Liberation Read online

  “Good show, my dear.”

  It seemed to take forever, the men coming two at a time. The officer was looking at his watch every five seconds. His men were shuffling the boys about in the rowing boat to make space for the last three escapees now. Gregory went in last, grabbing Nancy’s hand and squeezing it as he passed her. The crew men were hauling him in over the side when a light hit them from the coast road, a searchlight. Full beam. Then excited shouts in German above them.

  “Time to go,” the officer said smartly.

  One of his crew jumped lightly into the surf and he and the officer shoved off, forcing the overloaded boat back onto the water and into the darkness using their shoulders, their feet digging up great banks of wet sand and shingle.

  Bullets started to sing and zip into the water beside them as they flung themselves in, the officer ordering them to pull hard.

  Nancy turned tail for the woods as the edge of the search beam hit, praying it wouldn’t track her. It didn’t, thank Christ. They were after the rowing boat. In the shadow she caught sight of Antoine, lying on his back and firing up toward the searchlight.

  Shit, was that barking? Please do not let them have dogs.

  She dropped into a crouch among the wild sage bushes and twisted round to see how the navy were doing. They were still caught in the beam and at least one figure in the boat was slumped unnaturally in the stern. They were sitting ducks.

  “Come on, Antoine,” she muttered between gritted teeth, watching him, not daring to move yet. Could she climb back onto the road? Get behind the patrol and take out the searchlight with her revolver?

  Antoine exhaled slowly and squeezed the trigger. Glass shattered above them and the light faded.

  “You little beauty!” she said aloud. “Now let’s get out of here, shall we?”

  Not a moment too soon, as she could hear the shouts of the soldiers as they crashed down the slope toward them. They’d have rough going of it if they couldn’t find the path which twisted and zigzagged down to the water. Sharp falls and thorns. She hoped they broke their sodding necks.

  Philippe grabbed her arm. One path was open to them going east along the shore and the three of them ran, heads down, hunching forward. Nancy could feel the terrible pulse of excitement in her blood. This was better than flirting her way through checkpoints. Her feet seemed to find their way along the narrow track without her needing to think. The bullets tearing past her in the dark really did make a sort of mewing sound, like tiny kittens. The thought made her giggle.

  The patrol—it could only be an army patrol chancing this way rather than a trap or they would all be dead already—were still concentrating their fire on the retreating rowing boat, even though they couldn’t see it now, the idiots. She guessed only two guys were crashing through the tough grasses, juniper and laurel. Then the light of a torch swept across them from above. A shout and a shot. Nancy heard Antoine gasp, and she spun around as he crumpled onto the needle-thin track, only kept from rolling off the low cliff and into the water by a tangle of undergrowth, his hand on his side.

  “Philippe, help me!” she hissed into the darkness, and she saw his shadow returning.

  “Here! This way! They are getting away!”

  The man on the path above them was answered by his colleagues. Philippe aimed at the voice and the light, pulled the trigger. The torch went out, clicked off neatly to prevent Philippe from finding his target, and the man called for his friends again. He sounded giddy with excitement.

  Antoine pushed her away. “Go, Nancy!”

  “Like hell, I will.”

  She bent down to get her arm round his shoulders as Philippe shot blindly toward the voice again.

  “Help me get him up,” Nancy said to him, but Antoine was too quick for her. He pulled his revolver from his jacket, a revolver Henri had paid for, a revolver Nancy had given to Antoine herself, put the barrel into his mouth and fired.

  It happened so fast that Nancy could not even begin to understand it. She was still, too surprised to scream. Philippe howled and shot again into the darkness. More torches were approaching along the path above them. Then Philippe grabbed hold of her arm again, hauling her to her feet, and shoved her forward in front of him, loosing a couple more shots into the dark behind him. She stumbled. Suddenly her feet didn’t know what to do after all. What had Antoine done? That gun wasn’t supposed to be used on him. She’d given it to him to kill Nazis, not himself, stupid boy. She’d give him such a talking to.

