minute queue to get papers checked coming out of the Metro station brought Marc precariously close to ten o’clock curfew, though it was a nice feeling when the German handed his identity card back with a polite, ‘Thank you, move along.’

Marc banged on the door of the dormitory house, but the woman he’d spoken to earlier would only shout through the letterbox.

‘We’re full. Can’t you read the bloody sign?’

Marc gasped. ‘But you said you had
loads
of room!’

‘Half a symphony orchestra came and filled me up. Whoever pays first gets the bed.’

‘But it’s five minutes to ten. Can you let me in? What if I sleep on a chair, or in the hallway?’

‘All my residents are in and the door’s bolted,’ the woman said.

The slamming letterbox flap was her final word.

Marc raced down the street, but apparently the symphony orchestra had filled up the other two dormitory houses as well, and now it was four minutes past ten. Based on what he’d heard in Lorient, people picked up after curfew generally got a couple of nights in the cells and a stiff fine, but he’d met enough curfew breakers in Germany to know that deportation wasn’t out of the question.

‘Have you got any ideas where I can go?’ Marc asked, at the third place.

The man gave him directions to another dormitory house several streets away. There was no lighting because of the blackout, and the dead streets reinforced Marc’s opinion that curfew was not something people took lightly.

He walked briskly, ignoring growing tiredness and aches in his legs. His heart thudded and he reached full-on panic when he realised he’d taken a wrong turn.

The fourth dormitory house was above a laundry. He rang the doorbell and waited a full minute before trying a shout through the letterbox.

‘Hello? Can someone help me, please?’

A first-floor window came open and a hairy-chested man with a cigar butt hanging off his lips looked down.

‘If you don’t stop that racket, I’ll sling the piss pot over your head,’ he shouted. ‘Now sod off.’

Marc heard an entire dorm erupt with laughter at his expense.

‘I need somewhere to stay,’ he begged. ‘The floor, the hallway. I don’t want to get picked up.’

‘That’s not my lookout,’ the man shouted. ‘I’ve warned you once. If I have to come down there you’ll be sorry.’

The window slammed and Marc turned around, thinking about luck: one minute a pretty girl turns a blind eye and saves your life. Half an hour later a symphony orchestra turns up and completely screws you over.

It was gone quarter past ten now. Marc didn’t know any more dormitory houses, and he was well away from the small area of Paris he knew well.

Rather than spend hours hunting for a room, with the constant risk of getting busted, he decided to bed down in the first decent hiding spot he found. Anything would do: a back garden, the landing on a set of fire stairs, or even a big dustbin.

The street Marc was in was mostly shops, with no gaps or hiding places between them. He glanced down side streets, but they all looked the same. When he got to the third street he had to dash, because he was within sight of a bar crammed with singing German soldiers.

The fourth turning looked more hopeful, but Marc only made ten paces past the corner when a torch beam lit him up. It shone from the doorway of a small Renault car with two gendarmes stepping out.

Marc thought about running, but the officer on the driver’s side had his gun drawn, and you’d have to be a really bad shot to miss from this range.

‘Get here,’ the one with the torch said. He was in his forties, with the two middle fingers missing off his left hand. ‘Do you have a night worker’s pass?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Then we have a problem,’ the officer said. ‘Show me the rest of your documents.’

Marc nervously laid his documents on the roof of the car, where the officers inspected them by torchlight.

‘What’s your destination?’

‘I thought I’d be able to get a room in a dormitory house before curfew,’ Marc explained. ‘But I’ve been to four and they’re all full.’

‘These documents are pristine,’ the officer noted, as he flipped them over to look for the date-of-issue stamp. ‘Issued today, in fact.’

The officer on the other side of the little car picked up Marc’s employment status document. He was extremely tall, and the effect was exaggerated by his long coat and tall hat.

‘You’re from Paris?’ he began.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘It says you are released from prison camp on compassionate grounds, to look after your family?’

Marc nodded. ‘Yes, sir.’

‘This form says you come from Paris, so why are you walking the streets looking for a dormitory house?’

‘I …’ Marc began, before coughing to buy thinking time. ‘There’s been a bit of a mix-up. I expect my older sister sent a letter saying where my family has moved to. But a prisoner’s mail can take weeks to pass through the censors.’

‘So how will you find your family?’

‘I know where my aunt lives,’ Marc said. ‘But it’s quite a way, near Beauvais. I didn’t sleep on the train from Germany last night and I’ve been on my feet all day. It was getting near curfew and I just needed a place to sleep.’

To Marc’s relief, the cops seemed to buy his story.

‘If your aunt was in Paris, we might have been able to drive you,’ the gendarme with the torch said, taking a friendlier tone. ‘But Beauvais is over fifty kilometres, so you’ll have to spend the night in a cell. In the morning you can take your train to Beauvais.’

‘What’s your aunt’s address in Beauvais?’ the tall cop asked.

‘Fifteen Rue Lavande,’ Marc said, picking a street name out of thin air, but hoping it would be OK if he sounded confident enough.

‘Rue Lavande,’ the tall officer repeated, as he tapped fingernails on the roof of the car. ‘Hopefully you’ll find your aunt there tomorrow, in the meantime get in the car. The station is only a two-minute ride.’

