The Prisoner (22 page)

When he got back to the little garden, someone had already picked up the ground spike. A dead drop is an excellent way for espionage agents to exchange information without meeting each other, but the less time you leave your message lying around the less chance there is of someone else accidentally finding it. The fact it had been picked up swiftly was another sign that Chalice was part of a reasonably sophisticated resistance operation.

She’d clearly swapped documents or information in the bookshop, so Marc decided to check this out next. The place sold a few new books, but it was mostly second-hand, with closely spaced shelves going from floor to ceiling.

Three women sat behind the counter at the back of the store, which was far more staff than the number of customers demanded. They gossiped about the things you’d expect: husbands and daughters, a touch of luck arriving at a butcher’s shop at the same time as a delivery of lamb.

It didn’t take Marc too long to work out that they were sisters – or possibly sisters-in-law. Evaline was the oldest by a good ten years. Halette and Julie looked alike, though Julie was plumper and had much shorter hair.

When a German came in, Evaline pointed him politely towards a small section of books in German, but when he left she slammed the cash draw and spat on the floor.

‘Dirty Boche money.’

For the past two years, Marc had lived adventures rather than read them. But before the invasion books had been one of the few escapes from the dull life of an orphan, and he voyaged into his past opening books and reading paragraphs from stories he’d enjoyed when he was younger.

‘Can I help you to find anything in particular?’ middle sister Halette asked.

She had shoulder-length hair and a homely face. If she’d been an actress, she would have spent her career playing nurses, or the woman who answers the door when the policeman comes to say that your husband got killed in a car crash.

‘You’ve got lots of nice books,’ Marc said. ‘But I don’t have much money.’

Marc spent a pleasant half-hour talking with Halette about books he’d read, and books that she thought a boy his age might enjoy. While they spoke, nobody bought anything, but several people swapped books at the counter as Chalice had done, while Marc pretended not to notice.

Each time a book arrived, one of the sisters took it out back and spent several minutes doing something with it. Marc’s best guess was that the bookshop was being used by various agents to drop messages, which the women were then taking out back to encode, ready for radio transmission back to Britain.

Either one of the sisters was a radio operator, or if the resistance circuit was more security conscious, the women would leave the coded messages in some kind of dead drop to be transmitted to Britain by a radio operator who they’d possibly never even met.

Eventually, Halette told Marc the name of a good local cafe and sold him a copy of
The Three Musketeers
for a nominal price. She told him it was the tattiest of the four copies she had in stock and she was glad to be rid of it.

It turned out that the cafe was run by a cousin of the three sisters. Considering the food situation, Marc’s ration coupons bought him a reasonable lunch of hot soup, and the cafe owner didn’t object to him eating the sandwich he’d been given by Sister Madeline.

After enjoying the first few chapters of his book sitting outside the cafe, Marc thought it would be interesting to go back to the little park, and see if he could spot any further shenanigans with ground spikes.

It was extremely warm. A bunch of nine-to eleven-year-olds playing football gave Marc no trouble as he lay in the grass, reading bare chested with his shirt rolled as a pillow under his head. It had been ages since he’d been able to sit and read, but although he liked the book his mind kept drifting towards thoughts about Jae.

He knew she’d be working on the farm today. In this heat the sweat would be pouring down her neck. He recalled the earthy smell she had when she’d been working hard, and the way she had to keep pulling the straps of a man’s farm overall up on to her skinny shoulders.

Besides missing Jae, Marc found ways to torture himself. He got paranoid at the unself-conscious way she’d stripped off in front of him, and hugged him naked. What kind of girl did that? One who’d carried on with one of the older farm hands? Or with one of the German officers who lived in her house? Had Jae fallen for Marc like he had for her, or was he making a massive fool of himself?

‘Why are you here?’ a boy asked.

He was one of the footballers. Holes at the knee of his trousers and canvas pumps so tatty that several older siblings must have grown through them before they’d ever graced his feet.

‘What’s it to you?’ Marc asked.

The boy shrugged and didn’t sound unfriendly. ‘We know all the kids round here. Did you just move in or something?’

‘I came to meet an old friend,’ Marc said. ‘But he’s working until later.’