  “Move, Nancy!”

  She carried on, her thoughts fractured and muzzy. How strange to be here at this time of night. How did she get here? How pleasant and terribly British that officer had been. Shouldn’t they wait for Antoine? Philippe jostled her forward until at last her thoughts began to reconnect, make sense. She began to run and she ran on until the sounds of pursuit faded and the only sounds she could hear were her own panting breath and the chirruping song of the cicadas.

  They didn’t stop until the night became thick and silent around them.

  6

  Nancy stayed in bed the next day, only getting up to wash and dress when Henri was due home in the evening. If Claudette, Nancy’s maid, had noticed the blood on her clothes, she had not mentioned it. Nancy opened the hall cupboard on her way to the drawing room to meet Henri and saw her camel-hair coat hanging neatly on its padded hanger. It was spotless, but a patch on the side, a patch she was sure must have been smeared with Antoine’s blood, was slightly damp to the touch and smelled of vinegar.

  Henri talked to her about the usual sort of thing: his day, his workers and, after they had hunched over the radio listening to the evening news on the BBC, the progress of the war. Hitler had lost an army at Stalingrad, the Allies were winning in North Africa. Only when they had begun to eat did Nancy tell him about the previous night.

  “We could have got him out,” she finished, staring at the plate.

  Henri filled her glass. “Eat something, my love.”

  They still ate in the dining room whenever they were at home, and whatever they had, they ate off the best china. Since the arrival of Böhm and the destruction of the Old Quarter they had been having dinner alone more often. Friends not in the Resistance asked too many questions, and friends in the network kept apart from each other when they could.

  Claudette had managed to create a sort of parmentier with some black-market mince Nancy had got hold of. I can’t let it go to waste, Nancy thought, staring at her food, and then she saw Antoine putting the gun in his mouth just as she put the fork of potatoes and mince into her own. If Henri hadn’t been watching her, she’d have spat it out onto the plate again. She managed to swallow.

  “If he hadn’t seen Gregory, that man the Gestapo had… It was just bad luck,” she said.

  Henri picked up his wine glass. He was trying, dear Old Bear, not to stare at her as if checking to see if she were mad, but she still felt as if she was under a magnifying glass.

  “I’ll see his family is taken care of, you know that,” he said.

  “Thank you, Henri.”

  She put her fork down and covered her eyes with her hand. “We could have got him out.”

  Henri took her other hand and held it. “My dearest Nancy, isn’t it time to listen to Philippe? To be more careful?”

  She pulled her hand away. “No, I told you! It was bad luck! No one betrayed us, it wasn’t a German trap! We got those men out and then some sharp-eyed Boche must have caught sight of the boat in the moonlight.” She stared at him. “They are here, Henri. They destroyed the Old Quarter. They have sent the men off to fucking work camps. They are rounding up the Jews! Any pretense that France is independent is gone. We are under the jackboot. You can’t ask me to stop fighting. You can’t stop fighting.” She began attacking her food again. “It has to be faced. It has to be fought. And I won’t sit back and let other people do my fighting for me.”

  He put his elbow on the table and rested his cheek on his palm. He always shav
ed before dinner as well as in the morning, even now when getting decent soap was a battle. How did she end up married to a man so proper in his habits? Luck. Luck she didn’t deserve.

  “But the Germans can’t even win any more! Why can’t they just sod off?”

  Henri laughed at that, and she flashed a reluctant smile.

  Then he became thoughtful. “A wild beast is at its most dangerous when it is wounded,” he replied.

  She put her knife and fork together and took his hand again. “Are we both at home this evening?”

  He nodded, lifted her hand to his lips and kissed her palm. How strange to still ache with love for a man she woke with every morning, lay down next to each night.

  “Invent me a cocktail,” she said. “I intend to win your entire fortune from you over cards and far too many drinks.”

  “You may try, wife of mine. You may try.”

