The Prisoner (21 page)

‘That address could be anything from the home of a genuine resistance leader, to a false address circulated as a Gestapo trap,’ Marc said warily.

Noah looked at Sister Madeline, who was rinsing out his socks in the brown water he’d used to wash his feet. ‘What do you think, sister?’

‘We are brides of Christ, not worldly creatures,’ Madeline said apologetically. ‘We care for orphan boys and whoever else the lord sends our way. An airman passed through in similar circumstances to yours last winter. We fed and sheltered him for a short period, but we have no idea what happened after he left us.’

Marc saw Sister Madeline’s words as an opportunity to assert control over the situation, without having to tell a scarcely believable story about being a trained espionage agent.

‘I know my way around Paris,’ Marc said. ‘You two have no documentation. You speak French well, but your accents are unusual and men of fighting age are always treated with the highest suspicion. I’d suggest that we find a place to hide you. You can sleep and rest. The nuns can find you civilian clothes and food. This girl is our only lead and if Sister Madeline allows me, I can travel into the 18th Arrondisment and check out this address.’

‘If it’s a trap, they’ll arrest you,’ Noah said. ‘And you’ll lead them straight back to us.’

Marc nodded. ‘I’ll have to be careful. But I’ve spent the last two years living off my wits in Paris. I won’t just knock on the front door and ask this girl for help.’

‘It’s still risky,’ Joseph said.

‘Everything’s risky,’ Marc said. ‘I’m willing to try helping you. Frankly, I’m amazed you got this far dressed in uniform and with no documents.’

‘What if the girl’s no help?’ Joseph asked.

Marc shrugged. ‘We’ll have to think of another way of getting documents and helping you move south towards Spain.’

Sister Peter looked sympathetically at Marc, and spoke in a gentle voice. ‘He left here and survived for two years, when no other runaway lasted more than a few days. I sense the hand of God in you three coming together like this.’

The two Canadians didn’t look keen on entrusting their fate to a fourteen-year-old, but they were exhausted and didn’t have many options.

‘Get down to Paris then, I guess,’ Noah said, smiling at Marc. ‘I’m not gonna be walking far these next few days anyway.’

‘I’ll sort you food and money,’ Sister Madeline told Marc. ‘I’ll send one of the younger boys to tell Felix that you’re unable to work tomorrow.’

‘I may have to stay overnight,’ Marc said. ‘If the girl works in the day, for instance. I may not be able to speak with her and get back here before curfew.’

‘I’ll bring blankets and pillows so that Noah and Joseph can sleep here in the oratory tonight,’ Sister Madeline said. ‘We’ll find somewhere more secure before daybreak. But right now, I think we should put our hands together in prayer and seek the lord’s guidance.’

Joseph nodded, and gave Marc a slight smile. ‘Can’t see no harm in having God on our side.’

Note

  
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The Dieppe raid – officially named Operation Jubilee – took place on 19 August 1942. It involved 6,000 Canadian and British troops. The aim was for a large force to capture the harbour at Dieppe, destroy German facilities, take key pieces of German technology and abduct senior officers for intelligence purposes, before withdrawing in an orderly manner.

The raid resulted in the loss of 96 Allied aircraft and 34 ships. 3,623 of the 6,086 Allied soldiers who landed on French soil were either captured or killed. It is regarded as one of the most disastrous Allied operations of the entire Second World War, although lessons learned in the failure at Dieppe were crucial to the success of the much larger D-Day landings which took place two years later.

Marc couldn’t sleep. Swimming with Jae and cuddling up wet and naked afterwards was one of the most beautiful, mind-blowing things that had ever happened to him.

He’d spent most of his life stuck in this orphanage longing for adventure. Now he wanted nothing more than to stay where he was, working on Morel’s farm and spending time with Jae, but adventure had been thrust upon him.

Marc didn’t feel like getting up early and going to Paris. His escape had been a dangerous game, which he’d won as much by luck as skill: landing the job in the Labour Administration office, Fischer being a terrible shot, the friendly gendarme, the girl who could have screamed when he stole the German’s wallet.