‘Right,’ the kid said.

As the nosy kid went back to playing football, Marc spotted Chalice and two other women helping to load posters on to a cart outside the print works a couple of hundred metres away.

He was too far away to read the text, but he’d seen the poster all over Paris: The picture was of a smiling French gendarme, shaking hands with a smug-looking German soldier and the slogan
Working together to keep France safe
.

*

As Chalice wasn’t scheduled to finish work until ten, Marc faced a problem with the curfew. The good news was that this quiet suburb didn’t seem to be of much interest to security forces and he’d not seen a soldier or a gendarme since stepping off the bus.

But if things didn’t work out with Chalice he’d need a place to stay overnight. There were no dormitory houses in the area, but there were quite a few empty apartments around and a waitress in a cafe directed him to one of the area’s better buildings, where the concierge said he was welcome to sleep on the floor in a basement laundry room, provided he paid her two francs and behaved himself.

She seemed lonely and after finding Marc a couple of old sofa cushions to rest on, she babbled for ages about the patisserie she’d run with her husband, which had apparently been one of the best in Paris but had to shut down because her husband was sick and she thought it was a crime to cook with saccharin and powdered eggs.

‘When this war’s over, I’m gonna bring my girlfriend to your shop and we’ll sit outside and eat the biggest, fanciest thing on the menu,’ Marc said.

‘Ahh, you have a girl, how sweet!’ the woman said, laughing. ‘No surprise really, you’re a very handsome boy.’

But the woman was less pleased half an hour later when Marc said he had to pop out.

‘But the curfew!’ she said anxiously, before snapping her fingers. ‘You be careful. They’ll put a boy your age on the train to Germany like
that
.’

Marc gave a cocky smile and told the woman he’d be fine. Chalice’s building was less than a hundred metres away. It wasn’t yet ten, so he decided to wait in the communal toilet. He struggled through a couple more chapters of
The Three Musketeers
while listening out for the door of Chalice’s apartment, but he was too tense to concentrate.

It was about quarter past ten when Marc heard footsteps in the hallway. It was more than one person, and as he leaned towards the locked cubicle door to try and hear more clearly, someone booted it from the other side.

The door smacked Marc in the head. He crashed back against mildewed wall tiles as a boot hit him in the guts, doubling him over. It was two big men, plain clothes. Both spoke fluent French.

‘Open your mouth,’ one ordered.

Marc tried to wriggle, but the man grabbed him around the neck and clamped a hand over his nostrils. As Marc gasped for air, a rubber ball got rammed in his mouth. Then he got a hard punch in the lower back, and saw the jagged edge of a butcher’s knife at his throat.

‘I will not hesitate to kill you,’ the knifeman said. ‘One wrong sound, one wrong move. You understand?’

Marc glimpsed Chalice in her spattered printer’s overall as the two men pulled him out of the toilet cubicle and hauled him upstairs to the sixth floor. They took the knife away from his throat as they made him climb into a loft, then out on to a flat section of roof.

With a man in front, a man behind and Chalice at the rear, Marc was marched across the rooftops, struggling for breath with the rubber ball pinning his tongue to the roof of his mouth. After clambering over a set of chimney pots he was forced to jump down on to a metal fire escape.

They clanked rapidly down twelve flights of metal fire stairs. Marc looked back and tried to say, ‘I can’t breathe,’ as he was forced to move at speed, but the man behind cuffed him across the back of the head.

After being picked up by the waistband of his trousers and thrown over a crumbling garden wall, Marc was hoisted out of a mix of mud and fire ash, then thrust through an open back door into a basement room with a heavy butcher’s block table and a smell of damp.

Marc saw Halette from the bookshop standing at the bottom of a staircase as one of the big men bent Marc over the table. There wasn’t much light, but Marc was close enough to the rough wooden surface to see that the tabletop was spattered with fresh blood.

‘Who are you?’ Chalice shouted.

Marc couldn’t answer because of the gag. As one of the men smashed a large wooden club against the tabletop deafeningly close to Marc’s ear, the other pulled his trousers and undershorts down to his ankles.

‘Who are you?’

Marc still had no way to answer. The cook’s knife he’d tucked into his belt clanked against the ground, and his bag was thrown across for Halette to inspect.

