Liberation Page 7

  “When?” Nancy asked, her skin growing cold in the warm safe-house kitchen. “How?”

  The girl was drinking Madame Dissard’s coffee in tiny sips, as if she wanted to make it last as long as possible. “The day after you left, Madame.”

  Mathilde had huge eyes and an air of utter simplicity. No wonder they’d sent her. German soldiers might stop and stare at her, but they’d never believe she was a spy. The best disguise we have is the assumptions other people make about us. Nancy knew that better than anyone.

  Thank God. For one foul moment she had thought that perhaps Henri had… but no. The arrest had come too soon for Henri to have been the source of the Gestapo’s information.

  “Who betrayed him? Do you know what happened?”

  “I was there, Madame.” The girl caught Nancy’s frown. “At the next table. I had details of a prison escape to give to Philippe, but he must have seen something. He did not give the signal to approach. Then a man came and sat with him. A Frenchman, he called him ‘Michael.’ They spoke for a minute or two and then the men from the table behind Philippe got up, pulled out guns and took him away.”

  “But they didn’t take Michael?” Nancy said quickly.

  “No, the little shit just sat there grinning and finishing his wine.” She threw out her words. “I know the girl in the café, Madame. She is a good French girl. She will spit in his food every time this Michael eats at her table.”

  Nancy shook her head. Still, it was something. “I know him,” she said. “He worked for my husband.”

  Mathilde nodded sadly.

  Marie ground out her cigarette in the ashtray and lit another. “Has anyone else been picked up since?” she asked.

  “Just Albert, on the same day.”

  Nancy glanced at Marie and caught the older woman’s small nod of satisfaction. They knew what that meant. Neither Philippe nor Henri had broken yet. Nancy’s stomach twisted and she had a flash of Gregory’s broken hands. Jesus. What were they doing to Henri? She looked away, drank her coffee.

  Marie cleared her throat. “What about the prison break plans, Mathilde?”

  The girl smiled at her. “They are to go ahead. Tonight. That is why I am here. You should expect them sometime overnight and then they can go with you, Madame Fiocca, to Spain.”

  “Albert was my contact in Perpignan, Antoine is dead,” Nancy replied. “Who do I go to for a guide?”

  Mathilde rubbed her eyes and yawned before she replied. “I’ll give you a rendezvous, a café on the edge of town.”

  “And a fallback?”

  The girl shook her head. “We have run out of them.”

  Mifouf jumped up heavily into her lap and yowled in sympathy. Mathilde stroked him and he began to purr.

  “I worked with a Scotsman named Garrow,” Marie said. “He had to run last month, but we went together to Perpignan once. I have an address. No passwords, no names, but an address. That will have to do as your fallback, Nancy.” She took another swig of her coffee and tapped her fingers on the table. “With Philippe gone, we’ll have to use another forger to make papers for the prisoners. He’s not so good.”

  Nancy thought of the men she’d collected from prison breaks in the past.

  “Their clothes will need washing too,” she said. “At least it’s something to do.”

  The men, seven of them, arrived at 2:30 a.m. How the hell they’d made it through Toulouse in their condition Nancy had no idea. Their clothes were in rags, their faces gaunt, and they stank. Nancy was for once grateful for Marie’s smoking habit, but still, the reek of them.

  Once they’d told the story of their escape—drugged wine, a bribed guard, a hay truck and a three-mile walk with a map drawn on the back of a cigarette packet—Nancy ordered them to strip, dump their clothes in Marie’s bath and wash themselves down. They returned to the kitchen one by one, wrapped in old sheets and blankets, pink and scrubbed. The sirens started at dawn. The gendarmes, the Milice and the Germans were pulling the city apart looking for the cast of Julius Caesar now huddled in silence in Marie’s kitchen.

  “Dear lady,” one tall English airman said to Nancy as the patrols went back and forth outside. “I can’t face the Gestapo in a sheet. Any chance of getting my trousers back?”