  Nancy ended the night in happy oblivion, more deeply in his debt than ever.

  7

  Major Böhm’s office was lined with books. When the packing cases arrived in Rue Paradis, three days before the major, the corporal who opened them thought at first there must have been some sort of mistake. Yes, the upper ranks of the Gestapo tended to be reading men—university educated, a lot of lawyers—but they didn’t have this many books. He was about to report the delivery as an error when he found, taped to the third crate, a set of typed instructions as to how the books were to be arranged in the major’s office. It was precise. That was more like a Gestapo man. The corporal followed the instructions, very carefully indeed.

  Böhm had other reasons to be content as he sat down behind his desk that morning, spending his first hour or two moving steadily through the pile of papers, arrest warrants, requests for information on his desk. There was better news from Russia, gains were being made in Kharkov and the decision had been taken to liquidate the Jewish Ghetto in Krakow. It was necessary work, but brutal and inelegant. He had felt even his mind begin to coarsen during his service in Poland. Some of the lower ranks had shown themselves to be lacking in the necessary moral fiber, only managing to get through the business of the day by being drunk, or hyped up on the “vitamin” pills given out like candy by their officers. Böhm listened then with interest to the rumors of more efficient methods of disposing of undesirable peoples and trusted their use would make the difficult role of cleansing the Reich less difficult for the men.

  The Slavs were, like the Jews, irredeemable. The only humane course of action was to wipe them out as quickly and efficiently as possible. Eastern Europe was a place where one had to work as a hammer; here in France the work was better suited to a scalpel, and that was what Böhm was. A thin, very accurate, well-trained blade.

  He looked up as Captain Heller knocked on the door and then opened it.

  “Yes?”

  “Sir, I wanted to show you this.”

  Heller placed a sheet of cheap writing paper on Böhm’s desk, and he glanced down at it. All in block capitals, a clumsy attempt to hide the identity of the writer, it said: “HENRI FIOCCA IS SPEANDING HIS PROFITS ON GUNES, NOT HIS WORKERS. EVERYBODY KNOWS IT.”

  Böhm did not touch the sheet. “Who wrote this?”

  “A man named Pierre Gaston, sir. Dismissed from Fiocca’s factory last month for persistent drunkenness.”

  Böhm sighed. It was pathetic how many of the French citizenry tried to make use of the Gestapo to carry out their own petty revenges. But that last phrase, “Everybody knows it.” That was a telling choice of words.

  “Have you questioned Monsieur Gaston?”

  Heller nodded. A twitch in his cheek suggested the process had been unpleasant, not because violence was something he found distasteful, only that he regarded with contempt the man on whom he had used it.

  “A drunk and a fool, but he stuck to his story,” Heller said. “He told me there is a lot of seditious talk in the factory. He came upon his fellow workers several times, quietly boasting that their boss was working with the Resistance.”

  Böhm studied Heller. He clearly had something else to add, something which pleased him.

  “And? Out with it.”

  “Sir, as you suggested might be advisable in these circumstances, I cross-referenced the names he gave me with our records, and found a man with black-market charges on his sheet among those Gaston named as suspicious types in the factory. We took him up very quietly, and he was keen to be of assistance when I made the alternatives clear. Fiocca is certainly providing funding to the Resistance in the area, and Michael, my source, has given us a couple of names from the wider network. Those men are being followed now. Michael claims they are part of the White Mouse group. He also says Fiocca specifically financed the escape by boat of twenty prisoners from the beach east of Marseille last week.”

  Böhm was impressed. With further training Heller could go far. He was an excellent example of the sort of man on whose shoulders the Thousand-Year Reich would be built.

  “The transcript of your interrogation with Michael?”

  Heller placed a manila folder neatly above the anonymous letter, like a cat placing a mouse at its mistress’s feet. This time Böhm picked it up and began to read, nodding from time to time.

  “And no one knows we are speaking to this Michael?”

  “No, sir,” Heller said. “Unless he has talked.”

  “Excellent work, Heller.”