The bat smashed the table again, spattering some of the pooled blood over Marc’s face as the other man finally ripped the rubber ball out of Marc’s mouth.

He took three huge gasps of air, before the man with the bat pulled him up from the table. He brandished the bat under Marc’s nose and screamed right in his face.

‘One lie out of your mouth and I’m gonna stick this up your skinny pink arse. Got it?’

Marc was trembling, and still catching his breath as he nodded.

Across the room, Halette had switched on a desk lamp and stood carefully inspecting Marc’s identity documents and the contents of his bag.

The man who didn’t have the bat spat in Marc’s face, then pointed at Chalice. ‘Which German bastard sent you here?’ he shouted. ‘I want his name,
right
now.’

‘There’s no German,’ Marc said, as a loud shudder entered his voice.

‘Bullshit,’ the man roared. ‘You were seen. You snooped around her flat. Then you followed her. You went to the park. You went to the bookshop. Why are you spying on us?’

The one with the bat yanked Marc around and took over the shouting. ‘Lowlife scum. I don’t care if they’re holding your mother and your baby sister hostage. You’re still betraying your country. Tell me every detail and we might let you live.’

Chalice grunted. ‘Or at least, you might not have to die too painfully.’

‘Marc Kilgour,’ Halette from the bookshop said. ‘Is that your real name? These identity documents look very new.’

Marc jumped as the bat slammed the bloody table again.

‘You wanna end up like the last poor bastard we brought in here?’ the other man asked, as he made his point by dabbing a huge nicotine-stained finger into the pooled blood.

Marc had been trained in how to deal with torture and thought he was pretty tough, but this was complete sensory overload. His hands and legs were shaking and tears streaked down his face.

‘Please let me explain,’ Marc begged.

The man with the bat placed the end under Marc’s chin. ‘This is my lie detector,’ he said. ‘Wanna guess what happens when she detects lies?’

‘I came from Beauvais,’ Marc stuttered. ‘There are two Canadians at my orphanage. They got Chalice’s name and address from a man in Amiens who said she may be able to help.’

Halette looked at Chalice. ‘Who would know you in Amiens?’

‘I have a great-uncle there,’ Chalice said.

The man with the bat turned his spite on Chalice. ‘How in the name of Christ does your uncle know what you’re doing?’

‘He knew early on,’ Chalice said, as she eyed Marc suspiciously. ‘Maybe the Gestapo found something out through him. Oh shit … I hope he’s OK.’

‘Why are you talking to your family?’ the bat man shouted.

‘I wasn’t bloody talking to my family,’ Chalice shouted back. ‘But people aren’t stupid. Our families know what we do.’

Marc was relieved that some of the pressure had turned on Chalice, but that ended swiftly when the heavy not holding the bat slapped his face and pushed his cheek down into a particularly bloody portion of the table.

‘So you come to town. Why not just knock on Chalice’s door? Why follow her? Why go to the book store? Why risk breaking curfew?’

‘I wanted to check her out,’ Marc said. ‘The Canadians said the Gestapo set traps.’

‘Why did you come? Why not them Canadians?’

‘They’ve got no documents.’

Halette stepped closer. She held the file and a piece of carefully bent wire under Marc’s nose. ‘What were you planning to use that for?’

‘You could pick locks with it,’ Marc admitted.

Everyone in the room gasped. The guy with the bat swung it hard against the back of Marc’s legs. He rolled off the table and landed at the boots of the other thug. He was then grabbed off the floor, and slammed down on the table again.

‘I told you my wooden friend doesn’t like liars,’ the bat man roared. ‘Since when do orphan boys from Beauvais stake out suspects, watch dead drops and know how to pick locks?’

‘Who knew the Gestapo trained ’em this young?’ Halette said. ‘But it makes sense. Who’d suspect his little blond head?’

Chalice started to sob. ‘Oh Christ, I’m going to have to move. And my great-uncle? What if they’ve done something to the little kids?’

Marc realised the innocent orphan act wasn’t going to wash. But the truth that he was an underage spy trained by the British didn’t strike him as a tale that would make the bat-wielding manic happy either.