  “Nope. Sorry, Brutus. Not until they are clean,” Nancy said. “And then they’ll take at least a day to dry—we can’t hang them anywhere near the windows, can we?”

  “Brutus?” He glanced down at himself. “Oh. Yes. Quite.”

  He adjusted his grip on his sheet and shuffled awkwardly back to the kitchen.

  They split up on the train. Four of the escaped prisoners spoke French pretty well, the rest did not. Nancy divided them into groups, gave them times to turn up at the rendezvous point in Perpignan and drilled them through a series of nods, shrugs and odd words which might get them past a casual checkpoint. The papers wouldn’t stand up to any closer scrutiny than that.

  Now she was in a crowded second-class carriage with her handbag on her lap praying for good weather over the mountains. Two of the English were with her, the man who wanted his trousers and a redhead Nancy had taken a dislike to. He’d turned his nose up at the food Marie had offered him and complained that Nancy hadn’t managed to get all the stains out of his shirt. She almost throttled him with it. They’d taken the evening train. True, it meant when they got to Perpignan the streets would be emptying, but they’d still have a couple of hours before curfew to get to where they needed to be going. If their luck held.

  Their luck didn’t hold.

  13

  Half an hour before they were due to arrive in Perpignan, as the dusk was deepening over the countryside, the conductor stuck his head into the compartment.

  “Move,” he said, looking straight at Nancy. “The Germans are stopping the train. Full search.”

  She didn’t have time to thank him or work out how he knew she needed the warning. He was gone as soon as he finished speaking.

  “Shit, now what?” the redhead said in English.

  One of the French passengers in the compartment crossed herself as if she’d heard the devil himself speak.

  Nancy pulled down the window.

  “You’ve got crap papers,” she said. “We have to run, or you’ll be back in prison before dawn. If they don’t just shoot you.”

  The other Englishman, Brutus, was squinting out of the window next to hers. “There’s a hill, mile or two off, with a copse up top. Meet there.”

  He certainly had a bit more authority now he had his trousers back on.

  Nancy reached for the door handle, just as the train lurched against its brakes and began to slow. The door swung open and she fell forward. The world filled with the churning thunder of the wheels. She hung in mid-air by some miracle just long enough to grab the other side of the door frame with her left hand. She pulled herself back in, panting. An elderly Frenchman squeezed into the corner of the carriage had grabbed on to the edge of her coat and saved her life. She caught his eye, nodded her thanks, tried to control her breathing. The train had slowed to a walking pace.

  No time to wait for it to stop completely. No time to think. That was a blessing anyway, looking at the drop below her. Thank God she wasn’t in her high heels today.

  “Come on!” she shouted to the others, and jumped.

  Nancy landed OK, then slipped on the gravel and slid down a steep embankment into the darkness.

  Two figures leaped out behind her, carried farther down the line and silhouetted by the lights in the carriage as the train finally came to a rest. Farther up the train she saw another door swing open and another group of figures jump one by one into the shadows. Then shouts, as another shape appeared in the open door and lifted a rifle. The shot popped in the silent countryside, a sudden punctuation mark as the hot metal of the wheels above her clicked and cooled.

  Soldiers were climbing out of the train now. Shit. Time to run.

  She scrambled over the low stone wall at the bo
ttom of the embankment. It was a vineyard. Jesus, that was lucky. Paths to run along and foliage to hide behind. If they’d been on pasture land, the soldiers could have just mown them down like wheat.

  Fast or slow? If she went slowly, moving between the shadows, they might never spot her, but if they sent enough men into the field they might pick her up while she was still creeping about. If she ran they’d be more likely to see her. She was still hesitating, just inside the rows of vines, when she heard for the first time the deadly rattle of a light machine gun.

  Fast then.

  She ran straight and hard between the rows of vines, keeping as close as she could to the shadows. Behind her she heard the shouts in German, and the barking of dogs. Bullets thudded into the dry soil behind her, sending up little clumps of earth which sounded like rain as they landed among the leaves.