  The captain glowed. “What are your orders?”

  Böhm set down the folder and smiled at Heller, the benign teacher. “What would be your next move, Captain?”

  Heller blinked rapidly behind his little glasses. “Well, sir. I wouldn’t want to show our hand by arresting the men we are following immediately, but we could take Fiocca in for questioning, let it be known it is because of the tip-off from the drunk, and see what we could squeeze out of him.”

  “Very good. I think I need to stretch my legs, Heller. Bring the car round and we shall go and fetch Monsieur Fiocca together. Oh, and have the reports of that escape sent to my office for our return. I would like to look at them again.”

  Böhm put out his hand and Heller handed him a form authorizing the arrest of Fiocca and the seizure of his records. He signed it with a flourish.

  8

  Henri had been working quietly in his office since 7 a.m. It had been his habit since he first took control of the family business some ten years ago to spend his Friday mornings clearing the paperwork that had accrued like sediment on his desk during the week. He would have translated a satisfying proportion of it into notes for his secretary, Mademoiselle Boyer, copies for filing, questions for his lawyers and accountants even before his men began to fill up the workshops which lay to the rear of the offices, and the silence of those first hours was slowly replaced by the ringing of telephones, padding footsteps and the rattle of trolleys in the corridors of the offices. It comforted him, that swelling noise of business being done.

  So much of his business involved travel up and down the coast, meetings with other businessmen in hotels, factories, lawyers’ offices, that he clung to this quiet morning every week where any little problems could be thought out and smoothed over, so the wheels of industry could run uninterrupted. He saw no reason to do any differently in wartime, though, it was true, his wife was not free for lunch after his morning’s work as often as she had been before the fall of France.

  It was unusual then to hear his secretary tapping at the door while his coffee was still warm and the paperwork unfinished. He called her in.

  “Monsieur Fiocca,” she said. Her thin body, normally held ramrod straight, seemed to shake. She clutched the door handle as if for support.

  He took off his reading glasses and smiled reassuringly. “What is it, Mademoiselle Boyer?”

  “There are… men here.”

  He stood up quickly and went to the window, breathing in sharply. Three large black cars had drawn up outside the building. One of the drivers was standing on the pavement, not takin
g his ease or smoking his cigarette like an ordinary soldier, but with his hands clasped loosely behind his back, staring ahead. Gestapo.

  Mademoiselle Boyer was still clinging on to the door. “Monsieur Callan just came and told me. They are already questioning the men on the workshop floor. Others are going through the files in the contract room. What shall I do?”

  Henri lifted his eyes from the cars and stared out over the port of Joliette, the steamers and docks, the great hazy blue of the Mediterranean beyond.

  “Go back to work, Mademoiselle,” he said. “I’m sure they will get to us eventually.”

  He returned to his desk and the young woman retreated, closing the door behind her. Henri finished reading the contract he had been examining and signed both copies, then examined his signature. No one would suspect his hand was shaking. He placed both copies on the pile for Mademoiselle Boyer.

  Henri then began to read a request for some slight changes in an order from one of his suppliers to accommodate “unfortunate shortages in the present time.” He could feel the change in the rhythm of the building. A phone was ringing unanswered, the footsteps outside were hurried. The distant clangs and hisses which floated up from the workshop had stuttered. He waited, trying to read but seeing nothing. The door opened again and a tall German man in the gray-green tunic and collar patches of an SS major walked into the room. A captain followed respectfully in his wake. Behind them Henri could see Mademoiselle Boyer, on her feet, her mouth a little “oh” of shock.

  Henri got to his feet again. “Thank you, Mademoiselle Boyer,” he said clearly, as if his guests had been properly introduced.

  The major glanced over his shoulder, as if seeing the woman for the first time, then looked back at Henri with a smile. “My name is Böhm, Monsieur Fiocca,” he said in excellent French, but did not extend his hand. “This is Captain Heller. We are sorry to burst in on you unannounced.”