Gambling with your life doesn’t matter when you’ve got nothing to live for, but now he had the memory of Jae’s breasts pressed against him, the baby-fine hairs on the back of her neck and her delicate fingers. He’d had crushes on girls before, but he was certain this was love.

Yet Marc felt for the two Canadians. In Germany, he’d tended to think day-to-day: how to avoid a nasty guard, how to keep bugs off his mattress, what would the next meal be? But when he thought about the prisoners now, he kept wondering how it would end for people like ex-cabin mates Vincent and Richard. If the Allies invaded Europe and put the squeeze on Germany, the prisoners would get worked harder and fed less until they died. If the Germans won, they’d live out their lives as slaves.

So when Marc jumped off his bunk at 5 a.m., he resented having to re-enter the world of dodgy documents, chases and checkpoints, but he genuinely wanted to re-establish his links with the resistance and help the two Canadians.

‘Why are you getting dressed?’ Jacques asked, from the bunk below.

‘Go back to sleep,’ Marc whispered.

Down in the kitchen, Sister Madeline had laid out bread and cheese for Marc’s breakfast, a canvas bag with a sandwich and some apples for lunch, plus ration coupons and money in case he needed to stay overnight.

Marc added a change of clothes, a small metal file and purposely-bent piece of wire that would serve as a basic lock-picking kit, plus the cook’s knife he’d used to kill the squirrel the night before.

The sun was starting to come up when Marc finished a brisk six-kilometre walk from the orphanage to Beauvais Station. The seventy-minute train ride was quiet, but hordes of Parisians crowded the platform when his train reached the city centre, waiting to board the train going the other way.

Spending a weekend in the country north of the city had always been popular with Parisians, but tight rationing added the illicit attraction of buying black-market food from farmers.

Chalice Poyer’s address should have been a short Metro ride, but the line was closed so Marc had to take two buses. He stepped off in a hilly neighbourhood of five-and six-storey apartment blocks: the kind of place where an office secretary or minor civil servant might live.

The buildings had names rather than numbers, and Marc had to get directions at a cafe. Chalice Poyer lived in apartment 3–4, on the fourth floor of a narrow block. Like most Paris apartment blocks, there was a desk for a concierge, but judging by the dust and the absence of a chair nobody had worked this desk in years.

Marc checked the row of metal boxes in the lobby. The name
Poyer
was still on the mailbox for apartment 3–4. Although the box was locked, there was enough of a gap for him to see a couple of letters inside, but not enough to make him think she’d moved away.

If Chalice had lived in a house, Marc could have skirted around, peeked through the windows or looked over the back wall. Checking out a fourth-floor apartment was trickier.

He passed a woman on the stairs who took no notice of him. Marc had thought up a cover story while he was on the train. If anyone asked his business he’d say that he’d lived nearby when he was younger and was searching for an old school friend who he’d not seen since the invasion.

The fourth floor had five apartments. Number three was at the end of a short corridor, with a set of metal fire stairs crossing the window at the far end. Little kids played rowdily in the apartment opposite, and a whiff of drains and urine came from the communal toilets and rusted bath tub shared by all five flats.

Charles Henderson had taught Marc that the critical task when making an approach is to be patient, and find out everything possible about your target before letting them know you exist.

Marc’s first task was finding out whether Chalice was at home. He knocked loudly on the door, then backed quickly into the communal bathroom across the hallway. The door didn’t open, so she was either out or a heavy sleeper.

Marc decided that the fire escape would be his next step. Opening the window made more noise than he would have liked, but the metal balcony brought him within reach of a narrow apartment window, which had mercifully been left open in the hot weather.

To be certain nobody was inside, Marc gave the window a noisy upwards shove, then backed up to the wall. When no head popped out to investigate, Marc stepped over the balcony on to a precariously fragile window ledge and crawled through, dropping down on to polished wooden boards.

The apartment was a single room, with a built-in wardrobe and wash basin along one wall. The only other items were a metal-framed double bed and a chest of drawers. Everything was neat, which was how resistance operatives were taught to be, because it’s easier to detect if a neat apartment has been searched than a messy one.