  To the east of her she heard more shouts, more excited barking. They’d got someone. Sons of bitches. Go faster, Nancy. The ground began to rise. Torches to her west, she spun east, forcing her way between the vines, then went north again. She knew she was bleeding now. Was it from a vine scratch or a bullet? Did it matter? Keep on. Would they shoot the men they recaptured? Maybe. They’d certainly shoot her. The acid burn in her legs was excruciating and she couldn’t pause and catch her breath.

  Keep going. Follow the rise.

  She ran out of the vineyard, floundering into a wire fence and falling forward across it into a square, sloping field of grass. She turned over and lifted herself up on her elbows, looking back down the hill for the first time. Torches bobbed through the lower part of the vineyard near the embankment like fireflies, but they didn’t seem to be coming up the hill as yet. Above them, on the tracks, the train still waited.

  She lay there on the cool ground for a second, staring up at the moon and panting. Then she dragged herself to her feet and followed the fence east to the far corner of the field. The wire turned north, and she followed it, with woodland on her right and climbing again.

  She’d never liked walks in the country. She was a city girl to the core, and when her friends had told her, smugly, about the joys of tramping through the beautiful French countryside with a sort of religious conviction she was pretty sure they were mad. The countryside was where food and wine came from, but there were no shops, no cafés, and how excited could you get about looking at the same view for hours, or weeks? She was in no mood to change her mind now.

  She reached the top of the hill. This seemed to be the hill the Englishman had pointed out. Total silence. She sat down on the edge of the little copse and looked down again. The lights were still there, bobbing around in the vineyard, but as she watched they retreated toward the train and blinked out, and then, finally, the lit windows of the carriages were on the move again. She let out a long sigh as it disappeared toward Perpignan.

  It was then she realized she’d lost her handbag. It came as a cold feeling in the gut which spread upward and closed her throat. Her papers. Her money. Her jewelry. Her engagement ring. Her fucking engagement ring. She’d worn it through the whole occupation, but it was too fancy to wear around Marie’s flat, so she’d tucked it into the lining of her bag. Oh, the note! She’d been so careful, taken so little, but even that scrap of Henri’s writing was gone now.

  For the first time since the Germans had turned up in France she burst into tears. The cold, the exhaustion. Her ring. The note. How could she have dropped it without noticing? Shit shit shit shit shit.

  A rustle in the undergrowth startled her and she half-turned to see Brutus and the redhead approaching her carefully. The redhead held back, but Brutus knelt down beside her and offered her a handkerchief.

  “You hurt, Madame?”

  She shook her head. “No. I’m fine. I’m sorry. It’s stupid. I lost my bag, it had my engagement ring in it. All my papers.”

  “Shall I go and look for it?” he said quietly.

  “Don’t be a sodding fool,” the redhead whispered fiercely. “The Germans will have left a platoon down there. Just because they’ve switched their torches off doesn’t mean they are gone. If the silly bitch wants it, let her go and look for it herself.”

  Brutus ignored him. “I’m happy to do it.”

  Nancy wavered, then shook her head. “It’s too dangerous. We need to get moving.”

  She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “I’m more tired than I thought, that’s all. We walk tonight, find somewhere to lay up during the day and then go into Perpignan when it gets dark.”

  “We haven’t any food! Any water!” the redhead protested.

  “If you are missing prison rations, just hand yourself over to the Gestapo,” Nancy snapped.

  Brutus patted her awkwardly on the shoulder. “Of course we should only travel by night. We’ll get there.”

  14

  Nancy knocked at the door again.

  “Come on, come on…”

  It opened, just a crack, and a thin sliver of light fell onto the roughly cobbled road.

  “My name is Nancy Fiocca,” she said. “Marie Dissard sent me; she worked with Garrow. I worked with Antoine. I’ve two men with me and we need to get out over the mountains.”

  She had nothing but hope. Hope that the right man would open the door, hope that he’d know the names and help.