*

Every prison gets the same smell of bad food, bodies and cigarettes and Marc found it depressingly familiar. He was one of the first arrivals in a big holding cell that filled up as the night went on. There were several drunks, a husband spattered in his wife’s blood, two Luftwaffe
⁸
pilots who’d fought over a girl and an old man who seemed completely off his head.

There was nothing but the concrete floor to sit on. Marc had barely slept the previous two nights and this one turned out no better, with constant noise and a crazy man who kept screaming and asking where all his teeth had gone.

There was light coming through the slot windows when the officer with the missing fingers called out Marcel DePaul. It took Marc a couple of seconds to remember that it was his new name.

‘Sit,’ the Gendarme said, when they reached a titchy interrogation room. All Marc’s things were spread across the table. ‘There’s a train to Beauvais at 06:42, and they run every half-hour after that.’

‘That’s good,’ Marc said guardedly. But he knew there was a sting in the tail because cops didn’t take you to an interview room if they were just going to release you.

He’d only seen the gendarme the night before in the dark, and he looked more wrinkled in the morning sunlight.

‘The only thing is, I called a colleague in Beauvais. He said he’s lived there all his life, but he’d never heard of Rue Lavande.’

Marc rubbed his eye. He needed his wits, but a third consecutive night without sleep meant his brain was in fog. It was a struggle just to keep his eyes open.

‘Maybe I got the name wrong. It doesn’t matter. I know the streets. I’ll find it when I get there.’

‘Why don’t you cut out the shit?’ the officer shouted, as he banged his fist on the table. ‘I’m trying to help, but you’re treating me like a fool. You’re carrying a brand-new set of identity papers but you’re full of lies about family and places that don’t seem to exist.’

‘It’s not lies,’ was all Marc could muster, as he wondered whether the gendarme was a good guy who wanted to help, or a Nazi pet.

The problem was, interrogators are trained to put suspects off balance by switching from scaring the hell out of you to pretending to be your best pal, and that made it impossible for Marc to get any real sense of the gendarme’s motivation.

‘Carrying false identity papers can get you shot,’ the gendarme said. ‘I’ve been working all night and I need my beauty sleep, so here are two choices. One, give me a story that checks out, or two I’ll pass your case on to a senior investigative team led by a German military officer. And believe me, you don’t want that to happen.’

Marc realised he didn’t have much choice but to trust his interrogator. If he was genuinely a good guy the gendarme might let him off the hook. If he wasn’t, Marc was screwed no matter what he said.

And Marc did have one story that would check out. He locked his fingers together to stop his hands shaking and took a deep breath before speaking. ‘My real name is Marc Kilgour,’ he began. ‘I ran away from an orphanage a few kilometres north of Beauvais, a while back.’

‘This better check out,’ the gendarme said suspiciously, as he wrote the information down.

He then asked for the exact address of the orphanage and the name of someone who’d be able to verify that he’d run away.

Marc thought of giving the name of Mr Tomas, the orphanage director who’d beaten him on a regular basis, but Tomas was unpredictable so he gave the name of a young nun who’d always stuck up for her orphans.

‘Sister Madeline knows all about me,’ Marc said. ‘And Sister Mary Magdalene, though she’s getting on a bit.’

‘I see,’ the gendarme said. ‘But these new identity papers are real. How did you obtain them?’

Marc was shattered, but only had seconds to think of a convincing way that a runaway orphan could get a full set of fake documents, without opening further lines of enquiry, or incriminating anyone else.

‘When I was on the street this guy told me that returning prisoners can get identity documents if they present a travel warrant,’ Marc said. ‘I went through the rubbish bins outside the identity office. It took a few attempts, but eventually I found a travel warrant they’d thrown out. I flattened it out, changed the picture, and carefully altered some of the details before taking it back to the counter inside.’

The gendarme laughed. ‘Ingenious,’ he said. ‘But
extremely
risky. And a serious offence in the eyes of our German masters.’

Having already thrown himself at the gendarme’s mercy, Marc decided it was a good time to sound pitiful. ‘I’ve never done anything like this before, sir. I was sick of the other boys, and I hate farm work.’

‘Let me tell you,’ the gendarme said, raising his voice and wagging his pointing finger. ‘An orphanage may not be great, but I’ve seen boys younger than you rot away in prison cells that would make your hair stand on end.’

‘Yes, sir,’ Marc said meekly.

‘You’re a very stupid boy,’ the gendarme said, as he picked up Marc’s papers and rattled them in his face. ‘If you mess with the system, it will crush you.’

‘I’m going out to call my colleague in Beauvais. He’ll check out your story. Is there anything else you think you ought to tell me before I go?’

‘Not that I can think of, sir.’

*

A two-hour wait in the interrogation room did Marc’s nerves no good. An orderly brought him stewed oats for breakfast, but they stuck in his throat.

‘Mr Kilgour,’ the gendarme said warmly, when he finally got back. ‘My colleague in Beauvais actually knows your friend Sister Madeline. He rode out to the orphanage and the sister vouched for you. He even dug up a missing person’s report, filed by the orphanage director.’

Marc smiled, feeling slightly embarrassed for some reason. ‘So, what happens now?’

‘One of my fellow officers will escort you back to Beauvais,’ the gendarme said, before leaning across and squishing Marc’s cheeks in a manner that was friendly, but also intimidating. ‘You’re
bloody
lucky that I picked you up, instead of a German patrol.’