Marc was wary of touching anything, but he noted a distinct lack of personal mementos, such as photographs or address books. This was another sign of a trained spy, because if you didn’t crack under torture, the Gestapo would try and break you by threatening friends and family.

Now that Marc’s initial wariness had worn off, he peeled back and carefully replaced the bed clothes. The sheets were cold, as was the kettle on the stove and the dregs in the coffee cup on the bedside table.

Next he looked in a couple of drawers and opened the wardrobe. It seemed Chalice had a slim figure, along with a taste for good clothes and makeup. There was some expensive-looking evening wear, but also sets of plain brown dungarees with ink stains and a couple of wage slips for a job with a printing company.

The printing company tied up with the Canadian’s theory that Chalice was linked to the anti-Nazi newspapers he’d seen in the house in Amiens. The date of birth on a wage slip indicated that Chalice was only nineteen, but she wasn’t earning enough for the nice clothes so Marc reckoned there had to be a rich daddy or rich boyfriend in the mix somewhere.

Marc had clearly unearthed an interesting character, but the door rattled before he could investigate further. A turning key meant it was almost certainly Chalice, but Marc was saved from a confrontation by the double locks.

By the time Chalice was inside, Marc had scrambled out on to the fire escape and the only clue to his entry was that he didn’t get a chance to push the squeaky window back down.

Chalice was attractive, with dark tangled hair and a tight-fitting black dress. The look suggested she’d spent Friday night on the town and slept elsewhere. She’d brought in a fresh, black loaf, a newspaper and the letters from the mailbox downstairs and sat on the edge of her bed dunking the hard bread into a glass of milk.

Marc thought about knocking on the door and introducing himself, but heard Charles Henderson’s voice in the back of his mind, telling him to be patient and act on solid information rather than gut feeling.

Half a day following Chalice would make no difference to the Canadians, but sooner or later someone would spot Marc skulking on the fire escape, so he retreated into the communal bathroom and bolted himself in a cubicle.

An old boy stunk the place up taking a huge half-hour dump and the woman from the apartment with the little kids came in and started yelling at him.

‘What am I supposed to do, shove a cork up my arse?’ the old man roared.

‘You should see a doctor,’ the woman shouted back, as her toddlers stood behind her legs pinching their noses. ‘That smell isn’t natural. It seeps through to my kitchen.’

Marc would have seen the funny side if the stench hadn’t been filling his nostrils. And the shouting match almost made him miss Chalice leaving her room.

She’d tied her hair back and changed into ink-stained printers’ overalls. Marc crept down the fire stairs and emerged on the doorstep seconds before Chalice vanished around a street corner. He kept his distance as he followed her down a couple of narrow streets to a bookshop.

Chalice was only inside for a few seconds, but emerged from the shop with a different package to the one she’d walked in with. Then she cut through a small garden square and glanced around casually before pushing a ground spike into the earth between some shrubs.

Marc had never used a ground spike, but he’d heard about them in training. They were simply a hollow metal spike into which you placed a rolled-up message. Then you pushed it into soft ground, either earth or longish grass, and it would remain invisible until someone came along to dig it out.

Marc was now completely convinced that he’d found someone linked to an anti-German resistance organisation, but also a little concerned. The security in Chalice’s apartment was impeccable, but Marc had followed her for half an hour and not once had she doubled back, or taken an indirect route to see if she was being followed.

Still, Marc knew from his experience in Lorient that most resistance groups were sloppy, and even well-trained agents grew complacent and fell into routine patterns.

Chalice’s next stop was a tobacco stand, where Marc saw nothing beyond an innocent purchase of cigarettes. Fifty metres more took her through an arched, blue doorway into the premises of the Constellation Print Works. She gave friendly nods to women in identical overalls who stood smoking in the doorway.

Marc knew from Chalice’s payslips that her shifts lasted ten hours, with thirty minutes docked for lunch. It was just before noon, so in theory she’d finish work at around ten that evening. She’d be tired and Marc would have the advantage of surprise when he approached her.

Ten hours is a lot of time to kill, but it gave Marc a chance to investigate Chalice in more depth.