  It had taken two days to make it this far. They only dared to move at night, spending the daylight hours in deserted barns or huddled under hedgerows. Every day they’d seen patrols passing by them, inches away one time, but they hadn’t been spotted. Once they’d walked straight into a local farmer heading out to his fields before dawn and just stared at him on the track, too surprised to run, until the old man had taken his pack from his shoulder and given them his lunch of bread and cheese and a flask of watered wine. It was the only food they’d eaten since they’d left the flat in Toulouse.

  When they got to the outskirts of Perpignan they’d discussed their next move. The redhead, whose French turned out to be fluent, went first, like the raven out of Noah’s ark, to see what the chances were of meeting a friendly face at the original rendezvous point. He came back thin-lipped and discouraging.

  The word in the café was their contact had gone dark. Three men from the train had been recaptured or killed. Their contact had now skipped town and headed over the mountains himself with the two remaining escapees. They had managed, cunning buggers, to double back to the train during the search of the vineyard and retake their seats as if nothing had happened. They had wanted to wait for Nancy and the others to reach them, the redhead reported, his voice dripping with sarcasm, but the contact was spooked, and insisted he wasn’t hanging around waiting for the Gestapo. He forced them to choose and they chose to leave with him.

  Now it was Nancy’s turn, going out to find a safe perch, like Noah’s dove, on the basis of a half-remembered address and hoping whoever looked at her face would know, somehow, that she wasn’t lying.

  The door opened a little wider. She didn’t know the man who greeted her, and he looked afraid, but he also looked like a friend.

  “You’d better come inside.”

  Nancy was counting again. Her steps this time. The route was steep, heading over the highest peaks because the dogs the Germans used on the lower slopes couldn’t smell them through the thin air at this altitude. The track was so uneven that it was impossible to get into a rhythm, one two… one… two. She missed the bloody coal truck that had taken them out of Perpignan and into the special zone that extended twenty kilometers into France from the Spanish border. Funny that. She hadn’t been a fan at the time, but even jolting along the back roads under one coal sack and lying awkwardly on another had been bliss compared with this.

  She needed a holiday, she thought idly as she counted, then giggled. She could see it so clearly: Henri waiting round the next bend in his car, ready to whisk her away to some health resort. She could imagine falling into his arms, complaining about what a terrible time she’d been having. Washing prison
clothes in a bathtub, shot at, starved, thrown in the back of a truck. She could imagine his sympathy, his warm chuckle of laughter, his promises to make it all up to her.

  She started telling him the story in her head, making it big, comic, ridiculous, pouting and swearing her way through the tale until he made her stop because his ribs ached with laughing so hard.

  “What are you so fucking happy about?” The redhead.

  She didn’t bother replying. She missed Brutus. He’d shipped out of Perpignan a day before them. His clothes were in better shape and his shoes were still in decent nick. The redhead and Nancy had been forced to wait until the last shreds of the Resistance network in Perpignan could gather warm clothing for them.

  The redhead took her silence as an invitation to talk. Not talk so much as complain. They were going too fast, this was a stupid route to take, why hadn’t the Resistance managed to get him more socks? Two pairs wasn’t enough.

  Nancy ignored it, tuned him out and listened only to the sound of her internal voice, counting. He didn’t seem to notice.

  “We rest now,” Pilar said.

  Pilar and her father were their guides. They didn’t talk much, and didn’t rest much either. Ten minutes every two hours, and that was it. The paths twisted and snaked over the peaks, and sometimes in those ten-minute pauses, Nancy looked around her in wonder. They were caught among the snowy peaks like travelers in some fairy tale, like pilgrims, staring out over this exuberant feat of nature, the endless parade of mountain tops disappearing into the bluish spring air. And it seemed Pilar wanted to make sure they climbed every damned one of them.

  Onward again, up tracks only Pilar was able to see. This was mountaineering, not walking. Nancy saved her breath and kept moving. The redhead wittered on. Now he wanted to know why they hadn’t brought more food, how they were expected to keep going through the cold as the snow began to deepen around them. His voice became shrill.